Publishable by Death

by A C F Bookens

  “Okay. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  After I reviewed the play-by-play of the night before, he said, “Yep, it sounds like Mayhem heard the murder. The timeline matches up almost perfectly. Too bad she can’t testify.”

  I glanced over at my beautiful, red-headed pooch as she slept, again, butt to butt with Taco, and sent her a pulse of gratitude. Then, an idea came to me. “Maybe she can. Do you have a minute?”

  The sheriff gave me a puzzled look. “Sure. What do you have in mind?”

  I called Mayhem over. “She definitely knew something was going on. Maybe she can sniff something out?”

  The sheriff smiled. “I can see the headlines now, ‘Local dog bests sheriff.’”

  “I’m sure she’ll give you all the credit.”

  I snapped on Mayhem’s leash and told Daniel what was up. He leashed up Taco as official scent hound, and we headed out on the street while Mart watched the register.

  “Too much activity out here on the street today, but maybe out back,” I said as I led Mayhem around the building.

  We let the dogs sniff and putter along the parking lot for a few minutes, and then, Taco started baying and was off. I had no idea a Basset Hound could move that fast, but Daniel was practically jogging to keep up. Then, Mayhem caught the scent, and I was sprinting along behind her. They were headed up the street toward Daniel’s garage, which I could just see between buildings as we ran. Then, we darted off into the empty field behind the art co-op, and the dogs slowed to put their noses to the ground.

  I’d seen hunters run dogs before, but I’d never been a big fan of chasing down an animal – either for sport or for the kill. So Mayhem had never been trained to hunt. But these dogs were hounds, and their scent instincts were kicking in hard. Within a minute, they’d centered in on a swatch of grass near the road, stopped, and stood stock still.

  The sheriff gave me a look and headed over. There, glinting in the grass, was a knife with a long, thin blade. And at the tip, there was blood.

  For the second time that day, a street in St. Marin’s was closed off, and the entire police force of the county was on site. Fortunately for the store, most of the police activity was behind the building, so we’d stayed open and available for customers who just needed a place to rest or be distracted. But by the end of the day when the Chinese food had been delivered, courtesy of Rocky and her mom, we were all frazzled, exhausted, and full of questions.

  “So this person really has something to hide? And Deputy Williams must have been on to it, you think?” Mart asked between mouthfuls of Lo Mein.

  “Seems to be the case. Or at least the murderer thought she was on to it,” Woody added.

  I swallowed my bite of General Tso’s chicken and said, “So we think it’s the same person?”

  “Pretty big coincidence if two murders happen in almost the same spot and aren’t connected in some way?” Walter said.

  “True.” I put my chopsticks down and leaned back onto my elbows, knowing my back would regret this position in about two minutes. “Then, if that’s the case, what did the deputy find?”

  A silence settled in while everyone pondered what might have been worth killing for . . . twice.

  “Do you think someone was trying to break in here again?” Daniel’s voice sounded edgy, like he was angry, maybe. I was angry, though, so maybe I was reading more into what he was saying than was actually there.

  “I think that’s a possibility. I mean, you did say, Harvey, that Sheriff Mason had been really discreet about the umbrella. Maybe the murderer thinks it’s still here.”

  I shuddered. “Glory, I hope not.” I pondered installing a second alarm system.

  Stephen reached over and patted my hand. “They moved the box inside. This time, when someone breaks in, we’ll know.”

  “This time WHEN someone breaks in . . . ” I could hear the panic in my own voice, but then laughed when I saw the smirk on my friend’s face. “Stephen Murphy, you are the worst.”

  “Why thank you,” he said with a little bow. “But seriously, a person would have to be pretty stupid to try to get in here again.”

  I knew he was right, but then, the murderer had stabbed a deputy sheriff to death in the same place they’d killed Stevensmith. I started to giggle.

  Daniel gave me a puzzled look. “Care to share with the class?”

  “Well, I started thinking about one of my favorite shows of all time, Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, and how all these bad things happened at Sunnyvale because there was a portal to hell there.”

