I only read murder, p.25
I Only Read Murder, page 25
With a triumphant flourish, Miranda pulled open the desk drawer and . . .
Nothing.
There was no secret compartment from which to withdraw a vial of poison. Of course not. When actors produced items from the supposedly secret compartment that was tucked out of sight inside the drawer, they did so through the power of suggestion. They just pretended there was a secret panel; they pretended there was a hidden compartment. It’s what actors do. They pretend.
The stage desk was as sturdy as the real thing, though, this being Burt Linder’s handiwork. Anything he built was built to last.
Inside the desk drawer was another yellow police maker, almost mocking them. This was the missing number 12, closing out the set. Miranda considered the sequence of the police markers again: 1 to 7 backstage, 8 to 12 on the stage itself—and that one anomalous number 13, out of sequence, backstage near the work area, like an afterthought.
And inside the deep drawer of the desk: number 12, and nothing else. Other than this single police marker, the drawer was empty.
“They must have taken everything out.”
Miranda reached inside to check, ran her hand along the bottom and the inner edges. Nothing. It was empty all the way down.
“Dang it all to heck,” she said, channeling her inner Pastor Fran.
Feeling discouraged, Miranda walked out to center stage. Susan joined her.
“I really thought there would be an actual secret panel,” said Miranda.
Susan was sympathetic. “If it makes you feel better, Burt wanted to install one, but Judy said it would have caused problems for the actors. What if they couldn’t open it in the middle of a performance? So Burt ceded this point. ‘Concessions have to be made,’ is what he said.”
Miranda looked at the darkened theater. She remembered that first audition. Judy’s comfy seat in the middle and twelve folding chairs for the actors. No. Not twelve chairs. Thirteen. Rodney had had to scramble to place an extra chair on the stage for Miranda.
“I just made it to the audition,” she said. “Under the wire. Thanks to you, Susan.”
“With only minutes to spare,” Susan said fondly.
“Seems so long ago now.” Then something twigged. She turned to Susan. “Burt said concessions? Is that what he really said?”
Susan nodded. “He said, ‘Concessions have to be made, I suppose.’”
“That’s funny. He said the same thing to me about an episode of Pastor Fran.”
And now Susan’s phone was ringing.
Unlike Miranda, she didn’t need to rummage; her phone was where it always was, tucked in the designated side pocket of her purse. When Susan checked who was calling, she blanched. She showed Miranda: HAPPY ROCK PD.
“What do I do?” she whispered.
“Answer it. No! Don’t!”
“I have to answer.”
“Don’t! Wait. No. Yes, answer it, but be cool.”
“Hello, Susan speaking.” She listened, said “I see” and “Mm-hmm,” and then handed the phone to Miranda. “It’s for you.”
Gulp.
“Yes!” said Miranda with false bravado. “It is I.”
“This is Officer Holly Hinton, Happy Rock PD. I called your number, but you weren’t answering.”
“Terribly sorry about that. I’m out for my nightly constitutional, a stroll along your magnificent waterfront, and I’m afraid I hadn’t thought to bring my cellular phone with me.”
“You’re walking along the harbor?”
“That’s right.”
“No. You’re not. You’re inside the Opera House and you need to come out.”
Miranda, bluffing. “An outrageous accusation! What makes you think we’re anywhere near the theater?”
“I saw you go in through the window. You need to come out, okay Miss Wiggly Bum? You and your pal. You need to leave. Right now. We’ve already swept the scene, and the police tape isn’t up anymore, so I suppose I can’t charge you with entering a restricted zone, but it’s still trespassing.”
“But—”
“Listen. I’m on the last hour of my last shift of my last night before I start a much-needed and long overdue maternity leave. I’m too tired and too pregnant to go in after you. So you have to come out, okay Nancy Drew? And bring George with you.”
Is that who we really are? thought Miranda. Not Starsky and Hutch, not Crockett and Tubbs, not even Turner and Hooch, but just Nancy Drew and her best friend Georgia, aka “George.”
