I had never dated a girl with a nose ring before -- hell, it had been years since I'd dated anyone, period -- but when you're incarcerated, and you're in Mexico, Missouri, it's not like you've exactly got a wide selection of attractive ladies throwing themselves at you, so I figured I ought to be open-minded about things.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, of course. She didn't even end up in jail with me until well after the soy bombs started blowing things up all over Mexico, and, well, I probably should start there.

Or maybe I should take a few steps back. My name's Culp -- Emo Culp. Emo's short for Emerson, as my pappy was a real big fan of old Ralph Waldo; my middle name's Vandiver, which was my mother's maiden name, but Emerson Vandiver Culp is a bit too much of a handle to saddle anyone with, so ever since I was a boy, I've just been Emo. I hear that now there's this whole genre of music called Emo, which is short for emotional, I guess, and that's just unfortunate. Not that there would be a genre of music that shares my name -- that's actually pretty nifty. It's just that, in my book (and by "my book" I'm of course referring to the metaphorical book, my actual books contain very few opinions on the nature of modern music), all music is emotional, and to label one genre as the emotional genre seems to be a bit misdirected. Personally, I liked it better when they called music by thoughtful, long-haired depressed boys "Shoegazer music," in recognition of the fact that they were so overcome they had to look at their shoes while they sang. But I digress. Of course, I should warn you right now, I tend to do that. Of course, if you've read my other two books, "Soy de Mexico" and "A New Mexico," you already know that.

And maybe I should tell you about what happened in those, as a recap if you've forgotten, or to bring you up to speed if you never read them.

(And if you've never read them, you really should, because unless you've read them, you'll never believe the kinds of crazy things that happen here in little Mexico, Missouri. I mean, I'll be honest with you, there aren't nearly enough true mysteries in the world to merit all the TV detectives they've got working on them, but here in Mexico, we've had more fishy stuff going on than Cabot Cove. Full disclosure here: I've always had a thing for "Murder, She Wrote." Well, actually, I should clarify that -- I've always had a thing for Angela Lansbury. You in the younger generation will likely find this strange, as you've only known her as an older lady solving improbable crimes (or improbably solving crimes, as was often the case) in a tiny little town in Maine. But back in her heyday, she was quite a looker. But the other thing I've always had for "Murder, She Wrote" was this notion that, well, I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but that I could be a small-town crime solver who also happened to be a novelist, just like Jessica Fletcher. And in a way, I've achieved that dream -- I've helped solve two of Mexico's biggest murder mysteries, and I've turned them into novels. Well, they're more like ripped-from-the-headlines novels, rather than the kind created from whole cloth. But they sure read like novels. Of course, one big difference is that in the first one, I was, well, I was the murderer. Which made it pretty easy for me to solve the case. The other big difference between me and Jessica Fletcher is that I'm in jail, as I mentioned. But you gotta dream big, my pappy always said. That's why he named me Emerson. But of course, I digress.)

Mexico -- and when I say Mexico, I'm referring to Mexico, Missouri, of course -- has always been a sleepy town, and probably would have stayed that way if Percy Crocker hadn't been the victim of a triple murder. Well, to be precise, he was only killed once, but three attempts were made on his life. First, I shot him, then the Propane Syndicate gassed him, and then the Pork Mafia contracted with the Mexican Mafia, who gave up their operation to three high schoolers who won a bunch of money off them in a high-school-football point shaving scandal, and then those three high schoolers hired Horton Granger, who had a serious gambling problem and thus owed them a bunch of money, to blow up Percy and the entire OriFlame plant, which he chose to do wearing the bulldog suit worn by Vasco da Gama, the mascot of the Mexico State University Conquistadors. If you want to know why a school whose teams are named the Conquistadors has a bulldog named Vasco da Gama prowling the sidelines, well, you're just going to have to read "Soy de Mexico." But if you want to know my motivation for shooting Percy, I'll tell you -- after the big flood, I was fishing in Lakeview Lake, and I fished up the heirloom diamond necklace that had belonged to Percy's late wife, Ashley, with whom I'd been having a salacious affair. That necklace convinced me that Percy had killed her, so in a fit of rage, I went over there, confronted him, and shot him. I never really considered myself a murderer, but, well, sometimes love does crazy things to you. You can never really predict how you're going to act in a situation like that. So what I'm saying is, don't be so quick to judge me. I mean, you can judge me to the extent that the judge judged me, since I am writing this from the Audrain County jail, but, you know, have some charity. Most everybody in town agrees that I'm a good guy.

And if you needed proof, I helped solve Mexico's next murder mystery -- the blow-dart shooting of Leslie Marshall Doniphan, Chancellor of Mexico State University and the first-ever female Senator from Missouri. Of course, without my buddy Hiram Détente, we wouldn't have been able to figure that one out, but what I'm saying is, I helped. And considering my incarceration, I think that's not too shabby.

