Note Before Dying (Ghostwriter Mystery 6)

by Larmer, C. A.

  “Gilda, you know better than to beat yourself up about that. Nothing you can do about it now. You need to get over it and focus.” His tone was harsh but when she looked up at him, Wiles’s eyes were soft and sympathetic. “I could do with your help. Quick can’t see beyond his own ego, no real use to me at the moment. Can you drop that other case for now? I can check it with Houlihan.”

  “I think my time’s up anyway.” She took the blue plastic gloves he was now handing her. “Rightio, then, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Back at Bindi’s Eco Hideaway, Roxy was attempting to forget what she’d just heard about Macker Maroney and focus on the reason she was in Byron in the first place. It was no mean feat. She kept flashing back to Macker’s ruddy face, his smarmy smile and sleazy innuendo. She hadn’t liked the guy, loathed him, in fact, but he had been full of life, you had to give him that. She couldn’t imagine him dead, couldn’t even get her head around it yet. Still, if the locals were right and there was such a thing as karma, it had certainly come calling for Macker.

  Suppressing a small shiver that tingled down her spine, Roxy began tapping into the B&B’s WiFi and started trawling through scores of e-mails, mostly SPAM, to locate the relevant one from her agent.

  She scanned through the contract as quickly as she could, printed it out down in the lobby, signed it, then enlisted Bindi to fax it to Oliver while she returned to her room to make some more calls. She took a weary breath and called her mum.

  “Oh, my goodness me, she’s alive!” Lorraine cried before calling out to someone, probably Charlie, “Call off the hounds, my daughter is alive!”

  “Sorry, Mum,” Roxy said, thinking those two simple words were so familiar they should form her epitaph. “My mobile has zero coverage up here.”

  “Oh, and they don’t have landline telephones anymore? The flower children not into that?”

  “Yes, in fact I’m using the B&B’s landline now, so I can’t talk for long.”

  “B&B? I thought you were staying at that rock star’s house, the one who was just murdered.”

  Lorraine managed to pack a lot of guilt and insinuation into that final word and Roxy winced. Did she really expect her mother would not have heard by now?

  “It’s a long story, Mum. I’m staying with Gilda at a place called Bindi’s—”

  “Gilda? Your police friend?”

  “My best friend, yes. She’s...” Roxy went to explain, thought better of it and said simply, “She’s up here on police business.” It was partially true.

  “Is she investigating that rock star’s murder?”

  “No, she’s not.” As far as Roxy knew, this, too, was true.

  “Well, now I think about it, that’s good news. She can keep an eye on you.”

  It’s Gilda who needed watching out for, Roxy thought, remembering what she’d been up to the night before. “I’m safe as houses here, Mum, don’t worry about me.” There was no way she was going to mention the latest murder; that would do her mother’s head in. “What about you? Is everything okay? Oliver said you’d been hassling him again.”

  There was an intake of breath. “I was most certainly not hassling him. I called him once. Well, maybe two or three times. There might have been a fourth call, I can’t remember. But that’s not the point. I would have left the man alone if you had bothered to call me. I figured he’d know where my daughter was considering my daughter was too preoccupied to bother ringing her mother.”

  “Mum, I’m on assignment, and I’ve been out of Sydney what, six days.”

  “Six whole days, has it been that long? And you’re already caught up in a murder, again!”

  Roxy groaned to herself and said, “I’ll give you this number should there be an actual emergency. You know the type? Someone’s lost a limb, had a heart attack.”

  “Been electrocuted...”

  Roxy winced again. “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “Well how do I know that? I hear it on the news, Oliver won’t tell me anything.”

  “I’m fine, I promise you that!” She tried to soften her tone a bit. “Listen, I really can’t call you all the time, Mum, not when I’m working.”

  Now Lorraine’s tone turned to one of deep hurt. “I don’t ask you to call me all the time, Roxanne. Just every now then would be nice.”

