All She Wrote

by Josh Lanyon

“Like what?”

  “To start with, my fall down the garden stairs. I can’t swear to it, but I’ve been up and down those stairs a million times in winter, spring, summer and fall.”

  “No pun intended? Listen,” I said, “because you never slipped before doesn’t mean you couldn’t slip this time.”

  “There was ice on the step. Solid ice. Not snow, not frost, not the usual thin glaze of ice. Thick ice as though someone had poured water on the stones and let them freeze over.”

  “That’s it? That’s pretty thin, Anna. It’s not impossible that there could be some…some ice anomaly.” Mr. Wizard I am not.

  “There have been other things. Nothing conclusive. Nothing in itself conclusive, but when you put it all together…”

  She put it all together. The case of violent food poisoning that affected her but no one else in the house, the stone urn that fell off a balcony and narrowly missed crushing her, the brakes failing in her car. I heard her out in silence. Well, for me it was silence. Close to silence. I hardly interrupted at all. For me.

  “Christopher, would you kindly shut up?” Anna requested at last. “This is my story. I’m trying to tell it my own way. I do know about maintaining proper levels of brake fluid. I have an excellent mechanic.”

  “The thing I don’t understand is what you imagine I could do about it if someone is trying to harm you? If this is true, you need to go to the police.”

  “That is what I absolutely cannot do.”

  “Why?”

  “What if I’m wrong?”

  “That would be a relief, right? Personally, I wouldn’t mind looking a little paranoid in order to be wrong about people trying to kill me.”

  “I’d be ruined. There would be no way to keep something like that quiet. This is a small town and I’m a big name.”

  Modesty was never Anna’s weak point.

  “Surely five minutes of embarrassment is worth—”

  “It would either look like a publicity stunt or it would look like I’m losing it. Either would be intolerable.”

  Not as intolerable as being dead, in my opinion, but I’m very fond of me. I would miss me a lot.

  Anna said, “Keep in mind that the pool of suspects is small. I would be accusing a friend or a student or one of my long-time trusted employees of wishing to do me ill.”

  “Seriously ill. Which is still better than terminally ill. I mean, you do suspect one of them of wanting you dead, right? Who is it you suspect? Everyone? Or no one? Or all of the above?”

  She looked pained. “I’ve told you I’m not sure about any of this.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get that. It’s not nice to blame the friends and family of wanting to do away with you, but you must have some inkling. Some gut feeling about who it might be—assuming it’s anyone.”

  “But that’s it. I don’t. And that’s why I want your help. You’re very observant, Christopher.”

  “I never noticed.”

  “For being almost totally self-absorbed, yes. You’re also surprisingly perceptive about people so long as they’re not connected to you. As glib as the Miss Butterworth novels are, you’re very good at ascribing believable motives to your characters. Especially the killers.”

  “That’s fiction.”

  “The best fiction captures the truth of real life.”

  Was there an echo in here? I remembered that mantra from way back when. Way back when I used to cut the majority of my non-writing classes or spend them scribbling stories in the back row with the stoners and sleepers.

  “So you’re thinking that I can snoop around and figure out if one of your merry band is planning to knock you off? I knew you didn’t drag me out here for my teaching skills because I don’t have any.”

  “You don’t mind, do you?” She gave me the closest thing I’d ever seen to a beseeching look. I didn’t trust it for a minute. One thing Anna was not was the beseeching brand of damsel.

  “Do you want me to be honest or polite?”

  “I want you to help me.”

  “You must truly be desperate.”

  “I am.”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “it’s your life. I’ll do what I can.”

  She looked relieved. That made one of us.

  My room might have been the same room I’d had the last time I visited, a decade or so ago. My memories were vague. These days I was no longer impressed by genuine antiques or opulent furnishings or prints that didn’t come from Art.com—which is to say that I didn’t take my shoes off before walking on the handwoven blue and green Persian rugs, and I avoided sitting on the gold-threaded emerald brocade bedcover merely because I wasn’t that tired, not because I was intimidated by a few bed linens.

