Page 14 of Broken Bird (The Last Picks #4)

A Whale of a Tale Books and Curios was slow on Sunday afternoon. The bell jingled as we stepped inside and were met by the comfortably familiar smells of paper and a dusty furnace. Warm afternoon light washed over the display in the storefront windows: the featured holiday titles, the books with green covers stacked in the shape of a Christmas tree, the carefully wrapped packages from the North Pole arranged around the tree. Katniss lay in an oblong patch of sun, cleaning one paw. She looked up lazily and twitched her tail at us.

Bobby and I made our way down an aisle (Fantasy on one side, Science Fiction on the other, with a frightening amount of Robert Heinlein brooding on the shelves), and as I drew closer to the sales desk at the back of the shop, the familiar sound of the old cash register reached me. A woman said something, the words too low for me to make out, and then Stephen said, “If you don’t love it, bring it back and we’ll find you something else.” A moment later, the woman passed me on her way out—not local, I was sure, based mostly on the sweatshirt that featured a crab in a Santa hat (SANDY CLAWS printed above it).

When I stepped out of the aisle, the cash register chimed again. Stephen caught the drawer as it slid open, and he began organizing the bills—tucking some of the larger bills under the tray, his face intent with his silent tallying. I considered him for a final moment. He seemed like such a nice man. So quiet, especially in contrast to Pippi. So dedicated to his family. So genuinely (and, in my opinion, confusingly) in love.

“Hi, Stephen,” I said. “Do you have a minute?”

He jolted. His head snapped up. Then he wheezed a laugh and shut the register with his hip. “You scared me. Hey, guys. What’s the good word? Dash, I meant to call you—I think I found a copy of that out-of-print book you wanted, Strachey—right? Let me check the price, and you can tell me if you want me to order it.”

He turned toward a door behind the counter.

“Stephen,” I said, “stay right where you are.”

“What—” He tried to laugh, but his mouth was too stiff. “What is this?”

“This is a friendly conversation,” Bobby said. “Right, Dash?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It depends on what Stephen tells us.”

“Tell you?” The question wasn’t even close to believable; his terror made it almost unintelligible. “What would I have to tell you?”

“Why you stole Marshall’s manuscript? Why you broke into my house? Why you attacked me? Why you killed Marshall Crowe?”

He was so white, I was sure he was going to pass out. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill anybody.” He stared at me, bug-eyed, until he seemed to think to say, “I want you to leave. Right now.”

“All right,” I said.

I headed for the door.

As Bobby followed me (dodging a display of Octavia Butler books along the way), he said, “That’s it? You’re giving up?”

“Nope. I’m going to prove he killed Marshall and stole the manuscript.”

Behind us, Stephen sounded like he was speaking on the phone as he said, “Turtledove, they think I killed him.”

“Turtledove?” Bobby said. “Please don’t tell me you’re planning on searching this place. We don’t have a warrant, and I’d like to keep my job, plus there’s the tiny fact that it would take you forever. You’d need a team of officers and a month to make a dent in it.”

“I don’t need a team of officers or a month,” I said, and inside, I sent up a little prayer to the god of gay-boy amateur sleuths that I was right. “Where do you hide a pebble?”

“Why do you want to hide a pebble?”

“No, just—where would you hide it?”

“Well, you could hide it behind a wall plate, or behind a baseboard, or—”

“Bobby!”

“What? Those are good places. You could tape it to the inside of a P-trap.”

“I swear to God you do this on purpose. You hide a pebble on the beach.”

“Like, under all the sand?”

I swallowed a scream and moved over to the display window. “You hide a pebble with other pebbles, Bobby. My God, it’s like you want me to have a stroke. And where do you hide a Christmas present?”

“How big is it?”

I took several calming breaths—and ignored what I thought was Bobby’s struggle to hide a smile. I reached into the display window, grabbed a familiar-looking parcel, and held it up. “You hide a stolen Christmas present with other presents.”

“That was very impressive,” Bobby informed me.

“I can’t deal with you right now. Go shoot something.”

