by Sara Rosett
I thought I heard the revving of a large engine and hurried to the door, glad to be back in the sunlight, but it was just a large pickup rumbling down the street. I stood in the sunshine for a few moments, soaking up the warmth. It was a clear, cloudless day with sunshine so bright it hurt my eyes. Tiny specks of green spotted the branches on the trees outside the garage. Spring wasn’t far away. Reluctant to go back into the cold garage, I went up the steps to the house to retrieve a box of books. Grandpa Franklin was an avid reader. Besides the books in his bookcases under the back windows, I’d found books scattered throughout the house. I had collected all those extra books and put them in a box. I hefted it outside and settled on the porch steps in the sun’s glare, since inside the house it was about the same temperature as the garage.
I pulled out books and began stacking them around me. Biography, history, and political thrillers were his favorite types of books and those stacks reached my knees, but there were also some westerns, mysteries, and an occasional self-help book sprinkled into the mix. I pulled out a book that was stacked facedown in the box. I flipped it over and saw that it was a biography of Jefferson Davis. I put it in the biography stack, then paused. There was something . . . I frowned and reached for the book again. It was a soft-cover book with a photo of Jefferson Davis on the front cover. I flipped to the back cover again. A black-and-white photo showed the two authors, a man and a woman, each seated at desks, which had been shoved together so that they faced each other. The authors were turned sideways, smiling at the camera. The photo had been taken fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, but I still recognized them. Her hair was darker and styled in a puffy, feathered hairstyle that brushed the boxy shoulder pads of her dress. The goatee was missing, but he actually had hair, quite a bit of it. I shook my head, amazed that I was looking at a twenty-year-old picture of Stan Anderson and Maggie Key.
Ellie Avery’s Tips for Preserving Family Treasures
Preserving Memorabilia
• Use archival paper and special plastic sleeves.
• Use archival spray to preserve newsprint. Be sure to spray both sides of the newspaper to prevent acid transfer.
• Transfer photos, video, and home movies to digital storage. There are professional services that will transfer older video and home movies, if you don’t have the equipment to do it yourself.
Chapter Twenty-two
I read the first paragraph under the photo, then read it again. “Sandy Keenor is the pen name for a husband and wife writing team. They have collaborated on over ten biographies of historical figures, including the critically acclaimed Jackson’s Legacy, which is currently under development at a major motion picture studio.” The rest of the paragraphs lauded the current book, calling it “a new perspective on a turbulent time in U.S. history.”
Husband and wife? Sandy Keenor? Was I wrong? The name wasn’t anything close to Stan Anderson or Maggie Key. I stared at the picture again. No, that was definitely Stan and Maggie. They’d acted like they didn’t even know each other at the viewing. Why would they do that? Did the police know about this connection? I patted my pocket, looking for my cell phone, but it was empty. It was locked in the car with my purse. I’d get it in a minute. I should think about what I was going to say before I called one of the detectives.
I flipped back to the front of the book to the page that listed the books they’d written. All of them were biographies of Southerners—Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Harriet Tubman, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Andrew Jackson, and Margaret Mitchell. I recognized a few of the titles. And there had been a miniseries on one of the pay cable channels about Jackson, maybe ten years ago. It had won a ton of awards. Had it been based on their book? I shook my head. That wasn’t important here. What was important was that Stan Anderson and Maggie Key had been married once. Could they have still been married when he came to town? I didn’t think so. Rochelle had said Stan was divorced and worked at an insurance company in New York. And Maggie wrote middle grade mysteries and lived in Smarr. What would bring Stan here to Smarr? And Maggie, too, come to think of it. Out of all the places to live, why here? What did they all have in common here in Smarr?
My gaze focused on the list of books they’d written. What if they were writing another book together? But why keep it quiet? And if they were writing a book, why would Stan arrive in town and say he wanted to open a pizzeria and make a documentary? And why was he in Grandpa Franklin’s house when he died?