  The entire group broke into laughter, and it felt like the weight of the day lifted a little. After a moment I said with fake seriousness, “So that’s a no to the hell portal then?”

  Stephen reached over and patted my knee. “That’s a no. But if Willow shows, tell me. I love her.”

  “You got it.”

  We all walked back to our house together, and then quietly and without a hint of teasing, Mart, Stephen, and Walter went inside taking Mayhem with them. I turned to Daniel and found his face soft with worry. “You okay?”

  I took a deep breath and gave myself a minute to really think about it. “I am. Dinner and a good laugh helped.”

  “I’m glad. Be careful, though, Harvey, okay?”

  I nodded. “I will.”

  He gave me another soft kiss, and I slipped inside, not quite as elated as the night before.

  I woke slowly on Sunday morning after a sleep so deep I wasn’t sure I’d moved at all. My body ached in that delightful way it does after a good rest, and I stretched hard as I headed into the kitchen. My good mood immediately dropped when I saw my friends’ faces. Mart was actually pale, which never happened given her love of a sunny day.

  She gestured toward a bar stool and then spun the newspaper to face me. The headline read, “Local Bookshop Becomes Locus for Killing Spree.” I gasped and then started to cry.

  “It’s not such a bad article, honey,” Walter said as he came behind me to massage my shoulders. “Just a really atrocious headline.”

  “And it’s just the Courier. Everyone here already knows about the murders.” Mart’s voice was breathless with desperate reassurance.

  I wiped my eyes with a napkin and leaned back with the paper in front of me. Walter was right. The article wasn’t that bad. In fact, they said a lot of good things about the store. The title wouldn’t hurt the store, I knew. But the idea that a place I had created was associated with all this violent death really hurt.

  Laying the paper on the counter, I stood and got a cup of coffee for myself. Then, I turned to my friends and said, “Time to get to work. We have a lot to do. Wear comfortable walking shoes.” Then I turned and headed to my room, coffee mug in hand.

  We all convened thirty minutes later in the foyer. My friends had no idea what I was thinking, but they’d all put on sneakers and were ready. I bent and put on Mayhem’s brightest bowtie – she had one for each season and holiday thanks to Mart and her dog attire spree of 2017. Then, I looked at my friends and said, “It’s time to give people a new association with our bookstore. No more ‘Locus for a killing spree’ for us.”

  “Alrighty then. What’s the plan?” Stephen asked as he donned a bright red ball cap. “Handing out Rice Krispies treats? Hiring a pep band?” He gasped. “Giving away books?”

  I smiled. “All good ideas, but no. We’re going to solve this murder, but first, we’re going to throw a party.”

  We needed to lift the mood in St. Marin’s – I needed to lift the mood, and everyone loved a good street fair. So we spent the day planning for the first annual Leap Into Spring Street Fair for the following Sunday. A week wasn’t much time to plan an event, but by the end of Sunday, we’d gotten most of the merchants on Main Street to agree to have a sale or giveaway table on the sidewalk in front of their shops, convinced the local restaurants to offer a special spring dish on their menus, secured commitments from three of Baltimore’s favorite food trucks to come out fo
r the day, and sent press releases to all the local media. We were billing the day as a “Celebration for the Life of Deputy Skye Williams.”

  When the shop closed after a mediocre sales day – only the true crime enthusiasts seemed excited by shopping at “murder central,” as one customer put it – I was still feeling pretty good about the plan for the following weekend. But I was also more determined than ever to solve this murder. I wanted the sheriff to be able to announce he’d made an arrest at the festival. Of course, I hadn’t told anyone that – it seemed a ridiculous goal, but still, when I put my mind to something, I was hard to stop.

  After we closed up, I sent Mart, Stephen, and Walter home after assuring them that Daniel would be there in a few minutes to walk me home. I had to show them his text message saying just that and lock the door while they watched before they would leave. But finally, I had a few minutes to myself. I loved my friends, but I was worn down by constant people. My little introvert heart needed just a few moments alone.

