Wild Secrets (A Wilder Witch Mystery Book 3)

by Jade Wolfe

  “We got the report back from the crime lab, too. Bess’s fingerprints were all over the place in Bagly’s store, and they were also on a baseball bat we found under that pile of clothes. She was guilty of that, at least.”

  “What about the dictionary? Were her prints on that, too?”

  He hesitated, then sighed. “I guess you’ll find out eventually. Yes, they were.”

  “Ha! I was right!”

  “I’m pretty sure that she came to the library with Jasper that morning,” he said.

  “To kill him?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Well, they sure weren’t going to do the hokey pokey,” I said.

  He chuckled, and I realized that sounded kind of dirty. “Ooh, stop. That’s gross. Dwayne would have a cow if he found out someone was desecrating his book shrine like that.”

  “I don’t think he was supposed to find out.”

  I shuddered. “So is Pete in jail?” I asked.

  “Not yet. We still have no clear reason to arrest him. You know how it goes.”

  Unfortunately, I did.

  “We’ll get him, though. Don’t worry any more about it.”

  “Is my dad making you say that?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “I was thinking, Dante. What about the lawyer?”

  “What about him?” In the background, I heard his truck start up. He must be done for the day.

  “Do you think he was involved in all this?”

  “I don’t think so. He was pretty uptight about us even questioning him. That might be another lawsuit waiting to happen.”

  Some song came on in the background, and I knew he’d been fiddling with the radio. He always claimed he couldn’t drive without music, and now that I thought about it, I had never been in his vehicle when music - usually country - wasn’t playing. I sat up on my butt and tried to stretch my stiff shoulders. Staining something - even something as simple as a bookshelf - wasn’t as easy as I remembered.

  “You don’t think Pete did anything, do you?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that. I said we have no evidence to lock him up. You are so bullheaded sometimes.”

  “That’s why I’m so lovable.”

  “That’s...the opposite of why you’re so lovable.”

  “But I am lovable, right?” I laughed and hung up.

  By the time I got the bookshelf stained and ready for its clear-coat, I was a mess. Time for a shower.

  When I wandered into the house, I heard the TV coming from Dad’s room. I stuck my head in on the way down the hall. “Whatcha doin’?” I asked.

  Dad was sitting on the edge of his bed. A bald, pale news anchor was jabbering on about something.

  He motioned toward the screen. “Your buddy Pete is about to make his announcement,” he said.

  I came into the room and sat beside him - carefully, so that I didn’t get stain anywhere. The news anchor disappeared and Pete Shoemaker came on, a host of microphones in front of him. It looked like he was in front of the courthouse again.

  The lawyer was standing nearby. I could see him over Pete’s right shoulder. His expression was carefully blank, and I wondered again how much he knew about Jasper’s death. We might never know.

  His face was pinched in sorrow and he was holding up a hand for quiet. The reporters shut up.

  “As you all know, Jasper Davenport died here in Wilder, Virginia a week ago. There is speculation that he was murdered, although the police have no leads.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Those are lies,” I squeaked. “All lies. It isn’t just speculation, and the police do have leads. He’s one of them. That jerk.”

  Dad patted my knee. “Listen.”

  Pete said, “But what some of you don’t know is that Jasper had eclectic interests when it came to his career. You all know about this book.” He held up the familiar thriller novel. Its cover flashed blue in the sun. “But you might not know about these.”

  Now he put down the thriller and pulled a stack of books from behind the lectern. The romance novels. “Every single one of these is Jasper’s work. He wrote them under the pseudonym of Marjorie Happenstance.”

  “Why did he use a pseudonym?” One of the reporters yelled.

  “To avoid confusion. His name is synonymous with ‘bestselling thriller’, as you know. He didn’t want folks to think they were getting an action adventure, when they were really getting a romance.”

  “How many of those books has he published?” Another reporter leaned in for the question.

  “At least forty.”

  There was an audible gasp from the small crowd.