I gripped the page, wrinkling it. What if they were working on a book, but not together? I stood up and walked to the end of the porch, the book tucked in my elbow. What if they were both working on a new biography of another famous Southerner, like Addison McClure? Grandpa Franklin knew her and both Maggie and Stan had contacted him. Grandpa Franklin even had letters from the author. That had to be it—the letters. I rubbed my forehead. Oh my goodness. Letters from Addison McClure would be something a biographer would want. A primary source that had never been published before. And the letters were from Addison McClure, so reclusive and so loved by readers. Oh, this was big. Sally Addison McClure! Sally, Sal for short. Or, Sal as in letters from Sal. Oh my god.
I pressed my hand over my mouth. Livvy had been reading those letters. Grandpa Franklin must have put them in one of his memoir books and Livvy thought they were a story. My second-grader was carrying around original—original!—letters from one of America’s most beloved authors? Probably shoving them in her purse or putting smeary peanut butter fingerprints on them. Where had she put them? She’d said she put the book away where she found it. They had to be with the rest of the books in the garage.
I stepped over the stacks of books, watching my feet as I trotted down the steps so that I didn’t knock anything over. I stopped short. A person blocked my path.
“Maggie. You scared me.” I gripped the handrail to steady myself as I came down the last step. My heart skipped into high gear. “I didn’t hear your car.” Logically, I knew she couldn’t appear out of thin air at the foot of the steps, but it certainly seemed as if she had. I looked behind her and saw only my minivan.
“That’s because I didn’t drive. I know all the trails through the woods from my morning jogs.” I’d forgotten she lived a short distance away. I glanced up at the houses on the rise, then back to her.
She was still dressed in the floral print denim jacket, white shirt, and black pants she’d worn at the book festival. She’d changed her shoes from black flats to sturdy running shoes and I could see an uneven edging of fresh mud around the soles.
“What a shame,” she said as she plucked the book I was still carrying out of my hand. “Well, I can see there’s no need to beat around the bush now. I’d hoped I could talk you into letting me borrow the letters with the promise of returning them, but now it will have to be the other way.” She pulled a gun out of her jacket pocket and I suddenly found it hard to breathe. It felt like a steel band had been clamped around my chest. Little black dots pricked the edges of my vision. I made myself take a deep breath.
“Letters?” My vision cleared and I focused on the gun. It was small and that’s about all I could say about it. Mitch was into hunting. He’d know what kind of gun it was. I couldn’t look away from the dark circle at the end of the barrel. She held it casually, comfortably, as if it were a pen or some other innocuous, everyday item.
The dark circle bounced back and forth as she waved the gun. “Ellie,” she said sharply, and my gaze skittered from the gun to her face. “There. That’s better. Where are McClure’s letters?”
Her back was to the sun, casting her face into shadow. I squinted to see her better. She looked perfectly calm. Her hands weren’t trembling—mine were—she wasn’t licking her lips, or nervously looking around. She raised her eyebrows impatiently. “You’re going to have to focus here, Ellie, if we’re going to get this done.”
I cleared my throat and kept looking at her face. No need to look at the gun. Odd that such a small thing could be so lethal. I was suddenly aware
of the brush of the breeze through the bushes below the porch, the call of a bird in the distance, and the smell of her perfume, a light powdery fragrance.
“That’s better,” she said. “The letters? I heard Livvy say she’d read the letters from Sal. Where are they?”
“Right, the letters,” I said, licking my lips. I forced myself not to look up the driveway behind her. It couldn’t be that long before the recycling truck arrived. If I could string her along until then . . . well, I wasn’t sure what I could do, but at least there would be someone else here besides me—a witness, maybe two. Surely that could keep her in check. There was only one problem. “I don’t know where the letters are, exactly.” A look of distrust shadowed her face and her dainty fingers tightened on the gun. I pressed my damp palms against my jeans. I didn’t need to actually find the letters, just delay. The letters were in the memoir. Livvy had said she put it away when she finished reading it. “They’re in a book. One of Grandpa Franklin’s memoirs,” I said.
“Spare me the details. Where?”
