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Chapter Twenty-One

A Kill Shot from Below

M iranda led the way, through the hall, past the kitchen, and down the stairs to the furnace room, with Ned, Deputy Andrew, and Edgar in tow.

In the dim light, they followed the overhead ducts in the basement.

Edgar reached up and found the latch Melvin had told them about.

The metal panel under the floor grate swung loose, and they found themselves peering up directly into the reading room.

Through the curlicue gaps in the grate, they could see figures moving about amid the heavy trod of footsteps and the muffled sound of voices.

An ornamental pattern. But space enough to fire an arrow through.

“If only he’d been wearing his hat,” said Miranda.

“It would have fallen on top of the grate, revealing where the arrow had come from. Alas, Kane had stuffed his trilby into his overcoat pocket, and when he toppled backwards into the chair, he took his hat with him. But not his toothpick. That fell though the grate into the basement.”

Miranda looked at the crates stacked against the wall. “The dust on those crates,” she said. “Undisturbed. What does that tell you?”

The others had no idea.

“It tells us that Fairfax DePoy did not kill Kane Hamady!”

“You can tell that from dust?” said Ned.

“The challenge the killer faced was how to get Kane to come to the grate. In the room above, Kane was growing frantic. He needed to know how that final John D. Ross story ended. He’d turned the manuscript over, found a handwritten note at the bottom of the last page: the answer to the riddle would be at the end of the book that matters most .

But which book? He began flinging hardcovers around, flipping them to the last page, tossing them aside.

Defeated, he came over to unlock the door and let us in, and what did he spot?

The one thing no author can resist: a copy of his own book .

It was lying open, face down on top of the grate.

Planted earlier by someone who knew Kane’s plan.

Someone who knew he was going to sneak back into the room and lock himself in it until he had retrieved the manuscript and uncovered its secrets.

The killer was familiar with the blueprints to the bookstore, had studied them online.

Knew the vanity of authors, and Kane Hamady in particular.

Knew he would stop to pick up his book when he saw it there.

I imagine, when everyone else was crowding in to stare into the cabinet at the manuscript, our killer casually laid a copy of Kane’s novel on the grate behind the open door. ”

“It also explains why the book was open at exactly mid-point,” said Ned. “Page one hundred out of two. That’s how a book would naturally fall open, I’d guess.”

“Exactly. Kane was being set up from the start. The trap was set. When Kane spotted his own book, he must have thought, in his last moments alive, Maybe it was me all along! Maybe I was the one who mattered most! He bent over. And the arrow went straight up from below, though the book and into his chest. He was thrown backwards into the chair, which swiveled in a slow turn, carried by the momentum of his falling body. That’s what was wrong with his ankles!

They were angled the wrong way, dragging away from the door, rather than the window, where we thought the arrow had come from. ”

Ned spoke. “So Lachlan Todd’s initial outrageous theory was correct on one score: the kill shot did come from below.”

Edgar craned his neck. “I’m not sure a bow and arrow could shoot straight up like that...”

“Not a bow, an arrow,” said Miranda.

Andrew was just about to remind her to speak in complete sentences, when she continued.

“A speargun. You could hold it straight up against the grate.”

Ned and Andrew joined Edgar in gazing upward.

“Were there no fingerprints on the arrow?” she asked.

“Wiped clean,” said Ned.

“What I don’t understand,” said Edgar, “is if it was a speargun—and true enough, they can be quite small and light and easy to hide, compared to a crossbow—why use it to shoot an arrow? Why not just fire a regular fishing spear?”

“To disguise the fact that it was a speargun, to make it appear to be a crossbow, to throw the scent onto Mr. DePoy, he of the crossbow-enamored, lassie-beguiling romantic love stories.” She turned to Ned. “Did you find any fingerprints on Kane’s novel, the one that was laid down on the grate?”

Ned nodded. “We did. Inez Fonio’s.”

Andrew gasped. “That will destroy Owen!”

“But Inez is the one person it couldn’t have been,” said Edgar. “Inez was upstairs with Owen at the time the murder happened. She has an alibi.”

“Be that as it may, her fingerprints were all over that book,” said Ned.

“As were Ray Valentine’s and Wanda Stobol’s and Penny Fenland’s and Sheryl Youngblut’s and Bea’s and Gerry’s and more.

