The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala

by Laura Disilverio

  I opened the fridge door and hid behind it, pretending to search for a lemon in case someone wanted iced tea. “I don’t have any. Lemons,” I said, closing the refrigerator.

  “Lemons, shlemons,” she said, waving them away.

  “Lola might want—”

  Her eyes widened. “You and Hart didn’t—”

  I turned away and grabbed a sponge to wipe down the clean counter, but not before she caught sight of my telltale blush. Sometimes pale skin was a curse.

  “You did,” she breathed. “When? You didn’t tell me! I want to know everything.”

  Even though Brooke and I had historically shared many details of our love lives, I felt shy about discussing what had happened between me and Hart. It was too new. Too . . . special. I was saved by the bell as the doorbell rang. I sprinted to open it and let in Lola, Kerry, and Maud. Misty trotted in with Lola, and I stooped to pat her. When I’d rescued her off the street, I’d thought about keeping her, but my schedule didn’t mesh with a pet’s needs. I’d given her to Lola, but it made me smile to see her back in my house. There was a flurry of greetings and drinks-getting, and Kerry busied herself, slicing the zucchini bread and handing it out on napkins. Brooke caught my eye as we all trooped into the sunroom, though, and her look promised that we would resume our conversation later.

  Lola sat beside me on the love seat with Kerry in the chair to Lola’s left and Brooke on my right. Maud sat on an ottoman across from me, and Misty leaped onto the low, deep windowsill and batted the blinds cord. We had barely seated ourselves when Kerry announced, “I’ll go first.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Something happened yesterday. I got a call from Trent Van Allen’s girlfriend. She filled me in on a few things.” I recounted as much of my conversation with Sharla as I could remember. “She ran off before I could ask her any questions, really,” I finished, “but we should all keep a lookout for a tan station wagon. If we find it, and the package is still there, well, it will probably point to the killer.”

  Maud rubbed her hands together. “A modern-day treasure hunt,” she said. “I’m in.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out while I’m making deliveries tomorrow,” Lola said.

  “If anyone finds it, though,” I cautioned, “you’ve got to call the police. I promised Hart.”

  Kerry gave a brisk nod, and said, “Can I report on Francesca Bugle now?” She slid her cheaters from the top of her head to the bridge of her nose and peered at a printed page. “I researched Francesca Bugle, and I’m here to tell you there’s no such person.” She gave us all a meaningful look over the top of her glasses.

  “Pen name,” Maud said dismissively, just as I had earlier. “There’s no such person as Carolyn Keene, either. Actually, she was several people, at least one of them a man. Fact.” She leaned forward with her forearms on her knees. “When you think about it, the whole writer-for-hire thing is a conspiracy of sorts, with publishers and agents and writers conspiring to convince the reading public that—”

  Kerry interrupted her ruthlessly. “I don’t think there’s any conspiracy related to Francesca Bugle. I do think she’s got something to hide.” She sat back and flipped her notebook closed.

  “Maybe she just likes her privacy,” Lola said. “I can understand that.”

  “Let me tell you what I learned about Cosmo Zeller,” I said, sensing that the Bugle conversation wasn’t going to go anyplace useful. “He is definitely not the shy and retiring type. There are more articles about him online than there are about global warming.” I saw Maud’s eyes light up and hurried on before she could launch into her spiel about the global warming conspiracy. I told the group what I’d learned about Cosmo, finishing with, “So, he may be having financial problems. Or not. Just because he’s selling his house doesn’t mean he’s on the verge of bankruptcy.”

  “He could be off-loading it because of the divorce,” Brooke suggested. She sipped her wine. “It could contain too many memories, or he might not want such a big place now that it’s just him.”

  “I looked at a video of it online,” I confessed. “He’s probably dumping it to avoid the maintenance bills. It must cost a fortune in cleaning teams, pool boys, heating and cooling—you name it. Anyway, all the pundits seem to think this movie, Barbary Close, will be a huge hit and put him back on top.”

