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“Yes, yes. Since you were in middle school together. I know, I know. I’m only saying, between the two of them, Geri and Gerry practically had the run of the place this afternoon. No one was tracking their movements.”

His eyes narrowed. “What are you saying, Miranda?”

“It’s probably nothing,” she assured him. “Unless it isn’t.”

Ned changed the subject. “Here’s a question. If you were on the run, at night, in a town you didn’t know, where would you go? What would be your first instinct?”

“Where would I go? That’s an excellent question, Ned. I imagine the first place I would head to would be my room, to gather up my belongings and run.”

And now it was Ned who was running, or as close to that gait as he ever came. He barreled down the hall, hollering, “Officer Holly!”

“What is it, Ned?”

Having fingerprinted everyone, Holly was now taping a large X across the closed door to the reading room. The room—and the body inside—were now officially off-limits until further notice.

“Grab yer gear,” said Ned. “We gotta go!”

As they swerved out from the bookstore in their patrol cars, lights flashing, Andrew Nguyen—Deputy Andrew Nguyen!—unexpectedly found himself in charge.

The vacuum of silence that followed was palpable.

The locals had mostly gone. Mabel, Bea, Harpreet and Tanvir.

Doc Meadows had left for the morgue, to fill in paperwork and arrange for collection of the body.

Owen had departed with a vaudevillian wink and eyebrow-bobbing grin thrown Inez’s way.

As subtle as a bag of cement dropped from the fourth floor, our Owen.

But Geri and Gerry were still there, cleaning up.

Scoop Bannister was hanging back, notepad at the ready, and the tongue-tied attorney Atticus lingered on.

The rest were out-of-towners: the four remaining authors from the festival (the macabre Inez Fonio, the professorial Ray Valentine, the statuesque Penny Fenland, and the formidable—and formidably drunk—Wanda Stobol), plus the gate-crashing Lachlan Todd and the perpetually frazzled publicist Sheryl Youngblut.

Trouble began almost immediately.

“Where’s Fairfax DePoy?” Ray demanded. “How come we’re stuck here and he’s not?”

“Yes,” said Penny. “Where is Fairfax?”

“Who knows, who cares?” mumbled Wanda.

Inez asked, “Can we see the body?”

Andrew: “No.”

“Not even a peek?”

“Why would you want to see the body?” Andrew asked.

“To read his dying aura,” she explained, as though this were the most natural thing on earth. Why else would one want to see a dead body? “Perhaps clues to his death are present in the shimmering afterglow of his soul’s departure.”

“No one is reading anyone’s aura,” Andrew insisted. “You heard what Ned said.”

Before he’d left, Happy Rock’s police chief had told everyone to sit tight. “Any questions, Deputy Nguyen will handle them.” But as a whispered aside to Andrew, he’d added, “We can’t hold them here indefinitely. If they get querulous, stall.”

“Deputy, are you detaining us?” Ray Valentine wanted to know.

“Don’t have to answer that,” said Andrew, erroneously.

“I’m sorry, but that is a fair question,” said Penny Fenland. “Are we being detained?”

Channeling his inner Miranda, Andrew straightened his shoulders, raised his chin, and said with abject confidence, “We are not not detaining you. And you are most certainly un-free to not go.”

Miranda beamed at her protégé. “You are doing wonderfully well, Andrew.”

Wanda, loud on medication and martinis, said with a raw guffaw, “Get Compendium Cathy on the case!”

“Our Chief of Police and his able officer Holly Hinton have things well in hand,” Miranda assured them.

Edgar was more worried about his golden Lab. He’d taken Emmy back upstairs, complaining all the while about the undue excitement, and had come back down with a sour look.

“Trapped in a bookstore with a bunch of disgruntled authors,” he said to Miranda. “One of Dante’s levels of Hell, I’m sure.”

Even worse, no one had bought any books.

Leaning to one side to better eye the co-owners, Lachlan Todd curled his mouth in what was presumably meant to be a smile. “A long way from the writers’ room in Burbank for you two,” he pointed out.

Do I tell him? Miranda wondered. Do I tell him, Actually, darling, I have been invited back—to LA, to Hollywood!

Do I tell him that solely to score a point?

