Chapter 1

“Where’s Bobby?” I asked.

No one bothered to answer me, but that might have been because the library was so noisy. For a library, I mean—a low-grade roar of voices just begging to be shushed. Indira, Fox, Keme, Millie, and I took up a full row of seats in the multipurpose room. It looked like the whole town had turned out for tonight’s event; we’d even had to surrender the seat we’d been saving for Bobby to JaDonna Powers—which was honestly probably a good thing, because if she’d sat in front of us, I wouldn’t have been able to see past the mountain of church hair. Say what you would about Hastings Rock (its shockingly high murder rate, for example), the people here loved books. Tonight, thriller-writer extraordinaire Marshall Crowe (author of the Chase Thunder series) was stopping in Hastings Rock to promote his latest book ( Thunder Clap, book seventeen in the Chase Thunder series).

The library’s multipurpose room was decked out for the occasion—well, for multiple occasions, which was probably the point of a multipurpose room. At the far end of the room was a temporary stage, complete with podium and chairs and an easel displaying a poster of Marshall Crowe’s handsomely grizzled face. (Chase Thunder, by no coincidence, was also handsomely grizzled, and in literally every book of the series, yet another tall, striking, dark-haired, Amazon-esque woman fell prey to his charms—only to be abandoned when Chase Thunder inevitably moved on.)

But the library also had paper snowflakes hanging from the, admittedly, water-stained acoustic tiles, and it had glittery snowmen taped to the walls, and an enormous candy cane propped in the corner. (God only knew why they had it or what it could be used for—clubbing children over the head after they’d been lured inside a gingerbread house seemed like the only practical possibility.) Tinsel-strewn paper chains hung everywhere. With so many bodies crammed into such a small space, the smell of overheated synthetics mixed with the odors of aging bindings and carpet that needed to be torn up. One of the things that had struck me, when I’d first come to Hastings Rock, was that it was such a cute town, and everyone seemed to love books, but it had such a dingy little library—it just didn’t make sense.

Regardless, everyone seemed to be having a great time. Mr. Ratcliff was nosing around the stage, clearly hoping he’d pick up some interesting tidbit he could share with the rest of the town. Princess McAdams (not a real princess) had come dressed from head to toe in camouflage, and it looked like she’d brought the stock of a shotgun, presumably for Marshall to sign. And Mrs. Shufflebottom—librarian, wearer of uncomfortably tight cardigans, and apparently, for reasons unbeknownst to me, my self-appointed nemesis—was currently trying to force a family of six (tourists who had apparently wandered in during the off season) into the already overfull space. It was enough to make me, with my charmingly mild case of social anxiety, want to bite someone.

And still no Bobby. I checked my phone, but I didn’t have any missed messages from him.

“Dash, aren’t you SO EXCITED?”

Even over the hub of voices, Millie’s carried.

“I’m excited to get out of here,” I said. “Does anybody know where Bobby is?”

“You know who you should have invited?” Millie asked. (It wasn’t really a question.) “You should have invited DAMIAN!”

I scowled, but it didn’t have any effect. Damian was a bum—and a surfer—I’d met a few months before. He’d been irritatingly persistent about asking me out, in spite of my rejections. He was also Trouble, with a capital T. “Damian went to Hawaii. Permanently, I hope. Seriously, nobody knows where Bobby is?”

“He’s probably running late, dear,” Indira said.

“I know he’s running late,” I said. “I mean, he’s not here yet, is he?”

Indira looked at me. The thing about Indira is that she’s probably a good thirty years older than me, still strikingly handsome, utterly composed, and has a lock of white hair like a witch.

All of which were good reasons for me to mumble, “Sorry. It’s all these people.”

Keme snorted.

“But aren’t you excited,” Millie asked again, “to see your FRIEND?”

“He’s not my friend,” I said.

“But you brought him a Christmas present,” Millie said, looking at the parcel wrapped in brown paper (and string—that was my mom for you) under my chair.

