by Nancy Warren
“It still doesn’t make sense,” he said. “If she told someone that I had written a fake manuscript, wouldn’t I be the one who was in danger?”
“Oh, that’s a good point. Except now you’re the golden goose.”
He didn’t look thrilled. “The golden Bartholomew Branson goose. Yeah.”
“The person who might want you dead is the real Bartholomew Branson,” I said.
He laughed, understandably thinking I’d made a joke. “I don’t think he’s going to mind too much.”
Oh, wouldn’t he be surprised.
Chapter 18
I went straight home after work, needing time in my quiet cottage. My thoughts were racing around without form or structure. Everyone seemed guilty and no one. Was the manuscript the vital clue, or was it a wad of recycling?
Cerridwen happily polished off a dinner of gourmet cat food, and I, still smarting from the discovery that my hiking trousers no longer fit, grilled a piece of salmon I had in the freezer and served it with brown rice and spinach.
I brewed myself up one of my special teas for relaxation and clarity. I took it into the living room, which overlooked the ocean. I tried to settle, but I felt all the stress and horror of the last few days circling around me like noisy crows. I closed my eyes, breathed in and out slowly a few times. I was beginning to feel the wheeling crows settle when I was jerked out of my quiet by the television turning on.
I cried out, “Really? Really?”
“…That’s really a very fine example of British slipware. Of course, you want to know the value. I would think at auction the cottage would fetch four hundred pounds.”
“As much as that,” a pleased-looking man said, grinning down at the brown and yellow pottery house.
I was about to flip off the TV when the camera zoomed in on a paper manuscript in a buff cardboard cover marked with ink scribbles and streaks of dirt. The book expert asked a tall woman in glasses to tell him how she happened to have a shooting script of The Quiet Man.
“Well, my great aunt was a typist for John Ford, the director, and she used to love to tell the stories of being on set for The Quiet Man. I think she had a terrible crush on John Wayne.”
The book expert chuckled. “I’m sure she did. The Quiet Man was, of course, filmed in Ireland in 1951. The film was released in ’52, so this has been in your family quite some time. How exciting she got to meet the great actor himself.”
“It was. She met all the cast. There’s a picture of her with them in the box.”
Then the camera panned in on a black and white photograph of an attractive woman beaming and surrounded by a group of people I didn’t recognize and one I certainly did. There was John Wayne with his arm around the typist, grinning at the camera.
I put the remote control back down and settled back to watch.
“Anyway, when the filming ended, they didn’t need the scripts anymore, and my auntie took one home. I didn’t even know she had it. I found it in her papers when she passed away.”
“My goodness, this is really something,” he said. “It’s a difficult thing to value. If John Wayne had signed it or her boss, John Ford, had signed it, it would be worth vastly more. John Ford won best director for that picture. However, even as it is, just a curiosity, I think a film buff would pay fifteen hundred pounds for this. And if you had a few people competing, oh, it could go for two thousand pounds, maybe even twenty-five hundred.”
She looked tickled pink. “It’s more than my poor great-auntie ever earned typing, I can tell you that.”
They both had a good chuckle, and then suddenly I was looking at a Georgian silver tea service.
I flipped off the TV. “Biddy!” I yelled. There was no answer. “I want a word with you.” I sensed she was gone, though I could still smell the faint scent of earth and mangy cat.
“Fine,” I snapped. “You want to play hide and seek?”
I jumped up, got my candles and laid them out in a circle. Cerridwen saw what I was doing and immediately came over, sitting with me in the center.
“Biddy O’Donnell, wherever you be, Biddy O’Donnell, I summon thee,” and then I pictured the nasty, old witch. I stared at the candle repeating the spell until I smelled her. She always smelled like she’d just been dug up. When she appeared in the middle of my circle, she did not look pleased. With her, naturally, was her familiar, Pyewacket, who took one look at Cerridwen and hissed. That knocked her head to one side but didn’t make her any less aggressive.
“What did you do that for?” Biddy asked me.
I narrowed my gaze at her. I felt like arching my back and hissing, too. “Where is it?”
She looked completely baffled. “Where is what? I was nicely settled in my old home, about to find out what a set of silver would go for. When I think of the knives and spoons I owned hundreds of years ago, it’s enough to make me spit. All I had to do was bury them in the ground so I could dig them up again. They’d be worth a fortune today.”
“I’m not interested in cutlery, and I think you know it. What did you do with the manuscript?”
“Manuscript? You mean like the monks have?”
“Stop toying with me, Biddy. You’ve been watching nothing but TV for months now. You know perfectly well what a manuscript is. And I think you took a manuscript from Candace Branson’s bedroom in O’Donnell House.”
She went sly and shifty on me, as she always did when she was caught out in wrongdoing. “She didn’t want it, did she?”
“Why not?”
“Because she were dead.”
I’d have smacked her if she wasn’t so repulsive. “You saw what happened? You’ve seen us all running around trying to solve the murder of Candace Branson, and all the time, you knew who did it?”
