Chapter 4
I tracked Vivienne down in a panel on “The Twenty-First-Century Mystery Novel.” She was sitting near the front, hands clasped in her lap, attention fixed on the speakers—three young writers who were clearly convinced that they had written the most important mystery novel ever, in the history of novels.
(One of them was about a girl and her friends who solved mysteries while driving a pizza delivery van, and honestly, it didn’t sound bad.)
(It also made me hungry.)
Vivienne didn’t do anything nefarious. She didn’t steeple her fingers and peer over them. She didn’t glance around furtively. She didn’t have an evil cat that she petted while she listened and plotted. She didn’t cackle—not even once.
She still managed to throw the whole room into chaos.
It was obvious that half the room knew who she was and couldn’t believe she was there—and they were eager to tell the other half.
The amount of whispering, elbowing, and pointing could have put a high school Your Changing Body lesson to shame.
One older woman, who was knitting in the back, finally got up on her chair and said, “Where is she? I can’t see her. ”
Her neighbor, a pimply boy, used a laser pointer on the back of Vivienne’s head.
The panelists, for their part, didn’t seem to notice, but that’s probably because they were arguing among themselves about, quote, the death of the traditional mystery.
(Here’s a hint: it’s not dead.)
When the panel ended, Vivienne collected her purse, and I slipped back into the hall and wedged myself into an alcove next to a water fountain.
People began trickling out, and excited murmurs reached me.
Vivienne emerged a few moments later, pretending not to notice the people staring at her.
The woman with the knitting needles stopped in the middle of the hall to announce to no one in particular—loudly—“That’s not Vivienne Carver. Vivienne Carver’s dead.”
Vivienne swanned off down the hall, and I followed.
She didn’t appear to be in a hurry to get anywhere.
She stopped to check a promotional poster.
She dug around in her purse and touched up her lipstick.
She nodded to a middle-aged man in suspenders who was staring at her—he was so intent that he walked straight into one of the conference signs and got caught in the easel. Vivienne kept moving.
After about ten minutes of watching Vivienne examine the paintings in the gallery, fill a plastic cup with water, and produce a piece of butterscotch candy from one coat pocket, I felt the initial mixture of fear and adrenaline cooling off into a familiar, restless anxiety.
I’d never seen Vivienne in the wild, so to speak.
I wasn’t sure if this was how she always acted at a conference, but there was certainly a nonchalance, a refusal to behave as though this were anything out of the ordinary, that told me I was seeing how Vivienne must have acted for years and years—polite, engaged, but with a certain remoteness.
That was probably a defense mechanism; being the world’s most popular mystery writer for decades must have required a thick skin and a public persona that balanced being polite with being able to stave off raving fans.
(For a moment, I thought of the florid-faced man who had been so excited to meet me.
Now multiply that by about thirty million.)
Of course, Vivienne’s invisible wall didn’t stop everyone.
A pair of young women—one with Frankenweenie hair and a jumpsuit that made her look like an astronaut, the other wearing a burned velvet blouse and wheeling a dolly full of books—watched her from a distance, whispering to each other and giggling until the one in the blouse approached and asked for a picture.
Vivienne smiled, and the woman in the blouse snapped a quick selfie, gushed something that made Vivienne smile again and touch her arm, and then retreated.
When she got back to her friend, the one with the Frankenweenie hair gave a little scream of excitement.
Vivienne checked her bag, digging around as though looking for something—probably an excuse not to have to make eye contact with the excited women—and then set off at a brisk pace.
My pulse ticked up, and I hurried after her.
She kept moving until she spotted Graeme, and then she asked the conference organizer something.
I couldn’t hear what she said, but whatever it was, Graeme blanched and began fumbling through the papers on the clipboard.
He held out something for Vivienne to read, and Vivienne studied it for a moment.
My general sense was that Vivienne Carver tried not to let her emotions show on her face (think of the frown lines!), but I thought I detected a trace of what a writer like me would call her vast displeasure giving way to something more prosaic like…
well, befuddlement. Graeme blinked a lot, and sweat glistened at his hairline, but in all fairness, anyone in their right mind would have reacted that way if Vivienne cornered them.