“It’s from my parents; my parents are friends with him. They sent it to my house because they didn’t know which hotel he was going to be staying at.” My parents were both writers as well—my dad (Jonny Dane, the Talon Maverick series) leaned toward military thrillers, not too different from Marshall’s, and my mom (Patricia Lockley, The Echoes in the Cellar , We All Live in the Basement , The Matriarch’s Tooth ) wrote psychological thrillers. In addition to the parcel for Marshall, I’d gotten a package of my own from my parents—handwritten edits on my latest short story (“And Then They Were Done,” and let me tell you, my parents did not like the title). “He probably doesn’t even remember me.”

Although that, at least, definitely wasn’t true. Because when I’d turned twelve, Marshall had happened to be visiting my parents, and he’d been kind enough to give me a BB gun—and then been crushed to learn I didn’t want to go hunting with him and my dad. I hadn’t been all that surprised when, a couple of books later in the Chase Thunder series, Chase had been saddled with a pansy twelve-year-old who didn’t want to hunt, had zero self-confidence, oh, and ultimately got butchered in particularly disturbing detail. (To put your minds at rest, yes, Chase went on to exact about two hundred pages of bloody revenge.)

In other words, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to seeing Marshall again. Which was part of why I looked around one more time. If nothing else, Bobby could shoot Marshall if he got particularly annoying. Not that Bobby would, because he was too kind. But maybe he’d let me borrow his gun.

Unfortunately, though, as had become more and more often the case, there was no sign of Bobby. Things had certainly been different since he’d broken up with West and moved into Hemlock House. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected—okay, I had some very clear hopes and dreams, and yes, maybe one of them involved a bubble bath. But I also understood that Bobby was just a friend, and as far as I could tell, that’s all he wanted to be.

In fact, considering how things had gone lately, he might not even want that . He was hardly ever home. He went to the gym. He went surfing (yes, God, in the winter). He worked as many shifts as he could get at the sheriff’s office. And when he was home, he was busy, or the rest of the Last Picks were there, or he headed to his room. Slowly, over the last couple of months, I’d realized that I saw less of Bobby now that we were roommates than I ever had when he’d been engaged and living with his fiancé.

“I’m sure Marshall remembers you,” Fox said. Tonight, they’d gone with corpse bride meets James Fennimore Cooper as their fashion choice: a striped, ruffled dress over buckskin leggings and clonky boots. “Who wouldn’t remember you?”

“Uh, thank you?”

Keme and Fox both got a good laugh out of that.

I would have responded to that (probably), except raised voices drew my gaze.

At the back of the multipurpose room, my other self-appointed nemesis, Pippi Parker, was trying to clear people away from the coffee station. Pippi was yet another author—Hastings Rock was lousy with them, it turned out. She was a middle-aged white lady with platinum-colored hair in a pixie cut that looked like it had been blow-dried within an inch of catching fire. She wrote cozy mysteries. You know the type: everyone is friends, everyone gets along (well, except whoever got murdered, I suppose), calories don’t count, and nobody says bad words, not even when Keme was hiding in your bedroom and he jumped out and screamed, and then you screamed, and then you had a minor heart attack, and Keme and Fox laughed so hard that Fox fell over and you had to take them to the urgent care because, according to them, the fall had made their sciatica flare up (painful and believable) and they needed their laudanum refilled (less believable).

Right then, Pippi was directing her family as they began unpacking the bags they were carrying. Accompanying Pippi tonight were her beloved husband Stephen, balding, in a reindeer sweater vest, and her three sons (their names were Dylan, Christian, and Carter, although I couldn’t have told you which one was which; all three of them looked the same, with dishwater blond hair and obnoxiously friendly smiles, and they were all painfully polite and well-mannered). Under Mrs. Shufflebottom’s approving gaze, Pippi’s family was setting out what appeared to be an entire trade catalogue’s worth of promotional materials: Pippi Parker-branded pens, Pippi Parker-branded keychains, Pippi Parker bookmarks ( Park Yourself with a Good Book! ), even Pippi Parker-branded cups, napkins, and—

“Good Lord,” Fox said. “She has her own water bottles?”

Sure enough, a sticker with Pippi Parker’s face had been pasted over the water bottle labels. All I could do was watch as Stephen hustled to the stage and started setting out the branded water bottles for Marshall and whoever else might end up sitting there.

“It does seem like a bit much,” Indira said.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Millie said. “Dash, we should put your face on everything we drink.”

“I think I’ve got a little more class—” I began to say.

