Page 24

Chapter Thirteen

The Telltale Toothpick

T he basement of the bookstore was somehow musty and dry at the same time.

Dank smells and the taste of dust in the air.

A listing stairway, held together more by good intentions than actual carpentry, led them down in a steep descent.

Low ceilings and slab walls. The only light was from a naked bulb above and the boiler fire below.

The Monstrosity, as the furnace had been dubbed, was a rumbling presence with its rattling vents and rust-jointed valves.

Miranda could hear the strain and rasp of it as they came down the stairs.

Edgar had said they’d be lucky if it made it through another winter. More expenses looming.

Crates were piled under dust as thick as dryer lint, the corners of the room clotted with shadow and cobwebs.

In Pastor Fran Investigates , this was when the villains would emerge from the darkness.

Miranda craned her neck to study the exposed beams of the basement ceiling.

Jerry-rigged tin air ducts radiated out from the top of the furnace.

“Is that where the hot air flows through?” she asked.

“No. As I was explaining to Ned, we don’t used forced-air heating.

It’s a traditional boiler and radiator system.

Hot water is pumped out through the pipes over there, where it then circulates throughout the building and the various cast-iron radiators—though I do have some space heaters on the second floor; gets cold up there.

It’s an old building and an old system. The vents you see are for air movement, not the actual heating.

Boilers use ductwork to move the air, but it’s the radiators that, well, radiate the heat. ”

“Which one of these connects to the reading room?”

Edgar pointed out a flat metal duct that ran along the ceiling. She was disappointed. It was too narrow for anyone to fit through.

“In movies, people are always crawling along air ducts,” she said.

“In movies, people are always outrunning erupting balls of fire as well, and clinging to helicopter rudders with their bare hands. Even if you could squeeze into that duct, it would never support someone’s weight,” Edgar said, pointing out the obvious.

Once again, real life had failed to live up to that of TV and cinema.

Miranda stood directly under the duct, looking up.

“I can’t see the grate,” she said. “The one that leads into the reading room.”

“It’s covered by the tin.” The duct above them was screwed in and held in place by guy wires. “And anyway, the grate on the other side is made of heavy cast iron. Would be very hard to lift.”

“To say nothing of the fact that the edges of the grate were painted shut,” she reminded him.

He never had been much of a handyman, though he tried.

Lord, how he tried. She remembered how proud he’d been of the wine rack he’d built in their Hollywood Hills home and how, in the middle of the night, when it had come crashing down, shattering into a lake of Chateau Mouton Rothschild and Cabernet Sauvignon, they had stood laughing at the sight.

Laughing, mind you! Now he got angry when the mail was late.

“Would it have been better for you if I had stayed in LA?” she asked. “If I had signed the divorce papers, if I’d never come to Happy Rock?” If I left, she thought, if I accepted Penny’s offer?

“What? Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re here now, so what does it matter?

Coulda, woulda, shoulda doesn’t mean much in the real world.

” Then, gruffly: “I would’ve lost the bookstore if it wasn’t for you, would be living in a motel by now heating up Hungry-Man dinners on a hot plate.

You saved me from the sort of life Lachlan leads, so I suppose I owe you for that. ”

From Edgar, that was as close as one got to a declaration of undying gratitude.

Embarrassed, he cleared his throat and said, “Are we done down here?”

“I think so. Alas, it has proven to be a dead end. The grate in the floor above us is covered by an air duct.”

So much for a secret passage.

Then she saw it, lying on the cement floor, in the light of the naked bulb above: a single toothpick. On the dull gray, it stood out in its singularity. Miranda bent down, carefully retrieved it. Held it up to the light. It was red.

A cinnamon toothpick.

“It would appear that Mr. Hamady was down here in the basement,” Miranda said, “before he died.” A thought occurred. “Edgar, can you burn things in the furnace?”

“Not really. It’s a boiler, not an incinerator. There is no iron door that swings open into a fiery pit, like on TV.”

In Pastor Fran Investigates, hardly a tenement building’s boiler existed that didn’t have the bones of at least one person inside.

Not that they ever showed the grisly charred remains; they were usually referred to in the form of visual synecdoche: a single femur standing in for the body as a whole, or occasionally a plastic skull held up Yorick-style.

“Not bodies,” said Miranda. “Papers. I keep thinking of that missing page from the manuscript, wondering what Kane did with it. Did they check his pockets?”

