“Your article said that you investigated this case,” Aiden says, presumably for the sake of prompting Floyd to speak. He hasn’t said anything yet. He’s just staring down at the blog post printout, memories moving in his magnified eyes. “Do you remember anything about it?”

Floyd lets out a dazed laugh.

“Do I! Such an unusual case, really. A lot of cases go unsolved due to pure police incompetence. But for a case like this - well, you can’t blame them for failing to solve it. It’s so complicated, so strange.” Floyd finally tears his gaze away from the printout, blinking up at us. “You boys know the particulars already?”

“We read an old newspaper article about it,” I tell him, “But when we tried to pull the case file from the Ketterbridge City Hall archives, someone stole it.”

There was already a spark of intrigue kindled in Floyd’s eyes, but now there’s something akin to a fuel tank explosion. He leans forward, crushing himself against the counter like he forgot that it’s there, his eyes widening. His glasses already make them look so large, and they look about saucer-sized, now.

“You’re telling me that the case is still live?” he asks, agog. “Someone stole the case file - recently?”

“Yep.” Aiden nods at him. “And they stole the Port Sitka PD copy of it, too. Made it away without getting caught, on both occasions.”

Floyd practically sways on his feet in excitement.

“You boys have time for a coffee?” he blurts out.

“We’ve got all day,” I answer, and Floyd beams at us.

“Fantastic! Let’s go to the kitchen!”

He zips around the counter, his wild flyaways bouncing around his face. He sets off immediately for a door at the back of the shop, then hesitates.

“Oh, wait - I should probably stay in the shop, in case there’s a customer.” He looks hopefully at the front door. “You never know, right?”

A stab of sympathy for Floyd overtakes any remaining apprehension I had about him. He seems harmless, honestly. And he’s looking at me and Aiden like he’s waiting for us to say that yes, we should stay in the store, because a customer might be coming up the road at any moment.

I scramble around for an answer, and come up with:

“What if we leave the door open, so we can see if any customers come in?”

“Kitchen’s around the corner,” Floyd muses, “But - you two are young, so you’ll hear it if someone comes in, won’t you?”

“Yeah, of course!”

Floyd nods brightly at me. He opens the door and props it open. Aiden and I follow him further into the house.

Streams of sunlight fall through the windows as he leads us to the kitchen. This is a tiny house with very low ceilings, and Aiden has to bend awkwardly to fit. It’s clear that the store itself is the most spacious part of this place. Floyd has newspaper articles and printouts stuck to basically every available surface of the hallway we walk down, which makes everything seem even smaller.

But the kitchen is bright and cozy. Stepping into it, we’re greeted by a surprising sight: a Rottweiler with floppy ears, napping in a pool of sunshine beneath the table. She blinks and sits up on her front paws when she hears us, reminding me of how Floyd woke up when we came into the shop.

The dog lurches to her feet in a stiff, labored way that suggests a very old age. She looks to Floyd as if waiting for an explanation.

“Friends, Ida!” he says, already pulling some mugs out of a cupboard.

Ida wobbles slowly over to us. She sniffs Aiden’s hands, then mine, her tail wagging.

“Hey, Ida!” I say, dropping down to give her ears a scratch. “Aren’t you gorgeous?”

“You have a dog, Jamie?” Floyd asks, pouring out three cups of coffee.

“No, I wish. My apartment is too small for that.”

“Oh, too bad! What about you, Aiden?”

Aiden shakes his head. “Pretty much the same situation as Jamie.”

I glance up at Aiden, realizing that we haven’t talked about this before. I bite back a smile, quickly dropping my gaze back to Ida. It’s kind of cool to know that we’re on the same page. This is one less thing to worry about when I finally work up the courage to talk to Aiden moving in together. That place for us, the one that I’ve been daydreaming about recently.

“Too bad,” Floyd says, sympathetic. “One day, though, I’m sure!”

He’s speaking over his shoulder, crossing to a door in the back of the kitchen. I assume that it’s a pantry, and he's grabbing some sugar for the coffee. I’m only half right. It is a pantry, but every shelf is crammed with binders and folders, scribbled labels on their spines.

“Overflow from the living room and my office,” Floyd explains, when he sees us staring.

He reaches for the top shelf right away, like he knows exactly what he’s looking for and exactly where it is. He can’t quite reach it, even standing on his toes, so Aiden goes over and helps him out.

“Thank you, Aiden! You’re so tall, it’s quite amazing - it’s that one, all the way on the top left.”

