All She Wrote

by Josh Lanyon

  “Yes,” Rudolph answered. “I’d arrived the night before and was sleeping late. I heard her scream.” He spared me a grim look. “From the sound, I thought she’d been killed.”

  “It’s surprising she wasn’t. This would be one hell of a fall. How far up was she?”

  “About halfway up.”

  We were about halfway up ourselves.

  I paused—it had nothing to do with being short of breath—and looked down.

  The snowy bottom of the garden seemed a long way away. Foreshortened, dark evergreens, a tiny, snowy sundial, courtly statues blanketed in white. The snow-globe effect again.

  “Seriously? Halfway up?”

  Rudolph read my tone correctly. “Anna might be exaggerating. Or confused. She’s always been a tad high-strung. However high up she was, I’m sure it was terrifying. If things had gone differently…”

  I was nodding agreement. “It would have been all she wrote.”

  Chapter Three

  What’s that quote by Woody Allen? Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

  I was thinking of both murder and beverages as I sat at dinner that night in the elegant dining room at Asquith House, gingerly sipping my merlot (red wine always gives me a headache) and studying my fellow guests for signs of incipient homicidal mania. In addition to Sara, who was presiding in Anna’s absence, and Rudolph, there were five writing students staying at the house that weekend.

  I politely listened to their names as they were introduced, promptly forgot them all except for Poppy C. Clark which I heard as Poppy Seed Clark. She set me straight fast.

  “Poppy C. C as in Catholic.”

  Trust a writer to drag her religious hang-ups into it. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Poppy wrinkled her nose in disapproval.

  She was a small, birdlike woman around my age. She had very short black hair and slanted eyes of a unique turquoise color. She wore men’s style chinos, a white tailored man’s shirt, loafers and a man’s watch. I didn’t pick up lesbian, though, so much as affected. Like those non-Francoise non-painters who wear berets.

  The soup was served as we were still untangling the introductions. Rudolph was right. Anna’s cook was superb. The creamed pumpkin was almost worth the entire trip.

  I do like my food. And it was sort of a relief to know that I could eat my dinner without fear that I was going to have to get naked in the near future. I could get as fat as I liked and no one would care. Heck, no one would see. Sheer bliss.

  It was funny the way bliss took your appetite away.

  “Christopher Holmes. You write the books about the Scottish police constable, don’t you?” That was Victoria Sherwell, a tall and pleasantly plain forty-something. She wore spectacles and no makeup. An I’m-comfortable-being-comfortable vibe.

  “No. I write about Miss Butterwith. She’s an English botanist.”

  It was a bit lowering that Anna hadn’t apparently even told her precious writer’s circle who would be taking over for her in her hour of need, but I supposed she was preoccupied with people trying to kill her and whatnot.

  Victoria smiled, displaying a cute little gap between the two front teeth. “That’s sweet.”

  I tried not to bristle. Sweet? Miss Butterwith was not sweet. She was not some sweet old lady in a pink woolly cardigan with Life Savers in her pocket and grandchildren and a weekly bridge club. She was Justice personified. She had a mind like a steel trap and a resolve of iron, and she used scientific methods for solving crime. Okay, she was aided in her investigations by her intrepid cat Mr. Pinkerton—and the dashing Inspector Appleby, who was not gay no matter what anyone said—but other than that, she was as hardboiled as they come.

  Poppy Seed said, “Are you sure she’s not a librarian? I’ve read that series with the English librarian. It wasn’t too bad considering all the typos.”

  Librarian? My hand froze on my glass. Someone was writing a series about an English librarian? Why didn’t I know this series? Who was publishing it? Was it doing better than Miss Butterwith?

  Naturally, I didn’t let a flicker of that show. “I’m sure,” I said pleasantly, as though a competitive thought had never passed behind my eyes.

  “I only ask because I haven’t heard of your series. Is it new?”

  I was still smiling—through my teeth—as I said, “It’s been around for over fifteen years.”

