Chapter
Three
“ I pretty much lost my appetite
after that,” Liss said when she finished recounting her
conversation with Jane Nedlinger to Dan.
“So you just walked out?” He was on the
other side of the bar in the lounge, polishing a glass with a
towel.
The place was all but deserted. Most of
the hotel’s guests were attendees at the First Annual Maine-ly Cozy
Con. They were buying their drinks at the portable bar set up at
the reception. Dan’s only patrons were a young couple sitting in
one of the booths, a nervous-looking man in his early thirties at a
table, and an elderly gentleman occupying the stool at the end of
the bar farthest away from where Liss perched, nursing a ginger
ale.
She scooped up a handful of
complimentary party mix from the nearest bowl. “I couldn’t see the
point in sticking around.”
“And she said her name was
Nedlinger?”
“Yes. Jane Nedlinger. But she didn’t
have a name tag. I’m not sure if she’s attending the conference or
not. Why? Do you know her?”
“Sherri called earlier to ask if we had
a J. Nedlinger registered here, which we didn’t. She didn’t say
why.”
“Ms. Nedlinger must have stopped by at
the P.D. She said she’d seen police reports. Would Sherri have
shown them to her?”
“I’m not even sure Sherri is the one
who’d have them. The state police did the
investigating.”
The name Gordon Tandy hung in the air
between them, unspoken. He was the state police detective assigned
to Carrabassett County and, until recently, he’d been Dan’s rival
for Liss’s affections.
Liss doubted that Gordon had talked to
Jane Nedlinger himself. The state police had a public relations
officer to deal with the public. Or would Jane be considered the
press? Liss didn’t suppose it mattered. The woman had gotten
information from somewhere. Now she wanted more, and she didn’t
strike Liss as the type to give up easily.
“Drat,” Liss muttered. “I was looking
forward to this weekend. I don’t want to have to worry about some
scandalmonger dogging my steps.”
“You may be making too much of
this.”
“You mean I’m overreacting.” She made a
face at him. “Maybe.”
They were interrupted by the entrance
of a trio of screaming kids in wet swimsuits. “Daddy! Daddy!”
yelled a little girl of perhaps six as she ran up to the nervous
man at the table. “Mommy says you have to watch us.”
The two boys, one who looked to Liss to
be eight or nine and the other a little older, started a game of
tag around the furniture. A chair toppled over. The little girl’s
shrill voice rose even higher when the older boy poked her in the
ribs in passing.
“Daddy! He’s picking on
me!”
Dan left the bar and went over to speak
quietly to the father. Then he turned to the two boys and told them
that if they didn’t settle down they’d have to leave. He was
perfectly polite and therefore made no impression at all on any of
the children. No sooner had he returned to his post than all three
of them were racing in and out of the lounge, shouting at the top
of their lungs. Liss felt a little sorry for the father, who had
probably been trying to hide from his family long enough to have a
quiet beer. Her sympathy quickly evaporated when he proved
unwilling, or unable, to control his brood. The second time Dan
came out from behind the bar to speak to him, he stood up, threw
some money down to pay his tab, and stormed out. The children had
already disappeared.
“Kids shouldn’t be allowed in bars,”
Dan grumbled.
“Not those kids, at any
rate.”
As he refilled her glass, she could
almost see him collecting his thoughts. Dan’s face fascinated her.
Unless he was making a conscious effort, all his feelings were
right there for anyone to read. She liked that about him. He was as
honest, as they said around here, as the day was long.
“The Nedlinger woman said she wanted to
interview you, right?” Dan asked.
“She said she had
questions.”
“And you immediately put up shields.”
Liss not only saw the smile on his face, she heard it in his
voice.
“I told her that her claim wasn’t true,
that I’m not some kind of magnet for murder. And she just laughed
and said that magnet for murder was an even better turn of phrase
than lightning rod for violent death. Sheesh! Some days you just
can’t win!”
“The point is, she’s offered you the
chance to talk to her and answer her questions. If you agree, she
might end up giving her story a more positive slant.”
Liss glared at him. “Or not. Oh, that
may be what she implied, but I didn’t
believe her. There was just something. . . smarmy about her. I wouldn’t trust her to take out the
trash.” She managed a weak smile and held up one hand with her
thumb and forefinger held a quarter of an inch apart. “I came
this close to telling her to publish and be
damned.”
When Dan’s eyebrows shot up, she
chuckled.
“Okay. Dumb impulse. I wish I could
remember who said that originally. Somebody famous. If I knew who
it was, maybe it wouldn’t sound so hackneyed.”
