by Vicki Delany
“How am I going to do that?”
“I put Kevin’s business card somewhere in the Emporium. Check the drawer beneath the cash register.”
“Suppose he doesn’t want to tell me? I’m sure they want their privacy at this time.”
“You’ll think of something.” Jayne went off to find the card, and I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. Finding Paige and Nancy might prove to be more difficult.
I pulled out my phone and made a call.
“Gemma! Nice to hear from you,” Great Uncle Arthur bellowed into his own phone. Despite the wonders of modern technology, Arthur seems to think it necessary to shout at the top of his voice to be heard in West London from wherever he might be. And having spent his career in the Royal Navy, rising to the position of captain of one of HRH’s battleships, he had a mighty powerful outdoor voice. “How’s Violet?”
I wasn’t offended that his first question was about the dog. “She’s well. Healthy and happy but missing you.”
“Glad to hear it. I’m missing her too.”
I strained to listen for background noise. There didn’t appear to be any. “Where are you?”
“Still in the Outer Banks. I’m having a marvelous time. I met a retired Royal Navy chap the other day, and he’s been taking me out fishing.”
“I didn’t know you liked to fish.”
“I don’t. I don’t like him either, but I like being on his boat. His sister is a widow.”
Fancy that.
“Why are you calling, Gemma?”
Straight to the point, as always.
“Your euchre partner, Mrs. Johnson, left something in the shop this morning, and I want to call her about returning it. Do you have her number?”
“Just a minute.”
I waited while he checked his phone’s contact list. Jayne came in waving a small square of paper. I gave her a thumbs-up. Next door, investigators were still moving things about and walking in and out to their van. Upstairs, the silence continued. “Here you go,” Arthur said at last.
“Thanks. Catch a big one for me.”
Jayne stood by the window to make her call. I dialed the number Arthur had given me. “Hi, Mrs. Johnson. It’s Gemma Doyle here, Arthur Doyle’s niece. How are you today?”
Her bunions, apparently, were acting up. Last night’s dinner, liver fried with potatoes and onions, hadn’t agreed with her, and . . .
“Sorry to hear that. Arthur’s still in North Carolina, but he sends his love. I have something I’d like to talk to your granddaughter about.”
“Which one?”
“The West London police officer. What’s her name? So sorry, it’s momentarily escaped me.”
“Stella.”
“Of course! How silly of me to forget. Such a lovely name. I seem to have misplaced Stella’s phone number.”
Silence.
“Do you have it? I hate to bother you, but . . . the book she ordered is here.”
“A book! I’m so pleased. All Stella ever seems to read anymore is that policing stuff. Rules and procedures and true crime books about serial killers and criminal gangs. You sell such sweet books at your store. I have her number right here. I’ll be just a moment.”
She soon came back and rattled off the number.
I thanked her profusely and gave her Uncle Arthur’s love one more time.
Small towns. Gotta love ’em. I would never have been able to pull that off in a city such as London. Stella Johnson had not been among the officers who answered the 9-1-1 call to the Emporium earlier. I’d seen her Thursday night in the Blue Water Café, so she was probably working nights. It was now almost five o’clock, meaning she should be up and getting ready for work. I made the call.
“It’s Gemma Doyle here. Sorry to bother you, Officer Johnson.”
“How did you get this number?” Another one who got straight to the point.
“You know West London,” I said. “Nothing’s a secret.”
“True enough. What can I do for you, Gemma?”
“Have you heard about the death this afternoon at my shop?”
“Yes.”
I decided that any pretense of this being a social call, and by the way did she happen to know where Paige was staying, would be a waste of time. Instead, I also got straight to the point. “You were called to the Blue Water Café Thursday evening when a woman made a scene. You escorted her out.”
“I remember.”
“The woman, Paige, came into the Emporium earlier today. I have something of hers I’d like to return and thought she might have told you where she’s staying.”
