I smeared the aloe gel on my pen, grabbed Kimberly’s book, and hurried over to her. The other mean author smirked as she walked away. If it wouldn’t have been obvious, I’d have tripped her.
“Eloise,” Kimberly said. “You’d like me to sign your book?”
I set the book—her newest hardcover—down before her and held out my pen. “Yes, I wanted to get your signature before they let the fans in. I know both our lines will be long.”
“You’re right about that.” Kimberly reached for my pen, then stopped and shook her head. “What am I doing?” She jerked her hand back and pulled an expensive-looking pen from her blazer pocket. “My lucky pen. I only sign with this one. Now, should I make this out to my dear old friend Eloise?”
I could swear she emphasized the word old. Seething, I nodded yes.
* * * *
My honoree interview was that afternoon, and I was so enraged with Kimberly that when the interview ended, I had little recollection of what I’d said. Had I stuck up for quieter mysteries? Made all the points my agent had encouraged me to make? I had no idea.
I guessed it went well because a bunch of fans happily mobbed me right after. “Ladies,” I said, “let’s go to the bar and relax.” I needed a drink. Badly.
Minutes later we settled at a table and ordered. I tried to focus on what these fans were saying to me, but I couldn’t keep from scanning the room. Was Kimberly here? I had to find her. The convention was more than two-thirds over, and Kimberly hadn’t suffered at all.
She had to suffer.
Suddenly, there she was, entering the bar with a group of friends. She dropped her bookbag onto a chair, laughed at something someone said, and headed toward the ladies room. This was my chance. I grabbed my bookbag, excused myself, and hurried after her.
I entered the restroom just as Kimberly closed the door to her stall. The lavatory was otherwise empty. Perfect. I reached into my bookbag, pulled out a large water bottle, and turned on a faucet. The running water would mask the sound of me pouring my bottle—filled with vegetable oil—all over the floor right outside Kimberly’s stall. When she opened the door, she would slip and maybe break a hip. Oh, how I hoped so.
I unscrewed the top of my water bottle and—
“Eloise Nickel, it is you,” a freckled woman said, entering the restroom. “I missed your signing. When I spotted you across the bar just now, I thought, perfect solution. Would you sign my book?”
She thrust one of my earliest books at me. I stood there, my mouth hung open. Had this woman actually followed me into the restroom and asked me to sign a book? Had she no propriety?
“Now?” I stammered.
She nodded like a bobblehead doll. “And Kimberly, Ms. Siger, I know you’re in here, too,” she said. “Could you also sign a book for me? I’ll hand it to you under the stall door.”
Kimberly flushed her toilet and stepped out of the stall. “Here would be easier.” Her smile looked real, but her icy tone indicated she was as annoyed as I was.
We each signed the woman’s books. She thanked us profusely before scurrying away. Kimberly rolled her eyes and walked to the sink. “Did you finish filling your water bottle, Eloise? Should I shut off the faucet for you?”
Dumbfounded, I nodded.
She washed and dried her hands while I stood there, trying to comprehend what had just happened, how my chance had slipped away. Again.
“You know,” Kimberly said, her hand on the door, “if I were you, I’d spill that out and ask the bartender to fill it with bottled water. You’re not really going to drink water from the bathroom sink, are you?”
She made a gagging noise as she left the room.
* * * *
I hardly slept that night, tossing and turning, furious that Kimberly kept sticking it to me, while eluding my plans again and again. By morning I was bleary, but I knew one thing: I would not leave this convention without getting satisfaction.
All my aloe schemes were out. It was like they were cursed. So I had to improvise. I recalled that nasty author from the signing yesterday, the one I’d wanted to trip. And I remembered how Kimberly often took the stairs, despite that—or perhaps because—there were four exceedingly long flights between the main level of the hotel and the lower one.
I’d follow her discreetly. Eventually she’d take the stairs down, and I’d walk with her. And clumsy me would wobble, tripping Kimberly. She’d tumble down, spraining an ankle or wrenching her back. Anything painful would do.
Finally, in the late morning, I saw her enter the stairway door. I dashed after her. But when I pushed open the door, she wasn’t there. Had she run down the stairs?
I hurried down the first flight to catch up with her, turned the corner, and suddenly I was flying. Tumbling over and over, my head banging against the cold steps, my right hip screaming in pain, my mind getting fuzzy.
When I reached the bottom, I knew something was drastically wrong. Blood was pouring from my temple. I became lightheaded and began to shiver. They say that people don’t die from stairway falls in real life as often as it happens in fiction, but it was possible. And now I was living it. Or rather, I was dying from it.
I heard someone clomping down the stairs and blinked my eyes open. Kimberly.
“That was quite a fall.” She smirked. “Did you think I wouldn’t figure out you were up to something, Eloise? That business with my water glass. And that pen you wanted me to use so badly. And the sabotage to my hotel room doorknob?”
She squatted down so our faces nearly touched. “But you were only trying to injure me, right? Maybe if you’d tried to kill me you wouldn’t be in this position.” She laughed. “You were always way too cozy for your own good. Rest in peace, old friend.”
