“Please.”
“I’m fine.” She hated when men treated women like weaklings. Plus, these days she liked to prove to herself that she could manage things on her own.
The man stopped trying to wrest the wheelchair from her but didn’t leave her alone. “You don’t like the press?”
“Not when they ask inappropriate questions just so they can get a juicy sound bite. Are you all right, Michael?”
“I’m fine,” he called back.
“It’s up to reporters to ask the tough questions,” Leather and Denim said. “The questions everybody wants answered but is too afraid to ask.”
“Maybe so, but they should still exercise some common sense.” Annie reached the top of the ramp and stopped so Michael could greet an editor who’d rushed over.
Who was this guy? Annie wondered. She didn’t recognize him from publishing; plus he had a man’s man look about him she didn’t often run across in the literary world. He didn’t seem like a politician, either. Maybe an actor? No, his face was too lined, too world-weary. Not pretty enough. Attractive, though, in a tough-guy way.
“Are you a reporter, too?” she asked.
“No.”
She was about to inquire how he knew Maggie Boswell when a TV cameraman appeared at his side. “I got the set-up shots you wanted. Ready to go inside?”
“You go on ahead. I’ll be right there.” Then he turned again toward her.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You said you weren’t a reporter.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why are you walking around with a camera crew?”
“I’m a show host. For Crimewatch. It’s on Friday nights at nine.”
Crimewatch? She’d heard of it, never watched it.
“I was hoping,” he said, “that we could put a camera on you so you could give your thoughts about the writer murders.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, then pushed Michael forward when he gave a slight wave of his hand.
Inside the church, Annie claimed the end of a pew and parked Michael’s wheelchair beside her in the aisle. He leaned toward her. “So you met Reid Gardner?” he whispered.
“Is that what his name is?”
“He must be doing a story on the murders.” Michael gazed at the altar, where several ministers were assuming the starting position. “I’ll be interested to hear his take.”
That surprised her. “You watch his show?”
“I’ve watched it for years.”
Annie felt a tap on her shoulder. It was her agent, looking as unkempt as ever despite his suit and tie.
She hadn’t retained Frankie Morsie for his looks. He was a former wrestler whose muscles had long ago gone to fat and who never grasped that no man past college age should sport a ponytail. Still, Frankie “The Pitchfork” Morsie had proved he could pin a publisher to the mat when need be and that was all Annie really cared about.
Frankie reached down to shake Michael’s hand, then spoke to Annie. “I didn’t think I’d run into you here.”
“Same goes double for you.”
His mud-colored eyes darted away. Annie got the feeling he was reliving past hurts with the deceased, the stuff of legend in the industry. Frankie had repped Maggie Boswell for a few years. Then she’d fired him in the most humiliating way possible, by screaming insults in a Manhattan restaurant that catered to the publishing crowd. In true wrestler style, he’d overturned the table and stalked out.
His eyes came back to hers and this time they shone with a new light. “I got good news for you, Annie. You made it.” She watched him kind of puff up. “I told you I’d make you a star and I did. You’re gonna hit the list next week.”
“What? The list? I made it?”
He nodded, beaming like a proud parent. Or maybe like a relieved agent whose client had finally started gaining real traction. “You’re gonna come in at fourteen.”
She knew exactly what he meant. Any author would, though it was far more than the vast majority would ever achieve.
The New York Times bestsellers list. The most prestigious of all, the hardest to crack, and she’d made it. Devil’s Cradle had made it.
She stared straight ahead, focusing on odd things, the ministers huddled at the front of the church; the redhead two pews ahead who couldn’t stop fingering her hair; the scuffling at the rear of the church that signaled that the Boswell family was about to make its solemn progress up the aisle. She glanced at Michael, who look as delighted as Frankie. Michael grasped her hand and held it and all she could do was squeeze back, as tears of joy and gratitude pricked hot behind her eyes.
All those hours of servitude at her computer seemed worth it now. All that battling with the language, the struggle to make her characters leap off the page and dance, all those mornings, nights and noons of trying to craft stories that people would want to read—she’d done it. So much for the naysayers. She’d done it.
See, Philip?
She hated herself for thinking of him at this moment. He, chief doubter, didn’t deserve to be part of her victory.
The organ music swelled. With a congratulatory pat on her shoulder, Frankie edged away. Annie blinked, tried to restrain the tears that pooled behind her eyes. At least it was socially acceptable to cry in this setting, better than, say, screaming for joy.
She had a distraction, at least, the bereaved family shuffling up the center aisle. Along with everybody else, she pivoted in the pew to see.
And found herself staring, once again, at the man she now knew by name. Reid Gardner.
*
He held her gaze without blinking, a skill he’d honed in his cop days, and tried to get a bead on why this woman interested him. He’d known who she was right away, thanks to the reading he’d done on the short flight up California’s coast. Along with a file of background information on the writer murders, Sheila had provided him with a handful of mystery novels to acquaint him with some of the personalities. He’d read a few pages of each and given a passing glance to the authors’ bios and photos. One had captured his attention more than the rest.