He didn’t, of course; he tagged along as we made our way back to the sales desk. Stephen was clutching a phone in one hand, and if anything, he looked even paler.

“You can’t—” he said when I picked up a pair of scissors from the desk. “That’s private property—Bobby, you’ve got to arrest him!”

I slit the package open, and a manuscript slid out.

Stephen gasped. Like, an old Hollywood starlet gasp.

At the front of the shop, the door crashed open, and the bell jangled madly. Footsteps raced toward us, and a moment later, Pippi was there. Her hair was limp. She only had eyeshadow on one eye. And she had only a single member of her production crew today; Dylan was back to being jack-of-all trades as he trained the camera on her and said, “You look so beautiful, Mom! Action!”

“It was me,” she announced. “I did it! I killed Marshall!”

“Sure,” I said as I bent over the manuscript. “Tell us how.”

“Mr. Dane,” Dylan asked, “can you look at the camera when you say that?”

“I’m starting to suspect nobody in this room killed anyone,” Bobby said, “so why don’t we—”

“No!” Stephen’s voice trembled, but he made up for it with volume—projecting for the camera, I suspected. “My turtledove never could have hurt someone. I did it. I killed Marshall Crowe.”

“Good Lord,” I said.

“Hold on, I had the camera on Mom—”

“It’s not true,” Pippi’s words throbbed with, uh, emotion. “ My turtledove never could have harmed a soul. It was me. I am a foul murderess! What’s done cannot be undone.”

The manuscript was definitely Titus Brooks. It was covered in my dad’s familiar chicken-scratch, most of it red ink. “We’re going Shakespearian, I see.”

“A little help, please,” Bobby said. “Or should I arrest both of them?”

“Well, they can either go on arguing about which one of them did it, or they can tell us what really happened.”

“Turtledove, this is all my fault,” Stephen moaned.

Dylan whipped the camera toward his dad a moment too late.

“No, turtledove.” Pippi pressed forward. “This is all my fault.”

Dylan whipped back to Mom.

“Enough with the camera, Dylan,” Bobby said. “In fact, go wait outside.”

When Pippi gave a nod (and a whisper to “get some B-roll”), Dylan trotted out of the shop. The bell jangled again. The door shut. And then we were alone.

“What do you two have to say for yourselves?” I asked (and I sounded way too much like my mom).

They shared a guilty—and surprisingly tender—look before Stephen let out a pained breath. “It’s all my fault. I took the package from the stage. I didn’t mean to, I promise. I was picking up, trying to help, and then everything was such a mess. I figured it wasn’t a good time to try to figure out who to give it to; I’d return it the next day, or I’d give it to the police. But I swear, I didn’t kill Marshall. And neither did my turtledove.”

Pippi looked a bit put out as she admitted, “I didn’t kill Marshall.”

“But?” I asked.

This time, it took her longer to answer. “I…opened the package. Just a little.”

“How can you open something ‘just a little’?” Bobby asked.

“I taped it up again, see? But once I saw that it was one of Marshall’s manuscripts—a draft, I mean—I realized, well…”

“ We realized,” Stephen said, “it could be valuable. Especially since Marshall had, uh—”

“Died?” I said.

“Passed,” Stephen said.

“I was going to tell you,” Pippi said, “but then you’d gotten a copy of the manuscript from Elodie, and it didn’t matter anymore.”

“You realize this is stolen property, don’t you?” Bobby asked. “How were you going to explain it when you tried to sell it?”

“There are…discreet buyers,” Stephen said, and his eyes shot to Pippi.

Pippi spoke over him. “We would have offered it to Marshall’s estate, of course.”

“Very convincing,” Bobby murmured.

“That’s it?” I asked. “Why’d you break into my house?”

“We didn’t,” Stephen said with a hint of outrage.

“What did you do with the manuscript he was going to read from?”

“Nothing,” Pippi said. But she kind of ruined it when she immediately added, “We were keeping it safe.”