  Roxy ignored this, read out Bindi’s phone number then said, “I’ll call you in a few days. Give my love to Charlie, okay?”

  There was a small huff. “Fine, start meddling in another horrendous murder while your poor mother sits here all worried about you.”

  “You have fun, too, Mum. Good-bye.”

  She hung up, collapsed onto the bed and pulled a pillow over her mouth to muffle her cries of anguish. They had always had a tense relationship, Roxy and Lorraine, yet it seemed to worsen after Roxy’s father, Jacob, died. She was still a child when the cancer got him and she recalled now, walking back into their house soon after the wake, how their differences seemed to intensify without him around to hose things down. Roxy’s father’s death only compounded how little mother and daughter had in common. Yet they both endeavoured to keep the relationship going, if only out of respect for Jacob and a begrudging admiration for each other’s wily determination to always be right. It had become a game of sorts between then, one that sometimes amused, sometimes grated. Sometimes left Roxy screaming into pillows.

  She wondered now why she bothered, and why things seemed to get even harder as time went on. Wasn’t her mother supposed to relax at some stage? After all, Roxy wasn’t a child any more.

  She sat up straight. No, she thought, I am not a child, and it’s time to stop acting like one. She’d had just about enough of everyone telling her what she should and shouldn’t do, and that included her best friend. She grabbed the phone again and stabbed in a mobile number she had somehow—oddly—learned off by heart.

  “Hello?”

  “Sam, hi, it’s Roxy.”

  “Hey, Roxy,” his voice softened. “We had fun last night, huh?”

  “Not nearly enough,” she replied. “Wanna meet again tonight?”

  Chapter 35

  Doug Campbell was not nearly as thick as Sam had made out. Simple was a better word for him, she decided. He just liked the simple life. Despite fame and fortune, all he seemed to care about was surfing his days away, smoking a bit of pot, and hanging out with his mates at the local pub. Drumming didn’t seem to come into it, and, he admitted as she interviewed him that morning, he would have given up percussion a decade ago if it wasn’t for the band’s endless reunion tours and Houghton’s persuasive powers.

  “I guess Jed’s death has put an end to that then?” she said as they sipped chai tea in the bright kitchen of his Byron beach house.

  “Not if Houghton has his way,” he replied, watching as honey slowly dripped from the teaspoon he was holding above his cup. “You want?” He darted a look at the honey jar and she shook her head. Some sugar would be nice, but the only sugar he could find was crawling with tiny black ants.

  “The little buggers get into everything down here.”

  “No worries,” she said, “I’ll pass.” He clearly hadn’t yet heard about Macker’s murder and she decided not to tell him. That wasn’t the reason she was here. She would do as Oliver had asked and focus on the book. “So you were never as ambitious as Jed or Alistair?”

  He laughed then licked the spoon before dumping it into the sink. “No one’s as ambitious as Al. Nah, surfin’s more my gig.”

  “What about a wife, kids?” He grimaced. “But you must have been tempted. Chicks used to throw themselves at you.”

  “Still do, occasionally.”

  She blushed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean...”

  He chuckled. “I’ve seen the grief Annika’s given Jed and nope, no way, that kinda crap is not for me. Just give me a six-foot swell and a Thruster and I’m happy.”

  “You don’t like Annika?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t not li
ke her. Just wouldn’t want one for myself, that’s all.”

  They had spent the past two hours going through Doug’s biography, Roxy ticking off all the basics—his date and place of birth, family background, early influences. They had then moved on to how Doug came to be in the band and she was stunned to learn his first audition had been in front of Annika, not Jed.

  “Yeah, she’d placed an ad, looking for a drummer. I fronted up, she liked my chops and I got the job.”

  “It was up to her, not Jed?”

  “Always has been, as far as I can tell.”

  “Can you remember where you saw the ad?”

  He thought about it for a few minutes as he slurped his tea. “Nah, not off hand, sorry. Houghton’ll remember, he was part of it from the start.”

