Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “She’s not married. Try calling her Ms. instead.”

  Mort looked miffed. “You think that’s why she’s not answering the door?”

  “Just try it.”

  “Ms. Bond,” Mort said, pounding harder on the door.

  Still nothing.

  “Any more brilliant ideas?”

  “Try her real name.”

  “Ms. or Mrs.?”

  “Mrs. Monica Bellucci is divorced.”

  I slid over to the nearest window, which was covered by curtains, then another, which wasn’t. I peered inside and glimpsed what looked like a—

  That was as far as I got in my thinking.

  “Mort!” I meant to say quietly, but it came out in more of a shriek.

  “What?” he asked, shoes pounding atop the plank porch, which smelled of pine.

  I pointed toward the window, watched Mort cup a hand over his brow to better focus on the interior. He turned toward me from it, rotating only his neck.

  “Well, at least we know what happened to the park ranger.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The ranger lay with his limbs askew on the floor, bullet holes in both his chest and his head. Same with Alicia Bond, who lay half on and half off the bed. A trio of kerosene lanterns, the only witnesses to what had happened here, flickered in rhythm with our movements.

  “The ranger was shot outside and dragged in here,” Mort said, kneeling by his body. “He’s got pine needles and ground brush all over his clothes. A bit of exploration and we can probably find the exact spot where he was killed.”

  “We?”

  “You didn’t just come along for the ride, Jessica, did you?”

  I looked at the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt as he stood back up. “Who are you supposed to call about this?”

  “It’s park ranger jurisdiction. For all intents and purposes, they’re the law in these parts.”

  I looked down at the body clad in green uniform and jacket. “Not right now.”

  Mort followed my gaze. “When it comes to serious crimes, the FBI has jurisdiction,” he said, and reached for his walkie-talkie.

  * * *

  • • •

  True to his word, and because neither of us wanted to stay cooped up with the bodies, Mort showed me the spot, about sixty feet away, at the edge of the clearing in which the cabin rested, where the park ranger had been killed. I imagined the man putting up his hands as his killer approached, the two shots that followed punching him backward and knocking him to the ground. Based on the limited blood spill, he was probably dead by the time he hit it or moments after. Whoever had killed him and Alicia Bond were clearly professionals, well trained and practiced at this.

  Something that was in keeping with The Affair, in the form of the army of killers pursuing Pace and Abby.

  Was I cracking up, living in a book instead of writing one? Was all this even happening?

  “We’ll be on our way as soon as we square things with the FBI,” Mort said suddenly. “We don’t want to be up here after dark, and with these winds building, we don’t want to be forced to spend the night.”

  “We certainly don’t,” I agreed, feeling a need more than ever to finish that manuscript, perhaps to see what else awaited me.

  “To repeat your earlier question: What in that book could have caused all this?” Mort asked me.

  “I said that? I didn’t just form the thought in my mind?”

  Mort shrugged. “Maybe we both did. Maybe that’s why I remember you saying it.”

  A twig or something snapped nearby, and he went for his gun, quicker than I’d ever seen him do anything. Only then did I realize he’d already unfastened the safety strap.

  “Jumpy, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t think we missed the killer by much; the author and ranger haven’t been dead for more than two hours.”

  “You think the killers might still be about?”

  “Depends if they wanted to see who might show up.”

  “In which case, they would’ve probably still been inside when we got here.”

  “Hey, my imagination isn’t quite as developed as yours.”

  “Oh no?” I looked at his hand still lingering close to the butt of his pistol. “Have you actually drawn that outside of the range?”

  “This?” he said, following my gaze. “No.”

  “What about another gun?”

  He took a deep breath but didn’t seem to finish it. “I was in Vietnam, Jessica.”

  I could feel my eyes bulging out of my head. “You never mentioned that before.”

  “I never mention it at all. And, by the way, I haven’t been to the range since I became sheriff of Cabot Cove. I’ve done enough shooting for a lifetime, without sharpening my skills on cardboard.”

  I could tell that was about as far as Mort was going to go with this, and I couldn’t blame him. It had gotten appreciably cooler, the midafternoon warmth beginning to bleed from the air, when Mort and I turned our eyes upward toward a helicopter that must’ve been carrying investigators dispatched by the FBI in Boston descending toward the landing pad and disappearing below the tree line.

  “Won’t be long now,” Mort said, but I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant.

  * * *

  • • •

  We were there for three more hours, coming dangerously close to sunset, to the point that Mort borrowed a pair of flashlights from the FBI agents to help guide us through the forest that rimmed the mountain back to the plateau that held the helipad. The agents inspected the entire cabin in painstaking fashion, grousing over both jurisdictional issues and the challenge of getting a crime scene unit to the scene.

  Mort and I had already discussed the fact that we couldn’t reveal the true reason behind our coming here, could make no mention of all that had transpired previously that had led to this point.

