“Ah,” I said, enlightenment dawning. “That was her own manuscript. We never did figure out who mixed it in with the sale items.”
He shook his head, wispy yellow-white hair dancing. “No, it was a guy, a Frank something.” He concentrated for a moment and then jerked his head up. “Bugg,” he said. “I knew it would come to me. I’m not ready for the Alzheimer’s ward yet. Bugg. Frank Bugg. It said, ‘Shades of Passion,’ and on the next line, ‘by Frank Bugg.’” He nodded his sharp chin triumphantly.
I didn’t insult him by asking if he was sure. I didn’t know what to say. I stood still as a fence post, trying to understand the ramifications. Cletis’s wife came over, greeted me, handed her husband his crutches, and told him it was time to head for brunch at their daughter Annie’s. My mom’s voice came from far away.
“Are you okay, Amy-Faye?”
I looked down into her concerned eyes. “Fine, Mom. Well, maybe a little tired. It’s been a couple of late nights in a row.” I didn’t explain that my lack of sleep had more to do with Hart than with events. Thinking about it warmed my cheeks and I smiled through my worry.
“LuAnn Sealander told me about what Jeffrey Hovey did to Jan last night,” she said, making a tsking noise. “He should be ashamed of himself. LuAnn said it was a lovely party, right up until Jeffrey went off the deep end. LuAnn said he dove right into his midlife crisis like a hog into muck. You won’t have any trouble getting paid, will you?”
Trust Mom to home in on the important stuff. Maybe if she got tired of drawing beers at the pub, she’d come work for me. She could do my billing and collecting, the part of the business I liked least. “I’ll handle it,” I said. “Look, Mom, I’ve got to run. Say bye to Dad for me, okay?” Not giving her a chance to ask more questions, I kissed her cheek and took off across the room.
I wasn’t sure where I was going at first. Too many ideas were swimming around in my head, colliding and then separating. Francesca had clearly claimed the auction manuscript as her own. She’d almost had a seizure when Cletis started to read out the author’s name, I remembered now. Frank Bugg. Who the heck was he? The name was too similar to “Francesca Bugle” to be a coincidence. I wanted to talk to Lola, try to sort it out, but I knew she’d be at church. Ditto for Brooke, who dutifully accompanied her husband and in-laws to the late service at an Episcopal church in Grand Junction. Troy Sr. had had a falling-out with the priest at St. Joseph’s Episcopal here in Heaven and made the switch to the Grand Junction church six or seven years ago. Maud had mentioned an early-morning fishing trip and I didn’t think she’d be back yet. That left Kerry. I phoned her from the van and got an immediate, “Come on over.”
I pulled up in front of Kerry’s place ten minutes later. It was a ramshackle two-story gabled house she’d inherited from her parents. To hear her tell it, her entire mayoral salary went to maintaining the place, to “bubble gum and baling wire,” as she put it. She and her son, Roman, were in the front yard, raking up the leaves deposited by yesterday’s winds. Roman had on headphones and was swaying to a beat as he raked near the house. Wearing ratty sweats and work gloves, with a kerchief securing her short hair, Kerry met me at the curb and thrust a forty-gallon yard bag into my hands.
“You hold—I’ll rake. I think this is the last of them.” She gestured upward at the two cottonwood trees, one oak, and two aspens that sat on her property. Blue sky showed through their mostly bare limbs. “I swear I’m going to chop them down one of these days.”
I took that with a grain of salt. Kerry said the same thing every fall, and changed her mind every spring when the trees leafed out and provided gorgeous shade for her house and yard all summer. She tromped across the yard to a large pile of crisp leaves. I dutifully held the mouth of the bag open as she stuffed leaves in. While we worked, I told her about what Cletis had said, and also filled her in on finding the duct tape on the tank lid last night. She listened, her brow slightly corrugated.
When I’d finished, she said, “Well, I think we can say that Francesca Bugle is at the center of this whole mess, one way or another. I mean, Frank Bugg? C’mon, there’s got to be a tie to Francesca Bugle. And the way she bid for that manuscript—what, five thousand bucks?—she was desperate to keep anyone else from getting their hands on it. And I don’t care what she said about her publisher being pissed if the manuscript got out. That kind of money means something bigger is at stake.”
