I got closer and sighed to myself. Was that…charring in her hair? She probably hadn’t even noticed it. Hair care wasn’t Alyson’s priority. She was lucky she had gotten out of there without smoke inhalation at the very least. At the very worst, she could have been burnt to a crisp. I stopped and thought about this for a moment. Maybe I ought to go a little bit easier on her.
But she did tend to bring all these things on herself.
“Is that ash on your shoulder?” I asked. I wondered what had happened to the detective kit.
She glanced up at me like nothing had happened.
“Matt tells me you were at Captain Eightball’s today. So you’re back on the sugar then?”
Sure, of course she wanted to change the subject. This was just a topic I didn’t want to talk about. I mean, not the sugar, though I didn’t want to talk about that either as the line I was still sticking to was that my dental problems were all minor and dealt with. What I didn’t want to talk about was being at Captain Eightball’s.
“Just needed a quick refreshment,” I said, shrugging, looking over my shoulder at the ocean, hoping that would be the end of it. But I knew it wouldn’t be. I hadn’t been to Captain Eightball’s in a month and I knew the whole thing was suspicious.
She glanced up at me, a paintbrush in her hand. “He told me you ran out of there fairly quickly.”
“Ah well, I’m surprised he even noticed,” I said, kicking the sand a little. “He seemed pretty preoccupied with a friend of his.”
She shrugged. “Kate is just an old ex of his. She’s back in town for a couple of weeks visiting her folks. They’re just friends now.”
“Looked like they were more than just friends,” I grumbled.
“What?” Alyson said, looking up at me again. She looked quizzical.
“Nothing,” I said. “None of my business anyway.”
Alyson could never ever find out what had happened between her brother and I, so I had to play it cool. Anyway, I was cool about the whole thing. Who cared if an ex of Matt’s was back in town? Why would that bother me at all?
I just couldn’t understand what he saw in her or how she was his type. I mean, she had long, brown hair. How could that be his type? I had short, blonde hair. And she was tanned and tall. I was short and had pale skin.
Something didn’t compute there. He couldn’t like both of us.
“So, I suppose you got absolutely nothing out of the house before it burned down to the ground,” I said. It was time to return focus.
Alyson stood up. “Actually, I did. And it’s not burned to the ground. Only the living room is completely gone.”
I shook my head. “Alyson. How on earth did you manage to start a fire in Nicole Marie’s house? You’ve made things fifty time worse for us!”
She glared at me. “I told you I had nothing to do with it.”
“But you were sneaking around in there in the dark with a candle?” I asked. Word had already traveled about how exactly the fire had gotten started. “And you put the candle down in the living room, right? Next to a pile of paper manuscript?”
Well, the manuscript that I had left there. We could ignore that little factoid for now.
She crossed her arms and looked uncomfortable. “I know you don’t believe me, okay? So why don’t you come out and say it?”
“Umm, I thought I had.” Was I being too subtle? “I don’t believe you. You left my shop unlocked and caused a disaster to happen there, and now you have burnt down the house where all the evidence was. You are completely irresponsible, Alyson, and I’m sick of having to clean up your messes. Have I said it clear enough for you now?”
Her face turned bright red and she screwed up all her features. I thought she was going to yell. Or self-combust. But instead, she just reached down, picked up a board, and started to run.
What was she going to do, surf right away from me? Oh no, she was not getting away that easily. I grabbed a surfboard and followed her into the waves.
10
Alyson
It had not been the best of days. But at least Claire had been knocked out by the very first wave and had to head back to town, head hanging low, while I stayed out in the surf for hours, fuming.
I mean, at first, it had been a little funny to watch her climb out of the water like a drowned rat and retreat. I’d even laughed a little.
But now I was starting—just starting—to feel bad about the entire thing. I wished that we could just work together and solve this thing. It was threatening our friendship and in spite of everything that had happened, I still valued that above everything else. I wanted us to work in tandem. To have fun. For it to be like it was when we were kids—the two of us against the rest of the world.
But more often than not, Claire and I tended to find ourselves on opposite sides even when we were working together. So for now, I was going to have to work on my own because I needed to redeem myself.
And that was how I found myself around the corner of Fabled Books.
Sure. What I was about to do could lead to more trouble. But I had to something. Claire was too scared to go inside her own shop. But I wasn’t. Sergeant Wells didn’t scare me, and he never would.
As I was approaching the shop, I felt more and more certain. “This is where all the answers lay,” I said to myself.
But there was someone at the door. Maria. I was about to jump out and surprise her with a great big hello! After all, she had been my favorite teacher in high school, and she was my current tutor.
But something made me hang back.
She pulled out a key and started unlocking the front door. Hang on, why did Maria have a key to the bookshop? Okay, think, Alyson, think. Maybe Claire gave her one after your own disastrous screwup. But Princess had made such a big deal about me having the only spare key and her not trusting anyone else to have one.
Maybe it wasn’t an actual key to the shop. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It definitely opened the front door though, because she was stepping through it.
My heart started to race. Maria had a secret key. It must have been Maria all along.
