Evil Under the Stars

by C. A. Larmer

  They nodded enthusiastically and began yelling out their priorities.

  “They should be smart and suspicious!” said Missy.

  “Fabulous and good fun!” added Perry.

  “Exotic and handsome wouldn’t hurt,” added Claire, causing them all to stare at her aghast. “What? Why should Alicia have all the fun?”

  “I’ll just take anyone who can cook,” said Lynette. “I’m a bit over feeding you lot.”

  They chuckled as Alicia scribbled down their ideas and began constructing a fresh advertisement for the Agatha Christie Book Club, Mark 2.

  Just as they’d run out of steam, Alicia looked up and beamed, then took up the pen and wrote the final prerequisite:

  “Must adore Ms Christie, have a passion for puzzles, and never be averse to solving a real-life mystery should one fall into your lap.”

  Then Perry scoffed and said, “But what are the chances of that?”

  ####

  About the Author

  Christina Larmer is a journalist, magazine editor and author of 12 books including The Agatha Christie Book Club series and six in the popular Ghostwriter Mystery series. She has also written the non-fiction book A Measure of Papua New Guinea (Focus; 2008). Christina grew up in Papua New Guinea, spent several years working in London, Los Angeles and New York, and now lives with her musician husband and two sons in the Byron Bay hinterland of Northern NSW, Australia.

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  Do Not Go Gentle

  Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Dylan Thomas

  Prologue

  So there’s been a murder. My murder, in fact, but please don’t waste time feeling sorry for me. Your tears and platitudes are of no use to me now. I need your help to solve this thing, and I need it fast. I’ll explain why shortly, but for now, let’s try to iron out the facts while they’re still clear in my mind.

  I’m dead. Stabbed just once from behind, but gee it did the job. Hence the reason I need your help. I never saw the bugger coming. I have no idea who did this to me or why. I have no idea what he used, but I recall something cold and sharp before it all went black. A knife most likely, but let’s not jump to conclusions too quickly.

  I’m currently lying in a sticky pool of my own blood. Well, I can only assume it’s sticky. Certain senses are no longer available to me, and that’s a good thing. Believe you me, nobody wants to feel their own blood oozing out of their body, coagulating beneath them, turning dark and pungent. Again, that’s just an assumption. I’ve seen enough CSI to know how it works. Thank God I didn’t lose control of my bowels. That would have been embarrassing. For now, I’ve left a pretty clean corpse.

  Not a bad-looking one either, if I do say so myself.

  I’m only thirty-eight, after all. I have a thick mop of hair, the colour of maple syrup. I have faintly tanned legs, which are sprawled rather delicately on the floor, just a sliver of black undies showing beneath my red-and-white spotted nightdress, a larger red splotch where the murder weapon entered my back. Really, it just looks like five dots have joined together for a group hug. Nothing too alarming, I can assure you of that.

  So I’ve been stabbed. By person or persons unknown. The cops have no idea yet. No one does, which is where you come in.

  If death has taught me one thing, it’s that we have to be quick. I see a light. I see a tunnel. I see my dead grandmother beckoning like there’s no tomorrow—which I guess, for me, there isn’t—but I won’t have it. I need to know who did this to me, and I’m guessing the well-lit, granny-beckoning tunnel won’t wait long.

  I’m guessing we’ve got two hours, maybe three. Tops.

  So I’m going to fill you in on the facts leading up to my death and the drama that unfolds. I’m going to give you as much detail as I can without sending you on a wild-goose chase or leaving you wanting to stick another knife in my back. I have my suspicions, I have my theories, but I’ll try not to prejudice you with those. I need you to think about this clearly and objectively, and I need you to tell me as quickly as possible whodunit. Not because I can do anything about it. I’m not delusional—death is death is death, after all—but because I need to know, before I choof off into eternity, that my thirteen-year-old son did not murder me.

  Damn it, I wasn’t going to do that.

  Sorry.

