Page 105 of Killer on the First Page
“I’ve already spoken with Helen. She knew about you and your mentor. She always knew. She just didn’t care, and that must have been the final sting. What was it Wanda said? ‘Some people sleep their way to the middle.’ Ah, but you were in love. And yours was not a middling talent. You were the only real writer amongst them, the only one who’d already been published, even if it was with a small, obscure press.”
“Miranda, listen—”
“You planted the note about the lighthouse, slid it under Fairfax’s door to lure him there. You would never have spelled Virginia Woolf’s name wrong, and you were also the one who ‘discovered’—and decoded—the message. A nice deflection, that. Fairfax was waiting for you at the lighthouse, and when you entered with the speargun, held him at bay as you began preparing the noose, he knew. Fairfax choked trying to swallow the last page of the manuscript, thinking that’s what you’d come for. But it wasn’t.”
A flash of anger from Penny. “It wasn’t enough to sink that stupid series of novels. A six-foot former whatever, going town to town punching bad guys? It deserved to die. But so did the others. I was going to make them pay, starting with the two I was closest to, myfriends—my so-called friends—the ones who’d watched it happen, had watched me fall in love, had watched as he toyed with me and then fobbed me off, had watched me squander my talent and my heart.”
“How Precious the Rain, How Sad the Sun. There is no Gertrude Gyilkos, is there? That’s why Andrew couldn’t find any trace of her, and he’s very good at that sort of thing. Your name truly is Penny Fenland, unlike Kane or Wanda or Fairfax, all of whom operated under pen names. And yet, I suspect Gertrude Gyilkos is who you truly are.”
But Penny’s thoughts were elsewhere. She looked away. Far away. She was remembering the tall, ungainly girl who had attended the Idaho Writers Workshop in Boise, nervous and insecure even though she was the only student there who could call herself an actual author, who had actually been published; the tall, ungainly girl who struggled in her attempts to switch to mysteries, only to have each and every attempt dismissed by The Great Writer™.John, turning in bed to look at her. John, reaching out to stroke her cheek, saying, “You know, I liked that one character of yours, the French Canadian in Chapter Seven. You could probably write a whole book about him, so long as you don’t worry too much about psychology and focus more on plot instead. Who knows? It might change your life.”It would. It did. Though not necessarily for the better.
She looked at Miranda with twenty years of sorrow in her eyes. “We missed one. The other authors and I. Fear, greed, love, anger, and madness. But we can also kill out of pain. The missing motive on that list is pain.” The sadness broke, the rage returned. “I was the only one! The only one with a novel to my name, the only one who’d come there as a real writer, the only one with talent, yet my work was marginalized, dismissed, and demeaned by the same Great Man who gathered his acolytes around him even as he isolated the weak andthe vulnerable, as he took advantage of my affections and my insecurities. Like his cruel alter ego, Trevor Lucas, he deserved to die.”
“John D. Ross died in his sleep. The others were not so fortunate.”
Penny’s rage had dissipated. Her eyes had cleared. Her intelligence took over. “Miranda, let’s think this through. I can ensure that you get a bigger role, a better character, more lines—maybe a limited series of your own eventually. I won’t insult you by offering you money, I know you don’t care about that, but I can offer you fame—and creative control over how your character is depicted.”
“It’s tempting—I won’t say that it’s not. But I keep thinking about Fairfax in his ill-fitting lifts, terrified and desperately trying to save himself when you cornered him in the lighthouse, shoving that page into his mouth, trying to swallow the final, lethal words of John D. Ross, choking on them, dying in abject fear. He didn’t deserve that. Neither did Kane. Neither did Wanda.”
“Listen, Miranda. We can work this out. Where did you say you were staying?”
“Oh, I’m not staying in LA. I’m only down for the day. We’re heading back this afternoon.”
“We?”
Ned Buckley entered Penny’s office with Deputy Andrew Nguyen in tow.