  “Has it? I find it offensive that any female sleuth would be referred to as a spinster.” Poppy Seed turned to Victoria. “Don’t you?”

  Victoria smiled noncommittally and dipped her spoon in her soup.

  I finished my wine, defiant of the inevitable headache. I was still brooding as the soup dishes were whisked away and replaced with plates laden with juicy prime rib, buttery whipped potatoes and tender asparagus drizzled with creamy tarragon sauce. I began to perk up.

  Besides, some people think fullness in the face makes you look younger.

  “Who’s your agent, Christopher?” one of the male students asked.

  It was going to be one of those weekends, I could tell already. “Rachel Ving.”

  Ving the Merciless they called her in publishing circles, though so far she hadn’t killed anyone. That I knew of.

  “How did you happen to land her?”

  “I let my fingers do the walking.”

  “Eh?”

  What was his name? Something unusual. Rowland…Bride. That was it. Rowland Bride looked like he was in his late forties. He was a short, roly-poly man with bright dark eyes and tight dark curls. He looked hot. Not like J.X. looked hot. Hot as in permanently perspiring.

  Hot and perplexed. Maybe he was thinking of the Neil Young song.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “I sent the manuscript to several agents who indicated they were willing to look at a new author and were interested in handling mysteries.”

  Rowland looked unconvinced. Perhaps he thought Anna had written a letter of recommendation or something, but that wasn’t the case. She would have, of course, but her own agent hadn’t been taking new clients when I went looking. I had found Rachel all on my own.

  Poor Rachel.

  “How long have you known Anna?” I asked generally of the table.

  “Nearly nine years,” Rowland said.

  “Have you been part of the AC for nine years?”

  “No. I was only invited to join the circle last year.” He pursed his mouth. I couldn’t tell if the expression indicated discretion or annoyance that it had taken so long for Anna to include him in the festivities. As I recalled, invites to the AC were exclusive and much sought after by aspiring scribblers.

  “Two years.” Poppy Seed sounded curt. She was hacking away at her prime rib as though she had a score to settle.

  “Two years,” Victoria concurred. She was the only person at the table still on her soup. She had a half bowl to go and was serenely dipping her spoon as though she’d never heard of such a thing as a main course.

  “Were you members of the writing group last year?”

  “No.”

  “No.” Poppy’s portion of the table jiggled as she sawed.

  At the far end, Sara and Rudolph were ignoring my efforts at sociability. They spoke quietly together, much like weary teachers supervising a sock hop. Do they still have sock hops? Do they still have socks?

  I’d have liked to sit at the adult table too, but I’d been placed smack-dab in the center of the playing field to be more accessible to the students. It’s true what they say about no good deed going unpunished. Granted, I was conveniently located for sleuthing, but it irked me nonetheless.

  I called down, “I know how far back you and Anna go, Rudolph, but what about you, Sara?”

  She fastened her cool gaze on me. “I’ve worked for Anna for five years.” She turned back to Rudolph.

  And clearly had a ball every minute. Jesus. Maybe Anna found her a jewel beyond price, but I thought she was a whey-faced bitch. As Mi
ss Butterwith would have said.

  Well, okay, Miss Butterwith wouldn’t have said that, but it was my opinion and I was sticking to it.

  “I met Anna this year.” That chirpy voice belonged to the youngest member of the enclave. I’d managed to remember Nella House’s name because of a not-very-kind name association. She was a big girl. A very, very big girl. One of those very big girls who you fear won’t live to see forty if they don’t take action now. She was perhaps in her early twenties, bright blue eyes, glossy brown hair and rosy cheeks.

  “How did you meet her?”

  “When I found out she actually lived here, in Nitchfield, I drove out to tell her how much I loved her, and we…” She pressed her fists together which I guess was supposed to signify what we grownups call rapprochement. Or maybe it was a gang sign. The Crips. The Bloods. The Quills.

