by Josh Lanyon
I jogged across the road and ducked into the trees on the other side. Standing in the shadows, I gazed out at the woods opposite.
Nothing happened.
It was so quiet I could hear my wristwatch ticking. How long was I going to wait? Till something happened? I didn’t want anything to happen. Enough had happened already. Much better to hightail it out of there before the next thing happened. Especially if it was going to happen to me.
Picking up my bags again, I started race-walking toward the hill.
What else could go wrong? Did they have bears up here? I knew my California history, even if I did set all my own books in picturesque English villages with horrendous crime rates, and it seemed to me that this area had once been populated by grizzly bears and cowboys and other antisocial carnivores.
A covey of quail burst from the bush in front of me. I yelped. However, being short of breath, it came out more like a balloon losing air fast. The quail vanished into the wet silence, wings beating, making weird twittery sounds.
My thoughts kept circling back to the woman lying dead in the woods. How long had she been there? Not too long, from the looks of things. Even though we try to keep the forensic details to a tasteful minimum in cozy mysteries, I’d watched plenty of episodes of Bones. And not merely because of David Boreanaz.
At the crest of the hill I paused for another rest. Safe to say, I would not be winning the President’s Challenge this year. My calf muscles were burning. I had a stitch in my side. My back was starting to twinge in that ominous way. Unbelievable to think I was struggling so hard to get someplace I hadn’t wanted to go to begin with.
Below, I could see a rambling old-fashioned log-and-stone house and several outlying buildings and cabins. Lights twinkled in the many windows of the main house. A thread of pale smoke rose cheerily from separate chimneys. In the scattered cabins, the windows were mostly dark.
Beyond the lodge were the vineyards, rippling in the wind, with an eerie glint of red or blue or silver flickering here and there amidst the yellowing leaves—something metallic to discourage birds, I guessed.
The valley was encircled by a forbidding wall of mountains wreathed in storm clouds. Lovely. The kind of place the Donner Party might choose to vacation.
I dropped my bags then and there. Not that putting my back out wouldn’t have been the perfect touch to this weekend. What the hell was I thinking buying all this stuff? Wasting money when I was technically unemployed? Even the mental picture of bears dancing around the woods in my brand-new Calvin Klein briefs couldn’t convince me to haul my bags farther. New underwear. The sure sign of desperation. I hadn’t bought new underwear since…
Yeah. Like the Road Not Traveled wasn’t bad enough, I had to take a detour down Memory Lane.
Nope. Not going to happen. Gritting my teeth against the torture of heels rubbed raw—and memory rubbed rawer—I forged on.
And on.
At last the stone and wood homestead loomed before me like a painted backdrop on the set of Bonanza. Chimes made of rusted cowbells jangled on the breeze as I made it up the steps to the long porch. Pushing open the heavy front door, I nearly swooned with the combination of warmth and the homely scents of firewood and cooking.
I half collapsed on what appeared to be an abandoned—unless you counted the stuffed moose head mounted on the wall—front desk. There was a silver bell on the polished desk. I rang it.
Silence followed the cheerful ring.
“Hello?”
From down the hall I could hear voices and general merriment…like a party. Weren’t these people supposed to be writing? How could anyone get any work done with that racket going on?
In a kind of sleepwalker’s shuffle, I headed down a short hallway carpeted with faded Indian rugs. I caught a glimpse of myself in a long horizontal mirror and got a funhouse view of Quasimodo’s kid brother. It was almost a relief to realize that it was me—I’d have been terrified to be alone with that creature.
A few yards farther down I found myself outside what appeared to be a meeting room. Huge picture windows looked out over a long deck and the vineyards. The mountains beyond could have been a painted backdrop. Open timber beams disappeared in the shadows of a soaring ceiling. An immense stone fireplace crackled cheerfully.
