Based on the song "Life on Mars" by David Bowie...
Someone is killing girls in the little town of Nowhere, South Dakota and they all look like Fiona Mars.
Fiona has a secret she can't quite remember. A secret her father, the Sheriff, is trying hard...
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The truck didn't know me yet. The passenger seat couldn't hold my body right, and I shifted on the old leather to sit deeper on my seat bones. My knees were tough from falling, and I rested them on the dashboard. The open window bit my elbow from its hiding spot inside the door.
"Where you from?" I asked, watching the flat landscape go on and on and on like a long-winded sermon.
We were on our way to a mid-day matinee in town.
The Sheriff's station was in town, too.
Lucky lounged on his door. The window didn't bite him. Nothing bad could happen to someone who knew they were okay inside and out. He drove with his wrist at twelve noon on the steering wheel.
"Here about," he said, licking his lips. "The family has been split for years. I go where I please now." He grinned at me. A pair of aviators sat on the bridge of his nose disguising his eyes. I could only see myself in them. "And you? You always lived Nowhere?"
"My whole life. I'll die here."
"Harsh."
"I'll be murdered, you'll see. Have my neck squeezed like all those other girls."
His mouth flattened. I didn't need to see his eyes to know he was bothered. I wanted to say I was joking. But only just. I hadn't decided who would do the throttling: me with a rope of some kind, or a mystery killer.
Maybe, Deputy Bithell.
"They know who done it? All those girls in those papers."
I shrugged. "They call him the Lady Killer."
The tires filled the silence, vibrating my molars as they peeled off the tarmac at a shaky sixty miles per hour. There was dust on the windshield, bowed around two clean arches like plucked eyebrows. Grit coated the floorboards where the mats didn't cover. The keychain swayed above his knee. Attached to it was a room key. The metal tag read 20.
"I'll tell you who it is when they don't know who it ain't," he said. "A cop. It's always a cop. They're good at covering things up."
I squirmed. It wasn't an accusation, he didn't know about me. But there was the paint scraper and the VIN number and the coroner who got every weekend off now to the departments confusion.
"Those dead girls," I said out loud to shut my mind up. "I look like them, don't I?"
He glanced at me, then the road, then back at me again.
"Well shit, I never."
But I did, in every headline. I could see it clear:
