Page 13 of Always Murder (The Last Picks #9)
“How stupid is he?” I asked as we drove back to town.
“It wasn’t a good choice,” Bobby said.
“A good choice? You can say, ‘That wasn’t a good choice’ when someone orders an oatmeal raisin cookie, Bobby. This is a different order of magnitude.”
“I like oatmeal raisin cookies.”
“Bobby, they have raisins . They’re practically a fruit. And fruits are practically vegetables. Why would anyone do that to their cookie?” I could hear my volume rising, so I drew a deep breath. “I’m just saying chocolate chip never let anybody down.”
Bobby was wise enough not to respond to that—yet another sign that he was the man for me.
The road back into town wasn’t the smoothest, and Bobby’s cruiser lacked the Pilot’s gentler suspension. After bouncing around in my seat for a while, I said, “I mean, I knew Paul wasn’t the smartest—”
Then I stalled out.
“You want to say cookie, don’t you?” Bobby asked.
I glared, but it rolled right off him. Finally, I gave up and said, “I mean, what was he thinking?”
“He wasn’t thinking. His prefrontal cortex isn’t entirely developed.”
“That’s not the only thing that’s not developed.”
A quicksilver smile darted across Bobby’s face. “Did you know one time, I got a call-out to the boardwalk? He and Ryan were fighting about who got to drive a dune buggy.”
That got a reluctant laugh out of me.
“We learned something useful,” Bobby said. “That’s good.”
“Yeah, we learned that literally everyone knew Paul’s route,” I said sourly. “He live-streamed it for the entire world.”
Bobby laughed. “Who is his target audience, anyway? Other delivery drivers?”
“It’s like one step above the people who love unboxing videos: people who love boxes. Like love them.” I glanced over at—yes, I’m going to say it—my man. He was resting one elbow on the car door and driving with one hand again. And I’ll just say God knew what he was doing the day he invented khaki polyester. “Hey, you were really good with Sissy, by the way.”
“Hmm? Oh. Yeah, that’s kind of the job. Community relations are important.”
“Yeah, but you’re good at it, Bobby. And you didn’t interrogate her. You built trust with her. You used that trust to get her on our side. She wouldn’t have helped us if you hadn’t gotten on her good side. Oh my God, I’d love to use that in a book.”
“I was already on her good side by default,” Bobby said. “I didn’t make that crack about the 4-H club.”
“Yeah, but you’re missing my point: you’re so good at this. You’ll be such a good detective.”
The tires hummed on the worn county road.
Then he said, “Thanks.”
It was like the night before all over again, except now we were in a car.
If you, unlike me, don’t experience a constant, low-grade panic about all social interactions, especially ones with your significant other—if you’re not constantly analyzing and reassessing and trying to decide if you made a mistake or if someone is mad at you or if you missed some key social cue—it’s hard to explain how a short silence and a one-word answer can set off your internal alarms. All of them. Every. single. one.
“What?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate that.”
“You’re upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
We drove for maybe half a minute before I said, “I don’t understand what happened. I think you’re good at your job. I think you’d make a great detective. You’re the best deputy with the sheriff’s office, and that’s not just me talking as your boyfriend. Everybody knows it. What you did today, with Sissy, that’s proof.”
This time, he took a breath.
“Bobby—” But I stopped.
He looked over. He switched hands on the wheel so he could squeeze my leg. He even smiled. “Thank you. That means so much to me. I love you. I’m so lucky to have somebody as supportive as you.”
I must have mumbled something, because the moment passed, and then it was over.
We drove the rest of the way without talking. He kept his hand on my leg, and his face was smooth.
I tried texting Millie, but she didn’t answer, so Bobby took me back to Hemlock House. When he stopped at the front door, I waited for…something. But he leaned in for a kiss, and then I found myself moving automatically: reaching for the door, throwing it open, scooting out of the cruiser.
“That was definitely longer than a lunch break,” I said. “Is anybody going to wonder where you were?”
Bobby’s grin was boyish—and full of trouble.
“Oh my God,” I said. “That is not what I meant. I meant people are going to talk.”
