The Full Scoop Read online

  PRAISE

  for the Riley Ellison Mysteries

  “Millennials will love following Riley Ellison, junior reporter, on her laugh-out-loud adventures in the quaint town of Tuttle Corner, Virginia.… Riley is a heroine for the twenty-first century, struggling, like others of her generation, with such contemporary concerns as online dating and obnoxious coworkers. Her romantic misadventures provide most of the comedy here, but there’s plenty of suspense, too; an additional source of appeal is Tuttle Corner itself, a thoroughly quirky but realistically drawn small town full of eccentric and amusing characters.… Orr’s series is perfect for fans of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum and Kyra Davis’ Sophie Katz, witty protagonists who always mix fun with murder. The Ugly Truth is a great vacation read for comic mystery fans.”

  — Booklist (starred review!)

  “Delightfully comic…highly amusing… Quirky characters enliven the carefully constructed plot.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “Jill Orr hits an almost impossible combo with The Ugly Truth; page-turning suspense, laugh-out-loud humor, and a delightfully complex mystery you just can’t put down. If you like smart criminals, smarter women sleuths, and endearing side characters you care about, Orr delivers with the third book in her charming Riley Ellison series.”

  — Libby Kirsch, Emmy Award–winning journalist and author of the Stella Reynolds Mystery Series and the Janet Black Mystery Series

  “The small town nature of this mystery, with the requisite fish-bowl local politics, relationships, and grudges, makes it perfect for cozy lovers who want something more modern. Readers will enjoy Riley’s humor and determination even when things turn sad.”

  — Booklist

  “Here comes Riley Ellison, the journalist-slash-hero we need right now. She solves murders! She writes obits! She lets a really cute guy get away but she’ll survive! I loved this fresh page-turner—it’s fun, funny, and moves like lightning. Jill Orr has created a complex plot and complex contemporary characters that make murder quite delightful. Can’t wait for the next in the series.”

  — Lian Dolan, Satellite Sister and author of the best-selling novels Helen of Pasadena and Elizabeth the First Wife

  “A ray of sunshine cloaked in a mystery. Jill Orr is the best humorous mystery writer around, with a voice all her own.”

  — Laura McHugh, best-selling author of The Weight of Blood and Arrowood

  “Fresh and funny, romantic and sunny, Orr’s book checked three genre boxes for me: a smart cozy series, a Southern small-town setting, and, my favorite, a newspaper mystery.… I loved the hilarious emails the author interjects into the narrative from Riley’s ‘Personal Romance Concierge’ at Click.com.”

  — Carole Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “The laughs keep coming.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  THE FULL SCOOP

  By Jill Orr

  ALSO BY JILL ORR

  The Good Byline

  The Bad Break

  The Ugly Truth

  THE FULL SCOOP

  By Jill Orr

  Prospect Park Books

  Copyright © 2020 by Jill Orr

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all names and characters, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. With a few exceptions, all places are also products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by Prospect Park Books

  2359 Lincoln Avenue

  Altadena, California 91001

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution www.cbsd.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Orr, Jill, author.

  Title: The full scoop : a Riley Ellison mystery / Jill Orr.

  Description: Altadena, California : Prospect Park Books, [2020] | Series: Riley Ellison mysteries

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019047137 (print) | LCCN 2019047138 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945551802 (softcover) | ISBN 9781945551819 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781945551826 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3615.R58846 F85 2020 (print) | LCC PS3615.R58846 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047137

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047138

  Cover design by Susan Olinsky

  Cover illustration by Nancy Nimoy

  Book layout and design by Amy Inouye

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Jimmy, again and always

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Sign Overview: Scorpio

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  Daily Astrological Forecast

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  Daily Astrological Forecast

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  Daily Astrological Forecast

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  Daily Astrological Forecast

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  Weekly Tarot Card Forecast

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  Daily Astrological Forecast

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  It’s amazing how quickly—and slowly—a month can go by when you’ve been blindsided by shock and grief. It had been exactly thirty-one days since Hal Flick died, alone, in a hospital bed. The medical examiner listed the official cause of death as acute internal hemorrhage, but those words didn’t mean anything to me. That was just rhetoric, a slippery way of defining something with itself to avoid a harsher truth. It was like saying the cause of global warming was the rise in the Earth’s temperatures, or the cause of the opioid epidemic was too many people addicted to pain meds. The harsh truth here was that Hal Flick died because someone forced his car to crash, at full speed, into the rocky side of a mountain on a dark highway in rural Virginia. The harsh truth, in this case, was murder.

