Books, Blogs, and Bloody Murder

by Michelle Ann Hollstein

  “Nice of you to join us, Chuck,” Melanie said.

  Aggie couldn’t tell if it was part of her speech or if she was being sarcastic due to Chuck’s tardiness.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Chuck replied.

  Melanie handed the microphone to Betty who was still sitting on a stool behind the table.

  “Um… hi,” Betty said, standing up. She stared at the group of people. There were maybe thirty people at most in the bookstore. And about ten were sitting and listening. “I’m Betty Wilcox… um…” Betty froze. She looked like a deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming car. “I-uh… um…”

  Aggie could see Anita sitting in the first row of chairs waving her hands and mouthing something to Betty. Betty stared at her.

  “Oh no,” Aggie sighed. She had no idea what Anita was trying to tell Betty, but she hoped it didn’t make things worse. Aggie eyed Anita as she pretended to take off her clothing and then pointed at the audience.

  Betty’s lips shook as she grinned. Again, she looked at the audience. “I-I, um, started writing my amateur detective series online as a blog. And I was amazed when my stories went viral. Since I was receiving such amazing feedback from my fans, I continued to write more stories.

  Recently, I’d been receiving emails from fans asking if my series was available in print. So, with the help of my cousin, Roger,” Betty nodded at Roger who smiled and then twitched his reddish-brown mustache, “I had published my stories as a book. My stories are actually loosely based on my best friend, Aggie.” Betty then nodded in Aggie’s direction and everyone turned to look at her. “Aggie and I have been friends for over twenty years now.”

  Again, Aggie felt her cheeks redden with embarrassment. She forced a small smile which was more like a grimace. She worried it made her appear as though she had gas. She tried harder to smile.

  Betty then thanked everyone for coming out to see her and handed the microphone back to Melanie.

  “Thank you, Betty!” Melanie said. “Betty has copies of her book available, so please make sure you get a signed copy of The Aggie Underhill Mystery Collection. Since we still have a few minutes, does anyone have any questions for Betty?”

  Several hands went up into the air. Betty smiled and batted her eyelashes.

  “Yes,” she said pointing. “How about that handsome gentleman over there?”

  Melanie nodded to him.

  “Yes, I have a question.” The man stood up and cleared his throat. “My question is for Aggie…”

  Mortified, Aggie’s jaw dropped. She looked at Betty whose smile faded. For a moment, her jaw dropped too. “Oh, um… sure,” Betty said. “What’s your question? Maybe I can answer for her since I’m the one that wrote the book.”

  Aggie smiled sheepishly, again, wishing she could disappear. She slunk down as far as she could into her folding chair.

  “Sure,” the man said. “The story about Aggie being kidnapped in Oceanside by the baker… was that also based on a true story?”

  “Yes,” Betty said. “That actually happened. Of course, I changed the names and, well, you know…”

  “Really?” The man turned to address Aggie. “And the baker had killed her son’s fiancé?”

  Aggie nodded, and when she found her voice she said, “Yes, yes, that’s true.”

  “Wow! That’s amazing!” The man’s eyes lit up. “Can I get your autograph, too?”

  Aggie’s cheeks flushed. She could feel all eyes on her. “Um, yes, if you’d like.”

  A short, thin woman said loudly, “I want Aggie’s autograph, too!”

  Several other voices began to chatter animatedly.

  “Is it true you caught a purse thief at the street fair?” asked an older gentleman with a straggly comb-over of white hair.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say I caught the thief,” Aggie said, feeling horrible that she was stealing Betty’s moment of fame. She glanced at her friend apologetically. Betty was standing in front of the table holding the microphone with an overly large fake smile plastered on her face.

  Roger snatched the microphone from her. “Yes,” Roger said, motioning to Aggie. “It’s true! Aggie did catch a purse thief by tripping him. And that’s how she met Officer Tom Wood. Isn’t that correct, Tom?”

  Anita turned around in her seat and squealed. She clapped her hands excitedly while staring at Tom. “I just love a good love story! Is that how you met?” All eyes were now on Tom and Aggie.

  Tom smiled. “Well, yes, that part is true.”

