Page 52 of Killer on the First Page
Embarrassed, he cleared his throat and said, “Are we done down here?”
“I think so. Alas, it has proven to be a dead end. The grate in the floor above us is covered by an air duct.”
So much for a secret passage.
Then she saw it, lying on the cement floor, in the light of the naked bulb above: a single toothpick. On the dull gray, it stood out in its singularity. Miranda bent down, carefully retrieved it. Held it up to the light. It was red.
A cinnamon toothpick.
“It would appear that Mr. Hamady was down here in the basement,” Miranda said, “before he died.” A thought occurred. “Edgar, can you burn things in the furnace?”
“Not really. It’s a boiler, not an incinerator. There is no iron door that swings open into a fiery pit, like on TV.”
InPastor Fran Investigates,hardly a tenement building’s boiler existed that didn’t have the bones of at least one person inside. Not that they ever showed the grisly charred remains; they were usually referred to in the form of visual synecdoche: a single femur standing in for the body as a whole, or occasionally a plastic skull held up Yorick-style.
“Not bodies,” said Miranda. “Papers. I keep thinking of thatmissing page from the manuscript, wondering what Kane did with it. Did they check his pockets?”
“Holly patted the body down fairly thoroughly. Went through his wallet. Didn’t find the last page of the manuscript, though in fairness she wasn’t looking for it. He might have tucked it into his sock or something. When Doc Meadows returns to accompany the body to the morgue, I’ll ask him to check again. That missing page didn’t vanish into the night on its own.”
Another thought occurred to her. “Pirates, Edgar? Any?”
“Complete sentences, Miranda, remember?”
“You know the history of Tillamook Bay better than I. Were there pirates?”
“Don’t think so.” Conversing with Miranda was like trying to dance with a kangaroo. “What does that have to do with—”
“Something I overheard Fairfax say, something about the ‘cutthroats of Tillamook Bay,’ and I thought perhaps in times gone by buccaneers and swashbuckling freebooters had once prowled these waters.”
“Oh,that,” said Edgar with a laugh. “You’ve always had a rich imagination, Miranda. He would have been referring to cutthroat trout. It’s a type of fish. A record for cutthroat on the Nestucca was set a few years back.”
“Hmm,” said Miranda.
Edgar said, “Perhaps we should go back up, see how Andrew’s doing.” The furnace had kicked in with a groan.
“Before I forget, I informed Sheryl Youngblut that she is not to enter the reading room under any circumstances. Stand firm, Edgar! I don’t want that flirty young publicist sidling up you, trying to inveigle access to the room.” Sheryl wasn’t actually flirty, but Edgar could be as susceptible as the next man. “She’s been acting strange.”
Edgar smiled at Miranda. Such a beautiful smile, and so rarely seen these days.
“Inveigling access? Miranda Abbott, I do declare. Are you worried that I wouldn’t be able to resist the blandishments of a slightly younger woman?”
“Well, she is pretty. In a vague, nondescript, unimpressive sort of way.”
“I promise, if Sheryl comes sliding in next to me, cooing in my ear, nibbling on my lobes, asking for access—whether to my heart or the reading room—I shall resist heroically with every fiber of my being. I’m a married man, remember?”
This set her back on her heels. A married man?So you admit it! Ha!
“I see flames,” Miranda said, trying to stay on task. She was referring to the orange glow cast on the floor. “If he rolled it up tightly, couldn’t Kane have fed the missing page into the furnace that way?”
“Through the gap? I suppose. But there are easier ways to get rid of a piece of paper. And why come down to the basement to do it?”
Not destroy, not burn.Get rid of. Edgar had inadvertently given Miranda the answer. It percolated through her free-range mind. The page was not destroyed; it had, as Edgar had said, vanished into the night.
“Kane opened the transom, not to escape, but to get rid of that page!” she said. But as soon as she said it out loud, her thoughts clouded over. “But there was no page lying on the flower bed outside, no footprints in the soil, no crumpled paper on the grass.
“Unless it blew away,” said Edgar.
He was keeping his eye on the toothpick Miranda was holding between her fingers. She had been gesticulating with it as though it were a tiny little pointer.