  But here’s the thing: I have a sneaky, dreadful, gut-wrenching suspicion my only child is the culprit. He’s my prime suspect, and it breaks my heart. Or it would if my heart wasn’t already broken, pierced with that cold, sharp weapon that I can only assume is a knife but which you mustn’t jump to conclusions about. Gee I’m really stuffing this up, aren’t I?

  So here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to help you out as best I can. I don’t know all the rules yet—this death thing is new, you got that, right? But I’m learning pretty quickly that I have a fairly decent bird’s-eye view of the crime scene. As far as I can tell at this early stage, I can see most things. I’m nowhere yet everywhere all at once. Omnipresent I think they call it. I appear to be floating above, but I can move around too. Kind of like my son’s drone, I hover above, beside, into and through. Having said that, I can’t quite access everything. For some strange reason, I can only see into certain parts of my house; I’m not sure what that’s about. There must be method in Death’s madness, but it’s a little maddening to be honest. Still, I’m in a pretty good position to work this out, and you, dear reader, are my conduit.

  Do you mind?

  It’s not like I’m asking you to get your hands dirty or put yourself in harm’s way. Hell, you can’t even get in there and poke and prod, but what you can do, what I need most right now, is for you to be my sounding board. Be there to help me sort fact from fiction. I don’t want to do this alone. I need someone to bear witness, someone to know I tried. And I want that someone to be very much alive.

  So I ask for just a few hours of your time. Help me sift through the suspects, climb all over the clues. Help me deduce, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it wasn’t my son—my achingly beautiful son—who murdered me in cold blood, and I will be eternally grateful. And I mean that quite literally, of course.

  Help me work out whodunit before that bloody light extinguishes all hope of ever knowing.

  And good luck!

  Chapter 1

  My son was born prematurely, a difficult birth, an agonising start. I know we haven’t much time, but bear with me, this will come in handy later. I just know it will. He was tiny, but I was tiny too. Always had been, apart from a slight blip during my boozy university years when all that cheap cider left its mark. So by week thirty of my pregnancy, my hips had carked it and I was wobbling about like a beer-bellied old lady with a walking stick.

  When you’re able-bodied, you tend to begrudge all those empty wheelie car parks right out the front of every supermarket, shopping centre, and cinema complex, and you might even have considered sneaking into one. But once you actually need a wheelie car park, well good luck finding one, my friend! Suddenly they’re all taken and you have to hobble three kilometres just to buy a loaf of bread.

  And don’t even start me on ramp access.

  So I hobbled about until week thirty-eight when the obstetrician decided my penance was complete and booked me in to be induced.

  “It’ll be over before you know it!” he’d promised in that smug I’ve never had a child, but I’m somehow more of an expert than you way. But he was wrong.

  After twenty-six and a half hours of excruciating labour, they finally agreed to give me an epidural, and my tiny child was
suctioned out of me an hour after that.

  It took another twelve hours before I could feel my legs again and, I guess, even longer for bub to discover his lips because he didn’t latch on at all to start with. He didn’t seem to have a clue. I could only deduce he was as bombed out of his brain as I was.

  As a consequence, for the first few months, feeding was a disaster. It’s like we both missed the How To class and couldn’t catch up.

  Every two hours for weeks on end it was our mini battleground. I would shove him on, he’d spit me out, and my husband would chuckle beside us. He seemed to find it all so amusing, not sensing how crippling it felt. How mortifying. How unwomanly.

  “Just give him the bottle,” he said over and over, meaning, He clearly doesn’t want you.

  He might as well have stabbed me in my left breast.

  Then one day I awoke to my son’s usual hungry squawks and I thrust him to my breast as I always did, tensing for the inevitable trauma, but it never came.

  He simply latched on and began to gently suckle. It was like every bird was singing in unison, every flower blossoming at once. It was one giant, tacky cliché, and I loved it. In that one simple act of acceptance, my entire life shifted. By latching onto me, my son and I became one again.

  And that’s when my husband latched onto someone else.