“Don’t get your shift in a twist, girl. I did not see who killed that woman. I didn’t even know she was dead at first. I came in to watch a nice bit of telly, and she were lying there in the bed. I thought she was asleep. I put the telly on. It was that nice young man who does the china. Had a bit of Spode, he did. Then Pyewacket acted peculiar and began sniffing around at the woman, and that’s when I realized she wasn’t sleeping.”
“But I could tell she was dead just walking up the stairs. Didn’t you feel it?”
The old witch glared at me. “I was buried in the ground next to a graveyard for three hundred years. Me senses are dulled.”
“Good point.” I kept forgetting that she was a little bit undead herself. “You’d seen that episode already, hadn’t you? The one where that woman had a script from The Quiet Man.” That’s why she’d turned on my TV and then left. She didn’t want to watch a rerun.
“What if I did? A thousand pounds for a bit of paper. Mad it was. I’d heard all the shouting and argumentation over the manuscript at my old house and thought it would be worth a nice bit of gold.”
“You have interfered in a murder investigation.” I tried to sound very severe, but she didn’t look bothered.
“Oh my. What will they do? Hang me?”
Then, as though I had forgotten she had been hanged, she shifted her head around, putting it more firmly on top of her neck.
I was going to remind her that if she didn’t behave, I was going to put her back under the yew tree where she’d been cursed to stay for so long, but it was a threat that was going to get pretty flimsy if I kept pulling it out every five minutes.
We both knew I couldn’t do it on my own anyway.
Instead I tried to appeal, not to her good nature because she obviously didn’t have one, but to her self-interest. “Karen is going to do very well with that bed and breakfast if you behave. But if this murder remains unsolved, she’ll have to close it down, and she’ll sell those comfortable beds that you enjoy so much and get rid of those TVs that are all tuned to your favorite show. Is that what you want?”
Her wrinkled and age-spotted lower lip protruded in a pout. “No.”
“Fine. Where did you put that manuscript?”
> She flounced over to my wardrobe, and before my astonished gaze, pulled open the doors and dug to the back of the cupboard where I stored the guest room sheets and blankets. From underneath, she pulled out the manuscript and handed it to me.
It was as though she’d handed me burning coals. I wanted to drop the pages rather than touch them. “You put that here? In my house? Don’t you know the police are assuming that whoever is holding on to this manuscript is the person who killed Candace Branson?”
She looked somewhat interested at that. “Did you? Kill her?”
“No, I did not.”
She gave me a knowing leer. “Come on, you can tell me. You won’t be hanged for it. They don’t do that anymore.”
“The only reason the evidence is in my cottage is because you planted it there. I did not kill Candace Branson. Why would I?”
Once again, she gave me that knowing leer. “Sometimes the urge just comes over a body.”
I took a step back. “It doesn’t come over me.”
She leaned over and patted my hand. “You’re young yet.”
I was gripping the manuscript in both hands, and her touching me just made me even more eager to drop the thing.
“That night, when the woman died and you took the manuscript, did you see anything significant?”
“Now, let me see.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “The painting of fruit and dead fish wasn’t bad. And there were some lovely dolls, like the ones I used to have when I was a child. Of course, the clothes were terrible moth-eaten, but the little painted faces took me back.”
“Not what did you see on the television. Did you see anybody come into her room?”
“No.”
“Where was the manuscript?”
“Lying on the bed beside her. Though some of the pages had slipped to the floor, probably when she was being strangled.”
“They were out in plain sight?”
“Aye. I just said.”
“So she wasn’t killed for the manuscript?”
I had no idea why I was discussing Candace Branson’s death with Biddy. She wasn’t interested in solving a crime. Not unless there was something in it for her.
The sly eyes focused on the pages in my hands. “What are ye going to do with it then?”
“Give it to the Gardai, I suppose.” And how was I going to do that without giving them some explanation of how I’d come across it?
“Don’t be hasty. There could be a fine profit to be made.”
“But not by me.” I glared at her. “Or you.”
It was still pretty early in the evening, but I felt this news couldn’t wait. After discovering I wasn’t going to let her sell Tristan’s manuscript, Biddy flounced off in a huff. And good riddance.
I called Lochlan and explained that it was Biddy who’d taken the manuscript. “So this whole time we’ve been chasing that missing manuscript, thinking whoever had it was the killer, and we were wrong. It was a red herring.”
“Curious,” he said, not all agitated like I was. But then Lochlan never seemed to get agitated. Maybe that’s what living for eight hundred years did for you. Gave you perspective on the human condition. “Come to the castle. No one’s gone out yet, so we can get the book club together for a quick meeting.”
“Excellent.” I really wanted other minds to talk over this new development with, since I wasn’t eight hundred years old and I was seriously agitated.
When I got to the castle, Lochlan let me in and escorted me to the library. Bartholomew, Dierdre, Oscar, Thomas Blood, and Lady Cork were present. It wasn’t the full book club, but that was fine.
I explained that the missing manuscript had been found at the back of my cupboard and briefly filled them in on the antics of Biddy O’Donnell.
“Biddy O’Donnell?” Thomas Blood said in his loud, blustery way. “I thought she was back in her underground prison.”
“No.” I left it at that.