And at that exact moment, of course, the room fell into one of those conversational lulls that occasionally happen.

“—than to slap my face on every available surface.”

Every eye turned toward me as my words rang out through the multipurpose room.

Mrs. Shufflebottom recovered first, glaring at me, one hand pinching the cardigan shut at her throat. “Mr. Dane,” she stage-whispered, “this is a library. If you cannot keep your voice down, I will have to ask you to leave.”

Some bozo—I thought it sounded like one of the Archer clan—made a familiar high school noise, the one that suggested: a) I’d gotten in trouble, and b) this was going to be good.

“But,” I said, and I made a flailing gesture at the roomful of people who had chosen that particular instant to fall silent. I tried not to see Pippi’s death stare. “Everyone was—I mean, I wasn’t trying to—it was so loud in here—”

“Mr. Dane,” Mrs. Shufflebottom snapped. And then, yanking the cardigan up a few inches: “Control yourself.”

I sank down in my seat.

And then Millie waved. “HI, MRS. SHUFFLEBOTTOM.”

A few of the people closest to us were knocked backward by the gale-force winds.

“Well, hello, Millicent,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said, her voice changing to that syrupy sweetness I associated with librarians who spent too much of their lives doing story time. “Aren’t you looking lovely this evening?”

To be fair, Millie was looking lovely this evening—you could tell by the fact that Keme practically fainted every time Millie said something to him—but the injustice of it still made me whisper, “How is that fair? I barely said anything—”

“Mr. Dane!”

I sank down even further and clamped my mouth shut.

Slowly, nervous chatter began, and the volume began to build again.

“She really doesn’t like you,” Fox informed me.

I glared at him.

Keme was smirking, so I gave him a dose too.

“What did you do to her?” Millie asked.

“I didn’t do anything,” I whispered furiously. “I’ve been nothing but charming and polite and charming and—”

“Polite?” Fox murmured.

While I tried to ratchet up the glare a few degrees, Indira said, “It’s not your fault, Dashiell.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re a lovely young man.”

“Thank—wait, why does it sound bad when you say it like that?”

“I think you and Mrs. Shufflebottom got off on the wrong foot,” Millie said. “Because you came to town, and you killed Mrs. Shufflebottom’s favorite author—”

“I didn’t kill anyone!”

“—and then it turned out that you didn’t kill her, but you exposed her as a murderer, and you destroyed her reputation, and you destroyed her legacy in Hastings Rock—well, her legacy all over the world, actually—”

“I didn’t destroy anything!”

“—and then you spilled that hot chocolate all over her library books—”

“That was Keme’s fault! What would you do if he jumped out of the closet at you and you were holding a nice, big mug of delicious hot chocolate?”

“—so Mrs. Shufflebottom probably just, you know, needs to get to know you.”

“If she has a chance to get to know me,” I said, “she’ll probably bonk me with that candy cane and turn me into kidney pie.”

“Oh no, Mrs. Shufflebottom is the SWEETEST. She did the best story times. I was always her favorite because I was the BEST at being QUIET!”

The excitement at the end meant a little ramp-up from ear-splitting to ear-shattering. Even Indira’s eyes widened slightly.

Once again, I was spared having to respond. A wave of interested murmurs ran through the crowd, and I craned my head to see Marshall Crowe enter the multipurpose room. He hadn’t changed much since the last time I’d seen him. He was tall and muscular, although at his age, muscular meant a build that leaned toward stocky. His hair was dark with presidential gray at the temples, and he wore a black military jacket over a black tee, with black jeans and black boots. I guessed black underwear was involved at some point. I knew for a fact that he needed reading glasses, and I was looking forward to when he had to pull out a pair of cheaters.

Behind him came two much younger people: a man and a woman. The woman was white, in her twenties, her mousy hair in a bun held by two pencils. Cardigan, cameo locket, pearl earrings, and dark pantyhose all suggested a Carter-era schoolmarm, and her face was set in grim severity. I pegged the man as close to my age, Black, his hair in twists. He was around my height, but muscular instead of, uh, whatever I was. (Slender. I should have said slender.) He wore a tweed blazer with a pocket square that, yes, somehow he actually pulled off, and he gave the general impression of a guy who owned a fedora (in a GQ way, not in a neckbeard way—did anybody still read GQ ? Should I be reading it?)

