Gus Maloney, unofficial mayor of Mudflat Manor, a homeless campsite, scratched his head. Four pairs of eyes watched him, waiting for his answer. Maloney sighed. Who had done in Mad Mollie? That was the trouble when folks found out your past. They had expectations. Maloney had been a cop before bum marriages and booze sent him drifting. So it came natural. Folks looked to him to enforce the camp's unwritten law: Don't bother me, and I won't bother you. Someone, though, had broken that law big time. Maloney gave the four a hard-faced glare that chilled them even more. "All of you stay put. No one leaves. You're joined at the hip until I say otherwise." Mollie lay sprawled face down at the bottom of an embankment. Litter, white with frost, surrounded her. Her gray hair jutted from her blue stocking cap, her long overcoat was half way up her hips. Everything she owned, she had on underneath the coat. That was law number two: If it's valuable, wear it or lose it. He gave the body a visual once over. She had one hand in her pocket as if keeping it warm, the other one extended to her right side. She had used her forefinger to scrawl the letter M in the dirt. Next to it, she had drawn an S, though her finger had trailed through it as her life ebbed away. Gingerly, Maloney examined the body, glad he had on his wool gloves. Mollie's gold chain with the crystal pendant was gone. She always wore that. She fancied herself a seer, using the crystal to tell fortunes, or rather write them. Mollie didn't talk. She wrote out her short messages with pretty penmanship. Someone once said she'd been a teacher. She used a Post-It pad to write whether the person would have a good or a bad luck day. Maloney knew that Mollie would never willingly part with her necklace. He pulled back her coat collar. A thin red line ran across the back of her neck. Maloney then checked the pocket with her hand in it. He found her yellow pad, nothing else. Miss Moonglow had discovered her friend's body when she peered over the high bank's edge earlier. When she screamed, the men in the camp came running. Maloney had been the first to scramble down the bank and check Mollie's pulse. When he saw the traced letters in the rigid earth, he muttered, "What have we got here?" Miss Moonglow, together with three men, had followed him. They started to tromp around the area, until Maloney stopped them. "We've got a crime scene to preserve." The ground was firm now, but by mid-afternoon when it warmed up, the place would be soft mud as usual. The men were Milquetoast, Midas Man and Mulligan. Their street names came easy. Milquetoast had no teeth, had to gum everything he ate, soaking food like toast in milk, to make it easier to chew. Having no teeth helped him play a mean harmonica, though. Midas, who always wore a wool scarf, was called the Midas Muffler Man. He'd been selling his blood a lot to plasma banks and was looking peaked lately. Mulligan made a stew he learned from his early rail-riding days when he was a hobo instead of a non-domiciled person. At least that's how he said the Census Bureau had him classified. Miss Moonglow had a face as round as a full moon that glowed just as bright. She had fits once in a while that left her cantankerous and forgetful. Looking at the scrawled letters again, Maloney shook his head. M could stand for anything or anyone in camp. The joke on the street was that if your name didn't begin with M, you couldn't bed down at Mudflat Manor. Milquetoast had pulled his cap off, holding it over his heart in the presence of the dead. "She sleepwalked, right, Mister Mayor?" He sounded anxious and wishful. Most folks knew that Mollie wandered without knowing it at night. Maloney didn't answer. Instead, he told the four to go stay by the campfire. "Keep away from the top of the bank." He didn't want them messing up the area where she had fallen. He added, "No one wanders off alone. No one. Understood?" Then Maloney hunkered down, giving the scene a close inspection and the situation some thought. The way he sized it up, she had dragged herself to the foot of the embankment but hadn't been able to climb up. Knowing she wasn't going to make it, she drew the letters as a clue. His guess was that someone had grabbed her necklace, then pushed her over the side, hoping the fall would kill her. Unable to call for help, she had died from her injuries and exposure. Who would have been with Mad Mollie? Maloney wondered if she had been doing the person's fortune. The letter M wasn't much help as a clue. He looked at the S and the ragged line through it from Mollie's dying hand. None of the four waiting for him had two initials, much less two names, unless you counted Miss Moonglow and Midas Man. He studied the high bank again. Poor woman. She must have flung her arms out going over the edge. Seemed odd, finding her hand jammed in her pocket. It would have been more natural for her to clutch her coat close for warmth while she used the other one to write the letters. Maloney left to join the four at the campfire. First, though, he checked the area where Mollie must have been standing before she was pushed. He searched the area carefully and found what he was looking for. A stub pencil. He walked over to the campfire and stretched out his hands to warm them. The three men and Miss Moonglow huddled by the fire, staring into it. Maloney began, "One of you killed Mad Mollie. Probably didn't mean to. But you did." No one looked at him. "It's all logical when you think about it. Mollie was reading someone's fortune--writing it, I mean. I found her pencil on the edge of the bank, and the pad in her pocket. Either you didn't like the fortune or you just wanted her necklace. Mostly, the last one, I guess. Anyhow, you yanked the chain off her neck, then shoved her over. Mulligan said, "Now Mister Mayor, how you going to prove that?" "I'll get to that in a minute." "The two letters Mad Mollie drew gave me grief for a bit. If they were clues, they didn't seem to point to the killer's initials. Then again, they might if they stood for something like M for Mulligan and S for stew." Mulligan hopped to his feet sputtering. "Don't you go saying I ---" "Sit down. I'm not." Maloney flexed his shoulders, thinking it was a good thing he'd kept in some kind of shape. Though he didn't think he'd have trouble handling this bad guy. "Well, it wasn't all letters. Mollie was trying to draw a line through the S to make a dollar sign but never finished. We all have names that start with M, but who here has money?" Midas Man scowled. "Don't look at any of us." "Well, I am. In fact, I'm looking at you." Maloney said. "Mollie was an educated woman. She knew that Midas also was the name for a miserly king who loved gold." "You can't prove nothing," Midas blustered. "Oh, I think I can. Around here, law number two is keep your valuables on you. Mad Mollie left her hand in her pocket as a way to show us that her killer had stuffed her necklace in his own pocket. That's where she wanted us to look." Maloney searched Midas and found the necklace. A yellow piece of paper was stuck to it. In Mollie's handwriting, the note said, "You're going to have a bad luck day, tomorrow." ===== About the Author Patricia Harrington’s debut mystery novel Death Stalks the Khmer, will be released in March from America House Publisher in trade paperback. Her mystery short stories have also appeared on NEFARIOUS, Tales of Mystery and Mystery Time Anthology. Her website is www.patriciaharrington.com. Her e-mail is pharrin107@aol.com.