Page 27 of Killer on the First Page
Pulled away from Penny, Miranda had moved about, topping up glasses and encouraging people to eat. Many of the guests seemed reluctant to, intimidated by G&G’s bravura culinary arrangements—it would have been like plundering a work of art. And as she moved through the crowd with feigned laughter and air-kiss greetings, Miranda spotted a vaguely familiar face among the crowd. It was the bookstore customer from earlier, the one with the weirdly pale upper lip, the one who’d purchased thePastor Frannovelizations. Oh joy! A fan! But his demeanor had changed. His eyes had grown flinty.His expression, cold. Miranda now received only a terse nod, barely perceptible, to her warm “Yes! It is I!” greeting.
Who invitedhim?thought Miranda.
Officer Holly Hinton, meanwhile, usually sardonic and tough as nuts, had been reduced to a giggling schoolgirl by the presence of the Great Wanda Stobol.
“Compendium Cathy was my hero! Honest!” Holly was clutching her cloth bag of books, waiting for the right moment to ask. “Nancy Drew and Pippi Longstocking, but especially Compendium Cathy. They were my inspirations—aremy inspirations. Honest!”
A weary sigh from Wanda. “Yeah, you mentioned that. More than once.”
She was eyeing the rest of the room, looking for an exit. Of the authors there that evening, Stobol was the one who fit in the best, fashion-wise, with the aesthetic of Oregon’s Pacific Coast. She sported 501 jeans, a red checked flannel shirt, and Blundstone boots. What would be considered semiformal wear in Happy Rock. As wide as she was tall, Wanda Stobol had two deep lines etched on either side of her mouth, like parentheses of disapproval.
“Honest! At Halloween, I always went as Compendium Cathy!” gurgled Officer Holly. “Granted, that mainly meant carrying around a magnifying glass and saying, ‘Aha! It all fits together now!’”
This was Compendium Cathy’s catchphrase, and the author must have heard it quoted to her many times, because she held up a hand as if to say “Enough.”
Miranda parlayed that into an offer to top up their wineglasses, as Wanda stuffed handfuls of antacids into her mouth. She chewed them noisily.
“Stomach issues?” asked Miranda.
“Ulcers. From worrying.”
“Worrying?”
“About my blood pressure. It’s off the charts, which makes me worry, which is why I drink, so I can forget, which causes my ulcer to flare up, which raises my blood pressure, which causes me to drink. Quite the conundrum, ain’t it? Ought to put my snotty-nosed, nine-year-old sleuth on it, see if she can crack the case.”
Officer Holly chimed in with “If anyone can, Cathy can!”This was the motto written in crayon above Compendium Cathy’s clubhouse detective agency. “She’s the best! The way she handles Bugsy McGregor and his gang of—”
Again, the hand went up. “Compendium Cathy is just a character, y’know that, right? A pint-sized detective running a pint-sized operation. It’s not even a viable business plan:25 cents a day! No case too small.Who could pay the rent on that? I pitched the idea for a Compendium Cathy story where it’s revealed that the reason she can afford to charge so little per case is because she is secretly embezzling from the school principal. Publisher nixed that one, and my follow-up idea, where she is blackmailing the adults in the town with photos of their ongoing infidelities. Ended with a knife fight under a bridge. Publisher vetoed that, too, said it would—get this—‘sink the series.’ Like that was a bad thing.”
Wanda Stobol finished the last of her chewable antacids, took out a fresh pack from one of her flannel shirt pockets, struggled with the top. “Damn childproof lids.”
But now someone else caught Miranda’s eye: a miserable figure in a jacket two sizes too big, lurking near the back with a lean and hungry look. Lachlan Todd.
Sigh.
Before Miranda could intercept him with a witheringAnd you were invited by whom exactly?(a well-placedwhombeing more scathing than a merewho, syntax be damned), the person next to her scoffed. “Luckless Lachlan, in the flesh.”
It was Ray Valentine, Prince of the Police Procedural. He was staring hard at Lachlan Todd, and for a moment Miranda was caught between the two men like hapless townsfolk caught between gunfighters squaring off on Main Street.
Lachlan came over. He’d heard Ray’s snorted comment and did not appreciate the moniker that had dogged him since his third pilot was canceled.Luckless Lachlan!the trades chortled.Always a bridesmaid, never a showrunner!It rankled, how this nickname had stuck to him all these years like gum on the bottom of his shoe.
“My name isTodd.”
“Duly noted. So why’re you here, Luckless Todd?”
Another feud? thought Miranda. What a nest of vipers these authors were! They were the only people on earth who could make actors look copasetic and well-adjusted.
“Funny,” said Ray. “I didn’t see your name on the poster.”
A mild smirk from Lachlan. “Like I said to Pastor Fran here, my invitation must have gotten lost in the mail.”
“You know each other?” asked Miranda.
“Lachlan wrote the infamous Red Herring Episode onParrot P.I.!”
“The murder weapon was an actual red herring,” Lachlan explained with no small amount of pride. (Much like Miranda, Lachlan tended to hearinfamousasfamous.) Addressing an objection no one had raised, he added, “The fish was frozen. That’s why the killer could bludgeon someone with it. Then, after it thawed, the mystery became ‘How could someone be killed by something so floppy?’ I don’t claim it was a work of genius...” But the nuance was clearly that it was a work of genius.
Much like Inez Fonio’s contempt for cozies, Ray Valentine had little regard for Lachlan’s outlandish plots. “I write police procedurals. They’re grounded in the real world, not propped up by elaborate scaffolding.”