Then again, maybe it would. Was Dan
right? Was she overreacting?
“At least think about talking to her,”
he advised, ever the voice of reason.
“I suppose I could. She did give me a
grace period. She said that if I changed my mind, I should let her
know before the end of the conference.”
“Then why don’t you go back upstairs
and enjoy the rest of the reception? Then maybe talk to Sherri—oh,
damn! I forgot to tell you about Adam Willett.”
His sudden change in tone alerted her
to expect bad news. “What happened?”
Word of Adam’s broken arm banished Jane
Nedlinger from Liss’s thoughts. She tried phoning Sherri, but none
of the numbers she tried were answered. Finally, she just left a
message on the voice mail for Pete’s cell phone, a sympathetic word
and the assurance that if Sherri needed her for anything, she
shouldn’t hesitate to call.
“I feel so helpless,” she lamented
after she hung up.
“He’ll be okay. Kids heal
fast.”
“Broken arm, though—that’s a bummer.”
She had plenty of experience with injuries, and with physical
therapy, too. Adam would be in pain. And Sherri would suffer right
along with him.
“Enough doom and gloom,” Dan said.
“There are movies showing later, right? Which one are you going to
attend? Maybe I’ll join you. We can make this into a date
night.”
She could use cheering up, Liss
decided, and she didn’t have to fake her enthusiasm for the
conference’s offerings. “They’re all good,” she told him. “You
pick. The choices are Rear Window,
Dial M for Murder, Murder on
the Orient Express, and The Maltese
Falcon. The classic versions, of course.” She was pretty
sure they’d all been remade in less successful, more violent modern
adaptations.
Since it was barely seven, Liss was not
inclined to hide out in the lounge until the film fest started at
nine. Besides, she knew she wouldn’t be able to avoid Jane
Nedlinger for long, no matter what she did. That being the case,
she decided that she might as well go back to the
reception.
On her way there, she passed the
harried father who’d been in the lounge. A woman, obviously his
wife, had him backed up against one of the pillars in the lobby.
Her face was a picture of outrage as she demanded, in a voice as
shrill as her daughter’s, “What do you mean, you lost the
kids?”
Liss kept walking.
Back at the reception, she decided it
was a good thing she had not yet regained her appetite. In the
short time she’d been gone, the contents of the buffet tables had
dwindled down to a few scraps of cheese and a single mini-éclair.
Liss snagged it and looked around for Jane Nedlinger.
The woman’s height and Wagnerian
proportions stood out even in a crowd that contained a number of
plus-sized, middle-aged women. Jane was still holding a plate
heaped high with goodies. Or perhaps it had been refilled. But she
wasn’t eating. She was talking at Yvonne Quinlan. Her body language
was aggressive and her current prey had a deer-in-the-headlights
look on her face.
Just how many people did Jane Nedlinger
plan to harass that evening?
Liss tried telling herself that what
was between the blogger and the actress was none of her business.
And that she should be grateful someone else had captured Jane’s
attention. But when she spotted Nola Ventress chatting with
Margaret Boyd, she headed their way, thinking that perhaps Nola
knew something about Jane Nedlinger. Something they could use to
rein her in. If Jane wasn’t registered at the conference, maybe
they could even kick her out.
“Here’s my lovely niece now,” Margaret
said as Liss approached.
Almost two years earlier, when Liss had
first moved back to Moosetookalook, Margaret MacCrimmon Boyd had
been a plump and comfortable widow in her late fifties who dyed her
hair bright red and had little to occupy her time besides a
good-for-nothing son and the family business, Moosetookalook
Scottish Emporium. Since then, she had lost weight, let her hair
fade to a natural grayish brown, and begun a new career as events
coordinator at The Spruces. Margaret still talked a mile a minute
and had a cheerful outlook on life, but now her days were much more
well-rounded. She even had a boyfriend, if such a term could be
applied to a man who was pushing sixty.
“You must stop in and see the Emporium,
Nola,” Margaret continued. “Liss has worked wonders with it since
she took over.”
“I’ll do that, if I can find the time.”
Nola started to move away.
Liss spoke quickly. “Nola, do you know
anything about a woman named Jane Nedlinger?”
Nola went perfectly still except for
her eyes. She blinked several times, as if to process the question.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked.
“Because she’s here and she’s asking
intrusive questions. At least she did of me, and I’ve watched her
accost two other people this evening. Neither looked happy about
being cornered.”
