Assuming the clues I was looking for were actually contained in those chapters. Since I hadn’t finished the book, though, I was still missing the final revelations that would include why the president himself was in danger, too. Why it fell to Pace and Abby to save him instead of kill him there in the Oval Office. I admired the turnabout I’d been in no way expecting, but I was frustrated by the fact that unless the pages the fire department had found charred and sodden could be salvaged, I’d never know all the answers. What it was that marked anyone who read The Affair for death.
Sitting there in the bedroom in my Hill House hotel suite, the flat-screen television tuned to a news station with the sound muted, I had reached an impasse. I didn’t believe in writer’s block, but that’s what this felt like. A big obstacle thrown in my way that prevented me from going any further. All I could do was—
I finally remembered something from earlier in the night, an elusive image that had been lurking at the edge of my memory. In focusing on something else entirely, I’d freed my mind to recall whatever it could about the attack that had nearly cost me my life. It conjured an image, a mark on the back of the hand I’d bitten into straight through the glove. I hadn’t registered the mark based on the brief glimpse I’d gotten when he groped for my collar, had probably dismissed it as a smudge or shadow. But I registered it now, realized it wasn’t a smudge or a shadow at all.
* * *
• • •
“A tattoo?” Mort said the next morning at Mara’s, where he’d joined Seth and me for breakfast.
I nodded. Seth had picked me up at Hill House and driven me straight to his office, where I’d passed a battery of tests. Seth looked almost disappointed, as if he’d hoped to find something wrong with me he could treat.
“I’m buying you breakfast to celebrate.” He beamed nonetheless.
“You buying breakfast is something to celebrate in itself.”
I was so glad to be alive that my home being rendered uninhabitable by the fire wasn’t bothering me nearly as much as I thought it would, especially since it had been deemed structurally sound. If nothing else, that left me even more determined, now that they’d tried to kill me, too. I already had ample motivation in the fate of Lane Barfield, not to mention Thomas Rudd.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t remember it last night,” I said to Mort.
He looked at me through the steam rising off his coffee. “Understandable, Jessica. You’d just barely escaped being burned alive.”
“There was that.”
“What do you remember about this tattoo?”
“The general shape, the fact that it was black, I think.”
“You think?”
“The room was dark. They’d cut the power and the only light was from that emergency plug-in thing in the hallway.”
“But if you saw it again . . . ,” Mort prompted.
“I’d definitely recognize it. Almost definitely, anyway.”
He exchanged a glance with Seth, who was seated next to me, neither of them fancying the prospects.
“Could be nothing, ayuh,” Seth offered.
“But it’s all we have, and these could’ve been the same men who killed Alicia Bond and that park ranger at the very least.”
“How’s that help us?”
“It doesn’t, necessarily; it just makes identifying that tattoo all the more vital. And if I could find it in a book or something . . .”
“Lots of tattoos out there, Jessica,” Seth noted, his expression as dour as Mort’s. “Probably enough to fill a whole shelf of old-fashioned encyclopedias, never mind a single book.”
“I’ll find it,” I insisted.
“How? You lost your computers in the fire.”
Mort saying that stung, given how many years of work, experiences, and correspondence were contained on those hard drives. Everything was backed up to the Cloud, of course, so I’d be able to reconstruct the data once I had a new computer. My actual collection of photographs, the artwork I’d collected over so many years, the only keepsakes I had left of my late husband, Frank—none of those could be reconstructed, except in memory.
I started to choke up again, thinking there was so much I was going to miss, things I saw every single day and had come to take for granted because they were always there. I was so fortunate that our fire chief’s initial assessment and prognosis was that the house itself was structurally sound and could be rebuilt, restored to its original condition almost without exception. Except for those keepsakes. The paint, wallpaper, carpeting, hardwood floors, cathedral ceilings, art deco moldings, could all be restored reasonably close to their original state. But the house would never be the same again, because of what wasn’t hanging on the walls, cluttering the counters, and battling for space on this table or that. I imagined moving back in wouldn’t feel much different from moving into my suite at Hill House, in its general coldness and lack of character, built up over more than a quarter century of living.
“It’ll give me something to do,” I said to Mort and Seth.
“That it will,” Seth agreed.
“Hopefully,” Mort added, “keep you out of harm’s way.”
“How’s Deputy Andy, by the way?”
“Already itching to leave the hospital. Almost as lucky as you.”
“Really? What—did his house burn all the way to the ground last night?”
Mort seemed to disapprove of my tone, but I was sure he understood. “He suffered a severe concussion, but he’ll be fine.”
“Why not just kill him?”
“Because that would’ve removed all semblance of doubt. A woman burns alive, it could still go down as an accident. A cop gets killed in front of her house, it’s double homicide.”
This was a different side of Mort, a professional, polished side typical of a seasoned investigator that I glimpsed only in the midst of the investigations I kept finding myself in the middle of. “When did you become so good at this stuff?”
