Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  What if someone had made all reference to The Affair in the company’s database disappear?

  As a mystery writer, I often find the conspiratorial nature of evil creeping into my everyday life. Sometimes with foundation, sometimes without. But Lane’s death was very real, as was the fact that a book he had splashed layers of praise upon didn’t seem to exist as far as his own imprint was concerned. And that got me back around to the crime scene at Thomas Rudd’s apartment.

  Yes, I said crime scene. Because someone had bound his arms to a chair before setting off that gas explosion. And that wasn’t just my overactive imagination talking, either. I was just about to dig back into the manuscript when Artie Gelber reached me by phone.

  “Artie?” I greeted him, afraid of what he might have to tell me this time.

  “Just wanted you to know our crime scene unit went over what’s left of your friend’s apartment building again. Still no sign of that flash drive you asked me to look for.”

  For some reason, I was glad I hadn’t corrected Artie when he called Rudd my friend.

  “It could’ve burned up in the fire, I suppose,” he continued, “especially if it was in the kitchen area.”

  “Or it could have been taken by whoever rigged the explosion,” I pointed out.

  “I made some calls about Rudd, Jessica. The number of people he was in debt to would fill a book by itself, and plenty of those would make great villains.”

  “The kind who blow people up?”

  “For starters, anyway.”

  He paused so long I thought he’d hung up. Then his voice returned.

  “You on your way home?”

  “I’m on the train now.”

  “Be careful,” he warned.

  “I’m not driving, remember?”

  “Just be careful. I don’t know what’s going on here, but too much of it doesn’t add up to anything I can make sense of.”

  I should have told him I had the manuscript, should have left The Affair with him in the first place. Instead I glanced at the pages piled on the seat next to me and wondered if A. J. Falcone’s critique had been accurate:

  It sucked. Awful. A waste of time . . .

  Then again, Falcone hated his own books, by his own admission.

  “Did you hear me, Jessica?” Artie asked me in my ear. “I told you to be careful.”

  “I heard you.”

  That was Artie. He was probably the best detective I’d ever known, never giving up the chase no matter how much time had passed or how many roads in an investigation ended up leading nowhere. Harry McGraw wasn’t bad, either, was pretty damn good, actually, in spite of what his ruffled persona might have indicated. If anyone could uncover who Benjamin Tally really was, it was Harry, even if all he had to go on was a manuscript title page.

  I sat on the aisle so I could lay the manuscript on the seat next to me by the window. It was so voluminous, I wouldn’t be surprised if the conductor asked me to purchase an extra ticket. Musing on that, I picked up a stack of the pages, finished the obligatory prologue quickly, and moved on to the first chapter.

  Chapter Nine

  If I’d known she was the president’s daughter, I never would’ve said yes. No, I’m lying, because I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and when she approached through the haze of club-made smoke from dry ice and asked me to dance, well, let’s just say my legs melted.

  I shouldn’t have been drinking that night; she shouldn’t have been drinking. That’s how it all started, with a fight that separated her from her Secret Service escort team and left Abby under my sole protection.

  Her name wasn’t really Abby, as I’d quickly learn. But it was how she introduced herself, so, for me, the president’s daughter became Abby.

  We ended up at a motel that night, but not for the reasons you think. She didn’t want to go home, back to the White House in other words. It was a Motel 6 or Super 8, some chain with a number in its name. A dump, basically, and I’ve never seen anyone so overjoyed to have all of twenty-four basic cable channels to watch without anyone peering over her shoulder or protesters chanting across the street.

  Everything was just fine, until the door to our room shattered and blew open.

  I nodded off for a fluttery second there, only to snap alert an instant later. I caught a bald man sitting in a seat facing mine a few rows away easing his gaze away from me and wondered if I’d cried out or something in my half sleep. But he trained his eyes casually out the window and melted back into the scenery.

  I could already see what had gotten Lane Barfield so excited about The Affair. It was beyond commercial, bestseller written all over it thanks to a simple and exceedingly melodramatic premise. A young man involved with the president’s daughter . . .

  Wondering what that dot-dot-dot might be, I settled myself with a deep breath and went back to reading.

  The three men didn’t know who I was, where I had come from, what I’d been trained to do. They had no idea the president’s daughter wasn’t the only fugitive in the room, and it cost them.

  They had launched their attack, not anticipating any resistance. That told me something about them before I could catch my breath, because true professionals, special operators, always proceed with that possibility in mind. And their misjudgment of the situation they were walking into cost them. It cost them dearly.

  Hating the kind of lurid and graphic descriptions that followed, I skimmed the next few pages, finding myself relating quite well to the president’s daughter’s reaction to what she’d just witnessed.

  Abby had taken refuge in a corner, the roach motel’s flashing marquee turning her face jagged with color. I had to step over the bodies to reach her, two of them anyway, avoiding the blood that was already soaking into the cheap carpeting. I felt bad for the maid who would come to clean this room tomorrow.

