“Sure; but let’s wait until Mr. Everett comes in.”
“Oh, he won’t care. He’s a man,” Pixie said, as if that explained everything.
She was probably right.
The shop door opened and Randy the mailman once again sang out, “Mail call!”
“I hope you brought more than just bills,” Pixie answered as he handed her the small bundle.
“Don’t kill the messenger,” he said, and laughed. “See you tomorrow.”
“Bye.” Pixie handed the mail to Tricia, then she and her cup headed for the shelves on the north wall, which were in need of straightening.
Tricia sighed and went through the envelopes. Bills, credit card offers, and several publisher catalogs. On the bottom of the stack was a copy of the latest edition of the Stoneham Weekly News. Tricia seldom read it. Usually she glanced at the top story before tossing it into the recycle box. That day her mouth dropped as she read the headline out loud.
“‘Death Visits Bookseller Again’? ‘Death Visits Bookseller Again’?” she repeated even louder.
Pixie turned. “What?”
But her breath caught in her throat and Tricia couldn’t seem to speak.
Pixie made it across the shop in three big steps and snatched the paper out of Tricia’s hands. “Let me read it first and see if it’s fit for your eyes.”
Tricia stood there, her mouth open, as Pixie’s eyes shifted from left to right while she took in the article. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.”
Tricia slapped her palms against her cheeks. “You’d better read it out loud.”
“Only if you sit down,” Pixie cautioned. “I don’t want you having a stroke or something and keeling over.”
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s pretty bad,” Pixie admitted.
Feeling rather shaky, Tricia made her way to the reader’s nook and practically fell into the first chair. Pixie took one opposite. She cleared her throat and began to read.
“‘There’s a reason some people call Tricia Miles, owner of the Haven’t Got a Clue bookstore, the village jinx. She has a penchant for finding dead bodies.’”
“Oh, no!” Tricia wailed.
“‘In this most recent case, however, the body in question died in her own home after eating food Miles prepared in her own kitchen.’” Pixie wrinkled her nose. “He could have at least called you Ms. Miles, and he should have left out that second own.”
“This is no time to play critic,” Tricia admonished.
Pixie started reading again. “‘In this instance, the body was a guest at a dinner party Miles threw to celebrate the ostentatious remodel of her home.’” Again Pixie stopped. “For one, it wasn’t a dinner party—sloppy reporting right there, because he was actually at the party—and two, what’s so ostentatious about your apartment? I think your new digs are positively gorgeous.”
Tricia groaned. “I don’t think I want to hear any more.”
“Want me to just read the highlights?”
No! She didn’t, but Tricia supposed she had better listen. Maybe there were grounds for a libel lawsuit. “Okay,” she said as she fell limply against the back of the upholstered chair.
“Let’s see … Uh, suspected food poisoning … waiting for autopsy toxicological reports … Uh, then he kinda lists all the stiffs you’ve been acquainted with. Want me to read them to you?”
“No, thank you. Unfortunately, I clearly remember them all.” Tricia let out a long breath. “Why? Why would Russ do this?”
“To shitcan your chances of winning the election, what else?”
“But the paper goes to bed on Mondays.”
“Well, he knew you were going to run for the job. I mean, that’s what a bunch of people were talking about at the party, right? He was there lapping it all up. He’d probably already decided he was going to make a bid for it himself. What better way to smear your opponent than with the power of the press?”
What indeed?
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.” Confront him with the evidence. Yeah, that’s what she’d do. But first she needed to calm down.
“What did Russ say about Ted Harper?”
Pixie consulted the paper once more. “Uh … that you claimed you hadn’t met the guy before the party.”
“Claimed? I never saw the man before in my life. I didn’t invite him. He was Frannie’s date!”
“It doesn’t mention that fact. Makes it sound kind of sneaky or something, huh?”
Sneaky? Maybe. Or that Harper might have been a party crasher who hadn’t been asked to leave? Tricia wouldn’t know until she read the article herself, and she wasn’t in a hurry to do so.