  Plus, I wanted to take a look behind the shop right quick because something had been bugging me since the day before, and I needed to see the parking lot now that it was almost dark. I could almost hear Daniel scold me as I pushed open the back door, but I had Mayhem on her leash and a hammer in my hand.

  I walked out into the lot a ways after taking a good look to be sure I was alone. I could see clear to the tree line that ran beside the houses on the block over, and all the way down the street, the lights on the back of the shops showed an empty back alley. No one in sight.

  Turning to face the building, I studied the back of my store. It looked like the back of a gas station, except that the doorways for what used to be the outdoor bathrooms – one for men and one for women – were closed off from the inside. They would have opened into the bathrooms inside if they worked, but I didn’t love the idea of customers having to go around the building to, well, “go.” So I’d had the contractors move the doors inside and close these off. But when we’d been back here looking for the knife, I’d noticed that the left-hand door looked dingy and had made a mental note to paint it again.

  The fact that one door had gotten dirty and the other hadn’t bugged me, though, and I wanted to see if there was a problem with the gutter or something. I got closer, and that’s when I noticed the smell. Oregano? No, sage. I knew that smell from almost every shop in the Haight in San Francisco. It was the scent du jour of the wellness community, but I had never cared for it much since it was so deeply appropriative to take a Native American ritual and use it to make a store smell good.

  I got closer and saw a pile of ash on the ground by the door. Someone had been burning sage? Presumably they thought the place had bad energy and had been smudging the doorway, but who? And why? And for how long? Something had been burned here a lot to turn that door a slightly gray hue.

  I was almost certain that I was smelling sage, but I couldn’t be sure. I need to get a sample and have it analyzed, I thought and then immediately wondered if that was even a thing investigators did or just a result of my deep affection for TV police procedurals. Better safe than sorry. I dug into my back pocket and pulled out a candy wrapper that I’d shoved there earlier. I was always putting trash in my pockets – a gum wrapper someone had dropped in the store, a bottle top on the sidewalk – and it drove Mart crazy when she did laundry. “Ooh, you don’t know where that’s been, and you put it in your clothing.” I always shrugged. Now, I had good reason for my trash.

  I took a quick look around to be sure I was still alone and then set down the hammer. Then, I used the tip of my pinky finger to scoot a little of the ash into the wrapper and twisted it shut before carefully sliding the filled wrapper into my front pocket. I scooped up the hammer and made my way over to the back door. I slammed it shut, dropped the safety bar into place, and stood stock-still, listening to be sure no one was on the other side of the door. I didn’t hear anything, so I let out a long sigh and headed toward the front of the store.

  Mayhem, however, didn’t follow. She stood staring at the back door until a knock at the window signaled Daniel and Taco’s arrival. Only then, did she join me by the alarm box and then lead me out the front door. I appreciated her vigilance, but I hoped it was just over-caution and not a response to someone outside.

  As we headed down Main Street, I told Daniel about the back door and the ash I’d found. I wanted to be annoyed that he was more concerned about me being behind the shop alone than he was curious about the ash, but I couldn’t be. It just made me want to smile to see his concern, but I figured grinning away as he expressed that feeling probably wasn’t the best idea.

  We decided we should probably let the sheriff know about the door right away, just in case, so after I texted Mart to let her know we’d be a bit late AND answered her call when she confirmed I wasn’t texting under duress AND let her hear Daniel’s voice to triple check, we walked over to Mason’s office. I didn’t know if he’d be there, but I figured I could leave a note and the wrapper – preferably transferred to something a little more secure – with the officer on duty.

  But we didn’t even need the note. The sheriff was the officer on duty for the night, a fact that made me like him more. I always respected a person who did all the things they required the people who worked for them to do.

  After I explained about the door and endured a less pleasant lecture not only about the risk I had taken to gather the evidence but also about how there were trained police officers in town that had phones, Mason took the wrapper, poured the contents into an evidence bag, and then said, “This makes things more interesting.”

  “It does?” I sat forward on the edge of the hard, plastic chair next to his desk. “Why?”

