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“They cater as well?”

Edgar and Andrew were stacking the hardcovers on a display table. “They do indeed,” said Edgar.

“I’ll say!” said Andrew. “I took a peek at the menu for tonight. Trout croquette and goat cheese parfait.” He thought a moment. “Or maybe it was trout parfait and goat cheese croquette.”

“A gala!” Miranda exclaimed.

“A reception,” Edgar amended. “A modest reception.”

“A gala!” Miranda enjoyed nothing more than making a reluctant appearance at a grand soiree. “I shall have to ransack my wardrobe.”

“It’s nothing that fancy,” Edgar insisted.

“Just some of the community supporters milling about, trying to make small talk with underpaid over-competitive loners. Authors, in other words. The main readings and book signings will be at the Opera House. I’m just the designated bookseller for the festival.

Tonight’s get-together isn’t an opening night gala or anything. This isn’t LA, okay?”

But Miranda heard what she wanted to hear. “An opening night gala! Here in the store! I shall make my lemonade!” she proclaimed.

“No!” Edgar said, too quickly. “Your lemonade, it’s—it’s too good. You don’t want to overshadow our hosts.”

Andrew agreed frantically, his head bobbing up and down in whiplash-worthy nods. “Edgar’s right! No lemonade! You don’t want to show them up.”

She frowned. “That is true. One mustn’t outshine the stars when one shines out with the stars.”

Miranda’s lemonade was famous—or rather infamous—across the Greater Tri-Rock Area.

She often threw in a fistful of salt at the end to counteract the many scoops of sugar she’d added to balance out the sourness of the glug-a-jug of extra lemon juice she included, which in turn was needed to counter the taste of the salt.

A self-supporting Mobius strip of ingredients.

“But still...” Miranda was not entirely convinced. “People do talk about my lemonade.”

Oh, they do, thought Andrew. They do, indeed.

Saved by the bell! The one above the front door jingled, signaling the arrival of that most fickle of guests: a customer! First of the day.

Alas, it was only Owen McCune, the World’s Worst Mechanic. He let Emmy in as he entered.

“She looks pooped,” he said.

And she did. Emmy loped through to the back, where her doggy bed was laid out. Owen, meanwhile, quickly spotted the stack of boxes.

“New books come in?” he asked, wiping his hands on a rag as he approached.

One of the many unresolved mysteries of Happy Rock was how Owen McCune of McCune’s Garage could constantly be wiping his hands yet never getting them any cleaner. It was up there with the Mystery of Miranda’s Lemonade, which was, namely, Why the salt??

Owen McCune spent most of his free time in the bookstore, browsing merrily away, never buying anything.

He’d read entire series in the store, would even lick his fingers to turn a page and would fold down a corner to mark his spot before putting the book back on the shelf.

He left various oil stains as he went. The man, Edgar had said, was a walking Rorschach test. Owen sported massive, some might say magnificent, sideburns and wore baggy coveralls in an indiscriminate shade of blech.

Instinctively, Edgar threw himself between Owen and the John D. Ross books.

“You’re not touching any of these. Not with those oily hands.”

“Not even a peek?”

“No! These are John D. Ross originals. Your greasy paw prints would only diminish their value, both monetary and spiritual.”

“Ross? Oh, that guy. The one whose hero is an alcoholic ex-cop with the NYPD who also works as a retired ex-Navy shore patrol investigator while living on a houseboat as a burglar?”

“Trevor Lucas,” said Andrew. “That’s the name of the character. In the books, he’s six feet seven and blond, so naturally he was played by Tom Cruise in the movies. Netflix has a new series based on him coming out next spring. It’s a cash machine, the entire series.”

“Never cared for him,” said Owen. “Ross, I mean.”

Edgar was aghast. “John D. Ross, modern master of the genre? The most influential mystery writer of his generation, often copied, never bettered. You don’t—quote—‘care for him’?”

“Nope. Not a bit. In one book, the houseboat has what I assume is a Cummins X15 diesel engine in it, and in the very next book, way it’s described, it’s clearly a GM Marine 350 V8! I mean, which is it? How the heck is that believable?”

“The part where he’s an ex-cop who is also a former Navy shore patrol, Korean War vet burglar for hire—that didn’t bother you. But the engines did?”

“Never cared for those books is all I’m saying. Thing is, Ross always puts the killer on the first page. Every dang time. It’s always one of the first characters the hero, Trevor What’s-his-face, meets. How is that a good mystery?”

“That can’t be right,” said Edgar, though his voice wavered. He did seem to recall the last John D. Ross novel he read having featured a person later revealed to be the killer who had appeared in the opening scene...

