Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “It’s me who should be thanking you, Jessica, for the crash course I needed to get on digital publishing. Your world has really changed, hasn’t it?”

  “Hasn’t everything, Herb?”

  I hung up, my thoughts veering back to how anyone could possibly have known I had a copy of The Affair in my possession. I couldn’t chase from my mind the presence of the bald man on the train and couldn’t say why, either. I should’ve forgotten all about him when there’d been no sign of him on the train to Portland or in Boston’s South Station, before I made the transfer. But he clung to my memory, something about the way he looked at me and then switched his seat to move closer.

  I felt like Pace and Abby in The Affair, my enemies lurking behind every darkened corner.

  “How?” Abby asked me. “He’s the president. It’s the White House. It’s impossible.”

  “You forget I’ve been trained to kill.”

  “You’ll have to get close enough first.”

  “And for that I’ll need your help. You are still his daughter.”

  “He wants me dead.”

  “I repeat, you are still his daughter. He still loves you.”

  She looked at me like she found that funny. Then her expression turned to anger, frustration, or, more likely, both. “You don’t understand,” Abby said, her tone reeking of condescension. “You can’t understand.”

  “You’re right. I don’t understand, I can’t understand, because I wasn’t raised by a mother and a father.”

  Abby nodded. “You really think you can do it? You really think you can kill the president of the United States?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  I’d picked up right where I’d left off, and the pace of the manuscript refused to let up. No lulls, no slow spots, the motion constant. For Abby to live, her father, the president of the United States, needed to die. So Benjamin Tally had turned us into her accomplices, rooting for Pace to succeed and ready to cheer once he did. I seldom had to face such moral dilemmas in my own books, but life was full of them, if not defined by them. The mark of great popular fiction is that it adds just that kind of subtext.

  But I wasn’t reading The Affair for subtext. I was reading it because I was starting to think that somewhere inside this manuscript, mired within the content, was the reason why Thomas Rudd, A. J. Falcone, Alicia Bond, and perhaps even Lane Barfield had been murdered. I stopped for a moment, to collect my thoughts, sort through the more technical aspects outside of Pace and Abby’s taut exchanges that might hold the clue to what I was looking for. Say Benjamin Tally was a Washington insider and this book was a roman à clef, a novel about real life overlaid with a facade of fiction.

  Maybe I’d find the secret it was hiding in the next section of the manuscript, I thought, reaching that penultimate moment when Abby and Pace are about to infiltrate the White House.

  “You mean the tunnels beneath the White House are real?”

  Abby nodded. “The Secret Service took us on a tour the day we moved in. The tour came with a history lesson but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to that part. I remember something about the British burning the original White House in 1814 and the tunnels being built under the one I used to live in to make sure the president could escape in the event of an attack.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “Anyway, the tour included showing us where one of the tunnels spills out. I’m pretty sure I could find the spot that’s located somewhere in Lafayette Park.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “It’s obviously camouflaged so it could never be used to sneak in. And it’s not like it’s a regular door with a knob and a lock. Even if I can find the exit, I’m not sure we’ll be able to open it.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “And you’ll kill my father?”

  I nodded. “If it’s the only way to save you.”

  Abby’s stare turned distant. “If I tried to just go back home, I’d disappear, like the ones who didn’t make it where you grew up.”

  “It was an old farm. And they actually called it the Farm.”

  “Ironic, given they were raising a different kind of crop.”

  “Maybe that was the point.”

  “How’d you fool them?” she asked me.

  “By always doing what I was supposed to. Playing the game.”

  “I tried that, too. It worked until I overheard the truth about what my parents had done.”

  “We all have our breaking points,” I told her.

  I had to keep reminding myself I was reading for more than pleasure. But if there were any clues as to what had led to four people being killed, five including the park ranger, I was clearly missing them. Could it have something to do with how Abby and Pace ended up infiltrating the White House? I hadn’t gotten to that yet and there was still a big chunk of the manuscript left to read, so the clues could be anywhere.

  I read quickly for a stretch, getting to the part when they were inside the secret escape tunnel beneath the White House, steering toward it instead of away.

  Abby recalled the spot in Lafayette Park where the emergency tunnel beneath the White House spilled out as soon as we got there. Turned out a secret doorway had been included in the construction of the monument to Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. It took me a few minutes, especially since I didn’t want to draw attention to us by shining a flashlight for too long in the darkness. The door wasn’t meant to open from the outside, but I managed to create enough of a gap along the granite frame to free the latch and push it inward.

  It took every bit of strength I had to make it budge and almost as much to seal it again behind us once we were inside the tunnels I had thought were a myth. The winding, circuitous route beneath the White House smelled like a place nobody ever used, because nobody ever did. I tried to keep Abby directly behind me, shielded by my frame, so in the event there were security cameras they would pick up only me. If we were found out and they came for us, the plan was for her to run. Even if my road ended here, I could still buy her the time she needed to escape again.