  Images from the past month flashed through my mind like a slideshow. I closed my eyes and saw Holman driving me to the hospital that night. “I’m so sorry, Miss Ellison.” The ER doctor’s long gray ponytail. “Did you know Mr. Flick had given you power of attorney?” Talking to the Brunswick County sheriff. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm him?” The sun glinting off the mahogany casket as it was lowered into the ground.

  There were moments when it felt like I was a spectator watching the whole thing as if it were happening t
o someone else on film, and then there were moments when I felt Flick’s loss so sharply, I thought I might suffocate under the weight of it. Most of the time, though, I was somewhere in between, just trying to get from one moment to the next without feeling anything at all.

  Another harsh truth was that when someone dies, the world does not stop turning. There are certain responsibilities that must be dealt with even when all you want to do is sleep or cry or shake your fist and vow revenge. So, day after day you find yourself in one office or another—hospital administrators, lawyers, insurance agents—having conversations you don’t fully understand because your bandwidth for such things is limited by your heartache, and because none of this was supposed to happen in the first place. But despite your grief-induced apathy, you make the phone calls, you sign the documents, you file the paperwork.

  It isn’t until much later—thirty-one days later, actually—that the numbness begins to subside. And when it does, it’s replaced with a deep sense of injustice that washes over you like acid rain. It’s not just the loss, which exists in its own emotional ecosystem; it’s the audacity of the crime that keeps you up at night. They took your friend. They took your grandfather. You may not know who “they” are yet, but it doesn’t matter, because you know you will find out. It’s that certainty that pushes past the shock, past the sadness, past the grief, and grabs you by the throat. Do something, it urges.

  But the problem with bossy inner voices is that they are, almost without exception, infuriatingly vague. The fact of the matter is that you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to begin to seek justice. You don’t even know that if you could somehow figure out who was behind these terrible crimes, it would help heal the mile-wide hole in your heart. Do something, the voice calls again, this time more insistent. So you do. You claw your way out of your sorrow, you go back to work, and you start to live your life again. Everyone says that’s what Flick and Granddad would have wanted, but you know that they’d also want justice. And so, to the outside world, you look like a woman moving on. But on the inside, you’re making plans: You will not only find out who did this and why, you will make them pay.

  Voicemail transcript: Jeannie Ellison to Riley Ellison. Sunday, December 26, 4:43pm

  Hi honey. It’s Mom. I’m calling because I’ve been a little worried about you lately. The other day when you were going on about “making people pay” and “hunting people down” and whatnot…well, to be honest, it was a little disturbing. I mean, I know you’ve been sad—we’ve all been sad ever since…you know [clears throat], but you’re young and you have your whole life ahead of you! You should be focusing on your future!

  So, in the spirit of focusing on the future…SURPRISE! I signed you up for one of those astrology websites! I got the idea from Sheila Nixon—do you remember Mrs. Nixon? Her daughter Lilith was a year ahead of you in school? Anyway, Sheila told me that Lilith told her that all the kids are super into astrology these days. [Lowers voice] Lilith lives in West Hollywood and has a tattoo of a lotus flower, so I feel like she would know.

  Anyway, it seemed like the perfect little pick-me-up—to learn about all the wonderful things that the universe has in store for you! Hope you don’t mind that I shared your email address and birth date, place, and time with them. I’m sure it’s super safe.

  Okay, sweetie, that’s it for now! Sorry this message is so long. [Laughs] I’m surprised it hasn’t cut me off yet. Seems like these machines are forever hanging up on—[Click]

  Sign Overview: Scorpio

  Oct. 23–Nov. 21

  Symbol:

  Scorpion

  Element:

  Water

  Ruling planet:

  Pluto

  Best qualities:

  Magnetic, passionate, loyal, protective, brave

  Worst qualities:

  Oversensitive, vengeful, insecure

  Favorite things:

  Your home, books, a good meal, comfortable shoes

  What you hate:

  Simple-minded people, insincere flattery, social-climbing users

  Fiery, independent, and unafraid to blaze their own trail, Scorpios aren’t afraid of controversy. They love debates and won’t back down from a fight, especially if it involves defending those who can’t defend themselves. Protective of themselves and others, when they attach themselves to a cause, they will go down swinging every time.