  We tossed around ideas about where Cosmo and Trent Van Allen might have crossed paths, but other than the fact that they had both lived in Illinois once upon a time, nothing popped. We realized we didn’t know enough about Van Allen to determine where his path might have intersected with that of any of the suspects, and I made a note to ask Hart if he could share some details from Van Allen’s file. “Hart mentioned Van Allen was a marine,” I said. “Did any of our suspects spend any time in the military?”

  Everyone shook their heads no. “Of course,” I pointed out, “the murderer doesn’t have to have known Van Allen personally. Van Allen could have come across something the murderer wanted, or evidence of wrongdoing the murderer wouldn’t want revealed, and approached the killer with it. I mean, all of these people are public figures, to some extent. It wouldn’t be hard to track any of them down.”

  The others let that sink in for a moment, and then Lola pushed her glasses up her nose and pulled up a document on her notebook computer. “I’ve got a report on Eloise Hufnagle. She’s really a very interesting woman. As you know already, she’s from the Atlanta area. She grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. Her mom was a teacher—she died of breast cancer eight years ago. Her dad works for the post office.”

  “Bad genes there,” Maud quipped.

  “Eloise won a full scholarship to Emory University, where she got a PhD in biochemistry with an emphasis on pathogen transmission. She wrote her dissertation on environmental factors in aerosolized transmission of pathogens in commercial airplanes. I managed to find a couple of her papers online. They were quite interesting. She works for the CDC now, the Centers for Disease Control.”

  Of course Lola, with her master’s in chemistry, would find the scientific angle appealing.

  “I couldn’t find as much about her fiction writing, but from newspaper reports about the court case, I gathered that she’s been working on publishing a novel for some time. Years. Apparently, the manuscript she was working on has a story line and characters a lot like those in Mary Stewart’s novel Blood Will Out. Eloise called hers ‘Marked by Blood.’ She was part of a writers’ critique group and suspects that one of her feedback partners knows Mary Stewart and gave her a copy of the manuscript.” Lola stopped, a look of concern on her face. I could tell she sympathized with Eloise Hufnagle.

  “Which Mary Stewart categorically denies,” Brooke put in, waving a sheaf of papers she had pulled from her purse. “Stewart says that any similarities are coincidence, a case of spontaneous ideas arising simultaneously. At least, that’s what her lawyer says. Stewart doesn’t talk about the case. Anyway”—she twiddled the ends of her ponytail—“Mary Stewart has been a writer from the get-go. She grew up in Boise—”

  “Wait a minute.” I straightened. “That’s where Van Allen was from. I think.” I screwed my eyes shut, trying to remember what Hart had said. “Yes, I’m sure Hart said he was from Idaho originally, although he didn’t mention Boise specifically.”

  “Worth looking into,” Lola said.

  “Lots of people are from Idaho,” Kerry said.

  “Anyway,” Brooke continued, “Mary was into writing from middle school on, winning all sorts of contests and awards. She left Idaho to go to college at the University of Virginia, where she was active in Pi Beta Phi. She’s one of my sorority sisters.” Brooke smiled. She’d been social chairperson of her sorority chapter at Colorado State University. “She was briefly engaged to a fellow student, Jonathan Logan, but broke it off a week before the wedding. Cold feet, I guess.”

  “She doesn’t strike me
as the type that would return either the ring or the wedding presents,” Kerry said.

  I looked a question at her and she shrugged. “Gut feeling. There’s something cold about that woman. Calculating. I had a Realtor like her in my office once—could sell the proverbial fridge to an Eskimo—but I caught her colluding with a listing agent to jack up the price one of our clients would have to pay for a house, so I canned her. She moved to Montrose and I hear she’s been agent of the year in the Re/Max office there three years running.” She flared her nostrils.

  Brooke continued. “Mary had a few short stories accepted for online publications and then sold a couple to print magazines. You know,” she said, looking around at all of us, “I read a few of the stories. They were pretty good; at least, I enjoyed them. But not one of them featured a vampire or anything vaguely fantasyish or paranormal.”