Penny turned on Miranda, not in anger or hatred, but with tears in her eyes and genuine affection. “You were a true actor, so much more talented than those TV writers ever gave you credit for. Classically trained, sharp as a whip, you squandered your talents on that show, just as I squandered mine. I would have removed Lachlan from the picture—you know that, don’t you? And once he was safely out of the way, I would have invited you back into the fold. It would have been the two of us, together, telling the stories we wanted to tell. We could have made art, Miranda.”
Miranda Abbott said nothing.
Ned was holding a manila envelope in his hand, and when he spoke to Penny, his voice was surprisingly soft. “Ma’am, I have an extradition order here from the State of Oregon. You’ve written enough of these books. You know what happens next.You have the right to remain silent...”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Those We Worry About
The janitor’s tell-all memoir—I AM Ray Valentine: The Truth Comes Out!—ignited a veritable firestorm. It was widely reviewed, got nominated for several awards, and sold well. On the advice of a literary agent, Cephus followed it up with a cop novel of his own, which promptly tanked. He never was much of a writer. And although he’d done nothing illegal, Ray’s backlist suffered from the accusations, and his publisher eventually dropped the series, Ray Valentine’s reputation having been broken into a million little pieces, like shattered glass. The last anyone heard, he had taken over the Compendium Cathy franchise as the new Wanda Stobol.
Sheryl Youngblut chose to honor her grandfather’s final wishes and releasedA Black Orchid to End Withwithout changing the ending, with Trevor Lucas as an unrepentant serial killer who’d framed innocent people for decades. Far from sinking the series, however, the John D. Ross novels saw an uptick in sales as readers went back through the entire oeuvre, looking for clues.
Business boomed at I Only Read Murder. Turned out, having a mystery writer murdered inside your bookstore, when your bookstore specialized in murder mysteries, only added to the cachet. Fans of the morbid made pilgrimages to Happy Rock just to tiptoethrough it to see the room where Kane Hamady had been struck down, and occasionally to buy a book. They posted wild theories online about the way the bookstore was organized.There has to be a system of some sort, but damned if I can find it!The Fibonacci sequence was involved, one person insisted.No, it’s according to the number of murders in each book and their severity, said another,as arranged in alternating descending order.Others believed it to be based on the unrevealed solution to the Voynich Manuscript.
Lachlan Todd blamed Miranda for ruining his comeback on the now-canceled TV series. (Never mind that she’d probably saved his life in the process. “I could’ve outsmarted Penny!” he said, erroneously.) Under oath, he testified to what he’d seen that night: Penny Fenland, Queen of the Cozies, slipping out the back of Hiram Henry House, heading for a rendezvous of death with Fairfax at the lighthouse. Ironically, Penny’s own DNA was found on the remnants of the broken vial she’d flung into the forest from the second floor, not realizing that the chain had caught a branch on the way down. The faintest trace of a scratch, but fatal in its own way. Oddly enough, after she was arrested, the sales of her novels soared as well. Handy tip for authors: consider killing a rival writer for added notoriety.
No longer a deputy, and more a friend than a personal assistant, Andrew Nguyen continued to mind the till at I Only Read Murder. Even with the added gawkers and would-be codebreakers filing through daily, the bookstore felt quieter without Owen McCune tromping about, folding down pages and using the upstairs washroom. Owen and Inez were on their honeymoon, a tour of Eastern European medieval torture chambers—Inez for the frisson of it, and as research, presumably; Owen for the mechanical appeal of said devices.
Miranda had stopped by the bookstore to take Emmy for her walk, and Edgar had come downstairs with the exuberant pooch, a cup of chamomile in hand. As the golden Lab wove her way between thetwo of them, turning loops and thumping her tail excitedly, Edgar said, “Don’t get her too wound up. And make sure you have her back in time for her nap.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
Miranda attached the leash to Emmy’s collar, but before she could leave, Edgar added, as though just in passing, “Ned told me, by the way.”
“Told you what?”
“About the, ah, conversation you had with him, about lucky quarters and who we worry about and why.”
Oh. “Blabbermouth,” she said.