Aiden pulls it down and gives it to Floyd. I’m still crouched by Ida, who is blinking her big brown eyes at me. Without warning, she flops onto my lap with enough force and weight to knock me flat onto my ass on the kitchen floor. I make an undignified, startled sound, and Ida cuddles up in my lap. She looks at me, paws up, her tail pounding the floor.

Aiden catches the entire thing, unfortunately. He throws his hands up over his mouth, stifling a laugh.

“Oh, sorry about that!” Floyd says, waving at Ida with the folder. “She thinks she’s a lapdog, won’t listen to me when I tell her otherwise. Just move her if your legs start to go numb, that’s my system.”

“Okay,” I stammer, as Aiden fights back his laughter. “So - Ida?”

“After Ida B. Wells,” Floyd explains, adjusting his glasses. “A top-shelf investigative journalist. One of the very best, if you ask me! Reading about her is what got me into the biz, myself.”

Aiden looks at Floyd with a surprised expression to match mine. “You’re an investigative journalist, Floyd?”

“Yes! Well - I was, I should say. Some people found my theories a bit - out there, and eventually the newspapers stopped biting. They more or less told me that my synapses had fizzled.” Floyd shrugs his narrow shoulders, and smiles. “I happen to think that the world is stranger and more interesting than we give it credit for. Sometimes even right in our backyards. Not everyone sees it the same way.”

He’s right, honestly. I can personally attest to that. The proof is standing right behind Floyd, his sweet blue gaze lingering on my face. He’s trying to catch my eye, as if to say: don’t we know it.

I smile up at him, and Floyd’s discerning eyes catch the tiny exchange between us.

“Looks like you two are my kind of people,” he observes. “Appreciators of the odd and unexpected?”

“I think you’re right about that, man,” Aiden says, and Floyd beams at him again.

With tremendous difficulty, I manage to squirm out from beneath Ida, then join Floyd and Aiden at the table. Ida shambles over to sprawl out on top of Floyd’s feet. He winces, but doesn’t move her. 

“So, is that why you investigated the Botswick case?” I take a seat, accept the coffee that Floyd offers me. “For a story?”

Floyd sits back, nods at me.

“That was actually the case I cut my teeth on. I investigated it in the ’80s, right at the start of my career. At that point, it had already been cold for twenty years.”

Aiden tips his head to the side. “Then why pursue it?”

“I was a grunt at the paper, so I was handed all these tiny, boring stories to do. I was dying to get out there, do something consequential and real. I thought that if I took it upon myself to crack something interesting, they’d start giving me better leads, better stories to write.”

Like me, Floyd gestures a lot as he speaks. His story is punctuated here and there with the click of his ringed fingers knocking together.

“My dad collected vintage newspapers,” he continues, “So I went through the local ones he had, wrote down anything that struck me as interesting. Then I threw the whole damn list away when I found the Botswick case, and it blew everything else out of the fucking water.”

Aiden and I both let out a startled laugh. I try to picture Floyd as a young man, sitting amidst piles of old newspapers, scribbling down the details of unsolved crimes. I wonder if he already had these perfectly round, staggeringly thick glasses, at that point. I imagine that he did.

“I mean, shit, man!” Floyd laughs, tossing a hand into the air. “It had everything. An unsolved murder, strange lights in the sky, a man with no face. No footprints in the sand, no ID on the victim, no ID on the murderer, no murder weapon. There was just so much to sink your teeth into!”

He opens the folder that Aiden took down for him. He extracts an aged slip of newspaper and slides it across the table to us.

It’s the same article that we read in the archives, published in 1961. Floyd has his own copy.

“Cut it out of the newspaper in my dad’s collection, just about as soon as I finished reading the story,” he explains. “My dad was ready to kill me, but I was so excited. It was worth it. And I dug into the investigation right away, gave it every free minute I had.”

“How did you go about that?” I ask. “If the case had already been cold for twenty years?”

“I went to go see the detective who was lead on the case. The guy was retired, and he wasn’t thrilled to have me show up asking questions about John Botswick. The fuzz don’t like to talk about their fuck-ups, you know? And no one solved this case, so that’s a fuck-up, right there.” Floyd chuckles, arches one grey eyebrow in a devious kind of way. “But I got him talking. Buttered him up a bit, talked about him and his officers doing their best, how I had nothing but reverence and awe for the badge...”

Floyd very deliberately crosses his over-magnified eyes as he says this last bit. The sheer absurdity of the sight makes me laugh again, and Aiden bites his lip, grinning.

It’s just struck me that Kasey and Floyd would get along. The thought warms me to him even more.

“So, what did the detective tell you?” Aiden asks, intrigued. “Anything that was in the case file, but not the newspaper article?”

