COPYRIGHT
Words That Kill
A Maddox Storm Cozy Mystery (Book 3)
Published by Claire Robyns
Copyright © 2016 by Claire Robyns
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or resold in any form or by any means without permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations for non-commercial uses. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author.
All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, living or otherwise, is purely coincidental. If real, names, places and characters are used fictitiously.
ONE
Winter was my favorite time of the year. Cozy fireplaces and red wine. Long November nights and snow-dusted days. Cuddly jumpers that hid those pesky bulges. I’d always felt that winter and I understood each other like no other season could.
This particular November morning, I stared out at the vast white wonderland from my bedroom window and felt a sense of oneness with all the seasons. My divorce had gone through six months ago, and even though I’d initiated the proceedings, it had been a prickly time. But my bristles had fallen off along the way somewhere during autumn, I’d settled in to hibernate through winter, and I had every intention of emerging like a butterfly with spring.
I was getting my stuff sorted.
I’d even gotten myself a part-time job at SKNNY, the local radio station that broadcast out of Skaneateles. Okay, part-time-ish. I was in a pool of stand-in temps to fill in for the regular broadcasters as and when required. It wasn’t much, but it kept my frugal lifestyle chugging along until something better came along.
Joe had finally completed his second thriller and was preparing it to send off to his editor. He hadn’t fled back to the city yet, although I’m not sure why. He’d received a rather nice royalty check a couple of weeks ago, definitely enough to tide him over until the advance for his new book came in.
Maybe Silver Firs was growing on him.
Or maybe he was working on some genius plan to shift his shares in Hollow House, which had actually had a steady trickle of guests since the first snow fall. Not enough to break the bank or attract investors, but I had an idea on how to capitalize on this surprising (to me, anyway) winter market.
I pulled on a pair of fur-lined Uggs and headed downstairs for my wake-up coffee. As I hit the bottom step, Mr Hollow emerged from the dining room, cream linen suit drooping from his rail-thin frame, cane tapping on the flagstone floor as he crossed the reception area.
“Mr Hollow,” I called out cheerfully. “I was just coming to find you.”
He stopped, turned to me with an expression that was almost cordial. “I wasn’t lost.”
“Why, Mr Hollow, is that a joke?” My lips twitched.
The more common scowl dug into his forehead. “A fact.”
I rolled my eyes as I drew nearer. “I’ve been thinking how we could turn Hollow House into a really attractive prospect for investors and I came across this brilliant—”
“We had a deal,” he interrupted with a decisive stomp of his cane for emphasis. “You keep all your fancy ideas to yourself and I’ll shut up about how you invited a murderer into my home.”
Mr Hollow was a tough cookie. Six months, and he still hadn’t forgiven me for the GRIMMS debacle.
“This is different.” I turned up the smile wattage. “Wouldn’t you like to be rid of me and Joe?”
His scowl burrowed deeper. “I don’t mind Joseph so much.”
That stung, but it wasn’t totally unexpected. An unlikely alliance between Mr Hollow and Joe had been brewing for months now, mostly based on neither of them giving a fig about reversing the inn’s fortunes (or should I say misfortunes?)
“Anyway,” I went on stoically, “I’ve been doing some research and school trips are big business. Hollow House is the perfect year-round venue. We have the lake front for water activities, and the hiking trails. Winter sports is great around here with all the snow we get. All our rooms are large enough to hold two pairs of bunkbeds. We could accommodate parties of thirty and still have a couple of rooms for the teachers and chaperones.”
“You want to turn my home into a dormitory,” Mr Hollow said flatly.
“I want to turn the inn into a profitable endeavor,” I countered.
Burns popped out from the dining room, a white napkin folded over one arm, the jacket of his black funeral suit riding up his rotund middle. “Ms Storm,” he said by way of morning greeting. “I’m about to clear the breakfast table.”