“The Ocean Side Hotel. Mr. Reynolds said they didn’t want to press charges so I let Ms. Bookman go with a warning.”
Mr. Reynolds was Kevin, and Bookman (Bookman?) must be Paige.
“Thanks.” I hung up before Stella Johnson could ask me any questions in return.
“Renalta’s party’s at the Harbor Inn,” Jayne said. “Ryan and Louise arrived while Kevin was on the phone with me.”
“Excellent. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“The Ocean Side first and then the Harbor Inn. It is, as you know, a capital mistake to speculate without evidence. However, I am going to do so and speculate that Paige Bookman is the most likely person to have wanted Renalta dead. I will then gather evidence to support my theory.”
“The game’s afoot!”
“So it is.”
* * *
I needed to check on Moriarty before leaving. The shop was closed, but the police were busy in the Emporium, and they were unlikely to want to go about their business with a curious cat underfoot. It was possible he was pulling the old prison trick of pretending to be dead so the foolish guards would rush in and leave the door unlocked, in which case I ordered Jayne to act as backup. I took fresh water and a bowl of kibble with me.
“On the count of three, I’ll open the door and run in,” I said. “You close it behind me.”
“You make it sound like we’re SEALs attacking terrorist headquarters.”
“The principle is similar. One . . . two . . . three . . .” I burst into the office. The door slammed shut behind me. Moriarty lay on the windowsill, basking in the soft rays of the evening sun. Lazily, he opened one eye. Seeing it was only me, he shut it again.
“You don’t fool me,” I said. I refilled his food and water bowls. He’d indicated his indignation at being confined by kicking kitty litter all over the office floor.
I kept my eye on him as I backed up toward the door. “Coming out!” I called to Jayne. “Be ready!” I turned, threw the door open, dashed through it, and kicked it closed. I leaned up against it with a sigh, my heart pounding. “Safe?”
“You give Moriarty far too much credit, Gemma. He’s a house cat, not a criminal mastermind. If Arthur had named him Midnight or Blackie, you wouldn’t have this fixation.”
I grumbled something noncommittal. Downstairs I told the forensics officers I was leaving through the tea room doors. I reminded them to lock up when they left, and a gray-haired woman gave me a look.
I always walk to work, and today had been no different. The Harbor Inn is in easy walking distance of the center of West London, but the Ocean Side Hotel’s on the outskirts of town, so it was necessary to go home and get my car.
Jayne and I trotted quickly down Baker Street to the boardwalk that runs parallel to the small harbor, and then we turned up the hill into Blue Water Place. The day had started off hot and sunny, but as often happens close to the tempestuous sea, the weather changed quickly: dark clouds were now gathering over the ocean, and the scent of rain hung heavily in the air.
I would have liked to have collected the car and sneaked away with Violet being none the wiser, but I had to go into the house for my keys. The cocker spaniel greeted me in her usual exuberant manner before lavishing attention on Jayne. That done, I let Violet into the backyard to do her business while I tapped my foot impatiently. Once business had been taken car
e of (and the dog had confirmed that no itinerant squirrels had taken up residence on her property), I told Jayne to wait outside and lured Violet into the house with a bowl of fresh water and an early dinner. Then, guilt stricken, I dashed outside and shut the door behind me. Violet loves nothing more than a ride in the car, but that wasn’t possible. I drive a Mazda Miata, and there’s no room for the dog if I have a passenger.
The Ocean Side is a midrange hotel, located across the road from a stretch of public beach on the Atlantic side of the peninsula on which West London is located. I parked beside the lobby entrance, and we went inside.
“We’re here to see Paige Bookman,” I said to the receptionist. “But I’ve forgotten her room number. Can you call and let her know we’re here, please? I’m Gemma and this is Jayne.”
She said, “Sure,” and pressed a couple of keys on her computer.
