Mark wanted to kick something extremely hard, but he didn’t dare show doubt, or Reinette was doomed. Maybe she already was. All he had was an empty bag that could have contained jewelry, and a dead vampire’s arm. Alexis had means and opportunity on her side, and one of the best motives imaginable: greed. Mark had managed to cloud means and opportunity a little, but he had nothing for motive. Unless ...
“Mark?” Stella asked.
“Your Honor, I call Vilmos to the stand.”
Mark heard gasps, and even Ramon looked appalled. But Stella said, “Vilmos, will you take the stand?”
Mark had been expecting haughty indignation, but instead Vilmos was chuckling as he sat. “Of course. Who am I to argue with genius?”
Mark took a deep breath. “Vilmos, it is my understanding that you made an offer for Reinette’s services as a concubine.”
“I did. Under the circumstances, I count myself fortunate that I did not succeed.” He chuckled again.
“I also understand that the bids were unusually high.”
“We got caught up in the moment, I fear. No woman is worth that much money.” He twinkled at Stella. “No human woman, that is.”
“In other words, you bid more than you could afford?”
“I would have honored any promises made,” Vilmos said stiffly, no longer affable.
“Presumably Geoff felt the same way.”
“Geoff would not have shamed me by failing to meet his obligations,” Alexis said.
Mark was sure that he had the answer now, but he needed one last thing to prove it. The question was, how far would Stella be willing to play along? “Your Honor, I again request a search of the house.”
Alexis jumped up, furious, while Vilmos laughed out loud, and said, “A genius!” But Mark looked only at Stella. He’d told Reinette that having Stella as judge would give them no advantage, but he was hoping he’d been wrong. It all came down to one question. Did she trust him enough to risk loss of face in front of her fellow vampires?
It didn’t matter to him what anybody else did.
Finally she spoke. “I will allow a one-hour recess for a search. No more. Ramon, you may choose assistance as needed.”
Mark said, “May I make a private suggestion to Ramon?” He whispered his thoughts to Ramon, who looked at him as if he were making the joke for once, but nodded before enlisting a trio of vampires.
Stella left the room, but Mark and Reinette remained as the rest of the vampires and humans speculated wildly. It was all he could do to keep from pacing, but preventing Reinette from going into hysterics kept him distracted.
Stella came back into the room five minutes before the hour was up, and Mark could tell she was as anxious as he was. Half the people were watching the clock, while the others were watching the door. One minute before the time was up, Ramon came into the room, grinning widely. “I believe we have the missing item,” he said. His assistants came behind him pushing Geoff into the room ahead of them, still alive, but with only one arm.
Mark turned to Stella, who was smiling at him, and neither of them noticed that Reinette had fainted again.
“IT was the joke of a lifetime!” Ramon said admiringly.
“Perhaps not so funny to Reinette,” Stella said.
They had gotten the whole story out of Geoff. It was a classic case of buyer’s remorse. After signing Reinette’s contract for far more money than he should have spent, he’d had to meet the terms even as the economy drained his pocketbook. As Mark had verified with a quick audit, Geoff was fast approaching bankruptcy, and the monthly gifts of jewelry were the last straw.
So he’d staged his own death, spreading around the dust he’d brought in the velvet bag Reinette was so covetous of and cutting off his own arm to add the right touch of horror.
“Because he’d rather lose his arm than lose face,” Mark said.
Stella rolled her eyes. “Aren’t Ramon’s jokes enough?”
“Sorry.”
After setting the stage, Geoff snuck out of the room and locked the door behind him before going to hide in the attic.
“I’m surprised it took so long to find him,” Mark said to Ramon. “I told you to look up there first.”
“Oh, we found him in the first ten minutes. We only waited to make a better entrance.”
There was nothing Mark could say to that, and no point, anyway. Ramon was incorrigible.
Geoff had planned to escape from the mansion at the earliest opportunity and had already arranged a new identity to use for as long as necessary. He’d assumed that Reinette wouldn’t survive long as Alexis’s belonging, but that by the time he reemerged from hiding, nobody would care enough to bring a case against him. Reinette was not well-liked.
Once the plot was revealed, Reinette, with prompting from Mark, asked for judgment against Geoff for trying to skip out on their contract. Alexis, furious that he’d dishonored her line, had supported the concubine.
Stella’s judgment was that Reinette be released from her contract but that she immediately receive everything promised to her, including the jewelry or its cash value, which would drive Geoff into poverty. Moreover, since Geoff had been willing to go without an arm, he could continue to do so. Each time it grew back, it would be cut off again. For a full five years. Knowing how much it hurt to regrow a finger, let alone an arm, even Vilmos winced at Stella’s decision, while Alexis offered up another one of her rare smiles.
Reinette was so grateful that she offered to feed Mark right then and there, but he respectfully declined. He hadn’t wanted her enslaved, but that didn’t mean he liked her. He did accept her emerald ring as a thank-you gift and planned to give it to Stella at the first opportunity.
