This particular evening the six of us distributed ourselves around May’s living room to enjoy pizza in front of her gas fireplace before settling down to the task at hand. Although we all had copies of Lizabeth Mulgrew’s letter, May read it aloud to refocus our attention:
Friday, February 19th (very, very early)
Maybelle –
What a hag you and your companions must think me, and how right on the money you are. I was feeling distinctly hag-like yesterday evening, but I should not have taken it out on you. In my defense I can only say I’d had a bit of a bad day, primarily involving unpleasant test results from the doctors who are determined to delay the inevitable (and prolong my misery) by carving me up and subjecting me to various other indignities over the next year. I said, “No, thank you” as prettily as I could, but still they pouted, which put me into my cups rather earlier than usual. Do please forgive me.
Having recovered my wits and my customary good humor (Ahem!), aided by a great deal of water and several hours’ sleep, I am spending the wee hours rethinking my plan to shock the Mysteries USA members with the truth about the writing and publishing biz. On second thought, why should I bother? They will learn it for themselves soon enough. At this stage of their naively optimistic quest, they wouldn’t believe me anyway, clinging all the more tightly to their misguided hopes. So I shall leave them to it and invent a family emergency to cover my hasty dawn departure.
I candidly advise you to do something similar to avoid the awards dinner Saturday evening. You’re not going to win. I have it on the best authority that Jessica Price will take top honors this year, thanks largely to my superb editing of her latest cozy manuscript, not that she would ever acknowledge my contribution. Without my hard work—unremunerated, of course—she wouldn’t even be in the running. Her ego would never allow for that possibility, but then, I don’t have to tell a publisher colleague about that, do I? Wait until next year, when I’m not around to clean up her sloppy prose, and see how she fares. At any rate, her title is the political favorite this time around, and the totally unbiased judges have gone along, so my advice is to come down with a convenient case of the flu and spare yourself the charade.
You’ll be delighted to know I’m about to get to the point of this rambling diatribe, which has a lot to do with how I wish to be remembered by one of my favorite people. No, I am not going to leave you my publishing company. I wouldn’t burden you with it, as it’s on its last leg. Nor will I saddle you with the three dozen authors currently under contract who will throw hissy fits of impressive proportions when they get the news. I shall simply set my little flock free to make their own way in the world—all, that is, except my single greatest asset, the final manuscript of W.Z.B. Trague.
As you (and everyone else) know, W.Z.B.’s thrillers have been published by Random House, but a few years ago I was lucky enough to land the ebook rights to his backlist, which is substantial and has been lucrative enough to keep my little business afloat. Over time W.Z.B. and I formed a unique bond. To cut to the chase, growing disenchantment with agents and major publishers resulted in W.Z.B. specifying in his will that I would receive the publication rights to his final manuscript, not his agent and not Random House. When he passed on just before Christmas, I received a special delivery package containing a flash drive on which is the manuscript of the mystery world’s next best seller: Swan Song by W.Z.B. Trague. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Ingenious of him, eh? Such a tiny device, so easy to hide, and that’s precisely what I did before I left Lenox to come to Hartford.
The majority of the publishing world hasn’t a clue about all this yet, although between you and me, I’ve had a nagging suspicion that someone is aware that I have the manuscript and intends to get his or her hands on it. This may simply be rampant paranoia, but I still felt it prudent to take precautions. Trague’s will also included instructions to destroy the single hard copy that existed, which I have done. Since I received the flash drive, I’ve been enjoying the hell out of my little secret and looking forward to a bright financial future. Bad timing, I know, but it struck me about an hour ago that W.Z.B. has given me an incredible opportunity to go out with a bang instead of the whimper my doctors are offering. So what say we have some fun, you and I?
Once word gets out about Trague’s defection, all hell will break loose, so you must act quickly. I want you to find the flash drive, publish the manuscript and reap the rewards you so greatly deserve. I trust that this language, written in my own hand, will satisfy any legal eagles who may wish to dispute my decision, so guard it with care until I can have my lawyer tweak my will.