  Of course they’d hit it off. What’s not to love about unconditional admiration? Nella’s baby blues were sparkling even now with the remembered thrill of that first meeting with her idol. The shock and the joy of discovering Anna breathed the same air that Nella did.

  For which I really had to hand it to Anna. I can’t say I’d have been as gracious, let alone taken under my wing an admiring aspirant. Not that aspirants ever showed up at my front door to admire me. Frankly, no one showed up at my front door with the exception of the mailman, UPS and the pool guy. No, come to think of it, the pool guy used the side gate.

  “How long have you been writing?” Perhaps I don’t always do the right thing, but I do generally know what the right thing is.

  “Since I was fourteen. I wrote my first novel when I was sixteen.”

  I swallowed the lump of prime rib that seemed to have wedged in my throat. “Are you published?”

  “I’ve had sixty-three poems published. No novels yet.”

  “Your novel will be published,” Rowland told her. He nodded at her with an assurance I’d have thought only Rudolph Dunst was in a position to offer. Nella blushed.

  “You were both in the writing group last year?”

  “Yes,” Rowland said. “Me, Nella and Arthur.”

  Arthur Gohring was the other male student. Arthur struck me as more of a biker type than a writer type. Not that he couldn’t be both, of course. He reminded me of Ving Rhames: brawny, bald and black. He looked like he’d have interesting things to write about—after he finished stabbing his pen through your neck.

  “How long have you been writing, Arthur?”

  It’s my experience that aspiring writers and the newly published aren’t nearly as tired of such questions as veterans of the writing wars. Arthur, however, said in his deep, deep voice, “A long time. How did you get an agent, Chris?”

  Chris. No one calls me Chris. It’s Christopher or Mr. Holmes. I don’t even let my parents call me Chris—though they did draw the line at Mr. Holmes. True, J.X. called me Kit, but that was J.X. He got special dispensation for being…J.X.

  “I got mine from the pound,” I said. “I always think it’s nice if you can rescue one of the older agents. They’re usually housebroken and—”

  “No, really,” Poppy Seed cut in, no nonsense.

  Hadn’t I explained this to Rowland? Was this how the writing seminar was going to go too? Was I trapped in some annoying version of Groundhog Day 101?

  I said, “I’d completed the first Miss Butterwith manuscript so I mailed it to several—”

  Poppy Seed gaped. “Mailed it?”

  “Right.”

  “Through the post office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You couldn’t just email it?”

  “No. This was back in the day when some of us still used paper and typewriters. Electric typewriters, of course, and later on word processors, but still antediluvian, I agree.”

  Nella, boldly reaching for seconds of those buttery whipped potatoes, asked, “But how did that work? The agents would receive a package in the mail and then what? Did they mail you a letter to tell you they were accepting your work?”

  “Usually it was to tell you they weren’t accepting your work, but yes. Or they’d call.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “About sixteen years ago.”

  “Oh. So there weren’t so many writers back then.” She smiled knowingly.

  I started to object, but in a way she was correct. Technology had changed publishing, and was continuing to change it in ways we’d never dreamed back when I was carving out shelf space in my comfortable niche. But it’s not like hard work and, hopefully, some talent hadn’t played a role in my success. At least, I wanted—needed—to believe so.

  “How convenient. For the agents.” Poppy’s plate was now cleared of any prime rib. Had she already eaten it or had she cut it into such infinitesimal pieces it was no longer visible to the naked eye?

  “Well, yeah. Basically they hold the keys to the citadel. At least in those days. And these days too if you still want a contract with mainstream publishing.”

  “Mainstream publishing,” scoffed Arthur.

  “That’s where the money is.”

  “Money.”

  I gave that up for a lost cause. I happen to like money, so sue me—but not for all my money, please.

  “I’d like a mainstream contract,” Nella put in. I smiled benignly at her. I like common sense in a beginner.

  Arthur said, “Mainstream publishing is obsolete. There’s nothing mainstream publishing can do for you that you can’t do yourself.”

  Nella said, “There’s more prestige.”

  “Prestige.”