  Again, Anita squealed with delight. “And Roger is the cheapskate cousin in Betty’s stories. Right, Roger?”

  Roger shot Anita a look and then smoothed his thick reddish-brown mustache with his forefinger. “Cheapskate… ha ha, yeah, good one, Anita. Remember, everyone, Betty’s stories are fiction. You can’t believe everything you read,” he chuckled. He was second-guessing his decision of having invited Anita to the book signing.

  “Everyone that would like to buy a copy of Betty’s book will have a chance to get it signed by both the author and her amateur detective,” Roger said, nodding at the table. “Aggie, would you like to come up here? Melanie do you have an extra chair or a stool?”

  Put on the spot, Aggie stood up. As she approached the table, Melanie motioned for Chuck to bring up another stool.

  When Aggie sat down, she realized Betty was gone. “Where’s Betty?” Aggie asked Roger.

  Roger looked around. “Bathroom, probably,” he said. “Coffee runs right through her.”

  “Maybe I should go fetch her,” Aggie said, feeling uncomfortable. She worried that Betty was upset. The last thing she wanted was to ruin her best friend’s special day. Betty was supposed to be the center of attention, not her.

  Just then, there was a loud crash and what sounded like books falling from somewhere in the store, followed by a scream.

  Tom, although off duty, jumped up from his seat and hurried in the direction of the commotion. Aggie hopped off her stool, almost knocking it over.

  ◆◆◆

  Chuck was standing next to the body of a woman. The tall, red-headed woman from the coffee shop was also standing near the body. Her hand was clamped over her mouth and her eyes were wide open. She appeared to be in shock.

  The older woman lying on the floor had short, copper, permed hair. Her gold wire frame glasses were crooked, and her head turned to the side. Mouth open.

  Books had been pulled down from the shelves and were scattered all over the floor around her.

  Aggie immediately recognized the woman. She’d been sitting in the coffee shop, reading a newspaper, before Betty’s book signing. The newspaper and magazine section was right by the entrance. Often, people brought newspapers and magazines to read while sipping coffee. Aggie racked her brain. There’d been something that’d struck her as odd at the time when she’d noticed the woman, but she couldn’t pinpoint, why? What was so odd about it? Aggie shook her head. She wasn’t sure.

  “Oh my God!” Betty shrieked, coming up behind them. “Is… is she… dead?”

  “Yes,” Anita said, clicking her tongue while standing next to Aggie. “Tsk, tsk, tsk… I bet she had a heart attack.” She glanced at the romance novels on the floor and shook her head. She picked one up with a half-naked man on the cover.

  “Lock the front doors,” Tom said. “And call for an ambulance.”

  Melanie was peering over Chuck’s shoulder as Tom kneeled and checked for a pulse. As he’d expected, there wasn’t one. He frowned. “Don’t let anyone leave until instructed. Okay?”

  Melanie nodded and scurried to the front door.

  “You think this was murder?” Anita gasped. She held out a different romance novel with a picture of a couple in a loving embrace for Tom to see. She tapped on the picture. “You sure it’s not a heart attack? I’m usually not wrong about these sorts of things.”

  “I’m not sure of anything yet,” Tom said. “At this time, no one is to leave the store. Understand?” H
e glanced at Anita. “Why don’t you help me by escorting people over to the book signing? Give them something to do while we sort things out.”

  Anita nodded and smiled. She loved being put in charge. “Okay, everyone!” she said, loudly. “Book signing is about to start. Let the officer do his job. Give him space. This way, please! There’s nothing to see here!”

  Aggie eyed the books scattered all over the floor and at a disposable coffee cup that’d rolled and stopped near a bottom shelf.

  Tom stood up and directed everyone to step away from the body while Anita busily herded people over to Betty’s book signing. Tom then slid his cell phone out of his pocket and called in the incident.

  Several minutes later, Betty was sitting at the table, sobbing into a wad of toilet paper she’d brought with her from the bathroom. She hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d been crying because her so-called fans appeared to be more interested in Aggie than herself. So, in a morbid sort of way, she was happy the murder took attention away from her. She hoped, people would think she was crying due to the incident, and not due to her jealousy and hurt feelings over Aggie stealing her thunder. She knew it wasn’t Aggie’s fault, but it still hurt.