“I’ll give you exactly four minutes. After that, I will charge you with interfering in a police investigation.”
“But—but we were searching for evidence. To help clear Edgar’s name! And evidence found is as good as evidence gained. That’s what they say!”
“No one says that. Let me guess. You were looking for a vial of green liquid labeled POISON.”
“Er, yes.”
“And you figured we were too dumb to have looked in the drawer.”
“Not the drawer. The secret drawer!”
“There is no secret drawer.”
“Well, yes, I realize that now. But still.”
She could hear Holly sigh on the other end. She didn’t even try to hide it.
“Yes, we found the vial,” said Officer Holly. “And yes, there was a green liquid inside. And yes, we sent it to the lab.”
“And?” Miranda asked eagerly.
“It showed a high concentrate of triarylmethane dihydrogen monoxide.”
“Aha!”
“That’s the chemical formula for food coloring and tap water. There was no poison in that vial. And anyway, we already found the source of the boric acid that killed Annette Baillie. We were going to make the announcement tomorrow morning anyway, so you might as well know. It was Carl who did it.”
“Carl! I knew it! I was right all along.”
“Not the murder, Nancy Drew”—Miranda really wished she’d stop calling her that—“the poison. Carl was the one who discovered it. On our third pass. I was too pregnant and Ned was, shall I say, a little too ‘pleasantly plump’ to really get under the work cupboard. But Carl? Well, you know how athletic he used to be. Was the star of our high school. Before my time, but the legend lives on. Anyway, he crawls all the way along the bottom. Spots it waaaay in the back when he shines his flashlight underneath. Asks me for a coat hook and we pull it out. It was her water bottle. The bedazzled one. That’s what caught his light: the rhinestones. She was always leaving that bedazzled bottle everywhere. Anyway. The water still inside was laced with boric acid. She must have kicked it under the cupboard during her death throes.”
Number thirteen, Miranda realized.
That was why the police markers were out of order. They’d found Annette’s water bottle after everything else had been collected and tagged.
That number rattled around in her head.
Thirteen . . .
Something was tugging at her sleeve. Miranda handed the phone back to Susan, then pointed to the darkened sound booth at the rear of the auditorium.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
Miranda made her way down the stairs on the side of the stage and then hurried up the aisle, past the seats to the very back. She disappeared through the CREW ONLY door that was next to the main entrance.
* * *
SUSAN WATCHED FROM THE STAGE, ignoring Holly’s repeated “Hello? Hello?” on the phone.
The lights in the sound booth came on.
Susan could see Miranda’s silhouette for just a moment before the lights went off again. Miranda then came back out, but instead of walking down to the stage, she opened the auditorium doors. The low lights of the lobby spilled out, then the doors closed behind Miranda—on a muffled thump. What was she up to?
Susan was alone onstage with only the ghost light and the increasingly irate voice of Officer Holly to keep her company. “So help me, I will lock the both of you up and throw away the key!” Susan tried to remain calm. But a sudden loud noise from behind startled her. It was the grating sound of the heavy backstage doors.
MIRANDA BURST ONSTAGE, out of breath, nodding—but satisfied—as though having unwrapped something crucial.
“You went all the way around?” Susan asked. “Through the lobby and then in from the back?”
Hands on hips, still panting. “As fast as I could. And as quietly as I could.” Miranda held out her palm. “You can give me the phone. Thanks.”
“Time’s up, Nancy Drew,” Holly snapped. “Go get George and go.”
“Can you at least unlock the front doors?”
“You got yourself in, you can get yourself out. Same way.”
The patrol car was parked in the alleyway, with Holly no doubt watching, amused, as Miranda wormed her way out through the window into the alley. Holly’s last official duty as an officer.
After they’d screwed the latch tight again and moved the bin back—under the baleful eye of Happy Rock’s finest—Miranda and Susan walked over to the parking lot feeling suitably chastened.
