“Not present are Colleen’s Beauty Shop, Sam’s Seafood Shack, Franzetti’s Pizza Place, Koh’s Grocery, and—”
“I chatted with everyone else today,” said Bud. “Consider me their proxy.”
“Hey, there, I made it!” called a voice from the door.
“Oh, hey, Seymour, come on in,” said Sadie.
“There’s our big winner,” teased Bud. “And I thought celebrities like you were too busy on weekends to bother with us little people.”
“Wouldn’t miss it, Bud! Besides, I’m out of ice cream.”
On evenings and weekends, Seymour liked to drive an ice cream truck around Old Q. He’d purchased it with part of his big winnings on Jeopardy the year before. Apparently it had always been his dream to become an ice cream man, or so he said. Go figure.
“I parked the empty truck outside,” Seymour said. “Not for nothing, but I never ran out of cones and dishes before! And that horde at the bookstore this morning? What a crazy day!”
“Thanks again for your help earlier,” I told him. “You really saved our hides.”
“Oh, my, yes,” said Aunt Sadie. “And you get the next four pulps for free.”
“Let’s get on with it, shall we?” said Bud.
“ ’Bout time,” said Fiona. “That all right with you, Brainert?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone, Fiona.”
“What tone?”
“You know what tone.”
“I didn’t use any tone.”
“Enough!” cried Sadie. “Get to the emergency issue, please.”
“Parking,” said Bud.
(Actually, what Bud said was “pahkin’ ”—his pronunciations displaying the dropped R’s and drawn-out vowels typical of many Rhode Islanders. But, as I noted much earlier, I’m sticking with the conventional spellings!)
“Parking!” repeated Fiona. “That’s what I’m talking about! Today I had cars jamming my parking lot that don’t belong there. Rev. Waterman had to post guards to see that there was no illegal parking in the church lot. Why, even the Embry land was vandalized—”
“I think ‘appropriated’ is a better term,” interjected Brainert.
“Right on,” said Bud Napp.
“Really,” sniffed Fiona. “Someone tore down the fence. No matter how you feel, that’s no way to solve the town’s parking problem! We’re here to find a solution, aren’t we?”
Aunt Sadie rose. “Look,” she said, “we don’t expect an author to be murdered in our store every other weekend. Nor do we expect to make national headlines and the news networks. This whole incident is going to blow over in the next few days, and then Quindicott can happily fall back into the coma from which it will most likely never emerge.”
“Not if you’re cagey, Sadie,” said Seymour. “There are ways to exploit this incident, draw it out, make it pay long-term. Like the arrest today—of Brennan’s daughter. That means more headlines, which means the crowds will be back here again tomorrow, not to mention the television cameras. That’s our chance to make the first move. . . .”
Everyone leaned forward with anticipation, waiting for Seymour to continue. In truth, Seymour had always had far-fetched ideas. But now, with the Jeopardy win, people actually took him seriously.
“Let’s look at the facts,” he said. “Firstly, the real Jack Shepard vanished in Quindicott decades ago. Secondly, the author of Jack Shepard’s fictional adventures drops dead in the very same town—probably on the very same premises. Now, that’s a Stephen King story.”
Brainert frowned. “Except King isn’t writing anymore.”
“That’s not my point,” said Seymour.
“Then what is?” asked Brainert.
“Here’s a story Sadie and Penelope could sell to Hollywood as Buy the Book: The True Story. That’ll keep this town on the map for years to come. Heck, those Hollywood types might even come here to film it.”
Silence followed. Sadie and I glanced nervously at each other in a sort of “Is he joking?” way.
Brainert cleared his throat. “While Seymour’s idea is . . . interesting, I’m not sure what it has to do with parking.”
“It has nothing to do with parking,” Bud Napp said, rising. “But who cares? A murder involving a best-selling author is much more interesting than Quindicott’s parking problem!”
Then Bud turned to Fiona Finch: “What did happen at your inn this afternoon?”
That’s all the encouragement Fiona needed. She stood up, adjusted her bird pin, and launched into her story with gusto.
“The State Police arrived at around one o’clock, along with a Criminal Investigation Unit, and our local police chief Ciders. A Detective-Lieutenant Marsh showed me a warrant to search the premises. And another investigator—from the medical examiner’s office—started grilling me about the Frankens. Where had they gone? When were they coming back? I told him they’d gone to lunch in Newport—because, of course, we don’t have one decent restaurant in this town—”
“Stay on the subject,” said Bud.
“Well, you know how I feel about it—”
“We know!” cried half the room. Fiona’s decades-long reverie of opening up a gourmet restaurant at Finch’s Inn was as ubiquitous a notion as Harriet McClure’s self-portraits—and the wasted Embry lot.
“Just get on with it,” said Brainert.
“Fine,” snipped Fiona. “At that point, the search began. And within half an hour, I saw a woman from the Criminal Investigation Unit carrying a disposable syringe in a clear plastic bag to their police van.”
Hearing that last line, I nearly choked on my Oreo.
Could the syringe found in Mrs. Franken’s possession be a second syringe? I wondered. No, I decided. That would be too much of a coincidence. It had to be the same syringe. For some reason, Josh must have planted it in the Frankens’ room.
Now you’re thinking, said Jack in my head.
“A syringe?” said Brainert.
Fiona nodded. “I got a pretty good look at it, then I heard the detectives talking about dusting the syringe for fingerprints and testing the residue inside, so I knew what they’d found.”
“Poison!” Seymour declared. Fiona nodded and smiled smugly. It was, after all, her theory voiced that very morning that Seymour was now endorsing.
“It’s got to be poison,” he continued. “Maybe it was arsenic—you know, like that church poisoning up there in Maine. The pot of coffee to die for.”
Everyone began to chatter and toss out wild theories and rapid-fire questions. I kept my mouth shut, even though I wanted to scream the truth. For some reason, Josh Bernstein had set up poor Deirdre Brennan-Franken for murder.
But what was my proof?
A ghost saw Josh find the syringe in my store’s bathroom, and he told me all about it. I wasn’t about to fly that explanation past the State Police!
Crack wise all you want, sweetheart, purred Jack in my brain. I’m your ace in the hole.
Bud loudly clapped his hands. “Order!” he barked. “Fiona holds the floor.”
“At that point, Mr. and Mrs. Franken returned from their luncheon,” Fiona continued. “Detective-Lieutenant Marsh immediately placed the couple in the common room and asked them to wait there. Another State Policeman guarded the door. That presented a problem for me, so, of course, I had to go outside and creep around the house to the sun porch, where I could hear the conversation going on inside.”