Scandal at Shady Point

From the collection: Murder at Thompson Bog
Episode 4

Mike Emerson sold his truck, took a room at a small, ramshackle motel out of town and rented a beat up hulk from “Wrent-a-Wreck.” It was a green Plymouth from back when there were green Plymouths. In it, he sat outside Rick and Lori's house watching Dana as she left in Lori's car. He followed her to the mall in town where she met briefly with a man who gave her a paper shopping bag. There were words, but no hugs, no kisses. Dana was keeping her distance and so was the man.

The man shook his head and said a single word that Mike could read on his lips. “Sorry.” He then got into an aging Honda and drove to the city, to a small bank where he stayed until it closed. Then the man drove to a house in a used-to-be-OK part of town, now a place where you wouldn't walk at night. The man appeared heart-sore about the matter, as if he wished he could go back and undo it all, just erase it. He was sick to his stomach, so much so that he never noticed the beat-up green Plymouth following him home.

Mike waited a week, watching the rhythm of the neighborhood. On a dark, cloudy day that threatened rain, he went up to the man's door, just before the bank was scheduled to close. Mike wrote the word “Adulterer” across the door in black marker. He went to the bushes across the street and waited with his rifle. He waited without moving for three-quarters of an hour.

At five-thirty, the gray Honda pulled up to the curb and the man got out. He went to the door, his keys in his hand. Mike raised the rifle to his shoulder and looked down the barrel, putting the word he had written on the house in his cross-hairs. As the man hesitated with his key, Mike could see his head turn slightly. He could see his shoulders tighten as he sucked in a deep breath. The man realized what it meant and who wrote it. Mike squeezed the trigger.


The heat of that late-spring evening was nothing compared to the day eight weeks later when I received a call that Randy Turner had been shot at again. It was outside his place of work, a small branch bank. He had been going to his car after work when a shot rang out. There was a bullet hole through the left side-mirror of his car, having passed between the car and his body as he was about to open the door.

I arrived to find a shaky Randy Turner, again surrounded by reassuring police and Sergeant Gillespie looking at all the angles. When I walked up to the tape, Gillespie was squatting down, peering through the hole in the side-mirror, guessing the trajectory of the slug.

“Somehow I knew I would see you here,” said the Sergeant.

“Where's Sheriff Willis?” I asked, looking around.

“May not be related,” the Sergeant said, wiping his hands on a crumpled handkerchief.

“That's what my father said whenever I screwed up. How is this not related?”

“Nothing written on the car, no slug found,” the Sergeant turned slightly in the direction of the front of the car where the slug would have gone, if it existed at all, then toward the other direction where the shooter, if there was a shooter, would have stood. “No shell casing. This might even have been a set-up.”

“You mean Turner might have shot his own mirror? What, for attention?”

“Something like that. There's nothing to say that the two incidents are in any way connected, save that the same man was nearly, allegedly, shot.”

“So you don't think that Mike Emerson...”

“I didn't say that. I didn't say anything. I'm not even standing here.” Sergeant Gillespie walked away, calling one of the uniforms over to him. Apparently, he had urgent business with that patrolman and none with me.

Officers continued to look over the wall in front of the car and across the street for a place where a man could have stood to fire a shot. They found nothing. There was no gunshot residue, no shell casing, no tell-tale candy wrapper or dropped library card saying “Mike Emerson” on it. In short, there was nothing to indicate that a bullet had been fired at all except Mr. Turner's statement, shards of broken mirror on the ground and a hole through the mirror-housing.

I stood by the tape barrier, trying to extend my ear to hear the whispers being exchanged by Sergeant and patrolman.

“Got something here!” yelled a patrolman, the same one who found the shell casing eight weeks earlier. Gillespie rolled his eyes; apparently, the talk they had about shouting things out at a crime scene had not had it's desired effect. “He could have stood here.”

There was no tape across the street, so I beat Gillespie over there. Sure enough, there was a small alcove in the side of the building across the street that could have held a man out of sight. Yes, one could have stood there out of view, aimed a rifle and fired at the car. Yes, it was possible, but only possible. There was no evidence to indicate that it was the case. Right now, it was just supposition, and supposition, as the Sergeant said, was not my job.

As I left, I heard one of the officers saying to another, “Crying wolf, isn't he?” The other one replied, “I don't know, he could have done this himself.”

After that, Randy Turner moved out of his townhouse and back with his sister. He quit his job and became a recluse.


Mike had prepared this for eight weeks. The board he had prepared was thick enough to take and hold a .22 slug. The place he had found to stand was perfect for where Randy Turner parked his car. The tarp would keep gunshot residue from being found on the short, stucco wall.

Mike already had the shot lined up when Randy Turner came out of the bank. Just as Turner walked up to the door, about to reach out and open the door, Mike squeezed off the shot. The bullet went through the mirror, shattering the glass. It then buried itself in the board behind the bush in front of the car.

Randy Turner spun around and ran back into the bank as Mike wrapped the rifle in the tarp and returned it to his green Plymouth. He drove around to the side of the building on the far side of the street, pulled the rope attached to the board and retrieved both board and slug. He was gone before the police arrived. No one would ever know he was there.


By late September, Randy Turner had stopped going out completely. The only time he left his sister's house was to go across the backyard to the greenhouse. He had been renovating the discarded greenhouse and it was his only diversion.

On the third Saturday in September, a flowerpot shattered and Randy Turner dove for the floor. He crawled to the door, sprinted to the back door of the house and called the police.

Gillespie was watching for me as I drove up. He didn't ask what I was doing there. He didn't even have tape put up.

The police were confounded. The flower pot was broken inside the glass greenhouse, and yet there was no bullet hole through the glass. No bullet could be found near the broken flower pot, no shell casing in, around or anywhere near the greenhouse.

“Unless he fired the shot inside the greenhouse, there's no way he could have done this without breaking a window,” said the patrolman. Gillespie just shook his head. He had no solution for how to shut the cop up when in the presence of the press at a crime scene.

“So there was no bullet, no shell and no possible place for the shooter to shoot from, and yet a flower pot was shattered?” I asked, making a note in my notebook.

“Here y'go!” said another patrolman, standing on a ladder and looking at the rafter above. “There's a scuff mark up here, looks like there was a pot sitting here where the scuff mark is. Must've fallen and hit the other pot.”

“Oh, yeah? How did it get up there?” yelled Turner, frantically pointing; his eyes wild with fear. “He's messing with me! He's out to get me and you've got to stop him!”

The police gathered themselves up and walked toward the squad cars, chuckling to each other. Randy Turner had gone from cheating boyfriend to hapless victim to running joke.