The old Miranda would have twisted the stiletto in Lachlan’s side.

But Happy Rock Miranda was more understanding of people’s foibles.

This was, after all, a town inhabited almost completely by eccentrics.

A former locked-room mystery writer who shows up uninvited to a party?

That hardly registered. Plus, what would Edgar think when he found out about Penny’s offer? She wasn’t ready to know.

With Fairfax AWOL and the police having scrambled their only two patrol cars, and this being a room filled with mystery writers, they’d already deduced that the officers were most likely on their way to their bed-and-breakfast to arrest DePoy, though Inez suggested that he might be crouching in a local cemetery instead, “communing with the creatures of the night.”

“Gimme a break,” said Wanda.

“All I’m saying is that the police should be following every avenue,” Inez snapped back. “This isn’t some second-rate children’s story.”

“My nine-year-old detective’s tales make more sense than your pseudo-mystical nonsense, full of portents and omens and the occasional cryptic message a dying person writes in their own blood.

See: Ecclesiastes 1:1 . Who could spell Ecclesiastes correctly as they’re dying? Or alive, for that matter.”

“Philistine!” cried Inez. “If you were more liturgically literate, you would know that Ecclesiastes 1:1 refers to a priest, unnamed, who is also the son of David, King of Jerusalem. The killer’s name was Dave. Don’t you see?”

“Why not just write that?” said Wanda. “If you’re dying, why not simply write Guys! It was Dave! in your own blood, rather than come up with the whole secret message rigmarole. Why so cute about it?”

Amid such rising incriminations, Miranda noticed the publicist slip into the hallway. Miranda followed her around the corner to the reading room, wherein dwelled the corpse of Kane Hamady.

The door was closed, but despite the yellow police tape that crisscrossed it, Sheryl Youngblut tried the handle. It started to turn...

“You can’t go in there,” Miranda said, and the publicist jumped.

“My friend Tanvir, most regrettably, had to destroy the mechanism in order to get in, so the reading room can no longer be locked. But it has been sealed off with police tape, as you must certainly have noticed. Until Mr. Hamady’s body has been removed and the forensics team from Portland has gone through the room inch by inch, this area is strictly off-limits, I’m afraid. ”

“I was just—I was checking the door to see if it was secure. I wanted to ensure the manuscript was safe.”

A smile from Miranda. “It is.”

“No... pages missing?”

Miranda’s smile grew thin. “Why would you ask?”

“Wanted to make sure it was still, you know, intact. If it is a lost John D. Ross novel, you wouldn’t want any of it going astray.”

Astray ? An interesting choice of words. How did a page from a manuscript “go astray”? Miranda wondered. Do I tell her that the last page is indeed missing? Better not to.

Instead, Miranda escorted Sheryl back to main room, where G&G, having packed up their ornate serving trays and tablecloths and various floral arrangements, were asking Andrew whether they could “run it all back” to their B&B.

“It’s been such a long, long—”

“—night,” said Gerry. “And we really should be—”

“—getting home,” said Geri. “Before the—”

“Trout tartare—”

“—spoils,” said Geri.

To Miranda’s chagrin, Andrew was considering their request. True, Ned had told Andrew to let the locals go, and though new in town, Geri and Gerry were technically locals, but still.

As Andrew was about to give his assent, Miranda stepped in. “We need to wait for the all clear, Geri. Mr. DePoy might well be hiding in his room at your inn. Chief Buckley and Officer Holly have gone there to check.”

Standing nearby, Ray Valentine peered at Miranda over the top of his rimless glasses in that lectern manner of his. He wanted to know why Fairfax would kill Kane. “It seems clear Fairfax did it, but for what reason? They had their disagreements—but murder?”

Penny replied, “Why does anyone kill anyone? As purveyors of death, you know very well that there are only four basic motives for murder: love, fear, greed, and insanity.”

With her contempt for cozies clear, Inez said, “Maybe in your world, but you missed one: anger. And its cousins: vengeance, justice.”

“I would argue that unbridled anger is a form of madness,” said Penny. “Thus, it falls under the category of insanity. Any psychologist will tell you that a hunger for vengeance can become an obsessive disorder.”

“Not buying it,” said Ray. “Too general. By that logic, one could argue that any murder is a manifestation of insanity.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Penny.