  “Since he kept this portion of his work a secret to most, we will have to research his contracts before we can give an exact number,” Pete was explaining.

  I fumed. “That’s baloney. If Pete and Bess knew about the books, they had to know how many thee were.”

  “He’s just trying to create a sort of treasure hunt,” Dad told me. “Make people start looking everywhere for these books, and it creates a market for them. People will try to buy every one they find.”

  “Oh. That makes sense. Sneaky, but ingenious, too.”

  “Yep.”

  I tried to imagine Pete - who was just average, it seemed, in every way, manipulating Bess into doing his dirty work for him. Did she think she was in love with him? Or did he tell her that he would split the money from those books?

  The news switched from Pete Shoemaker’s face to that of the reporter. “And now, here is Lester Lucas, head of the BBC Award Association.”

  The man who came on the screen now was a bulky, soft-looking fellow with nice blue eyes. “The passing of Jasper has been a shock to all of us,” he said, “But we are happy to learn that there is more of his superb writing in the world than we previously thought. He will be greatly missed.”

  “Lester looks like he swallowed a lemon,” Dad noted.

  I laughed. “You’re right, he does. Maybe he doesn’t like romance.”

  Dad pulled out his phone and started fiddling with it, while I watched the reporter sign off. Then he nudged me. “Look at this.”

  I looked. He had pulled up eBay and did a search for Jasper’s romances. It took me a moment, but then I saw what he meant. Those romances, which normally died forgotten in shoeboxes all over America, were suddenly going for a lot of money. Dad refreshed the page a few times, and every time he did, the bid prices jumped. Some of them were in the hundred dollar range - for ragged looking paperbacks. “Wow.”

  “Right. Now imagine that he and Bess managed to collect whole sets of these.”

  I nodded. “That’s crazy. But how could they make enough to kill Jasper? I mean, he was surely paying Pete more than a few hundred dollars.”

  Dad chuckled. Then he did something else with his phone and handed it to me.

  I was looking at a forum post about Jasper. Three or four people had commented, but one entry in particular stuck out to me. This person heard from their friend, whose mom apparently worked in the publishing world, that Jasper was about to fire Pete when he died. I looked up. “Is this true?”

  Dad shrugged. “As true as anything else you read on the internet.”

  I pulled up Dante’s contact info and texted him the link before handing the phone back to Dad. “It might be important.”

  He nodded and picked up the remote to change the channel.

  I left him to his programs and went to shower and clean up. Then I got dressed in fresh jeans and a t-shirt and headed for Bagly’s store.

  Town seemed busy, and I could see that there was still a small crowd milling around the courthouse steps, even though Pete and his lawyer were already gone. I drove slowly, looking for any sign of Lavinia, but she seemed to be missing from the onlookers. I didn’t blame her. It had to be hard, especially if she had figured out that her husband died for Pete’s personal gain. I was angry on her behalf, anyway.

  Dante called while I was trying to park the tru
ck. “Thanks for that link. It helped,” he said when I answered.

  “Is Pete in jail?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then it didn’t help enough.” I paused. “What if he gets away with it, Dante?”

  “He won’t.”

  “What if he does?”

  “All we need is some evidence from Bess’s body,” he said. “We’re still waiting on those reports.”

  “Or a confession. That would be nice,” I said.

  “Well, yeah, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was busy wondering if I could get Pete to confess. Maybe I could pretend like I liked the guy? The thought of flirting with him made me shudder, but if I could catch him...hmm.

  “What are you thinking about?” Dante asked. Tension laced his voice.

  “Nothing.”

  “Liar.” He waited, but when I didn’t answer, he said, “Stay away from him, Clover. If he really did kill Bess, I doubt he’ll have any problem doing the same to you.”

  “I know. I wasn’t thinking anything.”

  OK, that wasn’t true, but he didn’t need to know everything. “I’m going to Bagly’s shop. You need anything?”

  “Like what? An old typewriter?”

