The Mysteries of Max Box Sets 3

by Nic Saint

  I saw she’d parked a ways away from the library. She probably didn’t want to advertise the fact that she’d called in her private feline army to deal with this latest murder emergency. Even though Odelia can talk to cats, and so can her mother and grandmother, no one else can, and they would think it strange if they saw a grown woman speak feline.

  We watched Odelia lock up her pickup and stalk away in the direction of the library. I felt for my human. She looked more stressed and downhearted than I’d ever seen her.

  “I hope they don’t lock up my human,” said Harriet, who must have read my mind.

  “They won’t,” I assured her. “Your human’s brother is the chief of police, and he would never lock up his own sister. Humans don’t lock up their own kin.”

  Actually, they probably did, but this wasn’t the time to discuss worst-case scenarios. This was the time to rally round and tackle this dreadful murder business which had suddenly struck very close to home indeed.

  “Let’s do this,” I said, and we were off to the races.

  Chapter 4

  When Odelia tried to enter the library she discovered a police officer had been stationed at the front door—possibly the first time that had ever happened. He was one of those stalwart types: buff, with a slight pudginess in the belly area, and sporting a nicely trimmed mustache, which doubled as a donut crumb collector.

  “Um, I need to get in there?” she said tentatively.

  She’d recognized the cop as one of her uncle’s guys and she was pretty sure the cop had recognized her as well. He shook his head, though, and stared over her head as if silently hoping she would take a hint and simply melt away into the background.

  “Oh, come on, Jackson,” she said. “Don’t give me that dead cod look.”

  This stirred him out of his self-chosen apathy. “I don’t look like a dead cod,” he said indignantly.

  “Yes, you do. Now are you going to let me in? My mom is in there and she needs me.”

  “Your mom is a suspect, Poole, and unless you’re her lawyer you’re not setting foot anywhere near her.”

  “I was wrong,” she said. “You’re not a dead cod. You’re dead, period. Or at least dead from the neck up.” She tapped his noggin. “Yup. Just what I suspected. Solid ivory.”

  He had the good grace to look offended. “I’m just doing my duty. Please go away.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, but if you don’t step aside you’re the one who’s going away.”

  That seemed to register. Officer Jackson obviously knew that Odelia was his boss’s niece, and not just any old niece but the man’s favorite niece, who’d helped him out with quite a few investigations in the recent past. What was more, she was now dating one of Hampton Cove’s foremost police detectives.

  He still continued undecided, though. That’s the trouble with making decisions: either way you go, there are going to be consequences so it’s probably better not to do anything.

  Odelia decided to try a different tack. “Come on, Jackson. Have a heart. That’s my mother in there. What if it were your mom?”

  “My mom would never get involved with murder,” he said a little huffily.

  “Hey, that’s something we’ve got in common: my mom wouldn’t get involved with murder either!”

  He rolled his eyes. “Chief Lip told me not to let anyone in so I’m not letting anyone in.” Clearly feeling this was the last thing he was prepared to say on the matter, he clasped his hands behind his back and directed his gaze in the middle distance, studiously ignoring this pesky troublemaker.

  Incensed, she poked him in the stomach, burying her index finger to the knuckle.

  “Hey! That’s police property,” he sputtered, touching the offended spot.

  “Oh, fine,” she said, throwing up her hands and walking off. She turned back to the cop, walking backward now. “This isn’t over, Jackson. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, making a throwaway gesture.

  She hurried around the side of the library, where a paved footpath was lined by mulch-covered patches of rosebushes, made her way to the back, then hung a sharp left before arriving at the service entrance which doubled as the library’s emergency exit. To her surprise, her uncle hadn’t stationed anyone at this door, and she blew right through and into the short corridor that led to a small cafeteria and a dressing room slash storeroom where authors and guests could get changed before stepping onto the stage for their readings.