“The garage,” I said, fighting to keep the note of triumph out of my voice. That would keep her busy. “Livvy put the book away, so it’s in the garage. I don’t know which box, but it will—”
“Okay. That’s enough,” she barked. I realized she wasn’t as cool and collected as she’d seemed. She backed up a step and waved me toward the garage with the gun. “You first.”
The crunch of gravel under my feet sounded loud. I felt jittery, like I’d just touched an electric wire. I stopped at the garage’s threshold and pointed to the boxes. “Somewhere in there,” I said, my voice coming out in a croak. I cleared my throat and watched her.
She looked at the boxes, then back at me. “You’re not serious.” She stepped closer to me and I backed up until the rough wood of the garage door snagged at the fabric over my shoulder blades.
“I promise. It’s in one of the boxes. Livvy told me she put it back.” I was relieved to see that the tape had been cut on many of the boxes, so theoretically it could be in any one of those.
The tip of the gun bit into my ribs, setting off another asthmatic breathing pattern in me. “You better not be lying to me. Because if you are . . . I know where your kids are.” She stared at me with a level gaze, her brown eyes the same color as the dead leaves scattered on the ground. She didn’t blink and my heart seemed to contract.
My kids. She was threatening Livvy and Nathan. My brain disconnected for a moment because what she was suggesting was too terrible. I forced myself to swallow the bile surging up my throat. Not my kids. I couldn’t let my thoughts go there. “I’m not lying,” I said, fighting to get my words out without them sounding choppy.
“Then get to it,” she said impatiently, and pulled the gun away from my side.
I met her cold stare even though inwardly I was alternating between icy fear and flaming anger. I tried to push all that emotion down so I could think clearly. I crossed to the boxes and she walked in a sweeping circle behind me, so she could see me and the driveway.
The flaps on the first box were folded together so that they interlocked. I tugged and a puff of dust sprayed into the air. The box was about half full. I picked up a book and flicked through the pages, praying that the letters wouldn’t be in the first one I came to, which would be the most likely location for Livvy to have returned the book to. But I couldn’t quite see her mastering the tricky folds of the box flaps, so maybe the letters wouldn’t be in this box. That would be good . . . as long as Maggie didn’t get too impatient. I took a steadying breath and focused on the task at hand.
“Higher. Let me see what you’re doing,” Maggie barked, and I raised the book so she could see it.
“Nothing.” I flicked through the rest of the books in that box, then moved the box to the floor. The next box was the same. The dark blue cover of the memoir repeated over and over again, filling about half the box. All the edges of the books looked pristine, as if they hadn’t been opened but I pulled out copy after copy, fanning the pages so that Maggie could see there was nothing between the pages.
I thought I heard a heavy engine outside. Please be the recycling truck, I prayed. Trying to cover the possible noise it would make in the driveway, I said, “You had me completely fooled that first day. Quite a performance.”
Instead of downshifting to turn into the driveway, the engine accelerated, continuing down the street. I fought down a surge of disappointment. “With your distraught act. ‘Poor Mr. Avery. Is he okay?’ ”
“Oh that. That wasn’t an act. I was distraught. I needed to know where the letters were.”
My hands were dusty and dry as I pulled open the next box. “So you really didn’t know what had happened to him?” I said, in an effort to keep the conversation going. Surely the truck wouldn’t be much longer.
“Oh, I knew he was unconscious, she said flatly. “Endless trouble that caused me, too.”
I turned to look at her hard face. “You did that to him?” The words slipped out before I could check them. Not good. Not a good thing to say, I thought.
But she waved the gun, unruffled. “No, he was already like that when I got there that night,” she sighed, a deep, irritated sigh as if someone hadn’t refilled the paper tray in the copier. “I’d hoped to search his house while he was sleeping, but when the storm rolled in and he didn’t come out of his room, I knew something was wrong. He’d told me he wasn’t able to sleep through thunderstorms. He’d watch their progress on television until they’d passed through. Since there was no noise from his room, I thought maybe I’d messed up—that I’d somehow missed him leaving the house and that he wasn’t home. I looked in his room and saw him, lying there in bed, not moving, as those tremendous claps of thunder sounded, and I knew. Christine showed up so quickly that I barely had time to get out of there before she came in.” Maggie waved the gun. “Keep working. Stay at it.”