“I think Reinette has learned something from all this,” Ramon said. “She’s going to change her life around, perhaps attend college or go into charity work.”
Mark and Stella stared at him.
Ramon chortled. “Just kidding. As far as I know, her only goal is to see how fast she can spend Geoff’s money. When that gets old, she may sign another contract. Or perhaps I’ll offer her the Choice.”
“Ramon, tell me you’re joking,” Mark said, aghast.
“Oh, I know that she’s vapid and vain and greedy, and honestly, not terribly bright.”
“Then why?”
“Because I’m in love with the little bitch!” Ramon snapped. Then he gathered himself enough to put the clown mask back up. “It would give me somebody else to play jokes on instead of you, Marcus—won’t that be a relief? Maybe after a decade or two or three, she’ll grow up.”
He sauntered off, leaving Mark and Stella to enjoy their first time alone in what seemed like days. They took advantage of it promptly.
Afterward, Mark said, “I just realized that Ramon purposely maneuvered me into defending Reinette.”
“That’s quite a compliment, to put the life of his beloved in your hands.”
“That kind of compliment I can do without. Setting me against you, then dragging out the search for Geoff to the last minute. Which reminds me. I never thanked you for giving me that hour.”
“You’re welcome. Besides, I needed it, too.”
“Oh?”
She looked embarrassed. “It took me most of that time to get in touch with a sorcerer I know. He was ready to teleport into the house on my signal, and teleport out with Reinette.”
“You mean you would have—?”
“I know you, Mark. You wouldn’t have defended Reinette unless you thought she was innocent, and could never have accepted what would have happened to her if I had found her guilty. That helped me realize that I couldn’t, either.”
There was no way he could say anything to match that, so he didn’t try. Instead, he showed her how he felt even more enthusiastically than before.
By the time he’d exhausted his gratitude, dawn was nearly upon them.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Mark said. “Why did you give me the Choi
ce instead of making me your concubine?”
“I knew five years with you wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “I was taking the long view.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Author and journalist Steve Brewer has published sixteen books, including the comic Bubba Mabry private eye series and the recent thriller Cutthroat. The first Bubba book, Lonely Street, was made into an independent Hollywood film starring Jay Mohr, Robert Patrick, and Joe Mantegna. Brewer’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Damn Near Dead and The Last Noel. A longtime newspaperman and syndicated columnist, he now writes a column for www.anewscafe.com, an online magazine in Redding, California, where he’s lived since 2003. Brewer has served on the national board of directors of Mystery Writers of America, and has twice been an Edgar® Award judge. More at www.stevebrewerbooks.com.
In addition to her award-winning archaeology mysteries, Dana Cameron’s Fangborn short story, “The Night Things Changed” (in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner), won a 2008 Agatha and a 2009 Macavity and was nominated for a 2009 Anthony award. Her historical short story, “Femme Sole,” appears in Boston Noir (edited by Dennis Lehane). Dana lives in Massachusetts with her husband and is hard at work on a Fangborn novel. Learn more about her writing at www.danacameron.com.
Barbara D’Amato has won the Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction, the Agatha twice, the Anthony twice, the Macavity, the first Mary Higgins Clark Award, and several Lovies. She is a past president of Mystery Writers of America and of Sisters in Crime. She divides her time between Chicago and Michigan.
Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of eleven novels and more than one hundred short stories. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and have also earned him three Edgar® Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.
Jack Fredrickson’s latest mystery, Honestly Dearest, You’re Dead, is a selection of the Mystery Guild and received a starred review from Library Journal. His first novel, A Safe Place for Dying, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was nominated for a Shamus Award. His short fiction appears in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (most recently, “For the Jingle,” May 2009) and is anthologized in Chicago Blues and in Michael Connelly’s The Blue Religion. His most recent essay appeared in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. His next novel, Hunting Sweetie Rose, comes out from St. Martin’s in January 2011. Jack lives west of Chicago. Check him out at www.JackFredrickson.com.
Parnell Hall is the author of the Puzzle Lady crossword puzzle mysteries, the Stanley Hastings private eye novels, and the Steve Winslow courtroom dramas. Parnell is an actor, singer, songwriter, screenwriter, former private eye, and past president of the Private Eye Writers of America. His books have been nominated for Edgar®, Lefty, and Shamus awards.
Charlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author, has been writing for twenty-seven years. Her body of work includes many novels, a few novellas, and a growing body of short stories in genres ranging from mystery to science fiction and romance. Married and the mother of three, Charlaine lives in rural Arkansas with her family, three dogs, and a Canada goose. She pretty much works all the time. The HBO series True Blood is based on Charlaine’s Sookie Stackhouse novels.
Carolyn Hart is the author of forty-four mystery novels. New in 2010 is Laughed ‘Til He Died, twentieth in the Death on Demand series. Merry, Merry Ghost, second in the series starring the late Bailey Ruth Raeburn, an impetuous, red-headed ghost, was published in autumn 2009. Hart has been nominated nine times for the Agatha Award for Best Novel and has won three times. She has twice appeared at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Letter from Home, a stand-alone World War II novel set in Oklahoma, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers. She lives in Oklahoma City with her husband, Phil.