They sat in Susan’s car, and Miranda told her what Holly had said, how it was Annette’s water bottle that had been poisoned, not the chipped glass.
Annette had been the target all along, right from the start.
“We were asking ourselves who wanted to kill me,” said Miranda. “The answer is: no one. So the real question is, who wanted Annette Baillie dead?”
Susan was very quiet. “Owen,” she said. “It has to be him.”
“Except Edgar told me that Owen had already won his case against Annette.”
Susan wasn’t convinced, though. “Revenge is a dish best served cold. Maybe he still wanted to exact his.”
“No,” said Miranda. “It’s not Owen. We’ve been looking in the wrong place all along.” She turned to Susan with renewed determination. “I want you to drop me off at McCune’s Garage. There’s someone I need to talk to. I’ll meet you back at the bookstore, okay? And Susan?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful. Bring Chief Buckley with you. Just to be safe.” She rummaged in her bag. “I have one last call to make, and then we can go.”
She dialed Carl’s number.
“Officer Carl? Miranda here. Can you pick up Rodney and meet us at the murder store? I’ll explain when I get there. I know it’s after hours. Susan will let you in.”
OWEN MCCUNE’S GARAGE was closed up for the night. There was a light on, but it didn’t matter, because Miranda wasn’t going to McCune’s. She had a different path to follow.
She had to be absolutely certain before she went any further. She couldn’t afford another misstep.
Behind McCune’s Garage, a gravel lane curved into the forest, shrouded by evergreens under a partial moon. A log cabin at the end of it and a pickup truck parked out front.
Miranda stepped up, onto the front porch, took a steadying breath—and knocked.
“Hello, Burt,” she said when he opened the door.
He eyed her warily. “It’s late. What brings you out here?”
“I just had a couple of questions. About the set.”
“Sure. Come inside. I’ll boil us up some tea.”
But Miranda stayed on the porch. Didn’t go in. Smiled tightly instead. “I’m fine out here, thank you. This won’t take long.”
“Okay. Suit yourself. What did you want to ask me?”
“You built the entire set, yes? From scratch?”
“Yup. Exactly to scale.”
“Exactly?”
“That’s right.”
“So you would know how it all works? How it fits together?”
“Yup.”
Miranda smiled. “Thank you.”
“Anything else I can do for you?”
“There is, yes. If you wouldn’t mind, could you give me a ride up to the bookstore? I don’t have a vehicle, and I need to drop by and pick something up. Would you accompany me?”
“Of course,” he said. “Let me grab my keys.”
Anything for a lady. He was gallant to a fault, our Burt.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
J’accuse!
Burt was surprised when it was Chief Buckley who opened the door. This was not who he had expected at Edgar’s bookstore late at night, after hours.
“Ned?”
“Hiya, Burt!”
Ned was in uniform and on duty, and he beamed at the Deadly Spy of Happy Rock like a schoolboy. Oh right, thought Miranda. The man crush. Let’s hope it doesn’t get in the way of this.
“Come in, come in,” said Ned. “Susan’s setting up.”
They followed him down the hallway, lined with books, into the main room. Susan had rolled the display tables back to open up the center space. She’d placed five chairs of various vintage in a straight line, with the sixth chair facing them. It looked like the setup for a very intimate book reading.
Murder was in the air, which was appropriate considering where this was taking place.
When Susan saw Burt, she was equally surprised. She came over, whispered to Miranda. “Not Owen?”
“I walked to Burt’s from the garage instead,” Miranda whispered back. “That way, I could ask him for a ride afterwards. If he’d heard a vehicle, Burt would have wondered.”
Burt stood, surveying the room: the heavy desk, the high shelves, the chairs that Susan had lined up for them.
“Expecting someone else?” he asked.
“Why would you say that?” said Ned, hand resting on his holster.
“Simple math. There’s only four of us, but there’s six chairs.”
“Hello?”