  Abby looked up at me in terror. “Wh-wh-who are you?” she managed.

  “You’re not the only one with secrets, Abby.”

  Her eyes fell on the bodies. “But . . .” She left it there, nothing more to say until she was ready again. “The only thing I lied to you about was my name.”

  “I didn’t lie to you at all.”

  “You’re a killer.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You just killed three men, three men with guns.”

  “That doesn’t make me a killer. And if I’d been somebody else, they’d have you now.”

  “So, what, you’re like a knight in shining armor?”

  I shook my head. “Sometimes knights are as dark as those they’re protecting the kingdom from.”

  “The kingdom,” Abby repeated behind a trace of a smile, as if she found that funny, maybe ironic. “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “Come on,” I said instead of answering her question, stretching a hand toward the corner where Abby had taken refuge. “I’d better get you home.”

  “No,” she protested, pulling back against the tug of my hand. “That’s who sent them.”

  Wow!

  I could almost feel Lane Barfield reading over my shoulder, pleased to no end that I saw exactly what he had in The Affair. It was utterly addicting, a twist or surprise literally to be found on every single page. I couldn’t wait to read on to see what was going to happen next. Abby and . . .

  I realized I didn’t know the narrator’s name and flipped back through the pages to see if I’d somehow missed it. Nope. I didn’t know his name because it hadn’t been provided yet, rendering him anonymous, the lack of a true identity meant to give the reader a glimpse into his life on the run from whoever it was who’d made him what he was. It wasn’t a new theme, but it was pretty much tried-and-true when in the right hands. And Benjamin Tally clearly had the right hands, a maestro on the keyboard when it came to this pulp tale of ridiculous connections and coincidences that reader
s would overlook as the plot spun them along at a breakneck pace.

  I needed to use the restroom, wanting nothing to distract me from my reading of The Affair. Given all the time remaining on this ride, and the one that would follow between Boston and Portland, I’d have plenty of time to cover a considerable chunk of the manuscript and actually wouldn’t mind a delay, since that would give me a chance to read the whole thing.

  I realized the bald man I thought I’d caught watching me was gone, likely having detrained at one of the stops that we had passed while I’d been transfixed by the double-spaced pages. New riders had taken seats in the car, and I began to fear I’d have to give up my cherished extra seat, currently occupied by the bulky manuscript.

  When I thought about it, the whole process now felt odd. I had agreed to read The Affair as a favor to Lane Barfield, to give him my honest thoughts, offer a blurb in the event he wanted one. I wished I’d had the opportunity to validate his decision—to tell him that if this wasn’t the next big thing in the publishing world, I didn’t know what was. Instead, I had cracked open the manuscript to see if it might yield some clue as to the circumstances behind his death. If it was suicide, so be it. If it was someone trying to provide that impression, though, this book, or something contained within it, might hold the motive for his killing. Nor could I chase from my mind the fact that Thomas Rudd had been murdered. Unpaid street debts aside, murder seemed extreme even for the thugs who held his markers.

  I rose from my seat and tried to stretch the stiffness from my neck and shoulders, the result of being stuck in one position while I read. My eyes drifted backward and I froze.

  The bald man I remembered from before was now seated three rows behind me.

  * * *

  • • •

  He appeared to be sleeping. I blinked a few times to make sure it was him and sat back down. I didn’t dare leave the manuscript behind, and lugging a clump of pages up the aisle, along with my handbag, would make me feel ridiculous. I’d have to pass the bald man’s seat on the way to the restroom, so I resolved to wait as long as I could.

  Sitting back down left me feeling anxious and tense, resisting the urge to peer backward over the seat, perhaps to catch the bald man watching me again. I eased the cell phone from my bag for no good reason at all; whom was I going to call and what was I going to tell them? There were at least fifty other passengers in this car and their presence lent a measure of security. I didn’t dare fall asleep, though, and resolved to do a better job keeping an eye on my surroundings.

  No easy task, given how much I kept slipping into the world of The Affair. If nothing else, reading on would keep me awake, as well as distract me from the fact that I’d never gotten to the restroom. And as soon as I plunged back into the manuscript, the president’s daughter, Abby, posed the same question I’d been asking myself.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “When somebody saves my life, I like to know their name.”

  “This happens a lot, does it?”

  “First time for everything, but not the last. You can rest assured of that.”

  “What did you do exactly, Abby?”

  “Uh-uh. You first, pretty boy.”

  That stung. “Pretty boy?”

  “Nobody ever called you that before?”

  “I don’t get out much.”

  Abby watched me drag the first body toward the closet to hide it from view of anyone peering through the thin, flimsy curtains. She wasn’t rattled. I found that interesting.

  “We need to get going,” I said to her.

  “Where?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “If you don’t tell me your name, I’ll keep calling you pretty boy.”

