by Jessica Beck
To Grace’s credit, she didn’t even flinch. “Is that what you told that editor in New York you were arrested for harassing a few months ago?”
I thought we’d ease into our interrogation, but evidently Grace had decided to go full throttle right out of the gate. Given Amanda Harrison’s temperament, it was probably a good call. Evidently time had done nothing to take the edge off the woman’s temper, and I’d seen firsthand how Tom Johnson had pushed her the day before onstage. “Nonsense. That man simply had an overactive imagination,” Amanda said as she backed off a step. Perhaps she realized how she was looking to us at the moment. In the instant she’d gotten in Grace’s face, I’d had no problem at all seeing her as a hot-blooded killer, and what was more, she knew it.
“What was in the bag, then?” I asked her, trying to be as mollifying as I could manage. “Is there any reason not to tell us?”
“Of course not. It was only books. What else would it be?” she asked.
Since the robbery wasn’t public knowledge yet, I couldn’t exactly bring up the fact that we thought it was my cash, well, mine and Paige’s, and I hoped that Grace held her tongue as well. I was certain that it would get out sooner rather than later that we’d been robbed during the murder, but when it did, I was determined that it wouldn’t be because of me or my best friend.
“That’s what we want to know,” Grace said.
Evidently Amanda had learned to at least get her temper under control these days. She backed away from us and even managed a smile, albeit one that lacked any warmth or sincerity. “Sorry I can’t be any clearer than that, but I have nothing to hide. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go prepare for the panel.” She didn’t even look at Grace as she turned to me again before she walked out. “I trust you’ll do a better job today than you did yesterday.”
“Well, the truth of the matter is that I could hardly do any worse,” I said in a moment of stark honesty.
“I wish I could disagree with you, but I can’t,” she said with the first sign of happiness she’d shown since she’d come into the room.
Once Amanda was gone, Grace shook her head. “Can you believe that woman taking a cheap shot at you like that on her way out the door? Suzanne, I thought you did a commendable job, considering the circumstances.”
“Yeah, for a donutmaker, I’m a pretty good emcee,” I said. “Do you believe her about the books?”
“I don’t know. I can say one thing with certainty, though. The woman surely has a temper. We know that Tom Johnson goaded her on your panel, and she doesn’t seem the type to just let things go.”
“I know, but that doesn’t make her a killer, or a thief,” I said.
“Maybe not, but it doesn’t make her innocent, either.”
“Grace, my esteemed panelists are many things, but innocent isn’t one of them,” I said. “Not even Hannah Thrush.”
“Well, look at it this way. At least we’ve got two more writers to speak with, and an editor and an agent too, if we can track them down before your panel starts.”
“That might not be as hard as you think,” I said. “From the way things sounded, I have a hunch that wherever we find Hannah Thrush, the two of them won’t be far behind.”
As it turned out, I was right, which was a nice change of pace for me, considering how things had been going for me lately.
“Hannah, I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn,” a thin, stylish young woman wearing all black said as we approached the author we’d been seeking near the town clock. A dowdy older woman who was trying her best to be as stylish as her compatriot, and failing miserably at it, added, “We just want what’s best for you. If you sign with me, Monique and I will see to it that your career is carefully nurtured for many years to come,” she said.
“And what makes you think I need to be nurtured, Maye?” Hannah Thrush asked. She must have resented the implication that she needed to be taken care of, because the older woman started backpedaling immediately. “What I meant to say was that you are an artist, a truly creative person. Why should you let yourself get bogged down with boring business details? We will make certain that you are taken care of, so you’ll be able to focus solely on creating your lovely books.”
I wasn’t sure even Monique was buying what Maye was selling, and I had a hunch that Hannah wasn’t all that impressed, either. This young writer had more depth to her than I’d first suspected. That was an important reminder for me not to judge a book by its cover, which was a coincidental saying, given that I was dealing with more authors at the moment than I’d ever met in my life.
“You don’t want to go with anyone else, and you obviously can’t stay where you are,” Monique said. “What other choice do you have?”
“Why can’t I stay with Hobson Moon Books?” Hannah asked. “They’ve been okay so far, and besides, they plucked me out of obscurity. Maybe I can get Mr. Hobson to give me more for my next contract, and then I won’t have to leave.”
“You can’t do that without me,” Maye said. “I’ve known Jebadiah Hobson for thirty years. Trust me when I tell you that I know where all of his skeletons are buried.” Monique glared at Maye for a moment and made a throat-cutting gesture out of Hannah’s sight, but Grace and I saw it. “But Hobson Moon is a second-tier publisher. You need someone with the force of a large corporation behind it, and that means going with Sterling, Platinum, and Gold House. Even their name says quality.”
I thought it said “pretension,” but maybe that was just me. I never really paid attention to a publisher’s name anyway. It was the author that counted with me, but at least I’d heard of SPG. They’d published one of the books we’d read in our book club a few years before, some rambling mystery that had made no sense to me at the time. Hazel had chosen it for the group, but I think she must have been trying to impress us with her refined taste. In my defense, no one else had cared for it either, and we’d even taken away Hazel’s picking privileges the next time around. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to know, though,” Maye said. “All you have to do is trust us.”
