Murder Most Conventional

by Verena Rose (ed)

  Worse, I’m not dressed for it. I’m a New Yorker. Not one of those people who populate the farms upstate, but a New York City girl, born and raised in Middle Village, Queens. I thought it was cold when I left home, but it’s much worse here.

  Before you begin to feel sorry for me, don’t. I’m here for an inventors’ convention with my lint-collecting dryer sheet prototype, the Lint-Locker—the guaranteed way to ensure your laundry doesn’t get covered in lint—so I can meet James Maguire O’Reilly, megastar inventor. As soon as I’d found out he was going to be running workshops and hearing inventor pitches—something he never does—I’d registered, even though it meant coming to Maine in January. I signed up for every one of his morning workshops, and I’m going to make sure he notices me. He’s going to love my product and help me get financial backing for it. All he needs is to hear my pitch.

  Soon enough I’ve found my destination, a chain hotel on the edge of town. It has cookies in the lobby, racks of brochures, and a fake fire.

  “I’m here for the inventors’ convention,” I say when I catch the front desk clerk’s eye.

  She takes my name and completes all the formalities quickly. “The event takes place at Bayview House.” She hands me my card key.

  “Where is that?”

  “It’s out of town about seven miles away. It’s a beautiful old house overlooking the bay.” She smiles an awful lot but doesn’t have what I recognize as a Maine accent.

  “It didn’t say that in the literature. I assumed the convention would be here, at the hotel.” I bend down to root through my bag to convince her that she must be wrong. I can’t find the literature and suspect that if I did, there wouldn’t be anything about where the actual sessions were going to be held. I straightened up.

  “It’s all in here.” She hands me a folder with the convention logo on the cover.

  What did it matter where the sessions were as long as I had a chance to get to know James Maguire O’Reilly? I had to get to know James Maguire O’Reilly.

  “Are all the convention people staying here?” I ask in a psycho-calm voice.

  “Yes,” she says. “Everyone except the speakers, or I mean, experts. They’re staying someplace else.”

  “Oh. Where are they staying?” The desperation in my voice is so obvious it covers me in a cloud of crazy.

  “I’m not sure,” she says in a tone that clearly shows it’s me, rather than their location, that she’s unsure of.

  “Oh well,” I say, smiling as if I’m fine about this, which I’m not.

  “There’s a swimming pool with a hot tub,” she says, as if any hotel amenity could make up for these disappointments.

  “What a shame. I’d definitely have brought a suit if I’d known,” I lie. I know whale hunting is illegal, but given my age and physique, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “You could go get one at the sportswear store?” Her tone is questioning, as if she already knows the answer is no. “It’s open twenty-four/seven for the post-Christmas sales. You could get a swimsuit there.” She motions to a brochure on the counter advertising said store.

  “Isn’t that great,” I say. Twenty-four/seven? Really? Up here?

  “It’s world famous,” she adds.

  Like I’m going to drop my bags at eight o’clock at night and rush over there. I enjoy shopping, don’t get me wrong, but this place is just not what I thought it would be, you know?

  I go to my room and stay there.

  * * * *

  The next day, the first day of the convention, I don’t bother with breakfast and am on the road before I see anyone else. I have my heat cranked up high, and I’m still freezing. I’ll have to break down and get myself to the world-famous store and buy outdoor gear that doesn’t make me resemble some sort of half-woman/half-animal, all-blubber creature.

  The directions to the wonderful and awe-inspiring location where the actual event is taking place—the organizers’ words, not mine—send me through the town. In the dawn light, with snow flurries drifting down, the place looks even more plastic than it did the evening before.

  Have you noticed how anything that’s described in glowing terms is always a pain to get to? The main road goes on a bit, and then, when I turn off, whammy. Within minutes, I’m in the middle of the forest. Well, not really, but it’s countryside, pretty countryside, and I can see there’s a lot of trees up ahead.

