Chapter 25
You know good sleep? Like, really good sleep?
There is literally nothing better.
(Okay, there’s that. But that falls in the category of strictly none-of-your-business.)
(I mean, if I had to say something, though, it would be that if you ever find someone who makes you feel treasured and safe and beautiful and, uh, ready to go, then yeah, you should probably hang on to them.)
(God, why am I still thirteen years old on the inside?)
Poor Bobby woke sometime after dawn so he could go to work; by my sleep-addled calculations, we’d only been asleep for frumpteen minutes, but I got up long enough to give him a kiss before collapsing onto the pillow again.
The next time my eyes opened, it was nine.
Now, nine o’clock isn’t a great wake-up time. In my opinion, frankly, we’d all be a lot happier if the day didn’t get rolling until eleven, eleven-thirty.
But listen: some days you wake up warm and glowy and like everything inside you has turned into honey butter.
(The most delicious of all butters, unless we’re talking savory, and then obviously it’s garlic butter.) I felt so good—aches and pangs and bruised throat aside—that I couldn’t even be mad that it was only nine.
Also, someone—several someones—were talking in the hall, and some of them were making zero effort at all to keep their voices down.
“Because if he’s naked, I’ll be forever scarred.” That was Fox. “There are things that one simply cannot unsee.”
“If he’s naked, then Keme should wake him up,” Millie said with cheery matter-of-factitude. “Because he’s a boy.”
I didn’t know, until that moment, that you could actually hear a teenage boy’s horror.
“What about Indira?” Keme said with what was unmistakably desperation.
“You’re all being silly about this,” Indira said. “Leave him alone. He’ll wake up whenever he wakes up.”
I didn’t want to get into the weeds, but I felt like Indira was undermining her own point.
Normally, she tended toward the quiet side, but this last statement had a quality I remembered hearing as an adolescent.
I called it parental-volume-you-can’t-ignore, and no matter what they said, it was always on purpose.
“If he is naked,” Fox said, “I don’t want to see his shanks.”
“I’m not naked!” I shouted. (Although—check—yes, I was.) “And I don’t even know what a shank is!”
“It’s your leg!” Fox shouted back. “But a less attractive word for it!”
“Well, look at that,” Indira said. “Dash, we’re all happy you’re awake. I’ve got breakfast ready.”
“It’s WAFFLES,” Millie announced.
“You can’t have any,” Keme told me.
“And PANCAKES!”
“You can’t have any pancakes either.”
“AND APPLE CINNAMON CRUMB MUFFINS!”
Okay, here’s the thing: waffles and pancakes are literally the food of the gods, but Indira’s apple cinnamon crumb muffins made me levitate out of my bed.
In a tee and shorts, I opened the door.
And Millie screamed.
This was immediately followed up by a collision—Millie crashed into me and grabbed me in a bone-rattling hug.
“YOU PROPOSED TO BOBBY!!!!”
I’m not even kidding: I couldn’t hear anything for about thirty seconds after that.
Eventually, though, Millie released me. Indira kissed my cheek and told me she was happy for us.
(At least, I think that’s what she said—my ears were still ringing.) Fox tried to get me to smoke a candy cigar with them (they were dressed like a nineteenth-century banker who got caught up in the shootout at the O.K.
Corral—a heavy wool suit, sleeve garters, and cap guns strapped to their hips).
(Also, I thought the manly smoke-a-cigar thing was about having a baby, but honestly, everything straight men did was a mystery to me.) Keme hugged me—not exactly bone-rattling like Millie’s, but in its own way, weirdly as intense.
He whispered, “I told him if he hurts you, I’m going to kill him.”
Okay, that was it. I was done. I melted.
And then Keme added, “And if you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”
At which point, he tried to knee me in the, um, nuggets.
All in all, a mixed message.
When I finally freed myself, I somehow got out the question: “How did you know?”
“Bobby gave us money to get a hotel room,” Millie said. “So you could have the house to yourselves last night.”
And then she giggled.
I was an adult. I was mature. I was independent. I was a successful author.
But ladies and gentlemen, I blushed. Again.
“And this morning,” Keme said, “he told us how you screwed everything up.”
“What?”
“He didn’t say that,” Indira said with a chiding glance at Keme. “Bobby told us that you had proposed to him. Now come on; we want to hear everything over breakfast.”
So, I told them. I skipped over some of the heavier details and focused, instead, on the happy stuff, making particularly sure to emphasize how brave I’d been, and how I’d taken the initiative, and how I hadn’t let my fear of navigating relationships hold me back from making the best and most important decision of my life.
(And yes, there were waffles and pancakes and apple cinnamon crumb muffins. And, almost as importantly, there was bacon.)
And when I finished, Fox said, “You didn’t have a ring?”
“That’s what made it so romantic,” I said. “It was a moment of raw emotion.”
“Because you didn’t have a plan.”
“Bobby had a ring,” Indira said as she topped up Fox’s coffee. “And a plan. He asked me for some feedback, and I told him his idea was lovely.”
“Wait, you knew he was going to propose?” I asked.
“Of course, dear.”
“Okay, yes, well, I didn’t have a plan because I was at a disadvantage—” I tried.
“You can say that again,” Fox muttered.
“Why didn’t you get down on one knee?” Keme asked.
“Because I—it wasn’t the right time.” Everybody stared at me. “And the coffee table was right there!”
“I can’t wait to see the FLOWERS!” Millie announced.
I kind of stumbled into the next silence.
Millie’s (loud) excitement transformed into (equally loud) disappointment: “DASH!”
“What don’t you people understand about a wellspring of raw emotion?”
“You should have taken pictures,” Keme told me.
