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Chapter Twenty-Seven

Those We Worry About

T he janitor’s tell-all memoir— I AM Ray Valentine: The Truth Comes Out!

— ignited a veritable firestorm. It was widely reviewed, got nominated for several awards, and sold well.

On the advice of a literary agent, Cephus followed it up with a cop novel of his own, which promptly tanked.

He never was much of a writer. And although he’d done nothing illegal, Ray’s backlist suffered from the accusations, and his publisher eventually dropped the series, Ray Valentine’s reputation having been broken into a million little pieces, like shattered glass.

The last anyone heard, he had taken over the Compendium Cathy franchise as the new Wanda Stobol.

Sheryl Youngblut chose to honor her grandfather’s final wishes and released A Black Orchid to End With without changing the ending, with Trevor Lucas as an unrepentant serial killer who’d framed innocent people for decades.

Far from sinking the series, however, the John D.

Ross novels saw an uptick in sales as readers went back through the entire oeuvre, looking for clues.

Business boomed at I Only Read Murder. Turned out, having a mystery writer murdered inside your bookstore, when your bookstore specialized in murder mysteries, only added to the cachet.

Fans of the morbid made pilgrimages to Happy Rock just to tiptoe through it to see the room where Kane Hamady had been struck down, and occasionally to buy a book.

They posted wild theories online about the way the bookstore was organized.

There has to be a system of some sort, but damned if I can find it!

The Fibonacci sequence was involved, one person insisted.

No, it’s according to the number of murders in each book and their severity , said another, as arranged in alternating descending order.

Others believed it to be based on the unrevealed solution to the Voynich Manuscript.

Lachlan Todd blamed Miranda for ruining his comeback on the now-canceled TV series.

(Never mind that she’d probably saved his life in the process.

“I could’ve outsmarted Penny!” he said, erroneously.) Under oath, he testified to what he’d seen that night: Penny Fenland, Queen of the Cozies, slipping out the back of Hiram Henry House, heading for a rendezvous of death with Fairfax at the lighthouse.

Ironically, Penny’s own DNA was found on the remnants of the broken vial she’d flung into the forest from the second floor, not realizing that the chain had caught a branch on the way down.

The faintest trace of a scratch, but fatal in its own way.

Oddly enough, after she was arrested, the sales of her novels soared as well.

Handy tip for authors: consider killing a rival writer for added notoriety.

No longer a deputy, and more a friend than a personal assistant, Andrew Nguyen continued to mind the till at I Only Read Murder.

Even with the added gawkers and would-be codebreakers filing through daily, the bookstore felt quieter without Owen McCune tromping about, folding down pages and using the upstairs washroom.

Owen and Inez were on their honeymoon, a tour of Eastern European medieval torture chambers—Inez for the frisson of it, and as research, presumably; Owen for the mechanical appeal of said devices.

Miranda had stopped by the bookstore to take Emmy for her walk, and Edgar had come downstairs with the exuberant pooch, a cup of chamomile in hand.

As the golden Lab wove her way between the two of them, turning loops and thumping her tail excitedly, Edgar said, “Don’t get her too wound up.

And make sure you have her back in time for her nap. ”

“Aye, aye, captain.”

Miranda attached the leash to Emmy’s collar, but before she could leave, Edgar added, as though just in passing, “Ned told me, by the way.”

“Told you what?”

“About the, ah, conversation you had with him, about lucky quarters and who we worry about and why.”

Oh. “Blabbermouth,” she said.

Edgar cleared his throat. Miranda waited.

Edgar cleared his throat again. (Whenever Edgar wanted to avoid a topic of conversation, he would suddenly develop a severe case of scratchy throat.

When NBC canceled Pastor Fran Investigates , it had taken him a good twenty minutes of throat clearing before he could tell her.)

“Is there something you wanted to say?” she asked.

“Just that, y’know, even though you drive me crazy and everything, I do worry about you. I just wanted you to know that.”

He left quickly on some uncertain task.

“I worry about you, too, Edgar.”

The coin had come up tails, but Miranda had ignored the verdict. As she herself might have put it, life is a coin to be flipped, not a coin to be kept! And no matter how the coin landed, Miranda Abbott would always win the toss.

* * *

A FTER M IRANDA HEADED out, with Emmy bounding in every direction, the bell above the bookstore’s front door jangled loudly and a tired but eager man burst in. He stood beaming in the middle of the store, looking like a cross between Sean Connery and an elf.

“Welcome to I Only Read Murder,” said Andrew. “How might I help you?”

“I made it! Took me a while, but I made it.”

“I’m sorry. You are...?”

“Larry. Larry Block. I was supposed to be here for the writers festival, but got off-course along the way. But I’m here now!” He looked around the room expectantly. “So,” he said. “What did I miss?”