  The bed itself looked like it had been modified from a sacrificial altar on some obscure Grecian isle. There were four dark wood Corinthian columns, leather panel inserts with brass studs on the head and footboards, and a canopy frame of wrought-iron ivy and grapes. Green velvet draperies dusted the glass-slick floor.

  There was companion furniture, of course, but it seemed to exist merely to keep the bed from brooding over its change of fortune. Stephen King could have written a book about that bed. If I hadn’t been crazy before, I surely would be after a couple of nights beneath those curling grapevines. It was moot, since I obviously was crazy. How else to explain agreeing to go along with this loony plan of Anna’s?

  I shivered thinking about it and started looking for a warm change of clothing. I’d forgotten how cold it got in states that had actual winters. Invisible hands had unpacked my suitcase and stowed my things where I’d be least likely to find them. I finally located a change of clothes in the Louis XV black lacquered commode. I pulled out a clean pair of Levis—relaxed fit because even if forty is the new thirty, this time around I’d rather be comfortable—and a tan Ralph Lauren lambswool pullover with a shawl collar. The sweater was not the kind of thing I would have ordinarily bought for myself, but part of my career rebirth was a new look. That apparently meant fancy haircuts, grooming products you needed a science degree to figure out how to use, and a lot of overpriced clothes someone else had picked for me.

  It still gave me a start of surprise every time I caught sight of myself in a mirror or a window. Apparently clothes did maketh the man, and my clothes makethed me look less like a curmudgeonly recluse and more like a hip writer guy. The kind of guy I’d have loved to be when I was twenty—or even thirty. The kind of guy J.X. belonged with. The only problem being that I wasn’t that guy. Inside I was still a forty-year-old schlub writing cozy mysteries starring a spinster sleuth nobody wanted to read about, dumped by both my publisher and lover in the same year.

  Make that two lovers. Because J.X. was past tense now too, and encouraging that was about the first thoughtful thing I’d done for anyone in a long time. Maybe his feelings were a little hurt, but J.X. deserved more than I could give him. He deserved better. Which he’d have been bound to figure out on his own before long.

  I nodded in approval to the brown-eyed man with the expensive blond highlights in the oval mirror over the dresser. He nodded back. Hey, come to think of it, he’d lost some weight over the past months. Terror, no doubt, that he was going to have to get naked with a gorgeous young stud one weekend.

  Heading downstairs, I ran into the snow princess. Sara was carrying one of those white DHL parcels publishers usually send galleys in. She bore it before her like she was delivering a glass slipper on a silken pillow to Cinderella.

  Good to know Anna was writing again. It had been a while since her last book as I recalled.

  “Hi,” I said. “I wanted to walk down to the garden and take a look around the guest cottage before tomorrow’s session.”

  Sara gave me a wintry smile. “There’s really nothing to see. I’ll handle all the details for you. All you have to do is conduct tomorrow’s seminar.” She didn’t add and for God’s sake don’t break anything, but I could read the subtext loud and clear.

  “Tha
t’s nice of you, but I’ll be more comfortable if I can size up the room first.” That sounded appropriately neurotic. Sara preserved an exquisitely blank expression.

  “If you insist. The guest cottage isn’t locked. You can look around to your heart’s content. But if you’re walking down to the garden, there are snow boots in the downstairs closet beneath the stairs. I’d suggest you borrow a pair. I’d be very careful on those steps going down to the garden.”

  It wasn’t gracious, but it was what I needed to know. I thanked her, continued downstairs where I grabbed the snow boots as directed, pulled them on and stepped outside.

  We don’t get a lot of snow in Southern California. Not where I live. We have swimming pools and palm trees and skateboarders. I walked out of Anna’s mansion into a winter wonderland.

  It took my breath away—and not merely because it was so cold the oxygen seemed to freeze in my lungs.

