Chapter 17
We gathered in the servants’ dining room: my parents, the Last Picks, and Bobby and I. It was late, and on the other side of the gingham curtains, the moon was yellow and low. Indira had made coffee, and she’d even produced—by magic, if anyone wants my opinion—a lemon poppyseed bundt cake. I was on my third slice, and I had chosen not to notice when my mom slid the cake away from me.
“We need a trap,” my dad said. “Something to lure this woman, Wanda, back to Hastings Rock. We should make an announcement that we found the book they were looking for.”
“I’m not convinced she had anything to do with killing George,” my mom said. “Why would she kill him? The whole point of this mess was to recoup money, and you can’t recoup money if the man is dead.”
“You can if he’s one of those ghosts that drags money around,” Millie informed us. “Like Jacob Marley.”
It was oddly satisfying to see my parents speechless for a change.
“My problem with this whole thing is that I don’t know what they want,” I said. “They searched Hemlock House, but I have no idea what they were looking for. I don’t buy that story about a valuable book. I mean, if George had seen something valuable, why not simply sneak in and take it? It’s not like I’d have noticed.”
“Nobody would have noticed,” Fox said. “Not until Bobby made us clean again.”
“I don’t make anyone clean,” Bobby said mildly.
“Oh, remember when he made Dash VACUUM?” Millie’s excitement was not, in this case, contagious. “Dash tried to talk his way out of it for, like, an hour, and Bobby kept listening and nodding and listening and nodding. And then DASH HAD TO VACUUM!”
“We had a conversation—” Bobby tried.
“We didn’t have a conversation,” I said. “You just stood there, looking at me, until I got to work. It was terrifying. I even vacuumed the drapes, Bobby. I climbed a ladder!”
Keme snorted.
“You’re very good at delegating, dear,” Indira told Bobby.
“And I don’t know why we have to worry about the cobwebs on the chandeliers,” I said. “That’s where spiders are supposed to live. It’s their natural habitat.”
“And the windows,” Keme said.
“Oh right! And the windows, Bobby! Why do we have to clean the outside? It literally rains the next day. They’re clean for, like, six hours.”
“They’re making it sound worse than it is,” Bobby said to my parents. “I’m not a dictator.”
“Of course not,” my mom said. But from the way she was considering Bobby anew, I thought a terrifyingly efficient cleaning czar might appear in one of her future books.
“The murders,” Indira said.
“We’re missing something,” I said. “Something to do with George’s death. I agree it doesn’t make sense for the killer to be Wanda, but I can’t figure out what we’re not seeing.”
“Isn’t this where the forensic evidence comes in?” my dad asked. “Shouldn’t you consider what they found at the scene?”
“One would think,” Bobby murmured.
I whipped my head around to stare at him.
Bobby raised his hands in surrender. “Unfortunately, there’s not much. They’ve got a partial tire track, but it’s a common brand and size, so it’s not going to be any help until we have something to compare it to.”
“Also,” Fox put in, “Dash prefers to solve mysteries without inconvenient things like evidence or due process or eyewitness testimony.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “I’d love to have witnesses. I’d love evidence.”
“Then how does he solve them?” my mom asked.
“Usually he just muddles along until the killer corners him and confesses.”
I mean, they weren’t wrong.
Still, my jaw dropped. “That is so rude!”
“And that works?” my dad asked.
“No! I mean, I don’t just muddle along—” I drew a deep breath. “We’re thinking about this the wrong way. We’ve got to come at it from another angle.” I looked at my mom and dad. “If you were writing this, how would you do it?”
“If we were writing it?” my dad said with an insulting amount of disbelief in his tone.
“I forgot about this part,” Fox said. “Comparing it to mystery novels. Another step in his process.”
“Look who’s talking,” I snapped. “You’re the one who thinks we’re living in an episode of Law & Order .”
“But I’m only a humble sidekick,” Fox said. “Oh, did I tell you about the dream I had about Stabler and that strapping CSI chap—”
Bobby cleared his throat. “I feel like I need to say that this isn’t representative of Hastings Rock in general or the sheriff’s office in particular.”
“Yes, you’re very good at your job,” I said. Then, to my parents: “How would you write this?”
My mom narrowed her eyes. “It’s a little too plotty for a psychological thriller. It’s more your dad’s style.”
“Are you kidding?” my dad asked. “If I tried this, my readers would riot. The body count is way too low.”
“Will you please—” I drew another calming breath. Then I pointed at my mom.
“I don’t know, Dashiell.” But she thought for a moment. “There’d be some sort of untrustworthy information, of course. Maybe Colleen was experiencing blackouts. She might not know if she killed the mayor or George, and at the end, we find out her elderly neighbor had been gaslighting her. Or she might have killed them and then experienced dissociative amnesia.”
I chose not to comment on the amnesia bit. To my dad, I said, “You?”
“Well, there’d be some kind of second layer to everything. You think you know what’s going on, the library, the book, the scam. But then you’d find out that this was actually how one of the cartels laundered their money, and the entire town was in on the conspiracy, oh, and the cartel was sending a kill squad to clean up the mess.” He frowned. “There’d be some sort of betrayal, too. Someone in town who had been a little too helpful. Maybe, uh, a lady.”
He actually blushed.
I decided to hurry past that fresh trauma. “It’s not a psychological thriller. It’s not a military thriller. It’s an art heist, maybe, but that doesn’t make sense either.”
“What if we try a timeline?” Bobby asked. “Everything started when someone stole the diary, right? Or maybe before that, when the mayor recognized Colleen. We work our way forward—”
“How would you write it?” my mom asked.
“What?” I said.
“If it were your story, how would you write it?”
I almost said, I’d write it as a cozy noir . But I honestly didn’t think I was emotionally prepared to hear my parents’ opinions on my groundbreaking genre mashup—
And then, like a plot snapping together, the whole thing flashed through my head.
Colleen and the mayor.
George and the diary.
The theft at the auction.
The mayor’s death.
The genealogy room at the library.
The break-in at Hemlock House.
The emails on George’s tablet, and the forgery supplies, and the timing of George’s death.
Mrs. Shufflebottom’s alibi.
The Thomas Crown Affair , and the Pissarro that was actually a Monet. And The Maltese Falcon . And my dad’s thrillers.
Even—God help me—an entire genre built around convenient cases of amnesia.
“There it is,” Fox said. “That’s the look.”
I ignored them. “Bobby, call the sheriff.”