Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “When I’m around you, Jessica, I’ve learned to believe anything.”

  “Well, Mort and Seth won’t believe it.”

  “What about Harry McGraw?”

  “I’m not sure he’d even listen.”

  His eyes cheated toward the tunnel exit, then fastened again on me. “Care to provide some notion of what exactly happened?”

  “Even a notion would take too long to explain, and this isn’t the best place to try. I think I need to have a drink.”

  “I didn’t know you drank at all.”

  “Not yet. I’m rethinking that right now.” I followed his gaze toward the final stretcher being carried out from the aftermath of the gunfight that had followed the police storming the door in our wake. “You never did tell me how you knew where to wait for us, that this was where the tunnel spilled out.”

  Artie grinned. “Simple, Jessica: That’s where you told me it was in that manuscript.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We met two days later at Harry’s favorite place, the Tick Tock Diner, but arrived an hour ahead of him so Artie could fill me in on things he didn’t want Harry to hear.

  “All this is still being sorted out,” he started, “and I’m mostly out of the loop at this point.”

  “Give me the broad strokes,” I told him.

  “Sharon Lerner is cooperating and talking up a storm, giving up the entire network behind all this.”

  “Any names I’d recognize?”

  “I’m sure there are, but it’s the ones nobody recognizes that are the scariest. I wish I could say I was surprised, but this is just politics as usual to the nth degree.” Artie stopped and then started again. “Virtually everything you said has been confirmed, Jessica. Pat yourself on the back for cracking another case.”

  “One the world will never hear about,” I noted.

  “Not the truth, anyway. And I’m fine with that, as you should be, too.”

  “Depends on what happens next.”

  “Hypothetically?”

  I nodded. “Hypothetically.”

  “All the principals behind this are going to disappear. No arraignments, no plea deals, no interrogations, no court appearances, no formal arrests, no mug shots. Nothing that can be linked in any way to what happened a few nights ago and what started years before that.”

  “So what happens to them?”

  “They’ll be transported somewhere warm and tropical, where they’ll likely never be heard from again.”

  “Guantanamo?”

  It was Artie’s turn to nod.

  “Are you confident they’ve all been rounded up?”

  “Not yet. But I will be.”

  “Which raises one final question.”

  “The president and first lady,” Artie said, posing the question for me.

  “Not a question, but that’s the gist.”

  “It’s also above my pay grade,” Artie said.

  “Best guess?”

  “We’re coming up on the next presidential election.”

  “That’s not a guess.”

  “Yes, it is,” Artie said, leaving things there before elaborating further. “You think the country could handle the whole truth, Jessica?”

  “I think the guilty deserve to be punished, and that includes Stephanie and Robert Albright.”

  “‘Justice’ is a relative term, Jessica,” Artie noted.

  “That sounds strange, coming from you.”

  “They did save your life.”

  “I’ve thought about that.”

  “And?”

  “I’m sure they had their reasons.”

  “And those are?”

  “Well, one reason in particular, connected to the one part of this that’s still hanging out there, a part I realized I had wrong all along.”

  He leaned forward in our booth. “You’ve got my attention.”

  “I think I’d like to remain elusive, too.”

  “How about a hint?”

  “This needs to end where it started.”

  He thought only briefly. “The manuscript?”

  “I never did finish it.”

  “But it’s gone, Jessica.”

  “Only the pages, not the story.”

  Befuddlement claimed his features as Harry McGraw slid into the booth next to me, already signaling for his regular server.

  “What’d I miss?” he asked us.

  * * *

  • • •

  Kingdom Books was located in Waterford, Vermont, amid rolling hills layered atop unspoiled land that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was one of my absolute favorite stores this side of Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Book Shop. That store’s “Otto” was actually a couple, Beth and David Kanell, who’d built a store founded on mysteries because they loved them. It wasn’t all that close to Cabot Cove as sharing a New England location might have suggested, but I still made it a point to get down there for an event every time I had a new release, and for the paperback reprint.

  But that’s not why I was there. Today, and for the last three days, I’d come to Kingdom Books because Beth and Dave had recognized someone I’d described to them. I was sipping a tea Dave had made for me, and browsing the noir section of the stacks lined with new and used mysteries, when I glimpsed her entering the store. I caught David’s look and then his nod, moot because I’d already recognized her.

  I waited until she reached the section of the store devoted to thrillers. The Kanells had told me she did that on every visit, a few times a week. Never leaving without buying at least one of the books she’d sampled over coffee in one of the store’s cushy chairs. I approached so my frame was between her and the door.

  “Hello, Zara,” I said to Lane Barfield’s assistant, Zara Larson, “or would you prefer Kristen?”

  * * *

  • • •

  I didn’t know what reaction to expect from Kristen Albright, who’d turned herself into Zara Larson, but it wasn’t a smile.

  “How’d you know you could find me here?”

  “You put Waterford, Vermont, as your hometown on your application to work for Lane.”

  She shook her head. “I must’ve forgotten that. I came here once with my parents when I was a little girl. Never stopped loving it.”

  “With good reason. And since I knew you loved books . . . ,” I told her, glancing about the store to make my point for me.

  The way Zara gazed at me next seemed to put more distance between us. “You’re even better than I heard. It must be nice to live what you write.”

  “You should know, given that you wrote The Affair.”

  I waited for a reaction, continued when none came.

