Excerpt – A Poetic Puzzle by Joanne McLaughlin
Synopsis
Internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones has vanished—calls and texts unacknowledged, bank accounts emptied, car abandoned. But before she disappeared, she mailed never-published manuscripts to a lesser-known namesake poet, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones. Are the manuscripts clues only Mimi can decipher? And what about the handsome Philadelphia cop assigned to the case? He seems as intrigued by Mimi as by the missing celebrity poet. Talk about a person of interest…
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Excerpt
Mary Irene Jones shone like a rare supernova; her brilliant poetry admired from every point on Earth. My own writing light glowed more faintly, detectable only if you knew where in the universe to search. That her name was my name too was pure coincidence— life imitating art, if you considered the kiddie song “John Jacob Jingelheimer Schmidt” art.
As that Mary Irene Jones once did, I taught college-level English literature, but only part time. To afford health insurance, I also worked as a part-time pet sitter. Dogs terrified me, though, which seriously cut into my client base. (Blame an overly affectionate Great Dane, aptly named Kissy, who tackled me every time I visited my godparents as a little girl.)
Just to be clear, I had never traveled to Northern Ireland, whence that Mary Irene Jones emigrated in the late 1990s as the Troubles were winding down, more or less. And though she settled in the Philadelphia area and was a longtime professor at the same Catholic liberal arts college in the suburbs where I now worked, we had never overlapped on campus. She stopped teaching several years before I started there, and we didn’t move in anything like the same poetry circles.
That Mary Irene Jones was famous, yet extremely private. She declined all interviews while maintaining a grueling schedule of classes, conferences and symposiums for two decades. Unlike her, I would have welcomed any recognition, even a regular instructor’s post, as opposed to the patchwork of courses typically offered to me, often with little notice. It was assumed I would be available, and of course I was.
If you believed the campus lore, I might not have gotten my gig at the college at all if it hadn’t been for the same-name thing. According to the legend, the human resources folks thought they were rehiring her five years ago and pushed through the paperwork without noticing such discrepancies as my age (MIJ was more than twenty-five years older) and my job references (MIJ had not previously taught SAT prep classes, as far as anyone knew). The college administration officially debunked the story, yet it lived on because of new English lit students disappointed to learn who was actually teaching them: this Mary Irene Jones, not that one.
Full disclosure: My obscure, yet respected, poetry had been published only under the name M. Irene Jones, the one listed on my driver’s license as well as my Master of Fine Arts degree. In my family, we were all Marys, so none of us used the name. My mother, for instance, was M. Catherine “Call me Cass” Jones. My younger sister was M. Patricia “Call me Trish” Jones.
None of this would have made any difference to anyone but the aforementioned ticked-off students if the U.S. Postal Service hadn’t delivered a box of previously unpublished Mary Irene Jones manuscripts to my house while I was out pet-sitting two guinea pigs. When I realized what was inside—MIJ hadn’t put out anything new in years—I returned the box to my neighborhood post office. Which promptly redelivered it to me three days later.
That, I sort of expected. I didn’t expect the police.
About the Author
Joanne McLaughlin started telling superhero stories in second grade, and by age 9, she was writing plays staged in her Catholic school classrooms in Philadelphia. Eventually, she became a journalist, working on award-winning news and features for newspapers and public media. Her novels include the romantic cozy mystery A Poetic Puzzle; Chasing Ashes, a thriller; and Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human, a vampire trilogy. Her latest short fiction appears in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume 1; Peppina’s Sweetheart and Grass and Granite are available for Kindle.