  At first I never suspected a thing. He disappeared at all hours, for many hours at a time. Came back and headed straight for the shower, that kind of thing. So obvious, so cliché, and yet I honestly didn’t twig. I certainly didn’t put two and two together and come up with a couple that didn’t include moi. I guess I was too busy with Bob.

  Did I tell you I called my son Bob?

  It’s a very ordinary name, sure, but that was the whole point. There were enough loony names in my family already. I wasn’t going to saddle my child with another.

  Bob’s dad’s name is Cassowary. Yep, that’s his first name. Do you see what I’m saying? Loony. I should have run a mile the first time he said it to me, over a greasy bacon omelette after a torrid one-night stand. Or at least it was supposed to be. We’d not even bothered to exchange names that night, just stumbled to my apartment together after hitting it off in that Irish dive not far from my place. Neither of us expected it to go anywhere, of course. But when he was still there the next morning and our stomachs were growling in unison, he suggested we hit a café, and I didn’t bother to decline.

  What the hell, I was hungry.

  “I’m Cassowary,” he’d said, midmouthful, and I had laughed.

  When he didn’t laugh along, I choked back my chortle and said, “What? Really? Like the animal?”

  “It’s a flightless bird, actually. Native to Papua New Guinea.” His frown had remained in place, like no one had ever had a bad reaction to his really stupid name before.

  “Oh, right. And your surname?” I was going to add, “Is it Emu?” But something about his frozen frown stopped me.

  “Jones.”

  “Of course.”

  Cassowary Jones. I kid you not. That was—is—his name, and I stayed around to finish my eggs. I can see you’re losing respect for me already. Never mind, that’s not essential to solve this thing.

  So where was I? That’s right: We ate spongy omelettes, and I told him my name was Ludovica Gold but that everyone calls me Lulu. Then I did what I always do and paused so he could have a good ole laugh. Yep. I’ve got a loony name too, but at least I know it’s loony. At least I don’t act all surprised when people hesitate, then widen their eyes and say, “Huh?”

  I’ve learned to smile patiently, to shrug my shoulders, to add, “What can I say? My mother’s a bit batty.”

  The truth is, my mother is relatively sane, but she had a blind spot for a mad Bavarian King called Ludwig someone-or-other, who happened to build a Cinderella-style castle back in the late 1800s. Seems after traipsing through it on her honeymoon, Mum couldn’t get the joint out of her system, and I was now stuck with it for life, named after the mad King Ludwig (or the feminine form at least). Of course I didn’t tell him all that, at least not then. Nobody needs to hear the snoring details of my stupid name.

  In any case, we were two ridiculously named one-night standers who really should have parted company that first night and, failing that, never called each other again after breakfast. But for some bizarre reason, one I will never understand—even now with the wisdom of hindsight—we agreed to meet again, that night, back at my place. We didn’t bother with the dingy pub this time. We knew what we wanted, and we wanted it over and over until, a few months down the track, the inevitable happened and I fell pregnant.

  Cut to nine months later via a rushed marriage, and Bob Gold was born. I know what you’re thinking. Why doesn’t he have his father’s surname? Well, I have to ask, why should he? I didn’t take the name Jones. Plus when you think about it, it’s really the woman who does all the hard yakka. Sure, he squirts something in, but I’m the one who had to bake and ache for nine months, and don’t forget the trauma of childbirth (twenty-six-and-a-half hours of excruciating pain in case you had). I’m the one who cooked him up, the one left holding the stinky nappies while my so-called “partner” did a runner. It’s just as well I gave Bob my surname.

  Sure, maybe if I’d allowed Cass (no way was I referring to him as a flightless bird; the bugger took flight at the first opportunity) some kind of ownership of his son, maybe he might not have looked elsewhere for validation. I guess I’ll never know. Not sure I really care, but that’s beside the point.