Bobby’s grin got bigger.
“I’m done with you,” I said as I shut the door. “Goodbye.”
And all of that was normal. All of that was easy and light and the way things always felt between us.
It was so normal and easy and fun and light that I spent the next half an hour jamming thumbprint cookies in my face.
You can only do so much of that, though, before you either go into a diabetic coma or you run out of cookies. I ran out of cookies. I checked my phone, but I still hadn’t heard back from Millie. She was probably doing more Christmas stuff with her family. I tried Keme, and I didn’t hear anything back from him either. That wasn’t actually all that surprising. One time, I’d seen his phone. There were, like, three hundred unread messages from me. And they were important, too, like Can you bring me a Coke from the kitchen? and How much cake is left? and Are these my socks or yours? and I will do all your chores next week if you tell Bobby I went to the gym .
A quick lap of the house confirmed that I was home alone—Indira and Fox were still at the market, and although I found the keys to the Pilot in the den, Keme must have brought the SUV home and left again. I thought about playing Xbox—there’s nothing quite like mindless violence for self-soothing—but a voice that sounded suspiciously like Bobby’s pointed out that this was prime writing time, and I’d regret it if I wasted it.
Which was how I ended up in the den, in my favorite chair, with my favorite blankie—and yes, with some hot cocoa—staring at the screen while I tried to get my favorite fictional detective to do something.
Something was wrong with the plot; that was the problem.
The other, bigger problem was that I didn’t know what was wrong with the plot.
People approached plotting a novel in a lot of different ways. Some of them were meticulous planners. Others wrote without any preparation at all (what other writers called pantsers , in the sense that they wrote ‘flying by the seat of their pants’). I was definitely of the let’s-not-do-extra-work school of thought, and so I hadn’t written an outline. Which, for me, was probably best. You know what I figured out about myself early on? If I didn’t want to write, the best excuse was I’m still working on my outline . See, that’s the beauty of outlines. They always need more work. They’re a perfectionist’s best friend (and, for that matter, a procrastinator’s). Of course, then I figured out what was even better than working on an outline: video games.
But even if a writer didn’t outline, most of us had some sense of a story’s structure, which was largely determined by its plot. And something was wrong with mine.
See, plots are made up of big events and little events. The big events are the ones that change the trajectory of the story—like, the detective goes to meet an informant, only to be cornered by thugs from the local mob. That’s a big event. Those were the ones that needed to be absolutely right. And in a murder mystery, the big events usually had to do with, well, a murder.
And that was where I was running into a problem.
It might sound simple. You might be thinking, Put the dead body at the beginning, dummy . But it’s not that simple. Sure, in some books, that’s how things start. One of the Travis McGee books kicks off when a woman tries to hire Travis and gets killed while she’s hiring him . (Then the body disappears—it’s a good book.)
But sometimes, the first dead body doesn’t show up until later. Matt Scudder books usually work this way—someone hires him, and then while Matt’s wandering around New York, he finds a dead body. In one of them, he helps a woman escape from her, uh, night entrepreneur, but then she gets killed. (And then Matt is determined to get justice for her, obviously. Also a good book.)
And sometimes the dead body showed up even later . In Vivienne’s Death in the House of Mirrors (that’s Vivienne Carver, by the way—the one who tried to kill me), Mrs. Minty is the first victim, and she doesn’t die until halfway through the book. And because Vivienne was a better author than she was a murderess, it’s fantastically well-timed—the midpoint of the book is often called the mirror moment, when a disaster forces the protagonist to see themselves anew and face (or begin to face) some hard truths. In Death in the House of Mirrors , Vivienne’s protagonist, Genevieve Webster, has to confront her own overconfidence as the Matron of Murder, which has led to Mrs. Minty’s death. (It’s a watershed moment in the series, and it’s Vivienne at her best.)
There were even some stories that put the first death or murder before the book even started . How’s that for mind-blowing? Rebecca is like that, because Daphne du Maurier was a genius. Rebecca’s death, which happens before the book begins, shadows every single event that comes after. Cold case mysteries also work that way. Agatha Christie’s Nemesis is another great, Golden Age example.