The black-and-white still hadn’t let on how feisty this particular writer was. Or how much intelligence shone out of her bright green eyes. Or that she favored a musky perfume over a floral scent. Or how her voice had a husky quality that made him wonder what sounds she might produce in other circumstances.
Not that she was the sort of woman who made a man think instantly of sex, at least not more than any other attractive female. She was more a tomboy type than an erotic beauty. He’d always favored the girl-next-door, though. After all, look at Donna.
Remembering Donna made Reid break the stare. He couldn’t think of her and look at another woman. It seemed disloyal, even now. Five years it had been since he lost her. Such a long time, and so little progress made. Visions of her, bleeding to death at the mouth of that damn alley, still haunted his dreams. Bigelow still roamed free. Justice still remained to be done.
Sheila, beside Reid next to the aisle, leaned toward him. “That’s Boswell’s husband walking in front of the coffin,” she whispered in her lightly accented voice, then consulted her notes. “Charles Waring. And that’s her mother.”
The widower was an unprepossessing man who looked like he spent all his time indoors. Maggie Boswell’s mother was a white-haired woman nearly bent double with a dowager’s hump.
“They didn’t have children,” Sheila added, then flipped through the slim reporter’s notebook in which she’d jotted notes on the videotape the crew had already shot and on what remained to be done that afternoon.
All told, Reid did not find the service notable save for an unusually verbose eulogy delivered by the new widower. Eventually it wound to a close. Mourners filed out behind the coffin.
“I’ll catch up with you,” Reid told Sheila, and without waiting for a response plunged into the thick of the departing crowd. She’d be surprised by him abandoning her but he knew she could manage the B-
roll and interviews on her own. And there was something he wanted to do.
Something that’ll advance the story, he told himself, keeping his eyes on the brunette ahead of him, who was walking swiftly now, unencumbered by her friend in the wheelchair.
Reid got stalled by a crowd in the church’s narrow vestibule and managed to extricate himself only with a few gentle shoves. On the street out front, he spied her halfway down the hill to the right. Then she made another right and disappeared from view.
He caught up with her at the base of the hill as she was unlocking a powder-blue Honda parallel-parked in front of an Art Deco apartment building. “I’m thinking it’s time for me to introduce myself.” He held out his hand. “Reid Gardner.”
“I already know your name.” She ignored his hand, instead swinging the driver’s side door open. If he hadn’t hopped backward it would have slammed into a part of his anatomy he’d rather not injure.
“Ah. Well. I apologize for not introducing myself earlier, Annette.” She didn’t react to his use of her name. She simply tossed her handbag in the passenger seat, then peeled off her black jacket and threw that inside as well. “Where is Michael Ellsworth, by the way?”
No reaction to his familiarity with her friend in the wheelchair, either. “He went to the funeral lunch with my agent.”
“You’re not going?” Reid lay his hands on the driver’s-side door as she settled herself in the car.
“I have a manuscript to write. So I’m going home to write it.” She tugged on the inner handle of the door but he didn’t release it. “Will you give me back my car door, please?”
“Look, it’s like this.” He opened the door all the way and crouched with one knee on the asphalt, so their eyes were level. “My show is doing a segment on the murders and I’d like to talk with you about them. As I said before, maybe I could put you on camera for a couple of questions.”
“I’m sure that’s a very nice offer but I’m going to pass.” She poked the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine revved into life.
“You would provide a unique perspective. You’re an up-and-coming member of the mystery community. I expect you’d have insights I wouldn’t get elsewhere.”
“Be that as it may, I’m really not interested. Why don’t you go to the funeral lunch? I’m sure you’d find lots of takers there.”
He hated to admit it but thought he was probably beat. He rose but didn’t step away from the car. “By the way, on the flight up today I read the beginning of Devil’s Cradle.”
She was staring out the Honda’s front window but he could see her battle her desire to ask the question any author would be sorely tempted to ask. As he hoped, she couldn’t resist. “What did you think of it?”
“I thought it was really good. Very gripping. Made me want to read more.”
“Well, I guess you can do that on your flight home.”
This time he stepped away from the car. “If I don’t get too distracted by the author’s photo.” Then he shut the door but kept his eyes on the woman inside.
She sped away from the curb without giving him another glance.
*
The last thing she needed was a man interested in her. Annie was convinced of that even before she cleared San Francisco proper.
Her Honda sped north up Highway 101, Marin and then Sonoma counties flying past in a blur of suburbia beautified by more trees and rolling hills than that usually described. Eventually she exited onto a narrow road that led toward the coast.
As she careened up one incline and down another, she decided that Reid Gardner might be an interesting man—he certainly was a good-looking one—but she was in a phase of her life when she wanted to be unencumbered by male needs and desires. Selfish though other people might find it, she wanted to focus on herself: her writing, her workouts, her parents, her friends. She’d spent a lot of time—all of her twenties—trying to make Philip happy, and that would have been wonderful if he’d returned the favor. But instead he found fault with so much, and it got really wearing. They always had to live spitting distance from the hospital in deference to his long and unpredictable hours, regardless how grotty the neighborhood was. She had to understand how much pressure he was under, and how fatigued he was, and so forgive his moods and tirades. She had to stifle any complaint about her own unsatisfying work as a legal secretary, even though it was helping put him through his medical training, as he declared he “shouldn’t have to listen to it.”
