Page 81 of Killer on the First Page
“Exactly. Kane was being set up from the start. The trap was set. When Kane spotted his own book, he must have thought, in his last moments alive,Maybe it was me all along! Maybe I was the one who mattered most!He bent over. And the arrow went straight up from below, though the book and into his chest. He was thrown backwards into the chair, which swiveled in a slow turn, carried by the momentum of his falling body. That’s what was wrong with his ankles! They were angled the wrong way, draggingawayfrom the door, rather than the window, where we thought the arrow had come from.”
Ned spoke. “So Lachlan Todd’s initial outrageous theory was correct on one score: the kill shot did come from below.”
Edgar craned his neck. “I’m not sure a bow and arrow could shoot straight up like that...”
“Not a bow, an arrow,” said Miranda.
Andrew was just about to remind her to speak in complete sentences, when she continued.
“A speargun. You could hold it straight up against the grate.”
Ned and Andrew joined Edgar in gazing upward.
“Were there no fingerprints on the arrow?” she asked.
“Wiped clean,” said Ned.
“What I don’t understand,” said Edgar, “is if it was a speargun—and true enough, they can be quite small and light and easy to hide, compared to a crossbow—why use it to shoot an arrow? Why not just fire a regular fishing spear?”
“To disguise the fact that itwasa speargun, to make it appear to be a crossbow, to throw the scent onto Mr. DePoy, he of the crossbow-enamored, lassie-beguiling romantic love stories.” She turned to Ned. “Did you find any fingerprints on Kane’s novel, the one that was laid down on the grate?”
Ned nodded. “We did. Inez Fonio’s.”
Andrew gasped. “That will destroy Owen!”
“But Inez is the one person it couldn’t have been,” said Edgar. “Inez was upstairs with Owen at the time the murder happened. She has an alibi.”
“Be that as it may, her fingerprints were all over that book,” said Ned. “As were Ray Valentine’s and Wanda Stobol’s and Penny Fenland’s and Sheryl Youngblut’s and Bea’s and Gerry’s and more. Everyone who handled it left prints. It had been pawed over during the course of the evening, just like the other authors’ books that were on display that night.”
“Pawed over but not purchased,” said Edgar bitterly. The woe of booksellers everywhere.
“How did the missing page of the manuscript end up in Fairfax’s throat?” Ned asked.
“When he was at the lighthouse, he shoved it into his mouth, tried to swallow it when the killer confronted him, thinking that would save him, or at the very least buy him time, because with Kane dead, he was the only one who knew what the missing page said. Fairfax had been lured to the lighthouse by that note referencing Virginia Woolf.”
Ned looked around the dark basement, at the grim shadows and murky corners and the creaking furnace with its many tentacled ducts above. “So where is the murder weapon?”
Edgar answered. “If it’s a lightweight speargun, the type used for recreational fishing, they’re made of aluminum, can be broken down easily to be put away.”
“Everyone thought the arrow came fromoutside,” said Miranda, “through the transom, but the real killer—and their weapon—were in the bookstore, not outside. You can have Holly make a thorough search of this basement if you like, Ned, but I would imagine the weapon is gone. Stashed somewhere or flung away.”
Andrew’s phone trilled and everyone jumped, skittish and frightfully aware they were standing in the same place the killer had, in the suffocating air of a dank basement.
Looking at his screen, Andrew said, “It’s nothing. Scoop sent me a link to a story about the trout. I’ll look at it later.”
“No!” said Miranda. “The trout explains the transom.”
“The trout explains the transom?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, with an impatient flutter of her hands. It was perfectly obvious.
“Okay.” With a shrug, Andrew scrolled through the article. “It’sfromThe Weekly Picayunearchives, several years ago, under the headlinea good time had by all at annual fish run.” He read: “Last Saturday, a record 38-pound cutthroat trout was caught on the Nestucca River.”
Ned chuckled to himself under his breath at Miranda’s earlier error. “A hundredand thirty-eight pounds. As if.”
Miranda ignored this and said to Andrew, “I’m not interested in the record itself, but the participants. They would have interviewed people who were in town fishing that weekend.”
Andrew scrolled through to a pixelated image: a pair of beaming faces holding up their catches for the camera. Familiar faces.