  I can’t study the landscape, though, because the road is getting narrower all the time and the uneven surface makes me anxious for my car’s suspension. This little Korean rental, wincing and grinding its wheels in protest, doesn’t seem up to the task. What was the guy at the rental desk thinking giving me such a flimsy vehicle? I told him I’d be driving around, and he should have known what was needed in his own state.

  The evergreen trees are becoming denser. The snow on the ground is getting deeper, and, of course, there aren’t snow tires affixed to this car. All I need now is to run into a moose. Apparently, one contact with a moose and you and the car are history. It’s not like hitting a deer. Nope. Slamming into a moose is roadkill apocalypse.

  Just when I’m absolutely sure I’m lost, someone pulls out of a side road a little ahead with a sign for the Swallow Motel. I have no idea where they’ve come from, but I’m glad not to be alone. I’d deliberately left early because I wanted to be at the convention when James Maguire O’Reilly arrived so I could be sure to get a seat right near him in the first workshop. I don’t care how pushy that sounds. I didn’t spend all this money not to get as close as possible.

  The car ahead slows down, and I see Bayview House, large and old and elegant. It’s gorgeous. And not just because I’m relieved to see it. Even better, the parking lot in front is almost empty. We care a lot about parking where I come from. The person in front of me gets out. She’s young and blond. I watch this gorgeous creature step daintily over the recently ploughed snow in low-heeled leather riding boots. I hope she’s not in my workshop. I can’t afford anyone distracting James’s attention from me.

  I walk into Bayview House and can see it’s just the right place for the muse to sit and whisper in one’s ear. I’ll bet I come up with a new product idea every day I’m here. The huge hallway has many doors, and a carved wooden staircase rises with a full-length, wisteria vine stained-glass window at the bend. James Maguire O’Reilly is going to fit right in here.

  I won’t bore you with the checking in and the chitchat, but let me say this: I avoid everyone else. I have no interest in talking with inventors who will either have too high an opinion of their product and make me want to laugh, or have no confidence in it at all and make me want to cry.

  * * * *

  Standing by the fireplace in the library where we are to have the first session, I take a quick look around before training my eyes on the door across the room. The walls are lined with books with only a surprisingly small fireplace and two windows to break them up. The space is cavernous, with a long table sitting in the middle of the floor. There are eleven other people waiting, but I haven’t spoken to any of them because it would be just my luck to get distracted and find myself sitting far away from James.

  “Hi, everyone,” James Maguire O’Reilly says from the doorway.

  “Hi, Mr. Maguire O’Reilly,” all twelve of us say in a raggedy way that makes it sound like his name is even more elaborate than it is.

  “Call me James,” he says looking around from one to the other of us. He is even more attractive in person than on television and in magazines. Who’d have thought it? I suspect, and my own observations have backed me up, that people use pictures taken years before, on a particularly good day, for their promotional material. He looks just as if he’d walked off the back of his books with his blond wavy hair and perfectly symmetrical face.

  We all scramble to sit near James at one end of the table. I barrel my way to the seat on
his left. When we are ready to start, the beautiful girl from the parking lot comes in. Unlucky thirteen, but I don’t think she will be the unlucky one. She’s rushing and breathless, as unwelcome as the last-minute plane passenger arriving just when you think you have a row of seats all to yourself. How could she be late when she’d arrive more than an hour before? James hurries to push an extra chair up to the table directly across from where I’m sitting, edging out an older woman who looks as sick as I would have felt had he done that to me.

  “It’s so nice to meet you. I’m Brandi,” she says, holding out her hand to James. Her voice is so whispery it makes my throat itch. Close up, I see she’s older than she appears, at least thirty underneath all that like-you-have-nothing-on makeup.

  James cocks his head to the side like a questioning dog and takes her hand without saying a word.

  Like being drawn to like, James and the girl chat for a couple of minutes as if they’ve known each other forever, almost ignoring the rest of us. I don’t know what the others are thinking, but I’m pissed.