So now all you have to do is find the flash drive before anyone else gets wind of this arrangement. I remembered how much you enjoy setting up puzzles for your sleuth, Ariadne Merriwether, to solve, so I’m betting you’ll have fun finding the solution to this one yourself. The drive is not hidden in my house, my car or my safe deposit box, so don’t waste your time searching there. The key to the drive’s location is contained in this list of song titles. Once you crack the code, which isn’t very difficult, since I am rather pressed for time, you’ll know exactly where to look. Here goes:
My Secret Place
My Heart Is an Open Book
I Will Stand By You
Six and Seven Books
The Best Things in Life Are Free
Best of My Love
Hidden in My Heart
Hometown Girl
Paperback Writer
6,3 … 1,2 … 2,3 … 7,1 … 3,4 … 5,7 … 4,4 …
5,4 … 9,2 … 8,1
Off you go now. As for me, I’ll be incommunicado, traveling to the Galapagos or Australia or maybe Africa while I still can. My attorney, Robert Henley of Lenox, MA, will wind up the details of my estate and close down the business, finally earning the fat retainer I’ve been paying him lo these many years. Since I have no spouse or children, I have only myself to please for whatever time I have left.
Must wind up now as I have an over-eager room service waiter knocking on my door. I said I wanted coffee very early, but 5:30 a.m.???
Have fun, be well,
Lizzie
“Initial thoughts?” she asked over the top of her reading glasses.
Becky was the first to speak from where she sat on the rug, cross-legged. “I think she was smart to hide the flash drive, that’s for sure.”
Duane sprawled beside her, propped up on his elbows, in front of the fireplace. “And smart to shove the letter under the pillows. It’s too bad she got tricked into opening her door to whoever was knocking at 5:30 a.m. I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend, but I’m glad the intruder didn’t get what he was after.”
May regarded him fondly. “Our job is to see that he—or she, by the way, since we don’t know that it was a man—never does. I may not have been able to help Lizzie last night, but I surely plan to carry out her final wishes. What do you make of this code?”
“It can’t be terribly complicated, can it?” Isabelle mused. She took a thoughtful sip of wine. “May had to make it up on the fly. She had her laptop and, presumably, internet access via the hotel’s Wi-Fi, so she could look up the song titles.”
“She could look up everything about them, including the composers, lyricists, every singer who ever covered them and for what labels. Emma does that all the time,” I put in. “There are thousands of databases on line.”
Margo tapped the sheets of paper in her lap with one perfectly manicured nail. “True, but Isabelle makes a good point. It was the wee hours of the morning, remember. May had been drinkin’ pretty hard a few hours earlier, and she was struggling to come to grips with the worst news anyone can get about her health. I’m thinkin’ this is a KISS code.”
“Kiss?” May looked puzzled.
“Keep It Simple, Stupid,” Duane and Becky said together, not even looking up from the letter in front of them.
May laughed out loud, something we hadn’t heard in a
while but were very glad to hear now. “Okay, then, it shouldn’t take too long for six reasonably intelligent people to crack it. Where do we start?”
Perhaps the order of the song titles is significant,” I suggested. “The first pair of numbers is 6 and 3. That would translate to Best of My Love I Will Stand by You. The second pair is 1 and 2, which would be My Secret Place My Heart is an Open Book.” I looked up. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“Maybe she hid the drive in a book,” Margo guessed, “but what book and where?”
“Another possibility is that the numbers refer to the song lyrics, not the titles. Can we find those on line?” asked Isabelle.
“Can do,” Duane assured her and whipped out his iPhone. “What’s your wireless network key, May?”
“I have absolutely no idea. Do I have a wireless network?” May looked around, perplexed.
Duane put on his patient teenager face. “You have internet access in your office upstairs, right?”
May nodded. “Of course. I wouldn’t be able to run my business without it.”
“And when you use your laptop down here, you can still access the internet.” She nodded again. “So you must have a network. It’s probably secured, but I can get on it if I have the code. Do you have a black box upstairs with a lot of, um, twinkling lights?”