I had to tell Claire.
11
Claire
There were rules. And one of them was about to be broken. By the girl who had no respect for rules anyway. Typical Libra.
But I was a Virgo. And I was going to have to put my foot down. I stomped through the cafe, the floor—sticky from spilled sodas and who knew what else—catching my shoes as I approached the interloper.
To be fair, it wasn’t as though Alyson was officially banned from book club meetings. It was just that we had a strict three strikes policy. You had to actually read the book. Maybe one slip-up was fine, one week where you ran out of time—we all had busy lives. But Alyson had already used up her first strike. And her second one. And once you had been to three meetings where it was obvious that you hadn’t read the book, your luck was up. No more book club for you.
“We’re all full,” I said, pointing to the small group behind me. There was loud music playing so I had to yell a little to be heard.
She was holding her hands up in surrender. “I’m not here for the book club. I need to tell you something.”
“Alyson, I finally convinced everyone to meet, you’re not going to ruin—” I caught Kate out of the corner of my eye. She was leaning over the bar, saying something obviously flirty to Matt, who was laughing and ignoring the customers at the bar who were waving bills at him and trying to get their drink order taken. Kate was showing off her very long legs in cut-off shorts, even though it was the coldest day of the year so far. Having the meeting at Captain Eightball’s was a real double-edged sword.
After a fair bit of giggling, she looked around and then, when she thought no one was looking, ducked in behind the bar. My mouth dropped open a little. Was that within the rules? She wasn’t an employee.
But there was no manager around to see or to tell them off. Not that I could find, anyway. “Tha
t doesn’t seem very hygienic,” I muttered under my breath.
Kate had her arms hanging around Matt’s neck and she was sort of hanging off him while he tried to pick up a tray of potato wedges and sour cream to take them to a table, and he made little move to shift her off. She was very, very friendly for an ‘ex.’
Alyson cleared her throat. “Um hello, I am trying to tell you something important here.”
I looked at her warily. “I doubt it.”
One of the members of the book club—a woman named Sadie—stood up and whistled and waved me over. I checked the time. We should have started the meeting five minutes earlier. She looked cheery enough, but I could tell my tardiness was getting on her nerves.
“Come on,” I said, reluctantly leading Alyson back to the table with me.
We sat down in the booth that was large enough to hold the six members who had turned up, none of them Maria. She was taking her vow very serious apparently.
“Okay,” I said, smiling at everyone. “I’ve ordered us a couple of servings of the fried shrimp tails and a jug of sangria.” I was hoping those two things might make the ladies a little loose-lipped. “Oh, excuse me one moment,” I said when my phone buzzed. I caught Sadie giving me a bit of a shady stare.
Simon. Even though I wasn’t completely into him, there was a little flutter in my stomach. Maybe I just liked the attention from someone a little older and wiser. And someone who worked in publishing as well.
“We still meeting later?” the text said.
“Yes, perfect,” I quickly replied. And it was perfect. I could gather the intel I needed here from the ladies and then get the gossip from Simon to either confirm or go against what they had said. I was planning to subtly find out which, if any, of them were writing books. Then I could narrow my list of suspects right down.
I grinned at them all.
Sadie opened her mouth to talk before I could. “So, Emma. What did we all think of it?”
Oh gosh, we weren’t going to actually discuss the book, were we? Alyson grabbed a shrimp tail and started chomping on it but paused in excitement. “Oh gosh, isn’t she just one of the greatest protagonists of all time? A true feminist icon.”
So, she had read it. Trust me to pick the one classic book she’d actually read that week. I had to actually lean forward and interrupt her enthusiasm before this conversation got completely derailed with discussions about the actual book.
“What did you think, Claire?” Sadie asked me.
“About what?”
“Emma.” She stared at me blankly, and I realized that everyone else at the table had gone silent. I shifted back and forth a little, and I caught Alyson trying not to grin in smug satisfaction. Okay, okay, I hadn’t actually read it, all right? But in my defense, I had an awful lot to deal with that week.
Thankfully, there were enough distractions in the cafe-turned-bar that I wasn’t pressed on the matter. Phew. I realized this was my own second strike; the second time I had turned up at a meeting without having read the book. I picked up one of the loose copies of Emma and started fanning myself with it, my attention once again being drawn back behind the bar where Kate’s face was just close enough to Matt’s cheek that she looked like she was about to kiss it. And he didn’t seem like he was going to pull away.
I could hear Sadie over my shoulder, telling the other women, Alyson in particular, about how she also liked to write strong female protagonists in her own work. Including the book she was currently working on.
Well, that got my attention.
“Sorry, you are writing a book?” I asked, interrupting Sadie.
“Yes,” she said, stopping mid-sentence thanks to my interruption, looking around at the circle a little perplexed. Apparently, this was common knowledge. Just not common to me. “Well, I am writing the words. It’s a bit of a co-creation.”
“Who is the other creator?” I asked, reaching for the shrimp tails, while glancing, covertly as possible, over my shoulder to check on what Kate and Matt were getting up to. Had I missed the kiss or had it not happened?