“And what of justice? Or retribution?” Inez shot back. “Is a demand for justice a form of madness, too?”

“That’s not what she said. You’re putting words in her mouth.” Ray frowned his disapproval at Inez.

“Such a gentleman,” said Inez. “Stepping in to defend the queen. Tell me, where do you get your ideas from, Ray?”

This caught Miranda’s attention. She remembered the flinty-eyed man at the Q&A who’d asked the same question of Mr. Valentine, and how flustered Mr. Valentine had become.

“Who would want to kill Kane, anyway?” said Inez. “Abel aside.”

“Ask Fairfax,” said Ray. “Once they catch him, we’ll know. Doesn’t take a genius to work it out. Kane is dead, and Fairfax is missing.”

Inez turned her attention to Wanda Stobol. “Now, if it had been you who was murdered, we would have no shortage of suspects. Who wouldn’t want to kill you?”

Ray continued, “Even the murder weapon points to Fairfax.”

“Ha!” It was Wanda, deliberately ignoring the Maven of Malice.

“If I put that in one of my kids books, my editor would say, ‘Li’l too convenient, don’tcha think?

’ Not that anyone dies in Compendium Cathy.

But a writer whose hero rides into battle with a crossbow in each hand?

Killing someone with a crossbow? Was he trying to get caught? ”

“Maybe he was...” said Penny. Something was on her mind, Miranda could tell.

“What are you thinking?” Miranda asked.

“Oh, it’s—it’s probably nothing.”

Before Miranda could follow up, Lachlan Todd piped in. “It could’ve been an imposter.”

They groaned. “Come on, Lachlan. It was Fairfax, not a body double. We’ve known him for years.”

Lachlan was not dissuaded, however. “Does anyone know if Fairfax had a twin—preferably evil?”

“Hack,” Wanda mumbled under her alcohol-soaked breath.

This was the single greatest insult one could hurl at an author, and Lachlan was instantly upset. “A hack? Me? You write books for children.”

“Better than novels written by children,” Wanda snorted.

“Take that back!” said Lachlan. “Take that back or I’ll... I’ll...”

“What? Kill me? Gonna lure me into a locked room, are ya, Lachlan? Murder me with poison, a single drop of arsenic running down a thread as I’m sleeping on my back with my mouth conveniently open, or maybe an anvil suspended by a rope lit by a candle?”

“Enough,” said Ray.

Edgar agreed. “I’ve had all I can take of this,” he said. “I’m going upstairs to pat my dog.”

Miranda caught him before he could go, pulling him aside. “Edgar, do you remember that episode of Pastor Fran Investigates , ‘The Case of the Purloined Painter,’ I think it was called?”

Edgar tilted his head. He could almost see where she was going with this.

“The one where the killer’s footprints went across fresh paint on the floor of a hospital,” she said, “and then disappeared into thin air.”

“Oh, right. That one. Why they were painting the floor of an active hospital ward was never clear, even to me. And I wrote the damned thing.”

“Was that one of yours?”

“Sadly, yes. That was season six, I believe, when I’d used up all my ideas.”

“There was only one set of footprints in the paint,” Miranda reminded him. “And there were no footprints going in , only out. I was undercover as a nurse.”

“A sexy nurse,” Edgar amended, though that went without saying.

Every time the show sent Miranda into a hospital, the producers always wanted her in a tight, miniskirted nurse’s outfit, which don’t exist in the real world and had to be tailor-made for her.

“How a medical practitioner would effectively minister to their patients while wearing heels and a push-up bra was beyond me,” he said.

“Yes, but do you remember the solution to the mystery?” Miranda asked. “There was a secret passage! Behind the hospital bed.”

“Yeah, that was my go-to as a writer whenever I wrote myself into a corner,” Edgar confessed.

“Just add a secret panel. But there are no secret panels in the bookstore reading room. As I said to Ned, when I renovated, I stripped it down to the studs. Had there been a hidden passage, I would’ve found it. ”

“Are you certain there wasn’t one?” she asked. “Or perhaps the one that wasn’t there—was!”

A secret panel that isn’t—but is? What the hell was she talking about?

“Edgar! To the furnace room.”