Just Another Small Town Death

by Joseph Goodrich

About the Author: Joseph Goodrich is an Edgar Award-winning playwright whose work has been produced across the United States as well as in Canada and China. His fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and two MWA anthologies. An alum of New Dramatists and a former Calderwood Fellow at MacDowell, he lives in NYC.

Excerpt

In 1970 Margaret Breen used to invite neighborhood kids into her living room after school. She’d lead them through a scripture lesson and a hymn or two, then serve ice-cold lemonade and oatmeal cookies hot from the oven.

I’d been one of those kids. I thought about Mrs. Breen and those long-ago days as I studied the groceries scattered on the kitchen floor and waited for the ambulance to take her body away.

They wouldn’t let her do that now. It’s a different era. But those were less suspicious times—you knew your neighbors, you trusted them, they trusted you, and there was nothing wrong with a little after-school Bible study. In those days we’d all believed in God.

Manderton, Minnesota was a good place to live back then. Some of us still like it here; some of us never left. I’d gone to Police Academy in Minneapolis, and at first I thought I’d stay in the city. But in the end I came home. The town had been good to me, and I wanted to give something back. I wanted to help keep it safe for families like the Breens.

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