  Finally, the workshop gets underway. I’m the first to present. We’re allowed five minutes to pitch, after which we’ll be critiqued. I’d practiced and practiced until I was sure of every nuance and emphasis of my voice, with every movement designed to show off my product to its best advantage. Now I lean forward in my chair and flash my best smile. I’m going to sell the hell out of my Lint-Locker. I’m not so sure about the name but say it with pride, hoping James will help me come up with a better one, if needed.

  Brandi taps her pen on her notebook, a metronomic sound, and it throws me off. I don’t need accompaniment. I pause from time to time, hoping my glare will stop her, hoping James will stop her, but the tapping continues. I fumble and my yellow and blue rectangular plastic prototype flies across the table, landing in James’s lap. He picks it up, handing it across to me as if I were a dog who’d dropped her battered chew toy at his feet in the park. I flop back in my seat when I’m done, feeling so disappointed that my moment to shine has been wrecked. I hate Brandi.

  “Interesting product, but you need to change the shape, color, size, and name.” James says.

  I write all this down. He looks at me, and I want to tell him I’d cut off my own legs if it would lead him to champion me to his investors, or better, invest in me himself.

  “I thought the color worked,” says a rotund man with a pronounced grayish mustache that appears to be sprouting directly from his nose and not his upper lip. He smiles at me, and I smile back. Well, grimace really.

  “Do you think so? Why do you say that?” James asks him and they’re off. I wish I could concentrate more on the discussion and less on Brandi, who stares blankly at the rather haphazard fire in the cast-iron grate.

  Did I mention I’m still freezing? Yeah, turns out this old place is all beauty and no warmth, the fireplace be damned. Just like Brandi. I smile at my metaphor and mustache man clearly thinks I’m smiling at him because he winks.

  Most of the presentations are tedious. The older woman next to Brandi, who is even more besotted with James than I am, feels it necessary to tell us her own very traumatic life story and barely mentions the weird multicolored shoe-warmer inserts that are supposed to keep you “toasty” (her word, not mine) no matter how cold it gets or what else you wear. She clasps these ugly things to her flat chest as if they are sacred relics. She cries as she reaches the end. James is kind to her, and she cries some more.

  Then we get to Brandi. She is last, of course, and she glances around from one to the other of us before beginning.

  She holds up a box and starts reading from a sheet of paper in front of her. She stumbles and pauses over the description of a mousetrap that lures the vermin in with music—apparently Brahms is most effective. It’s clear to me she hasn’t invented this thing. You know your own work. She repeats the word extraordinary over and over as if it’s the only adjective she knows. You might stumble over the errors you didn’t catch in your presentation (even though you’d read it aloud to yourself over and over), but you know what is coming next, for goodness sake. Not only does she mispronounce annihilation, but she sounds it out first, as if she doesn’t have any idea at all of what the word is, like she’d never had it in her head. When she holds up the gadget, dangling it from two fingers like a dead mouse, the name—Killing Them with Kindness—is upside down.

  Brandi is stealing someone else’s work, it’s as clear as the exquisite nose on her oh-so-regular face. I wait for the trap to snap, for the cat to pounce, for the girl to be called out on her perfidy.

  “That was a great presentation of what will be a very successful product, Brandi,” James says.

  “Do you really think so?” she asks, her eyes ablaze.

  “Yes. The use of music is a unique selling point.”

  Selling point? Was he kidding? What about practicality? What about usefulness? What about the fact that this chick isn’t even pitching her own idea?

  I gaze around the table to see what the others think. They are all staring down except for mustache man who winks at me again.

  “We’ll finish things there and break for lunch. Afterward, we have a talk on the importance of having a good marketing strategy. And we’ll meet here tomorrow for our next workshop,” James announces. “I know a great spot to sit and eat lunch,” he says to Brandi, who walks away with him. It is of slight satisfaction to me that James is quite a bit shorter than her.