“Like a whole writing career,” I said, straightening and arching my back. I put a foot into the bag and compacted the leaves. They crackled. Kerry heaved more leaves in, trapping them against the tines of the rake, and angling the rake into the bag. Half her load dribbled back onto the grass, and individual leaves, goosed by the breeze, spun up and away, making a bid for freedom.
“Drat,” she said. She picked the leaves up in fistfuls and stuffed them in the bag. When she was done, I pulled the plastic drawstring closed and knotted it.
“I did an Internet search on the name before coming over here,” I said, “but I got four hundred seventy thousand hits. Who’da thunk there were that many Frank Buggs running around? Without more info, there’s no way to tell which one is the one we want.”
“I know a foolproof way to find out who he is,” Kerry said, planting the rake’s handle firmly on the ground, and setting the other hand on her hip.
“How?”
“Ask Francesca Bugle about him.”
I chewed on my lower lip. “Or we could tell Hart—the police—and let them look into it.”
“Like the police are going to be interested in hearing that Cletis Perry thinks he saw the name Frank Bugg on a manuscript that Francesca Bugle bought. Even if they believe what he says, where’s the crime? Where’s the tie-in to the Van Allen case? Nowhere, that’s where. Face it: Chances are, there isn’t a connection. The whole Frank Bugg thing will turn out to be unrelated.” Kerry shrugged in a “there you have it” way.
She made a lot of sense. “Okay,” I said, convinced. “Let’s do it. We’d better hurry—they’re all probably checking out of the inn as we speak.”
“I can’t go looking like this,” Kerry said, gesturing to her dirty, leaf-speckled attire. “Give me ten to shower and change.”
“I’ll meet you at the Columbine,” I said, anxious to catch Francesca before she headed home. I had a feeling that once all the suspects left Heaven, the chances of solving the Van Allen murder would plummet dramatically. Someone would get away with murder and, having gotten away with it once, might kill again when it seemed like a solution to his or her problems. Waving good-bye to Roman, even though I’m not sure he’d ever noticed my presence, I returned to the van and headed for the B and B.
Chapter 24
A white Ford Fusion was pulling out of the Columbine’s driveway as I drove up. I caught no more than a glimpse of what seemed to be a hat atop the driver’s head, and instinctively maneuvered the van across the driveway’s entrance. If it wasn’t Francesca driving the car, I would simply apologize and back up. The car door opened. Francesca got out and marched toward me, face flushed with irritation.
I got out to meet her. She wore a plum-colored pants suit over a gray blouse with a floppy bow tie. I’d worn something like that blouse to a 1980s-themed party in college. The poppies on her hat bobbed with each step.
“Don’t get out,” she greeted me impatiently. “You’ve got to move. Can’t you see you’re blocking the driveway? I need to get to DIA to catch my flight, so hustle up.” She turned around, confident I would do as she asked, I guessed.
She was halfway back to the rental before I asked, “Who is Frank Bugg?”
She froze. I waited.
After thirty seconds of immobility and silence, she pivoted slowly. Tension made her stiff as a robot, and made the tendons in her neck stand out like rigid cables. “Why do you ask?”
She knew him! I gave a mental fist pump. Keeping the elat
ion I felt off my face, I said, “Because that name was on the manuscript you bought at the auction.” I watched her closely, seeing her consider and discard several lies before the tendons in her neck relaxed and she said, “He’s my father.”
“Your father?” I parroted. “Then why—?” I couldn’t think why her manuscript would have her father’s name as the author, but I also couldn’t see why that was such a secret. Had she stolen a manuscript from him like the Stewarts had from Eloise Hufnagle? Surely not.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
“Then the sooner you start telling it, the better your chances of catching your plane,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
“I don’t want to do this in the driveway. You’d better come in.” Giving in to the inevitable, Francesca plodded up the six stone steps to the Columbine and pushed through the door.