So anyways, it's a new Mexico around here -- OriFlame, Percy's gas-grill company, isn't what it used to be, seeing as Percy, the company visionary and the kind of guy who could make deals even when he didn't realize he was making deals, was gone. They were still researching new soy opportunities, which makes sense, seeing as Audrain County is the leading soy producing county in all of Missouri, and when you've got that kind of economic potential, you've got to explore it. But with Percy gone, and with Chancellor Doniphan gone, both victims of murder, the spirit of Mexico was a bit depressed. People just weren't as optimistic that things were going to continue to be as great as they'd always been. People were worried about what might come next. And of course, we now know that they had every reason to be. But on the day they broke ground on the Leslie Marshall Doniphan Memorial Library, there was still some reason for optimism. And if anybody besides the guy with the silver shovel had bothered to show up, maybe there would have been some.

It was a particularly dreary day the Tuesday they broke ground for the DML, which is what the students took to calling the Doniphan Memorial Library even before it was open for business. College students love their acronyms -- I guess it's a little too much effort to say those ten syllables when you can get away with just three. Of course, sometimes those acronyms become problematic, as was the case with the Percy A. Crocker School of Hospitality and Tourism, which the students took to calling the PAC-SHIT. Never mind that it wasn't a direct acronym, and that it probably would've been more acronymmically accurate to call it the PAC-SHAT, particularly since the past tense of shit is a fun word to say, but anyway, that's college students for you. They study at the DML, they work out at the ICAC (pronounced "Ick-ack," and an abbreviation for the Iantha-Cabool Athletic Complex), and they take classes in hospitality and tourism at the PAC-SHIT -- despite the fact that the school has since been renamed the Percy A. Crocker School of Hospitality and Hotel and Restaurant Management, in a failed attempt to thwart student efforts to refer to one of the University's six colleges as a compacted bowel movement. What can I tell you -- they're going to a school that in less than 40 years has been called four different things, from the University of Mexico to Mexico University to the University of Missouri-Mexico to Mexico State University, so you'll have to forgive them for having something of a warped sense of humor when it comes to names.

Anyway, the crowd at the ground-breaking was a small one, to say the least. The family was there -- Leslie's daughter, Stella, her new husband, Hiram, and Stella's cousin/Leslie's nephew/Percy's son, Durham. Seeing as how the Doniphan and Crocker clans had been disproportionately murdered over the last several years, there wasn't much family left.

The new chancellor was there, a fella by the name of Sheldon Tebbetts, because, well, he was the chancellor, and those folks are expected to make an appearance at those sort of occasions. But outside the family, the chancellor and the photographer from "The Mexico State Monthly," the university's propaganda rag, which covers all the campus non-news fit to print, nobody came. The reporter and the photographer from "The Conquistador," who had both been assigned to cover the story, came down with a serious case of the flu, which one got and shared with the other (thought they could never agree upon who got and who gave), as they had been sleeping together for the previous three weeks, their denials to the rest of the editorial staff notwithstanding. The reporter from the "Daily Mexican," Gideon Gladstone, decided not to go because his rain jacket was at the dry cleaners, and as I mentioned earlier, it was a rather dreary, wet day. Now, before my incarceration, I wrote a regular column for the "Daily Mexican," and had I been a free man at the time of the groundbreaking, I would've been the man covering the event, and I certainly would've braved a little bit of cold and wet to be there, if need be. This would have been partly out of my allegiance to Leslie, Stella and Durham, but also because my philosophy is that a good journalist will not be deterred by a little moisture. Now, I'm not suggesting that Gideon isn't a good journalist -- he can employ a metaphor about as deftly as anyone I know, particularly if that metaphor involves livestock -- but when it comes to inclement weather, the man displays little to no intestinal fortitude. And since Gideon wasn't planning to go, when the photographer assigned to the story, Newton Menfro, called and asked where they should meet, ol' Gid told Newton he wasn't going, so Newton figured the event was off, and he didn't bother to show up, either.

It pretty much goes without saying that the state and national media that had been invited to the ground-breaking didn't even consider coming to the event. Sure, when there's a scandalous murder, you'll get all sorts of media coverage -- if it bleeds, it leads, and all that. But when it's a wholesome, positive news story, like the groundbreaking for a university library to honor the first-ever female senator from Missouri, you can't even get anybody from the school paper to show up. It's tragic, but it's true.

Actually, it's not all true. Well, I mean the part about murders being a bigger draw than libraries is true every time. But the part about nobody from the state and national media considering coming to the event, that's not entirely true. Because there was one reporter who read the press release and thought this might be a story worth covering.

Only problem was, he got there a day late.