  “Slow down, Cowgirl,” Mason said. “Did you not hear me about trained investigators?”

  I sat back and rested my hands on my knees. “I did, but can I help it if I’m a naturally curious person?”

  Daniel and the sheriff exchanged a look that said, “So that’s what she calls it,” before the sheriff turned to me. “I expect if I don’t tell you, you’ll be back at the library looking through microfilm again. Oh, you thought I didn’t know about that, huh?”

  I cleared my throat. “I guess there are no secrets in this town.”

  “Not when the new woman is poking her nose into a murder investigation. Nope, no secrets then.” He gave me a stern look down his nose. “Anyway, we found a similar pile of ash over at the courthouse.”

  “In the courthouse?” Daniel asked.

  “Well, not in there, but by the old “colored” bathrooms outside.” The corners of his mouth turned down hard when he said colored.

  “Oh man. I grew up in the South, but I’ll never get used to the fact that black people had to use separate facilities.” I looked at the sheriff. “I’m so sorry. Is that hard for you to think about?” I felt naïve asking that question, but to talk about segregation with a black man and not at least acknowledge that this history was his parents’ reality felt ridiculous, not to mention racist.

  “It used to be. Still is if I think about it too much. But it was the way it was, so I just work with that.” He looked at me then. “Thanks for asking.”

  “No problem. But this was found at the colored restrooms? The men’s room?”

  “Yep, same as at your place.”

  I tilted my head. “Really? Were the bathrooms at the gas station for black people?”

  He sat back then. “Oh, you didn’t know? Oh yeah, that station was owned by a black family, the Hudsons. It was even in The Green Book.”

  I knew The Green Book – that little booklet that told African American people where they could safely sleep, eat, and shop as they traveled through the segregated South. They’d made that movie with Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortenson and used the book’s name as the title. A lot of people loved that film; It even won the Oscar, but when I’d seen it at a theater in Oakland, the conversation in the lobby afterward wasn’t so flattering. One wo
man said, “Just what we needed, another movie about white people saving us.” I’d liked the movie, but what that woman said stuck with me.

  But it wasn’t the film that Mason was talking about – it was the actual book, and I was surprised. “It was? Wow.” I sat quietly for a moment, pondering the history of my little shop’s building.

  Mason furrowed his brow. “Does that bother you?”

  “What?! Oh, no. I love that actually. I like that it was a safe space for people. I’m just thinking about what it must have been like to need to consult a book to be able to know you were safe. I mean, I get the idea of safe spaces because as a woman I think about that stuff. I don’t go into a parking garage alone at night, for example—“

  “But you will go into a dark parking lot where two murders have happened alone.” Daniel’s tone was playful, but he had a point.

  I gave him a gentle smile. “You’re right. But I guess I’m saying I understand the experience of feeling unsafe sometimes, but never to that level. Never so much that I had to know which towns I could drive in at night and which were Sundown Towns, where I’d be in danger if I was there after dark.” In one of the local history books I’d read when I first moved to St. Marin’s, I’d read about an island a bit further down the shore, where black people couldn’t visit after dark for fear of their lives. The book had called it a Sundown Town, and I’d learned about another facet of racism I’d never been taught.

  “Well, I’m glad you like knowing that history, Harvey, but it does beg the question, why be burning sage at the door to two bathrooms that historically only black men used?”

  I nodded. That was a good question, and I was eager to try and find out.

  We left the sheriff’s office and had to wake up Mayhem and Taco where they snoozed by the bike rack out front. As we walked home, I ran through my thoughts out loud. I had always been a verbal processor, and so things really only became clear to me when I talked through them. It was a habit both of my parents, who believed firmly that personal problems needed to remain so private that they weren’t even shared with family, despised. Mom would pick me up after school and ask how my day was, but when I began to tell her about the girl on the playground who had told me to “mind my own beeswax” when I’d asked what she was doing or some such thing, Mom would say, “Now, dear, we don’t need to relive all the hard moments do we? What would you like for dinner?” And just like that, the conversation would be over.