  Odelia took a quick peek inside the dressing room and held up her hand in greeting for Sarah Flunk, another one of her uncle’s officers.

  “There’s no one guarding the backdoor,” she said.

  “On it,” said Sarah with a nod.

  “Have you seen my mom?”

  Sarah gestured with her head. “Library. Your uncle is talking to her now.”

  Moving past a stack of unpacked boxes—newly acquired books yet to be cataloged, Odelia pushed through the door and into the library. She’d arrived at the left of the stage, and the first thing she saw was Abe Cornwall, the county coroner, leaning over what was unmistakably the late Chris Ackerman—the self-proclaimed world’s bestselling writer.

  She blinked, not expecting to come upon the dead man quite so suddenly.

  Chris Ackerman was still seated in his chair, leaning precariously to his right, a large crimson spot on his white shirt, a pen of some kind sticking out of his neck.

  Abe looked up when he sensed her presence. “Oh, hey, Odelia. I liked that piece you did on Philomena, the blind groundhog. Has the rescue shelter found her a new home yet?”

  “Um…”

  “Oh, well. If they haven’t, my wife wants to take the plunge. Francine is simply crazy about pets, and figures why not a groundhog this time? Why always cats and dogs, right?”

  “Right,” said Odelia, staring at the dead man as if transfixed. Even though she’d reported on crime plenty of times in her career as a reporter, and solved more murders than most journos, the sight of a dead person never failed to unnerve her to a great extent.

  Abe, a scruffy-looking man with a pronounced paunch and gray hair that seemed to explode from his scalp in classic Einstein-style, returned his attention to the dead writer. “Such a pity, huh? Francine loves his books. Especially his Max Frost series. Read every single one of them. I’m more of a science fiction and fantasy reader myself. Give me a good Asimov or Ursula Le Guin any day over Chris Ackerman.” He shrugged and produced a cheerful smile. “I guess my wife will have to find herself a new favorite writer.”

  “How did he die?” asked Odelia.

  “Fountain pen to the jugular. Or, more accurately, the carotid artery. Very apt, I suppose. For a writer, I mean. Mind you, there are better ways to go.”

  “I’ll bet there are,” she murmured.

  Abe tsk-tsked as he scrutinized the fountain pen.

  “What is it?” asked Odelia.

  “Looks like he was killed with his own pen, too. That’s not very nice.”

  Odelia agreed that killing a writer with his own pen was not a nice thing to do, and left the coroner to continue his examination.

  Stepping off the stage, she spotted her mother seated in the kids’ section of the library, along with Uncle Alec, while Chase was talking to Odelia’s dad while taking copious notes. Odelia’s grandmother, meanwhile, was seated in the PC nook, surfing the web.

  Odelia made a beeline for the pirate ship where her mother and uncle were seated, and the moment Mom spotted her, she got up, stepped out of the ship, and they hugged.

  “I’m so happy you’re here,” said Mom. “This is a nightmare.”

  Chapter 5

  So we were sleuthing again. And if I say sleuthing I mean looking for clues the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel way. I have to confess I’d never liked the Hallmark Channel before. Over at Marge and Gran’s house they watch that stuff all the time, and it hasn’t done Dooley any favors. It’s turned him into a sappy cat. Sappy as in
overly mawkish, especially when it comes to Harriet, on whom he’s had a crush since just about forever.

  Harriet and Brutus had gone off to circle the block and talk to any animal they met—except for dogs—Harriet was sticking to her decision not to let any mutt so much as breathe on her flawless white fur—and Dooley and I watched them stalk off. Yes, detective work is a lot like being a Mormon missionary: it’s all about you and your buddy, knocking on doors and spreading the word.

  “Max?” said Dooley, even before we’d put one paw in front of the other.

  “Uh-huh?” I said, searching around for our first potential eyewitness.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “You are talking to me, Dooley.”

  “I watched the Discovery Channel last night.”

  Progress. It would appear that the Hallmark Channel was losing its dominant position in the Poole household.