“Plus, he always goes outta his way to work the title of the book into the dialogue, so one of the characters will say something like, ‘Boy, those hollyhocks sure lay heavy on the soul.’ Or ‘Out here, the sunflowers grow on the grave.’ Or ‘It’s time for a stroll among the scarlet solidago.’ It’s annoying.

Does he think we already forgot the title of the book we’re reading?

He has to remind us? That, and the fact that he always puts the killer on the first page. Don’t care for him.”

Edgar took a steadying breath, a single deep inhalation, a chestful of restraint. Miranda knew that breath. It was a breath of barely contained exasperation, a sigh in lieu of a head exploding. She knew it from their days as a couple.

“Owen,” said Edgar, unnaturally calm. “Shouldn’t you be at work right now?”

The hours posted at McCune’s Garage were always more aspirational than real. “Nah, that’s the beauty of being your own boss. You get to make your own hours. You know what that’s like, Edgar.”

“Yes, except I don’t spend my time hanging out at your garage, flipping through your tire catalogs.”

“You should! Anytime you like. My door is always open, and I’m usually out anyway.”

“That would explain why it took you two weeks to fix a simple valve on my Jeep,” said Edgar.

“Prob’ly,” said Owen, who then wandered off in search of more mechanically astute mysteries.

Edgar opened the last box of books, lifted the flaps to reveal...

“Huh. Well, that’s unexpected.”

“What is it?” asked Andrew.

“A book.”

“How is a book unexpected?” Miranda wanted to know. “I should think a book is precisely what one might expect to find in a box filled with books .”

Edgar held up a thin hardcover, mauve and faded, with a cursive font on the cover that uncurled like a fragile ribbon—a wistful font, if such a thing were possible: How Precious the Rain, How Sad the Sun .

“Terrible title for a mystery,” said Andrew. “Maybe How Dangerous the Rain, How Murderous the Sun ? Or, even better, Gun .”

“That’s just it. It’s not a mystery. It’s some sort of.

.. literary novel.” The word sounded thick upon Edgar’s tongue, like an obscure term he was not used to pronouncing.

He turned the book over in his hand as though it were an exotic bit of fauna long thought extinct.

He checked the copyright page. “A small press. Published twenty years ago. Not credited to John D. Ross. The author is someone named Gertrude Gyilkos. Andrew?”

“On it.”

Andrew fired up his smartphone, did that magical thumb dance of his that always amazed Miranda, and reported back within moments.

“That’s the only novel the author wrote, apparently. There’s nothing on her—or the novel, really. I found a single copy on AbeBooks selling for two bucks. Another one for five. And that’s about it. It’s long out of print. No synopsis available online. Doesn’t show up on Goodreads or Google Books.”

“Hmm,” said Miranda.

It was the fate of certain novels to disappear like pebbles down a well, leaving scarcely a ripple in their wake. This was one such book, it would appear.

“So it’s not one of John D. Ross’s pseudonyms,” said Edgar.

“If it was, that would have come up.”

John D. Ross made Alexander McCall Smith look like a piker when it came to the sheer number of mystery series he pushed out the door.

Prolific to the point of promiscuous, John D.

Ross had been forced to use an array of pen names to avoid flooding the market under his own, pen names like Chip Tanner, Sheldon Shaw, and Stark Holt. But Gertrude was not among them.

No author photo, either. Just a pebble, dropped down a well...

“How peculiar,” said Miranda.

Speaking of peculiar.

“Oh! Before I forget. Edgar, you’ll never guess who Andrew and I ran into outside the Opera House today. Lachlan Todd!”

“Luckless Lachlan? What is he doing in Happy Rock?”

“He is under the impression that his invitation to the writers festival was lost in the mail.”

“The mystery is how that guy is still alive. He burns bridges like a pyromaniac who has a... a grudge against bridges. Okay, not my best simile. But you get the idea.”

Edgar returned his attention to the mauve book with the unsettling title.

Opened it to a random page of text. Innocence is what remains after everything else has fled.

On another page: We are the leaves that worship the wind, the straw that worships the pyre.

Yes, this was most definitely literary fiction, not mystery.

“Helen must have included this by mistake,” Edgar said. He placed it to one side. “I’ll return it to her later. As for the rest of these—I’ll put the paperbacks out front, here in the main room, and I’ll store the hardcovers in the reading room.”

In spite of herself, Miranda shivered. The reading room was her least favorite area in the bookstore, second only to the groaning furnace and layered dust of its dungeon-like basement. Both places felt haunted to her, and she wasn’t wrong.