Ink-Slinger Murder

by Wendy Meadows

  “I didn’t know you two knew each other,” said Cassy, but then again why would she have done?

  “We go back a ways,” said Archibald finally tapping ash. “I dare say we’ve been on a couple of double dates. Me and the dearly departed,” he said while pressing his hands in prayer, eyes raised to the heavens. It was as sarcastic a mime as was possible. “And you with—what was that girl’s name?”

  “Never mind her name.”

  “Phyllis. Phil we used to call her, like a man.”

  The playful, yet combative joking between the two had begun to sour somewhat, again for reasons Cassy couldn’t quite fathom. Frowd began to retreat, both physically and emotionally. Cassy could see the blast doors coming down, his defenses going up as his expression became hardened.

  “I knew this was a mistake,” he grumbled, looking back the way they had come.

  “He’s always been like this,” said Archie. “Any wonder he’s alone now. The thing is, I know what’s going on in his head: he’s already had this conversation. Plotted it out in advance like a grandmaster would do with a game of chess. Every possible direction it could have taken he’s already been there. All I had to do was mention one little thing, and now the great writer has the whole story plotted out. It’s useless trying to talk to him.” The owner of the bookshop, that didn't seem to sell any books, stubbed out his cigarette then turned to Cassy as Frowd stepped back dismissing them both with a wave of his hand. “It’s been ten years since I’ve seen him and he hasn’t changed one iota. Good to talk to him though, even like this. So thanks for bringing him here.”

  The sudden slide into honesty took Cassy back a little. Until then, both men had been gruff and dismissive of both her and each other. She didn’t know what to think. “You’re welcome,” she managed to say.

  “You’d better go after him,” said Archie indicating Frowd who had by now crossed the street. “He likes to be alone, but that’s not always best for him.”

  Cassy bid Swaile good day and jogged after Frowd. He didn’t look as flustered or upset as he had just a few seconds earlier. Instead, he looked happy even. Maybe seeing his old friend, despite the odd exchange, had perked him up.

  “I guess it’s a form of flattery,” he said, unprompted. “I should be proud in some way that some lunatic would take my work as a template for his curious murder spree.”

  “Your number one fan.”

  The thought amused him and he seemed to mull it over as they walked back to Nether Edge. Just as they came off Main Street and were heading along Ecclesall (Eccy Road to the locals), Frowd spoke again.

  “Whose house was it?”

  Cassy shook her head.

  “The house where Cuthbert was staying and ultimately proved to be her final residence. She can’t have bought the damn thing just for the festival; even she’s not that extravagant, despite a couple of Hollywood movies under her belt. People make a lot of money renting out these things while they get out of town for a couple of days. I should have done the same thing.”

  James would know, was the first thing that came to Cassy. It struck her how often she thought of him. “I’ll look into it,” she said.

  “It strikes me that rather than chasing books, that’s the kind of hard fact detectiving you should be doing.”

  He was right, of course. No one had ever accused her of being anything but the most amateur sleuth. “Detectiving?” she blurted.

  “Hey, I’m a writer,” he said defiantly. “I can make up any word I want.”

  Chapter 16

  The station was eerily quiet. It was never busy but even so, Cassy had never actually heard her footsteps echo through it whenever she’d been there. She tried shuffling then walking softly to prevent the clacking of her soles on the polished tiles.

  Sheriff Noyce’s office was empty, the door ajar. They must all be out, she mused then leaped out of her skin when a hand landed on her shoulder.

  “Cassy!”

  It was Deputy Jones. Cassy pushed him away playfully to give her a moment to calm down. She’d been so deep in her own thoughts that it had frightened her more than it should have done.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. He was unsure exactly what to do. Cassy saw that he went to reach for her, to comfort her, but held back. Their relationship, such as it was, was still in that awkward space between “just friends” and something more intimate.

  “Don’t mind me,” she reassured him. “Just a bit high strung.”

