The Megalodon Mix-Up

by Amanda M. Lee

  “I’m not an expert on sharks,” Jack replied. “I’m head of security. The rest of the group is handling the shark business.”

  “So that means her?” Lily’s eyes shifted to me. “Are you an expert on sharks?”

  I took another sip of the extremely strong rum runner to buy time. “Um ... .”

  “She’s new,” Jack answered for me. She’s basically an intern.”

  The statement stung. “I’m not an intern,” I grumbled, offended.

  “Fine. You’re not an intern,” Jack conceded. “You’re new, though. She’s still learning the ropes.”

  “Is that why you have her at the tiki bar, just the two of you?” Lily’s blue eyes were full of intrigue, as if she knew something the others didn’t and wanted confirmation.

  “We’re just not ready to call it a night,” Jack replied smoothly, his charm on full display as he winked at her. “We thought we would have a drink or two to settle our nerves. We flew all day. It’s hard for me to sleep on travel days.”

  Lily didn’t look convinced. “Well then, by all means.” She gestured toward the small group. “Have some drinks and get to know everyone. I think it will be a marvelous exercise for your young intern.”

  “Thanks.” Tension radiated off Jack’s body, but he kept his smile in place. “I appreciate that. So ... what do you all write?”

  IN TRUTH, MEETING THE AUTHORS was fascinating. I managed to slow my drinking to the point I took only a sip every five minutes or so and listened with slack-jawed excitement as Lily introduced us to everyone in her group.

  There was Carter Reagan Yates, a prepper writer from Michigan who fathered a boatload of kids and built hobbit holes in his backyard in case of a zombie apocalypse. No joke. He was prepared for when the zombies arrived and had no intention of being munched on.

  “I’m completely ready for the end of the world,” he said with a straight face as he clutched what I could only describe as an adult sippy cup in his hand. “I’ve got enough rations put away to get us through five years of trouble. After that, I have the seeds and machinery necessary to start humanity over again ... right in my backyard.”

  “In Michigan?” I was dumbfounded. He seemed like a nice enough guy — the adult sippy cup notwithstanding — but the idea that he built hobbit holes in the hills behind his house freaked me out. And that was before he told me he’d stored more than one-hundred guns in those holes as well. “I’ve been to Michigan twice in the last few months.”

  It was a lame thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else to ease the moment.

  “Michigan is awesome,” Carter agreed. His hair was long on the top and he had a beard straight out of Duck Dynasty reruns. If I hadn’t already talked to him I would’ve assumed he was a serial killer before he even opened his mouth. “Michigan is one of the few places people will survive after the end of the world. Do you want to know why?”

  “Because you’re in Michigan,” I answered perfunctorily.

  “No, because of the Great Lakes ... although that was a very good answer.”

  “Thank you.” I waited until Carter lost interest in talking to me before asking Jack the obvious question. “What’s prepper fiction?”

  “It’s kind of like post-apocalyptic stuff,” Jack replied, keeping his voice low. His thigh was stuck to mine because the bench we shared was narrow. He didn’t seem to mind, which made me even giddier than before. “You know ... zombies, the grid fails, nuclear attack, etc. Only a small portion of the population survives and they’re tasked with rebuilding the world.”

  Hmm. “Like The Walking Dead?”

  “Basically.”

  “And Revolution.”

  Jack made a face. “Except most authors don’t make their heroes and villains fight with swords.”

  “Okay. I get it. He has an adult sippy cup. That can’t be normal, can it?”

  Jack laughed so hard I had to smack his back to clear his airways. “That’s not an adult sippy cup.”

  “It has a straw and a lid.”

  “It’s just a cup,” Jack explained. “They offer drink deals with the cup. It’s more expensive to fill the first time, but saves money on refills.”

  “Oh.” That actually made sense. “You’re basically saying the guy waiting for the end of the world likes to drink.”

  “Pretty much.”

  THE NEXT AUTHOR OF note was Priscilla Jennings. She looked to be in her late fifties or early sixties, with short-cropped brown hair that resulted in extremely tight curls, reminding me of bad eighties perms I saw in various movies while flipping through channels on the weekends.

  She talked in full sentences, kept her back ramrod straight, and said a lot of things I didn’t understand.

  “Hooky,” she barked. “You have to write hooky if you expect to survive in this business.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but she was dead serious.

  “What’s hooky?” I asked Lily, leaning closer.

  Lily smirked as her eyes shifted across the table. There was something about her I liked — she was snarky to a fault and said whatever came to her mind, which I could relate to — and I’d taken to asking her questions about the others in the group whenever I needed answers.

  “That’s her one-word mantra,” Lily explained. “She just keeps saying it and people assume she knows something because she refuses to say anything else. She makes decent money and the assumption is that she knows her stuff, but she honestly doesn’t know anything.”

  That was interesting. Lily didn’t like her. She didn’t come right out and say it, but it was clear she preferred avoiding conversation regarding Priscilla and her “hooky” prose. “Did she have a relationship with Shayne Rivers?”