“Who are they?” Millie whispered, which meant Mrs. Shufflebottom’s head came up and whipped around, and I tried to use Fox as cover.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’m going to get this over with. Wish me luck.”

“GOOD LUCK!”

I swear, one of the acoustic tiles shifted overhead.

A few of Hastings Rock’s best and brightest hovered nearby, clearly waiting for a chance to approach Marshall. I wasn’t sure they were going to get it—as I watched, Marshall looked up from his conversation with the young woman who’d accompanied him and scowled at JaDonna Powers (church hair) as she made an approach. JaDonna swerved left, her face flushed as she scurried back to her seat.

I was jealous; I would have loved to scurry back to my seat. To scurry back to Hemlock House, as a matter of fact. But if I didn’t give Marshall his parcel now, I’d have to find an opportunity to do it later, and that would probably mean drinks, and a meal, and more drinks—and I could see the evening getting longer and longer. And why would any sensible person spend all that time in a bar or a restaurant, around other people, when they could be safely at home, in their pajamas, on the couch, watching, for the fourteenth time, season two of Supernatural ? (With no one talking to them.)

So, I crossed the no-man's-land of open floor between the crowd and Marshall. Marshall hadn’t noticed me yet, his head bent as he whispered furiously to the woman who had arrived with him. As I got closer, I caught the tail end of his words.

“—don’t know why you’re acting like this,” Marshall said. “Anybody else would feel lucky to be in your position.”

The woman opened her mouth, and then she saw me. Something in her expression must have alerted Marshall because he turned. He didn’t recognize me. And then he did, and he pasted on a smile as he roared, “Killer!”

Egad. I’d forgotten about that stupid nickname.

Before I could recover, Marshall wrapped me in a bear hug. Then, with a shake, he released me. “Well—” And then Marshall chose to use several colorful expressions favored by Chase Thunder, which weren’t exactly fit for public consumption. “I was wondering when you’d pop your head up. Where’s Hubert?”

“Hugo,” I said. “And we broke up. That’s why I’m here, as I’m sure my parents told you. Dramatic flight across the country. Total mental and emotional breakdown. I have a pet seal now who makes all my financial decisions.”

I don’t know why I threw in the pet seal thing; to get a rise out of him, I guess. As usual, though, Marshall ignored it. He said another of Chase Thunder’s favorite words, and then “Really? That’s too bad; I liked him.”

“Not enough to remember his name.”

He gave me a considering look, and I realized the Dash of a few years ago—heck, the Dash of last year—wouldn’t have said something like that. But Marshall only grinned again and said, in a different tone, “Killer.” He reached out like he might scrub his hand through my hair—or, God, give me noogies—and I managed a dodge. The movement was uncoordinated, and I caught a whiff of his breath, and with a flash of surprise, I realized Marshall had been drinking. I gave him another, closer look—the slight slackness to his face, the cloudy eyes—and upgraded that to drunk.

Instead of trying again, though, Marshall only said, “How’s the writing going? I saw that gay thing.”

That gay thing (which was now how I was going to refer to it) was a story that I’d had published at an online crime fiction magazine called The Midnight Messenger . I had a feeling that Marshall and people of his generation looked down on e-zines because they weren’t print, but The Midnight Messenger paid pro rates, and even better, they were actively searching for diverse authors. One of the editors had reached out to me about a last-minute story, after they had problems with another author, and—miracle of miracles—I managed to get “Pickup at Pershing” (my take on a Chandler story) completed and sent off. Even better, it wasn’t a Will Gower story; I’d tried something new. Granted, I’d only finished it and sent it off because Keme had hidden the Xbox and Millie had brought me a million coffees and Fox had threatened to give me a “new” haircut and Indira had suggested the possibility of locking me in my room. And, of course, because Bobby had been so genuinely excited for me, and I honestly couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing him.

“God,” Marshall said before I had a chance to speak, “that’s got to have Chandler spinning in his grave.”

“He’ll survive,” I said. “Or not, I guess. I love Chandler’s stories and what he did for crime fiction, but he was a massive homophobe. There’s a ton of homophobia baked into the crime fiction genre, actually. I think it’s time to start pushing back on that, don’t you?”