  “I was just being polite.”

  “You are trying to get off the phone.”

  “OK.” He wasn’t wrong.

  “Just keep your head down and I’ll talk to you later, all right?”

  I promised I would and hung up. Then I just sat there in the truck for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to make Pete Shoemaker confess.

  Eventually I gave up and went inside, intent on buying the vase I’d been looking at a few days before. I was tired of teasing Bagly about the price, so I figured I would just buy the thing and have it home to decorate the house for Thanksgiving, which wasn’t too far away.

  When I stepped inside, the store looked just like it always did - kind of cluttered, kind of raggedy, a lot dusty - but I still stopped dead in my tracks...because the place felt different. Not different like “Oh, he moved things around”. No, it felt wrong. Tension crackled in the air, and as I stood in the doorway I shuddered in spite of the warm sun on my shoulders and back.

  No one was in sight - not Bagly, not any customers. The door was open, but the whole store seemed deserted. My heartbeat ramped up; I was thinking that this seemed a lot like the day I’d found the old man hurt. I opened my mouth to call out, but then closed it again. All my instincts were screaming for me to be quiet, to get away from the door, to run back outside. I didn’t want to do that, though. What if something had happened to Bagly? He might need help.

  A few quiet clocks ticked away on the back wall, and a car drove by on the street outside, but those were the only sounds at first. Then I heard Bagly’s voice, coming from directly ahead - his back room. “It won’t work.”

  “We’ll see.”

  My jaw dropped. That was Pete Shoemaker! He was here...but what on earth was he doing? They were at the back of the store, but I couldn’t see either of them, even though the door was standing open.

  Then there was noise. Rattling and scraping. I realized that someone was moving Bagly’s stuff around back there.

  “Where did you put them, you old fart?” Pete snapped. The venom in his voice made my knees weak. He was really mad.

  “I told you, they’re all gone. Your friend Bess took them.”

  I heard Pete snort, and then a shadow moved across the open door. Was he coming this way? I took an involuntary step back, as if to run, but my elbow accidentally hit a small table to my left. Before I could do any more than gasp, a ceramic donkey fell to the floor and shattered into a million pieces at my feet. Uh-oh.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Pete came barreling through the store-room door all at once, his eyes blazing with anger. He didn’t stop when he saw me, kept charging up the aisle, but I was too taken aback to do anything.

  And then he was grabbing my arm with one big hand and jerking me away from the door and the front windows. “What do you think you’re doing here?” he growled.

  Bagly stepped into the store-room doorway. His face was ashen and pinched, and there was real fear in his eyes. A bruise was forming near his mouth, almost on his chin. I could see it from where I stood.

  I jerked my arm out of Pete’s grip, but he grabbed it again before I could get away.

  “He’s got a gun,” Bagly called, and pointed.

  I realized that Pete was hiding his other hand, but now he brought it from behind his back and aimed a large black pistol at my chest. “Oh,” was all that came out of my mouth as I stared at it.

  Pete dragged me toward the back of the store, to where Bagly stood.

  All I could think was that Dante was going to be so mad at me. But I could deal with him later. Right now I had to figure out how to get me and Bagly out of this mess.

  “What are you doing to this poor man?” I asked Pete. “Haven’t you and your girlfriend done enough damage?”

  Pete stared at me for a moment. Then he snorted and started to laugh. It wasn’t a pleasant sound - more like drowning than laughing. “You thought she was my girlfriend?” he gurgled. “That’s hilarious.”

  I kept an eye on the gun. He was waving it around as he laughed, and I wondered if I could be quick enough to knock it out of his hand. I didn’t know, and I was scared to try, in case the whole attempt backfired on me. “Well, you sent her to steal Bagly’s books and then you killed her,” I said. “You had to at least have told her you loved her...why else would she do that for you?”

