The windows were starting to rattle a little as a wind set in and I could hear rain start to fall, just softly. It was after dark and I didn’t want to be in the shop all on my own for much longer. Was there really not a single soul who was going to turn up?
There was one person I could call. Begrudgingly. But there was very little chance of her actually answering. And so just as I was about to hit ‘call’ on Alyson’s number, I put my phone away. She didn’t want to help or be accountable for anything, so why should I bother with her?
But one soul finally did arrive. Wearing a long velvet cape in a shade of dark crimson. A little like a very rounded Little Red Riding Hood.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Maria said. She was glaring at me like she was doing me a huge service.
“Why not?” I asked, ushering her in from the cold. Darn, it was raining heavily now. The New South Wales winters were fairly mild but compared to the summer, it was awfully chilly, and this was an unusual cold snap.
Maria’s coat dropped on the floor while thunder clapped outside. I felt a little like I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past, but it was only July.
“We all made a vow to never return to the book club again,” Maria said, her voice low and steady. “And a vow is a very serious thing to break.” She stared at me with the whites around her eyes getting wider and wider, like she was making sure I understood the extreme sacrifice she was making just to be inside the shop. It was all I could do not to slap her in that moment, though. Did we really need all the theatrics?
“Well, that’s a little unfair!” I cried. “It’s not like I had anything to do with what happened to Nicole Marie.”
But Maria shook her head as though I had deeply misunderstood what she was trying to tell me. “This vow has nothing do with you, Claire. Nor does it have anything to do with the bookshop. Well, not really.” She glanced around and shivered.
Right. I wasn’t supposed to take it personally even though they were boycotting the book club I had started in the bookshop that I owned. Yeah. Definitely not personal at all.
“It’s the book club itself,” Maria said, finally using a normal tone of voice. “It makes no difference where it is held, or what book we read, or who the owner of the store is. We’ve all agreed that it should just be disbanded for the time being just in case…well…” She paused for a moment like she was going to continue, but then she just stopped.
Maria sat down, and Mr. Ferdinand jumped up into her lap. Which was very strange as he was not the most sociable cat. But he knew Maria well, as she had been coming into my grandma’s book store since Mr. Ferdinand was a kitten.
“Did you know that Nicole Marie was writing a murder mystery novel, Claire?” she asked, peering up at me as she stroked the cat who was starting to fall asleep on her lap. He had one eye shut and one still slightly open, like he was winking at me. “And that she was going to get that book published?”
Well, I did now.
Just as I was locking up, I was blinded by blue lights flashing onto the glass of the window. I turned around and shielded my eyes as the door of the cop car opened and someone very angry-looking climbed out.
“Just what are you doing, going inside the shop?” Sergeant Wells asked as he stomped over to me, the veins in his neck bulging. Just how does one go about getting neck muscles like that anyway?
Well, I was coming out of it, if you wanted to get technical about it.
“Umm, I own it,” I said, even though it was still technically in my grandmother’s name. Actually, apparently, there was some complication with my grandmother’s estate, and my solicitor Dawn Petts-Jones was still leaving me messages asking me to call her back, but I had been avoiding it. So, I started to feel a little guilty. Did this guy know that I didn’t technically own the store? Surely, he wouldn’t be down here after dark just to tell me off for that, though, would he?
Come on, Claire, this is crazy.
He was not playing around. It was like being told off by a parent, school teacher, and well, a cop, all at once. “This is a crime scene. I thought my officers were perfectly clear with you about not stepping foot inside.”
Actually, they really hadn’t been clear with me at all. Or perhaps I just hadn’t been listening. Both seemed like viable options.
“It’s not like we had any customers today anyway—”
“This is not a time for jokes.”
Didn’t know I was so hilarious.
“I’m not joking,” I said, pointing inwards towards the shop. “I have cats in there that need to be fed. Or are they part of the crime scene as well?”
He peered in and screwed up his nose when he saw Mr. Ferdinand staring back up at him. They each shared the exact same grumpy expression and just for a moment, I had to try not to laugh at the almost mirror image.
“Well, you’d better take them home with you now then,” he said. “Quickly. While I supervise.”
“This is the cat’s home,” I replied, not willing to back down an inch. “I am not going to disturb them. They didn’t do anything wrong.”
“One of our officers will feed them in the morning then,” he said. “Now get out of here.”
“I will leave in my own time, thank you.”
But he just glared at me. “I better not see you down here again until I give you the all-clear. Or there will be consequences.”
6
Claire
Of course the house had two levels, and of course the only possible way in—a window that could be pried open—was on the top floor. All the doors and windows on the bottom were deadlocked. I sighed. These were the times I needed Alyson. And of course these were also the times she disappeared. No coincidence there. Unreliable.
Maria had told me that there was a paper copy of the manuscript that Nicole Marie kept on her desk. It had taken her three years to write and polish the book, and now it was all printed and ready to be released out into the world. Maria had said that there was a digital copy, but that would be a little more difficult to get to as it was locked inside a safe. To me that made zero sense, but Maria told me that Nicole Marie had never intended for the paper copy to be left unattended either.