“Anything else?”
“Uh, just that before you moved here, Stoneham used to be the safest village in New Hampshire. Uh, it kinda hints that you’re responsible for the extended crime wave.”
Tricia felt like weeping.
And then the phone rang.
Tricia sat bolt upright and the two of them stared at it.
It rang again.
Pixie got up from her seat and hurried over to the cash desk where the vintage black telephone resided. “Haven’t Got a Clue; this is Pixie. How can I—” She went silent. “Yes. Yes!” she said, piqued. “No, you can’t speak to her. You should be ashamed of yourself. Good-bye!” She slammed the receiver down on the cradle.
“Who was that?” Tricia asked with dread.
“Um—nobody!” Pixie said, her voice high and squeaky.
The phone rang again.
They both stared at it.
It rang again. And again.
Finally, Pixie picked up the receiver. “Haven’t Got a Clue; this is Pixie. How—”
Tricia watched as a plethora of emotions twisted Pixie’s features, anger the most apparent one.
“I’m hanging up on you, you mean-mouthed jerk!” Again she slammed the phone down.
The phone immediately rang again.
And again.
“Um, maybe we should switch it over to the answering machine,” Pixie suggested.
“Sounds like a good idea,” Tricia said, and sank farther back in the chair. She let Pixie take care of it.
Hunching over, Tricia covered her face with her hands, willing herself not to cry and trying to find the intestinal fortitude to make herself read the hack job Russ had done on her.
*
• • •
It took the better part of an hour before Tricia felt she could speak coherently to Russ—she cringed at even the thought of his name, and her cheeks burned with outrage when she thought back to a time when she had actually trusted the jerk. Yes, he’d proved himself to be a jerk on too many occasions. Why had she ever deigned to speak to him after he’d shown his true colors after first dumping her, then stalking her three years before?
It was close to eleven before Tricia marched across Main Street and headed north for the Stoneham Weekly News. Yanking open the heavy glass door, she entered.
“Hi, Tricia,” called Patty, the paper’s receptionist and classified ad-taker, her voice sounding just a tad shaky.
Tricia didn’t answer and barreled toward the closed office door.
“You can’t go in there! Russ is—”
But nothing was going to stop her. Tricia yanked open the door and stomped into the tiny office.
Russ was immediately on his feet and stepped behind his office chair as though to shield himself from a physical attack. “Hello, Tricia. What brings you here?”
Tricia slapped the by-now wrinkled copy of the paper’s current issue onto his desk so hard it made him jump and his half-filled coffee cup tremble.
“What’s the meaning of this? Are you trying to smear me so you can win the Chamber presidency?”
Russ gave a feeble laugh. “All’s fair in love and politics.”
Tricia’s glare was icy.
“You wrote this hack job before you announced your candidacy—but you’d already
planned to announce your bid to run, right?”
“I was undecided until … until the actual meeting.”
Tricia didn’t believe him for one minute.
“Why would you do this to me? We were friends.”
“We used to be lovers,” he reminded her.
“That was a long time ago.”
“I haven’t forgotten those days.”
“And I’ve done my best to put them out of my mind,” she asserted.
Russ took his seat once more, and leaned back, looking more than just a little smug. “Our lives would have been very different if you had taken me back. At least my life would be different.”
“You dumped me when you thought you would get that job at the Philadelphia Inquirer.”
“A lapse of judgment, I’ll admit.”
“And I didn’t force you into a relationship with Nikki,” Tricia pointed out.
“No, but it was a blatant example of a rebound relationship, and we all know how successful those are.”
Should she fight fire with fire? Say that she was on the rebound after her divorce from Christopher and that’s how she ended up with him? But that wasn’t true.
“You’re a grown-up. You made your choices—and now you have to live with them. Don’t blame me for what you now see as a big mistake. Take your lumps like a man.”
Russ bent lower, his eyes narrowed. “She’d bleed me dry. You don’t know how nasty she can be.”