  “Tell me about it. The last thing we wanted was to have such a high-profile investigation.” He went to his desk, one of three arranged so that they all looked at each other. Between them was another table strewn will all kinds of paperwork. Most of it pertained to Cuthbert, including some of her books.

  “Did you know that the murders were from books,” said Cassy picking up a copy of Bognsatchers: Curse of Dawnwind.

  “They’re for kids, aren’t they? I doubt that she wrote anything so grim.”

  “Not these books. Frowd’s books. Both murders have uncanny similarities with scenes in some of his early work.”

  The deputy sat on his chair and leaned back on it precariously. He hooked one foot under the lip of his desk to prevent any catastrophe. Even so Cassy was put on edge.

  “Is that so? Are you an expert?”

  “No, but Brian is, he’s the one who figured it out.”

  With a shudder, the deputy came crashing back upright. He leaned over his desk. “Brian?”

  “I mean Brian Vidor, one of the authors on the panel. Horror writer.”

  “I know his work,” he said, then added after a brief moment, “You two getting to know each other?”

  Cassy went to reply truthfully, that they had been out on a date of sorts and that, yes, she was getting to know him. But noting the tone of Jones’s voice, a kind of hurt curiosity, but nothing too committal, she decided to hold back. “Just talking shop.”

  “And that involves speculating about an ongoing case,” he said flatly. “Are you getting involved again?”

  Cassy wasn’t sure if he meant with Brian or with the murders. “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  He’d trapped her. There was no escaping it; she had to come clean. “Do you know who owned the house where Caroline was killed?”

  A sly knowing smile cracked Jones’s face. “I don’t, as it happens,” he said, “but how hard can it be to find out?”

  Without waiting for any kind of permission, Cassy came round to James’s side of the desk and leaned over him to access his computer. “There has to be some kind of local advertising site for this kind of thing.”

  She let the deputy type in his password and soon they were searching through results for temporary leases in Havenholm. They found a promising site and narrowed the filters to places that had already been leased in the higher price bracket. They swiped through several familiar houses until the crime scene appeared.

  “Let me see. It was rented out by…” Deputy Jones scrolled through the info, “Mrs. Bridget Bradley.”

  There as that name again. Cassy had to take a step back.

  “What is it, Cass?”

  “I lied,” she admitted. “I couldn’t help looking into a few things. But James—I’ve seen this name before. This woman borrowed Frowd’s book from the library. Now we find out that she let Caroline Cuthbert stay in her house.”

  “There was no forced entry,” said Jones. “It would make sense if the killer had a key to the place. We’d been going on the theory that Cuthbert knew her attacker and let them in.”

  He rose suddenly, his chair skittering back across the floor. “She’d be staying with friends for the duration of the festival,” he proposed. A brief check on the website showed that the house was only being let out for one more day. “There’s no reason for her to go far, especially if she intended to…”

  “Kill?”

  “We don’t know that for sure yet. All I have is very circumstantial
evidence and your word.”

  Cassy nodded. Even she knew it was the flimsiest lead. “It can’t hurt to talk to her.”

  “But she’s not at her address. She could be anywhere. Even in a place as small as Havenholm, that’s a big door-to-door operation.”

  “The website,” said Cassy impulsively. She took control of the mouse and clicked the “contact us” tab, “The lease for the house must be up in just over a day. We can contact the rental agency and say we want to rent her house out but we want to be shown around the property by the owner. They give us her number and arrange a meeting. We play it casual so no one suspects anything, but then drop the thing with the book on her when she least suspects it.”

  Whatever she had said made Deputy Jones laugh. “You’re thinking like a writer, Cassy. We don’t need to use an elaborate deception to get the number. I just contact them, say I’m with the Sheriff’s department, and they give me the information I need. That’s how it works. No need to pretend.”

  As always, she had tried to over-think the situation. Being a representative of the law had its benefits in this type of scenario.

  “Yeah or we could do that.”

