These Marigolds Grow Too Tall, Chapter 1

Below is the first chapter of the third story in the Fintan O'Keefe mystery series, working title (until the poet whose line it is catches up with me) is These Marigolds Grow Too Tall. The book is as yet unfinished. I thought perhaps I might find a little motivation to solve that problem if I did this. We'll see I guess.

The first 2 Fintan books are available at Lulu.com in both paper and e-versions.

http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?fListingClass=0&fSearch=Michael+Horgan
Comments, as always, are welcome

Please stay tuned for the new adventures of Lili and Mikie, too. Coming soon to this space.

Remember to click on the ads. I've raked in $3 today alone. It's funny. The AdSense program searches its data base for connections to what I write in these entries. It should be interesting what it finds now.

I

For centuries the Balkans has been an inhospitable place. With topography carved with a dull knife and a sack of home-made dynamite, the region, especially the hilly inland and just along the Adriatic, can confound then swallow the uninitiated. It is conflict, however, both formal and ad hoc, that has saturated, detoured and defined the lives of its inhabitants off and on for forty generations. For others, too: those seeking to pillage or to convert or merely citizens of the world.

Ivana Grdesic, a privileged daughter of Croatia, ended up as far too many sons and daughters of the region do: dead with still supple skin and muted light just behind the eyes. On inefficient mountain roads, or an ancient city’s cobblestone streets, or forests so thick bodies return to the soil well before someone wide-eyed and inhaling sharply stumbles upon the tatters and bones, the Balkans has eaten her young and her not so young.

Ivana Grdesic, though suffering the same fate as hundreds of thousands of Croats, Serbs, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and outsiders-in-conquest or with an international mandate to stem one slaughter or another, got out of the Balkans with her life. Grdesic came all the way to North America, New England, to add her name to the butcher’s bill.

I had been hired to find Ivana Grdesic. I did. While standing between two parked cars on Commercial Street in Portland, Maine, I matched her to the photograph I was given as she sat in a condominium’s broad salt-sprayed window facing Casco Bay. Her inanimate face that day belied the happier times in which the photo had been taken.

I called the man who had hired me, one Ante Bukovats, the Portland Police, and headed down the Maine Turnpike back to Boston. Within days Grdesic had been found face up, eyes open clad in a Portland Sea Dogs’ sweatshirt and snug expensive jeans at the tide line on Nantasket Beach, south of Boston. Her father, Andrija Grdesic, had identified his daughter at the Chief Medical Examiner’s facility on Albany Street in Boston the next day. After the ME declared accidental drowning as the cause of death Mr. Grdesic claimed his daughter’s body.

I knew that the information I had provided my employer had been used to find the late Ms. Grdesic in Portland. I had been paid the balance of my fee and expenses. A check from the Croatian Exchange Enterprise, Incorporated awaited me upon my return from a case in Canada.

When Mr. Bukovats had contacted me to offer the job he had identified himself as a diplomat from the Croatian Consulate in Boston. He said he was searching for a lost citizen, perhaps a runaway, of his nation. He had given me a cashier’s check as a retainer, a photo, and a theory or two.

I thought a call to Mr. Bukovats was in order, even if only to satisfy my curiosity. Why was a private corporation paying his government’s bills? I’m nosy that way. There were now, however, other questions I wished him to address.

Perhaps I should have been more attentive to research prior to taking the commission. There was no Croatian Consulate in Boston. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but not here. The Croatian Exchange Enterprise, Inc. was a post office box at the massive mail facility at South Station.

There was no phone number for the C.E.E., Inc. Ante Bukovats’ cell phone rang and rang unanswered.