I inched closer, positioning myself near a group of middle-aged writers who had chosen to share a pizza in, of all places, a public hallway.
They were laughing at something that involved saying the word hobbits over and over again.
I took out my phone, pulled up the conference schedule, and tried to figure out what Vivienne needed to talk to Graeme about.
The schedule for the rest of the day was fairly simple.
There was another block of panels. Then there was a short break, followed by the welcome social.
The following days offered more of the same—my panel was at the end of the final day, which I hoped (fingers crossed) meant it would be poorly attended.
“Excuse me.” The speaker had graying hair, pink-framed glasses, and a shirt that said QUOZY. He was looking right at me.
“Uh, hi,” I said and braced myself for another reader who had enjoyed A Work in Progress.
“Did you pay for the pizza?”
“I’m sorry?”
He pointed to the box of pizza—from Fratelli’s, an excellent choice. “You can’t have any if you didn’t chip in.”
“Oh, I didn’t—”
“Because we paid for it.”
“Right, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to get any pizza. I’m not even in your group.”
“You’re not?” he asked. Then, over his shoulder, he called, “Karen, is he in our group?”
Karen was apparently a bluff-faced blond woman with massive shoulders who took one look at me and shook her head.
“Then what are you doing?” the man with the pink glasses asked me. “Because you can’t have any pizza.”
“I was looking at the schedule. I’m sorry, I needed—”
“You’re doing your one-on-one,” the man said with a nod, as though that decided it. “You’re nervous.”
“My one-on-one?”
“He’s not in our group,” Karen shouted. “He can’t have any pizza.”
“He doesn’t want any pizza,” the man in the pink glasses shouted back. “He’s about to do his one-on-one. He’s too nervous to eat. He’d probably throw up.”
“Well, I don’t think I’d throw up—” I tried.
“Who are you meeting with?” That question came from a tall, thin woman with a mane of hair down to her waist.
A heavyset man with a Castlevania T-shirt said, “What’s your book about?”
I had a vague memory of registering for the conference and being given the option to purchase a one-on-one meeting with an author or agent. I’d chosen not to—mostly because having to talk about my writing with a stranger sounded like yet another personal nightmare.
“When are the one-on-ones?” I asked.
“At seven,” the man with the Castlevania T-shirt said—clearly under the assumption that I was an idiot. “Didn’t you look at the schedule?”
“Who are you meeting with?” asked the tall, thin woman again.
“Is there a master list somewhere?” I said. “A way to check who was meeting with whom?”
The man in the pink glasses frowned. “No.”
“It’s a one-on-one,” Karen said. “You don’t need to be nervous. Come on, have some pizza. We’ve got plenty.”
“You don’t want to do your one-on-one on an empty stomach,” the man in the pink glasses said.
“You’re going to do great!” the tall woman said—she even did jazz hands to show me how great I was going to do. “You can practice on us!”
By that point, fortunately, Vivienne was on the move again. “Thank you so much,” I said. “But I don’t want to be late.”
A chorus of cheers and good wishes followed me, which is proof that we writers might be weird and awkward and grumpy and protective of our pizza, but we’re also good at supporting each other. And that’s pretty cool.
I lost Vivienne around a corner, and when I made the turn, there was Julian.
“Dash, perfect timing—”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said as I slipped past him. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Ahead of me, a wall of glass gave a view of Arcadia College’s campus, which was quickly disappearing into the evening’s gloom.
Vivienne exited through a pair of doors, and I picked up the pace.
On the other side of the windows, a veranda overlooked Quick Creek, which separated the conference center from the main campus.
A few people stood outside, clustered together in conversation or, in a few cases, alone, almost all of them holding drinks from the bar.
Vivienne moved toward the far side of the veranda.
When I stepped outside, the air was purple and hazy and already cooler than it had been even a short time ago.
