Chapter 6

Indira, Millie, Fox, and I crouched at the end of the hall, watching. In Vivienne's bedroom (and mine), the deputies were busy carrying out their search.

"I still don't think this is a good idea," Indira whispered.

"Exactly." Millie did not whisper. Millie's volume could be generously described as conversational. Fox put a finger over their lips, and Millie grimaced and continued in a lower voice, "This is why I should be the one—"

"We're not getting into that argument again," I said.

"I don't know how you think I'm going to keep them occupied." Indira looked at the carafe of coffee in one hand and then at the basket in the other. "It takes five seconds to ask someone if they want a snack."

"But you brought all the snacks, right? And you're going to tell them about each snack. About dietary restrictions. About flavor profiles. About anything and everything. Because you're a brilliant chef, and that's going to be easy for you."

For a moment, before the cool mask fell into place again, Indira looked strangely gratified.

"Plus," Fox said, "you'll have Millie."

"Exactly!" It was still not, by any stretch of the imagination, a whisper.

"Give us two minutes," Fox said. "And then go."

"Wait, maybe you should do a sign so we know you're in position," Millie said. "You should crow. Like a crow. No, wait, that'd be too obvious. What sound does a fox make?"

Indira didn't actually clap a hand over Millie's mouth, but whatever she said, it worked nearly as well. Millie fell silent as Fox led me into one of the unoccupied bedrooms at the rear of the house. It didn't look too different from mine; the major difference was that the horse in this painting was brown instead of white, and instead of an imposing mantel clock, it had an equally imposing vase with silk flowers. Fox crossed to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom, which connected to another bedroom along the rear of the house, and from there, they opened the next door onto a stub of a hallway that intersected with the main hall. The door to Vivienne's study was almost directly opposite us. Another door opened off to the right, and an unadorned staircase ran up toward what I presumed was the attic.

Almost as soon as we were in position, Millie's voice floated down the hall: "But I want to ask them! Let me ask them!" Indira said something, and Millie said, "Then I get to ask them about the coffee."

"She's really getting into character," I whispered.

Fox rolled their eyes. That was my first clue that this was not, perhaps, part of the script.

Millie and Indira's voices grew louder as they came down the hall, and a moment later, the male deputy poked his head out of Vivienne's bedroom. He was a stocky white man with ruddled cheeks, hair buzzed to a zero. He radiated enough toxic masculinity to set off a Geiger counter.

"Excuse me," he said. "You can't be up here."

"I'm sorry, Dairek," Indira said. "I thought maybe—"

"Do you want any coffee?" Millie asked. "And Indira brought snacks."

"This is a crime scene," the female deputy said. She emerged a moment later: white with her brown hair in barrel curls, she had a way of standing like she thought she might be wearing heels. "We can't eat in here. We'd get crumbs everywhere."

"We can have coffee," Deputy Dairek said. He sounded like a man who had been forced to explain a lot of obvious things to the female half of the species over the years, things that were completely obvious to any healthy, straight, cis man. For example, why they should all want to date him. "We're not going to spill any coffee. And we can eat out in the hall."

"We're really not supposed to," the female deputy said to Indira.

Indira's smile was surprisingly warm. "I don't think Sheriff Jakes expects you to work all night without eating anything."

Indecision fluttered in the female deputy's face. Then she said, "It's got to be out in the hall."

"Let me set everything on this credenza," Indira said as she moved down the hall. The deputies followed her, passing our little side corridor where Fox and I still hid inside the bedroom. As the voices moved away, Fox eased the door open and slipped out into the hall. I followed a moment later. We crossed to the study door. With every step, I waited for one of the old boards to creak underfoot. But we made it in silence, and when Fox tried the door, it opened easily.

I blinked and whispered, "Are you wearing gloves?"

Fox grinned and produced a second pair from inside their vest. "I thought you were a mystery writer."

"That's more in theory than in practice."

"Time for the rubber to meet the road, then."

"And these," Indira was saying, "are your traditional chocolate chip, but I went with a particular brand of semi-sweet chocolate that I quite like, and the sea salt dusting—"

"YOU HAVE TO TRY THEM! THEY'RE SO GOOD!"