“I was never sure what that was for. I had a computer tech set it up for me. It’s on top of the little file cabinet next to my desk.”
“Back in a flash.” Duane scrambled to his feet and thundered up the stairs.
“The key’s probably right on the black box,” Becky assured us.
Within seconds, Duane galloped back down the stairs, his fingers already busy on his phone. “Bingo,” he said. “This will go much faster now.”
By 10:30 p.m. our heads were swimming with song lyrics and titles assembled in dozens of configurations, but we were no closer to achieving our goal. May closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the sofa. “That’s it for tonight,” she pronounced. “I’m exhausted. Making up puzzles for someone else to solve is fun, but code cracking is hard work.”
“Are you going to that awards dinner tomorrow night, Auntie May, or are you going to take Lizabeth’s advice and bail out?”
May made a face and opened her eyes. “I think I have to go. For one thing, I’m not supposed to know yet that I’m not this year’s top prize winner, so people would think it’s strange if I don’t show up, not to mention disrespectful to the memory of my publisher. For another, I’ll be curious to hear what the membership is saying about Lizzie’s demise. Nothing like an unexpected death to get a bunch of mystery writers het up. And finally, I want to know if news of Trague’s final manuscript is common knowledge yet. So, yes, I’m going to the awards dinner, even though I’d just as soon jump off a bridge.”
Chapter Six
By noon on Saturday, I’d given myself a headache by taking one more crack at the blasted code in Lizabeth Mulgrew’s letter. I knew Armando wouldn’t call until Sunday morning, since this was the day of a highly competitive golf tournament among the Telecom reps, which traditionally was followed by an extended cocktail hour and dinner. Unable to postpone it any longer, I tackled the vacuuming, mopping and laundry, then made a serious run through the local Stop & Shop to replenish our food supplies. I decided to reward myself for my efforts, and take advantage of Armando’s absence, by buying a scrumptious piece of cod from City Fish for my dinner. Fish wasn’t on Armando’s preferred menu list, but I loved it.
After stowing the groceries, I put the fish in a hot toaster oven with chopped garlic, lemon juice and buttered bread crumbs and poured myself a glass of crisp pinot grigio to enjoy while I waited. Gracie, whose nose never failed her, appeared at my side, ready to accept whatever scraps I might offer her when the fish was cooked.
As I sipped and waited for the timer to go off, I had what I thought was a very good idea. My daughter Emma has one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever come across, and she’s a real puzzle nut. If anyone could crack this code, Emma could. I looked at my watch: Six o’clock, which meant it was three o’clock in Oregon. It was unlikely that she and Ryan, her current love interest, would be hanging around his apartment in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, but I decided it was worth a shot and went upstairs to my office. Five minutes later a copy of the list of song titles and code from Lizabeth’s letter was en route to Emma’s laptop via e-mail. With her phone, laptop, scanner and printer, she could carry on her career as a real estate paralegal seamlessly whether she was in Connecticut or Oregon.
Predictably, my phone rang just as I was taking the fish out of the toaster oven. “Sorry, Gracie, but I won’t be long, I promise.” I thumped the baking pan back into the oven, set it to keep warm, and grabbed my phone.
“Hi, Momma,” my daughter greeted me. “Fun and games, huh?”
I filled her in on our efforts at solving the puzzle, including printing out the lyrics to each song on Lizabeth’s list. “We’re not having any luck figuring it out here, so I thought I’d give you a crack at it. What do you think? Any inklings?”
Coming from anyone else, her derisive laughter would have been insulting. Even from my daughter, it was annoying, and I bristled a bit. “You guys are overcomplicating it, Mom. This is a piece of cake. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to ask you to do one thing to the list of songs. Then I’m going to hang up, wait ten minutes and call you back. If you haven’t solved the puzzle by then, you’re not my mother.”
I was seriously amazed. “You mean, you’ve already cracked the code? How is that possible?”