  But my road wasn’t going to end here. As we wound our way through the serpentine swirl of the tunnel beneath the most secure building on the planet, I started to realize there must really be some kind of cosmic plan out there. This day, this moment, was what I’d been raised for. To save myself by saving someone else. To find value in what the Guardians had turned me into.

  I never wondered who my real parents were. What was the point? I was never going to see them again. Even when I managed to get out, I harbored no aspirations of tracking them down and trying to resume a life I’d never really had. My parents had surely moved on.

  And now I had, too.

  For the first time since starting the manuscript, I skimmed ahead, unable to wait any longer to get to the part where Abby confronts her father, the president. I didn’t believe Pace was going to kill him, which heightened the level of suspense even more.

  Finally I reached the section I’d been racing to find, sat up straighter on the couch, and tightened the pages on my lap into a neat pile before reading on. I didn’t care how they’d gotten into the Oval Office, where they found the president, Abby’s father, hunched behind the historic desk nursing a bottle of bourbon. I cared only about what happened once they got there, the confrontation I’d been long awaiting finally here.

  I watched the president rise and face Abby, his daughter who wasn’t really his daughter, and lock stares from across the Oval Office. The two of them standing like statues, each waiting for the other to move. I stayed where I was; I owed it to Abby to leave what came next to her and then back her up any way I could.

  “I want to know who my real parents are,” she said in a soft, flat tone.

  Her father swallowed hard, making me think of the fact that I had no parents, fake or otherwise, to go
back to. The Guardians were my parents and I wasn’t going back to them. In fact, in my mind coming here tonight was about destroying them. How many boys had they killed during my tenure? Was I spared the same fate only because they believed I was a success story, top of my class?

  “Make me understand why you did this,” Abby said, her voice turning harsh. “Make me understand why you sent those men to kill me, your own daughter. But I’m not really your daughter, am I?”

  “These people who tried to kill you, they’re the ones calling the shots. They always were from the beginning.” He stopped, then started again immediately. “Get out while you still can. Run away and keep running.”

  His eyes fell on me. He looked as if he had something to say but spoke no words in my direction, before Abby chimed in.

  “And I’m supposed to believe you? After all this, I’m supposed to take you at your word?” She shook her head. “Sorry, Dad, that ship has sailed. You’re the goddamn president, commander in chief. Call the army, the navy, the air force, the marines. Declare war on these SOBs.”

  The president stepped close enough to reach out and touch Abby, but he stopped short of doing so. “Who do you think runs the military? The FBI, the Secret Service?” He shook his head, a beaten man. “I can’t stop them now. No one can stop them now.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I said.

  I’d reached that point where my conscious mind had surrendered, no sense I was even flipping pages anymore. The real world no longer existed. There was only Pace, Abby, the Guardians, the president, and what sounded like a plot to take over the government, the country. I couldn’t wait to reach over and grab a fresh stack of pages from the top of what remained of the manuscript.

  And that’s when the lights died.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A single plug-in emergency light snapped on in the hallway that divided the kitchen from the living room, a second one snapping on in the upstairs foyer, neither making much of a dent in the darkness that had descended upon me. Suddenly, the unrestrained fury of the pounding storm revealed itself beyond the windows curtained by rain under the deluge.

  I could see well enough to make my way toward the front window of my house and peered out toward the Cabot Cove squad car parked at the end of the driveway. A flash of lightning revealed a shape behind the wheel, Deputy Andy standing vigil, but I couldn’t tell if he was awake or conscious. I hit his number on my cell phone, but it rang unanswered, making me fear the worst. If the loss of power had been caused by men dispatched by whoever was behind the deaths of A. J. Falcone and Alicia Bond, maybe Lane Barfield and Thomas Rudd, too, then I might be walking straight into their arms if I rushed outside to Deputy Andy. Maybe that was what they wanted me to do.

  Then I heard the patter of footsteps in the kitchen and realized that wasn’t their plan at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  I discerned two distinct sets and had the presence of mind to tuck the final third of the manuscript, which I’d yet to read, beneath the couch, leaving the rest of the pages scattered on the cushion. Hopefully, my intruders would see those pages and gather them up without ever thinking there were more. Maybe that was all they’d come for, and they’d spare me once they had the pages in their possession.

  Fat chance, given I was a risk for the same reason their other victims had been: I had read the manuscript, had the clues that might explain whatever plot The Affair threatened to reveal. Whoever Benjamin Tally was, he had somehow included something all too real in this commercial, surefire bestseller. Perhaps he’d done that inadvertently; perhaps he hadn’t. It didn’t matter right now and I fully suspected that Harry McGraw’s search for the real Benjamin Tally was futile, since Tally was likely dead now, too.

  Once the remainder of the manuscript was safe, I padded quickly toward the stairs in my stocking feet, the shadows of movement just curling past the wall the intruders would have to pass on their way from the kitchen. They’d clearly gained entry through the back door and I didn’t need to rush outside into the storm to know they must have dealt with Deputy Andy beforehand, which explained why he hadn’t answered his phone.