The faint smell of clove cigarettes hung in the air.
Murmured conversations drifted around me as I worked my way down the veranda, doing my best to keep to the thicker shadows at the edge of the lights.
Vivienne had settled into a seat at a two-top patio table.
Across from her sat a petite woman with her dark hair in a bun, a hint of curls pulling loose at her nape.
She had yellow eyes and the kind of nails that meant she never had to open a jar of pickles.
Right then, those nails were tensed against the metalwork of the table.
Of course, as soon as I started eavesdropping, the volume of the other conversations swelled. A man brayed with laughter. A woman screamed, “You’re joking! You’re joking!” Someone got to the most exciting part of what sounded like a long story about a boat.
I couldn’t get any closer to Vivienne’s table without sitting in her lap (a big no-no for me ever since the devastating truth about Santa Claus), and all I could catch were fragments.
“—threaten me—” the petite woman said.
Vivienne smiled and said something that ended with “—always sensible.”
The petite woman stood. Those pretty nails glittered as she grabbed her bag.
She leaned down, but if the move was meant to threaten Vivienne, Vivienne held her ground—she didn’t pull back, she didn’t flinch.
The petite woman said something low, pulled the bag up her arm again, and finished, “—what you deserve.”
And then she stalked off—not into the conference center, but down the veranda steps and into the night.
For several minutes, Vivienne stayed where she was. If the argument—or threat, or whatever it was—had upset her, she gave no sign of it. She didn’t fidget. Her expression didn’t change. Then she checked her watch and got to her feet.
Instead of following the petite woman, though, she turned in the other direction down the sidewalk. When she passed out from under the globe of the security light, she dissolved.
Following Vivienne out into the dark was not a good idea. In fact, it sounded like exactly the sort of thing Bobby had told me not to do. If we’re being honest, it sounded like the kind of thing a particularly stupid character in a prologue might do before becoming the first murder victim.
But, on the other hand, if I were Vivienne Carver, and if I wanted to do something evil/wicked/dastardly, it would probably involve sneaking off somewhere in the dark.
Right?
I found a lot of holes in that argument.
But.
I said several words under my breath—words that mystery writers love to use in moments like these.
And then I headed after her.
The night grew colder as I moved away from the conference center.
Colder, and darker, and quieter. Too quiet, as a matter of fact, as voices faded behind me, until the only sounds were my steps on the sidewalk, and the ripple of moving water, and the wind in the trees.
Security lights were spaced at regular intervals along the path, along with emergency callboxes and cameras.
This was, after all, a college campus. But the light only reinforced the darkness—emphasizing how much lay beyond the reach of those little bubbles of safety.
I made my way along the sidewalk. A nightbird called.
Something moved in one of the trees. A long way off, on the other side of the water, someone laughed, and shadows that might have been people moved against the dim backdrop of lighted buildings.
The wind was like a hand on the back of my head, giving me a shove, and I yanked my jacket tighter around me.
How stupid are you, I asked myself.
Apparently, very.
There was still no sign of Vivienne. Had she cut off the path and looped back? Had she spotted me, and this was some elaborate deception—a way of throwing me off her trail while she went back to doing whatever she did?
It was possible. Barely.
But I didn’t think she’d noticed me.
Ahead, the ground to the side of the path rose up, so that I found myself walking between the creek on one side and, on the other, the rocky face of a bluff. The sound of the water swallowed my footsteps.
Then the bluff curved away, opening up, and I saw the grotto.
A few floodlights lit it dramatically: an irregularly shaped cave set into the face of the stone, within which a waterfall poured down.
In the floodlights, the spray caught iridescent sparks and flecks and threw a dozen miniature rainbows.
Benches lined the pool at its base, and then the water flowed down a stone channel until it met the creek.
The air was damp, freezing, full of a mineral, metallic smell that was so thick I could almost taste it.
And then I saw her.
Vivienne floated in the pool, a spot of crimson in the weak light. She was facing me. Her eyes were open. And her face was covered in blood.