“Fine woman in her day,” he said.
“But anyway, now it seems we’ve been wrong thinking whoever killed Candace Branson stole the manuscript.”
“Unless there’s another copy,” Bartholomew said.
I felt a headache forming. “We know Tristan Holt, the ghostwriter, had a copy with him. And Candace had one, which I also now have.”
“Perhaps Candace shared the manuscript on a confidential basis before announcing its existence.”
“Really? Why would she do that?”
“Quinn, I can see I need to explain to you how publishing works,” Bartholomew Branson said in a condescending tone. I tried to overlook the patronizing note because I really did need to understand more about his world if I was going to solve Candace Branson’s murder, which was the quickest way of getting the police and a lot of nosy reporters out of Ballydehag.
I wasn’t the only one who had secrets they preferred to keep to themselves. There were other witches in town, and the last thing Lochlan Balfour and the undead residents of the castle wanted was close scrutiny of their lives and, even more important, their identities. I was certain that Lochlan, high-tech wizard that he was, had given them all passably good documents and so forth. It seemed like the kind of skills he’d have, but I doubted he wanted them scrutinized by law and government agencies.
“Okay, explain it to me,” I said to Bartholomew.
“It begins with the literary agent. If one has an agent, that is. The agent is the author’s salesperson and to some extent a co-manager of their career.”
“And how do you choose an agent?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Normally, it’s the agent who chooses the author, unless the author is high-profile enough that agents come to him. Or her. But I was a young author sending out query letters and sample chapters to every agent I met, read about, or heard of. For the most part, those that deigned to reply rejected me. I tried every decent agent in New York, and then I turned to London agents. I got more rejections—”
“And still you didn’t take the hint,” Oscar said softly.
Bartholomew’s hands fisted, but otherwise he pretended he hadn’t heard the interruption. “Then Philip Hazeltine replied. He said he thought I had something and worked with me until he felt the novel was good enough to send out to editors. He was very good at his job, and I was lucky enough that he was able to provoke interest among several publishing houses.” A reminiscent smile came over his face. I could tell he loved this part. “There was an auction. My first novel went for six figures, an enormous amount at the time, especially for an unknown name. But so much of it was timing. My first novel released about the same time as the first Jason Bourne movie with Matt Damon. Giles won the bidding war and became my editor. We turned out to be a wonderful team, the three of us. I wrote the books, Philip took care of the money and business, and Giles was in charge of editing and publishing. So long as he treated us well, which he was careful to do, everyone was happy.”
“Until you died.”
The reminiscent smile was replaced by his more recent petulant expression. “Must you keep bringing that up?”
“I’m sorry, but it is pretty relevant to the mess we’re in right now.”
He thumped his fist on his knee. “Candace Branson has a lot to answer for,” he said in a furious undertone.
I was so glad he hadn’t been the one to kill his ex-wife. What if he’d turned her into a vampire and I’d had to deal with an undead version of Candace Branson? It was bad enough having the constant bickering between Oscar Wilde and Bartholomew without adding in the bickering of two formerly married egomaniacs.
“She does. But we also need to figure out who killed her so we can get back to our regular, quiet lives.”
He nodded. “And I can go out again with fewer restrictions.”
I was pleased that there was a direct benefit to him in this. I needed his cooperation.
“So Bartholomew Branson is no longer an unknown name. Therefore, she might send the manuscript to several agents to get them com
peting for the chance to represent your next last book.”
“Exactly. The woman’s so grasping, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
I looked around the room. “The two people who have the most to gain from Candace’s death then, assuming she was killed because of the manuscript, are the two agents?”
Bartholomew looked miserable. “Not the American one. He’d already won the battle. Remember? You said he announced the morning after the launch that he was my new agent. He had no reason to kill Candace.” He thumped the leather arm of the couch with his fist. “I can’t believe that on top of hiring a ghost to write my books, she screwed over my agent. Does no one have loyalty anymore?”
I felt really sorry for him. “You know that this makes Philip Hazeltine the most likely suspect?”
“Not so fast,” he said, and I could see his thriller mind spinning. “What if Giles were able to produce that manuscript and claim that I’d already sent it to him before I died? It’s a twist in this plot we haven’t explored.”
I put a hand to my forehead. “But you just said the books went through Philip to Giles.”
“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head as though I were being particularly clueless. “That was how the negotiations worked. But after seventeen novels, I no longer needed Philip’s editorial advice. I would send the manuscripts straight to Giles.”
“You mean he got them before Philip did?”
“Yes. Philip negotiated the contracts, but he’d ceased to be involved in the editorial process after about the third novel.”
I was getting a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. “But if Giles claimed that you had sent him that manuscript, wouldn’t Tristan Holt have something to say about it?” I had all their attention now.
Lochlan rose. “And didn’t you say that Tristan was staying at O’Donnell House?”
“I did.”
“Then he’ll be your next victim,” Bartholomew said. “It’s the perfect turning point for act two.”
“We’ve got to warn Tristan,” I said. I liked the guy. I didn’t want him to get killed over a manuscript that he hadn’t even been properly paid for.