  It shocked Cassy how easy it was to locate the woman. Just a few calls, a stern authoritative voice, and a few well-rehearsed lines from Deputy Jones and he had the new temporary address within minutes. It was something that she wouldn’t have been able to do on her own. Of course, she was technically helping him with the investigation, though in her mind it felt like the other way round. When the Deputy’s car pulled up outside Pat Spilane’s house on Northside Drive, a friend of Bridget Bradley’s who had been putting her and her entire family up for the duration of the festival, Cassy wondered how the woman would react.

  Would her reaction be that of a killer whose time is finally up, or that of someone who knows that they’ve got a lot of library late fees coming.

  Cassy hanged back while the Deputy knocked on the door. She could see him talking with whoever answered. After a few words he motioned for Cassy to follow him inside.

  The two of them followed the house’s owner, Mr. Clarke, to the kitchen where he offered them a drink. Jones declined but Cassy asked for tea. It was a bitter Lady Grey, but not unpleasant. While James Jones asked questions about Mrs. Bradley and her whereabouts, Cassy wandered off under the pretense of having to use the bathroom. As far as she could tell the house was otherwise unoccupied. In the TV room, a couch had been extended into a double bed. A pair of bright pink furry house shoes, presumably Bridget’s, were placed on the floor at the end alongside a larger set of plaid slippers. Along the corridor that linked the downstairs rooms, Cassy found another room, a kid’s room with posters of garish and freaky looking big-eyed creatures playing in primary-colored landscapes. The kid’s shows of her youth hadn’t been so unpalatable, had they?

  A makeshift cot sat on the floor and piled up to it were clothes in a random heap, a true sign of a teenager. The poor kid had been forced to sleep in the same room as a family friend’s younger son. A true humiliation.

  From under the pillow at the end of the cot, Cassy saw the corner of a stack of papers jutting out. Far from it for her to question what kind of thing a teenage boy kept under his pillow, but even so something didn’t look right. She knew what this was, she’d handled one herself, as had all pf the writer in attendance this weekend.

  Cassy glanced back to the kitchen. The muted cadences of a question and response could be heard though she couldn’t distinguish the specifics. At a guess, she had a few more seconds before her absence became suspicious.

  Treading carefully into the room, Cassy approached the cot and slipped the manuscript from under the pillow. The hundred or so sheets of paper were bound by clasps through eyelets along the left side. The top sheet was blank so she hastily thumbed through the pages. Markings in red ink had been scrawled over the printed text.

  “Cassy?”

  It was James calling from the kitchen. Her heart plunged and a chill ran over her skin. Thinking fast, Cassy slipped the manuscript down the top of her dress and crossed her arms to cover the rectangular bulk.

  “Coming,” she said nonchalantly then returned along the corridor to where the deputy was waiting for her.

  “It seems as though Bridget is out all day today,” he said. “So, I’ll call back later.”

  Mr. Clarke nodded his approval. “I’ll tell her you called by. Sorry I couldn’t have been more help, Deputy.”

  Back in the car, James offered Cassy a lift back home which she accepted. Her priority, however, was to get far away enough that she could reveal to him what she’d taken from the house.

  “Cassy! What have you done?” said James as she removed the manuscript from her dress. “Did you just steal that?”

  “Can you steal something that’s already stolen goods?” she countered.

  “Legally speaking, yes. It’s still a crime.”

  “Oh,” said Cassy, confused. “Look at it though.” She held up the stack of paper like a trophy.

  “What am I looking at, Cass?”

  She flipped the top sheet over to reveal a title printed plainly in black ink.

  Hall of the Goblin King, it proclaimed, then a few lines further down it read, by Caroline Cuthbert. Below that somebody had written in red ink, DRAFT FIVE—REVISIONS.

  “Cuthbert, huh? What is that?” said James. “Is that some kind collector’s piece?”

  Cassy flicked through the pages, skimming the words as well as the revisions that spattered the pages. “No this hasn’t even been published yet.”

