“Our Chief of Police and his able officer Holly Hinton have things well in hand,” Miranda assured them.
Edgar was more worried about his golden Lab. He’d taken Emmy back upstairs, complaining all the while about the undue excitement, and had come back down with a sour look.
“Trapped in a bookstore with a bunch of disgruntled authors,” he said to Miranda. “One of Dante’s levels of Hell, I’m sure.”
Even worse, no one had bought any books.
Leaning to one side to better eye the co-owners, Lachlan Todd curled his mouth in what was presumably meant to be a smile. “A long way from the writers’ room in Burbank for you two,” he pointed out.
Do I tell him? Miranda wondered. Do I tell him,Actually, darling, I have been invited back—to LA, to Hollywood!Do I tell him that solely to score a point? The old Miranda would have twisted the stiletto in Lachlan’s side. But Happy Rock Miranda was more understanding of people’s foibles. This was, after all, a town inhabited almost completely by eccentrics. A former locked-room mystery writer who shows up uninvited to a party? That hardly registered. Plus, what would Edgar think when he found out about Penny’s offer? She wasn’t ready to know.
With Fairfax AWOL and the police having scrambled their only two patrol cars, and this being a room filled with mystery writers, they’d already deduced that the officers were most likely on their way to their bed-and-breakfast to arrest DePoy, though Inez suggested that he might be crouching in a local cemetery instead, “communing with the creatures of the night.”
“Gimme a break,” said Wanda.
“All I’m saying is that the police should be following every avenue,” Inez snapped back. “This isn’t some second-rate children’s story.”
“My nine-year-old detective’s tales make more sense than your pseudo-mystical nonsense, full of portents and omens and the occasional cryptic message a dying person writes in their own blood.See: Ecclesiastes 1:1. Who could spellEcclesiastescorrectly as they’re dying? Or alive, for that matter.”
“Philistine!” cried Inez. “If you were more liturgically literate, you would know that Ecclesiastes 1:1 refers to a priest, unnamed, who is also the son of David, King of Jerusalem. The killer’s name was Dave. Don’t you see?”
“Why not just write that?” said Wanda. “If you’re dying, why not simply writeGuys! It was Dave!in your own blood, rather than come up with the whole secret message rigmarole. Why so cute about it?”
Amid such rising incriminations, Miranda noticed the publicist slip into the hallway. Miranda followed her around the corner to the reading room, wherein dwelled the corpse of Kane Hamady.
The door was closed, but despite the yellow police tape that crisscrossed it, Sheryl Youngblut tried the handle. It started to turn...
“You can’t go in there,” Miranda said, and the publicist jumped. “My friend Tanvir, most regrettably, had to destroy the mechanism in order to get in, so the reading room can no longer be locked. But it has been sealed off with police tape, as you must certainly havenoticed. Until Mr. Hamady’s body has been removed and the forensics team from Portland has gone through the room inch by inch, this area is strictly off-limits, I’m afraid.”
“I was just—I was checking the door to see if it was secure. I wanted to ensure the manuscript was safe.”
A smile from Miranda. “It is.”
“No... pages missing?”
Miranda’s smile grew thin. “Why would you ask?”
“Wanted to make sure it was still, you know, intact. If it is a lost John D. Ross novel, you wouldn’t want any of it going astray.”
Astray? An interesting choice of words. How did a page from a manuscript “go astray”? Miranda wondered. Do I tell her that the last page is indeed missing? Better not to.
Instead, Miranda escorted Sheryl back to main room, where G&G, having packed up their ornate serving trays and tablecloths and various floral arrangements, were asking Andrew whether they could “run it all back” to their B&B.
“It’s been such a long, long—”
“—night,” said Gerry. “And we really should be—”
“—getting home,” said Geri. “Before the—”
“Trout tartare—”
“—spoils,” said Geri.
To Miranda’s chagrin, Andrew was considering their request. True, Ned had told Andrew to let the locals go, and though new in town, Geri and Gerry were technically locals, but still.
As Andrew was about to give his assent, Miranda stepped in. “We need to wait for the all clear, Geri. Mr. DePoy might well be hiding in his room at your inn. Chief Buckley and Officer Holly have gone there to check.”
Standing nearby, Ray Valentine peered at Miranda over the top of his rimless glasses in that lectern manner of his. He wanted to knowwhy Fairfax would kill Kane. “It seems clear Fairfax did it, but for what reason? They had their disagreements—but murder?”
