“What?” Fiona said, sounding breathless. “What did you say?”
“Did you write the Jess and Addie historical mysteries?”
“Who are you? Where did you get that idea?”
“Miss, Miss!” the woman in the purple jacket insisted, holding up two volumes in her hands. “These aren’t the Agatha Christie books I want. Don’t you have a back room with other titles?”
“Mr. Everett!” Tricia called.
“Ms. Miles?” Fiona Sample insisted from hundreds of miles away.
“Excuse me,” Tricia told Fiona, and turned to Mr. Everett. “We may have other titles, but they haven’t been inventoried. I wouldn’t know where to find them right this minute.”
The woman slammed the books onto the glass counter. “What kind of customer service is this? I want Murder at Hazelmoor. I was told your store stocked every mystery book ever written!” she said indignantly.
Was she crazy?
“Ginny!” Tricia called.
Ginny looked up from her customer, excused herself, and hurried to the cash desk.
“Ginny, I’m on a very important phone call. Can you please help this customer?” she asked, pleading.
Ginny turned to the irate woman. “How can I help you, ma’am?”
“Ms. Miles,” Fiona said firmly.
“I’m sorry,” Tricia apologized. “It’s organized mayhem in the store today. Would you be open to me calling you right back from a more quiet location?”
Tricia heard the woman on the other end of the line sigh. “Yes.” She gave Tricia her number.
“Please call me right back,” Fiona said. “I want to get to the bottom of this.”
Twenty-Two
“Wow,” Ginny murmured, not for the first time. “You’re practically a living, breathing Miss Marple to figure all that out yourself.”
Hearing her name, Tricia’s little gray cat jumped onto the cash desk, immediately nuzzling her head on Ginny’s chin. “Not you,” she chided, petting the purring cat.
Tricia shook her head. “I had a lot of help. And a lot could still go wrong. That’s why I need your help to set this up.”
“Hey, all you have to do is ask,” Ginny said. “But do you really think you can pull it off by tomorrow? And what are your safeguards?”
“Good question.”
Ginny beamed. “Hey, in the last year, I’ve read a lot of mysteries. I can’t wait to see how this goes down,” she said, perhaps a bit too eagerly.
Tricia shook her head. “You aren’t going to be here. I won’t put you or Mr. Everett in danger.”
“Oh, but you being in danger is okay, right?”
“I won’t be in danger.”
“Doesn’t that kind of contradict your previous statement?”
“It all depends on how much cooperation I can get from the Sheriff’s Department.”
Ginny snorted. “I think you can count on one hundred percent total noninvolvement from our local law enforcement.”
“I hope you’re wrong, but it will mean pulling in a few favors from friends and acquaintances.”
Ginny crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, I’ll do as you ask, but if I don’t get all the juicy details, I will commit serious mayhem.”
“And you won’t be the only one, I’m sure.”
Ginny sobered. “What do you want me to do?”
“Tomorrow, late in the afternoon, you and I will call all the members of the Tuesday Night Book Club and tell them the regular meeting’s been canceled.”
“All but one member?” Ginny asked.
“Yes.”
“And what if she calls or comes in asking about it?”
“There’s only one person who could spill the beans.”
“Frannie?”
Tricia nodded. “I’ll handle her myself.”
“Okay. That doesn’t seem like much work to me.”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something else for you to do. In the meantime, there’s a box of Agatha Christie books to shelve. I want to be ready in case our irate customer decides to come back and berate us again.”
Ginny smiled. “You got it,” she said, and trotted to the back shelves.
Tricia looked down at the notepad in front of her. The logistics of pulling everything off in just about twenty-four hours were frightening, but she felt she needed to gather all the players and have an old-fashioned showdown, just like in a Rex Stout Nero Wolfe Story.
First up was talking to Artemus Hamilton. She called his office and was told he would be out of town for at least the rest of the week, and no, she could not have his cell phone number. The Southern New England Medical Center told her that Kimberly Peters’s room had no phone hookup. Okay, if that meant she’d have to make another visit to the hospital to track down Hamilton, she would.
Next on the agenda: backup for herself. She didn’t feel like making the lonely ride to Nashua all by herself. Another phone call later and she’d lined up Russ to ride shotgun, but only if she promised to tell him the whole story. This time she readily agreed. There were just two people she didn’t want to make a party to her plans: Angelica and Frannie. As she told Ginny, although without malice, Frannie was liable to blather, and Angelica was likely to put herself in danger trying to protect her baby sister. Tricia wasn’t about to put her plan at risk by telling either woman more than she needed to know.
Still, the twenty-four-plus hours until her own private D-Day seemed like a lifetime.
Tricia let out a sigh and hoped she could orchestrate her plan. If the whole thing soured, Zoe Carter might not be the only fatality.
The elevator doors whooshed open. Tricia stepped into the quiet hospital corridor, with Russ right on her heels. He hadn’t ridden shotgun after all, leaving that spot for her, and their trip to Nashua in his beat-up old pickup truck had been uneventful. The journey, that is. The conversation had been lively.
“Are you nuts?” Russ had asked when Tricia told him her plans for the next day. His next question had been “Can I be there?”
The answer to that was a flat “No! If you want to watch the store—either from across the street or behind in the alley, I could use someone out in the field on guard, just in case something goes wrong.”
“Okay, but only because I’m getting that exclusive.”
They turned the corner, passing the nurses’ station and heading down the hall. The door to Kimberly’s room was open, with no deputy on duty outside it. They peeked inside. The TV was switched on, with some decorating program from HGTV playing for background noise. Kimberly sat propped up in bed, her face still alarmingly swollen and bruised, a trail of bloody drool leaking from the corner of her mouth. Artemus Hamilton held a small plastic cup of dark liquid in one hand, and a spoon in the other. A bloodstained cloth lay on the bedside table. On the floor, parked against the wall, was Hamilton’s opened briefcase with manuscript pages poking out of it. Angelica’s manuscript?
It was Hamilton who first noticed their arrival. “Oh, look, Kimberly, Tricia and Mr. Smith have come to visit.”
Kimberly blinked and slowly turned her face toward the doorway. What seemed like eons later, her eyes brightened and her lips parted into a toothless smile. “Tre-ah,” she managed in greeting.
Tricia swallowed the urgent impulse to cry. She gave into emotion and surged forward to capture the frail Kimberly in a gentle hug, grimacing as she took in the fetid odor that seemed to surround her. A long moment later she felt a soft pressure on her back and realized Kimberly’s free hand was patting her.
She pulled away. “Are you okay, Kimberly?”
A very dumb question.
Kimberly fell back against her pillows and a mix of grunt and laugh escaped her lips.
“She’s much better today,” Artemus said, his voice faltering, his eyes bright with unshed tears as he gently wiped away the bloody spittle that leaked from Kimberly’s slack mouth.
Tricia braved a smile. “Yes, I can see that.”
“I goh no teef,” Kimberly mouthed, pointing at the stubs of knotted black suture that stuck out at angles from her scarlet gums.