  The car came to a sudden halt as James slammed on the brakes. “This is incriminating evidence,” he said, “If Mrs. Bradley took this, it would link her to the murders.”

  “No, not her. Her son. I found this under a pillow where presumably her son was sleeping.”

  “How do you know she has a son? We know nothing about her yet. We can’t even find her.”

  There was no answer to that question, though Cassy was sure that she was right. Something in the back of her mind had made a connection though she couldn’t vocalize it. The reason she knew there was a younger son involved was because… Cassy teased the errant thought from the depths of her mind.

  From the floorboard of the car, Cassy retrieved her bag, and rifling through it, she eventually found what she’d been looking for. With a satisfied yelp, she produced a copy of her own book.

  “Spicery?” said James checking the cover. “Not the best title ever.”

  “Never mind the title,” she said, secretly dismayed that he didn’t like it. “Look what’s inside. She flipped it open to the blank page which she’d signed. “I signed this but I got it wrong and gave the kid another one instead.”

  “A kid?”

  “Kid, yeah. Late teens. Look who it’s made out to though.”

  James read the inscription aloud. “Dwayne Bradley.”

  “I know this kid. I know what he looks like.” In her mind’s eye she conjured up the lank-haired boy with squinting eyes.

  “We’ll go back to the station and put out an APB for this Dwayne Bradley. But first, I’ll get you back home.”

  As always, Cassy felt relaxed when she was around James. His sonorous southern accent put her at ease. It was both reassuring and firm, but gentle too. Maybe now wasn’t the time—it most definitely wasn’t—but Cassy felt compelled to ask him out on a date. A real one. Not one engineered by Dot, but something more personal.

  She cleared her throat like a singer about to go onstage and was about to suggest a meal at a new restaurant she’d heard about in the nearby town of Newcastle when she saw a familiar figure on the sidewalk going the opposite way.

  “That’s him,” she blurted out. She swiveled in her seat to keep an eye on the kid walking hastily back the way they’d come, head bowed, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “That’s Dwayne Bradley!”

  The kid hadn’t said a word, save to state his name, since arriving at the station
and now wallowed in gloomy silence in the interrogation room all alone. Both Noyce and Jones had tried to get something from him to no avail.

  Cassy looked at Jones as he exited the small square room furnished only with a plain table, two chairs and a microphone.

  “No luck?”

  He shook his head.

  “How about if I try?”

  “Not sure if I can let you do that,” said the deputy.

  “Not in an official capacity, but what if I was his council? Look I think I can get something out of him, so it can’t hurt. Right.”

  James considered the notion for a moment, then relented. “But I’ll be with you at all times. If this kid did what we suspect he did, then you’re not safe.”

  “I just want to know why he did it, that’s all. And I don’t think police techniques are going to get through to him.”

  The deputy led Cassy back into the small room. She took the seat opposite the young man while Jones stood in the corner watching the scene like a hawk.

  “Hi, Dwayne. You remember me?”

  He nodded, lank hair covering his face.

  “Good,” she continued, “I remember meeting you earlier, and you were at the panel too I recall. Caused quite a stir.”

  A smirk was visible between the ratty strands of hair.

  “You’re quite the reader, aren’t you, Dwayne? I saw you get autographs from everyone from the panel.”

  He nodded.

  “Couldn’t get Frowd though. He’s a tough one to pin down. If you want, I could go to where he lives and get him to sign something.”

  At this, Dwayne looked up sharply, expectantly. He then looked to the deputy and his enthusiasm faded again.

  “Will they let you?” he said.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Because of what I did.”

  “We don’t know what you did, Dwayne. Why don’t you tell me. How did it all start?”

  There was a long pause, a deadened silence, while the boy considered his options.

  “I’ve been reading Frowd,” said Cassy when the boy failed to reply. “Not my sort of thing but I can see the appeal. You said to me that he saw things the way they should be, is that right?”