The implied reprimand in his understated tone irked me. “That’s okay, Burns, I’m not hungry.”
“If you say so,” he murmured and retreated into the dining room.
As per usual following any encounter with Burns, I was left in a state of mild confusion, not quite sure if he’d just accused me of lying to both myself and him.
I shook it off and turned to Mr Hollow with renewed determination. “I understand your reluctance, Mr Hollow, I really do. And I do realize this is your home, but it is also an inn that I—um, that Joe has a lot of money tied up in.”
Harsh of me, but it was the truth. If the bank had foreclosed, Mr Hollow would have been a whole lot more inconvenienced by that than by anything I’d ever proposed.
A look that could be mistaken for remorse passed over his heavy-browed face. “You may be right, Maddox.”
My smile returned.
“Come on.” Mr Hollow stomped his cane and started toward the lounge. “Let’s see if I can convince my partner of the benefits of your proposal.”
Needless to say, Mr Hollow had been rather delighted by my divorce. Or rather, by the fact that any say I had in Hollow House had reverted to Joe along with our shares.
I followed through the archway. Our only guests this weekend, an elderly couple who travelled this way twice yearly to visit their daughter in Montreal, were nowhere to be seen. Joe was in an armchair by the massive fireplace that hadn’t yet been lit for the day. He glanced up and gave me a small wave.
“Joseph, my boy,” Mr Hollow called out loudly rather than stepping deeper into the lounge. “How do you feel about a pack of kids running wild in this place all hours of the day and night?”
My jaw dropped. The weasel.
Joe blanched. “Not very good.”
“Are you sure?” Mr Hollow prompted. “Maddox seems to think it would be good for business.”
Joe flickered an apologetic grin my way. “There are easier ways to die.”
Still wearing that deceitful look of remorse, Mr Hollow gave me a helpless shrug and walked out.
Why did I even try? I stalked to the coffee machine, shoved a porcelain mug on the drip tray and selected the cappuccino option. I could almost hear Nana Rose’s whisper in my ear. You can lead a grown man to water, but you can’t make him fish.
A muttered curse from Joe spun me around. His head was bowed, sandy hair flopping over his eyes, his attention on the tablet propped against one squared leg.
“Joe?”
He looked up, all color drained from his face. “You have to see this.”
“Okay.” I hesitated, caught between his need for urgency and my need for caffeine. No competition. I mean, no one was dead or dying, right? I grabbed my cappuccino and then I hurried on over. “What is it?”
He hit the stop button on the video stream. “A news clip, from two days ago.”
I perched on the arm of his chair. “I assume it’s not good?”
“You can say that again.” Joe rewound t
he TV channel’s recorded stream by a couple of real time minutes, then pressed play.
The usual duo of male/female presenters sat at the news desk, a middle-aged man with a slick hairstyle and a serious-looking woman.
“We’re hearing now that Senator Markson’s daughter went missing last Tuesday night,” the woman said. “Let’s cross to Jennifer Lowfer, reporting from the scene at The Sashay.”
The camera switched to a young woman standing on the curb of a wide avenue. The view at her back was an apartment block stacked on top of a row of street level green-canopied shops.
“Hello, Anne,” the reporter said, looking into the camera with a grim expression. “As you can see, I’m not outside The Sashay. The police have cordoned off East 84th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue. What we know is that The Sashay was the last place Lacey Markson was seen.”
“That was Tuesday night, right?” the male presenter asked.
The reporter nodded. “Yes, Sean, that has been confirmed. Lacey was a regular at the cocktail bar, and Tuesday night she was there with a group of friends. From what we understand so far, there was no incident as such. A close friend said that Lacey often ditched them to go off with someone she’d met, so there was no immediate cause for alarm. The FBI were apparently treating this as a kidnapping, until this morning, of course.”