All of which was to say: I had too many options.
(Also, I had a momentary flash of what I thought was genius—what if the murder happens after the book is over??? Then I realized that made no sense.)
Let’s be frank: it wasn’t a productive day.
And believe it or not, eventually, if you waste enough time, you really can read everything on Crime Cats (it’s a website, and it’s exactly what it sounds like). (Also, side note: there was a whole article on a tabby who committed grand theft gato , and it was as cute and clever as the title suggests.)
Which was how I ended up thinking about that idiot Paul again.
Part of me wanted to call it quits. From the beginning of this, Paul had been less than helpful. He’d lied about the incident at work with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate . He’d disappeared. And now, I learned, he’d been broadcasting his deliveries—with guesses about what was inside each package—to the entire universe.
Although—as Bobby had pointed out—it was more likely that the live stream had gone out to the grand total of three people who were bored or stupid enough to watch Paul’s live stream.
(And yes, I’m aware of the irony, with me reading Crime Cats , etc., etc.)
An idea popped into my head, and I struggled to sit up. ( Crime Cats is best read lying down, snuggled up, and in what is generally the coziest of all human positions.) I grabbed my phone, found Paul’s YouTube account, and clicked on his followers. Well, tried to click on them. Because YouTube is rude, it wouldn’t let me see who Paul’s eight followers were.
When I played one of Paul’s videos that he’d recorded in his truck, though, the comments were a different story. Public opinion to the contrary, I’m not a super sleuth, and I don’t spend my time doing brilliant, super-sleuth things (like anagrams or mathematical proofs or unbreakable encryption). But you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that naughtymommy71, for example, was clearly Christine. (Her only comment on the video was Don’t forget to stop for milk and eggs on your way home .) I was willing to go out on a ledge and say user frenchfryanOR was, well, Ryan. He’d commented, everybody subscribe to my channel too!!! Paul sucks!! jk . (Ryan was not my favorite, er, french fry, but I had to admit that was a cute name.) And naught.millie was, well, Millie. Her comment was…extensive. She started off by talking about Paul’s hair, and by the end, the comment had wandered down memory lane to talk about a time Paul had gotten in trouble for breaking a window. It was what the brother- and sisterhood of writers would generously call stream of consciousness .
The only other comment was from muskyotter5796, which suggested either someone with a love of otters or (please, God) someone who had used some sort of random generator to come up with a name. The comment said, any jewelry?
Well, if that didn’t make all my super-sleuth alarms go off.
Paul’s reply was slightly more eye roll-inducing: I got you! Thanks for subscribing!
I tried to backtrack muskyotter’s profile, but it was a dead end—the account was set to private, and even if it hadn’t been, it was clearly a throwaway account.
When I examined Paul’s videos again, I didn’t see any comments from Paul’s other subscribers. But I did find several more comments from muskyotter. They were…incriminating, to say the least. They were always short. Always to the point. Always—to probably anyone except Paul Naught—clearly bad news. Like Hold the box higher and We can’t read the address and How do you know it’s electronics?
How had this not come up before? But I had my answer almost immediately: because no one had looked for it. The people at CPF had either been involved at some level—I still hadn’t gotten over my vibe that something was off with Luz Hernandez—or had genuinely suspected Paul from the start. No official complaint had been made to the sheriff’s office, which meant there hadn’t been a law enforcement investigation. And since nobody but Paul had been reading his YouTube comments, there hadn’t been any reason for someone to suspect.
Of course, there was the rather obvious other question: how had Sissy known about Paul’s videos? Sissy was clearly smart. She was also—apparently—a criminal mastermind. She claimed that her family had only gotten involved to warn Paul off their territory, but had she shown us Paul’s live streams to throw us off the scent, so to speak?
I didn’t know. I would have liked to talk to Paul. Preferably with a length of rubber hose.
But what I did know was that several people in the Naught family had known about these live streams. And I was starting to suspect someone in that house was lying to me.