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Chapter Eighteen

The Book That Matters Most

T hey stuffed Lachlan into the back of Edgar’s Jeep, hoping they wouldn’t have to talk to him on the drive, but he leaned forward, shoving his big face in between them to ask gauche questions about Miranda’s marriage and Andrew’s salary—or lack thereof (in both cases).

“What, are you scared to go back to LA?” he asked.

Miranda ground both the gears and her teeth, following the road past Hiram Henry House, where the lights were still on, and then onto the forested road out of town. If only Lachlan Todd had been eaten by a bear!

“You’d think Edgar would have offered to put me up,” Lachlan griped. “It’s the least he could do, with everything I’ve done for him.”

When Miranda didn’t take the bait, he added, “Edgar owes me. Big time.”

“What could Edgar possibly owe you?” she snapped, pushing harder on the accelerator.

“I was his designated fall guy. On your TV show. Whenever Your Highness got angry over a given scene or bit of dialogue, he would blame me. Remember when Pastor Fran gave in to the temptations of the flesh and kissed that priest, Father McKenzie—what a lush that actor was! Didn’t you catch him in your dressing room trailer once, trying on your undergarments?

—and you were worried that it was out of character, even though Fran and Father McKenzie were locked in a vault with a time bomb about to go off and Pastor Fran, thinking her life was about to end, revealed her true feelings in a moment of weakness? ”

“What about it? Although savaged by critics, it remains one of our most popular episodes. The whole, ‘will-they-won’t-they?’ aspect of it.”

“But you threw a fit over one of the lines: Father, your lips are like the Holy Water of Christ tempered with a secular love, but, alas, I am and shall remain a woman of the cloth; my calling, like my heart, is clear, and I must not—may not! shall not!—accede to these baser instincts. Then you karate-chopped the clock on the bomb, thereby disabling the timing mechanism. Remember that?”

“How could I not? It was voted worst dialogue at that year’s Razzie Awards—along with my performance of that same dialogue.

” The memory of it still stung. She’d shown up thinking it was an actual awards show.

She’d fired her agent over that. (Technically, she had already fired him; she’d rehired and then refired him, but the effect was the same.)

“I didn’t write that dialogue,” Lachlan revealed.

“Edgar did. He inserted those lines into my script at the last moment. He was always doing that, trying to give you these dramatic emotional scenes, showcase your talent, I guess. Half the time, it fell flat—and I took the blame because you were his wife and he begged me to.”

“Edgar would never beg!”

“Okay, so he slipped me a couple of bucks to take the fall.”

That sounded more like him.

“The point being,” said Lachlan, “Edgar owes me at least a couch to crash on after I helped maintain his matrimonial harmony. Not that it did a lot of good. Are you guys divorced now or what? No one can give me a straight answer on that.”

With an angry yank of the wheel, Miranda veered off the main road toward Happy Rock’s Hideaway Motel, circa 1972, where the sun-faded sign out front promised Color TV! and Air Conditioning! with icicles hanging off the brrrr letters of the latter.

“Let me out down here,” Lachlan said. “I’ll walk in. Motel manager has been yappin’ at me about ‘bounced checks’ and ‘expired credit cards,’ blah blah. So suspicious, these small towns.”

Lachlan closed the door of the Jeep as quietly as possible and then hiked in as Miranda spun the Jeep around, kicking up gravel, not caring about the noise and muttering invective under her breath. “I ought to lean on the horn, really wake up the manager.”

Instead, she flew back into Happy Rock, past the Duchess Hotel, gunning the motor. Rather than follow the road along the shore, however, she turned up Beacon Hill.

“I thought we were going to Bea’s,” said Andrew.

“We are... eventually.”

* * *

M IRANDA PULLED IN at the I Only Read Murder bookstore and marched up to the front door, fully expecting to enter unimpeded—but the door was locked.

“It took a dead body in the bookstore to finally make him take security seriously.” She turned to Andrew. “Key!”

“Key?”

“To the front door. As cashier, you must have one on you.”

“I do—but shouldn’t we knock first?”

“And rouse Edgar from a much deserved slumber? Nonsense. As the owner of this establishment, I may enter at my leisure. Now, please unlock the door.”