“Thank you, Jennifer.” The camera switched to the woman in the studio again. “This morning, a body was found floating in the East River, near the Ferry Terminal. The FBI released the identity of the girl as Lacey Markson, Senator Markson’s daughter. We don’t know if she drowned, or how long she’s been dead, but we do know that this is now being treated as a murder investigation.”
A photograph popped up in the right hand corner, a pretty girl with long dark brown hair and smiling blue eyes. Below, in big red letters, the hotline number.
“If you have any information, if you saw this girl or anything suspicious in the area between Tuesday night and Thursday morning, please—”
Joe stopped the feed, cutting her off mid-sentence.
“That’s terrible,” I murmured, cradling my mug as I lifted it to my lips. “What’s the matter with people?”
“Terrible?” Joe looked up at me, clearly expecting more.
I swallowed my sip of cappuccino. “Yeah, I mean, she was so young. And she could have been floating in the river since Tuesday.” A shudder ripped through me. “Her poor parents.”
Joe’s gaze lowered to the tablet. He called up a browser and found images of The Sashay. “Look familiar?”
I peered closer. The frontage window was an honest-to-God fish tank. One of those flat tanks with bubbles shooting through long algae, filled with exotic tropical goldfish. Inside, the décor was just as stunning. Low sofas in pale blues and greens, the floor looked like a sandy beach.
It was beautiful, and not that far from where we’d lived, but it was the kind of place I would remember. “I’ve never been there, or even noticed it in passing. That is East 84th Street in Upper East Side, right?”
“Right,” Joe clipped out, swiping the images away.
“Okay…” I went to sit in the chair across from him. Lacey Markson’s death was a tragedy, and she was a senator’s daughter, sure, but Joe seemed to be taking the news awfully hard. “Want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked softly. “Joe, did you know Lacey?”
“No.” He sank deeper in his chair, frowning at me. “You didn’t read The Twilight Kill, did you?”
I blanked out for a moment.
“Jeez, Maddox, you don’t even know what my new book is called?”
“The Twilight Kill, of course I know.” I winced on the inside. But seriously, I did know. He’d given me a draft copy of the manuscript a couple of weeks ago to read, all 436 printed pages of it.
It was that stupid word association thing. My brain kept thinking The Twilight Hour. Personally, I didn’t think The Twilight Kill had that sticky factor, but what did I know? I wasn’t the bestselling author in the room.
“You said you’d read it,” Joe grumbled.
“To be fair, I never actually said I’d read it.”
“When I asked what you thought, you said it was great,” Joe said. “The word you used was masterpiece.”
“Well, duh, you wrote it,” I retorted glibly. “Of course it’s a great masterpiece.”
So sue me for having a little blind faith.
Joe looked at me, stunned silent.
I sipped my coffee, firm in my belief that I’d done no wrong. Don’t forget, 436 printed pages! Who’d blame me for reading the first and last page, and skimming through the middle for a handful of quotes to feed back to Joe? Besides, the protagonist is a serial killer, not the kind of hero I could get behind. And all the girls he hooks up with apparently die, so there was never going to be a happy ever after.
Joe rubbed a hand through his hair, and I had to say, he looked gutted by my admission.
“The bits I did read were really good,” I said, relenting.
“This isn’t about my ego, Maddie.”
“Okay.” I waited a beat, got no response. “Well, what is it about?”
“I wrote Lacey Markson’s murder.”
“Huh?”
“Other than the fact that my victim wasn’t a senator’s daughter, everything is an exact copycat of the first murder in The Twilight Kill,” Joe said. “Young brunette girl, blue eyes. Max Wilder, he’s the serial killer, picks her up in a cocktail bar on East 84th Street, strangles her and dumps her body in the East River.”
Chills scraped my bones. “That’s one hell of a coincidence.”
“You think?” Joe gave a dry laugh. “Not just any cocktail bar, Maddie, he picks her up at The Sashay.”