  In any case, one night I awoke and found Cass had vanished from our bed. Bob was snuffling away on the duvet beside me, and I glanced around, more curious than concerned. Was Cass in the spare bed again, a place he frequently slinked off to, more interested in sleep than bonding with his son? Or was he downstairs pretending to scrutinise the share market while scrounging for porn on the web?

  Either would have been preferable to what I had soon discovered. Through the window, within easy sight of our bedroom, was my husband in another bedroom, in another bed. He was directly across the road at a stranger’s house. Or at least she was a stranger to me. I had to assume he knew her, judging by their proximity to each other, their nudity, and the giant smile on her face. The lights were on. The neighbour had him in a chokehold that almost saw me dialling 000 before I realised he was smiling too. They were in flagrante, and he was enjoying every minute. Worse, he kept darting glances towards my window. Yep, seriously. No way he could have seen me, no way he could know I was awake and watching, wide-eyed and mortified in the dark. But on they went, her smiling, him staring smugly towards me. Sick bastard.

  So what did I do?

  I turned over and went back to sleep, of course. I had a baby to feed in four hours, and I was damned if I was going to let him ruin Bob’s breakfast. Then when he left for work the next day, all cutesy kisses and chirpy whistle, I placed all his belongings in the back incinerator and burned them to a crisp, hired a locksmith to change the locks, and left a note on the front door telling him to bugger off.

  And bugger off he did, straight to the floozy across the road where they continued to make love with the curtains open and the lights bright for the first year or so, her smiling less each time, and him still glancing towards our window, his expression increasingly inscrutable.

  Eventually they closed the blinds.

  So why am I sharing this sordid little chapter in my sorry little life? Well, I guess either of them could be the culprit. I guess you could pin it on the ex-hubby and his new wife. Not that she’s new now, of course. Cass might be wreaking revenge. I mean, I know we weren’t exactly Romeo and Juliet, but it’s like I thrust him into a kind of purgatory. Sure they may still have sex—fortunately I’m no longer privy to that—but she nags him within an inch of his life. I can hear them from my house. All the time. She’s a perfectionist; he has to live up.

  And he puts up with it. Bizarre stuff. I’d hate me too for releasing him to t
hat.

  And her? Well, I call her the Nagging Hag, or NagHag for short, although she’s five years younger than me and as sexy as all get out. Luscious, thick blond hair. I’m not actually sure it’s real. I mean can you really grow hair that luscious and thick in your thirties? And her legs, well it’s like they forgot to put a torso in and just let them ride all the way to her breasts. They’re long, long, long! She’s a stunner, a mean, husband-stealing cow, but a stunner nonetheless. And she knows it. Makes him pay for it on a daily basis. She never seems to shut up. I can hear her from across the street: Natter, natter, natter, nag, nag, nag.

  It’s like he’d scored the perfect parking spot and now he has to keep feeding the meter, over and over. It must be exhausting. Depleting. Boring even.

  So maybe he hates me for kicking him out, maybe he still holds a grudge?

  I don’t know, sounds a bit weak, but we’re trying to keep an open mind, remember?

  Then of course there’s NagHag herself. Maybe Cass’s second wife loathes me with a vengeance. Yes, they did make it official after a few years, and they even invited me to the wedding would you believe? Of course I didn’t go, but I did let Bob tag along, if only so I could get the goss. He didn’t have much to say. Bride looked “all right,” Dad was “okay,” food was “not bad.” It’s a wonder men ever become writers, they have so little to say.

  Maybe NagHag feels she could have done better and I have somehow thrust a loser into her life. But again, I doubt it. I mean, she can always boot him out as I have done. Or better yet, shove a knife through his heart.

  I’m really stuck on the knife, aren’t I? There’s something to be said for that. I mean, I want you to keep an open mind, but you gotta wonder why I keep coming back to the knife. It certainly felt like one before most of my senses did a runner. And what else is going to slice through your back ribs and into a heart so cleanly? Surely a pair of scissors would be too short, an axe too messy, a metal bar too fat to leave such a clean cut?