That betrayal cut deep. “You hate pictures. I said I wanted a picture of the two of us, and you laughed. And then you hit me with that pillow.”
Keme shrugged.
“Did you have to talk him into it?” Fox asked with what sounded like despair.
“No, I didn’t have to— No!” But they were all still staring at me. “Clearly you didn’t understand, so I’m going to have to explain it again. In detail, this time.”
Fox groaned.
Keme reached into his hoodie for his earbuds.
Millie perked up.
And Indira patted my shoulder as she pushed the apple cinnamon crumb muffins my way, saying, “They’re teasing, dear. We’re all happy for you.” And then she added, “It would have been nice to have a ring, though.”
Keme actually snickered.
I was about to object to this treatment—and inform them of my sudden decision to elope, and that nobody was invited except me and Bobby and Gilberta from the Cakery (listen, I couldn’t trust this wedding cake to anybody else)—when my phone buzzed.
It was Bobby.
“Will you please tell these jokers that my proposal was heartfelt and beautiful and full of—”
“If he says ‘raw emotion’ one more time,” Fox said, “I’m going to suffer a fit of emesis.”
“Full of love,” I snapped. “Tell them!”
Bobby’s silence lasted a beat too long, and then he said, “Your proposal was really sweet, babe.”
I couldn’t help the shrill rise to my voice. “Really sweet?”
“Listen,” Bobby said, “I can’t talk long. We might have a lead on who attacked you.”
“Seriously? That’s great.”
“Your number one fan claims he was keeping watch last night, trying to protect you, and saw someone park a car on the state highway and sneak up toward the house. Whoever it was drove off when I came home, but he thinks he can identify the car.”
“Uh, that’s less great,” I said. “In fact, it sounds like a story Spenser made up to prove that he wasn’t the one who broke into the house and attacked me. Did you notice he hurt his leg?”
“According to him, the stress of meeting you made his gout flare up.”
“Did he say something about gout?” Fox asked.
“The sheriff thinks he might be telling the truth,” Bobby said. “Or mostly, anyway. Besides, we got an anonymous tip that might finally give us a break in the case. Get this: those one-star reviews on Simona’s book? The caller insists Whitney posted them.”
“An anonymous call seems…convenient.”
“I know, but we’ve got to check it out. I don’t know if we can track IP addresses from ten years ago, but we’re going to pull her in and see what she says.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, that’s great.”
“I just wanted to let you know. I think we’ve got this, babe. You stay safe.”
We disconnected.
“So, that’s it?” Fox said. “This woman, Whitney, she’s the one who killed Vivienne?”
“I…guess. I mean, maybe?”
Fox said something under their breath that almost made my gout start acting up.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it makes a certain kind of sense. Maybe Whitney was jealous of Simona. She might have thought if she could make Simona’s debut a failure, she’d be next in line.
And if Robert figured out Whitney was the one posting those reviews, Whitney might have killed him to cover it up.
And then, when Vivienne figured it out, Whitney might have killed her to keep the truth from coming out. ”
Indira made a sound that suggested this was a lot of mights.
“What about your number one fan?” Millie asked.
Keme made a gagging noise.
“He sounds SUPER shady.” Excitement at a new possibility brightened Millie’s eyes. “WHAT IF THEY DID IT TOGETHER?”
“It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know why Spenser would have killed Vivienne or Steven or be helping Whitney. He loved my book—”
“It makes one wonder, doesn’t it?” Fox murmured.
I chose to ignore that. “—and he was a little overbearing, but I can’t figure out why he would do any of this.”
“Obsessed fans don’t need a logical reason for what they do,” Fox said.
“In this one episode of Law that story needed to be burned, and someone needed to perform an exorcism on the ashes.) But maybe I could be convinced that years ago, Whitney had killed Robert.
Or, alternatively, that Spenser had killed Vivienne because he thought he was protecting me.
He certainly hadn’t liked Vivienne; that had come through clearly enough.
Neither version of events, though, seemed very compelling.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. A glance at my phone showed me the time. “Shoot; I’ve got to get to my panel.”
“What’s it on?” Fox asked.
“It’s on—”
“It sounds boring; I’m not going.”
It’s hard to talk through gritted teeth, believe it or not, but somehow I managed, “It’s on publishing options. Indie versus traditional.”
“I stand by what I said.”
“You’re going to do GREAT!” Millie informed me. It was more of a command than an encouragement.
“I don’t know about ‘great,’” I said. “I guess I’ll tell them I turned to indie publishing as a last resort because I couldn’t get anyone interested in what I was writing.”
“Yes,” Fox said. “Open with that.”
I chose to ignore that as well. As I rose from the table, I said, “Maybe I’ll share some of Vivienne’s words of wisdom.”
“Stab them in the back?” Keme said.
That made me grin. “No, she wrote me this letter—God, it’s a whole thing, and I don’t have time to explain. The short version is if you’re going to write a letter that’s supposed to be your failsafe, don’t wander off on a tangent because you’ve got a bone to pick with traditional publishing—”
But I barely finished the sentence, and the last words trickled out of my mouth.
Because what if it hadn’t been a weird soapbox rant?
What if Vivienne had been thinking about publishers for a reason?
Simona’s deal for her debut novel.
Her gratitude to Robert Kessler.
My name on the list of one-on-ones to meet with Vivienne.
The fact that Vivienne had gone to the grotto, alone, at night, when she should have been so much smarter.
Steven’s death, out of sight of the cameras that covered campus, and with no defensive wounds.
The attack on Charlie.
“His brain broke,” Fox said.
Keme whapped me on the back.
I scrambled for the stairs—for the piece of evidence that had been sitting in my room since Thursday night. “I know who did it,” I said as I ran. “And how.”