  “I do, too,” mustache man, whose name is Benjamin, says to me, and close up I see that he isn’t winking at all but has some kind of a twitch. He’s tall though, and that’s something. Not much, but something.

  “Where are you from?” Benjamin asks when we are seated with a few dozen other people in the dining room. The bowl of vegan salad, our only choice, looks as appetizing as the insides of a lawnmower bag.

  “New York City. You?”

  “I live in South Carolina.”

  “You must be even colder than I am,” I say.

  “Yes, yes, it’s extraordinarily cold here for someone from where I come from.”

  “James seems to like Brandi an awful lot,” I say.

  “Of course he does,” Benjamin says.

  “I liked your pitch. It reminds me of something, but I can’t think what,” I say. He frowns and I add, “Very good, it was very good. I’d buy it.” Though there wasn’t a single chance that I would buy an adjustable shoe horn.

  “Thanks. I liked your product, too. Don’t change it just because O’Reilly says so,” he says, twitching up a storm.

  The rest of the day is agony. I don’t need to tell you much except to say that James and Brandi spend the entire time together as we sit through two boring lectures. I’m so cold by the time the day ends I think I could have packed up and gone home, if it weren’t for the slight, faint hope that James would come to his senses and drool over my Lint-Locker. I consider the possibility as I run out to my car before Benjamin can catch me and offer yet again to take me to dinner at some place named the Hacienda Grill. Hacienda? In Maine?

  * * * *

  I can’t sleep. It’s cold. I turn the thermostat to the highest setting and wait. Not even a puff of air. I wonder what the symptoms of frostbite are and whether the fact I can’t feel my feet is cause for concern. The clock, which is bright enough to read by, says 3:10 a.m. I call down to the front desk, and after several rings, someone answers. I’m surprised but relieved that there is a person on duty to deal with emergencies—like my imminent death from cold.

  “It’s cold in my room,” I say.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. There’ll be someone coming to fix the boiler tomorrow morning. Until then, you’ll find extra blankets in the closet,” the young man says.

  Extra blankets? Is he kidding? We’d passed the extra blankets phase a long time before.

  “The heating is on in the lobby area,”
he says.

  “The lobby?”

  “Well, yes. The ground floor is heated by a different boiler. You could come down here.”

  I mean, really? Not that it would have been a bad idea if James had been staying with us. Then I’d be down there hoping to score time with him. But as it was...

  “No, thanks,” I say and hang up.

  There’s nothing for it but to go to that all-night place and get myself a coat. A cheap coat that would, in all likelihood, make me a dead ringer for a yeti. But do I care? I could walk into the session with James tomorrow wearing a combat uniform and no one but mustache man, I mean Benjamin, would notice.

  I layer on as many clothes as I can and head down toward the parking lot.

  As I near the lobby, I hear someone splashing in the indoor pool. At three a.m. Don’t they lock that baby up at night? Unlike most pools I’ve seen, this one doesn’t have windows all along the sides. I see Brandi through the door, standing in what I assume is the hot tub section of the pool wearing a white bikini that fits her perfectly. Trust her to find a warm spot in this place. Her head is bent back and she’s laughing, putting on a show, and peeking up at someone I can’t see. I come closer, but when Brandi glances my way, I leave. I don’t want her to think I’m interested. But what if it’s James with her? Luckily, the thought of him cavorting with Brandi makes me sick. Missing that sight takes no willpower at all. I walk out of the lobby, get into my car, and after a little coughing and groaning, it starts and I drive away.

  There’s a line at the outdoor clothing place’s checkout counter. A line at three thirty in the morning. This certainly isn’t anything at all like the Maine of my imagination. But within twenty minutes I’ve paid for a deeply discounted cerise-colored thermal jacket. It fits over all my layers and is guaranteed to keep me warm even without layers, which is good, because with the layers I resemble a poorly stuffed sausage.