“Like Tom Johnson trusted you?” Hannah asked them both pointedly. Grace and I had been ready to step in, but this was just getting interesting.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maye said.
“You were both here to dump him, and I know for a fact that he wasn’t going quietly. That man and I never got along, but at least we were both authors, and if you don’t think writers talk about their agents and their editors when they get together, you’re both seriously delusional. At dinner last night right before he was murdered, he told me that you’d both tried to dump him, but he’d shown you that it wasn’t going to be as easy as you thought it was. He had too much on the pair of you to go quietly, so my question to you both is, if Tom Johnson couldn’t trust either one of you, why should I?”
Both women looked stunned by the previously timid Hannah Thrush’s directness for a moment before Monique recovered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Tom’s books have been selling, that much is true. They just haven’t been doing as well as we needed them to. I told Tom in person since I was already here to meet with you, and while he wasn’t happy about being dropped, he understood. That’s the nature of the business, I’m afraid.”
“Tom Johnson never took bad news graciously in his life, and we all know it,” she said. “What about you, Maye? What’s your story?”
“I wasn’t leaving Tom. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Hannah said.
“You knew the man. Certainly we had a lively relationship filled with spirited discussions about the publishing business, but I wasn’t going to drop him from my list of clients.”
“Maybe not, but you certainly weren’t going to be his champion anymore, were you? Tom told us all at dinner that you were going to try to bury his submissions until he went away. He said that was what you thought, anyway, but he had somet
hing on you that was going to change your mind. What was it, Maye?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said stiffly. “Now, if we can get back to the matter at hand. You need us, Hannah. Monique and I can make great things happen for your career. Don’t waste this opportunity.”
Monique smiled grimly as she nodded. “Listen to Maye. She’s giving you solid advice.”
“I’ll give you my decision after the conference is over, and not a moment before,” Hannah said. “I never decide anything this important without due consideration.”
“I’m not at all certain that I care to stay in this area one more night, which I’ll have to do if I delay my flight until then,” Monique said. “The clock is ticking, Hannah.”
“Well, if you’re gone by the time the festival ends, then I suppose you’ll have your answer, won’t you?”
“I’m sure we can stay one more night,” Maye said quickly, evidently seeing her future twenty-percent commission slipping through her fingers. “Right, Monique?”
The editor frowned for a few seconds before she nodded. “I suppose so. Where should we meet?”
“How about right here?” Hannah asked as she looked up at the clock. “Is that acceptable?”
Monique looked around for a moment in dismay. “Why not? Until later this afternoon, then,” she said as she turned away.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to stay behind for one more minute,” Maye said as she winked at Monique.
“Do as you please,” the editor said as she started in our direction.
Grace and I didn’t even need to discuss what to do next. We’d keep an eye on Hannah and Maye, but our chance of speaking with Monique alone was clearly going to be fleeting, so we needed to seize the opportunity while we had it.
“May we have a moment of your time?” I asked the editor as sweetly as I could manage.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know either one of you,” she said as she tried to brush past us.
“Maybe not, but we know you. You’re an editor with S, P, and G,” Grace said.
Monique paused for a moment upon hearing that. “I don’t read unsolicited manuscripts. Send them to the house, or better yet, talk to her,” she said as she gestured toward Maye.
“About murder?” I asked her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the editor said stiffly.
“Surely you haven’t forgotten your late writer that quickly,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t remember him. I’m saying that I had nothing to do with what happened to the man.”
“Where were you last night at the time of the murder?” I asked.
“Given that I don’t know when he was murdered, that would be hard to say. I was probably sitting in my dismal little room in Union Square counting the minutes until I could go back home,” she said, dismissing us.
“Really? How can you explain someone seeing you here in April Springs last night, then?” Grace asked her pointedly. Wow, I’d been known to stretch the truth in our investigations, but I rarely lied outright. At least I thought Grace was lying, unless she was holding out on me, which would be something much worse, in my opinion.
“When did you say it was? I may have been here around that time talking to that flighty little bird over there, but I can assure you, I had nothing to do with the man’s demise,” she admitted.
“When was the last time you saw him alive?” I asked her.
“Right after that disastrous panel of yours.”
“Not possible. He went straight to a signing table after that,” I said, correcting her.
“I know that, but we had a few words before he was seated. Believe me, it was a conversation that didn’t take all that long.”
“What did you two talk about?” Grace asked her.
“Publishing,” she said, and then, without another word, she walked away.
After she was gone, I asked, “Grace, what was all that about?”
“Suzanne, I know you don’t like lying to our suspects, but that’s because they are usually friends of ours, and we don’t want to burn any bridges in April Springs that we don’t have to. The thing is, with Monique, we’ll never see her again, and I had a hunch that she was lying to us. I’m sorry I didn’t give you any warning, but I had to make an executive decision without consulting you. It got results too, didn’t it?”