And the big deal about it all, Maria said, was that Nicole Maria had a book deal. As in, someone was going to take this manuscript and turn it into a real book that was going to be in bookshops around the globe. Maybe even my own. I knew our book club was full of writers, most of them wannabe writers. If one of them knew about Nicole Marie's stroke of good fortune, then they very well might have flown into a jealous rage. “But as far as I was aware, Nicole Marie wasn’t telling anyone until it was all official. I was the only one she had confided in,” Maria had told me before she had taken off for the night, leaving Mr. Ferdinand meowing at the door for her to come back.
I couldn’t help but get a visual of Sergeant Wells’s face in my mind as I looked up at the second floor and thought about what I was doing.
Hmm. All I was doing was breaking and entering a dead woman’s house. What could go wrong?
It was a relatively easy ascent up the side of the house, or maybe I was just getting too good at this. Not a skill I ever thought I’d want to excel at, and not one I ever thought I would. Not for the first time, regrets about ever moving back to Eden Bay filled my head as I gripped the railing and pulled myself onto the balcony.
There was a screen in the bedroom window that popped out. I only had to slide the glass back and grab a chair from the deck to stand on so that I could pull myself up to the window ledge and climb through the window.
I could hardly even believe what I was doing. I used to be the girl who never even returned a library book late.
But there I was, in Nicole Marie’s bedroom. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust, but the moonlight was strong enough that I could see without turning on a light. I definitely couldn’t turn on a light. The room looked strangely still lived in. The bed was only loosely made with the blue doona pulled up crooked
ly, and there were a few items of clothing scattered over chairs.
I found the desk and crept towards it. So this was clearly where Nicole Marie did her work—it was full of notebooks and a laptop that was still open and gathering dust now. Why hadn’t the police taken it?
And there, beside the laptop, was the printed manuscript. I reached for it like it was a pile of gold and read the title. The Girl in the Meadow. Flipping through it, I could see that it was just over four hundred pages long. The last page had “The End” printed right down the bottom. I was impressed. I never knew that Nicole Marie had it in her to write a book nor to get the end. For a moment, I felt a little like I was on the outskirts of the inner circle of the book club. Most of the members all knew each other from long before I’d come back to town. Was it only Maria who had known about the book deal, or had others? At the very least, the others must have known that she was writing a book.
I shook my head. For just a second, clarity struck me. What was I doing? I couldn’t even see what the point of taking the manuscript would be. Maybe I should just put it back down on the desk and make my way back out the way I’d come. Forget the whole thing. But Maria had been pretty adamant that the answers could be found in it.
You’ve come this far, Claire. Just do it.
I was just about to try and figure out how I was going to climb out the window and back down the side of the house with the stack of loose papers when I heard a door opening and shutting from the floor below.
My heart began to race. Shoot, shoot. I clutched the stack of papers to my chest and tried to find an exit or a place to hide while a male voice called out, “Hello, is there someone in the house?”
The footsteps were already coming up the stairs.
Uh-oh.
Sprung.
“How did you get in here?” I asked the man standing in front of me. We were on the ground level of the house by that stage, and the lights were on. Nicole Marie’s living room was filled with books, most of them as old and falling apart as the ones in my shop. She had a frayed rug on the floor and mismatched furniture. No wonder she had gravitated so much towards my shop. It must have felt like home to her.
“Nicole Marie gave me a key. Though I really don’t see why I’m the one explaining myself to you,” he said with a hint of amusement as he raised an eyebrow. “After all, you are the thief here.”
His name was Simon, and he told me that he was an editor at a publishing house. I certainly believed it. His appearance fit the bill. Checked shirt underneath a sweater. Thick black-framed glasses. Late forties and stubble on his chin. Someone I would have found attractive in another life—or at least one where I wasn’t being caught breaking and entering.
I’d thought he was going to demand the manuscript back, at the very least, but he just shrugged and told me I could keep it. “She’d probably just be happy that someone was reading her work.”
I took a seat gingerly on the sofa, even though I wasn’t sure that was allowed, and looked at Simon for some kind of approval. He didn’t seem to care what I did, though. He was making himself at home, flicking on the light to the kitchen area and asking if I wanted a cup of tea. “But aren’t you her publisher?” I asked, confused. “Surely you don’t want the book out and about illegally before it is officially published…”
He laughed a little and reached into the pantry for some tea bags, the kettle now boiling. “I said I was a publisher, not that I was Nicole Marie’s publisher,” he said as he shut the door and raised a bushy eyebrow at me. Everything he did had an air of flirtatious energy about it and it made me a little nervous as I sat there, clutching the manuscript as though it could be snatched from my arms at any moment.
“Oh. Right.” What did that mean though?
