To Fetch a Killer

by Maria Hudgins

  Jessica turned around. Three dogs stood, practically drooling, teeth chattering, necks craning, to reach that pillowcase. Trey and Kim stood rigid, their curly tails quivering. But Atlas, the only one of the three who had been trained by a police officer, was pawing at the floor, as if he smelled murder.

  Jessica had to think fast. If she stayed in her room too long, someone would come looking for her and she wasn’t ready to tell anyone what she now suspected. When she had left the group outside, it was obvious that she was taking the pillowcase and there was only one pillowcase of any possible importance. They knew she was hiding it.

  Are the crabs out yet? She ran to the window in Alex and Ashley’s bedroom and looked out. They were still drinking beer and downing oysters. Is everyone there? Where is Ashley?

  Jessica dashed up the stairs and onto a porch. Looking down, she spied Ashley rummaging through the trunk of her and Alex’s car. Everyone else was gathered around the fire. Philip was pulling another fistful of papers from the trash bag.

  Jessica returned to her room, closed the door, and sat on the side of the bed. She thought. Who could it be? Who put that pillowcase in the trash?

  If it had been left in Olivia’s room, the police would have found it and recognized it as important. It couldn’t have been left in the kitchen, or it would be covered with the messy sort of thing that always ends up in kitchen trash—tomato paste cans, plastic covers, not-quite-empty wine bottles, milk bottles, Pepsi cans. Was there a wastebasket in the living room? She thought not. That left the bedrooms and the bathrooms, but whose bedroom? Whose bathroom?

  There was no way to know. The trash had become all mixed together in the big plastic bag. Jessica tried to think if there was anyone she could eliminate. How about the Harlows? When had they arrived? Before or after the murder? It was after, wasn’t it? She had seen the headlights of their car down below as she was on her way upstairs to check on Olivia. They arrived after Olivia was dead. They were in the clear. But what if they weren’t arriving for the first time? What if one of them, maybe Daniel, had come in earlier and left? He could have left his mother somewhere else, driven here, climbed the outside stairs, done the deed, then went back and picked up his mother. That didn’t sound likely, but given Ruth Harlow’s avid defense of her son, right or wrong, might she have sat in the car and waited for him to finish the deed? Might she not have done it herself?

  Jessica thought her imagination was running away with her.

  Philip: Philip was tortured by the possibility that he had sent an innocent person to prison. Or that he had missed an obvious clue and let a guilty one escape. Olivia had been a journalist who investigated crimes. Might she have discovered something that Philip hoped no one ever would?

  Sophie: Italian. Mafia. Jessica mentally slapped herself for the unfair stereotyping. Sophie? No way.

  Ashley: Unstable, to say the least. Her refusal to read, the close call in the water after she’d been warned. Very strange, but murder? Why?

  Alex: International espionage. World traveler. Spies. Olivia had lots of connections in Washington D.C. Politicians. Lobbyists. Could be anything, couldn’t it?

  The bedroom door shook with the scratches of little paws. Jessica figured it was time to rejoin the party.

  She rejoined the festivities in time to see Philip and Alex muscling the huge steamer pot to the picnic table Sophie had cleared off for them. They dumped the entire load of crabs, now bright red and covered with spices, on the table. Everyone gathered around, but Alex halted them before they could pick up a crab.

  “This man needs a lesson,” he said, slapping Rogowski on the shoulder. “He’s never picked a crab.” Alex chose a crab from the pile on the table and unceremoniously ripped its claws off. He peeled off the crab’s carapace and twisted the body in two. When he got to the claws, he showed Rogowski how to crack them with one of the little wooden hammers Sophie had dropped around. They all watched as Olivia’s agent decimated his first crab and dipped the lovely white meat into a dish of cocktail sauce. It wasn’t a professional job, but it was enough to win him a round of applause.