  “And? What did you learn?” I asked.

  He suddenly shivered. “Nothing good,” he intimated.

  This didn’t surprise me. Oftentimes people—or as in the case of Dooley pets—respond to being weaned off the Hallmark Channel by experiencing dizzy spells and bouts of insomnia. “It’ll pass,” I assured him as I looked up at the streetlamp we were standing under, and wondered how long it would be before the first dog trotted over to use it as a urinal.

  “There was this documentary on about the end of the world as we know it,” Dooley continued. His eyes had widened to their full dilation. “Max—it won’t be long now before the entire country is either swallowed up by a gigantic tsunami of ocean waves, or the earth simply opens up underneath us, or Yellowstone finally erupts and kills us all!”

  Oh, boy. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to advise Dooley to stop watching the Hallmark Channel after all. “Look, Dooley—I’m sure you misunderstood. Nothing is going to drown us or crush us or—”

  “Cover us in boiling lava!”

  “—or that. Are you sure you were watching the Discovery Channel and not some fringe crackpot conspiracy show?”

  “I don’t think so. Gran was watching so I decided to join her. And let me tell you—I was terrified!”

  “What did Gran say?”

  “She fell asleep five minutes in.”

  Good self-preservation strategy. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. It’s called alarmism and it’s never done anyone any good. Just forget you ever saw that show.”

  “It wasn’t a show—it was real! They showed diagrams.”

  “Never trust a diagram.”

  “They had real scientists! They had PhDs!”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, wondering how to steer the conversation away from natural disasters and the end of the world and back to our all-important murder investigation.

  “It was very scary. I think we should talk to Odelia. We need to move countries.”

  “And go where?”

  He looked at me earnestly. “New Zealand. Mark Zuckerberg bought a house there.”

  “Oh, well, if Mark Zuckerberg bought a house, we should probably all go there.”

  He heaved a sigh of relief. “I knew you’d agree. Now we need to convince Odelia.”

  Just like a child, Dooley is impervious to irony. Luckily, also like a child, Dooley’s attention span is extremely limited. So I simply decided to change the subject.

  “I say we enter the library first,” I announced.

  “To talk to Odelia about the volcano?”

  “To check the crime scene.”

  “Crime scene?”

  “The dead body. Haven’t you noticed that almost every Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel detective stumbles over a dead body in the opening scene and takes it from there?”

  Dooley was staring at me. “I don’t like dead bodies, Max.”

  “I don’t like dead bodies either, Dooley. But like it or not, we’re detectives now, and detectives look at dead bodies.” I spread my paws. “It’s the only way to solve the mystery.”

  He looked pensive for a moment, and I could almost see the wheels and gears in his head turning and grinding away. Finally, he said, “Fine. Let’s look at the dead body.”

  “I mean, how can we solve a crime if we don’t know what the crime is all about?”

  So we crossed the road and tripped up to the library. A large cop was blocking the door, so we decided to go around back, where hopefully there would be another way in.

  To be perfectly honest I wasn’t looking forward to visiting this so-called crime scene either, but if watching my fair share of Hallmark Movies & Mysteries had taught me one thing, it was that most detectives weren’t born sleuths but had sleuthing thrust upon them.

  All I ever wanted was to be a regular, happy-go-lucky cat, but through some strange twist of fate I’d had my human Odelia thrust upon me, and she had thrust detecting upon me and now here I was thrusting the same thing upon Dooley. Trying to figure out why one human murdered another human. I guess sometimes life is just weird that way.

  Chapter 6

  “So what happened?”

  Odelia’s mom shook her head. “One minute he was fine, and the next he was… dead.” She looked up, and Odelia didn’t like the look of anguish on her mother’s face. “Do you think he could have done this to himself? That I was talking to a man in great psychological pain, suffering through great stress, and that I didn’t pick up the signs?”

