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From her days as Pastor Fran, Miranda knew that alibis could be chronological or physical.

That is, an alibi via eyewitness accounts could place a suspect away from the scene of a crime at the time it occurred.

If, at the moment of the murder, one were hobnobbing with supermodels, say, as was often the case with the villains on Pastor Fran Investigates (nice guys never hobnobbed with supermodels, only bad guys did; that was a fundamental rule of network TV; ditto with champagne glasses: anyone seen swirling a champagne glass at a reception was a de facto villain), it precluded one from having taken part in said murder.

Likewise, if someone were attending an auction for orphans (not auctioning off orphans; an auction for orphans), as the wrongly accused so often were on her show (to go by Pastor Fran Investigates , there were more charity auctions per orphanage than there were actual orphanages), that fact might allow them to elude false arrest. Those were examples of chronological alibis.

But physical clues could also provide either an alibi or proof of guilt.

A parking ticket in one’s jacket, time-stamped miles away while the murder was occurring, for example.

Or if one’s leg were in a cast and the murder required leaping from a building.

These were examples of physical evidence providing an alibi.

Of course, such evidence could also incriminate a person.

How many telltale discarded matchbooks had Pastor Fran come upon over the years?

Half the suspects on her show seemed to be either exonerated or incriminated by discarded matchbook covers.

(Men of that era were just dropping matchbooks everywhere, apparently.) But could a lack of physical evidence provide an alibi?

A lack of footprints, for example. Could that eliminate a suspect?

The absence of evidence did not prove evidence of absence! Miranda Abbott knew this (it was practically axiomatic), but just as equally, absence of evidence did not indicate absent evidence by its lack of presence! And if the absent was present, then the presence itself was not!

Where was Andrew, anyway? He really should be writing this down, she thought.

Oh, right. Her newly deputized personal assistant was taking statements from the locals and then ushering them toward the front door, where they gathered their jackets and assorted accoutrements.

How can you shoot an arrow through a closed window?

The answer? You can’t.

Pastor Fran Investigates had employed its fair share of locked-room mysteries over the years. Were any of those applicable? Penny Fenland had waded through many of those scripts during her time as a reader for the show. Perhaps she would recall something similar.

Miranda waited until Penny had finished giving Andrew her statement, then called her to one side. “Penny, dear. About the show...”

Penny’s eyes widened. “You know?”

“Know what?”

“I wanted it to be a surprise. I was going to tell you after the reception, just the two of us toasting our good fortune over a bottle of wine, but then—well, this incident does put a damper on things. Is it wrong that I’m excited anyway?

Should I still be excited when one of my fellow writers has just been killed? Am I a bad person?”

“Whatever are you talking about?” Miranda asked.

“The show.”

“Yes. Pastor Fran Investigates . My show.”

“Oh, I thought you meant... my show.”

And that was how the news came out, inadvertently and suddenly, like an avalanche. Earlier, Miranda Abbott had been searching for a sign, an omen, and one had just been delivered.

“Netflix is all in. They’re going to mount a full production of the Eastern Township Mysteries!

But we’re swapping out the genders of the two lead characters this time, making Inspector Le Gnash a woman and Sergeant La Flamme a man.

Le Gnash was always my alter ego, and you know how stumped I’ve been, trying to adapt him for the screen.

Once I swapped that out, everything made sense. Everything worked.”

“How wonderful!” said Miranda, missing the point.

Penny gave her a Don’t you see? look, and when Miranda still didn’t clue in, she said, “We want you to play the lead. A female Inspector Le Gnash. You’d be perfect for the role.”

“Oh. An audition?”

“Not an audition, an offer. I’m one of the executive producers, so they have to run the casting past me. You were one of my conditions. If we make Inspector Le Gnash a woman, she has to be played by Miranda Abbott.”

“Oh my.” Miranda felt flushed. “The lead role? In my own series?”

“A pilot, followed by an initial order for twelve episodes, with an automatic pickup for a second season if all goes well, to be filmed in LA.”

“LA?”

“The exteriors would be shot in New England, standing in for Quebec. Everything else would be in LA. Burbank, more specifically.”

“So I would have to leave Happy Rock?”

“Of course!” Penny looked around her. “I Only Read Murder is a remarkable place, Miranda. It is. But in the end, this is really Edgar’s bookstore, isn’t it?”

Miranda’s voice went quiet. “I’m the...” But she couldn’t finish the sentence. Like her marriage, Miranda’s co-ownership of the bookstore existed more on paper than in fact. A technicality. A rounding error.

“We’d be working together! You can move back to Hollywood and be famous again.” Penny caught herself. “Not again. Still. But now even more so. You get the picture.”

“I do. Fame, as I’ve always said, is two sides of the same coin.”

Escape velocities...

Edgar would later ask her, “What were you and Penny talking about?” and Miranda would say, “Nothing.”

But they hadn’t been talking about nothing; they’d been talking about everything.

And she would ask Edgar, “If I stepped back from my life... in the bookstore. Would it make things easier for you? Or harder?”

But Edgar would deflect. “Nothing ever gets ‘easier’ in the book trade. You know the joke about the owner of a bookstore who wins the lottery. They ask him what he’s going to do with all the money, and he says, ‘Oh, I suppose I’ll just keep running the store till it’s gone.’”

In some ways, Miranda had won the lottery. The only question was whether she would cash in and cash out. Or carry on.

Meanwhile, tensions were rising in the room. The locals were getting antsy. The authors, surly. Wanda Stobol was shoveling chewable antacids into her maw, Lachlan Todd was pacing like a caged ferret, Ray Valentine was watching everyone with a hostile eye.

The ever-intrepid Scoop Bannister, meanwhile, had pinioned Inez Fonio in one corner, notepad out and pen at the ready.

“So your new character is essentially just Sherlock Holmes?” said Scoop.

A glare from the black-lipped one in her stark white dress. “Not in the least. My cadaverous creation, my hellacious creature of the night—Detective Frankenstein!—has been assembled from the greatest fictional characters of our times. He has the eyes of Dupin, the hands of—”

“Yes, but the brain is from Sherlock Holmes, so...”

“ My detective has the girth of Poirot, the—”

“But the brain of Holmes. Your character is basically just Sherlock Holmes in a mismatched body. That’s what matters, right? When it comes to being a detective. The brain?”

A look of doubt had crept into Inez Fonio’s eyes. The tattoo under her eye began to quiver. “I wanted to write about vampyres again, but my agent said vampyres are passé, so...” Her voice trailed off.

Owen comforted her with a squeeze of the shoulder. “Frankensteins are way cooler than vampyres, if you ask me.” He shot Scoop a glance. Why are you hounding her with your relentless queries?

“Thank you,” Inez whispered.

“Rice,” Scoop said brightly.

“Rice?”

“Your name, Fonio. It’s sort of a type of rice. Right?”

“No, it’s completely different!”

(Later Scoop would note that Penny Fenland’s surname was simply a variation of “Marsh,” and would receive a similar response: “No, it’s not the same. A fenland is far edgier than a marsh.”)

“And wasn’t Frankenstein the name of the doctor, not the monster?” Scoop asked.

“Can you wrap this up, maybe?” Owen asked.

“Sure thing. Finally, Ms. Fonio—and don’t feel you have to answer this if you don’t want to—but, in your honest opinion, would you say, before the murder happened, of course, that a good time was being had?”

“A good time?”

A dangerous question, to be sure! Owen whispered frantic advice in Inez’s ear.

“Um, yes?” she said.

“Excellent.” Scoop wrote that down. “By all?”

“I suppose.”

“Perfect!”

Scoop Bannister had got her story.