The Mystery of the Missing Majorette: Art Dodger Case File #1

Art Dodger, survivor of personal tragedy turned amateur cold-case sleuth, tried to keep an open mind. So teenager Danielle Standridge had disappeared twenty years ago? That didn’t necessarily mean anything other than that she’d gone. Fifteen-year-old girls did all sorts of odd and unexplained things, then and now. Even so, in his experience, which was considerable, when a girl as good looking as Danielle managed to stay disappeared for two decades, it usually didn’t bode well. It was possible, of course, that she was basking on a South Sea beach with the love of her life, still gorgeous at thirty-five, but more likely that her bones lay buried somewhere in the autumnal woods near the mall parking lot where she’d last been seen. And why did no one seem to care? Well, obviously, Travis Whitman did or Dodger wouldn’t be in North Carolina. Whitman, the mill-owner who’d effectively killed the town by moving the mill’s textile production abroad, had been most persuasive when he addressed the Mystery Mavens the month before. This poor girl deserves to come home, he’d said. Can you help us? Something in his attitude roused Dodger’s interest. Why was Whitman so obsessed with the missing girl and, especially, why now? In The Mystery of the Missing Majorette, solving the mystery isn’t Dodger’s immediate goal. First, he’ll just nose around and give the Mavens his opinion - is there enough information remaining to make the mystery’s solution feasible? Then he’ll go home to the studio at the top of the Savannah townhouse and get back to his collages. First, though, he must survive a game of cat and mouse put in play by someone who very much doesn’t want Danielle’s fate revisited. What’s the real deal here? By the time Dodger finds out, it’s almost too late.