  Lola leaned in. “You’re saying you think she stole Eloise’s book?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Brooke hedged. “I just thought it was a little odd that all her short fiction was slice-of-life type stuff, and then her first novel is all about a vampire. It doesn’t prove anything. Like I said, I just thought it was odd.”

  “I’ll bet Hufnagle’s lawyer has hired someone to compare the linguistic style of Stewart’s short stories with the novel,” Maud said. “You can’t prove anything by subject matter, but writing style—that’s a different matter.”

  “What about her family?” I asked. “And where does she live now?”

  “I didn’t look into her family much,” Brooke said. “A couple of articles mentioned that her folks were divorced when she was ten and she lived with her mom and three brothers. I wonder if the other two look anything like Lucas. If so, they missed out on millions by not forming a boy band. Wouldn’t matter the least bit whether they could sing or not.”

  We all laughed, which eased the gradually building tension and frustration. I thought we were all a little edgy, feeling like we weren’t making much progress, that we were missing something.

  “The police had me come down to the station yesterday,” Lola said into the silence that followed the laughter. “They wanted my fingerprints.” She rubbed her thumbs against her fingertips like she was trying to remove ink. “They’re still trying to link me to the murder, as if my bringing that metal stake to the party wasn’t link enough.” Unusual bitterness sounded in her voice.

  I put an arm around her shoulders. “The prints are just for elimination purposes, I’m sure. They already had mine on file,” I said. “From when Ivy . . .”

  We paused a moment, remembering our sixth Readaholic, who had been poisoned in May.

  “There’s no way around the fact that I’m partially responsible,” Lola said quietly. “If I hadn’t brought that weapon—”

  “The killer would have used something else.” Kerry leaned forward to pat Lola’s knee. “Don’t beat yourself up, Lola. You’re not responsible. The only one responsible is whoever stabbed Van Allen with it.”

  Lola gave Kerry a grateful smile but looked unconvinced. As if knowing her mistress needed comforting, Misty jumped into her lap and began to knead her thighs, making little prrrp sounds. Lola patted her and I could see the tension leaking out of her with each stroke. To get us past the moment, I turned to Maud. “What about the Aldringhams, Maud?”

  Maud sucked on her thin upper lip, unusually slow to respond. “I shouldn’t have volunteered to investigate them,” she finally said. “Merle was . . . he and Constance were my friends, once upon a time. It felt wrong to go prying into their lives. However, I did it.” Like Lola, she had a notebook computer and referred to it now.

  “I’ll skip over their growing-up years and our college adventures, and get right to the stuff that might be germane.”

  Darn. I wanted to hear about the college adventures. Maybe I could get Maud to talk over a margarita one day.

  “When Constance hit it big with her books, Merle quit his job as an actuary. When Allyson came along, I guess you could call him a stay-at-home dad, somewhat at the forefront of that movement, although they also had a nanny.”

  “It’s hard on a man, giving up his work identity,” Kerry observed.

  Maud merely nodded and kept going. “More recently, the last eight or ten years, it looks like he’s become a day trader, very active on the stock market.”

  “That’s a risky route to riches,” Brooke said. “My Troy played at day-trading for a while, but Troy Sr. put his foot down.”

  “It hasn’t paid off for Merle, that’s for damn sure,” Maud said. “Over the past three years alone—the only years I could get the data for—he’s lost over three and a half million dollars.”

  Lola gasped. I refrained from asking how Maud had gotten hold of the Aldringhams’ financial records. I knew she did some hacking, usually in the service of outing conspiracies.

  “What an idiot,” Kerry said. “Surely they can’t afford that kind of loss, no matter how well Constance’s books are doing.”

  “No, they can’t,” Maud admitted. “They’re inches away from being foreclosed on. They really need for Autumn of the Lynx to be a blockbuster. A movie deal would help, as well. I suspect that’s the real reason they’re still hanging around Heaven. Constance wants to work on Cosmo Zeller to option her novel.

  “As if that weren’t enough—” She paused to build suspense. “There’s Allyson.”