  Jessica had lost all desire for crabs. She was juggling a dozen events, memories of the last couple of days, in her mind. Where are the dogs? She spotted them across the parking area, near the sandy boundary of the property, where Olivia had parked her car. They were sniffing around the dry collection of debris at the edge of the lot. Kim, as usual for her, was digging. Atlas was running in circles around the two little dogs, across to the fire pit, around the table where everyone was eating, around the man opening oysters, and back to the two little dogs. Around and around. What is he doing?

  In a flash, she got it. A Briard is a herding dog, bred to round up sheep. Or dogs. Or people. Whatever is alive but not in a neat bunch. Atlas, like all of his kind, could not stand to see living things scattered about.

  Laughing at the sight, Jessica called to her dogs. Trey paid no attention to her. Kim kept digging. “Help me round up these little sheep,” she told Atlas. She plodded over to the red sports car and saw that trash was strewn across the sand near the passenger side door. She recalled the small avalanche of trash that had fallen out when Mark Rogowski had opened the car door. Kim was pawing at something in the sand a few feet away. Jessica bent over and picked it up. A memory stick, much like the ones Jessica herself used when she needed to save or transport her work to another computer. It was sandy, but otherwise it looked pristine. As if it had not been out here long. She stuck it in her shorts pocket.

  Traipsing back to join the others, Jessica saw the word Fentanyl in her mind’s eye. Why did she think that? As a deaf person, she had developed the habit of jotting down things she thought people said, always remembering she might be wrong. She had to rely on her visual memory. She could remember words she had not actually heard much better when she jotted them down. The letter “F” is especially easy for lip readers to spot. Fentanyl. She had thought this was what Olivia had said, then later decided she must have been mistaken. But what if she wasn’t? She had jotted it on the margin of her own paper. She had intended to ask Olivia to explain why that apparently unconnected sentence had appeared in her story.

  Rubbing the memory stick in her pocket with her fingers, she rejoined the group. Mark Rogowski was talking to them about the difficulties of dealing with publishers these days. Jessica grabbed a crab and one of the small wooden hammers. Alex was interrupting Mark after almost every sentence and Jessica noted that he was slurring his words. The trash can under the table was filling up with empty beer cans.

  “Since everyone is into self-publishing these days, it’s impossible to figure out the market,” Mark Rogowski said. “It used to be easy. You could take a manuscript to a publisher that does the sort of book you’re trying to sell. They read it and decide. The agent simply hypes the book he’s got and waits to see what happens. Now? Whole new ballgame, right?” He took a big gulp of his beer. A small tendril of crab meat clung to his chin.

  “It seems like the agent would have nothing to do now,” Jessica said.

  “Oddly, we have more to do,” Mark said. “The average writer doesn’t know the market, doesn’t know how to find the really good editors, doesn’t know all kinds of things that a book needs to go from first draft to best seller.”

  “And a really good editor is important,” Philip said. By now, he had made a three-inch-high pile of shells on the table in front of him. He picked up another crab, wrenched the carapace off, and punctured his own thumb in the process. He flinched, looked at the tiny drop of blood, and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

  It reminded Jessica of the blood on the pillowcase. A lab would be able to sequence its DNA. Would it match the DNA of one of them? More than likely. The house cleaner would have a soiled pillowcase and tossed it in the bin. She felt as if the clouds of confusion might be lifting.

  Philip was talking about his search for a good and reliable editor. “The woman I’m working with now is good, but when she says
‘I’ll get it to you by next week,’ she really means next month.”

  “Michael Pacifico,” Alex said. He wiped a bit of spicy crab boil from his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’s my editor, but he’s always booked up. Lots of luck, hiring him.”

  Jessica was a firm believer in connections. Connections were what made a story believable. Here was an odd connection. Olivia Sands and Alex used the same editor. Her own editor had finally adjusted to receiving only electronic submissions, but Pacifico was one of those who still needed a paper copy for his red pen. All that wasted paper. No more than one in fifty would ever see publication. She checked her shorts pocket to feel the memory stick that Kim had dug up. What was on it? Had it fallen out of Olivia’s car or had it been lying there in the sand for a long time?

  Jessica excused herself and left the party.