S. W. Hubbard is the author of three mysteries set in the High Peaks area of the Adirondack Mountains: Take the Bait, which earned an Agatha Award nomination for best first mystery, Swallow the Hook, and Blood Knot, all published by Pocket Books. She has also ghostwritten a thriller released by Knopf in 2009. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and in the anthology Adirondack Mysteries. She lives in Morristown, New Jersey, where she teaches creative writing to enthusiastic teens and adults, and expository writing to reluctant college freshmen.
Toni L. P. Kelner figures that vampire mysteries are the same as other mysteries, except that the dead people are a lot more active. Kelner is the author of the “Where Are They Now?” mysteries, featuring Boston-based entertainment reporter Tilda Harper, and the Laura Fleming series, which won a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award. She also coedits urban fantasy anthologies with Charlaine Harris and is a prolific writer of short stories, including the Agatha Award—winner “Sleeping with the Plush” and “How Stella Got Her Grave Back,” which introduced the vampire pair from this story. Kelner lives north of Boston with author/husband Stephen Kelner, two daughters, and two guinea pigs.
Lou Kemp’s writing has appeared in several anthologies, and she received an honorable mention from Ellen Datlow in 2005’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for one of her short stories. Her story, “Sherlock’s Opera,” appeared in Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert, Akashic Books (May 2009). She is actively seeking an agent for her novel Farm Hall. She recently retained the services of Spectrum Literary for her novel The Sea of the Vanities.
Harley Jane Kozak, a sometimes actress, lives in California with her three children, two dogs, a rabbit, and several half dead fish. Her debut novel, Dating Dead Men, won the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Its sequel was Dating Is Murder, followed by Dead Ex and A Date You Can’t Refuse. Her short prose has appeared in Ms. magazine, Soap Opera Digest, the Sun, the Santa Monica Review, and the anthologies Mystery Muses, This Is Chick Lit, and A Hell of a Woman. She blogs regularly on the Lipstick Chronicles.
William Kent Krueger writes a mystery series set in the great North Woods of Minnesota. His protagonist is Cork O’Connor, the former sheriff of Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage—part Irish and part Ojibwe. The series has received a number of awards, including the Anthony Award and Barry Award for best first novel, the Anthony Award for Best Novel in 2005 and 2006, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Friends of the American Writers Prize, and the Minnesota Book Award. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves. He does all his creative writing in a coffee shop whose location he prefers to keep secret.
Margaret Maron is the author of twenty-six novels and two collections of short stories. Winner of several major American awards for mysteries (Edgar®, Agatha, Anthony, Macavity), her works are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature and have been translated into sixteen languages. She has served as president of Sisters in Crime, the American Crime Writers League, and Mystery Writers of America. A native Tar Heel, she still lives on her family’s century-old farm a few miles southeast of Raleigh, the setting for Bootlegger’s Daughter, which is numbered among the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century as selected by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. In 2004, she received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for best North Carolina novel of the year. In 2008, she was honored with the North Carolina Award for Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor.
Martin Meyers is the author of five Patrick Hardy PI mysteries, beginning with Kiss and Kill. His short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines. Using the pseudonym Maan Meyers, Martin and his wife Annette Meyers have written seven Dutchman historical mysteries and numerous short stories set in New York in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and ninete
enth centuries. The seventh in the series, set in 1899, The Organ Grinder, was published in October 2008. Martin’s latest short story, “Nate Devlin’s Money,” was a Black Mask feature in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 2009.
A lifelong New Yorker, Terrie Farley Moran dabbles in genealogy and is learning to play the Irish tin whistle, which she finds far more troublesome than babysitting for her ever-increasing number of grandchildren. Her short stories have been published in several venues, including the anthologies Murder New York Style and Dying in a Winter Wonderland, as well as in the final issue of the never-to-be-forgotten e-zine, Hardluck Stories. Terrie invites one and all to drop by the blog www.womenofmystery.net to enjoy the grand banter of nine talented New York mystery writers.
Jeff Somers strongly regrets the quote he chose for his high school yearbook, which was a lyric from an Iron Maiden song, and wishes he could devise time travel specifically to fix this gaffe. Since math makes him sleepy, however, he never gets further than writing “Time Masheen” on a cardboard box before falling asleep in his jammies. As with most other folks who can’t comprehend physics, he writes instead—most notably the Avery Cates series of science fiction noir novels, published by Orbit Books. He maintains a blog at www.jeffreysomers.com just in case.
Mickey Spillane (1918—2006) and Max Allan Collins collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, two films, and the Mike Danger comic book series. Spillane was the best-selling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial PI has been the subject of a radio show, comic strip, and two television series; numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Collins has earned an unprecedented fifteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning twice. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, directed by Sam Mendes. An independent filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced. His other credits include the New York Times best sellers Saving Private Ryan and American Gangster. Both Spillane and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye.
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