Everyone who handled it left prints. It had been pawed over during the course of the evening, just like the other authors’ books that were on display that night. ”

“Pawed over but not purchased,” said Edgar bitterly. The woe of booksellers everywhere.

“How did the missing page of the manuscript end up in Fairfax’s throat?” Ned asked.

“When he was at the lighthouse, he shoved it into his mouth, tried to swallow it when the killer confronted him, thinking that would save him, or at the very least buy him time, because with Kane dead, he was the only one who knew what the missing page said. Fairfax had been lured to the lighthouse by that note referencing Virginia Woolf.”

Ned looked around the dark basement, at the grim shadows and murky corners and the creaking furnace with its many tentacled ducts above. “So where is the murder weapon?”

Edgar answered. “If it’s a lightweight speargun, the type used for recreational fishing, they’re made of aluminum, can be broken down easily to be put away.”

“Everyone thought the arrow came from outside ,” said Miranda, “through the transom, but the real killer—and their weapon—were in the bookstore, not outside. You can have Holly make a thorough search of this basement if you like, Ned, but I would imagine the weapon is gone. Stashed somewhere or flung away.”

Andrew’s phone trilled and everyone jumped, skittish and frightfully aware they were standing in the same place the killer had, in the suffocating air of a dank basement.

Looking at his screen, Andrew said, “It’s nothing. Scoop sent me a link to a story about the trout. I’ll look at it later.”

“No!” said Miranda. “The trout explains the transom.”

“The trout explains the transom?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, with an impatient flutter of her hands. It was perfectly obvious.

“Okay.” With a shrug, Andrew scrolled through the article. “It’s from The Weekly Picayune archives, several years ago, under the headline a good time had by all at annual fish run .” He read: “ Last Saturday, a record 38-pound cutthroat trout was caught on the Nestucca River .”

Ned chuckled to himself under his breath at Miranda’s earlier error. “ A hundred and thirty-eight pounds. As if.”

Miranda ignored this and said to Andrew, “I’m not interested in the record itself, but the participants. They would have interviewed people who were in town fishing that weekend.”

Andrew scrolled through to a pixelated image: a pair of beaming faces holding up their catches for the camera. Familiar faces.

“ Frank Hoffman and his friend Nigel from the UK enjoyed the fishing last weekend, saying that Happy Rock was—and we quote here, for factual accuracy—a ‘nice place to visit.’ ”

A hush descended upon the basement.

“Kane and Fairfax,” said Ned. “They were...”

“Friends,” said Miranda.

“Everything Kane did was a facade,” said Andrew. “The tough-guy American persona, the swagger.”

“The two of them swapped lives,” she said.

“More than friends, they were co-conspirators. Their stage-managed feud may have sold a lot of books, and may well have raised the profile of both authors, but that only underlines the larger truth: they were working together . They were trying to snag the last page of that manuscript. And I can prove it with a single piece of paper!”

To the relief of the others—the heebie-jeebies had begun to seep in from the furnace room walls—Miranda Abbott marched her coterie back up the stairs to the main floor.

In the kitchen, she found a notepad and handed Andrew a sheet of paper. “Please fold this, as best you can, along similar lines as those we found on the paper lodged in Fairfax DePoy’s throat.”

“Um, sure. Let’s see. There were a couple of creases down the center, then more angled like a fan on either side...”

As he folded the paper, he saw it. They all did. Not a fan. Something else entirely.

Miranda entered the reading room, to cries of “Hey! What are you doing?” from the crime scene investigators. Ned quickly flashed his badge, saying, “She’s with me.”

On a decisive stride, Miranda crossed the room to the window, lowered the transom, and threw the paper airplane Andrew had folded through it. It glided across into the backyard, landing near the shed.

“That’s why we saw no footprints in the flower bed,” said Ned.

“The plan was, Kane would pass the final page of the manuscript through the transom to Fairfax, who would spirit it away,” said Miranda.

“But the last page only directed them somewhere else: the book that matters most . Which book? Kane folded the page into a paper airplane, opened the transom, threw the page through it, then closed the transom back up—not all the way, but enough that it was locked. He then began frantically searching through the John D. Ross first editions, trying to find the message at the end of the book that mattered most. He failed. Was turning the key on the door and was about to step out into the hallway to face Edgar’s ire, when what did he see, lying off to one side?

A copy of his own book. The rest, as they say, is murder. ”