  Aggie sat at the table next to Betty and signed copies of the books, feeling awful. She tried hard not to look at the photo of the provocative woman with her face on the cover of Betty’s book wearing way too little clothing. Every time she caught a glimpse of the cover with tons of cleavage and lots of shapely leg, she didn’t feel quite so bad.

  ◆◆◆

  The following morning, Aggie sat at her kitchen table, exhausted. There was something about the woman’s death in the bookstore that had bothered her. She’d been restless all-night thinking about it.

  After the arrival of the paramedics, the customers and the employees of the bookstore had left their contact information with Officer Tom Wood in case any questions came up. After that, they were free to go. There wasn’t any evidence that the woman had been murdered. And due to the woman’s age, per the paramedics, her death appeared to be natural causes and not foul play.

  Aggie stared at her half-empty mug of coffee and contemplated making something for breakfast. However, she was feeling overly tired from the nagging feeling that something was wrong. Dead wrong. She wanted to ask Tom if they’d found anything in the woman’s autopsy, if there’d been an autopsy. But she knew what he’d say. He’d tell her to leave things be. Aggie frowned. She couldn’t just leave things be, not when she had a gut feeling that something was wrong.

  Just then, Aggie heard her front door open and Roger called from the entrance hall. “It’s just us!”

  “Come on in,” Aggie answered. Betty lived in the condo next door, and the three of them generally had coffee together in the mornings on the weekends. She’d been expecting them.

  Roger entered the kitchen with Betty following closely behind. He carried a large pink box of donuts in one hand, and in the other, a small box of gluten-free cookies for Aggie. He set them both on the table. “Look who we found on your doorstep.”

  “Yoo hoo!” Anita cooed, entering the kitchen while twiddling her fingers. “I got here at the same time as Roger. How lucky is that?”

  Aggie groaned and rolled her eyes. So much for living in a gated community, she thought. “I thought you went back to Sarah’s to help with the children.”

  Somehow, Anita was always impervious to Aggie’s eye-rolling and sarcastic tone. She either didn’t notice or she didn’t care. “I decided to stay an extra day in Palm Springs. Isn’t that great?” she squealed. “Now we can have girl time before I drive back.”

  “Oh?” Aggie raised an eyebrow. Don’t you mean fly back on your broom? She kept that thought to herself.

  “It was Sarah’s idea,” Anita said, taking a seat at the table. “She said it’d be good for us.”

  Aggie frowned. She’d make sure to call and thank her daughter for sending Anita her way.

  “Girl time?” Roger scorned. “I’m not a girl.”

  “Not you, silly-Billy,” Anita laughed, waving her hand nonchalantly at him. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he grumped.

  Betty plopped her lavender laptop down on the table. She had dark circles beneath her eyes. She yawned.

  “Oh my!” Anita said, looking at Betty and then over at Aggie. “You both look awful! I hope you’re not getting sick! If so, I’d better leave immediately!”

  “I’m not sick,” Betty snapped and then yawned again. “I was up all night writing my blog.”

  “I might be getting sick,” Aggie lied, hoping Anita would hightail it back to Oceanside. When no one seemed to notice she pretended to cough and sniffle. Cough, Cough. Sniff, sniff.

  Instead, Anita beamed at Betty. “Did you post your story?” she asked. “You know, I’m your biggest fan!”

  And the loudest fan, Aggie thought while reaching for the gluten-free cookies that Roger brought over.

  “I thought you were done writing that blog,” Aggie said. “Now that you have a book. I didn’t think you were continuing to write it. I mean, you haven’t written anything in a while.”

  “I haven’t been inspired.” Betty shrugged. “You haven’t been doing anything interesting until yesterday.”

  “What did I do yesterday?” Aggie asked, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t even begin to imagine.”

  “I know what it is!” Giddy, Anita clapped her hands. “Did you write about that woman’s heart attack in the bookstore?”