I believed that much; they would have tried to sell that one too. The very manuscript he was holding when he died . They were quite the pair, these two turtledoves.

“How did Hayes know you had it?”

Stephen and Pippi exchanged a look that, for once, looked genuinely confused.

“I heard him demanding you hand it over,” I said. “The night Pippi confronted him in here.”

“Oh that,” Stephen said. “No, he thought I’d picked up something else. He was sure Marshall had been carrying some sort of financial paperwork, and he was convinced I’d stolen it. I mean, I’m not a thief.”

Aside from the last part—Pippi and Stephen were clearly a match in self-delusion—the rest of it sounded plausible. The chain of events seemed simple: Hayes had been stealing from his clients; Marshall had found proof and fired him; and, after Marshall had died, Hayes had been desperate to recover any sort of financial paperwork that might point back at him. It certainly explained why I’d seen him trying so desperately to get into the Rock On Inn the other day.

“Why don’t you two go stand by the display window,” Bobby said, “where I can see you? I’d like to have a word with Dash.”

Pippi huffed, as though this were outrageous, but Stephen patted her hand and soothed her as he led her down the aisle.

“I don’t think they killed anybody,” Bobby said. “Mostly because this is about the stupidest explanation I’ve ever heard.”

“Their cheeses done slid off their crackers.”

“I love Fox, and I say this as a friend, but I think you need to start spending less time together.”

“I don’t think they killed Marshall either,” I said, “but God, I really thought I’d figured it out.”

“Well, I’ve got to tell the sheriff what happened,” Bobby said. “I don’t know if she’ll press charges, but these two blockheads made this investigation so much harder than it needed to be.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I still have no idea if the manuscript helps or not. Someone wanted it—that’s for sure, because someone broke into my house and tried to get it, and it wasn’t Stephen and Pippi.”

“Maybe it was Dylan,” Bobby said, and it was hard to tell if he was joking.

“I mean, this looks like an earlier draft, and my dad did give Marshall a lot of feedback, but it’s not feedback…” I trailed off as a thought came to me. More softly, I said, “It’s not feedback he got a chance to use.”

“They seriously send manuscripts back and forth like this?” Bobby asked. “They don’t just email them?”

“Don’t get me started. This is why I can’t check the mail; I have a phobia.”

“You told me you can’t check the mail because the mailbox is so far away.”

“Bobby, it’s at the bottom of a hill!”

“I’m going to call the sheriff,” Bobby said in the tone of someone who might need a break from me. (Trust me, I’ve heard it before.)

His steps moved away, and I bent over the manuscript. I couldn’t stop thinking about the incongruity of the timeline. My parents had sent this manuscript by mail. Marshall had never seen my dad’s changes. And yet, at some point, Marshall had made edits. Because even a casual glance showed me that the manuscript he had sent to my parents was different from the one Elodie had given me. The changes were small. In fact, if I didn’t have a good memory for stories (one of my few talents, including making a Grim Reaper puppet out of the sleeve of my black hoodie), and if I hadn’t read the story in the last few days, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them.

I flipped through the pages, scanning for differences. They were all so minor. Even, it seemed, pointless—they didn’t change the story in any significant way. There wasn’t a drastically different murder suspect, or murder plot, or murder victim. Nothing that might explain why someone might want the manuscript to disappear. In one scene, for example, Titus Brooks holed up in a cheap motel for the night. In the version Elodie had given me, he had flipped channels before falling asleep. In this version, he scrolled Netflix until he fell asleep.

Or, in another spot, Titus Brooks went to a rave in an abandoned building. One of his thoughts was that the rave had a weird energy —intuition that was borne out, a few pages later, when it turned out half the guests there were trying to kill him. (It would take too long to explain, trust me.) In this version, he had the same intuitive reaction to the rave—but he thought of it as a bad vibe .

There were so many little things like that. At one point, when he was looking at a suspect’s phone, he opened their Facebook account to look through their pictures. In this version, though, he looked at Instagram—

And then it hit me.

I shoved the manuscript back into the package and ran for the front door, calling for Bobby.