With my last bit of strength, I reached up and raked my nails across her cheek. Kimberly screamed. She wouldn’t be able to hide that injury. And I’d die with her skin under my fingernails and a smile on my face.
That’s the beauty of being a cozy author. I could always plot a good twist in the end.
A DARK AND STORMY LIGHT, by Gigi Pandian
“Why are you looking at that old postcard from India instead of packing for your conference?” My best friend twirled his bowler hat in his hands. A mangled rose petal escaped from the interior of the hat and wafted down to my coffee table. “Damn. I thought I’d solved that problem.”
“Did I ever tell you about the second history conference I ever attended?” I asked. “It was back when I was a grad student.”
“I don’t think so,” Sanjay replied, but he was only half paying attention as he fiddled with the secret compartments in his magician’s hat. “Boring? We all have to pay our dues, Jaya.”
“That wasn’t the problem.”
“Traumatic?” He tossed the hat onto his head. With his signature hat, perfectly styled thick black hair, and impeccably pressed tuxedo, he looked far more mature than his twenty-eight years. The boyish grin that followed ruined the effect. “I didn’t take you for someone who’d get stage fright from public speaking.”
“I’m not. It was the most exciting conference imaginable. I’m procrastinating on my packing because I can’t imagine any future gathering living up to it. All I have to remember it by is this postcard of Pulicat.”
“The conference was in India?”
“No, it was here in the U.S. And I wish I’d known you then. I could have used your skills of misdirection to figure out what was going on before the situation got out of hand.”
“I’m supposed to be the cryptic one, Jaya.” Sanjay plucked the postcard deftly from my hand. He’s a stage magician, so I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d tried. His eyes widened as he looked over the text. “This postcard is signed by Ursula Light. I don’t care if I’m late for my dress rehearsal. Now you’ve got to tell me how you crossed paths with the famous mystery writer. What does
she have to do with an academic conference and a postcard from the east coast of India?”
* * * *
A few years ago, while I was still a graduate student, I began attending Asian History conferences. At the fateful gathering I will always think of as The Conference, we didn’t fill up the entire hotel. Instead, we found ourselves sharing the space with a mystery writers’ convention.
If I’m being true to the story, I need to say that it began on a dark and stormy night. If it hadn’t been for that storm, the whole fiasco would have been avoided.
I was drenched after my brief walk from the metro stop to the hotel. After changing into dry clothes, I was more than ready for a warming drink at the hotel bar. That night I learned that mystery writers are even bigger drinkers than historians. It was barely five o’clock and there wasn’t a single free table. Two women invited me to join them. They moved two hulking bags of books to make room for me and my behemoth three-olive martini, even after I confessed I wasn’t there for the mystery convention. These mystery folks were a friendly bunch. They introduced themselves as a mystery novelist and a children’s librarian.
“What do you think?” The librarian tilted her head toward a gaudily dressed woman standing at the bar. “Is that Ursula Light?”
I’d heard of the famously reclusive mystery novelist, of course. Even though I prefer historical adventure novels, I don’t live under a rock. The woman who might have been Ursula Light adjusted an oversized pair of dark sunglasses and the scarf tied around her head.
“Isn’t Ursula Light younger?” I asked.
The librarian tried and failed to suppress a smile. “Her book jacket photos are a few years out of date.”
“A few decades is more like it,” the writer added, raising an eyebrow beyond the confines of her cat-eye glasses.
“Why don’t you ask her?” I suggested.
“The convention hasn’t officially begun. She’s probably trying to get a drink in peace.”
“She doesn’t look very peaceful.” I watched as the woman gripped the stem of a martini glass with a forcefulness usually reserved for killing a mortal enemy. She looked to be in her seventies, but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with her. She knocked back the drink and scanned the crowd. Was she looking for someone? I revised my opinion about mystery writers being a friendly bunch.
“She hates being in public,” the librarian said. “She’s only here because she’s being honored.”
“In that case I’m sure she’d be happy to be recognized. She probably feels bad that nobody is talking to her. Why don’t we—”
“Jaya!” Stephano Gopal called to me from across the bar and waved for me to join him. He was impossible to miss. He stood over six feet tall, wore the thickest glasses I’d ever seen, and had a full head of white hair that framed his dark brown complexion.
I excused myself from my new friends and joined my professor. As he pulled me farther away from the crowds of the lobby bar, I caught a glimpse of the two women walking up to Ursula Light. A second later, all thoughts of mystery novelists disappeared from my mind.
“Milton York,” Stephano said, “is missing.”
“What do you mean, he’s missing?”
“Exactly that. This is a disaster. He’s supposed to give the keynote lecture, but he’s gone.”
“Do you mean he’s late arriving? I heard that the storm is causing flight delays.”
“No, it’s not that. We had a preconference meeting today. He was there this morning but missed the afternoon half of the meeting.”
“He’s a grown man. Why are you so worried?”
“He was afraid,” Stephano said, his dark eyes filled with intensity, “that something would happen to him.”
“Because of that Dutch East India Company discovery he made on his last trip to India?”
“Of course. Milton was paranoid about another historian getting an advance look at his findings. He told me last night that he was certain someone had searched his briefcase. He was quite shaken. And now he’s gone.”