Marshall gave me that considering look again and grunted; I didn’t think I’d be reading an impassioned speech from Chase Thunder about the importance of gay rights anytime soon, but Marshall didn’t argue. (Which was a good thing: my knees had reached melted-butter status, and I was so sweaty I thought I was going to slide out of my shirt.)

“This is Elodie, my assistant,” he said, jerking a thumb at the young woman. “She wants to be a writer. Like you. And that’s Hayes, my agent.” He must have meant the guy who had come in with him, but before I could check, he continued, “Elodie, work something out for Dash—dinner and drinks after.”

“I really can’t—” I tried, and I used all my mental energy to visualize a night of nachos, then Indira’s cookies, and then the episode of Supernatural when John—well, I don’t want to give anything away.

“Nonsense. We’ll call your parents; they’ll be thrilled.”

With that, Marshall headed toward the stage.

The worst part was, he was right: my parents would be thrilled. And it would be awful.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Elodie said. Her tone suggested the contrary, but grudgingly, she added, “I met your parents a few months ago. They were lovely.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I guess I should give you this—”

As I held out the parcel, though, another hand seized it before Elodie could take it. Marshall had come back without my realizing it, and now he gripped the package a little too tightly, his hand tense, his fingers dimpling the paper. “I’ll take that,” he said. “I forgot they were sending it here. Thanks for being the mailman, Killer.”

And then he hurried toward the stage.

“Now, about tonight,” Elodie said, tapping her phone’s screen so quickly that her fingers seemed to blur. “We had drinks at a great microbrewery last night, but I understand there are a few local bars. You’re the expert; would you like to pick?”

“Let me think about it,” I said. “There are so many good options. Can I tell you after the reading?”

Elodie agreed, and I retreated to my seat.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is called thinking on your feet and seizing an opportunity .

“Dash, that was amazing,” Millie said. “You’re FAMOUS!”

“I’m not—”

“Did you talk about writing? Did he tell you you’re a good writer? Did you tell him it’s hard for you to write sometimes? OH! Did you tell him about your special meditation with your eyes closed and sometimes you have to put a pillow over your face?”

Don’t judge. Sometimes a guy needs a nap, and his wonderful, loving, well-meaning friends won’t. leave him. alone.

“Special meditation,” Fox said scornfully.

“I went by your studio last week,” I told them. “You were asleep on the floor behind the counter. The door wasn’t even locked.”

“That,” Fox said, doubling down on the scorn, “was different.”

“How?”

“Tell him, Keme.”

Keme gave each of us a long, withering stare.

“He doesn’t seem like a very happy man,” Indira said. And then, almost as a question to me, “But maybe he’s different when you get to know him.”

“No, that’s pretty much how he always is.”

“Is he always snookered?” Fox asked.

“Fox,” Indira said.

“Look at him; he can barely stand up straight.”

Up on the stage, Marshall did look a little…wobbly. He was drinking some of the Pippi water (God, it sounds so bad when I say it out loud)—he was drinking some of the water with Pippi’s face stuck to the bottle, and he was staring out into the distance, his eyes glassy. A moment later, Pippi joined him on stage. In contrast, she looked all aquiver for the event—and, also, like she’d found a hot minute to duck into the restroom and volumize her hair one more time. Mrs. Shufflebottom joined them, and she spoke first to Pippi and then to Marshall. Pippi took one of the chairs. Marshall didn’t, and it was clear, from how Mrs. Shufflebottom waited, that she didn’t know what to do. After another moment, Pippi stood.

“Is this how authors are supposed to act?” Millie asked me.

“Neurotic and awkward and crippled by self-doubt?” I said. “That’s kind of the baseline.”

“We artists suffer for our art,” Fox said. “That’s why I need a Ring Ding.”

“There aren’t any Ring Dings,” I said. “They have these chocolate imitation things that are supposed to be like Ho-Hos. They aren’t bad, actually.”

And of course, at that moment, Mrs. Shufflebottom approached the podium, and the room went silent, which meant everyone heard my opinion of the imitation chocolate cakes, or whatever they were called.

“If everyone is finished,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said crisply into the microphone.