  “Yes, I heard that he and Jed used to be in Horror Story before the Roos. Know much about that?”

  “Not a lot. They never really talk about it. Bad blood between the band and Annika, something like that. That’s why Annika got to pick Jed’s next lineup, so we all got along. One big happy family.” His tone suggested nothing could be further from the truth.

  “Do Alistair and Annika get along?”

  He cocked his head to the side and a sly smile crept onto his face. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, I just front up, do the love-ins, tick off the gigs, take the money and get out again.”

  “Love-ins?”

  He chuckled. “God, I won’t miss those.”

  “Love-ins?” she repeated.

  “Annika insisted we all have a little powwow before each gig. You know, heads together, positive affirmations, that kind of crap.”

  “The point being?”

  He put on a hippie-dippy voice: “Positive vibes, man.”

  Roxy laughed. “Sounds more like Govinda’s spiel to me. Are they friends, those two?”

  He looked shocked at the thought. “What? Annie and Govinda? What are you on? No way, man!”

  “They seem to have lots in common.”

  “Too much in common, if you ask me.”

  “Both goddesses?” she suggested, remembering Sam’s words from the night before and he chuckled.

  “To say the least. Listen was there anything else you needed? I gotta get rollin’.”

  Roxy thought about how fortunate Jed’s death was for the reluctant drummer—the end of relentless gigs. Could that be a motive for murder? She shook her head.

  “Cool. Maybe just text if you think of anything else.”

  “Good idea, except coverage here is a bit patchy. Do you go up to the Moody place often? Am l likely to run into you up there?”

  “Too far from the coast for me. But I guess I’ll have to get up there sometime this week and see what’s cookin’. Houghton has plans. Reckons we need to do one final memorial tour.”

  “You’re obviously not keen.”

  It wasn’t even a question, he’d already made his feelings crystal clear, but he gave it some thought as he walked her to the door.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to do the tour, I don’t really care, to be honest, just not sure it’s gonna work without Jed. I mean, Al can moan all he likes, but Jed was The Man. The Moody Roos aren’t much without the Moody in it.”

  Doug’s words echoed in Roxy’s brain the whole way back from the coast, along the winding hinterland to Jasper Road.

  He was right, of course. Jed Moody was the Moody Roos, whether Al liked it or not. So unless Jed’s death was done in the heat of rage—which it couldn’t have been, not the way it was carried out—then whoever killed Jed had to be better off with him dead, not worse. Which seemed to rule out Houghton and Annika—they had both worked so hard to create this life for themselves, he was their cash cow, would they really destroy it all now? There were only so many Best Of albums you could sell, surely?

  It did point the finger at the band, however. Wiles might be gunning for the Holloways, but Roxy felt like the answer to this crime had to lay closer to home. She wondered again about Doug. Could he have murdered Jed to rid himself, once and for all, of the monster on his back, to ensure he could get on with the quiet life he so clearly craved? Seemed a bit extreme, she decided, plus he didn’t appear to have the enthusiasm for it. The guy just plodded through life, that much was clear. He was happy to go with the flow. He might be into catching waves, but he didn’t seem the type to cause them.

  Besides, couldn’t he just say no to Houghton and tell him to find another drummer? Would anyone really have cared? Or noticed for that matter?

  Which brought her back to Al. It was time to have another chat with the bass player. She glanced at the clock in the car. It was after one. Hopefully she would catch him up at the Moody house, her next destination. She was hoping Gilda would be there, too. The small matter of Macker Maroney’s murder was now wrestling its way back into her consciousness and would not be so easily ignored this time. She was keen to find out how the investigation was progressing and what, if anything, it had to do with Sunny and Jed.

  Chapter 36

  “I haven’t seen that detective friend of yours,” Annika told Roxy as she stood at the front door of her house; her feet bare, her hair in a tousled ponytail high on her head. “But I did hear about that paparazzi guy. Hans just told me. It’s all over the village. Can’t say I’m devastated.”