“Yes, actually!” Floyd leans forward, puts his elbows on the table. “It turns out that there were some details about the case that the fuzz chose to keep from the public.”

Aiden and I lean towards him, equally as excited to hear about this as he is to tell us.

“The hotel clerk,” Floyd begins. “She reported that she heard a heated argument between John Botswick and an unknown second party, the night before he was killed. So far as she knew, Botswick was by himself in his room. He hadn’t come in with anyone, and no one had come to visit him. But the clerk claimed to hear a second voice, in there with him. And when she went up to check on Botswick after the argument, he was alone.”

“I don’t suppose she heard what the argument was about?” I ask hopefully.

“She remembered one thing clearly, something Botswick said. It was…” Floyd flips through a sheaf of handwritten notes in his folder. “Blow this whole operation, and then, it’s too late for that.”

I sit back, trying to wrap my head around this. It’s basically confirmation of our espionage theory.

“This got the cops thinking that Botswick was some kind of criminal, working with a partner,” Floyd continues. “But it got me thinking…” He cringes, like we’re about to tell him that he’s an idiot. “I got to thinking that this had something to do with espionage.”

I break into a wide smile. “That’s exactly what we think, man!”

“I know, I know,” Floyd sighs, rubbing his forehead. “It sounds ridiculous, but there's the argument, and the way that the murderer removed all of the evidence with such acumen, such precision, like a professional killer would-” He breaks off abruptly, opens his eyes, and stares at me. “Wait - what?”

“That was our guess, too,” Aiden tells him. “Secret agents. Spies.”

Floyd looks at us both with undisguised delight.

“Great minds think alike, boys!” he hollers, at such an unexpected volume that Aiden and I both jump. Ida sleeps right through it, apparently used to these kinds of outbursts. “I knew-”

“Oh - we don’t know, yet,” I hastily amend. “That’s just our best guess! Did anything else make you think espionage? Besides the argument?”

“Yes! Yes, definitely. I gathered some good information before I stopped working on the case.”

Aiden hesitates, looking at Floyd curiously.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” he says slowly, “Why did you stop?”

Floyd’s expression falls.

“Ah, well. My editor didn’t like the angle I was taking with it. He thought it was preposterous, my theory that there was espionage at play. And then I - I thought…” Floyd swallows, rubs his arm. “I thought that someone was following me, the closer I got. I can’t prove it, but I know when I’m being watched. I told my editor, who made it sound like I had put everyone at the paper in danger. Said that if he caught me doing any more investigating on the Botswick case, I’d be fired on the spot. So - I let it go. I always wanted to see it solved, though.”

There’s a silence in the kitchen. Floyd sighs deeply, reaching down to scratch Ida’s ears. For a moment, he looks wistful.

Then he brightens up considerably, his distant eyes coming back to settle on us again.

“And now - maybe it finally will be solved! You said that someone stole the case files before you could look at them? How many decades later, and the mystery lives on!” He lets out a bright, cackling laugh. “Absolutely dynamite!”

Aiden and I exchange a little grin. Floyd’s excitement is contagious.

“It would help us solve it if you told us everything you know,” Aiden answers. “We’d really like to hear it.”

Floyd looks at us like we just gave him some kind of incredible gift.

“Well, boys,” he says, smiling from ear to ear, “I’m more than happy to do that.”

~~~~

By the time we say goodbye to Floyd, the sun is setting, and we have a lot to tell Kasey and Will. But there’s one quick thing I want to do first.

“Why are we taking this, exactly?” Aiden asks, yanking Floyd’s sign out of the icy ground by the side of the road. That measly piece of cardboard, with nothing but BOOKS scribbled on the front.

I step back, so Aiden can put it in the trunk of my car.

“Because it’s terrible, and Floyd deserves customers. You know who could make this sign much, much better than it is?”

“Ripley,” Aiden says, realizing out loud.

“Exactly.” I lean up and pop a kiss onto his nose. “Maybe this way Floyd will get a little more foot traffic, right? I don’t mind driving back here to drop it off, if you don’t want-”

Aiden catches me by the wrist before I can walk around to the driver’s side. He nuzzles his nose into mine, then treats me to a thorough, heart-melting kiss. I let myself be pulled up against his huge, warm body, taking two handfuls of his jacket without meaning to.

“I like the way you think,” he murmurs, the rumble of his deep voice moving through me in one perfect wave.

I press my lips into a thin line, trying to disguise my smile. “Would you say that I’m-?”

“Absolutely dynamite?” Aiden laughs, his breath a rush against my cheek. “Yeah, Keane. I would.”