  Everything, every flat surface, was covered in lovely, sparkling snow. Those surfaces too slanted or irregular were glazed in ice, glittering in the petrified sunlight like a jeweled crust, tiny flashing prisms of red and blue catching light like frozen fire. Ice garlands seemed to twine through the trees and I guessed that there were strands of lights beneath the frost. The tree limbs were spindly and attenuated where the ice had started to melt and then refrozen. It added to the otherworldly appearance.

  I crossed the snowy courtyard, crunched over the lawns and went down the crooked flagstone steps to the bottom garden. It was like traveling through a snow globe. Dryer, I suppose. And easier to breathe, although it did occur to me I really did need to start working out more regularly.

  The cottage looked like a scaled-down version of the house. Same quaint gothic door and multi-paned windows, same exact everything, only in miniature.

  As Sara promised, the cottage was unlocked. I opened the door and went inside. The heat was not on though the electricity worked. Again, it was a diminutive version of the main house. No marble staircase, but gleaming parquet floors, chestnut wood paneling and a limestone fireplace. French doors opened onto a snow-blanketed patio. A carved stairway led upstairs.

  Everything was spic-and-span. There was nothing out of the ordinary, but I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. My reason for coming down here was mostly to have an excuse for going up and down the garden stairs. And my reason for that was I had to start my investigation, to use the term loosely, somewhere. The scene of the crime seemed the obvious choice.

  A large, rustic-looking round table sat in the alcove with its diamond-paned windows. I had a sudden rush of memory of the first time I’d taken part in the Asquith Circle.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Not so long ago that I couldn’t remember the feeling of having been handed the keys to the kingdom—and the conviction that it had to be a mistake. I’d expected everyone else to be much more learned, confident and advanced in their career. The reality had been different. Yes, everyone taking part in the seminar that year had been further along in their career, but they had seemed nearly as confused about our industry as me—and certainly no more confident. The first and foremost lesson I had taken away from that year’s seminar was that writing was an insecure business. That underlying sense of precariousness had driven me ever since—at some cost to my personal life.

  I poked around, opened the fridge which was stocked with snacks for the following day—nobly refraining from snitching a brownie—and went upstairs to check out the two rooms there: a bedroom and an office space. The office window offered a view of the flagstone steps leading up to the house and its surrounding grounds. The bedroom was an ordinary, impersonal guest bedroom—with a wrinkled bedspread on the queen-sized bed.

  Maybe the gardening staff liked to take a nap in the afternoon. There couldn’t be a lot to do in the winter, could there?

  I returned downstairs and stepped outside—and nearly jumped out of my skin.

  An elderly man stood on the flagstone step.

  “Did I startle you? I’m sorry.” He offered a leather-gloved hand and a quizzical smile.

  “No, no. Not at all,” I assured him, as though my normal means of locomotion was to bound like a startled deer through every doorway. “Hi.” We shook hands.

  He was tall and willowy, with wavy hair as smooth and white as the snow, and handsome, even youthful, patrician features. He looked like someone famous, but I couldn’t quite place him.

  As though he read my thoughts, he said, “You don’t remember me, do you? I’m Rudolph Dunst. It’s nice to see you again, Christopher.”

  “I knew I recognized you. I’m still jetlagged. It’s good to see you again, Mr. Dunst.”

  “It’s been a few years back,” Dunst said easily. “And please. Call me Rudolph.”

  Rudolph Dunst was Anna’s longtime editor. She’d introduced me to him back when he was a Senior Editor at Theodore Mansfield and I was first starting out. Dunst had the incredible bad taste to pass on the first Miss Butterwith. Granted, he’d done it with great kindness and diplomacy. He was one of those old-school gentlemen editors that the new breed use as dipping sauce for their lunchtime sushi. In any case, Miss B. had the last laugh by going on to become an award-winning national bestseller.

  Now, ironically, both Dunst and I were fighting to stay afloat in the new publishing environment. Environment being a polite word for acid bath.

  Rudolph smiled, displaying impressive dental work. “So you’re going to run the AC for Anna, I understand?”

  “The AC?”