“I want to catch one break,” I said under my breath. “Just one.”

“Mr. Dane?”

I mimed zipping my lips.

With a final, pointed look for the troublemakers in the crowd (i.e., me), Mrs. Shufflebottom cleared her throat and said, “Welcome, everyone, to the Hastings Rock Public Library. This evening, we’re thrilled to have two world-renowned authors joining us to read from their latest releases. Many of you know Marshall Crowe from his bestselling Chase Thunder series. Mr. Crowe has hit every bestseller list you can name, and his popularity only continues to grow with the release of the latest entry in this series: Thunder Clap .

“We’re also so pleased and grateful that one of our own could be here. I don’t have to introduce Pippi Parker to anyone from Hastings Rock—”

“You might remember me,” Pippi put in from behind Mrs. Shufflebottom, “from the Hastings High bake sales.”

For some reason, that made everyone laugh. Even Mrs. Shufflebottom.

“She’s been running them for years,” Indira whispered. “She’s an absolute tyrant. Won’t let me donate anything.”

“It’s not fair,” I whispered back. “If I chimed in like that, Mrs. Shufflebottom would have eviscerated me.”

Maybe Mrs. Shufflebottom heard me, because she gave me a steely-eyed look like she was considering some eviscerating right then. After a brief summary of Pippi’s own performance on the bestseller charts—which, Mrs. Shufflebottom was too polite to point out, had dropped off significantly in the last few years—Mrs. Shufflebottom announced, “And, of course, it comes as no surprise to anyone in Hastings Rock to hear that Pippi will be reading from her latest entry in the Aunt Lulu’s Laundromat series, Spin Cycle Secrets .”

“It comes as a surprise to me,” I whispered to Fox, who was trying to ignore me. “I thought that got canceled after everyone found out she’d hired Vivienne to do some ghost-writing on her teahouse series.”

“You mean after you revealed it to everyone,” Fox corrected—unnecessarily, in my opinion.

“Dash.” It was a Millie-whisper. “Dash. DASH!”

My “What?” sounded, admittedly, a bit strangled.

“Why didn’t they invite you to be in the reading?”

“Without further ado,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said, “let’s give a warm welcome to Mr. Crowe.”

I sank back into my seat—grateful for a chance to avoid Millie’s question—as Marshall approached the podium. Even though it was only a short distance, his steps were so unsteady that it looked more like a semi-controlled lurch, and he clutched the podium to steady himself. He bent too close to the microphone and spoke too loudly, and the slight scrape of feedback raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

“It’s a pleasure to be here,” he said, and the words had the blurred edges of someone losing his grip. “Wonderful town. Charming town. You know, most places you go, they’re grateful to have a celebrity visit them. They feel lucky. They don’t try to shoehorn in a housewife with an overactive imagination.”

It was like an old sci-fi show when someone depressurized the airlock: I could almost hear the hiss of oxygen being sucked out of the room. Pippi’s face went pale, and then bright spots of color rose in her cheeks.

“I’m joking, I’m joking,” Marshall said. “It’s a real privilege to spend twelve hours traveling and end up sitting next to someone whose last book didn’t sell enough copies to pay for a cup of coffee. Have you read—” He reached for the mic, and when it touched it, feedback screeched. He fumbled with the mic for a moment, and when the feedback stopped, he said, “Have you read her stuff? It’s great. It’s really inspiring. You don’t see people like that anymore—people who don’t let zero talent and even less common sense stop them.”

Around me, the audience seemed to have gotten over their shock and was beginning to react. I remembered, when I’d first arrived in Hastings Rock, how many people had come to Pippi’s reading. People had turned out in droves, and they’d come with bags of books for her to sign—and tonight was no exception. Althea and Bliss Wilson, off to one side of the room, shifted in their seats, murmuring their disapproval. Cyd Wofford was clutching a well-read copy of Tumble Trouble , his jaw set. A little farther down our row, Mr. Cheek, in a zebra-stripe blazer and patent leather heels, bared his teeth at Marshall and hissed his displeasure. Mrs. Shufflebottom, for her part, stood at the edge of the stage, clutching her cardigan at her throat, her face so white I thought she might faint.

“He’s going to start a riot,” Indira murmured.

