Page 36 of Killer on the First Page
“Before that. When Edgar was pounding on the door, Kane yelled, ‘It’s just me.’ The more we pounded on the door, the more we heard him crashing about and the more frantic he became, shouting, ‘Won’t be but a minute! Terribly sorry!’ It was like... the timbre of his voice hadchanged.”
Miranda Abbott had studied voice and dialect, the stress, pitch,and rhythms—and something had shifted in Kane’s voice. It was still Kane, but it wasn’t.
“I’d imagine the door muffled much of it,” said Ned as Tanvir returned, drill in hand.
“Perhaps.” But she remained unconvinced.
The metallic sound of a drill going through the lock was the audible equivalent of chewing tinfoil.
As Tanvir drilled, the dessert trays appeared, right on time, and the crowds followed them down the hall excitedly, swooping onto the trays as soon as Geri put them down. (Gerry was apparently busy back in the kitchen, loading the next tray.) Ned looked wistfully down the hall, but duty beckoned and he stayed at the door instead of grabbing a china saucer and making a beeline for the peach cobbler.
On a final shriek of metal on metal, the door to the reading room popped open. It swung inward, revealing Kane Hamady with his overcoat fanning out behind him like a cape, jaw slack, eyes gaping. He was flopped back in the swivel chair, facing the glass cabinet. The John D. Ross first editions Edgar had so carefully stacked on the end table and shelves had been flung about violently, in a rage, as though he’d been searching frantically through their pages. More gruesome still was the open book that was now skewered to Kane’s chest—by an arrow. The standing lamp was no longer standing, having been knocked over, and the bulb overhead cast a yellow glow over this macabretableau de la mort.
Ned stepped into the room, hand on his holster. Edgar, faced with a dead body, reeled to one side, almost as though he were trying to hide behind the door, looking like he might get sick. Miranda, however, was drawn to the corpse. She leaned in, peered closer—not into the dead man’s eyes, not even at the shaft buried in his chest, but at the open book pierced by the arrow. The title at the top of theopened page revealed that it wasn’t a John D. Ross novel that had been speared into Kane Hamady’s heart, but one of his own books:Me, the Judgment.
You, the dead, thought Miranda.
* * *
HAPPYROCK’SCHIEF OFPOLICE, hands on his snug utility belt, stood in the middle of a baffling crime scene alongside the owners of the property, Edgar and Miranda Abbott. Everyone else, aside from Doc Meadows, had been pushed back.
Doc was checking for vitals, even though they knew Kane Hamady was dead. Ned had shouted to Officer Holly to “secure the perimeter!”
“From inside, sir?”
“Yes. From the inside. No one leaves this building.”
Ned had squeezed past the body to check the window. The window itself couldn’t open—the panes were set in place—but the transom above it could. But the latch on the transom was down partway, meaning it was effectively locked from the inside.
Doc noticed Ned looking through the glass of the window to the dark yard beyond and said, “Good idea. Guy might’ve left tracks. Get on it, Ned. You’re a regular bloodhound. ’Member when we were kids playing hide-and-seek in the bush? You always were the best one at finding us. Man, the number of times you spotted me hiding behind a twig.”
“Well, you were six feet tall by the time you were twelve, so it wasn’t that difficult. You were easy enough to spot. And anyway, that arrow couldn’t have come from outside. The window is sealed shut and the transom above it is closed and latched. Musta been a booby trap, but I don’t see how. The killer had to have been inside the room with Kane, but if he was, where’d he go?”
“Vanished?” said Doc.
“Like a ghost,” said Ned.
Andrew, giddy with excitement, was hopping back and forth in the doorway like a kid needing to go to the bathroom, asking repeatedly, “Can I come in? Please? I can help with the investigation.”
“Just stay back, okay?” said Ned.
“Actually, there is something you can do, Andrew,” said Miranda as she marched out of the room. “Come with me.” Then, under her breath, “Doc may be on to something.”
Miranda and Andrew passed Officer Holly in the hall as she was trying to corral everyone into the main room.
“On orders from Ned!” said Miranda, and Holly waved them past. It wasn’t entirely a lie. Ned had told them to “stay back.” And the backyard was as back as you could go.
“C’mon, you bunch of lookie-loos!” Officer Holly was shouting. “You bunch of Yertle-the-turtles. Stop stackin’ up. Into the main room of the bookstore, all of you! And stay there!”
Outside in the crisp night air, Miranda and Andrew circled around the building, across the grass, toward the square of light that marked the reading room window. Through the window, they could see Ned and Doc inside with the dead body and Edgar off to one side, looking queasy.
“Don’t!” said Miranda, before Andrew could step any closer. “Don’t tread on my flower bed.”
Wet soil, smooth and undisturbed, lay directly beneath the window.
“Yourhypotheticalflower bed, you mean to say.”
“A flower bed is a flower bed regardless,” she said.