Tricia had always enjoyed Nikki’s company before she became involved with Russ. It was after she started going out with him that she’d undergone a profound personality change. Suspicious; sometimes a shrew. Maybe divorce would be the best thing for both of them. But that didn’t concern her.
“You’ve done your best to ruin my reputation in Stoneham.”
He shrugged. “Only with the locals. Chances are it won’t hurt your business. Maybe it will even prove beneficial. After all, you make your living promoting murder.”
Revulsion roiled through her, and Tricia had to hold herself back from reaching down to slap the arrogant expression from his face.
Russ leaned back in his chair, resting his elbows on the armrests and folding his hands, as self-satisfied as a spider spinning its web for a juicy kill. “Just for the record, I don’t even want the damn Chamber presidency. I just want to see you squirm to get it.”
Tricia’s stomach turned. “What on earth did I ever see in the likes of you?” And with that, she turned, stepped out of the office, and slammed the door behind her. With her head held high, she stalked past Patty and out the door.
*
• • •
Tricia spent the rest of the morning holed up in her basement office, letting Pixie and Mr. Everett handle the customers—and anyone else who entered the store. Humiliation pressed down on her like a physical weight; she didn’t want to face anyone. But Pixie called down to her when the truck pulled up from the Antiques Emporium and the men unloaded the washstand, much earlier than Tricia had anticipated.
“Wow, that’s a beauty,” Pixie said in admiration, and brushed her hand across the pristine marble.
“Very attractive,” Mr. Everett agreed.
“Where do you want this, ma’am?” one of the guys asked.
Tricia directed the men up the stairs to her apartment and oversaw the installation, and then tipped them generously. They made no mention of the article, but they didn’t seem to want to look her straight in the eyes, either.
After they left, Tricia stayed upstairs, just puttering around. She tried several vases, a pile of books, and some crystal candy dishes on the washstand, but didn’t like any of the vignettes and put most of the items back in a box.
She should go back down to her store. She should go back down to the basement office to check online for the status of the sundries she’d ordered for the holiday season. She needed to go to the grocery store if she was to feed Angelica that evening, and she was nearly out of cat food, so that was a major consideration as well. Instead, she wondered what the reach of the Stoneham Weekly News was. Did the citizens in Milford, the next town over, get copies of it, or did they have their own weekly rag? If she wore a scarf and sunglasses, could she appear in the produce section incognito, or would she look like a Russian spy from a bad Cold War movie?
Maybe she’d just ask Pixie to go to the store and let Mr. Everett handle the customers in her shop below. Considering the circumstances, Tricia knew her assistant wouldn’t hesitate to help out. But that was the coward’s way out—and she was not a coward.
She was going to have to face the aftermath of Russ’s betrayal by holding her head high and swallowing her embarrassment.
But nobody said she had to enjoy it.
SIXTEEN
That afternoon, Tricia arrived at Booked for Lunch ready to dump her tale of woe on her sister, but when she sat down at the table in the back booth opposite her, she noticed Angelica’s red-rimmed eyes.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, wondering if her sister was just as upset as she was over the hatchet job Russ had done in his article, because she was more than ready to commiserate.
Instead, Angelica reached down beside her and picked up a trifold piece of plain white paper. Tricia quickly read the typed page.
Thanks for making your latest payment. I’ll be expecting the same amount, in cash, every week for the foreseeable future. You wouldn’t want everyone to know all your sordid little secrets, would you?
Under that were instructions on where to send the money, and the threat that contacting the authorities could end up with the death of a loved one.
A very young loved one.
Naturally, the note was unsigned.
Tricia placed the paper on the table. “Ange, you’ve got to talk to Chief Baker about this.”
Angelica leaned forward and whispered harshly, “And risk my granddaughter’s life? Never!”
Tricia sighed. “Then if you aren’t willing to do that, you’re going to have to come out with your secrets—only, don’t do it in the Stoneham Weekly News,” she added bitterly.