The room was packed with people, and everyone seemed to be talking at once—which, as I recalled, is pretty much how conferences go. A lot of the people were female and under thirty. Despite the chilly weather there were a lot of bare arms and bare legs. I’d seen fewer bare midriffs at a belly-dancing competition. That, of course, was the chick-lit contingent. They wrote mysteries called things like A Whole Latte Death and Death Wore a Little Black Dress. With their cartoon covers and glam author shots, they’d managed to turn murder and mayhem into something quite…frivolous.
An angelically beautiful guy with golden curls and a guitar sat in front of the fireplace. He wasn’t playing—maybe it was a prop. I made a mental note to put in a request for “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.”
I located Rachel almost immediately by the ring of spellbound people who appeared to be staring at their shoes. Rachel is five feet tall without heels and imposingly beautiful—like one of those tiny Mandarin empresses. Thumbelina meets Vogue. Despite the lack of inches, she’s not easy to overlook. She was chatting with a knot of people, not one familiar to me. Rachel’s crystal-clear Asian-English accent carried.
“Murder is always hot. Always topical. Auden said it best. ‘The murder mystery is the dialectic of innocence and guilt.’”
Shoot me now.
To her far left was Steven Krass, who I recognized from his photos in Mystery Scene. Tall, blond, and handsome—the kind of recruit you seek when you’re looking to people your Fatherland.
He was talking to a lithe and lean man dressed in black, sporting one of those dapper little mustache and beard combos like a young Spanish grandee.
Oh. Mah. Gah. As the natives say. J.X. Moriarity. How perfect. How…ironic. How perfectly ironic. The last time J.X. and I had crossed swords—and other body parts—was at the start of my career. By some ill luck, here he was in at the kill. For some reason the image clearest in my brain was the Full Living Color memory of his tanned and taut ass slipping out of my hotel bed and into a pair of Levi’s.
Rachel turned and spotted me. “Oh,” she said. It was more of a gasp really—like the kind of sound the Queen of England would make if someone slapped her on the back and called her Liz.
The people with her—she’s always got a string of hopeful followers—turned to see what had alarmed their deity. It was like in a film where everyone zeros in on the newcomer and the soundtrack fades and action decelerates to slow mo—usually to be followed by a hail of bullets and the demise of everyone wearing white.
While Rachel did not actually pull an Uzi out of her Prada bag, she was not wearing her happy face as she detached herself from the others, pushing her way through to me. Grabbing me by the arm, she hissed in my ear, “Christopher, I told you to dress up.”
Chapter Three
The implication being that this was how I usually looked?
I freed myself from her warden’s clutch. Like the rival villain in a penny dreadful, I hissed back, “For your information, the bridge is out. I had to walk all the way from the main road.”
“You walked?”
You’d have thought Rachel was a native Californian, given the horror in her voice.
“About five miles. I had a flat tire. That’s the least of it.” I took bitter satisfaction in delivering my bad news. “I found a body in the woods.”
“You—” She couldn’t even finish it. She stared at me. Light dawned in her almond-shaped eyes, then faded, as she read my grim expression. “Bloody hell. You’re serious?”
Did she really think I was desperate enough to reinvent myself as the kind of nut who claims they’ve witnessed murders or been abducted by space aliens? Actually, I was that desperate, I just wasn’t that i
maginative.
“I’m serious. I stopped to change shoes by this Japanese teahouse in the woods, and there was a dead woman…lying there.” As opposed to a dead woman doing what?
Rachel was staring at my encrusted trainers. In tones used by the medium at a séance she repeated, “The teahouse…in the woods?”
“Rachel, snap out of it. Maybe it was a temple. Or a gardening shed. How do I know? The point is the dead woman.”
She swallowed hard. “Are you sure she was dead?”
“Affirmative. We need to tell someone.” We were beginning to attract attention. Rachel’s coterie crowded around asking what the problem was. Luckily, across the room, Steven Krass was still hanging on J.X. Moriarity’s every word. Probably planning to give him my slot in Wheaton & Woodhouse’s spring catalog. Not that I’m paranoid.
“Who’s in charge here?” I asked.
“Edgar and Rita Croft,” Rachel said.