“Why is he being so mean?” Millie asked.

Pippi, for her part, wore a rigid, meaningless smile. I remembered, the last time I’d been at one of her readings, how quick she’d been on her feet. She certainly hadn’t been at a loss for things to say, and so it seemed strange for her to sit there, weathering Marshall’s abuse. My only guess was that she still thought—hoped—he was joking, and if she played along, a good relationship with Marshall might outweigh the humiliation. Her husband, on the other hand, looked furious—from my interactions with Stephen, I’d always thought he had as much personality as sofa stuffing, which was probably a good balance to Pippi’s more over-the-top persona. Right then, though, his face was red, his hands were curled into fists, and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

“Have ever read one of her books?” Marshall asked again with that leaden delivery. “You know what happens when you’re a middle-aged housewife with no life experience trying to write a book? You write book after book about middle-aged housewives with no life experience. It doesn’t matter how you dress them up; they’re all the same. You know what I mean. She’s got all these twenty-year-old cupcake bakers and booksellers and teahouse owners, but they don’t talk like twenty-year-olds, they don’t act like twenty-year-olds. They say things like ‘Oh my,’ and ‘Golly.’ They don’t message each other—they don’t even text. They call. When was the last time someone under thirty voluntarily made a phone call?”

Fox made a strange sound that it took me an instant to recognize as a laugh. I mean, I was under thirty and I did still make phone calls, but I definitely preferred to text—and that’s pretty much all Keme and Millie did. Fox and Indira, on the other hand, who were both at least twenty years older than me, did seem to call more frequently, so maybe there was something to Marshall’s point.

“Mr. Crowe,” Mrs. Shufflebottom began in a quavering voice. “I’m going to have to insist—”

“And when they do call, do you know what they do?” Marshall swayed and caught the podium again to keep from going over. “They use a landline.” He stopped like he might laugh, but he only blinked owlishly out at the audience. “The one I read, it was set in 2015, and every other chapter they’re running home to check their voicemail.”

A boo erupted from the crowd. I twisted and spotted the lumberjack—I didn’t know his name, but I thought of him as Fox’s lumberjack, since they had an ongoing, and apparently messy, quasi-relationship. Then I caught a glimpse of Marshall’s assistant, Elodie. She must have realized that her boss had gone too far—she was pale, and I thought, for a moment, she looked like she might pass out. Then Mrs. Knight stood and booed as well, shaking a paperback of Death by Dryer at Marshall.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Althea called from her seat.

Mr. Cheek hissed again and held up his hands like claws.

“A riot might have been underselling it,” I said. “He’s going to get himself killed. Keme, let’s get everybody out of here—”

But before I could finish, the guy who had arrived with Marshall—I thought Marshall had introduced him as Hayes—jogged down the center aisle. His face was fixed in what looked like polite goodwill, and he seemed to be trying not to make eye contact with any of the angry townspeople. As he approached the stage, he said in a low voice, “Hey, Marshall, why don’t we take a break? You look like you’re not feeling so hot.”

Marshall didn’t answer, but he did look worse than ever. His skin looked gray, his lips were tinged with blue, and his eyes looked bruised and sunken. His head bobbed, as though he were listening to music the rest of us couldn’t hear.

Hayes hopped up onto the stage and, as he rose, caught Marshall’s arm. “Why don’t we get some fresh air?”

Marshall twisted away, breaking Hayes’s hold, and then planted a hand on his chest and shoved. Hayes fell backward off the stage and hit the floor hard enough that the thud carried over the audience’s angry shouts.

“Come on,” I said, touching Fox’s shoulder. “This is getting out of control—”

But before I could finish, Marshall’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed.

Silence dropped over the crowd. Everyone froze.

Hayes picked himself up at the same time that I started toward Marshall.

“We need a doctor,” I called. I caught Mrs. Shufflebottom’s eye and said, “Call 911.”

I reached Marshall at the same time as Hayes. Marshall wasn’t breathing, and when I tried to find a pulse, his skin was clammy.

Dr. Xu dropped onto her knees next to me a moment later. “Move back,” she said as she leaned over Marshall.

But a part of me knew that, no matter what she tried, it wouldn’t be enough. Because even I could tell that Marshall was already dead.