I swiveled back to the books as she said, “No, it would have saved me so much time, if he’d just lasted a few more days. I almost had him convinced. Then he had to go and slip into unconsciousness. Do you know how inconvenient this has been for me?” she asked, and I could hear the agitation in her voice.
“I can’t imagine,” I said mildly.
“My editor’s breathing down my neck. I had to tell him my computer crashed to buy more time. And my agent! Calling and calling. E-mailing practically every hour. I barely had time to search this place with all the damage control I was doing.”
I flipped through book after book. I kept my gaze on the books, my tone conversational, but I was completely zeroed in on what was going on behind me—her words and listening for any noise from the driveway. “But, somehow, you found time. You pulled the plywood off the window and got in the house again.”
She didn’t answer. I’d been racing through the books and there were only three unsealed boxes left. Maybe the letters weren’t in the boxes after all. What would I do if I got to that last unsealed box and hadn’t found the letters? Despite the coolness in the garage, I’d worked up a sweat as I plowed through the books and shoved the boxes around. I consciously slowed down the movements of my hands. Where was that recycling truck? I removed a book, the last one in the current box, and flipped through it. I set it aside and picked up the empty box. As I turned to put it on the stack of empty boxes, I said, “And Stan’s arrival in town must have made things worse for you. He wanted the letters, too, right?”
Her face tightened and her eyes narrowed as she said, “Those letters were mine. I’d done the research and tracked them down. I’d spent a year in this backwater and he thought he could waltz in here and take them out from under my nose. He was wrong about that.”
My palms were gritty with a layer of dust. I used the back of my hand to push my bangs out of my eyes. “He got pretty close, pretty fast. That must have put you on the defensive.”
She bristled. “He wouldn’t have gotten the letters. He was too impulsive. He didn’t even have a plan
when he searched the house—just wandered from room to room, randomly opening drawers and looking under tables. It was laughable.”
“So you were both in the house at the same time? The night Stan died?”
She blinked, refocusing on me. “Back to work,” she snapped.
I opened the next box. I could hear her moving around behind me. “Such an idiot,” she muttered under her breath and I hoped she was talking about Stan. I was amazed that this was the same woman who’d been so nice to Livvy. It was all an act, even from the first moment I met her at the tape line when she’d asked about Grandpa Franklin, oozing concern and caring. My hands went still and I looked back at her. Now I knew why her story about the red car during the author talk had bothered me. “You made up the red car, didn’t you?”
She’d paced to the end of the garage, but she turned sharply. “What?”
“The day Grandpa Franklin died—you said you’d seen a red car parked in his driveway. You made it all up, just like in your books. You were scattering clues: the red car, the gym flyer in the funeral home van. You wanted the police to suspect Felicity.”
She raised one shoulder as if it was not a big deal. “I’d done my homework. It was easy to watch his house. My desk has a wonderful view. I can see everyone arriving and leaving. So interesting to watch the dynamics play out from above. Almost like writing a book. I began to get a feel for the characters. I had no idea manipulating real people could be so entertaining.” Her expression turned darker as she said, “Of course when I saw him carted off to the hospital I knew that if he died, there would be an investigation. I made sure it focused on someone besides me, that’s all,” she said. “Haven’t you found it yet?” She fixed her gaze on me and closed the distance between us, tension and anger radiating from her very pores. “I’m beginning to think you’re playing games with me and you don’t know where the letters are, after all. If you’re fooling around with me . . . I have no problem getting on with this myself.” She spoke very softly, almost a whisper as she said, “Killing someone is very simple. It’s all in the way you do it. A shove at the top of the stairs and it’s all over.” As I looked into her very blank and empty eyes, I knew that was exactly what had happened with Stan.