An award-winning couple, I had no doubt. “Well, we’d better tell them. They’ll have to call the authorities. Although, I don’t know how anyone is getting in here, unless there’s another road?”
“Bloody hell,” said Rachel again. Turning, she led the way through the mob to a long buffet table where a tall, big-boned, impossibly raven-haired woman of about sixty was stuffing assorted muffins into plastic bags.
“Rita, something dreadful has happened.”
Rita barely paused in the muffin retrieval. “Honey, they’re trying to fix the cappuccino machine,” she replied, bagging like she was in the express checkout line and shooting for employee of the month.
“This is Christopher Holmes, and—”
Rita paused, brown fingers sinking into a chocolate muffin. She stared at me with a kind of disbelieving recognition.
At last, I thought, and my spirits rose. A fan. She was the right demographic, though sadly the over-fifty demo isn’t the one most publishing houses actively court these days.
“You’re two days late, mister,” she informed me crisply. “Get this straight. There’s no refund on the cabin or the conference.”
So much for fandom. I shot Rachel a look. She knew perfectly well I hadn’t planned on really participating in this conference. I mean, I wasn’t about to sit through workshops given by enthusiastic twentysomethings on Getting That First Novel Down on Paper or Finding Your Hero’s Fatal Flaw (like you’d have to dig very deep to find a guy’s fatal flaw). The very idea gave me cold chills. Or maybe that was my five-mile forced march in the rain.
“Sorry about the mix-up,” I began, “but there’s something you should—”
“There was no mix-up on this end,” Rita retorted. “Your reservation was held in good faith.”
“Okay, but—”
“This conference—retreat, whatever you want to call it—sold out over three months ago.”
“Sure. I understand—”
“Cancellations have to be made two weeks in advance.”
I blurted, “There’s a dead body in your woods.”
Rita stared at me with pale blue eyes while ripples of shock went around the pool of listeners.
“You might have broken that a bit more gently,” Rachel muttered.
I ignored this, prompting Rita. “Blonde, late forties maybe, purple pajamas, gold toe ring?”
Rachel sucked in her breath. “Peaches Sadler.”
More ripples on the pink pond—I was wondering how Rachel recognized the dead woman from a description of her PJs and toe ring.
Peaches Sadler. That had to be her real name. No marketing department would concoct “Peaches Sadler.” But why was that name so familiar to me?
“Well,” drawled Rita, seemingly unmoved. “That explains that.”
That explains what? I wondered, but there wasn’t opportunity to ask. Rita said something about finding Edgar and disappeared through a side door off the meeting room. Meanwhile, the news of Peaches’ demise was being passed from person to person in a grown-up version of Telephone—and probably about as accurately.
“I’m getting old. I had to leave my luggage by the road.” I automatically reached for one of the chocolate muffins in the bag left lying there. Despite a decent lunch at the Encounter Restaurant at LAX, I was starving. Running for my life does that to me. “So who’s Peaches Sadler?”
Rachel’s eyes did this uncharacteristic slide away from mine. “Peaches Sadler is the author of Some Like It Haute. The bestselling comic crime novel of last year. You know, literary, but with that sexy chick-lit sensibility. She’s huge. She…was.”
I was listening to Rachel’s tone rather than her words as I crammed the muffin in my mouth, the chocolaty sweetness melting on my tongue. “Hold on a sec,” I said thickly, and dusted the crumbs from my chin. “Isn’t she the broad who wrote that essay in the New York Times? ‘Who Killed Miss Marple?’ was the title, and she basically blamed the decline of the classic mystery on hacks like me. ‘Sherlock Holmes’s other brother and his ilk,’ that’s what she wrote.”
Rachel gnawed her carmine-stained lips—something I’d never seen her do before. “I don’t think she was singling you out so much as generalizing about the—”
“The hell she wasn’t. That bitch dissected—savaged—three of my most popular titles. She called Miss Butterwith a nosy old bat with ugly shoes and no sense of humor. She said she was like Frankenstein’s Bride, a grotesque pasticcio of her older and more clever sisters.”