  Back in her own room, she slipped the memory stick into the USB port on her own laptop. She clicked on the first file and read: The Ghosts of Ashton Hall. A novel by Ashley Marie Fagen.

  Scrolling down, she began reading chapter one. She felt like a peeping Tom.

  She began reading and was soon lost in the world of Virginia’s James River Basin. The main character was a guide at an old mansion, now open to the public. The house was apparently haunted, but the story was taking some strange paths. The guides at the house were college students who were into partying after the tourists left.

  Jessica told herself to hurry up. She didn’t want to abandon the group at the crab feast, but curiosity was drawing her into the story. The bedroom door shook slightly. She set her laptop on the bed and opened the door. It was Kim, begging to come in. She let the little dog in and returned to the story.

  “It’s lucky you called me when you did,” the doctor said. “Fentanyl is nothing to mess with.”

  Jessica stopped. Where had she read this before? It didn’t take long for her to recall the note she had scribbled on her own paper when Olivia Sands was reading from her work. Was Ashley plagiarizing Olivia’s work? Apparently so. There was too much similarity to believe otherwise. But the work Olivia read from was political thriller. The first one she had ever written. Jessica remembered why she had written that note to herself. She also remembered looking at Ashley and seeing that she had gone pale.

  She sat on her bed, trying to work it out. It still didn’t make sense. Olivia had been reading from a work in progress. No title yet. It had nothing to do with drugs or with calling a doctor. But the sentence did make sense in a story involving Capitol pages. The one that was still at the publisher’s. The one titled Peril on the Potomac.

  Philip and Atlas appeared in the sliding glass door to the patio. Jessica got up and slid it open. “I’m trying to work out something very strange,” she told him. “And I need to run my really weird theory past you.”

  Philip pulled a folding lawn chair from the stack leaning against the house and sat.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sheriff Bo Deane took the pillowcase Jessica had pulled from the trash bag Philip had intended to throw into the fire and sent if off for DNA analysis. The Sand Fiddlers had to wait, hoping the results would tell them who had killed Olivia Sands. And it did.

  Lipstick and mascara smears proved consistent with Olivia’s brands, and the saliva was definitely from Olivia herself. The important thing was the blood. The blood must have come from the person holding the pillow over Olivia’s face. The DNA analysis of the blood answered that question.

  The blood was definitely that of Ashley Fagen.

  Ashley was arrested but the members of the Sand Fiddlers Writers’ group had to wait until their next meeting to fill in the blanks and make a coherent story of the night that had changed all their lives. They met in their usual room at the local library. Alex Archer, Ashley’s husband, was absent. He had left on an extended tour of the Middle East to gather material for his next book. None of the other writers blamed him for leaving.

  Ruth Harlow came all the way down from Alexandria for the meeting, but it was a friend of hers, not her son Daniel, who drove her. Daniel was now seeing a psychiatrist once a week. Sophie Perone, Philip Carr, and Jessica Chastain came, as did practically every member.

  “Rubber-neckers!” Sophie groused while arranging tiny pinwheel appetizers on platters in the back of the meeting room. “They just want to hear all the juicy details.”

  “And so do you, Sophie. Everyone is curious.” Jessica was dropping a flyer on each seat—the evening’s agenda. “It’s perfectly natural.”

  Philip called the meeting to order. “First and foremost, we need to talk about the recent tragedy at the retreat. I’ve been working with Sheriff Deane at the beach and we have—”

  An old member interrupted him. “Motive, Philip! We know it was Ashley Fagen, but what was her motive?”

  Everyone turned to Jessica who, they all knew, had first discovered Ashley’s plan.

  “It was plagiarism of the very worst sort,” Jessica told them, turning in her chair to face the group. “Ashley was having no success with getting her own work published, so she decided to make it happen. The fact was, Ashley had never gotten past page twenty on anything because she simply didn’t have the tenacity to stick with it. On a day when Alex was visiting the office of his editor, Michael Pacifico, Ashley had seen stacks and stacks of manuscripts lying around. She figured that, in all probability, none of these would ever see print. They would be returned to their owners with recommendations for improvement. Without too much thought, she scanned the shelves, found an eighty-thousand-word work by someone named Joyce J. Bradley and took it. Who was Joyce J. Bradley, anyway? She didn’t recognize it as the legal name of Olivia Sands. She grabbed the manuscript, quickly got the whole thing copied, and returned it to Pacifico’s office. She used Olivia’s work but changed the setting, the names, and so on, and then submitted it to another editor. Both books are contemporary stories about college students living and working away from home.”