She often wondered where her passionate college lover had gone. It took her some time to realize that she must have conjured him in her imagination.
The one consolation of those troubled years was that Annie had time to write mysteries on the side. She wrote almost as a guilty pleasure because she knew Philip disapproved of the genre. Even after a big-name publisher scooped up one of her manuscripts, Philip poked fun. Later, she wondered if he preferred the old arrangement: when he was much the brighter light.
Now all she wanted was to reclaim the Annie she used to be, when she was as courageous and full of spirit as any fictional hero, when her future seemed boundless and exciting. That Annie was still there, buried under layers of hurt and disillusion. Slowly, slowly, she was rising again to the surface. Annie did not want her progress hampered by a new man, regardless of how attractive he might be.
She reached into the handbag she’d thrown on the passenger seat and pulled out her cell phone. One thing she could count on: her mother would bolster her resolve.
She listened to her parents’ phone ring off the hook. She could imagine it on the Formica kitchen counter of their Berkeley bungalow, atop a pile of phone books and next to the pots of marijuana plants they’d been growing all her life. There was an outdoor crop as well, larger and just as well-tended.
Traditional, they were not.
She disconnected the call and made the final turn that led to her house. Most likely her parents were at a protest. Like other people went to movies, they went to protests. It wasn’t a practice that had endeared them to her ex.
About a block away from her house, she frowned. A cop car was parked at the curb. Helms was leaning against the front fender, his beefy arms crossed over his chest. His sidekick Pincus stood on the sidewalk talking to two men in dark suits, a heavyset fiftyish black man and an Asian man fifteen years his junior. They all looked toward her car as she slowed and stopped.
She exited the car and collected her things, less than pleased with this development. She suspected she knew who the men in suits were, and in seconds she received confirmation.
The African-American approached and flipped open a leather case to reveal his ID. He looked like a cross between a preacher and an NFL coach, someone who could tame either Satan or a prima donna wide receiver. “FBI. San Francisco field office. I’m Special Agent in Charge Lionel Simpson and this is my assistant Mark Higuchi. Ms. Rowell, we’d like to ask you a few questions.”
CHAPTER THREE
Not how she wanted to spend the rest of her afternoon, but it was clear this was a command performance.
“Of course.” She led the men inside. They took up residence in her living room, dwarfing the furniture. Simpson, as the quartet’s big dog, claimed the largest upholstered chair and flipped open a notebook to a page on which a great deal had already been written. “Tell us about yourself, Ms. Rowell. You’ve lived in Bodega Bay how long?”
She settled into a cane-backed chair she carried over from the dining room. “A little more than a year.”
“And you live here alone.”
“Yes. I’m divorced.” Annie noted Simpson’s wedding ring and gold bands on every other man in the room. Somehow her failed marriage felt like a count against her.
“Why did you move to Bodega Bay?”
“Well, I’d been living in LA with my husband and—”
Higuchi spoke for the first time. He was standing with his back to the bricked-in fireplace and like Simpson was consulting a notebook. “Lippinco
tt is his name?”
“Philip Lippincott, yes. He’s an internist.”
“Go on,” Simpson said.
“Well, after the divorce I wanted to come back to the Bay Area. I grew up in Berkeley but needed a less expensive location. And I liked the idea of a smaller town, somewhere I could focus on my writing and not get, I don’t know, distracted by all the big-city things.”
Simpson was watching her closely. “Is it fair to say, Ms. Rowell, that it’s difficult to make a living as an author?”
Odd question. “It’s fair to say. Most of us have to economize.”
Higuchi spoke up. “Yet even with money tight, you chose not to seek another position as a legal secretary.”
She was surprised they knew that detail about her. “I wanted to write full-time.”
“It didn’t seem risky to you?” Simpson asked. “To rely solely on your writing income so soon after your divorce?”
It was risky but her life had fallen apart as it was. Why not go one step further and quit an occupation she’d never liked anyway? But all she said was, “I thought it was a risk worth taking. And if it didn’t work out, I could always take a regular job later.”
Simpson turned a page in his notebook. “Devil’s Cradle is your most recent book, is that correct?”
“Yes.” She stopped. Somehow it felt like boasting to mention that it had landed her on the Times list.
But Simpson already knew that, too. “I understand that book will get you on the bestsellers’ list for the first time. So congratulations are in order.”
“Thank you.”
“Now you’re in that elite group of bestsellers. Like the late Seamus O’Neill. As you know, he was killed at the mystery-writers conference in February in LA. You attended that conference?”
“Yes.”
“Would you say that the other writers were jealous of O’Neill? He was a huge bestseller, at the top of the lists for years.”
Chasing Venus Page 3