Sadie was answering my question, though I was only half-listening. “He’s an illustrator. Zed Addams.”
“Oh?” I asked, turning back. Zed? Why did that name seem familiar to me? I wiped my hands clean on a serviette. And then I saw it. Kate fully leaned in and gave Matt a kiss—not a full tongue kiss, just a lip-press—behind the bar. Wow. This was very unprofessional to say the least. Wasn’t anyone else watching this? Weren’t they all as outraged as I was?
“Excuse me,” I said, standing up. I was cutting off Sadie, again. Boy, she really wasn’t a fan of me that day, judging by the look on her face. “These are on the cold side. And I think I should complain to management.”
I waltzed up the bar and slammed the tray down with a large, “Ahem!” Kate jumped away from Matt in surprise. “Can I speak to the manager please?” I asked, holding my nose in the air so that I was both looking at them and not looking at them at the same time.
“About?” Matt looked worried. He’d worked at Captain Eightball’s for almost a decade and I knew he prided himself on being a stellar employee with a pretty spotless track record. He hated when people complained to the manager.
The manager, a man named Ian who was in his early fifties and who took complaints very seriously, wandered out of his office to see what all the fuss was about.
“These are cold,” I said, waving the basket around. Then I couldn’t help myself. I glanced at Kate and looked down my nose at her. “And I believe there is a strict rule about only having employees behind the bar.”
“Indeed, there is,” Ian grumbled while Kate darted off and Matt turned red. He was keeping a polite smile on his face while Ian was watching, but as soon as he was gone, Matt glared at me and threw down the tea-towel he’d been holding, took his apron off, and stormed to the back.
Geez. I was making a bunch of friends that day, wasn’t I?
“What’s really going on, Claire?” Alyson asked, one arm against the bar. The rest of the group had already gone back to their own conversation and not one of them had even bothered to come over and check on me or say thank you, even though I had gotten them a second serving of shrimp tails and another jug of sangria on the house.
“You know that complaining to management is my specialty,” I said, trying to shrug it off. I’d been standing there for several minutes and Matt still hadn’t come back from wherever he had stormed off to. If he had gotten fired, I would never forgive myself for what I had done.
“Yeah, except I overheard what you really complained about,” Alyson said.
Yikes.
I paused and composed myself before I turned to her and really hoped that I hadn’t turned red. How was I going to spin this one? “It’s not professional to have just anyone behind the bar. You know how I get about germs.”
Alyson raised her eyebrows. “Whatever you say, Princess.”
So desperate was I to get the subject onto anything else, I asked her, “So what have you been trying to tell me all morning then?” I waved down another bartender and ordered a whiskey before I steeled myself to hear Alyson’s tale.
She took a deep breath. “I saw Maria. Down at your bookshop.”
I took a sip of my drink. “Not earth-shattering news, Alyson. Did you also see the moon in the sky last night?”
She didn’t bother replying to that. “She had a key. She was breaking in.”
I had to stop and blink a few times at that little explanation. Does that count as breaking in? If she was opening the door with a key?
I also wasn’t sure how to break the news to Alyson. I cleared my throat. “Well, yes, I got a pair cut for her the other day actually.” I got distracted again. Hang on. Are you kidding me? Kate was still in there behind the bar. Ian had left for the day and as soon as he had, her and Matt were back at it again. Was this just to spite me now? Was I going to have to escalate the matter?
Alyson didn’t care about Kate.
Only Maria. “You gave Maria a key?”
“Shh, keep your voice down!” I didn’t want to advertise the fact. No one was supposed to go inside the shop, but I did not trust the cops to take care of my little feline friends. “She’s just feeding the cats and changing their water,” I whispered. “And don’t tell anyone what you saw, okay?”
Alyson was frowning, lost deep in thought. Like she had already come to her own conclusions about things and now she couldn’t reconcile these conclusions with the truth. “But she looked so suspicious…”
I sighed. Alyson always wanted things to be more than what they were. She always wanted there to be a greater mystery lurking underneath. I shrugged. Sometimes there just wasn’t.
“She probably looked suspicious because no one is supposed to be going inside the shop.”
Alyson was still not happy with that explanation.
“So…what did you think of Sadie?” she asked, peering over her shoulder at the booth where the rest of the group were huddled in conversation. Clearly, someone had said something hilarious, because Sadie had her head thrown back in laughter.
I was still distracted by the behind-the-bar action. “What about her?”
Alyson snapped her fingers at me. “Have you been paying attention, Princess? Sadie said she is writing a book.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, children’s book, so what? That’s hardly in competition with anything Nicole Marie wrote, is it?” Totally different genre, audience, probably even different publishers and editors would be involved. I’d been hoping to discover that one of them was a murder mystery writer.
Alyson sighed. “That wouldn’t stop her from feeling jealous that someone else got what she wanted…”
I glanced behind the bar where Kate was hanging on Matt again. Alyson was right. When someone else got the thing you wanted, it was like battery acid burning away in your stomach.
Murder and Manuscripts Page 5