  Lily tilted her head to the side, considering. “Is that why you’re here? To see if any of us had motive to kill Shayne? If so, you’re in the right place. Pretty much everyone here hated her.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Lily opened her mouth to answer and then clearly thought better of it. “It’s a lot of drama, stuff that you won’t understand and probably isn’t important. I doubt it’s worth killing over.”

  “She was killed by sharks.” I was almost positive that was true. Jack’s niggling voice that Megalodons were extinct occasionally filled me with doubt, though. “I’m simply curious.”

  Lily heaved out a sigh. “Okay, here’s the thing: Authors are theatrical. We like our drama. It goes along with being creative. We can’t seem to help ourselves. Shayne was at the center of a lot of that drama.”

  “How?”

  “Well, at first she was simply an annoying woman who wrote UF.”

  “What’s UF?”

  “Urban fantasy.”

  “And that is?”

  “Magical people with swords. They’re usually running around a city. That’s different from what I write, which is magical cozy mysteries, because my characters usually don’t have swords, have sex off screen and hang out in small towns. There are rules for every genre you write. If you don’t follow the rules, you don’t sell.”

  “Huh.” I found all this fascinating. “So Shayne wrote urban fantasy,” I prodded.

  “Right.” Lily nodded as she returned to her story. “The author community seems big at times, but it’s not. You would be surprised how many people write one book and think they’re going to hit it rich and live like kings and queens off that one book for the rest of their lives.”

  “Not so, huh?”

  “Nope. The key is regular releases. If you want to do this for a living, you must have regular releases. The problem is, not everyone can write fast enough to deliver them. I’m lucky and can remain focused, so I do okay. It takes others much longer to write a book, and they’re the ones struggling.”

  I racked my brain to think of authors I read. “Most authors publish a few books a year, right?”

  “It depends. Some can put out more than that. Those are the lucky people. A lot of authors try to say that you
can only write two books a year because to do otherwise means you’re producing substandard work. I don’t find that true, but I overlap everything. A lot of people don’t do that ... and that’s why they need day jobs. No wonder they can only write two books a year if they have day jobs, right?”

  “Uh-huh.” I was starting to glaze over. “Did Shayne have trouble writing more than two books a year?”

  “She did,” Lily confirmed. “She had moderate success with her first series, some young adult paranormal crap that combined urban fiction with romance. It had a limited audience because her readers were destined to grow out of it, but she didn’t look that far ahead to see what was happening.

  “She invited several people to be co-writers,” she continued. “Basically, that means she put together the outline and the other writers did all the work of penning the story. They got paid fifty percent royalties — and so did she — and got their names out there. She retained ownership of the property.”

  “That sounds like a good deal for her,” I noted.

  “It was,” Lily agreed. “She made money without doing much of the work. That freed her up to do author services.”

  “Which are?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” Lily shifted on her chair. “She offered list-building services — we’re talking mailing lists — and advertising through her mailing list. She taught people how to make runs for lists, like the New York Times and USA Today. It started out pretty much above board ... and then she started skirting ethical lines.”

  “Really? Did she steal from people?”

  “I guess that depends on who you ask,” Lily replied, uncomfortable. “There were a lot of accusations being flung. I tried to stay out of that. I only grew interested in the situation when the trademark fiasco happened.”

  “What was the trademark fiasco?” Jack asked, sliding closer to me. It was only then that I realized he was listening ... and he appeared fascinated.

  “She tried to trademark the word lusty.”

  “Why lusty?” I asked, confused. “Are the magical creatures with the swords lusty?” I realized what I said too late to take it back. “Wait ... that might’ve come out wrong.”

  Lily chuckled, genuinely amused. “Most authors write more than one thing. Shayne also wrote romance under the name Farrah Serendipity — and before you say anything, it was definitely a stupid name — and she created the Lustrous Brothers. They had lusty sex.

  “Instead of trademarking Lustrous Brothers, she went after lusty and managed to secure a trademark,” she continued. “That infuriated everyone because that wasn’t the name of the series and she was sending nasty letters to others to get them to stop using the word. It turned into a whole big thing.

  “There were lusty lumberjacks ... and lusty lab technicians ... and lusty male librarians who wanted to help you read porn,” she said. “It took over the writing community for months.”

  “So what happened?” Jack asked.

  Lily shrugged. “While all the mean stuff was going on over the internet — and it was mean and scary — a woman took Shayne to court and fought the trademark,” Lily replied. “The case was eventually thrown out and she lost, but she did a lot of damage before then.”

  “What kind of damage?”

  “You have to understand, this goes back to the authors being drama queens,” she hedged. “She made a video that was three hours long stating her case. People mocked the video, then there was a Twitter campaign ... and online Facebook parties to bash her ... and then she wrote an open letter and referred to herself in the third person. It was basically a series of ridiculous stuff that had real-world consequences.”

  “And this was on top of the things she was doing with the mailing lists and stuff, right?” I pressed.

  “That stuff ended up in court, too,” Lily explained. “People sued her for stealing from them and not delivering on her promises. That got ugly.”