  I was thinking he meant air conditioner, which Mother Nature seemed to have well in hand, but he explained, “The Asquith Circle. Anna’s writing seminar has produced some marvelous talent over the years. Yourself included.”

  It would have been silly to quibble with that. Anna had certainly been instrumental in helping me get published, but I’d sold my first book my final semester of college. Anna had invited me to take part in the Asquith Circle two summers later, so the AC had zero to do with my success. It would have been ungracious, though, to make that point.

  Instead, I said, “Are you scouting for new talent?”

  Rudolph raised his brows. “Are you working on something new?”

  “Me? No.” I was nonplussed at the idea. Give up Miss Butterwith? For what? Another kickass, foul-mouth, bad-mannered female cop/secret agent/bounty hunter? Another kickass, foul-mouth, bad-mannered vampire/demon/witch slayer? Another kickass, foul-mouth, bad-mannered chef? Hmmm…maybe that last wasn’t a totally terrible idea. The research might be fun…

  “Still enjoying the Miss Butterwith books?” Rudolph seemed gently amused. Why, I couldn’t for the life of me imagine.

  “Yes,” I said staunchly. “I am. Very much so. Totally.”

  “Ah.”

  “Were you going inside?” I started to move from the doorway to allow him entrance, but he stepped back.

  “No, no,” Rudolph said. “I noticed the light was on in the cottage and…”

  He looked faintly self-conscious. I wondered if Anna had confided her fears to him. She had said not, but I’ve found that people tend to talk a lot more than they think they do.

  “I was trying to get comfortable with the setup before tomorrow.”

  He patted me on the shoulder as we started back across the snowy garden, trudging past the black iron bones of obelisks and trellises.

  “You’ll do fine, Christopher. Besides, I’d be very surprised if Anna didn’t drag herself down here at some point during the weekend.”

  With that cast on her leg? Down those stairs? In the dead of winter? If that were the case, why wouldn’t Anna run the damned seminar herself? But Rudolph probably knew her better than I did. For years the persistent rumor had been Anna and Rudolph were involved in a decades-old on-and-off romance. The only time I ever saw them together was at conferences, and they seemed to be behaving themselves as much as anyone does at those things. Which is to say that they weren’t actually jumping ea
ch other during panels.

  But I didn’t want to think about J.X. now. I was finding it surprisingly painful to contemplate the fact that I might never see him again outside a professional context. And why the hell that phrase should instantly remind me of how beautiful he was stark naked, I do not know. Except that I thought of J.X. naked a lot. But I’m sure he’d look equally nice in professional context. It would go nicely with that honey brown skin of his.

  “Is something wrong?” Rudolph asked, glancing at me.

  “Wrong? No.”

  “You were scowling so ferociously, I wondered.”

  “No, no. I was hoping we wouldn’t be late for dinner.”

  “We’re in plenty of time,” he reassured. “Anna does have a wonderful chef.”

  He was telling me all about the potatoes au gratin they’d had for lunch the day before as we started up the stairs. I listened with half an ear, while I wondered if Anna had been going up or coming down when she fell. I assumed coming down, but I should probably verify. Did it make a difference? Hard to know. Miss Butterwith would certainly think so.

  How many other people used these steps on a regular basis?

  Did Anna even use them on a regular basis? I couldn’t imagine she had a lot of cause to be tromping around her snow-covered bottom garden at this time of year. In a mansion the size of hers it was hard to believe she couldn’t find a quiet corner to write, so what had she been doing down here?

  Meeting someone away from the house?

  I made a mental note to remind myself to find out.

  The steps were slippery, but there was a low, rustic wooden railing, and I hung on to that. Anna, of course, being familiar with the staircase, might forgo clinging cravenly to the support.

  “Were you here when Anna had her accident?” I asked Rudolph who was a couple of steps ahead of me.

  He was moving briskly, but I noticed he watched where he put his feet. I didn’t see ice—a dusting of snow, as though the steps had been cleared earlier in the day, but no ice. Weather was a changeable thing. Because there wasn’t ice today, didn’t mean there hadn’t been ice the day Anna fell.