Page 51 of Killer on the First Page
“Oh, right. That one. Why they were painting the floor of an active hospital ward was never clear, even to me. And I wrote the damned thing.”
“Was that one of yours?”
“Sadly, yes. That was season six, I believe, when I’d used up all my ideas.”
“There was only one set of footprints in the paint,” Miranda reminded him. “And there were no footprints goingin, only out. I was undercover as a nurse.”
“Asexynurse,” Edgar amended, though that went without saying.
Every time the show sent Miranda into a hospital, the producers always wanted her in a tight, miniskirted nurse’s outfit, which don’t exist in the real world and had to be tailor-made for her.
“How a medical practitioner would effectively minister to their patients while wearing heels and a push-up bra was beyond me,” he said.
“Yes, but do you remember the solution to the mystery?” Miranda asked. “There was a secret passage! Behind the hospital bed.”
“Yeah, that was my go-to as a writer whenever I wrote myself into a corner,” Edgar confessed. “Just add a secret panel. But there are no secret panels in the bookstore reading room. As I said to Ned, when I renovated, I stripped it down to the studs. Had there been a hidden passage, I would’ve found it.”
“Are you certain there wasn’t one?” she asked. “Or perhaps the one that wasn’t there—was!”
A secret panel that isn’t—but is? What the hell was she talking about?
“Edgar! To the furnace room.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Telltale Toothpick
The basement of the bookstore was somehow musty and dry at the same time. Dank smells and the taste of dust in the air. A listing stairway, held together more by good intentions than actual carpentry, led them down in a steep descent. Low ceilings and slab walls. The only light was from a naked bulb above and the boiler fire below. The Monstrosity, as the furnace had been dubbed, was a rumbling presence with its rattling vents and rust-jointed valves. Miranda could hear the strain and rasp of it as they came down the stairs. Edgar had said they’d be lucky if it made it through another winter. More expenses looming.
Crates were piled under dust as thick as dryer lint, the corners of the room clotted with shadow and cobwebs. InPastor Fran Investigates, this was when the villains would emerge from the darkness. Miranda craned her neck to study the exposed beams of the basement ceiling. Jerry-rigged tin air ducts radiated out from the top of the furnace.
“Is that where the hot air flows through?” she asked.
“No. As I was explaining to Ned, we don’t used forced-air heating. It’s a traditional boiler and radiator system. Hot water is pumped out through the pipes over there, where it then circulates throughout the building and the various cast-iron radiators—though I do havesome space heaters on the second floor; gets cold up there. It’s an old building and an old system. The vents you see are for air movement, not the actual heating. Boilers use ductwork to move the air, but it’s the radiators that, well, radiate the heat.”
“Which one of these connects to the reading room?”
Edgar pointed out a flat metal duct that ran along the ceiling. She was disappointed. It was too narrow for anyone to fit through.
“In movies, people are always crawling along air ducts,” she said.
“In movies, people are always outrunning erupting balls of fire as well, and clinging to helicopter rudders with their bare hands. Even if you could squeeze into that duct, it would never support someone’s weight,” Edgar said, pointing out the obvious. Once again, real life had failed to live up to that of TV and cinema.
Miranda stood directly under the duct, looking up.
“I can’t see the grate,” she said. “The one that leads into the reading room.”
“It’s covered by the tin.” The duct above them was screwed in and held in place by guy wires. “And anyway, the grate on the other side is made of heavy cast iron. Would be very hard to lift.”
“To say nothing of the fact that the edges of the grate were painted shut,” she reminded him.
He never had been much of a handyman, though he tried. Lord, how he tried. She remembered how proud he’d been of the wine rack he’d built in their Hollywood Hills home and how, in the middle of the night, when it had come crashing down, shattering into a lake of Château Mouton Rothschild and Cabernet Sauvignon, they had stood laughing at the sight. Laughing, mind you! Now he got angry when the mail was late.
“Would it have been better for you if I had stayed in LA?” she asked. “If I had signed the divorce papers, if I’d never come to Happy Rock?” If I left, she thought, if I accepted Penny’s offer?
“What? Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re here now, so what does it matter? Coulda, woulda, shoulda doesn’t mean much in the real world.” Then, gruffly: “I would’ve lost the bookstore if it wasn’t for you, would be living in a motel by now heating up Hungry-Man dinners on a hot plate. You saved me from the sort of life Lachlan leads, so I suppose I owe you for that.”
From Edgar, that was as close as one got to a declaration of undying gratitude.