  Aggie cut her eyes to Anita. “That had nothing to do with me.”

  Anita ignored her and looked at Betty. “Well, is it?”

  Betty grinned.

  “I knew it!” Anita said.

  Aggie sighed. “Well, you can’t say I had anything to do with solving a murder. The paramedics told Tom that the woman died of natural causes.”

  “A heart attack,” Anita said, nodding. “From those racy covers.”

  Aggie threw Anita a dirty look. “We don’t know if she had a heart attack. And if she did, it had nothing to do with the covers on the romance novels. That’s a silly assumption. The poor woman lost her balance and grasped for the shelves knocking them over.”

  “Yes,” Anita said while winking, “in the romance section.”

  Exasperated, Aggie sighed even louder. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep her sanity.

  Roger finished brewing a fresh pot of coffee and pulled mugs out of the cabinet next to the sink for himself, Betty and Anita. He carried them over to the table.

  Aggie dunked a gluten-free sugar cookie into her coffee. “There’s creamer in the fridge,” she said. “I have both regular and sugar-free.”

  “Thanks,” Roger said, opening the refrigerator.

  “Well,” Anita said. “Are you going to read to us what you wrote?”

  Betty yawned again while nodding. She opened her lavender laptop and pushed the power button on the side. “Remember,” she said. “This is just fiction, mind you.”

  “Of course,” Anita said.

  “Did you remember to change people’s names?” Roger asked while sitting down. “We don’t want a repeat of what happened in Oceanside with that crazy baker woman.”

  “Oh hush!” Betty scorned. “That wasn’t my fault. You know that!”

  Roger twitched his thick, reddish-brown mustache, and grabbed a jelly-filled donut from the box on the table. “Then whose fault was it?”

  “You’re the one that carried on and on about almost choking on that stupid ring,” she spat. “So, it’s your fault!”

  “It was baked into my donut!” he grumped, dramatically throwing his hands into the air. “I saw the light!”

  “Yeah, the kitchen lights, when you looked up at the ceiling,” Betty said.

  “I could’ve died!”

  “But you didn’t!”

  “No, I didn’t. But I could have!”

  Betty scrunched up her nose with disgust. “You hock
ed up the ring in a chunk of donut, and you were just fine. If you hadn’t made such a stink at the bakery, Aggie wouldn’t have been kidnapped.”

  Roger scowled. “And if you hadn’t written about the incident in your blog, stating Aggie was investigating the ring that’d been baked into my donut, she wouldn’t have been kidnapped.”

  Betty pouted and stubbornly crossed her arms over her chest. “I always state that my blogs are a work of fiction. It’s not my fault that people are stupid and believe my stories are real. Besides, I changed the suspects' names.”

  “Changing names from Vince to Vance, or Jane to Janey, is not good enough,” Roger harrumphed. “And why you decided to use our real names in your stories is beyond me.”

  “Oh hush!” Betty spat. She was just about to continue the argument when Anita interrupted.

  “Betty, read to us what you wrote. There wasn’t a murder, so you don’t need to worry about a murderer reading your blog. It was just a heart attack.”

  Aggie groaned again. “We don’t know that she had a heart attack either.”

  Betty pulled up her blog post on the laptop and began to read. For the moment, everyone was quiet. Betty’s story contained descriptions of the people that had attended the book signing as well as their thoughts and opinions. Aggie could picture them vividly in her mind. Anyone who had attended the book signing would immediately recognize their description.

  Betty’s story ended with a to be continued and her fictional character, Aggie Underhill, stating that she didn’t believe the woman died of natural causes.

  Anita gasped. “Aggie, do you really think she was murdered?”

  Aggie shot Anita a look of disbelief. “No! I never said that!”

  “Fiction, remember?” Roger said to Anita, smoothing his mustache with his forefinger. “See, Betty? This is what I’m talking about.”

  “I know it’s fiction,” Anita said. “I’m not one of those stupid people. But I am curious what Aggie thinks.”

  All eyes were now on Aggie. She looked up at them as they stared, waiting for an answer. “What?” Aggie asked while retrieving another cookie from the box. “I never said it was murder.”