  “What about her?” Kerry asked in a “get on with it” voice.

  “I’m not quite sure. She was expelled from three private high schools, but I can’t find out why. Accessing private school files is harder than breaking into DoD computers,” she complained. “They’re all so paranoid about being sued. I actually called one of her former headmistresses, said that Allyson had applied for a job with me and I was checking her references—”

  “Smart,” Brooke said.

  “—but I got the runaround. She hemmed and hawed and said that she didn’t feel she could be of use, since Allyson had left their school so long ago. She made a point of saying that Allyson had not graduated from her august academy, almost as if she didn’t want Allyson’s name associated with the school.”

  “Did Allyson ever graduate?” Lola asked. She shifted to look at Maud, and Misty jumped down, affronted that her napping place was unsteady. She came toward me and poked her nose into my glass, which I had set on the floor. I nudged her away.

  “She got a GED,” Maud said, “and then she scored a thirty on her ACT. She’s bright enough, so I don’t think her school troubles were related to grades.”

  “Lots of bright people blow off classes,” Brooke said.

  “Derek,” I said. “He’s at least as smart as I am, but he couldn’t have cared less about his grades, so he was a C student all the way through high school. Drove my folks batty.”

  “Does she have a criminal record?” Kerry asked.

  Maud pointed an approving finger at her. “I wondered the same thing. If she does, it’s as a juvenile and it’s sealed. I couldn’t find anything on her as an adult, and I know my way around the courthouse databases. I can’t help but think it might be drug related. Her folks had plenty of money; she was an only child with a mother who was more involved in her work than in mothering, and a father who, well . . .”

  Maud petered out, clearly not wanting to say anything too negative about Merle. She swiped to the next screen on her notebook. “I called a couple of other people in California—it doesn’t matter who. I made it sound like I was writing an unauthorized biography of Constance.” She looked up. “It never ceases to amaze me how many people are willing to dish the dirt, given the slightest opportunity. Anyway, I picked up rumors that Constance had an affair some years ago with a writer.” She named a thriller writer whose books routinely debuted in the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list. “His wife apparently found out and confronted Constance. Wh
at I wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall during that encounter.” She grinned.

  “I never did like his books,” Kerry said.

  “My source said that Merle knew—the wife made sure of it—but that he and Constance worked it out. When they came for drinks the other night, they acted like a normal married couple, maybe a little bored with each other after more than thirty years, but not at each other’s throats, not even in that passive-aggressive Updikean way. Sure, Merle still thinks about me in a ‘What might have been?’ sort of way, but he’s absolutely not interested in pursuing it. And he wasn’t even before he met Joe and saw how we are together. Except that Constance is a bestselling author, they could be any late middle-aged couple from any suburb in America.”

  She sucked on her upper lip again. “It’s . . . deflating,” she said after searching for the word. “We were such firebrands in our youth, sure that we were going to save the world, bring clean water to Africa, reveal government conspiracies, get equal opportunities for blacks and women. And here we are, forty years down the road, with nothing to show for it. Well, a few more wrinkles, a hip replacement or two, and a medicine cabinet full of laxatives and statins. Millions of people in Africa die from easily preventable diseases each year, we’ve got the most corrupt and least transparent government in my lifetime, education costs are out of control, and—”

  “Since when are you such a Whiny Wendy?” Kerry broke in. “Just in the past couple years you’ve uncovered the last mayor’s kickback schemes and gotten me elected—”

  “Yeah, so happy about that,” Maud said, tongue in cheek.

  “—and caught on to that scam the school board was running, and wrote about how the Colorado Department of Transportation was wasting money with inefficient road-gritting operations, and dozens of other things, some of which were annoying, and some of which made a real difference in this town or the state. Pat yourself on the back, for heaven’s sake, rather than moaning about how you haven’t come up with a cure for malaria. You can only do what you can do. You make a greater difference in more people’s lives than any six people I know.” She sat back and pffted her bangs out of her eyes, her gaze challenging Maud to disagree with her.