The last time I’d seen Paige, she was being escorted out of the Emporium by Officer Richter. I was the one who’d ordered her to be removed from my property, and I hadn’t followed up, so it was unlikely she’d been arrested. It was early on a Saturday evening, and threatening rain or no, there are plenty of things to do in West London, so there was no reason for the woman to be hanging around in her room, but my luck held. The receptionist spoke into the phone, said my name, and handed it to me.
“Who are you?” asked a raspy voice.
“Gemma from the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium. We met earlier today.”
“Oh, yeah, you. The one who had me dragged into the street as though I was something the cat had brought in.”
“Sorry about that. I thought perhaps we could talk.”
“Why would I want to talk to you?” she said.
“Did you hear what happened after you left?”
“No, I didn’t. What happened? All I know is that one minute I was standing on the street telling that fat cop to unhand me and the next his radio was squawking and cop cars were tearing down the street. He ran off and left me standing there like last night’s garbage. So I came back to the hotel.”
“I think you’ll be interested in what I have to say. What’s your room number?”
“I’ll come down. I need a smoke anyway.”
I handed the phone to the receptionist. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Paige came into the lobby not more than a minute later, already pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. “Let’s walk.”
The moment we stepped outside, she cupped her hands against the wind and lit a cigarette with a disposable lighter. She then headed across the hotel’s parking lot at a rapid trot. Jayne and I scurried after. We crossed the road and met up with a small boardwalk winding through scruffy vegetation to a stretch of public beach. Waves pounded the shore, and whitecaps broke on the sandbar.
“You two were at the restaurant the other night,” Paige said when we caught up to her. “I only wanted to talk to little Ruthie, but they threw me out. They seem to make a habit of that in this town. I assume you’ve come to talk to me about her, so spill, what happened?”
While we’d waited for the elevator bearing Paige to make its laborious journey all the way down from the second floor, I’d told Jayne to break the news. Now she cleared her throat. “Renalta Van Markoff died.”
I watched Paige closely. The news seemed to take her by surprise, but I’ve been wrong before. Her jaw dropped. She gaped at Jayne, and then she let out a bark of a laugh. “Son of a gun. And I missed it. Her heart finally gave out, did it? It always was two sizes too small.”
“The police,” I said, “are treating it as a suspicious death.”
“Good thing I wasn’t there then, isn’t it? I assume that’s why you’re here. You want to ask me if I bumped off Ruthie Smith.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“As I wasn’t there, obviously I couldn’t have.”
I didn’t bother to enlighten her as to the cause of death. Paige had the opportunity to put the poison into the water before being evicted from the Emporium.
“If not a heart attack then what happened?” she asked.
“The police aren’t revealing details pending the results of the autopsy.”
“Is that Renalta’s real name?” Jayne asked. “Ruth Smith?”
“Ruthie Smith, a.k.a. Miss Renalta Van Markoff. A name as fake as her so-called talent. She stole her first book from me, you know. All I ever wanted was credit, and all I ever got was the back of her head.”
I’d wondered how I’d get Paige to talk. That obviously was not going to be a problem. “How did you meet?”
“A creative writing class at a community college in Brooklyn. I wanted to fine-tune my craft. Ruth wanted someone to tell her the easy route to publication. She’d been working on a book for years about some pig farmer’s daughter in Iowa but was having no luck getting an agent or a publisher. That came as no surprise to anyone when she read parts of the thing to the class. Total dreck. I felt sorry for her and befriended her. My mistake.”
We reached the end of the boardwalk and stepped onto the deep sand. The wind whipped my dress around my legs. The few people still out were enjoying playing at the edges of the surf. Out to sea, dark clouds were gathering, and they were moving fast our way.
“My manuscript in progress was about a noble-born English woman in the time of Queen Victoria who falls on hard times when her no-good husband deserts her and her family abandons her. She opens a detective agency in order to survive. Sound familiar?”
“If I may say,” I said, feeling bold, “I’m a bookseller. That’s not a unique plot.”