Milton York was a historian who focused his research on Indian colonialism, the same subject Stephano had spent his long career researching, and the research area I was focusing on at the start of my career. Milton claimed to have discovered a diary that would change some widely held assumptions about why the Dutch lost their stronghold in India. He found the diary in Pulicat, India, amongst the records of a Dutch East India Company cemetery. If his findings were accurate, the life’s work of many historians would be called into question. Stephano and I were concerned most specifically with the British Empire’s impact on India, so Milton’s research didn’t affect either of us as directly as it did others, but it was still a big deal.
“So you think someone killed him,” I said slowly, “to steal his briefcase?”
“Ada-kadavulae, Jaya.” Stephano gaped at me.
“What?” I left India at age seven and my Tamil is rusty, but I was fairly confident he hadn’t said anything worse than My God, Jaya.
“I had no idea you had such a brutal imagination.”
“You’re the one who said—”
“I’m not afraid he’s dead,” Stephano said. “I’m afraid he got cold feet and left before presenting his controversial findings.”
“Oh.”
Stephano adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and appraised me. “It all makes sense now.”
“What does?” I looked down at my black slacks, black cashmere sweater, black heels, and pseudo-briefcase. Was I underdressed for a professional conference of historians?
“Your draft dissertation chapters are the least dry chapters I’ve read in decades. The way you get inside the minds of the figures in the British East India Company you write about, it’s like you’re writing narrative nonfiction that’s being adapted as a screenplay for a big-budget movie.”
“Um, is that a compliment?”
“I’m not sure. I—” He broke off and swore creatively in what I’m pretty sure was Italian; Stephano’s father was from India, but his mother was Italian. “Reggie, you scared the life out of me. Don’t sneak up on an old man like that.”
I hadn’t seen Reggie Warwick approaching either. Like Stephano, he was a professor of South Asian history, and I don’t think he was attempting to be stealthy. He’s simply a small man. And I don’t say that lightly. He was only a few inches taller than my five feet.
“Sorry, old boy.” Reggie slapped Stephano’s shoulder, knocking him off balance. What Reggie Warwick lacked in height, he overcompensated for in other areas.
As a grad student, I probably should have thought of Stephano and Reggie as Dr. Stephano Gopal, Professor of Indian History, and Dr. Reginald Forsyth Warwick, Distinguished Herodotus Chair. But Stephano was a casual enough professor that he insisted we all call him by his first name, and Reggie was a snooty enough scholar that he hated it when people, even peers, failed to address him as Dr. Warwick—which, of course, caused everyone to jokingly refer to him not only as Reginald but Reggie.
“Milton still hasn’t returned,” Reggie said to Stephano. “Quite childish, if you ask me. All so he won’t have to give his presentation.”
“Reggie, you remember my student, Jaya Jones?” Stephano nodded in my direction.
“A pleasure,” Reggie said, barely acknowledging my presence. “He’s done a runner, Stephano. Damn shame. I was hoping to give a rebuttal to disprove this nonsense he’s claiming. We’re going to need a replacement speaker. Even though it’s short notice, I might be able to—”
“You’re thinking of nominating yourself?” I cut in.
Reggie looked at me directly for the first time. “It would not be the same presentation, of course, since Milton York’s was rubbish.”
“Nobody even knows the man is gone,” I said. “Maybe he got food poisoning and isn’t up for answering his p
hone. Maybe he’s simply taking a nap.”
“No,” Reggie said. “We know. I saw him leave with my own eyes earlier this afternoon. When the rest of us were walking back into the afternoon meeting room, I saw him sneaking out of the lobby with that bedraggled briefcase of his.”
“You did?” Stephano frowned. He was nearing retirement, and I knew he worried that he wasn’t as sharp as he’d once been.
“Perhaps,” a woman’s voice said from behind me, “I could be of assistance.”
Reggie gawked at the newcomer. It was the flamboyantly dressed woman from the bar.
“I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation,” she said. “I, Ursula Light, will solve the case!”
“Ursula Light?” Reggie sputtered.
“She’s a mystery novelist,” I volunteered.
“What business is it of yours?” Reggie asked. “Ursula, was it?” He squared his shoulders. Was he afraid of being upstaged?
Ursula grinned at us. “I’ve always wanted to solve a real-life mystery.”
I was immediately taken with her. In person, she wasn’t at all like the press reported. I’d expected her to be socially awkward, but her anxious display at the bar a few minutes before had vanished. A mischievous gleam in her eyes was visible through her sunglasses.
A woman in a purple jumpsuit ran up to our quickly growing circle. “Ms. Light, your assistant said your flight had been delayed and you wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow. I’m so sorry, if only I’d known you were here—”
“Not to worry.” Ursula gave the woman a warm smile. “As you can tell, there’s something more important than the convention. A man from our neighboring conference is missing.”
“Couldn’t someone simply see whether or not he’s checked out of the hotel?” I suggested.
All eyes turned to me. For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone began to speak at once. Ursula led the group to the front desk. Stephano and I lingered behind with our drinks—until raised voices carried across the lobby. We rushed over to see what was going on.
Murder Most Conventional Page 13