Sandy was in the foyer, polishing the woodwork with lemon oil. She looked up in surprise. “I thought you’d gone,” she said. “Forget something?”
“Do you think I could have a glass of water?” Francesca asked.
Clearly sensing that something was amiss, Sandy nodded. When she had disappeared down the hall leading to the kitchen, Francesca started to walk into the small parlor, but I was leery of being behind closed doors with her. My experience with the Stewarts the other day was too fresh. “This is good,” I said, plumping myself into one of the two lyre-backed chairs in the foyer. Francesca ignored the other chair and looked out the narrow window on one side of the double doors. She spoke without facing me and I had to scoot the chair closer to hear her.
“I don’t know where to start,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone this story, although I knew this day would come, that we couldn’t keep the secret forever.”
Impatience and curiosity fizzed through me. “What secret?”
Francesca wasn’t willing to be rushed. Still not looking at me, she said, “I’ve wanted to be a writer always. Always. I can remember lying in bed, covers pulled up to my chin, listening while my mother or father read bedtime stories. We had almost no money, so they couldn’t buy books, but my mother had a collection of fairy tales with beautiful illustrations from when she was a girl, and we had the Bible, so I grew up with the swan princess and Noah, Cinderella and the Good Samaritan. I can remember thinking when I was no more than four or five that I wanted to write stories like that. I wrote my first story when I was six and I haven’t stopped from that day to this.” She twiddled the blinds wand, letting stripes of sun in, shutting them out.
“I wrote all through high school and won awards for my stories, including a partial scholarship to the community college. I worked as a waitress and a housecleaner to put myself through school. When I graduated, I kept waitressing and cleaning, making enough to support myself, barely, while I wrote. I sent manuscripts off to agents, but never landed one. Lots of agents liked my writing style, but I couldn’t seem to hit on an idea that wasn’t hackneyed and trite. Yes, both those words came up in my rejection letters. By the time I was thirty, I had given up on making a living as a writer, and gotten a ‘real’ job.” She sneered the word “real.”
I shifted on the uncomfortable chair. The needlepoint pad had looked comfy enough, but the padding had wadded into pea-sized lumps over the decades. I heard a rustling noise behind me, but I didn’t take my eyes off Francesca Bugle to look around.
“I became an office manager at an over-the-road trucking company. I was good at it, and it wasn’t miserable, but it wasn’t writing. I did that for over ten years. Then—” Francesca took in a deep breath that swelled her back. “Then, my father went to prison.”
I stifled a gasp.
“He was sixty. With all that time on his hands, he took up writing. I visited him at least twice a month, and one day he handed me a three-inch stack of paper and asked me to read it. I took it home to humor him, and read it that night. The whole thing. The grammar was iffy and the characters lame, but the story and pacing gripped me, kept me turning the pages, even though I had work the next day. I thought about that book all the next day, while I was doing accounts receivable, counseling an employee, ordering supplies. By the time I got home, I knew what I was going to do. I might not have been able to come up with a good story idea of my own, but I recognized one, a hook that would grab readers, when I saw it.”
“You sent it off to a publisher,” I said, unable to stand the suspense of her drawn-out story.
“Not yet.” She opened and closed the blinds a few more times; if anyone from across the street was watching, he probably thought she was sending Morse code messages. No, only Maud would leap to that conclusion. “I rewrote it, gave it my stamp. Then, I talked to my father and he agreed that I could send it out. We compromised on a pen name, Francesca Bugle. I’m really Patty Bugg. Doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?” She gave a bitter laugh, her breath fogging the window momentarily.
“That book went to auction and was an immediate success. The next one hit the New York Times extended list, and the third one debuted in the top twenty. I quit my job. Now Barbary Close is going to be next summer’s blockbuster. It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it?” She let go of the wand, which swung against the blinds with a muted tink, and began playing with the cord that raised and lowered them, wrapping it around her index finger.
I leaned sideways, trying to read her profile. Sadness and resignation chased across her features. The unforgiving sun deepened the grooves around her mouth and made her complexion slightly sallow.