  That did the trick. “Emerson.”

  “Really?”

  “No, it’s the name on the television.”

  She glanced that way, then back at me. “Want to try again?”

  “Okay,” I said, pretending to relent, “it’s Ricoh.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Japanese.”

  She gazed toward a small cluster of appliances. “The microwave?”

  I shook my head, stuffing the final man I’d killed into the closet. “Coffee maker.”

  “I’m going to ask you one more time.”

  “No,” I told her, forcing the closet door closed, “you’ll keep asking until you get your answer. But I’ll make you a deal. You tell me why somebody from inside the White House wants to kill the president’s daughter and I’ll tell you my—”

  I awoke with a start, not realizing where I was for one brief, breathless moment. An unkempt pile of manuscript pages lay on my lap with a few having slipped to the floor. I looked to my right and breathed easier when I saw the remainder of the manuscript was still there.

  I checked my watch and realized nearly an hour had passed since I’d risen from my seat with the intention of going to the restroom. I stood up again, pretending to reach for my carry-on bag, and spotted the bald man still in the same seat, his face aglow from a cell phone screen he must’ve been watching. He seemed to have no interest in me.

  I think maybe the content of The Affair was making me paranoid, making me fear I might be attacked just as Abby and the book’s unnamed narrator had been in the grungy motel room. The writing was sparse but muscular, Benjamin Tally knowing just how much to say without saying too much. He had an ear for dialogue and had already given me a deep interest in his young heroes, who, I suspected, held many secrets yet to be revealed.

  My mouth was dry and I craved a bottled water terribly. But I didn’t dare vacate my seat as the train rumbled through Connecticut, hugging the coastline and Route 95, closing in on Rhode Island. Pretty soon, I’d have to use the restroom whether I liked it or not, even if that meant lugging more than eight hundred manuscript pages with me. But for now I shook the weariness from my mind and went back to The Affair.

  “—name.”

  I watched her nod, the hair tumbling into her face. I positioned myself so she wouldn’t see the blood starting to leak out from beneath the closet door.

  “I heard something I wasn’t supposed to.”

  “Involving your father?”

  “Uh-huh. Your turn.”

  “Pace.”

  Abby nodded as if she was bored. “That’s an English company, I think.”

  “It’s also my name. The name they gave me.”

  “The name who gave you?”

  “We should get out of here,” I told her, looking back at the closet.

  “Don’t you want to ask me another question?”

  She was right; I did. “What was it that you heard?”

  “Something they can’t afford me telling my father. They’re going to kill my mother and my brother if I do.”

  I tried not to show how interested I was. “I’m not your father.”

  “And it’s not your turn; it’s mine,” Abby said, peering through a crack in the drawn curtains to see whether there were any more men I needed to kill.

  “Nobody there,” I told her. “This was all of them.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  I shrugged. “I just am.”

  “Ready for my next question?”

  “I just answered your next question.”

  “I haven’t asked it yet.”

  “‘How can you be sure?’” I repeated.

  “That doesn’t count.”

  “Yes, it does. But because I like you so much I’ll give you another. Last one before we have to leave.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No fair. I get another: Where are you going?”

  “Same answer.”

  “Then I get a third, and
one more for each time you don’t answer.” She didn’t stop to let me argue the point, just asked away. “Who made you this way?”

  “They did.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Changing the rules again?”

  “Who are they?”

  “The Guardians. We call them that because that’s what they are to us, and it’s the way they see themselves for a lot more than just us.”

  “I don’t know what that means, Pace.”

  It felt strange to be addressed by as close to a real name as I had.

  “What do the Guardians do exactly?”

  “Is it still your turn?”

  “Answer the question.”

  I looked toward the closet. “They send men like that. To keep the wrong secrets from ever getting out, among other things.”

  I could tell the notion of that frightened her. “You think that they . . .”

  “I don’t know. I do know we need to get moving; we need to get moving now.”

  I nodded off again right there, exhausted after all that had transpired over the course of the last two days. I tried to go back to the manuscript, but fatigue kept claiming me no matter how hard I fought back.

  I stole another glance backward to find the bald man still in place, still caught in the spill of light from his cell phone screen. He’d probably switched seats just to ride in the right direction, so his back wasn’t to the engine. He seemed entrenched in whatever he was watching, buds dangling from his ears, no interest in me whatsoever.

  We’d just passed into Massachusetts; another forty minutes to go before the train reached Boston, never mind the additional three hours of travel that awaited me after that. I began to regret not flying. I could have been back in Maine now, heading home, instead of on this endless ride with only Abby and Pace to keep me company.

  I gathered up the whole stack of pages and tucked them back into the tote I put on my shoulder before heading down the aisle. I regarded the bald man for a single moment while heading for the restroom. I made sure to slide the lock into place. It rattled a few minutes later when someone outside began to jiggle the door latch.