Andrew did so, but under protest. “This might be a bookstore, but it’s also Edgar’s home.”

“ The book that matters most ,” she said, quoting the note Doc Meadows had found lodged in Fairfax DePoy’s throat.

“Kane must have assumed the book in question was one of John D. Ross’s first editions.

When he found that note on the final page of the manuscript, he began going through each book in a panic, flipping to the end, trying to find the answer: Who was the true killer in those cases? ”

She closed the door behind them and strode down the hallway, flicking on lights imperiously as she went, around the corner to the yellow X that Officer Holly had taped over the broken door of the reading room.

Before she entered, she turned to Andrew.

“Kane Hamady was trying to find ‘the book that matters most.’ He never found it. He was killed, and the last page of the manuscript ended up in a dead man’s throat.

But what was the one anomaly in those boxes of books Edgar received—the one book that didn’t fit with the others, that stood out by its very incongruity? ”

“Of course! That weird literary novel we thought had been included by accident. What was the title? So Sad the Moon, So Tragic the Wind ? Something like that.”

“ How Precious the Rain, How Sad the Sun .” She pushed the door to the reading room, and it opened on a groan.

The inside was tented with numbered police evidence markers.

The books remained flung about, as though by a child having a tantrum.

The lamp remained on its side, but the transom above the window was now closed.

Even so, the room was still chilly. Autumn, like death, had seeped in.

The body may have been removed, but its presence could still be felt.

Stepping under the police tape, Miranda crossed over to the glass cabinet and then swore in a decidedly non–Pastor Fran way. The book was gone.

“It was right here, in this cabinet! Some nefarious soul has snatched it.” She tried to remember the last time she’d seen it in there, but couldn’t.

Had it been there when the body was discovered?

She was sure it had been. Which meant the strange book with the mauve cover must have disappeared during the chaos right after, or during the drawn-out process of taking statements and fingerprints when Office Holly and Deputy Andrew had been distracted.

Or had someone slipped back into the bookstore after the fact? It could have been anyone.

“Miranda? Andrew? What the hell are you doing here?”

Edgar was standing sleepily in the doorway of the reading room, dumbfounded, holding a small china plate and a silver dessert fork.

Miranda swept out of the reading room, back into the hallway, asking Edgar as she stepped past him, “Did you remove a book from this crime scene?”

“Huh? No. Why would I? It’s a crime scene .

What are you two doing here? How did you get in?

I thought I locked the front door. I only came back downstairs because the lights were on.

It’s”—he checked his wrist where his watch would have been, having forgotten he’d taken it off for the night, an awkward maneuver because of the empty plate and fork he was holding—“Anyway, it’s gotta be two in the morning, at least. You should be in bed. We should all be in bed.”

“Fairfax DePoy is no more! He was found hanged—in the lighthouse.”

“What? My god. That’s horrific.” A beat. “But how does any of this involve you, Miranda?”

“It doesn’t not involve me!” she said. “We are closing in.” (She said “we” to include Andrew.) “That strange little novel that we assumed was included amongst the John D. Ross hardcovers by mistake may well contain the solution to everything. But that book has gone missing!”

Edgar closed his eyes a moment. Took a deep breath. Opened his eyes, but she was still there.

“Miranda, it’s late. You need to leave. Take the Jeep. I’m going to bed. You can let yourself out. Lock the door behind you.” Unstated was the sentiment and don’t let it hit your ass on the way out .

“And what is this?” she said, referring to the fancy fork and china plate he was holding. “Those don’t belong to you, Edgar. I recognize that plate, that fork. Those are from Geri and Gerry’s. They served Bea’s peach cobbler on those.”

“I found them upstairs on my bookshelf. Owen must have left them behind when he was canoodling with the Duchess of Darkness earlier. Don’t worry, I’m not keeping them.

I’ll wash them up, return them to Geri tomorrow.

They’ve probably already taken stock and noticed one was missing. Like I said: keen.”

“Owen McCune? He left that plate and fork upstairs?”

“They were the only ones who went up there. Who else would it be? Have you ever known him to clean up after himself? If I’m going to start adding locks, I should start with one to the stairs, just to keep Owen out.”

“Peach cobbler,” she said. “He took his peach cobbler upstairs with him.”