  I’d already noticed that Arthur and Nella seemed to disagree with each other every time the other opened his—or her—trap. They were both violently opinionated in the way only aspiring writers can be.

  “I read in Publisher’s Weekly—”

  “That’s not what I read in Writer’s Digest—”

  “Have you been with the same agent your whole career?” Rowland spoke loudly over their raised voices. He seemed preoccupied with my agented status, but that’s not unusual when you’re standing outside the hallowed gates of first-time publication.

  I nodded in answer. By then I’d have had to shout to be heard over Arthur and Nella.

  “Mainstream publishing is dead. Put a fork in it!”

  “Only egomaniacs would consider publishing their own work!”

  The others, including Sara and Rudolph, politely ignored the exchange.

  Ever the ambassador of goodwill, I said, “Were you all staying at the house when Anna had her accident?”

  Chapter Four

  You’d have thought I stood up and sloshed a bucket of ice water over them. The silence that followed my words could only be described as ringing.

  I’d been looking at Rowland, and he was the first to break that pregnant pause.

  “No. I only arrived yesterday.”

  “I was here,” Nella said. “I spend the weekend lots of times.”

  The others all said they hadn’t been present at the time of Anna’s fall. They answered so conscientiously, one by one, so that I felt like I was channeling Professor Plum in the Dining Room with the Candlestick.

  “Why?” Sara asked in her cool way at last.

  “Merely making conversation,” I replied.

  There was another funny lull and then Victoria mentioned finishing Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and everything seemed to snap back to normal. A lively discussion began as to whether the book was a mystery, a historical, or—in Arthur’s view—a total rip-off.

  My attention wandered. Only Rudolph, Sara and Nella had been staying at the house when Anna took her tumble down the stairs, which surely limited the cast of suspects.

  No, it didn’t.

  Nothing said a member of the estate staff couldn’t hold some grudge against Anna. She could be pretty hard to please as I well recalled.

  Still, if Anna had any disgruntled employees, they could simply leave her service. It’s not like these days anyone was
trapped in indentured servitude. Well, unless you believed everything you read in Mother Jones magazine.

  The idea of Rudolph, Sara or Nella wanting to injure Anna seemed pretty unlikely. Maybe Anna was stringing together a coincidental series of close calls and coming up with a murder plot where none existed.

  One thing I had noticed during the earlier introductions—though I didn’t see how it could be significant—was that every member of this year’s AC was local. The year I’d taken part, there had been writers from all over the country. There had even been a girl from Peru, an exchange student from one of Anna’s college classes. My understanding was Anna chose each year’s participants based on workshops and seminars she held all across the States—as well as recommendations from her publisher. This year’s gathering seemed much less formal; it had a certain homegrown feel to it. If these students were all locally based, it was possible that one of them could have arranged for a fall in the garden—maybe even tampered with the brake fluid in Anna’s car.

  Arranging a bout of food poisoning would be trickier, but there was always the chance that the food poisoning really had been an accident and was unconnected to these other events.

  Frankly, there was a chance—more than a chance—that all of these events were unconnected and Anna was imagining things.

  All the same, that had been a very odd silence when I asked about who had been staying in the house. Almost as though I’d brought up something that was on everyone’s mind, but that no one wanted to mention.

  After dinner the others adjourned to the large, fully equipped home theater to watch The Birds.

  Though Anna was no relation to The Hitchcock, in the early years of her career she had coyly implied a connection. I don’t know if it had helped her career or not, but one of the traditions of the Asquith Circle weekends was viewing classic Hitchcock films each evening.

  I wasn’t sure if I was expected to sit in for Anna and play Siskel to Sara’s Ebert, but I was short on sleep and I had a stack of manuscripts to read through—not to mention the fact that The Birds has always creeped me out.

  Leaving my fellow scribes to enjoy an evening watching human Barbie Tippi Hedren trying to keep her fine feathered friends from permanently rearranging her hair and makeup, I retreated to my quarters.