I hadn’t even known what “pasticcio” was before reading that essay—every word of which was branded into my memory.
Rachel looked more uneasy than ever. “Do keep in mind that Peaches wrote that in answer to another essay very critical of the new direction that mystery fiction has taken—” She glanced past my shoulder and pasted on a twitchy white smile. “Hullo, J.X.”
Instantly my body went so rigid that my head shook—and for the life of me I couldn’t have explained why. I thought of the man in purely professional terms—and that’s about all he was wearing when I thought of him. I glanced around, trying not to crack my fused spine. J.X. Moriarity offered that sardonic grin that was so effective on his book jackets. A tiny gold stud glinted in his ear.
“Kit Holmes,” said the only person in the world who called me Kit instead of Christopher. “As I live and breathe.”
“Such a bad habit,” I murmured.
“I thought I recognized you.”
Really? He remembered me looking like Swamp Thing? How flattering.
“We meet again,” I said as casually as though I’d stumbled over him on Park Avenue—or maybe under a bush in Central Park. “How’ve you been?” Not that I had to ask. He looked great, and you had only to open Publisher’s Weekly to see his latest thriller climbing the charts like Jack the Giant Killer scaling the beanstalk. Not that I begrudge anyone his success. Much.
“Good. Great.” He offered his hand, which seemed formal given the vividness of my own memories. I switched the muffin to shake—hoping that I was not smearing his palm with chocolate. He raised his eyebrows. “Cold hands, cold heart,” he said.
“Ha,” says I.
He looked me up and down. “You’re soaked through.”
“You really did use to be a police detective.”
“Have you heard about Peaches?” Rachel whispered, forestalling further civilities.
He still had my hand, which is why I felt him stiffen. “What about her?” He sounded…frosty. Or maybe I was projecting. I’d have sold my soul for a hot shower and a change of clothes about then.
The side door swung open, and Rita returned with a tall, square-jawed man with a gorgeous shock of silvery hair like a well-aged Clark Gable. He wore cowboy boots and an olive shooting jacket.
“You’re the young fella who found Ms. Sadler?” He had an attractive raspy voice, very different from J.X.’s husky tenor.
Speaking of which, J.X. was stone silent.
I nodded. “She was lying by that Japanese temple in the woods.”
�
��The shrine? And you’re sure she was…”
“I’m sure.”
“This is a real tragedy.” He shook his head regretfully. “A real shame.”
“It’s bad news for the conference, that’s for sure,” Rita said. “And it’s bad news for us. What would she have been doing out there in this weather?” She sounded indignant. “She was asking for trouble!”
Edgar said to me, “Young fella, would you mind showing us where she is?”
I did mind, actually. I was dirty, wet, exhausted, and I prefer my dead bodies between the pages of a mystery novel. “Me? She’s right there at the shrine. You know where the shrine is, right?”
His silvery eyebrows rose. “Sure, but—”
“I mean, you’ve called the sheriffs, surely? They’re on their way?”
“The phone lines are down,” J.X. said curtly. “They’ve been down since noon.”
I glanced his way. His chiseled features looked sharper than they had a few moments before.
“Well, what about cell phones?” As a self-proclaimed recluse, I didn’t bother with one, but I couldn’t believe the rest of these minions of technology weren’t packing.
“Have you noticed the mountains around us? Reception is impossible.” Rachel too wore a weird expression. Maybe it was the dawning realization that we were trapped here. Not exactly heartwarming news for me, either.
“Internet access?”
“The lodge doesn’t offer internet access,” Rachel informed me. “Writers don’t get anything done with internet access.”
“A two-way radio? Walkie-Talkies?” I turned to Edgar Croft.
He shook his head regretfully. “Somewhere around here we must still have an old radio set. We’ll have to try to dig it out later.”
“Carrier pigeon?” I have a tendency to babble when I’m nervous. “Blanket and campfire?”
J.X. made a snorting sound.
Yep, the inference was that we were here for the duration. We could not phone out, and apparently we could not drive out. Which meant the police could not drive in—they could not even land a helicopter until the storm passed.