He sighed and looked a little sad as the he stared at the kettle, not quite ready to pour the water. “I was a friend of Nicole Marie’s,” he said. “A good friend.” He reached over for the kettle and sounded a little choked up. For the first time, he seemed less cocky and flirty. “I would have loved to have helped her by publishing her book, really I would have. I had extremely high hopes for it when she first told me she had finished a book and sent it to me. It was just… Well…” He paused, like he was thinking of a polite way to phrase things. “It wasn’t quite ready for publication, I suppose you could say.” He handed me the cup of tea and I had to set aside the manuscript I was still clutching to so that I could take it.
But that was not what Maria had told me. “One of the members of the book club thinks that Nicole Marie had a publishing deal. That she was just a hop, ski,p and a jump away from having the next literary bestseller.”
He mused on this for a moment. “Maybe that is what Nicole Marie led them to believe.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it is what she wanted to believe herself.”
True. So it could still very well be a good motive for murder then. If Nicole Marie had lied about getting a book deal and someone had found out, that could also be a motive. “Maybe all I have to do is figure out which members of the book club are writing a novel,” I said a little wryly, glancing at Simon over the top of my cup of tea. “And then I will have my killer.”
He laughed a little. “Should be easy enough to do.”
“You would think. Except that I am apparently the town pariah at the moment. Or at least the book club pariah. None of them will come near me.”
But it turned out that Simon could actually be a little help with that. “I could always put in a good word with them,” he said with a laugh as he finished his cup of tea and set the empty mug down on the coffee table between us.
“You know them? The other members of the book club?” I asked, surprised. I had to wonder why he’d never turned up to a meeting himself if he was so tight with them all.
“Oh yeah, they all come to me with their book ideas. Telling me how they’re sitting on the next bestseller. Some of them even show me the writing they have done.” He seemed weary over it all and yet amused at the same time. Gulp. Maybe I wouldn’t tell him the idea I had for a murder mystery novel after all then. But I had been considering it. He must get it all the time.
“And you tell them…” I asked, curious.
“Well, I try to be polite, of course.” He grinned at me. “Let them down gently. Tell them the idea sounds brilliant and to send me the completed manuscript. Of course, Nicole Marie is the only one who actually had a completed one. So I hated to have to disappoint her.”
Hmm. I wasn’t sure it was a good word I needed so much as some actual help with sussing them out. The members of the book club were all avoiding me, but Simon had a way in. I asked if he wouldn’t mind meeting me at Captain Eightball’s the next day to discuss a few things. He apologized and said he had to head back to Newcastle, but that he could meet me later in the week if I was still interested. “Well,” he said. “It’s a date then.”
I blushed. Wasn’t quite sure about that. “So you’re from Newcastle then?” I asked.
He told me that he was originally from Sydney, actually, and that he had a cottage down in Eden Bay that he used for weekends, and which he hired out as a writing retreat for writers who wanted to take some time to get away from it all. “And I also run several writing residencies during the year, so that writers who don’t have much money can use the cottage for free, kind of like a scholarship.” He was only going to Newcastle for a few days to present an award, apparently.
I wondered if he could tell me which of the local writers had used the cabin, but he seemed a little funny when I asked him the question. “I’m not sure if I should give that sort of thing away. You know, for privacy reasons.”
“Sure. Sure.” I understood. I was a little disappointed, though. But if I could just get the location of the cottage then maybe I could find a log of the visitors myself. But just as I was about to subtly ask Simon for a little more information, there was a knock on the front door and a male voice—a little high pitched, but definitely male—called out, demandin
g to know who was inside.
Simon looked at me, a little bit of mischief in his eyes. “Uh-oh, we’ve been sprung.”
And for the second time that night.
Whoever it was, they were still knocking.
“Who is that?” I asked as we crouched down. The light was still on, though. We weren’t exactly being inconspicuous. He was probably wondering why the lights were on when the owner was dead.
Simon stood up a little and looked over the sofa. “It looks like Nicole Marie’s neighbor, Zed.” He laughed a little. “He’s completely harmless. Just terribly nosy.”
There was another glimmer of mischief in Simon’s eye. “So do we come clean or make a run for it?” he whispered right into my ear, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Making a run for it sounds like more fun,” I said. And so we did.
“Good night, Claire,” Simon said once we were safely out the back of the house and on the street. He asked if I wanted a lift home, but Nicole Marie’s house was only a few blocks away from my apartment complex.
“Good night, Simon,” I said, trying not to smile too much as I walked away into the night.
Oh, darn it. After all that, I had left the manuscript inside.
7
Alyson
So much for peace.
So much for sleep.
It looked like I couldn’t get a break no matter what time of day, or what day of the week, it was.
“Argh!” I screamed and threw the pillow off my head and onto the floor. It’s not that there was always total silence on a typical Eden Bay morning. Seagulls? That was one thing. Actually, I missed their ear-piercing squarks now that they were being drowned out now by heavy machinery. Jasmine, my niece, or J as we called her, was always telling me that I should wear ear plugs to bed, but every time I tried to put them in my ears, I felt like my ear drums were going to explode. How did anyone deal with those things? Besides, J only ever pretended to have hers in. That was how she eavesdropped on adult conversations—pretended she couldn’t hear anything while we spilled everything.
Murder and Manuscripts Page 3