“I understand why you did it,” I acknowledged. “I’m just not sure we should be lying if we can help it, even if it is to someone like that. Let’s try to stay within what we know from here on out, okay?”
“Okay, consider me formally reprimanded,” Grace said with a nod.
“I’m serious, Grace.”
“I know that. I crossed the line, and I’m sorry. What more do you want me to say, Suzanne? Are we good?”
“We’re always good, Grace,” I told her.
When I looked up, I saw Maye heading in our direction as well, but Hannah was nowhere in sight. We’d both been so engrossed in our conversation with Monique, and then with each other, that we’d lost track of one of our main suspects.
Chapter 17
“Do you have a second? Monique suggested we speak with you,” I told her.
“I’m sorry, ladies, but I’m not taking on any new clients at the moment,” she said as she barely slowed down. If she was trying to catch up with the lithe editor with her stubby little legs, she wasn’t going to make it.
“We’re not talking about publishing. We want to discuss Tom Johnson’s murder with you,” Grace said.
Both things she said were true; I couldn’t fault her for that. If Maye believed that both comments were related, it was on her. Grace wasn’t exactly breaking our pact we’d made a minute before, but she was certainly stretching it more than a little bit.
“Why on earth would she want you to speak with me? I wasn’t dropping Tom like she was, and he never had a public shouting match with me!”
“Are you saying that he and Monique did?” I asked her.
“I’m not saying anything. I knew enough that when Tom said he had something on someone, I had to believe him.” She took a step closer to us as she added, “How do you think he got the original contract with Monique in the first place? I’d submitted one of his novels to her, and she’d rejected it out of hand. At least that’s what I thought when I relayed the news to Tom. Six hours later, he called me and told me to call Monique and make the deal. I never found out what he had on her, but it was clearly pretty powerful.” The aging literary agent must have realized that she was telling two complete strangers way too much about her business, because she quickly added, “I never told you any of that, and if you repeat it, especially to Monique St. Cloud, I’ll tie you both up in court for so many years you won’t ever see it end.” She then left us without saying another word, not even a good-bye.
It was a warning, plain and simple, but at least she hadn’t threatened to kill us. Still, this woman had an ugly edge hiding just underneath the surface, and I wasn’t sure that I’d ever want to cross her. If she had felt threatened by Tom Johnson, for whatever reason, I could see her lashing out at him in an instant. I’d heard that agents were tough, but this one was a barracuda under the guise of an aging woman in hipster clothing.
“I’m not at all sure I’m up to writing that make-believe cookbook anymore,” I told Grace once we were alone again. “After what we’ve seen, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just stick with making donuts.”
“It won’t be that way, though,” Grace said. “There’s a whole world of self-publishing available out there these days. You don’t have to deal with agents or editors. Come on, it will be fun. I promise.”
“If you say so,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling that working with either one of those two women would be anything but fun. I wonder what Tom had on them?”
“I can’t imagine, but they have to be suspects,” Grace said. “Did you happen to notice that I did
n’t lie to Maye?”
“You might have led her to believe something wasn’t true,” I suggested.
“What? Me? I would never do anything like that,” Grace said with a grin. “It’s not my fault if I said two sentences in succession that were entirely unrelated. If she assumed anything from that, it wasn’t my fault.”
I had to laugh. “Is there a boundary that you won’t push?” I asked her.
“Our friendship,” Grace said emphatically. “Everything else is negotiable.”
“I’ll accept that,” I said. As I looked around, I said, “I wonder where Hannah ran off to?”
“She has to either be at the bank, the newspaper, or Cutnip,” Grace said. “Though why is beyond me, since all three of them are closed on Sunday mornings.”
“Even if they were all open, her hair looks good just the way it is, and I can’t imagine her seeking out Ray Blake for anything. Speaking of which, I haven’t seen him since early this morning. Have you noticed him lurking in the shadows anywhere?”
“Not so far, but that’s probably where we’ll find him. Do you think he’s been able to come up with one-tenth of what we’ve been able to?”
“I don’t see how he could have,” I admitted, “but even if he hasn’t, it got him out of our hair today so we could snoop around without him dogging our trail.”
“So then it’s a win for us either way,” Grace said. “Speak of the devil. There’s Hannah coming from the direction of the bank, and she doesn’t look very happy, does she?”
“If you were her, would you be?” I asked her as we headed in the writer’s direction.
“If I were her, I’d be regretting ever agreeing to come to April Springs in the first place,” Grace admitted.
“Is something wrong?” I asked Hannah as we got close enough to her to have a conversation.
“That bank of yours is closed, so I had to use my ATM card and draw money out of my account that way. I’m probably going to get stuck with a whopping big fee for doing it, too.”
“It’s Sunday,” I told her. “Our bank doesn’t open at all on the weekend.”