“Since I learned it all from you.” He chuckled. “By the way, I love your outfit.”
* * *
• • •
Doris Ann, our librarian, hugged me as soon as I stepped through the door of the Cabot Cove Library, wearing a fresh set of gym clothes I’d pulled from Hill House’s lost and found the night before. Next on my list was getting some clothes to tide me over for a few days, before embarking on a more extensive rebuild of my wardrobe. I was a clothes hoarder, seldom throwing anything out, which gave me something else to miss. I was sure there’d be plenty more losses that hadn’t occurred to me yet and was glad everything wasn’t hitting me at once.
“Oh, Jessica, I’m so sorry,” she said, nearly shutting off my air, she squeezed me so tight.
“I promise I’ll never miss another meeting of the Friends of the Library,” I quipped after we finally separated.
“That isn’t funny. This isn’t funny.”
“I’m still here, and very grateful for that much.”
Doris Ann looked as if she was going to hug me again, so I took a step backward, recoiling slightly. “In any event, I think it’s time you considered moving someplace where nobody knows you.”
“Think that would solve all my problems?”
“I’m thinking Norway or Sweden, one of those Scandinavian countries. Because of the low murder rates.”
“Less opportunity for me to get in trouble, in other words.”
“Well, yes, Jessica. Tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
“Murder?”
Her taut glance scoffed at my attempt at levity before her words followed. “What would you do if you lived someplace where nobody got murdered?”
“Write more books, I guess. Speaking of which, I need to use one of the computers to look up tattoos.”
“Please tell me you’re not thinking of getting one.
” Doris Ann flinched, her revulsion real.
“I was thinking of an M,” I said, pointing upward toward my forehead. “Like in The Scarlet Letter, only not an A.”
“Don’t tell me: M for ‘murder.’”
“What else?”
* * *
• • •
I spent hours on the computer, most of the day. So much that I had to get up and walk around the library’s Periodicals Room, where our computers were housed, just to get the blood moving again and work the stiffness out of my joints. I often had to remind myself to do the same when I got on one of my writing binges, when I just couldn’t stop.
But this feeling was nothing like that.
Seth was right about the number of tattoos that were out there. So many passing by me on-screen as I scrolled that the colors bled together in my mind, and the snakes, which seemed overwhelmingly popular choices, seemed to coil out from the machine.
Talk about a waste of time.
But I had to feel like I was doing something, that I was at least trying. Anything to distract myself from all I’d lost in the fire, the number continuing to multiply the more time cushioned the shock.
My favorite pair of slippers . . .
My hairbrush . . .
All my books, my beloved books . . .
Some of these items could be salvaged, rid of water and smoke damage by restoration companies that specialized in such things, but far from all of them, and plenty had burned up or been burned beyond the capacity for restoration. Each passing moment brought a memory of something else I’d lost forever, something else those two masked men had taken from me. And if the murders that had preceded the attempt on my life weren’t motivation enough for me to uncover the secrets held by the manuscript behind it all, now they’d made it personal, turned it into a race. I had to get them before they got me. The base simplicity of that stoked a fire inside me mixed equally of fear and rage, a dangerous and fraught combination.
I’d been involved in any number of real-life investigations, helped solve any number of murders, but never when I knew my own life was at stake, after an attempt had already been made. More than enough motivation to make me begin my search for the tattoo I’d glimpsed on the back of one of the attacker’s hands last night.
And I got nowhere.
Nearly six hours passed with me scrolling through pages and pages of tattoos, site after site on the Internet, to no avail. I couldn’t find even a remotely close match with what my memory conjured of the back of my attacker’s hand from the night before. Had it been just a shadow? Did he even have a tattoo?
My memory had become fogged with the clutter of lost items and cherished possessions that now existed only in my memory. I couldn’t trust it anymore to fashion an accurate rendering of the tattoo.
I trolled the screen for another fruitless ninety minutes, trying other keywords in my searches, and then scrolling through old mythic shapes and drawings in search of something from ancient culture that might yield some clue. Given the potential, if not likely, military background for my attacker, I then turned my attention to both tattoos and comparable shapes either drawn from something connected to war or popular among soldiers.
I was striking out there, too, when I realized Lane Barfield’s assistant, Zara, had by now likely heard about both Alicia Bond’s murder and the fire that had nearly claimed my life. She must be going crazy, worried sick, perhaps fearing for her own life. I needed to tell her I was fine. I needed to warn her that those fears she might have been harboring were well-founded.
I pulled my cell phone from my bag and hit Lane’s office number. It rang six times, went to voice mail.
“Hi. You’ve reached the office of publisher Lane Barfield,” Zara’s voice recited. “At the tone, please leave a—”
I hung up and found her cell phone number among my outgoing calls, tried that one.