Maybe, I thought, it was like being at a rock concert. Maybe some temporary hearing damage would ensue. Maybe Fox and I didn't even need to worry about being quiet.

Once we were both inside the room, I drew on my gloves and shut the door. The study looked more or less the way it had when I'd been here the day before. There was no sign of fingerprint powder, no disarray that suggested a search. Maybe the sheriff or detective or whoever was in charge of this investigation had been careful to replace everything. Or maybe they hadn't gone through this room yet. Either way, it struck me as strange. Of course, they already thought they had the suspect in their sights (Hi! It's me!), so maybe they didn't feel the need for a comprehensive investigation.

We used the flashlights on our phones and navigated through the dark to Vivienne's desk, where the laptop, its screen dark, still sat. I gave Fox a questioning look. The giant, throne-like chair rolled easily as Fox adjusted it to sit, and they tapped a button on the laptop to power it up. As Fox set to work on the laptop, I knelt and began rifling the drawers.

I didn't know what we were looking for, not exactly. I knew that in any homicide investigation, the two principal elements to establish were motive and opportunity. Unlike a lot of mystery novels (and don't get me started on TV), actual investigations often took one as a jumping-off point for the other. Take my current predicament, for example. I was the prime suspect because I had opportunity—the secret passage into Vivienne's bedroom. For the moment, Sheriff Jakes couldn't explain my motive. I was fairly sure that was why I was listening to Indira and Millie become accessories (loudly)—

"I KNOW, RIGHT? IT'S CINNAMON!"

—instead of occupying a cell as the county jail's newest resident. And good police procedure (good investigative procedure in general, what Will Gower would have done) was to cast a wide net and then follow up on everything until you got somewhere. Knocking on doors, in urban police fiction. Or, in Golden Age mysteries, sifting cigar ash. That kind of thing.

As far as I knew, the only person (besides me) with the opportunity to kill Vivienne was her lawyer, Mr. Huggins. He'd been the last person to see her alive. And, if that slammed door was any indication, they hadn't parted on happy terms. But the problem with that was the problem of every locked-room mystery, and that's what this was: a real-life locked-room mystery. Vivienne had to be alive after Mr. Huggins left so that she could lock herself in her bedroom. Which meant, in theory, Mr. Huggins hadn't killed her. Of course, in locked-room mysteries, there was always a twist: the room wasn't actually locked, or not in the way you thought it was, or the person had died at a different time than you thought. In my case, the secret passage between our bedrooms seemed like the perfect solution to this particular locked-room mystery, but—since I was innocent—I needed to keep looking.

So, I was doing my best impersonation of Will Gower: I was going to try to gather all the information I could about Vivienne. And then I was going to follow the threads until I found something that helped me prove who had killed her.

Or until I was arrested. I squelched that thought.

The topmost drawers contained what you would expect: office supplies, stationery, a bonanza of stamps (if I ever needed to send snail mail, I knew where to go). For a moment, I wondered if this was a Charade-type situation, and maybe the stamps were priceless collectors' items. But a quick check of the USPS online store told me these were ordinary stamps.

The next drawer was one of the big ones, and it was locked. I frowned; bypassing locks of all kinds had been another dinnertime topic, but I wasn't sure I could get this open without leaving a mark. Then I remembered something. I reached past Fox to pull open the desk's center drawer. As soon as it slid out, the latch in the bottom drawer released, and it opened easily. Hanging folders held what appeared to be financial documents. I pulled out a few, tried to make sense of them, and immediately gave up. The numbers swam back and forth. I hadn't been lying when I'd told Vivienne my parents didn't have much business sense, and I was, after all, their child.

"Leave them," Fox whispered. "I'll take a look; I'm about to give up on this thing."

The lock screen on the laptop suggested Fox hadn't had any luck hacking Vivienne's account (and yes, I know I shouldn't have called it hacking—I'd once gotten a story shredded in a workshop for using the term too liberally, so now I use it out of general spite). I left the drawer with the financial papers open and moved to the drawers on the other side of the kneehole.

I found more hanging folders with what appeared to be correspondence—at least, the sheets of paper were folded like they'd once been in envelopes. I laid the first folder on the desk, with the thought of scanning the letters to see if anything suspicious jumped out at me, but I didn't get far. The first letter was a single sheet of loose-leaf, and someone had scrawled the words I am going to get you across the page. The writer had used a ballpoint pen with so much force that they'd torn the paper at the tail of the Y.