  “The coroner seems to think it was murder,” said Odelia carefully.

  “No one sticks a pen in their own neck, Marge,” said Uncle Alec gruffly.

  Odelia directed a censorious look at her uncle. He was a fine police officer, but his bedside manner left something to be desired. Uncle Alec, a rotund man with russet sideburns and an equally ruddy face, held up his hands in supplication and heaved his bulk out of the pirate ship. Since the ship wasn’t made for humans—and definitely not for outsized humans—it took Alec some wriggling and silent cursing before he managed to exit the ship, hike up his pants and stalk off.

  “I’ll be over there—talking to my mother,” he muttered.

  “Oh, honey, you have to figure out what happened,” said Mom the moment they were alone. She’d grasped Odelia’s hands and squeezed them tightly. “A man was murdered. In my library. Who would do such a thing?”

  It wasn’t immediately clear whether she was talking about the murder or the fact that the killer had chosen the library as the place to do his or her dirty work, but Odelia decided to put her mother’s mind at ease. “I’m on it, Mom.” She darted a quick look around to see if Chase wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity. “And so are the cats.”

  “You enlisted the cats? So quickly?”

  “I picked them up before I drove down here. They’re searching around for witnesses and clues as we speak.”

  Her mother didn’t seem reassured by this evidence of feline sleuthing prowess. “Your uncle thinks this might be the work of a common thief. Chris Ackerman’s wallet is gone, and so is his watch, his phone and whatever other valuables he might have had on his person.”

  “They probably came in through the service entrance while you weren’t watching,” said Odelia thoughtfully.

  “I only let the man out of my sight for, like, half an hour or so! I was talking to Tex and your grandmother, checking the front of the library, when I heard a strange sound.”

  “What sound?”

  “Like a cry? That must have been the moment he was attacked. Oh, my goodness. To think we were so close to the killer. If only I hadn’t left Mr. Ackerman he might still be alive.”

  “Or you might be dead, too,” said Odelia.

  Her mother emitted a soft whimper. “What a horrible thing. And now people are going to say I did this—or your grandmother.”

  “I’m sure they won’t.”

  But her mother wasn’t listening. “At the very least they’ll accuse me of gross negligence. I allowed the world’s favorite writer to be murdered on my watch. At the library! Which is supposed to be
a safe haven. A place where people come to be transported into another world.”

  Chris Ackerman definitely had been transported into another world. Permanently. Odelia watched as Chase stood chatting with the coroner—presumably trying to wrangle an initial report from the man.

  “How was your date, by the way?” asked Mom, her sad demeanor suddenly replaced with a more cheerful expression. “Did Chase finally pop the question?”

  “Mom!”

  “What? You’ve been dating for so long now it’s almost as if he doesn’t want to marry you.”

  “Marriage is the furthest thing from our minds, Mom.”

  “Oh, that bad, huh? At least tell me he broke the news to you gently.”

  “What news?”

  “That he’s seeing another woman.”

  Odelia produced a frustrated noise at the back of her throat. “He’s not seeing another woman, Mom. And why would he ask me out on a date to break up with me?”

  “It’s the proper way to end things. Go out on a high note.”

  “He was working his way towards something, but it wasn’t a breakup.”

  “So what was it?” She clasped her hands to her mouth. “He’s already married!”

  “What? No! I think he was going to suggest we move in together, only you called and then Uncle Alec called and then we both had to leave.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, honey,” said Mom. “If I’d known I wouldn’t have called.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s a good thing you did. This has been a very traumatic experience for you, Mom.” She patted her mother’s hand. “How is Gran taking it?”

  Mom cocked an eyebrow in Gran’s direction. “She’s just fine. I think she’s even enjoying the whole thing. Something to tell her friends. Or write about on her blog.”

  “Gran has a blog?”

  “Blog or vlog. I’m not sure.”

  “I’ll have a word with her.”

  “About the blog?”

  “About the murder.”