“I was finally a bestselling author, but it didn’t feel the way I thought it would.” Her index finger was swollen and purple at the tip. It must have throbbed, because she unwrapped the cord tourniquet.
She was silent so long, I finally prompted, “So where does Van Allen fit in?”
She jerked the blinds cord so hard the metal slats jangled. “He was my father’s cellmate.”
A gasp sounded from behind us, and Francesca whirled so quickly she stumbled. Still holding the blinds cord, she pitched toward the floor and the blinds ripped from their valance and clattered down. I had hopped up, and turned to look, too, and I discovered that we had an audience in the balcony, as it were; both the Stewarts and all three of the Aldringhams stood on the upstairs landing, peering over the banister like they were watching a play. All they were missing was Playbills and opera glasses. Sandy stood in the shadow of the hallway, holding a glass of water. They’d all clearly been listening for quite a while.
I reached a hand down to help Francesca up, but she ignored it, disentangling herself from the blinds and using her hands on her thighs to push herself upright. She glared at the audience, her face first flushing a plummy red that matched her outfit, and then blanching white. I thought she might cry, pass out, or possibly explode, but then she started laughing. It was a weak, wheezy sound at first, but it grew into her usual ribald guffaw tinged with a hysterical edge. “Oh, my God,” she said when she could catch her breath. “I guess the secret’s out in a big way, huh?”
A nervous titter and some chuckling came from the others and the tension dissipated. I figured it would ratchet up again when everyone realized, as I did, that Francesca was a murderer. Van Allen had obviously been trying to blackmail her with his knowledge of her faux authorship. If her father’s prison was coed, she might end up in the cell next to him.
“What was your father in for?” Lucas Stewart asked. Mary tried to shush him, but he shook off her hand and leaned farther over the banister.
“Well, that’s the kicker, isn’t it?” Francesca said. She widened her stance and pulled her shoulders back as if bracing herself. “He’s a sex offender. I really don’t want to go into details.”
“Oh, my,” Constance breathed.
Everyone else was silent.
“You can see,” Francesca went on with an effort, “why it would be damaging to sales if word got out.�
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I could indeed see. If Francesca wrote thrillers, or caper novels, the details of her father’s imprisonment might not matter so much. But she wrote gothic romance verging on erotica. No buyer or reader in the world was going to be able to read her more passionate passages again if word got around about the true author’s proclivities. I gulped. It made a dandy motive for murder. And Van Allen’s death was in vain, since now more than half a dozen people knew the truth.
“How did Van Allen track you down? What did he say?” I asked.
“Shortly before he was due to be released, he stole a completed manuscript from my father and smuggled it out of the prison somehow.”
“He mailed it to his girlfriend,” I supplied.
Francesca cocked her head in acknowledgment. “Then Van Allen looked up my schedule on my Web site and followed me here. He approached me after the panel at the bookstore, and said he had a manuscript he thought I might be interested in. I thought he was one of those wannabe authors who wanted me to read his great American novel and pass it along to my agent or editor—people ask me to do things like that sometimes.”
“The nerve of some people, right?” Mary chimed in. “That happens to me at least twice a month, too.”
Constance nodded to indicate she’d been approached like that before, as well.
Francesca continued. “I refused to meet with him; in fact, I was pretty dismissive. To prove his point or to get back at me, he snuck part of the manuscript into the auction. I about had a heart attack when the auctioneer read off the title and almost blurted out my father’s name. Well, I knew Van Allen was telling the truth, so I got a message to my father—said there was a family emergency—and he called me. He was livid, almost incoherent with fury, mostly because he felt betrayed, I think. If he’d been able to get his hands on Van Allen, he’d have strangled him.”
“Frankie Bugg—Frankie the Cockroach!” I exclaimed, as enlightenment dawned. Noticing everyone’s puzzled expressions, I said, “Sharla—Van Allen’s girlfriend—said something about ‘Frankie the Cockroach’ being pissed off. She meant your dad, right?”
The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala Page 22