  “So,” an agent asked us, chewing on a mint I realized was a Rolaids tablet when he twisted another out of the pack and popped it into his mouth, “this was a social call?”

  “The victim and I shared the same publisher,” I said, telling the truth.

  “I asked what brought you up here.” The agent’s gaze fell on Mort. “With the local sheriff in tow.”

  “We weren’t actually coming up here strictly to see Ms. Bond,” I said, making up the lie on the spot.

  “No?”

  I let him see me grab Mort’s hand. “We came because she recommended this spot, another cabin just over the ridge.”

  “And you came by helicopter?”

  “Comes with the job,” Mort said without hesitation, hand stiff in mine.

  The agent didn’t look at all happy with our answers, but he also had no reason to hold us any longer, since we clearly weren’t suspects.

  “Did Alicia Bond have any enemies?” he asked before dismissing us.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Because you didn’t know her well enough?”

  I turned my gaze back on the cabin. “Apparently not.”

  The agent nodded and walked away without saying another word, and moments later Mort and I were on our way back to the helicopter, flashlights sweeping about to cut through the twilight.

  “Want to hold hands again?” Mort asked me after we settled into our trek, his eyes checking our surroundings for far more than exposed roots.

  “Only if we get your wife’s permission. Tell her I have a thing for war heroes.”

  He bristled a bit at me calling him that. “There’ll be hell to pay if she finds out we’re having an affair.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Well, it would make a pretty juicy rumor.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I can see Evelyn Phillips’s headline in the Cabot Cove Gazette now.”

  �
��Gossip travels fast in a small town.”

  “Gossip travels fast everywhere, Mort. The twenty-four-seven news cycle has brought the world into everyone’s bedroom.”

  “Not sure if I like the view. Meanwhile, I just want to see if I’ve got this right, Jessica,” he said. “You believe two other authors who were given the manuscript, an author who accidentally stole it, and the publisher who discovered it are all dead?”

  “That sums things up neatly. But you didn’t need me to tell you that.”

  “No. I need you to tell me if you’re afraid you might be next.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Of course I was. I don’t have a death wish and I wasn’t born with the proverbial danger gene. I sometimes get myself in trouble and put myself at risk when I try to help someone. Here I guess I was helping Lane Barfield; if there was more to his suicide than met the eye, circumstances yet undiscovered, I owed it to him to continue investigating.

  It all came back to that manuscript; the murders of Alicia Bond and the park ranger seemed to confirm that, leaving very little doubt. The ranger must have stumbled upon the scene, perhaps after Alicia Bond had already been shot, but more likely before, her killers lying in wait when he’d stumbled upon them and paid for the terrible timing with his life. The very definition of the wrong place at the wrong time. The ranger did carry a revolver, but we’d found it still in its holster with the safety strap fastened.

  I was scared and glad to be scared, because the primary effect of the fear was to make me even more determined to find the people who now posed an undeniable threat to my life. Living alone, I was terribly close to banishing the fear of death from my psyche. I guess coming upon as many bodies as I had at crime scenes had left me inoculated against the way most viewed and feared death. Personally, I fear killers getting away with murder much more. Hemingway once said that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. My refusal to accept evil in the world was my version of that fight. A lot of times the impetus for such came from some personal motivation, but beyond that it was about seeing justice done. That might sound like a cliché, but I honestly believe it, and it’s as close to a life mantra as I’ve got.

  People often asked me how I became a writer. I tell them it dates back to a day in my childhood when I found on the side of the road a dead dog that had been hit by a car. Whoever had killed him hadn’t bothered pulling over to see if he could be saved or to check his tag for a phone number. I found that number and called it myself as soon as I got home.

  I think that was the hardest thing I’d ever done, so hard that it wasn’t enough to cover the dog with my coat and call its owners. I had to find out who’d struck him with their car, so I began walking up the long street I lived on, checking the front bumpers and tires on each and every car for blood, fur, or some other indication that its owner was the guilty party. Even though my search continued all the way to dark and then after it with the help of a flashlight, I never did find that car.

  The death of that dog became my first case, and to this day I believe it’s the source of my fascination with mystery and seeing justice done, even though I never found the culprit. I wonder if things might’ve been different if I’d found a car with blood and fur on its front bumper or tires all those years ago. Would that have ended my obsession with crime before it even started? Had every investigation I’d undertaken since, both in fact and in fiction, been nothing more than my subconscious trying to find the person who left that dog on the side of the road?

  Questions better posed to a therapist, I suppose. I’ve never visited one myself, for two reasons, mainly: First, the process of writing serves as my therapy, and second, I’ve always believed all writers are inherently crazy, eccentric at the very least. You might say that, other than hit men and assassins, mystery writers are the only people who kill for a living.

  “I’m going to post a man outside your house,” Mort said as we walked back to his car after landing at the private airfield outside Cabot Cove.