  “Yes, well, he was a bit of a grub, but I’m not sure he deserved that.”

  Annika cocked an eyebrow at Roxy. “You’re a nicer person than me, then. Coffee?”

  Roxy tried not to look surprised as she followed Annika down the long hallway, remembering to discard her shoes by the door.

  “So, Hans is back?” she said.

  “Just dropped off some fresh bread and milk. Deserted me again, though, got to run the café. Govinda’s as good as useless these days, what with all those kids of hers. And another on the way.”

  “Another?”

  Annika rolled her eyes as they entered the kitchen. “Apparently four daughters are just not enough.”

  She padded over to an enormous gleaming espresso machine and started heating it up while Roxy took a stool at the floating kitchen bench and studied her. Now in her late thirties, Annika was still an extremely beautiful woman, elegantly dressed and statuesque, her high ponytail pulling her face back and making her almond-shaped eyes seem almost feline.

  Roxy wondered what she would do now and asked as much.

  “I’ll get on with my life, of course! I did have one, you know, it wasn’t all about Jed.”

  “Will you keep this property?”

  “Absolutely, yes. In fact, I’m going to start running festivals here. It’s such a stunning piece of land, really very underutilised. I’d like to share it more.”

  “What do your neighbours think about that?” Roxy already knew the answer, of course, and Annika’s eyes narrowed further.

  “The Holloways can get stuffed! They had their chance, a hundred years in this area and have barely made a penny. It’s time for them to move on and let the next generation have a whirl.”

  “You think they’re going to leave?”

  She placed a cup under the coffee spout. “I’m hoping they’ll accept my offer and clear off.”

  “You’ve offered to buy their property?”

  “I’ve offered much more than it’s worth. You saw the place, right? Scrubby, cleared land. It’ll take me years to replant, get it back to something vaguely resembling rainforest.”

  “Do you think they’ll accept?”

  “Oh God, I hope so. That couple has been an albatross around my neck. You take milk, right?”

  She nodded, wondering if Annika had any idea about Wiles’s suspicions. It didn’t appear so, and she felt a small flutter of concern. If Wiles was right about the Holloways, then Annika’s life might also be in jeopardy, especially if she was still pushing ahead with the festivals.

  “Will the council permit you to run the fest
ivals here?”

  “Don’t worry about them,” she yelled over the sound of frothing milk. “I’ve got them sorted.”

  So I heard, Roxy thought, flashing back to the night of Jed’s death. She wondered how far Annika took her flirtation. Had she exchanged sexual favours with the ponytailed councillor for a “Yes” vote on her development application, or was it more innocent than that?

  Annika handed her the coffee then got busy making herself a cup. When she was done, they headed back out to the veranda where Roxy noticed the stage was still taped up.

  Following her line of sight, Annika tsked loudly. “It’s a bloody nuisance. I just want to clear it away and get on with my life.”

  It had only been four days since Jed was murdered, Roxy wanted to tell her but instead she asked, “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine,” she snapped. “I’ll survive. As I say, my life wasn’t all about Jed Moody. I wish everyone would remember that!”

  Roxy felt a sudden surge of impatience with Annika. When she’d first arrived, Annika had been so possessive of Jed Moody, lecturing her about keeping her hands to herself. Now she was acting as though he was little more than a passing fad. “Jed was a huge part of your life, Annika,” she snapped back. “You obviously loved him deeply and you’re allowed to be upset, you know. You don’t have to pretend like it’s all okay.”

  Annika glanced sharply over at Roxy and looked like she was about to slap her down when emotion got the better of her. Her lower lip began to quiver and she slumped onto one of the sofas, hunched over her coffee cup and began sobbing into it.

  Crikey. Thought Roxy. She hadn’t expected that. She dumped her cup on a side table and sat down beside Annika, gently patting her on the back. They remained like this for some time and eventually the widow swiped her tears away and tried to pull herself together.