"Fox," I whispered.

Fox gave up on the laptop and turned their attention to the papers. Their eyes widened. After a moment, they slid the first letter off the stack and examined the next. It was similar, only the words said, You will pay. The one after that said, You won't get away with this. On and on like that. There had to be hundreds of them, all on loose-leaf, all done in blue ballpoint.

"My, my, my," Fox whispered. And then, eyebrows arched, "You didn't write these, did you?"

"What?" That was bordering on Millie-volume, so I lowered my voice. "Of course not."

Fox gave me a tiny grin.

Some of the tension in my body relaxed, and I managed to huff an amused breath. "That's not funny."

"This is good," they said. "As soon as the sheriff sees this, he's going to realize there's somebody else he should be looking at. This should get you off the hook."

I hadn't seen any envelopes to indicate who had sent these messages, and none of them was signed. I inched the folder closer to me and checked the organizer tab. I recognized the name written on it—I even recognized, to my surprise, Vivienne's elegant cursive. Matrika Nightingale, the tab said. My heart sank.

Anyone with even a passing interest in Vivienne Carver's work—or, for that matter, who had successfully lived through the Reagan era—would have recognized that name. Matrika Nightingale was a serial killer who had operated in Portland in the summer of 1987 and again in the summer of 1988. She'd killed four young women. And then she'd been caught by a young Vivienne Carver, whose first novel, Death at Maplewood Manor, had been published only the year before. The story of how Vivienne had met Nightingale had become a legend among mystery writers; it was the kind of thing that seemed like it had been lifted from the pages of one of Vivienne's own books. Vivienne had approached Nightingale for a research consultation. Vivienne was planning a new book, and she was considering a female ornithologist as the protagonist. But as Vivienne had met with Nightingale and gotten to know her, she had begun to suspect something was wrong. It was the first murder Vivienne ever solved, and it set her up for the rest of her career—not only as a writer (her second book, The Riddle at Ravenhurst Hall, was loosely based on the Nightingale Murders, and it broke bestseller records all over the world; and her nonfiction, true crime book The Nightingale Murders was nominated for a Pulitzer), but as a celebrity sleuth, traveling the world, solving crimes wherever she went.

So, if I'd had to pick a candidate for someone who would want to murder Vivienne, Matrika Nightingale would have been at the top of the list. Unfortunately, Nightingale was serving multiple life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary, which meant she hadn't been in any position to kill Vivienne the night before. Hey, I thought, with a flicker of panicked hilarity, maybe Ms. Nightingale and I would be cellmates.

Fox must have understood too. When they saw the name on the folder, they grimaced. Then, without another word, they returned the folder to its place. They gave me a pat on the shoulder and rolled the chair over to inspect the financial documents.

I stared at the hanging folders with all those lovely, convenient death threats that were absolutely zero use to me. Then I shut the drawer. I opened the next one. More hanging folders. I flicked through them. No threats. No warning. No severed teddy bear heads or fingernail clippings or whatever obsessed fans sent their celebrity crush. Just more papers. Vivienne Carver had lived out her whole life on paper—in more ways than one.

It took me a few moments of rifling the papers (okay, of feeling sorry for myself) before I actually looked at the documents I was handling. They were a manuscript, I realized. A draft of a novel called Café Capers. The protagonist was a woman named Flossie Thorn who ran a cat café in a small ski town. She apparently had a lot of nice friends who did and said lots of nice things and everyone was nice and everything was nice. The first chapter consisted entirely of Flossie and her group of friends (called, I kid you not, the Golden Gang) complimenting each other for gracefully embracing the beauty of their aging bodies.

It wasn't like anything Vivienne had ever written, and apparently even she'd had her doubts—the original draft at the very back of the drawer was titled Teahouse Tizzies, and it seemed she'd considered a nom de plume, since the byline was different. The protagonist in that version wasn't called Flossie—she was called Dolly. And it wasn't a ski town, it was a spa town. But otherwise, the characters, the plot, even some of the dialogue—it was almost exactly the same. I couldn't keep myself from muttering, as I flipped through the manuscripts, "A penname was definitely the right choice."