  I noticed construction workers laying two new runways and extending an older one. Efforts were also under way to fully renovate and expand the terminal, further indication of the outside world leaving a larger and larger mark on what once had been our quaint little village. Much of the work here was scheduled to be completed before the start of what promised to be Cabot Cove’s busiest summer ever. I’d heard from the town’s top Realtor, Eve Simpson, that every single summer rental property she managed was already spoken for, whereas most years early May would find Eve with at least a third and as much as half to fill. We were fast becoming trendy, a land-based Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket and, God help us, New England’s version of the Hamptons.

  As I said, God help us.

  “You told me that already,” I said to Mort.

  “That I was going to put a man on your house?”

  I nodded. “But you never told me you were in Vietnam.”

  “You never asked.”

  “It’s not something likely to come up in conversation.”

  “My point exactly, Jessica. I didn’t tell my wife, either, until after I married her. It was a long time ago and better left alone.”

  “If you say so. It’s just that I’ve never pictured you as anything other than the sheriff of Cabot Cove.”

  “There are a lot of days I feel the same way, like I never had a life until I got here. Maybe I have you to thank for that.”

  “How’s that, Mort?”

  “I’ve been involved in more murder cases in this job than all twenty-five years I spent with the NYPD. I lost count a long time ago. I heard the board of selectmen are entertaining a proposal to rezone your house into a neighboring town, because you’re driving property values down.”

  “Not a bad idea, given that ordinary people can’t afford to live here anymore.”

  We reached his SUV just as thunder rumbled somewhere off in the distance, a cool breeze the first indication of the cold front forecasters said would be coming through, dragging a storm behind it.

  “Let’s get you home before the storm comes, unless there’s somewhere else you’d rather I drop you.”

  “Home’s fine,” I told Mort. “I’ve got some reading to do.”

  * * *

  • • •

  But Mort wasn’t finished yet.

  “Who else knows you have a copy of the manuscript?” he asked once we’d pulled out of the airport, driving straight into the flare of lightning on the horizon.

  “Lane Barfield’s assistant.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, besides you, Harry McGraw.”

  “No one else?”

  “None that I can think of,” I said, racking my brain. “Oh, and Seth Hazlitt, of course.”

  “Is there anything you don’t tell him?”

  “I told him the same stuff I told you.”

  “Except I’m the sheriff.”

  “And he’s my doctor.”

  “Yeah,” Mort groused, “murder is bad for one’s health.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Mort stayed with me at my house until my babysitter for the night, the officer I affectionately called Deputy Andy, arrived in his cruiser and parked it at the end of my driveway to discourage anyone who might be driving by from doing anything more than that. I programmed his number into my cell phone so I could reach him easily.

  Deputy Andy’s arrival seemed to bring the storm along for the ride. It had been building since we’d left the airport and now the lightning and thunder came in full force, accompanied by a howling wind and driving rain that rattled the windows and made the big house feel as if it were lifting off its foundation around me. I’ve never feared or hated storms the way a lot of people do, even the occasional raging Maine blizzard. I loved nothing more than using the storm as an excuse to read, hopefully something intense and scary
to complete the mood.

  The Affair certainly qualified there.

  Mort’s very real concern over my potentially becoming the next victim of this manuscript for murder left me wondering how anyone else could’ve learned I had The Affair in my possession. There had been no phone call or e-mail with an attachment, as had likely been the case with both A. J. Falcone and Alicia Bond. Lane hadn’t been expecting me to show up at his office when I did, and he handed me the manuscript on a whim, an untraceable hard copy instead of an e-mail attachment that left a trail. The only person who knew that was Zara, and I certainly had no reason to suspect she was complicit in any of this.

  I was about to dig back into the manuscript when my phone rang, a number I didn’t recognize with a Manhattan area code lighting up in the caller ID.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Herb Mason, Jessica,” my trusty accountant said in greeting.

  “Oh, Herb, I didn’t recognize this number.”

  “It’s my office, and I don’t think I’ve ever called you from my office. Anyway, I have some news about this royalty issue you raised.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “I’ll leave that to you. I ran a comparison check with the statements of other authors this firm handles. Bottom line: There is no issue.”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Meaning the royalties for the digital editions of your books jibe with the statements issued from other imprints. There’s no anomaly here at all, and I imagine a detailed forensic audit of your publisher’s records would come to the same conclusion.”

  The news sunk in quickly, filling me with a hefty measure of relief. I hated even considering the notion that Lane Barfield might have been engaged in some form of financial malfeasance and now found myself feeling guilty I’d suspected him. I’d been a fool for listening to the drunken claims of Thomas Rudd; then again, if I hadn’t at least listened, I wouldn’t be poised to uncover the truth behind Lane’s death, and Rudd’s, for that matter.

  “Thanks, Herb,” I heard myself saying.