  I didn’t have a gun, didn’t have any weapons upstairs any more than I did downstairs. I took the cell phone from my pocket and dialed 911, then returned the phone to the pocket of my sweater to muffle any voice that answered my call.

  I made it upstairs, having already rejected any possible flight through a second-floor window. There was no tree branch I could conveniently grab hold of, and any drop from that height would surely leave me incapacitated, or potentially even do my intruders’ job for them.

  I figured I had fifteen, twenty seconds at most to do something, anything. I entered my bedroom but didn’t close the door, so the room would look exactly like the others up here. Sooner or later, at least one of them would poke his head in ahead of coming through. If I could incapacitate him, that would leave me with only one to deal with, doubling my odds of survival.

  What’s two times zero again?

  I could hear shoes grazing the oriental runner that wound up the stairs, grabbed the first potential weapon I spotted—my favorite leather belt with the heavy brass buckle. I stationed myself just to the right of the open doorway, satisfied nothing that might betray my presence was visible from the hallway or upstairs foyer.

  The single emergency light up here cast just enough light to splay an approaching shadow across the jamb, so I squeezed the doubled-over belt tighter, with the heavy buckle hanging low beneath my waist. When the shadow took on the elongated shape of a man, I lashed out with the buckle, spinning toward my target to push more force into the strike.

  The buckle impacted against the man’s temple through the ski mask he was wearing. It stunned him, sent him reeling, making him vulnerable enough for me to pounce, if a second, nearly identical figure hadn’t been directly behind him. I tried to bring the buckle up and around again, but the second figure snatched the leather of the belt out of midair and launched himself onto me.

  I felt myself being twisted around, weightless against the force of his brute strength. His gloved hand closed over my mouth and nose. I smelled rank perspiration and unwashed clothes before he succeeded in closing off my air. I fought back with everything I had, pinwheeling with him across the room.

  “Get her down! Get her down!” I heard the attacker I’d struck with the belt buckle cry out.

  Before the one holding me could do that, though, I managed to shove his gloved hand into my mouth and bit down with all the force I could muster. My teeth sank through leathery fabric damp with sweat, and I heard him gasp in pain when they finally found flesh. He jerked away, leaving me free for a moment with the glove caught between my teeth. But he came after me again before I could even spit it out, his bare hand going for my collar.

  Again I fought back, but I still hadn’t caught all of my breath. I felt powerless under the force of his strength and momentum, shoved backward and down until I was doubled over atop my bedcovers in the last moment before the second man covered my face with a pillow.

  * * *

  • • •

  I regained consciousness and realized I couldn’t move. My first thought was that I’d been drugged, but as my senses cleared I realized I’d been tied to the chair in my bedroom.

  Just as Thomas Rudd had been in the kitchen of his Tribeca apartment before his killers rigged the gas explosion that had killed him.

  I struggled to free my arms and legs, thinking again of Rudd, but that seemed only to tighten my bonds. Whoever these men were, they clearly knew their way around knots.

  Then I smelled the smoke. I caught it wafting in beneath my bedroom door and thought I could feel the heat building beneath my stocking feet on the floor.

  They’d left me alive so I could perish in the fire they’d set, another strange death that would never be adequately explained. I t
hought of poor Alicia Bond and figured shooting her had never been the plan, until the park ranger showing up unexpectedly altered her killers’ original intention. I wondered what they’d really had in store for her, in keeping with a gas explosion, a suicide, being trampled to death, and now a house fire. All deaths that would eventually be shrugged off for lack of evidence, especially since the one thing that bound the victims together was a manuscript that for all intents and purposes no longer existed. The only copy left of The Affair would soon burn away to nothing, the secrets it held gone forever to form a collective epitaph for the victims those secrets had claimed.

  I screamed and screamed for help, stopping only when the smoke started to pool and thicken. I tried to scream again and ended up with a lungful of coarse smoke that left me coughing and retching. I didn’t know if it was my imagination that conjured the heat of the flames building downstairs, but I was sure I felt it nonetheless. Just as there was no mistaking the rising amber glow in the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door as the fire gained strength, soon to consume this floor.

  The smoke was going to kill me before the fire got its chance, my breath starting to clog in my throat as I somehow formed the thought that Jessica Fletcher, mystery writer and amateur sleuth, had been done in by a mystery she couldn’t solve. That didn’t seem fair.

  Consciousness came and went in fits and starts, whatever strength I’d originally mustered to thrash against my bonds sapped. Every breath I chanced poured blistering heat down my throat and left me coughing anew. My last thought before I passed out, strangely, was that I wasn’t coughing anymore, because I couldn’t breathe at all. I felt myself thrashing again, more death throes than desperation, and realized my eyes were burning horribly even though they were closed.

  I tried to scream one last time, to no avail, as I felt myself lifted upward, rising straight toward the ceiling. All that was missing was the proverbial bright light.