As he scrambled into the patrol car, up front next to the chief, Andrew asked, eyes gleaming, “This counts as siren-worthy, no?”
“No!”
“Toss a coin?”
With a tired exhalation, Ned said, “One whoop. That’s it.”
“Yes!”
One whoop and a quick drive up Beacon Hill brought them back to the bookstore, where Edgar was still struggling to re-reorganize the shelves. The out-of-town investigators had finished with the reading room, were now in the basement.
“They haven’t found the weapon,” Edgar said. “But they agree that the arrow was fired from below.”
Miranda wasn’t interested in the furnace room, however. She was interested in the very books Edgar was sorting.
“You haven’t reached G, I see!” It was a statement that only made sense to her.
“What are you on about now?” Edgar asked.
“Hiding in plain sight!” she said. “Edgar, dear, what did you say to me after I selflessly spent my free time carefully revising our system of shelving? You said,How is any customer supposed to find a specific book they’re looking for now?”
And there it was, filed under G (right next to Carolyn G. Hart, naturally):How Precious the Rain, How Sad the Sun,by one Gertrude Gyilkos, that strange novel with the mauve cover and the cursive font.
A sudden intake of breath from Ned and Edgar, and a cheer from Andrew greeted the discovery. “Go Miranda!” He’d almost said Pastor Fran.
She flipped through to the last page, found the handwritten message. A personal note from John D. Ross.
To the one that mattered most, but was treated the worst. A gift to whoever finds this:
And below it, the missing dialogue from the final John D. Ross manuscript:
“You want to know who was behind it? Every one of the killings? Every one of them, right from the start? I’ll tell you who, and I’ll tell you now. It was—me, Trevor Lucas! I killed them all, every one of them, and then systematically ‘solved’ each case by framing someone else. Innocent people were convicted in my place and sent to the gas chamber, were sentenced to life without parole, to the gallows, to the firing squad—thereby doubling my kill rate. I remain the greatest murderer who never got caught: Trevor Lucas!”
It was written in the same scratchy penmanship, the same sharp lines and harsh angles, as the message that Fairfax DePoy had died trying to swallow.
“But is ithishandwriting?” Miranda wondered.
“It is,” said a low voice from across the room. Startled, they looked up and saw Sheryl Youngblut standing in the hallway. She was staring at the book in Miranda’s hands with a sadness so deep it was almost anger. Christmas cards and birthday letters and postcards from Rio. Even from across the room, she recognized it. “That’s my grandfather’s handwriting.”
It was Edgar who first understood the enormity of what had been revealed by John D. Ross’s note. “If the hero, Trevor Lucas, was the killer all along...?”
A grim nod from Sheryl. “It would sink the series. I’d heard rumors at family gatherings. My grandma had hinted as much, that that was Pawpaw’s intention: to bury the franchise with him, make it impossible for anyone else to take over.”
“Why would that make it impossible?” Andrew asked.
“Don’t you see?” asked Miranda, imagining the impact such a revelation would have on future movie sequels.
“It’s a twist ending,” said Andrew. “So? Books are full of twists.”
“It’s not merely a plot twist,” said Sheryl softly. “It’s the twist of a blade, ensuring that no one would ever profit from his work ever again.”
“Agatha Christie wrote her final Miss Marple mystery,Sleeping Murder, back in 1941,” Edgar explained, “to be published upon her death as ‘Miss Marple’s Last Case.’ Her request was honored, and the novel wasn’t released until 1976, thirty-five years after it had been written. Now, imagine if that final novel revealed Miss Marple to have secretly been a serial killer, playing readers and Scotland Yard for fools from the start, that every single death she’d ever solved had in fact been committed by her own hand. Imagine what would happen to the entire Miss Marple series. It would collapse. The backlist sales would plummet. Fans would be enraged. It would, as Ms. Youngblut so correctly puts it, sink the entire franchise.”
A heavy silence filled the room.
“That handwritten paragraph marks the end of Trevor Lucas,” said Edgar. “The end of an icon.”
“My grandfather’s parting gift to the world,” Sheryl Youngblut said. “A giant middle finger to his readers, his publishers—to all of us.”