  He waved the gun a couple more times, then got control of himself. His face was red, and I wondered if he might give himself a heart attack if he wasn’t careful. He was not a small man. “You idiot, she wasn’t in love with me. She was in love with Jasper. I told her we needed to gather all of his books because - get this - they were historically important, and we needed at least one complete collection.”

  “She believed that?” I asked. Bess had seemed naive, but not dumb. Of course, maybe Pete had really turned on the charm.

  If he had any. I wasn’t seeing it.

  “Of course. She thought Jasper was the next Mark Twain or something.” Pete shook his head. “Believe me, I was as surprised as you that she fell for it.”

  I thought about poor Bess, still not quite worldly enough to understand when someone was taking advantage of her. And now she would never get the chance. “So you got her to give you all those books and then you killed her.”

  “All those books? She didn’t bring me nearly enough. That’s why I know -” He pointed the gun at Bagly. “-You are hiding some of them.”

  “How do you know how many he has?” I asked, stepping forward a little to get Pete’s attention off Bagly. It worked. He pointed the gun at me again.

  “Because we checked it out. Bess didn’t come in here that first day to get in a fight with Lavinia. She came in to see how many of Marjorie Happenstances books were on the shelves.” Pete looked at Bagly and sniffed smugly. “You should have another crate of those books somewhere. At least thirty. Maybe forty.” He stepped closer to Bagly. “Where are they?”

  Bagly pulled up to his full height, and a spark of defiance flashed in his eyes. “I sold them already. You think you were the only one who knew Davenport’s secret?”

  Pete obviously hadn’t considered this. His eyes narrowed as he studied Bagly, probably trying to figure out if he was lying.

  “It’s true,” I said, hedging closer to Bagly. I hoped I could push him out of the way and tackle Pete for the gun. The thought of doing it terrified me, but I had to do something. “Practically this whole town knew about those books.”

  Pete’s face screwed up in anger again. “You’re lying.”

  “I am not! My poor, elderly dad even knew.” I raised my chin in fake defiance.

  Bagly was watching me, his eyes bright. I knew he was trying to figure out what I was doing, exact
ly, but it wasn’t like I could turn around and explain it to him. He was going to have to trust me and figure it out.

  “So you were lying to Bess,” I said, trying to get Pete’s attention again. My heart was beating so hard I could barely breathe. “And it was all about the money.”

  He snorted again. “Of course it was all about the money, and maybe a little revenge, too. That old jerk was about to fire me - I heard him talking to Lavinia about it on the phone. I made him what he is today! If not for me, he would have been just another nobody midlist author.”

  Why would Jasper have to talk to his wife about firing his publicist? That struck me as weird.

  As for the rest of what he said, I couldn’t exactly argue, but I did anyway. “Word in the forums is that he was carrying you - feeling sorry for you because you were so bad at your job,” I said.

  “Lies!”

  “Apparently not - good employees don’t usually kill their bosses.”

  “They do when their bosses don’t even appreciate how much they’ve done. I should have gotten that money, not Lavinia!”

  The way he said it, practically spitting Lavinia’s name, caused something to click in my mind, and suddenly I knew exactly why Pete looked so familiar. “You’re her brother, aren’t you?” I asked.

  It explained so much - the familiarity, the reason Jasper would hire someone he didn’t want, the reason Jasper was discussing his firing with Lavinia. All of it made sense. “She got you this job, and you screwed it up.”

  He glowered at me.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? Lavinia got you the job, it didn’t work out and you knew it, so you killed Jasper and planned to make a profit off his death with all those books. You’re just another deadbeat brother-in-law, aren’t you? Except most deadbeat brother-in-laws just get kicked out of the house. You’re going to prison for killing yours.”

  “He owed me!” Pete screamed, his face turning from red to purple. I almost didn’t see it coming, but then his arm - the one with the gun - came around and up, right for the side of my head. I jumped backward, yanking Bagly along with me. We both crashed into the front window. It didn’t break, but we both slammed our heads into the glass. I heard Bagly grunt and slide to the floor, but I wasn’t about to take my eyes off Pete.