  In their personal life, Scorpios yearn for the very thing they fear: true intimacy. Allowing themselves to become vulnerable is difficult but worthwhile. As Scorpios open up and learn to trust others, they can heal in ways that are truly profound. But those who dare to cross you will feel the powerful sting of your revenge!

  Scorpio’s ruling planet is Pluto, which is associated with depth, passion, intensity, and death. In this case, death is figurative, representing endings of all forms—relationships, projects, phases, ideas, and more. Scorpios use this concept of regeneration to grow, often killing off the ventures, activities, or relationships in their lives that no longer serve them to make room for something new. That is, if they can allow themselves to let go.

  CHAPTER 1

  I sat at my desk in the newsroom pretending to look busy. Again. Kay Jackson, my editor at the Tuttle Times, had been enormously understanding about my level of distraction in the month since Flick’s death, but I knew her understanding had its limits. I wasn’t the only one grieving. Flick had been a member of the Times family and we all felt his loss, Kay included. Besides, practically speaking, we were a small staff, and with Flick gone, we were down one.

  I’d taken an entire week off when Flick died and had been coming in to the newsroom since then to do just the bare minimum—editing, fact-checking, updating stories—things that didn’t require much from me. The rest of the team had taken over the beats I normally covered to give me the time and space to work on Flick’s obituary. It was their way of honoring him and his contributions to our newsroom. But now that the funeral had passed, the obit had run, and Christmas had come and gone, it felt like some unseen line of demarcation had been crossed and I was expected to become a fully functioning member of society again—or at the very least, a fully functioning member of the press.

  “Knock, knock,” I said as I hovered at the threshold to Kay’s office.

  “Come in,” she said without looking up. Kay was always doing the jobs of at least three people, and this necessitated her dropping all extraneous pleasantries like greetings and eye contact.

  I sat in the chair opposite her desk. “I think I’m ready to take on—take back—my usual workload.”

  Kay put down her blue editing pencil and looked up at me. She lowered her chin. “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.” She paused and then added, “Where are you with the other stuff?”

  By “other stuff,” I knew she meant my unofficial investigation into Flick’s so-called accident.

  “I’m still in touch with Sheriff Clark, but he says there’s not much more he can do at the moment. The case is still open, and he acknowledges that this doesn’t feel like an accident to him, but without any witnesses or cameras in the area, he says they’ve hit a brick wall. I’ve got a call into a guy at the Department of Transportation who used to be on a forensic crash investigative team in Maryland. I’m hoping to pick his brain about what places with bigger budgets do in these situations.” Flick had the misfortune to be murdered in one of the poorest counties in Virginia, which made finding his killer that much harder.

  “Good thinking,” Kay said.

  The connection to the guy in the DoT was tenuous at best, a friend of my ex-boyfriend Jay, who also worked for the government. I’d left Hank Jorgensmeyer a rambling message reintroducing myself and asked if he might give me some insight into how he would have handled a case like this back in the day. I was waiting for him to call back.

  Kay tapped the blunt end of her pencil on her desk. “And the file?”

  Before his death, F
lick had entrusted Kay with a tattered, brittle manila folder held together by rubber bands and tenacity. He instructed her to give it to me “in the event something happened to him.” She gave it to me the night of the crash.

  “Safe and sound.”

  “Do you want to tell me where?”

  I shook my head. The file contained notes about what Flick was working on, presumably what got him killed. I figured the fewer people who knew the whereabouts of that file, the better.

  “You sure?”

  I knew Kay well enough to know this wasn’t a challenge. It was a genuine offer of help. I smiled. “Yes.”

  “Okay then,” she said, looking back down at the proof sheet she’d been working on when I walked in. “Talk to Henderson and find out where he is with the bridge-repair story. You can pick it up from here. And Skipper Hazelrigg is supposedly announcing his candidacy for sheriff soon—you might want to track that down. Oh, and Holman has been covering the new botanical poisons installation at the Apothecary Museum for you. You can let him know you’re back, though he might want to keep it.”

  “Holman does love that place,” I said with a small laugh. I started to leave, then turned around before walking out. “Thanks for being so understanding, Kay.”

  She made some sort of noncommittal sound and kept her eyes down on her work. Someone else might have misinterpreted this as dismissive, but I also knew Kay well enough to know she was terribly embarrassed by any show of emotion, even gratitude. It was one of the qualities she shared with Flick—probably why they worked so well together. The second that similarity struck me I left, lest my misty eyes reveal that I might not be quite as ready to move on as I’d claimed.

  CHAPTER 2