“What makes you think that coming clean will stop this monster from hurting Sofia?” she hissed.
“Because I have faith in law enforcement.”
“This is Stoneham we’re talking about. We’re not dealing with real, big-city cops.”
“I think you’ve underestimated Grant Baker. He was a top-notch detective with the sheriff’s department before he—”
“He worked for a clown, and you know it. Wendy Adams couldn’t find her badge pinned on her own shirt. Anybody would look good standing next to her.”
“That’s an elected position. Grant was well trained, and—” Tricia stopped. It felt odd to be singing his praises, but she really did believe he was good at his job. Methodical. He had to be for his investigations to stick when it came time for the assailant to be prosecuted. He’d done his job well when it came to collecting the evidence to convict Bob Kelly for murder. But then, with so many eyewitnesses, his job had been much easier.
The last thing Tricia wanted to think about was Bob Kelly … but his last words to her had haunted her—that her life should be a living hell until the day she died. Well, despite the ups and downs of the previous week, her life was not a living hell. But … it had been aggravating and frustrating, and it felt as though his curse had rubbed off on her sister, too. Still, it was a prophecy that seemed to be more based in reality than Tricia would prefer, and had started the very day of the sentencing, with Ted Harper’s death, and then the vandalism that seemed to plague her place of business. And then there were the pranks against Ginny, and Angelica being blackmailed. It certainly seemed as though Kelly had some kind of uncanny power of prognostication.
Molly appeared before the sisters. “Made up your minds?”
Tricia looked up at the woman, whose crow’s feet hinted at years of smiles. “What’s the soup of the day?”
“It’s Friday,” Molly said with a laug
h. “Good old New England clam chowder. We’ve got a nice fish sandwich to go with it, too.”
“Tricia will never be able to eat that much,” Angelica said offhandedly.
“Sounds good, though. How about we share the sandwich and both get the soup.”
“Fine with me,” Angelica agreed.
Molly nodded and headed for the kitchen to put in their orders.
“It’s my turn to cook tonight,” Tricia said. “Do you want anything special?”
Angelica shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll even be able to eat lunch today—or anything else.”
“I’m going to the grocery store right after I leave here. Can I get you anything?”
Angelica shook her head. “I’ve been raiding the café’s kitchen for days. I really need to go to the store, too.”
“Why don’t we go together?” Tricia suggested, but again Angelica shook her head.
“I don’t have time today. I might go tomorrow—Sunday at the latest.”
“I called Grant this morning to report the graffiti and left a voice mail. Maybe I’ll drop over at the police station when I return.”
“He’s sure taking his time to get back to you—or is that old bat of a receptionist at the station not passing along the message?”
It wasn’t like Angelica to make disparaging remarks about people. She really must be depressed. Tricia ignored the snipe. “I called his personal cell phone.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk to an old girlfriend,” Angelica suggested.
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s out investigating a more important crime.”
“Like what?”
“Who knows. I didn’t read the Police Beat in the latest issue of the Stoneham Weekly News.” No, she’d been too upset to read anything other than the front page story, and it wasn’t likely she’d ever read the rag again.
Molly returned with two cups of soup and some packets of oyster crackers. “Bon appétit.”
The sisters ate their lunches in silence, which felt awkward and just plain wrong, and Tricia hoped the last meal of the day wouldn’t be a repeat performance.
*
• • •
Tricia did not go to the grocery store in disguise, and nobody seemed to even notice her presence, which was a huge relief. She figured since Angelica was down in the dumps that she should get something decadent for their dinner—but since she hadn’t done any preplanning, she settled for a roasted chicken. She snagged a can of cranberry sauce, a couple of russet potatoes, and a package of frozen peas, along with an apple tart, figuring they would have a sort of makeshift Thanksgiving dinner from a beginning cook—and she definitely still considered herself a beginner when it came to food prep.
Poisoned Pages Page 13