It was Carl’s voice from the front hall, and he appeared soon after, out of uniform, with Rodney in tow. Rodney, as always, was dressed in drab colors, with his head low.
“Perfect!” said Miranda. “Let’s begin. Everyone, please take a seat.”
Burt had assumed Ned Buckley would be the one facing them, but Ned sat down next to everyone else.
“What’s going on?” Burt asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Ned. “This is like an episode of Pastor Fran. I just wish Bea was here to enjoy it.”
And, in that moment, it was clear to Miranda that Ned Buckley had an affection for Bea so deep it could almost be mistaken for love. It was also clear that he wasn’t taking any of this too seriously.
Miranda chose to stand instead. She addressed them as one might a theatrical audience.
“Good evening, one and all. Let me begin by saying, thank you. Thank you for coming out this evening, thank you for—”
“It’s late,” Burt grumbled. “Think you can get on with it?”
“Certainly.” This would normally be where she would thank the sponsors, but there were none, except maybe the bookstore itself, so she pushed on. “I swapped glasses onstage. I had assumed that Annette had been poisoned by mistake when she drank from my glass. Which would have meant that I was the intended victim. But the poison was actually in Annette’s bedazzled water bottle, not in my chipped glass. I was not the target of a murder plot. It had been Annette in the crosshairs from the start. So I had to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew. And one name kept surfacing: Denise Penty, Graham’s wife.”
A murmur from the audience.
“She had motive. As she herself said, ‘Annette ruined my husband’s life. Everything she touches turns toxic.’ Toxic. That is how Denise described it. Was she tipping her hand on the method of murder? Denise seemed more bitter about Annette’s relentless hectoring of Graham than he himself did. Denise’s failed foray at Yale could have also played a part in it. The former Pride of Happy Rock removing the reigning Pride of Happy Rock. There would have been a certain poetic appeal to that. But beyond motive, she also had the means. Melvin mentioned that Graham never came in to the fertilizer store to pick up night soil or pesticides because—and I quote—‘his wife did all the gardening.’ But what of opportunity? The killer had to have access to the backstage area. I tried. But it would have been impossible for someone to slip out of the sound booth, make their way backstage, drop poison into Annette’s water bottle, then slip back out again and return to the sound booth without being seen—or heard—from several different vantage points and by several different people. It wasn’t Denise Penty, even if she had cause to want Annette dead and the means to do it.”
The expression on Ned’s face had shifted. This no longer felt like a party game. Miranda was zeroing in on something. Or someone. But who?
“Rodney,” she said. “Unlike Denise, you spend a lot of time backstage. Practically live there, am I right?”
Anger in Burt’s eyes. “What is this? Are you accusing him of something?”
“No. Not him.”
Any levity was gone. Things were serious now. Deadly serious.
“You helped out with the auditions, right, Rodney? You put out the chairs for us, yes? The big comfy one for Judy and twelve more for the actors, correct?”
He mumbled in assent, nodded.
“But then what happens? I show up at the very last moment and you have to scramble to find a chair for me, too. That must have really bugged you.”
“A little.”
“And for that, I apologize. But you do understand that I had signed up according to proper and rigorous protocol—as per the Giant Book of Regulations—and that my fees had been covered before I ever stepped onto that stage to audition?”
“I guess.”
“You sound unsure. Here, let me show you.”
Miranda crossed over to the rolltop desk, opened the shallow drawer, took out Susan’s ledger and receipt book, and held them up to show Rodney, as though they were Exhibit A in a trial.
“My name is listed in this ledger, and a receipt was written for my membership fee. You can confirm that, right, Susan?”
Susan nodded.
Miranda lay the ledger and receipt book to one side, turned her attention to Ned. “The Case of the Missing Pocketbook. Remind me. Who solved that one, Ned?”
“No one, really. It sort of solved itself.”
“But that’s not entirely true, is it?” She looked to Susan for confirmation. “It was Edgar. That’s who found your pocketbook and returned it to you. Is that right?”
