Double Booked For Death

“I guess she wasn’t quite the witch she pretended to be,” Darla observed after they’d settled on the horsehair sofa, displacing a miffed Hamlet in the process. “But the way she treated Mavis at the autographing . . .”

“Pretty much an act,” Reese said. “Morris and I had another informal chat after you two left. Apparently, the whole Valerie-as-diva thing was a put-on. They figured it was best to have the public Valerie Baylor be something of a bitch. That way, if a fan or an interviewer asked her a question about the books that she couldn’t answer, she could blow them off, and people would figure that’s just how she was. It also helped protect Mavis. They were afraid if the two of them got too chatty together, it would call attention to her, er, him. And that was what Morris was trying to avoid from the start. Social anxiety disorder is what he said it’s called.”

“Jeez, you’d think the guy was rich enough to afford counseling, or at least a bottle of antidepressants,” Jake broke in.

Darla gave her friend a disapproving glance. “It’s not always that easy. I once worked with a woman who refused to go out to lunch with the rest of the department. We all thought she was a snob. Then one day she told me she just was afraid to eat in front of anyone, couldn’t swallow a bite if anyone was looking at her. I’m sure Morris does the best he can.”

Jake appeared unconvinced, but she dropped the subject of the author’s brother for the equally confusing motivation surrounding Hillary.

“Her, I don’t get, either,” she said of the agent. “Wasn’t killing off Valerie basically killing off her golden goose?”

“Not necessarily,” Darla answered. “If Valerie’s death really had been an accident—or if Morris had thought it was—Hillary could have cut a deal with Morris directly. They could have said that Valerie had a couple of finished manuscripts sitting around and then put them out posthumously under her name. And once everyone got used to her being dead, Morris could have officially been authorized by the estate to keep writing under her name. It’s been done with a lot of authors before.”

Then another thought occurred to her, and she sat up straight in her seat.

“Lizzie’s manuscript!” she exclaimed, drawing looks of surprise from the other two. “Jake, remember in the basement how Hillary claimed that Valerie had stolen other authors’ books, and that she couldn’t even write a shopping list? It sounded like maybe other people had the same thing happen to them that Lizzie said had happened to her. So Lizzie probably was in the right, even though she tried proving it the wrong way.”

“You think?” Jake said with a snort. Then, turning serious again, she said, “But I still don’t understand why Hillary hated Valerie so much. The way she was carrying on, it sounded like something personal between them.”

She turned to Reese, who shrugged and said, “That’ll probably come out in the trial. I can make a couple of guesses, but that’s all they’d be. It’s not like a cop show on television, where the perp spills her guts as soon as she’s arrested. You should know that better than anyone, Martelli.”

“Yeah, so I like my murders tied up in nice red ribbons. So sue me.”

Darla gave her friend a commiserating look. She liked things tied up in nice red ribbons, too. She’d also read somewhere that greed was the number one motive for murder, closely followed by fear and jealousy and rage. All of them seemed likely reasons for the agent to have snapped. But perhaps it was something even more basic. Maybe Hillary, suffering from paranoia because of her drug use, had felt betrayed on a personal level when she learned Valerie was not who she had claimed to be and had felt compelled somehow to punish the woman.

Before Darla could ask what would happen to Hillary next, an ear-searing yowl from Hamlet made her jostle her champagne. She turned to see the cat sitting on the chair in front of her laptop, pawing at the screen. Alarmed, Darla rushed over to see what had caught his attention. The screen was displaying the interior of her store, along with a dark figure as it slid through the shadows past the cash register and then disappeared somewhere near the locked case of collectible fiction.

“Jake, Reese, come quick,” Darla called, barely able to keep the panic from her voice. “Someone’s in the bookstore again!”

Her cry was unnecessary, for the pair had already rushed up behind her. With no more movement to trigger it, however, the single channel view already had subsided back into the usual six-segment display.

“What did you see, and where?” Reese demanded, leaning in closer.

Darla pointed, leaving a champagne fingerprint on the screen. “There. Whoever it was went behind that shelf.”

“Can you switch views and show that part of the store?”

Darla shook her head in frustration. “That’s one of the blind spots Ted told me about. None of the cameras catch it.”

“What about sound?” Jake prompted. “Didn’t he set up some audio, too?”

“You’re right, I forgot.”

Fingers shaking, Darla pulled up the on-screen menu and found the audio option. Turning up her computer’s speakers, she could hear the hiss of an open microphone . . . and then, the soft sound of stealthy footsteps. Then came a sharp thud, which Darla recognized as a book hitting the floor. That noise was followed by what sounded like a gasp and a small voice saying, “Oh my gracious!”