  “The nerve!” someone said. “Didn’t she know she would get caught?”

  “I think she probably took advantage of Alex and Michael’s being absorbed in their discussion. They didn’t notice. She probably returned it to the same spot where she had found it since other writers have said that Michael Pacifico doesn’t move things in his office very often.

  “Pacifico liked the story when he got around to reading it, and he recommended it for publication. Olivia’s agent, Mark Rogowski, submitted it to a publisher with the title of Peril on the Potomac. That’s where it was on the night we all got together in the beach house. Ashley was planning to read an excerpt from the story she was calling The Ghosts of Ashton Hall, which was nothing but Olivia’s Peril on the Potomac with names, places and other details changed.”

  Philip said, “Those who have now read Ashley’s work say that, in spots, it’s word for word the same.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I thought there was something a bit off there. I tried to talk to Ashley about her work once, but she kept changing the subject.”

  “Why,” Philip said, “when she learned that Olivia Sands was going to be with us, did she bring work she knew Olivia would recognize as her own?”

  “She didn’t know it was Olivia’s work,” Jessica said. “She only found out when Olivia dropped her purse near the buffet table and out spilled the contents—including Olivia’s driver’s license in the name of Joyce J. Bradley—the name on the manuscript she had stolen and copied.”

  Philip said, “How did Olivia get hold of the memory card that had Ashley’s manuscript on it?”

  “She didn’t.” Jessica saw confusion on every face and could hardly wait to finish her story. “Olivia never saw that memory card.”

  “Better explain that,” Philip said.

  “I think Ashley probably hid it in the trunk of their car and it fell out later, but no one noticed,” Jessica said. “Ashley wasn’t stupid enough to send her manuscript to the same editor that she knew had read the story she stole. She
gave it to an editor named James Atkins. Now, editors work under conditions of strict confidentiality and will never share work submitted to them without the permission of the writer. But editors are often friends, and friends often have lunch together, and Atkins had lunch one day with Michael Pacifico. Michael told him about the mystery he had edited and that was soon to be published—told him a little about the story. Atkins says, ‘This sounds familiar.’ Long story short, the two men decided this couldn’t be coincidence. Atkins couldn’t remember, at first, who had written the story that this one reminded him of, but he knew it was one that had been submitted to him for editing. He checked his invoices and found the name Ashley Fagen. The light dawned.

  “Since neither man had direct quotes from either manuscript that they could share, they went to Olivia’s publisher and explained. They were eager to find out the truth and they told Olivia about their suspicions. Olivia Sands came to the beach that day knowing that she was probably going to encounter the woman who had stolen her work. She came, not for revenge, but for proof. When Ashley refused to read, Olivia had what she had come for.”

  Sophie paused, as if putting all this together in her head, then asked, “So, Olivia dropped her purse on purpose?”

  “Probably not. Olivia may have thought that simply reading an unrelated passage that Ashley had actually written, was what told Ashley it was all over. Olivia had no way of knowing Ashley would see the driver’s license or that she didn’t know Olivia’s real name.”

  “I’m confused.” This came from a member who had not gone on the retreat. “What did the memory card have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing,” Jessica said. “Nothing, except it told me who the plagiarist was.”

  Now, Philip came to life. “But after Ashley killed Olivia, she realized that the memory stick must never see the light of day. Peril on the Potomac was going to be published so no one must ever read Ashley’s Ghosts of Ashton Hall. She got her manuscript back before it was too late. At the beach, Ashley was doing damage control. The memory stick may have been in the luggage in their car or in their glove box, but somehow it ended up near the spot where Olivia’s car was parked.”