She turned to me, the rage in her eyes terrible to behold. I took an involuntary step back.
“It’s my plot! My story! The characters are mine. The idea was mine. She stole it. She pretended to be all sweet and friendly and suggested we form a critique group with some of the other people in our class. Her writing was absolutely garbage. Dreadful. Laughable. How do you think she went from that to being so successful? Huh? You tell me that, Miss Bookseller.” She jabbed her finger into my chest.
I didn’t bother to say that no one claimed Renalta Van Markoff penned great works of literature. “Did you stay in the group for long?”
She took a deep drag on her cigarette. The wind tore at her hair. Fortunately, it also blew her smoke out of my face. “No. It was a total waste of my time. All the other members were at her level. Far beneath what I was writing. I dropped out. I wanted to stay friends with Ruthie. Like I said, I felt sorry for her, but she cut me off. A couple of years later, I found out why. Can you imagine my shock when I happened to see a review of this hot new book and the author photo was of her? The picture was photoshopped, of course, and made her look about twenty years younger, but I recognized her, all right. I bought the book and read it in one sitting. It should have been my name on the cover, my picture on the back. The advance in my bank account!”
“Did you get a lawyer?” Jayne asked.
“I tried, but no one would take my case. They said I had no evidence to prove she’d stolen it from me.”
“Couldn’t you compare the published book with your manuscript?” I asked.
Paige’s intense gaze shifted away from me. “I didn’t . . . uh . . . have enough. The lawyers I spoke to said ideas can’t be copyrighted. But they should be!”
So that was it. Paige had a nebulous idea for a not unusual storyline, and Renalta had grabbed it. Renalta, not Paige, had added the Sherlock Holmes angle, turned a vague idea into an entire novel, and then went on to write another two books, each one more successful than the previous.
“All I want,” Paige wailed, “all I ever wanted was for her to acknowledge me. And now you’re telling me it’s too late.”
“What brought you to Cape Cod this week?” I asked.
“I keep my eye on her. She has a blog. I assume her secretary writes it because it’s not half bad. It talks about where she is and what she’s doing and all the wonderful adorin
g people she meets. She doesn’t exactly keep her public appearances secret, does she? I buy every one of her books the day it comes out, to see if she mentions me in the acknowledgments. Never a word. Never a single thanks. On and on she goes, thanking her editors and publicists, her faithful PA, all the great fans she meets. Never a word about me. Certainly not an offer to share in the profits.”
“You mean you’ve been pursuing her for years?” I’d thought Paige just happened to be in West London when she found out that Renalta was here and so decided to catch up on old times.
Paige threw the butt of her cigarette onto the sand and ground it out with her foot. I wondered if she was imagining Renalta Van Markoff’s face.
“I lost my job a couple months ago. I was a copywriter for a small advertising company, and they got bought by a big corporation. Out the door I went, and at my age, jobs in advertising aren’t easy to come by. Not that I’m old, but I’m not a simpering, brain-dead twentysomething either. I got a small payout, but it’s not going to last me into my old age. What else can I do but try to get what I’m owed? I wrote to her several times, but she never replied. I hoped that if I met her, face-to-face, she’d do the right thing. Okay, so confronting her at the restaurant the other night might have been a mistake. It wasn’t the right place. I was sure that this time, at your bookstore, she’d bring me up on the stage and tell everyone she wouldn’t be where she is today without me. But she died. And now it’s too late. I’ll never get what she owes me. Never.” She stared out to sea.
“I don’t see how getting a thank-you in her book is going to help you find a job,” Jayne said.
“I was planning to ask her to introduce me to her publishers so I can show them my new manuscript. It’s the least she can do in return for everything I did for her. I know they’re going to love it, and with her recommendation, it’ll be an instant bestseller.”
That, I thought, was taking delusional to a whole new level.
“What are you going to do now?” Jayne asked.
“Go back to New York. One thing about being out of a job—now I can finish my own book.”