“You used an actual cocktail bar in your story?” Not the most important issue, I realized that, but we wouldn’t be having this bizarre conversation if he’d used a touch of imagination. “You’re supposed to be a writer! What happened to getting creative and making stuff up?”
“It’s called The Green Lagoon in my book, and I changed enough details to avoid a lawsuit,” he said with a burst of indignation, but a moment later the fire left him and he shuffled low in his chair. “But it was based on The Sashay. I went in there a couple of times, bought a drink, sat in a corner sofa to soak up the ambience and…watch…” He sank his face in his hands. “I even picked out a likely candidate once, imagined her in the role…”
His words swept me to a dark, bitter place. Joe and Chintilly Swan, and the line he’d crossed in the name of artistic adventure. He’d seduced her in his quest to be edgy and authentic to his story, he’d convinced himself it was okay to rehearse that sexy scene in real life to make sure it came out more realistically on paper.
Nothing could forgive my next thought, but that’s the place it came from.
My eyes widened on Joe in horror. “You didn’t kill Lacey Markson, did you?”
“God, no!” He peeked at me through his fingers, his voice hoarse. “How can you—?” A basket full of hurt filled those puppy-dog eyes. “Maddie, you know I could never do something like that.”
The dark spell broke.
“No, of course not.” I couldn’t believe I’d accused him of murder. I was officially the worst ex-wife in the history of broken marriages. “Joe, I’m so sorry. I was just thinking about you and Chintilly and it popped out.”
“That was different.”
“Yes,” I agreed emphatically. “Totally different.”
Joe was an accidental adulterer, not a cold-blooded killer. But it was beginning to look like he knew someone who was.
“Joe, have you told anyone about your book?”
“No one.” He thought that through, then shook his head. “I mean, lots of people know I’m writing a serial murder thriller, but I’ve never spoken about the details or described any of the murder scenes. I haven’t even sent the manuscript off to my editor yet. No one’s read it except me and—” he cut off, giving me dolefu
l look, “—well, just me I guess.”
The tension in my shoulders eased. “That’s good news. Obviously the similarities to Lacey Markson are just a coincidence.”
Hope flicked in Joe’s eyes, then crashed. “No way, that’s not possible.”
“I hate to break it to you,” I told him, “but your plot isn’t that unique. Cute brunette gets picked up at a bar, strangled, and dumped in a river. I’ve seen that movie at least a dozen times.”
“It’s not the plot that’s the problem, Maddie, it’s the details. A beach-themed bar on East 84th Street? The East River? And Lacey disappeared on Tuesday.” Joe hung his head, looked at me. “That’s the same day of the week Max Wilder picks Lilianna up at The Green Lagoon. He strangles her the following evening, Wednesday at midnight, and dumps her body near the Ferry Terminal in the East River.”
Crap.
“Fine,” I sighed. “But what are you suggesting? Some stranger snuck into our home and stole a copy of your manuscript?”
“He wouldn’t have had to sneak in,” Joe said, and there was a definite bite to his tone. “We welcome strangers in with open arms here.”
“Because that’s the business we’re in,” I muttered. But seriously, I was sick of defending myself when it came to Hollow House. “At least I try, and I don’t even have a stake in this lousy inn.”
“Neither would I, if it wasn’t for you,” Joe hit back.
Ouch! The truth sure packed a punch.
Half-truth, I reminded myself as I drained the frothy dregs of my cappuccino. Joe had started this ball rolling when he’d wrecked our marriage. But I was well on my way to forgiving, we’d actually been getting along rather nicely since the divorce. Meanwhile, apparently, Joe had been holding onto this grudge. In the grand scheme of events, that didn’t seem entirely fair.
“Maddie, I shouldn’t have said that.” Joe’s expression crumpled. “I don’t mean it. I’m just rattled about this thing with Lacey Markson.”
I wasn’t sold. Joe totally meant it. But murder took priority over yet another argument.
Words That Kill (A Maddox Storm Mystery Book 3) Page 1