  “See, Zara,” I said, using the name I knew her by, “I must not be as good at this as you think I am. If I were, I would have figured out that all the murders—Lane, Thomas Rudd, A. J. Falcone, Alicia Bond, and nearly me—had little or nothing to do with the contents of the manuscript. It was all about who the author was. You reappearing on the scene, as a bestselling author no less, would have brought down your parents. The people behind them couldn’t let that happen. But even that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You wanted to stick it all in your parents’ faces, exact your revenge.” I paused, studying her reaction. “You sent them a copy of the manuscript, didn’t you? That was your real revenge, even more than publishing it.”

  She might have trembled slightly—that was all—as if comfortable with her actions and resigned to the consequences they’d unleashed.

  “People died,” I continued, “innocent people because of what you did, what you wrote. You’ll have to live with that for the rest of your life.”

  She looked away, maybe toward the door to judge the distance, then turned her gaze back on me. Her hair was longer an
d worn in a different style. She had lost some weight and her complexion had the kind of sallow shading of someone who didn’t spend much time in the sunshine and fresh air.

  “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” Zara Larson, born Kristen Albright, said. “I didn’t know what I was writing was so close to the truth. I made it all up. And I never expected anyone to be able to trace the manuscript to Lane Barfield. I took precautions, used a UPS Store instead of the mail room.”

  “UPS Stores have security cameras, Zara. Did you really think the people behind this wouldn’t pull out every stop they could to find who sent that manuscript to the White House?”

  Zara lapsed back into silence, giving me time to again consider the text message that had come from the late Harlan Babb: She didn’t die of a drug overdose. I had indeed mistaken the intent of his message, thinking he’d meant to imply that the president’s daughter was instead murdered. In fact, the message had been to imply she hadn’t died at all, but had run away. I had ultimately figured that much out, but not the fact that Zara Larson was both Kristen Albright and Benjamin Tally, until later.

  “When did you begin to suspect the truth?” she asked me.

  “I should have after paying a visit to your apartment with an NYPD detective. It had something starkly in common with your father’s desk in the Oval Office: not a single family picture, none at all. And how could there be without exposing your true identity?”

  “What else?”

  “I should have suspected the truth then,” I told her, “especially when the only remaining identifiable prints on the manuscript’s title page belonged to you and Lane Barfield. Since he clearly wasn’t the author, that left only you.”

  “There is that,” Zara acknowledged.

  “You would’ve made a good actress, Zara. Your performance in the office was brilliant.”

  “That’s because it was genuine, Mrs. Fletcher. I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life, and working for Mr. Barfield, living in that world every day, gave me the courage to try. I’ve never enjoyed anything more than writing that book.”

  “It would have been a huge bestseller,” I told her.

  She turned back to the shelves, seeming to study the various titles of Robert Ludlum as she responded, then suddenly swung back toward me, expression so taut I could see the first impressions of age lines on her face. “I knew my parents were involved in something I wanted no part of, with people who were in a position to help them gain the only thing they really cared about,” she said, the bitterness palpable in her voice.

  “Power?”

  “Nice guess.”

  “It’s not a guess. It’s a fact. The subject of pretty much every book in this section. So which is it, Zara? Was running away or writing the book your real revenge?”

  “Running away allowed them to kill me off in pursuit of what they truly wanted.”

  I nodded. “You helped them more than you can possibly realize.”

  “Stupid me.” Zara looked at me in the context of the store and started to move away. I moved with her to the J. B. Fletcher section of Kingdom Books. “I dream of having a shelf like that someday, just like my parents dreamed of something else.” Her gaze and voice grew imploring. “I didn’t mean for all those people to get murdered, Mrs. Fletcher. I had no idea the people behind my parents would go that far.”

  “I don’t think your parents did, either, for what it’s worth.”

  “It’s not worth much.” She shrugged.

  “I can help you with your career, Zara, your dream. Introduce you to the right agent, maybe the right publisher. I believe you’re a victim here to a large extent as well.”

  She regarded me suspiciously. “What’s the catch?”

  “Zara Larson needs to go away. Kristen Albright needs to reappear.”

  Her gaze narrowed, her expression twisting into a mask of befuddlement that deepened those thin lines. “That would destroy my parents.”

  “I know.”

  Her expression lengthened in realization, her eyes showing all of the whites. “Which I’m guessing, then, is the point.”

  “It’s also the best strategy, maybe the only way, for you to stop living a lie . . . Kristen.”

  “It seems I don’t have much of a choice here,” she said, cringing at my use of her real name.

  I just looked at her, watched her expression as a strange realization, something like surprise but not quite, blossomed on her face.

  “You’re writing the ending for this, aren’t you?” Kristen Albright asked me, shaking her head. “You’re writing the ending you want the story to have.”

  “I’m writing the ending it needs.”

  “It’s not a very happy one.”

  “Not all stories call for that.”

  Kristen Albright tightened her gaze upon me. “The book had a different title originally: The President’s Daughter.”

  “Why’d you change it?”

  “Because it stopped being about me. I got lost in the story.”

  “It was always about the president’s daughter, Kristen, no matter what you called it.”

  “You’ll make me famous, Mrs. Fletcher. You’ll make it so the whole world will know who I am and what I’ve done.”

  I let her comment hang in the air for a bit before responding. “As I said, not all stories come with happy endings. But I do have a question for you, Kristen: Since you never actually lived with your parents in the White House, how’d you know the tunnels were real and that the exit was built into General von Steuben’s statue in Lafayette Park?”

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I made it up.”

  “Really?”

  The daughter of the president of the United States nodded.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.”

  About the Authors

  Jessica Fletcher is a bestselling mystery writer who has a knack for stumbling upon real-life mysteries in her various travels. Jon Land, author of over 40 books, coauthors this bestselling series.

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