Page 8 of Killer on the First Page

“Yes, except I don’t spend my time hanging out at your garage, flipping through your tire catalogs.”

“You should! Anytime you like. My door is always open, and I’m usually out anyway.”

“That would explain why it took you two weeks to fix a simple valve on my Jeep,” said Edgar.

“Prob’ly,” said Owen, who then wandered off in search of more mechanically astute mysteries.

Edgar opened the last box of books, lifted the flaps to reveal...

“Huh. Well, that’s unexpected.”

“What is it?” asked Andrew.

“A book.”

“How is a book unexpected?” Miranda wanted to know. “I should think a book is precisely what one might expect to find in a boxfilled with books.”

Edgar held up a thin hardcover, mauve and faded, with a cursive font on the cover that uncurled like a fragile ribbon—a wistful font, if such a thing were possible:How Precious the Rain, How Sad the Sun.

“Terrible title for a mystery,” said Andrew. “MaybeHow Dangerous the Rain, How Murderous the Sun? Or, even better,Gun.”

“That’s just it. It’s not a mystery. It’s some sort of... literary novel.” The word sounded thick upon Edgar’s tongue, like an obscure term he was not used to pronouncing. He turned the book over in his hand as though it were an exotic bit of fauna long thought extinct. He checked the copyright page. “A small press. Published twenty years ago. Not credited to John D. Ross. The author is someone named Gertrude Gyilkos. Andrew?”

“On it.”

Andrew fired up his smartphone, did that magical thumb danceof his that always amazed Miranda, and reported back within moments.

“That’s the only novel the author wrote, apparently. There’s nothing on her—or the novel, really. I found a single copy on AbeBooks selling for two bucks. Another one for five. And that’s about it. It’s long out of print. No synopsis available online. Doesn’t show up on Goodreads or Google Books.”

“Hmm,” said Miranda.

It was the fate of certain novels to disappear like pebbles down a well, leaving scarcely a ripple in their wake. This was one such book, it would appear.

“So it’s not one of John D. Ross’s pseudonyms,” said Edgar.

“If it was, that would have come up.”

John D. Ross made Alexander McCall Smith look like a piker when it came to the sheer number of mystery series he pushed out the door. Prolific to the point of promiscuous, John D. Ross had been forced to use an array of pen names to avoid flooding the market under his own, pen names like Chip Tanner, Sheldon Shaw, and Stark Holt. But Gertrude was not among them.

No author photo, either. Just a pebble, dropped down a well...

“How peculiar,” said Miranda.

Speaking of peculiar.

“Oh! Before I forget. Edgar, you’ll never guess who Andrew and I ran into outside the Opera House today. Lachlan Todd!”

“Luckless Lachlan? What is he doing in Happy Rock?”

“He is under the impression that his invitation to the writers festival was lost in the mail.”

“The mystery is how that guy is still alive. He burns bridges like a pyromaniac who has a... a grudge against bridges. Okay, not my best simile. But you get the idea.”

Edgar returned his attention to the mauve book with the unsettling title. Opened it to a random page of text.Innocence is what remains after everything else has fled.On another page:We are the leaves that worship the wind, the straw that worships the pyre.Yes, this was most definitely literary fiction, not mystery.

“Helen must have included this by mistake,” Edgar said. He placed it to one side. “I’ll return it to her later. As for the rest of these—I’ll put the paperbacks out front, here in the main room, and I’ll store the hardcovers in the reading room.”

In spite of herself, Miranda shivered. The reading room was her least favorite area in the bookstore, second only to the groaning furnace and layered dust of its dungeon-like basement. Both places felt haunted to her, and she wasn’t wrong.