Page 71 of Killer on the First Page
“I do—but shouldn’t we knock first?”
“And rouse Edgar from a much deserved slumber? Nonsense. As the owner of this establishment, I may enter at my leisure. Now, please unlock the door.”
Andrew did so, but under protest. “This might be a bookstore, but it’s also Edgar’s home.”
“The book that matters most,” she said, quoting the note Doc Meadows had found lodged in Fairfax DePoy’s throat. “Kane must have assumed the book in question was one of John D. Ross’s first editions. When he found that note on the final page of the manuscript, he began going through each book in a panic, flipping to the end, trying to find the answer: Who was the true killer in those cases?”
She closed the door behind them and strode down the hallway, flicking on lights imperiously as she went, around the corner to the yellow X that Officer Holly had taped over the broken door of the reading room.
Before she entered, she turned to Andrew. “Kane Hamady was trying to find ‘the book that matters most.’ He never found it. He was killed, and the last page of the manuscript ended up in a dead man’s throat. But what was the one anomaly in those boxes of books Edgar received—the one book that didn’t fit with the others, that stood out by its very incongruity?”
“Of course! That weird literary novel we thought had been included by accident. What was the title?So Sad the Moon, So Tragic the Wind? Something like that.”
“How Precious the Rain, How Sad the Sun.” She pushed the door to the reading room, and it opened on a groan. The inside was tented with numbered police evidence markers. The books remained flung about, as though by a child having a tantrum. The lamp remained on its side, but the transom above the window was now closed. Even so, the room was still chilly. Autumn, like death, had seeped in. The body may have been removed, but its presence could still be felt.
Stepping under the police tape, Miranda crossed over to the glass cabinet and then swore in a decidedly non–Pastor Fran way. The book was gone.
“It was right here, in this cabinet! Some nefarious soul has snatched it.” She tried to remember the last time she’d seen it in there, butcouldn’t. Had it been there when the body was discovered? She was sure it had been. Which meant the strange book with the mauve cover must have disappeared during the chaos right after, or during the drawn-out process of taking statements and fingerprints when Office Holly and Deputy Andrew had been distracted. Or had someone slipped back into the bookstore after the fact? It could have been anyone.
“Miranda? Andrew? What the hell are you doing here?”
Edgar was standing sleepily in the doorway of the reading room, dumbfounded, holding a small china plate and a silver dessert fork.
Miranda swept out of the reading room, back into the hallway, asking Edgar as she stepped past him, “Did you remove a book from this crime scene?”
“Huh? No. Why would I? It’sa crime scene. What are you two doing here? How did you get in? I thought I locked the front door. I only came back downstairs because the lights were on. It’s”—he checked his wrist where his watch would have been, having forgotten he’d taken it off for the night, an awkward maneuver because of the empty plate and fork he was holding—“Anyway, it’s gotta be two in the morning, at least. You should be in bed. We should all be in bed.”
“Fairfax DePoy is no more! He was found hanged—in the lighthouse.”
“What? My god. That’s horrific.” A beat. “But how does any of this involve you, Miranda?”
“It doesn’tnotinvolve me!” she said. “We are closing in.” (She said “we” to include Andrew.) “That strange little novel that we assumed was included amongst the John D. Ross hardcovers by mistake may well contain the solution to everything. But that book has gone missing!”
Edgar closed his eyes a moment. Took a deep breath. Opened his eyes, but she was still there.
“Miranda, it’s late. You need to leave. Take the Jeep. I’m going to bed. You can let yourself out.Lock the door behind you.”Unstated was the sentimentand don’t let it hit your ass on the way out.
“And what is this?” she said, referring to the fancy fork and china plate he was holding. “Those don’t belong to you, Edgar. I recognize that plate, that fork. Those are from Geri and Gerry’s. They served Bea’s peach cobbler on those.”
“I found them upstairs on my bookshelf. Owen must have left them behind when he was canoodling with the Duchess of Darkness earlier. Don’t worry, I’m not keeping them. I’ll wash them up, return them to Geri tomorrow. They’ve probably already taken stock and noticed one was missing. Like I said: keen.”
“Owen McCune? He left that plate and fork upstairs?”
“They were the only ones who went up there. Who else would it be? Have you ever known him to clean up after himself? If I’m going to start adding locks, I should start with one to the stairs, just to keep Owen out.”
“Peach cobbler,” she said. “He took his peach cobbler upstairs with him.”
Edgar was showing them to the door. With plate and fork in one hand, he ushered Miranda and Andrew down the hallway with the other. As they passed the main room of the bookstore, Miranda noted the various volumes that had been removed from the shelves and stacked on the tables.
“Aha! What is going on here? Were you looking for clues, Edgar? Or has a soul more dastardly been through here, searching for hints amongst the stacks?”
“It was me. I was trying to re-alphabetize the shelves after the mess you made of it, but I gave up. It was too much. I see that G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown collections are now beside the Kellermans—both Faye and Jonathan—but nowhere near Laurie R. King’s DetectiveMartinelli series. Those are under R, naturally, next to the works of Philip Craig—sorry, PhilipR. Craig.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. This was his “imminent migraine” gesture. “I’ll take another stab tomorrow. To be clear, Miranda, the first principle of retail is that your customers should be able to find the product they are looking for. Don’t do it again, okay?”
Miranda stopped to ponder this. “But why would you want to make mystery books easy to find? Defeats the purpose, no?”
Andrew said, “In a weird way, she has a point.”
“Solve the mystery of our system, win a gift card! Is that the idea?”