  There was so much ugliness in the story I couldn’t keep up. “So ... what’s the bottom line?”

  “The bottom line is, if you’re looking for someone who wanted to kill Shayne Rivers, you need look no further than this beach,” she answered, gesturing to the open area around us. “Almost everyone here has had a run-in with her. Almost everyone here hates her. She had only a small group of friends, and everyone hates them as much as they hate her.”

  “Is the hate warranted?” Jack asked.

  Lily shrugged. “It depends on who you ask. There’s a lot of black hat stuff going on in the publishing world right now. I’m not sure that any side is completely without guilt. I know I said I a few horrible things to Shayne. And, before you ask, I’m not sorry. I think she was a certifiable nut and definitely a narcissist. And, when I say ‘narcissist,’ I mean she was diagnosable.”

  “I get what you’re saying.” Jack rubbed his chin and glanced around at the other authors, who were seemingly relaxed and having a good time. “I don’t suppose you could give us a rundown on the people who hated her?”

  “I could, but that would take all night.”

  “Just give us the highlights.”

  Lily let loose a sigh. “Okay, but you’re going to wish you hadn’t asked.”

  I was starting to believe she was right.

  Eight

  In the end, the cadre of authors Lily introduced us to was seemingly never-ending.

  There was Clark Savage, a militant prepper writer who wore a shirt that read “Due to price increases on ammo, do not expect a warning shot.” He was in the make-out corner, a woman with pants so tight you could see absolutely everything south of the border as if someone had drawn the details there was plastered against him. She didn’t wear a lanyard, and Lily swore up and down she was a prostitute. I wasn’t so sure, but Jack refused to let me wander over to the darkened area close to the bushes to ask questions.

  Then there was J.D. Wells, a science fiction and fantasy writer who seemed a little full of himself. His response when Lily introduced us was to say, “Now you can tell your friends you’ve met me and impress them.” He wasn’t overtly mean, but he was egotistical. His poor wife sat on the bench next to him, knitting in the dark — no joke — and merely nodded whenever he said something he thought was genius.

  There was a JAFF writer, Abigail James, who talked numbers so fast that I worried I was trapped in a nightmare. Math was never my favorite subject. And, after the third time asking, she explained JAFF was Jane Austen fan fiction. I had no idea that was a thing, but she seemed to know her stuff. When she offered a book, I politely declined. I liked my fiction teeming with witches and murder mysteries. Endless streams of corsets and prideful men didn’t exactly blow up my skirt.

  There were quite a few more faces and names, but they all blurred. Finally, close to midnight, Jack insisted we had to retire because we had an early morning. Lily waved us off and returned to her drinking, leaving Jack and me to walk back to the condominium in relative silence.

  “That was interesting,” I said as we moved toward the front door. “I don’t know that I’ll be able to remember all those names.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Jack slowed his pace and dragged a hand through his hair. “The one thing we’ve learned is that Shayne Rivers had a lot of enemies. I mean ... a lot. I’m going to try to track down that video everyone was talking about, the one where she lost her mind on YouTube. That might give us some ideas.”

  “You think she was murdered and not eaten by a huge shark.”

  “I think that she might’ve been injured and thrown in the water and sharks finished her off,” Jack clarified. “Even if she was dead when she hit the water, the culprit might’ve assumed the sharks would do all the dirty work and leave nothing behind.”

  That was an interesting hunch. “So ... what do we do?”

  He shrugged. “Tomorrow morning we head out on a boat and look for a Megalodon. After that, we research these writers to see if we can come up with a viable suspect.”

  “I think
that’s easier said than done. Most of them are operating under pen names.”

  “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “Some of them, like the creepy gun guy, are using variations of their real names. He kept his first name and changed the last. The guy with the adult sippy cup used his real name.”

  “Yes, well ... .” Jack trailed off as he ran his hands up and down my arms. “We’ll figure it out.” When he turned his face to me his eyes were lit with romance. “So ... I did enjoy the conversation about lusty lumberjacks.”

  I chuckled, genuinely amused. “Are you going to be a lusty security chief?”

  “Not tonight.” He was rueful. “I’ll probably give you another kiss, though.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “I think I’ve had just enough to drink that my inhibitions are compromised.”

  “Oh, darn.”

  He grinned. “Oh, darn, indeed.” He leaned down and offered me a lingering kiss. It was sweet, simple and without pressure. It was a simple goodnight kiss, even though we were going to sleep in the same condominium and spend the better portion of the next day acting as co-workers and nothing more. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said when we separated.

  My cheeks were on fire and I had to resist fanning myself. “Not bad at all,” I agreed. “I ... um ... .”

  “Oh, you’re speechless.” Jack was delighted. “That’s kind of cute. At least now I know how to get you to shut your mouth.”

  “I am not speechless.”

  “Whatever.” He grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze as he dragged me toward the condo. “We need to get some sleep. The boat ride is going to take up the better part of our day. You don’t get seasick, do you?”