“Hi. It’s Zara. At the tone, you know what to do.”
I did indeed.
“Zara, it’s Jessica, Jessica Fletcher. I just wanted you to know I’m okay. We haven’t spoken, so I— Just return this call, please, as soon as you can. I want to make sure you’re okay, too.”
I hung up and waited the obligatory moments for her to call back, on the chance she hadn’t gotten to the phone fast enough or she needed to get someplace where she could talk. The phone didn’t ring. Zara didn’t call back.
I tried to return my attention to the screen, but a dread fear had filled me. Zara should’ve been in the office, should’ve answered her cell phone when she saw my number.
Something fluttered in my stomach before I felt it tighten. All of me tightened.
I called Harry McGraw.
“Heard you took up smoking,” he greeted me.
“Mort or Seth?”
“Spoke to both of them. Didn’t want to bother you, because then I’d have to add the call to my billable hours.”
“I’ve got something else you can bill me for.”
“Hope it’s more challenging than finding who really authored a book, based on no more than a title page.”
“How fast can you get to Lane Barfield’s office, Harry?”
“Depends why I’m going there.”
“I need you to check on his assistant. Her name is Zara. I’m afraid she might be in danger.”
“Zara?”
“That’s her name.”
“Whatever you say, Jess.”
“Just make sure she’s safe and call me as soon as you’ve got something.”
I heard him let out a heavy sigh. “You know, I do have other clients.”
“Really?”
“No. I’ll get right over there. And, Jess?”
“Yes?”
“Why am I your favorite detective?”
“Because you never let me down.”
“Exactly. And I’m actually making some progress on Benjamin Tally.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You’re kidding.”
“I have my moments, most of them senior, but occasionally I stumble into something. They say if you leave a chimpanzee behind a keyboard long enough, he’ll type all of Shakespeare’s plays. Call me the ape of the private eye world.”
“Just call me as soon as you get to Lane Barfield’s office.”
I hung up and tried to go back to my search for the tattoo I’d glimpsed the night before, but I couldn’t pay attention to the screen anymore. I’d say that I’d just wasted a whole lot of time, but I didn’t have anything else to do, and at least the effort had made for a decent distraction from my woes.
I made sure I had everything stuffed into my bag and then walked back toward the main desk, where librarian Doris Ann was checking out some books for a trio of children, something she enjoyed more than anything else. I stopped to bid her farewell.
“Any luck?” she posed.
“Nope.”
“Oh well . . . Anyway, Jessica,” she said, pushing some stray stringy hair back behind her ear, “if there’s anything I can do to help you, anything at all . . .”
Her voice tailed off, no reason to say anything more. I looked up to thank her and noticed on the side of her face a dark squiggly mark that seemed to rise out of the temple. I almost lost my breath.
“Doris,” I managed, “is that a tattoo?”
Because it was identical to the mark on the back of my attacker’s hand.
Chapter Seventeen
“That?” said Doris Ann, surprised and maybe even a bit embarrassed that I’d noticed. “That’s just an old scar.”
“But it looks—,” I started, leaving it there.
“I know.” Doris Ann nodded. “Thanks to a condition called post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation.”
“Huh?”
“Scarring turns the skin rough, due to an increase in collagen bubbles coupled with
the lack of hair follicles and sweat glands,” she recited, as if I wasn’t the first person to notice what looked like a dark, jagged scab permanently marring her skin. “That creates discoloration within the skin itself, especially as we age, with the damaged tissue taking on a darker shade, even black. Normally, I cover it up with makeup, but I was too lazy this morning.”
“I need to call Mort,” I said, groping about in my bag for my phone. “And Seth.”
* * *
• • •
Because Doris Ann couldn’t leave the library unattended, Seth and Mort said they’d come over straightaway. Seth normally booked appointments only through three o’clock, leaving the rest of the day for emergencies. Since today had produced none, he was available. Since this was an active investigation, Mort was under no such restrictions.
They arrived together.
“What’s so important you dragged me away from my golf game?” Seth asked me, striding in just ahead of Mort.
“You don’t play golf.”
“But I’m thinking of taking it up.”
“Not at the new fees the country club has posted, you’re not.”
“What is it you want us to see?” Mort wondered.
“Show them,” I told Doris Ann.
* * *
• • •
“That’s almost identical to what I saw on the back of the man’s hand last night,” I explained, as Doris Ann tilted her face to the side and held her hair back to expose the scar, or whatever she had called it.
Seth was giving it a much closer inspection than Mort. “Post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation,” he pronounced, quite professionally. “It’s caused by an excess of melanin in the damaged tissue. That’s what causes the discoloration. Most scars inflamed like this are spotted, freckled, even raised slightly. Very few achieve this dark a shade.”
“Well, I saw another one last night.”
“You’re sure?” Mort said, turning toward me.
Manuscript for Murder Page 14