“Holly patted the body down fairly thoroughly. Went through his wallet. Didn’t find the last page of the manuscript, though in fairness she wasn’t looking for it.

He might have tucked it into his sock or something.

When Doc Meadows returns to accompany the body to the morgue, I’ll ask him to check again.

That missing page didn’t vanish into the night on its own. ”

Another thought occurred to her. “Pirates, Edgar? Any?”

“Complete sentences, Miranda, remember?”

“You know the history of Tillamook Bay better than I. Were there pirates?”

“Don’t think so.” Conversing with Miranda was like trying to dance with a kangaroo. “What does that have to do with—”

“Something I overheard Fairfax say, something about the ‘cutthroats of Tillamook Bay,’ and I thought perhaps in times gone by buccaneers and swashbuckling freebooters had once prowled these waters.”

“Oh, that ,” said Edgar with a laugh. “You’ve always had a rich imagination, Miranda. He would have been referring to cutthroat trout. It’s a type of fish. A record for cutthroat on the Nestucca was set a few years back.”

“Hmm,” said Miranda.

Edgar said, “Perhaps we should go back up, see how Andrew’s doing.” The furnace had kicked in with a groan.

“Before I forget, I informed Sheryl Youngblut that she is not to enter the reading room under any circumstances. Stand firm, Edgar! I don’t want that flirty young publicist sidling up you, trying to inveigle access to the room.

” Sheryl wasn’t actually flirty, but Edgar could be as susceptible as the next man. “She’s been acting strange.”

Edgar smiled at Miranda. Such a beautiful smile, and so rarely seen these days.

“Inveigling access? Miranda Abbott, I do declare. Are you worried that I wouldn’t be able to resist the blandishments of a slightly younger woman?”

“Well, she is pretty. In a vague, nondescript, unimpressive sort of way.”

“I promise, if Sheryl comes sliding in next to me, cooing in my ear, nibbling on my lobes, asking for access—whether to my heart or the reading room—I shall resist heroically with every fiber of my being. I’m a married man, remember?”

This set her back on her heels. A married man? So you admit it! Ha!

“I see flames,” Miranda said, trying to stay on task. She was referring to the orange glow cast on the floor. “If he rolled it up tightly, couldn’t Kane have fed the missing page into the furnace that way?”

“Through the gap? I suppose. But there are easier ways to get rid of a piece of paper. And why come down to the basement to do it?”

Not destroy, not burn. Get rid of . Edgar had inadvertently given Miranda the answer. It percolated through her free-range mind. The page was not destroyed; it had, as Edgar had said, vanished into the night.

“Kane opened the transom, not to escape, but to get rid of that page!” she said. But as soon as she said it out loud, her thoughts clouded over. “But there was no page lying on the flower bed outside, no footprints in the soil, no crumpled paper on the grass.

“Unless it blew away,” said Edgar.

He was keeping his eye on the toothpick Miranda was holding between her fingers. She had been gesticulating with it as though it were a tiny little pointer.

“You know that toothpick was in Kane’s mouth?”

“Oh. Right.” With a theatrical turn, she sailed back up the steep and creaky stairs. Some people made grand entrances; Miranda Abbott had mastered the art of the grand exit.

Cutthroat trout and vanishing pages from a lost manuscript... Did these intersect? Miranda was certain they did, but how?

* * *

I N LIEU OF a proper evidence container, Miranda placed the toothpick in a sandwich bag from one of the kitchen drawers, to a surprised look from Geri.

“Tidying up?” Geri asked.

“Indeed. One toothpick at a time,” said Miranda sunnily.

Better not to let anyone know. She would hand the evidence over to forensics when they arrived tomorrow, though Miranda already knew who the toothpick belonged to: the recently deceased Kane Hamady.

What she didn’t know was why it had been down in the basement.

As Miranda washed her hands in the sink, she pondered again the puzzle of the missing page from an unknown manuscript, and an open book shot through by an arrow into the chest of a dead man.

It all fit together, she knew it; if only she could figure out how.

Plus the ankles. There had been something about the position of Kane Hamady’s ankles that had seemed off.

Ankles, arrows, and open books. It was enough to make a girl’s head spin.

When Edgar and Miranda returned to the main hall after their foray to the furnace room, Deputy Andrew was in trouble. Serious trouble. An insurrection was brewing, and he was struggling to contain it.

“Settle down, people!”

“What the hell is going on?” Edgar wanted to know.