Edgar was showing them to the door. With plate and fork in one hand, he ushered Miranda and Andrew down the hallway with the other. As they passed the main room of the bookstore, Miranda noted the various volumes that had been removed from the shelves and stacked on the tables.

“Aha! What is going on here? Were you looking for clues, Edgar? Or has a soul more dastardly been through here, searching for hints amongst the stacks?”

“It was me. I was trying to re-alphabetize the shelves after the mess you made of it, but I gave up. It was too much. I see that G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown collections are now beside the Kellermans—both Faye and Jonathan—but nowhere near Laurie R.

King’s Detective Martinelli series. Those are under R, naturally, next to the works of Philip Craig—sorry, Philip R .

Craig.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.

This was his “imminent migraine” gesture.

“I’ll take another stab tomorrow. To be clear, Miranda, the first principle of retail is that your customers should be able to find the product they are looking for. Don’t do it again, okay?”

Miranda stopped to ponder this. “But why would you want to make mystery books easy to find? Defeats the purpose, no?”

Andrew said, “In a weird way, she has a point.”

“Solve the mystery of our system, win a gift card! Is that the idea?”

Edgar was being sarcastic, but Miranda thought this was a splendid idea.

“A mystery bookstore where the books are arranged... mysteriously. I love it!”

“Miranda,” he said. “I know you’ve always been a night owl...”

This had been a bone of contention, not to mention discontent, in their marriage, Edgar waking up at six in the morning to type (as authors are wont to do) and Miranda sleeping in till the crack of noon every day (as actors are wont to do).

Miranda had long suspected this was the real reason Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe had gotten a divorce.

“You and Andrew need to go home and get some sleep,” he said. “And stop meddling.”

“Meddling? I never meddle!”

“Meddling is all you do—in my bookstore, my life, this investigation. You can’t go around letting yourself into places whenever the mood strikes you. Call first and, maybe, I don’t know, knock before you enter?”

“I am the majority co-owner of this establishment, may I remind you.”

“Of the business. Not my home.”

“Our home.”

“My home!”

Miranda fought down the hurt, opted for ire instead. “Andrew! We are leaving.” She tossed the keys to the Jeep onto the nearest book-laden table. “We shall walk!”

“Miranda, don’t,” said Edgar, but she was already gone, into the cold air of night.

Andrew caught up to her, more out of loyalty than common sense—it was a good half hour’s walk to Bea’s, downhill on slippery roads and then out along the bay—and the talk of bears had rattled him.

“You grew up in Minnesota. Lotta bears there?” he asked, puffing as he jogged alongside. When Miranda Abbott strode, she strode .

“Oh yes. St. Olaf was rife with bears,” she said. “Bears, bears everywhere! Bears on the lake, bears in the park, bears in the lefse store, bears lounging about outside the town hall. One couldn’t leave one’s house in the morning without shooing away several bruins.”

“And—what do you, um, do if you encounter one? A bear, I mean.”

“You run. Faster than the person you are with, preferably.”

“Kidding, right? You are kidding, right? Any bears out here are probably hibernating by now, right? That’s what bears do, they hibernate. Right?”

Miranda was heading downhill at full pace, a storm cloud of emotion over her head.

“Maybe we should turn back,” Andrew pleaded, still jogging just to keep up. “Maybe smooth things over with your husband.”

“I have no husband!”

“Ex-husband?”

“I have no ex-husband!”

“Former?”

“Same thing. And I have neither!”

“I’m just saying, maybe you overreacted? You do tend to do that.”

Miranda stopped, dead in her tracks. Turned and glared at him. “Did you just say I overact?”

“Over- re -act.”

“Oh. Okay. Fine, then.” She continued down the hill.

Edgar’s Jeep pulled up, rolled alongside them. “Miranda,” he called through the open passenger window. “Come on. Get in. I’ll drive you there.”

“Never!”

“If you get in, I’ll apologize.”

“Done!”

She climbed into the back seat, gave Andrew the front.

Edgar followed Beacon Hill Road down to the harbor. The air was misted with frost. It was as though the very landscape were exhaling.

“Well?” she said, arms crossed. “I’m waiting.”

“Miranda, I’m sorry that you are upset by facts.”

“Apology accepted!”