Several years ago, I saw an anthology call for mysteries set in California, and my wife suggested I write about my childhood. Though I have lived in many places and now live in Texas, I spent much of my early life in California, and I graduated high school in Ft. Bragg, a town on the Pacific Coast almost two hundred miles north of San Francisco.
So, at Temple’s urging, I wrote a paragraph about my stepfather collecting scrap metal in the old town dump while I was in high school and about how I believe he played a significant role in transforming the dump into the tourist attraction it later became. Today, the old town dump, now known as Glass Beach, features an abundance of sea glass—broken glass worn smooth by the ocean—and it attracts visitors from far and wide.
That paragraph remained on my computer long past the deadline for the anthology—to which I never did submit—until I stumbled upon it again and asked myself, “What if, while collecting scrap metal, my stepfather had stumbled upon evidence of a crime committed many years earlier?”
While the opening paragraph remains essentially as I first wrote it and remains as true as I believe it to be, the story—with several nods to my teen years in Ft. Bragg—quickly became fiction. The story’s narrator accompanies his stepfather to the old town dump one weekend and is there for the discovery of a strongbox filled with cash, likely the proceeds from a robbery of the lumber company’s payroll office several years earlier.
As in any good piece of crime fiction, discovery of all that money leads to a string of complications. The narrator’s best friend and his best friend’s mother get involved, and the four of them deal with the complications together.
RETURN TO GLASS BEACH
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine is publishing “Glass Beach” only a few months after my high school class’s 50th reunion, and roughly 50 years after the fictional events in the story. My mother died while I was a senior, and mid-way through the last semester I moved to Tacoma, Washington, to live with my grandparents. Fortunately, I was allowed to graduate despite missing the last few months of the school year. Unfortunately, I was not present for the graduation ceremony, and I have never returned to Ft. Bragg.
Temple and I hope to attend the 2026 Left Coast Crime in San Francisco, and we’ve discussed adding a few days to the trip to drive up the coast so I can show her where I spent most of my teen years. I’m certain the town has changed during the past five decades, but maybe a few familiar places remain. Most importantly, though, we can visit Glass Beach, and she can see the town dump that my stepfather, in some small way, help turn into a tourist attraction.
Trace Evidence 