“Fresh eyes,” she assured me. “Works every time. The longer you stare at something, or the more you re-read it, the more complicated it gets. Your mind won’t take it in any more, just skips over the words. So go get your copy of the song list and number the titles from the top of the list to the bottom. Then take another look at the number pairings and see what happens. I’ll call you back in ten minutes. ‘Bye.” And she was gone.
I stared at the phone in my hand trying to decide whether to be aggrieved or intrigued. Having grown-up children with practical knowledge and opinions is a mixed bag at the best of times. After a few seconds, curiosity trumped pique, and I ran back upstairs to retrieve my copy of the letter. I spread it out on the kitchen table and did as Emma instructed, numbering the song titles from top to bottom. That gave me:
1. My Secret Place
2. My Heart Is an Open Book
3. I Will Stand By You
4. Six and Seven Books
5. The Best Things in Life Are Free
6. Best of My Love
7. Hidden in My Heart
8. Hometown Girl
9. Paperback Writer
Okay, I thought, so let’s assume the first number in each pair of numbers refers to the number of the song, but what could the second number signify? I reviewed the list:
6,3 … 1,2 … 2,3 … 7,1 … 3,4 … 5,7 … 4,4 … 5,4 … 9,2 … 8,1
Almost immediately, I saw that the second number of each pairing was very low, nothing higher than 7. I looked at the list of song titles again and began underlining the title words that matched the second number in each pair. Now I had:
1. My Secret Place
2. My Heart Is an Open Book
3. I Will Stand By You
4. Six and Seven Books
5. The Best Things in Life Are Free
6. Best of My Love
7. Hidden in My Heart
8. Hometown Girl
9. Paperback Writer
Finally, I laid out the underlined words in the order of the pairings: My secret is hidden by free books in writer hometown. Eureka! Lizabeth had concealed the flash drive somehow in W.Z.B. Trague’s hometown library. I felt triumphant and stupid at the same time, and when Emma called back, I told her so. Then I thanked her. And then I called Margo, who promised to call May, who was en route to the Mysteries USA awards dinner, and pass along the good news.
&
nbsp; On Sunday morning the three of us met for brunch at the Town Line Diner, later than usual in deference to May’s long evening at the Mysteries USA awards dinner. After our coffee had been poured and our orders given, Margo and I prodded May for details.
“It was a full house, all right,” she reported. “I can’t remember the last time I saw that many industry people in the same room. There were writers, of course, publishers and even some well-known agents. As a matter of fact, Wilhelm Trague’s agent, Renata Parsons, was there, which struck me as strange, since W.Z.B. is no longer with us. She must represent some other mystery writers or be looking for new ones. I wouldn’t have picked her out of the crowd, but Lizzie once told me she’s kind of a legend in the business. She’s nearly fifty, but she dresses like a teenager … a pink streak in her hair, short skirts, piercings.” She shuddered.
“It must have been a pretty grim affair for you, what with one thing and another,” I sympathized. “By the time the dinner got started, everyone must have been told about Lizabeth’s death, and as one of her authors, they must have been plaguing you for details.”
“Then you had to sit there during the awards presentation and give Jessica Price a big hand with a sportsmanlike smile on your face,” Margo added. “Poor Auntie May!”
Although the shadows beneath her eyes were a bit more pronounced than usual, May seemed none the worse for wear. In her shoes, I would have been haggard, but she was as pulled together and pleasant as ever.
“You know I don’t give a rat’s patootie about the silly award,” she reminded us. “That’s just something the conference sponsors dream up and pass around from author to author each year to get newbies to come and spend lots of money at their annual do. The award doesn’t mean a thing to the reading public.” She took a long pull at her coffee, and her face sobered. “Lizabeth’s death, though … that was another thing entirely. Between Jessica and some of Lizzie’s other authors weeping and wailing, plus the avid interest of people who never even met her in whatever sordid details they could glean, I had a lot of trouble keeping a straight face, I can tell you. It was like rubber-neckers passing a wreck on the highway, pure nosiness laced with a little venomous glee.” She rubbed her temples.
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