Fox glanced over and frowned. "That's not a penname."

"Then who's Pippi Parker?"

"Pippi Parker? The author?"

"I have no idea who that is."

"She's a New York Times—" They stopped and waved at my phone. "Look her up."

It only took one search. Pippi Parker was, as Fox had said, a New York Times-bestselling author. In fact, almost all her books had made the list. She wrote cozies—cozy mysteries. And while I occasionally read cozies, and I enjoyed some of them, the genre wasn't one I'd been drawn to. My parents wrote much darker stories, and although I didn't tend to write anything quite as dark as theirs, I'd never found myself hooked by a cozy the way I'd been hooked by Lawrence Block or Adrian McKinty or, let's be real, Raymond Chandler.

The author photos of Pippi Parker showed a middle-aged white woman. She had platinum-colored hair in a volumized, layerized, electrified (that's probably not the right word) pixie cut, and it was immediately clear to me that this woman had never met an eye shadow she didn't like. She didn't look familiar to me, so I showed the photos to Fox.

"That's her."

"I don't get it," I said. "Were they friends or something?"

A laugh burst out of Fox before they could silence themselves. I would have been worried, but Millie's voice was still carrying clearly from the hall: "And that was the THIRD time I broke my arm! The FOURTH time—"

"They're definitely not friends," Fox whispered. "I don't know why she'd have this."

I glanced at Teahouse Tizzies again, and then I took a longer look at Café Capers. They were so similar. Too similar. And a part of me knew what that meant, but I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Vivienne Carver—the Vivienne Carver—would need to plagiarize anyone's story, much less Pippi Parker's. I mean, in one chapter, the characters spent ten pages giving each other back rubs.

"I need more time to look through this stuff," Fox said, waving at the financial documents. "But it looks like Vivienne spent a lot of money recently. Some kind of investment, I think, but as I said, I need some time to see what's really going on."

"Let's take pictures, and we'll leave the originals so the sheriff can look at them."

Fox raised one eyebrow; they were too polite to say if the sheriff bothers to look at all.

Between the two of us, it actually didn't take that long to photograph the financial paperwork. We returned everything to how we'd found it. As we crept back toward the door, Deputy Dairek said, "We'd better get back to work. The county doesn't pay me to stand around all night."

The female deputy murmured something that sounded like "It sure seems like it."

"One more for the road won't hurt," Deputy Dairek said.

"And you're eating it in the hall because I don't want to explain to the sheriff why there's pound cake in his crime scene."

"Leave the coffee too," Deputy Dairek said. "There's a good girl."

Indira didn't respond to that. I didn't know for a fact that Deputy Dairek was at a sudden risk of having Indira decapitate him with nothing but her bare hands, but to judge by the look on Fox's face, my guess probably wasn't far off.

As we reached the door, Millie said, "OH MY GOD, LOOK OVER THERE!"

Fox didn't hesitate. They pulled open the door and darted across the hall. I followed, easing the study door shut behind us. I had that panicked moment again, waiting for a board to creak, but we reached the bedroom without making a noise. There was something to be said, apparently, for being an insanely demanding robber-baron when it came to long-lasting home design.

In the darkness of the bedroom, Fox and I caught our breaths. Then we looped back around to the other side of the house and went down the servants' stairs. Indira and Millie were already in the kitchen: Indira washing up at one of the enormous sinks, and Millie sitting on the counter, swinging her legs.

"Well?" Millie asked. "Did we get anything?"

"I should call his mother," Indira said, waving a sudsy plate at us. "‘There's a good girl.' He still lives with Gail, you know. She'd—she'd make him clean out the litter boxes."

Fox grinned at the confusion on my face and said, "Approximately a million cats."

"Oh my God," Millie said, "that was so scary. It was super scary. I was SO SCARED!"

It was hard to tell if she was serious since she had a mile-wide smile on her face.

"Well?" Indira said. "Tell me putting up with that buffoon was worth it."

"I think it was. Fox is going to work on some financial paperwork. Indira, maybe you could help."

"What about us?" Millie asked.

I wasn't sure about how quickly she'd made the jump to us, but honestly, I was so caught up in the night's discoveries that I said, "Tomorrow, I'm going to talk to Pippi Parker."