“I’ve heard she can be ... abrasive in
person.”
“That’s putting it
mildly.”
Nola frowned. “I’ve never met her, but
I’m a regular reader of her blog. I do hope everyone’s being polite
to her, even if she is offensive. Good publicity for our conference
is especially important this first year, so there can be a
second Annual Maine-ly Cozy
Con.”
“So you invited her here?” Liss
asked.
“I sent her a press release and some
other ... material. I was hoping to generate
publicity.”
“From a blog?”
Liss had designed the Emporium’s Web
page and now made most of her profits selling online, but she had
no experience with social networking or blogging. She’d never had
any urge to share her personal observations with the world. As for
reading other people’s opinions, who had the time? When she did
squeeze out a spare half hour for herself, she usually spent it
curled up with a good book. Or with Dan.
“You’d be surprised how wide an
audience The Nedlinger Report reaches,” Nola
said. “It has more readers than some newspapers.”
“So she’s here to report on the
conference? She’ll give you good press?”
Nola sighed. “Good? Probably not. She
tends to find fault with things. But she has a huge
following.”
Liss frowned. None of this was
encouraging. And if Nola had known in advance that Jane emphasized
the negative, she had been naïve to think alerting her to the
existence of the Cozy Con was a bright idea.
“Well,” Nola said, visibly stiffening
her spine, “I suppose I’d better have a word with her. Which one is
she?”
“She was speaking with your guest of
honor a few minutes ago.” Liss turned to scan the room. It was easy
to locate Jane Nedlinger, but she was no longer with Yvonne
Quinlan. Now she was talking to Dan.
Liss wondered why he wasn’t in the
lounge. He’d been scheduled to work behind the bar until nine. Then
again, his father owned the hotel. She knew he could get someone to
fill in for him when he really wanted to. He’d probably called for
a replacement as soon as she returned to the reception and come up
here looking for her, thinking that she still needed cheering
up.
He was right about that.
“Jane Nedlinger is the big woman in
gray,” she told Nola.
“Oh, my,” Nola said, her eyes widening.
Then she headed in the opposite direction. “Yvonne looks a bit
frazzled,” she called over her shoulder. “I’d better have a word
with her first.”
Shaking her head, Liss watched Nola
scurry off in the direction of her guest of honor. Wise to run, she
thought, trying to picture the petite Nola confronting Jane
Nedlinger. It would be like a squirrel facing down an enormous
black bear.
Should she follow Nola or rescue Dan?
Liss glanced back at her fiancé, torn. She ought not leave the man
she loved in the claws of a predator. But Dan was the one who had
thought she was making too much of Jane Nedlinger’s interest in
Moosetookalook’s past murders. Maybe a few minutes at the blogger’s
mercy would convince him that she’d been right to be concerned.
Besides, she’d been hoping for a chance to meet Yvonne
Quinlan.
Turning her back on Dan, Liss set off
after Nola and Margaret.
Dan held his ground with an effort. He
had a feeling that if he tried to back away from the formidable
woman in front of him, she’d pace him like a lioness stalking her
prey.
“Moosetookalook appears to be the
murder capital of Maine,” Jane Nedlinger repeated. “Wouldn’t you
say that’s correct?” She edged a little farther into his personal
space. She seemed to use up more than her fair share of oxygen,
too.
“Seems a stretch to me.” Dan slid into
the laconic drawl he sometimes adopted for the benefit of tourists.
In the popular opinion of the rest of the country, all Mainers were
laid back and folksy, fished for lobster in their spare time, and
said “ayuh” a lot, never mind that most of the state was nowhere
near the rockbound coast.
“Oh, come now, Mr. Ruskin! May I call
you Dan?” She didn’t wait for permission, just assumed it would be
forthcoming. “Now, Dan, there’s no sense in hiding the truth. Not
from a seasoned newshound like me. I was an investigative reporter
once, you know. I worked for one of the big Boston papers. There’s
no deflecting me when I’m chasing a hot story.”
And the juicier, the better, Dan
assumed. She was all but smacking her lips over this
one.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said aloud, “but I
don’t have anything to say to you. You’d best talk to the police if
you’re interested in the details of a criminal
investigation.”
“Investigations. Plural. And the way I
hear it, you and your little girlfriend had more to do with solving
those cases than the cops did.”
Little
girlfriend? Oh, Liss was going to love that one! Since Dan
couldn’t think of a single reply that wouldn’t come back to haunt
him, he wisely remained silent.
Jane Nedlinger kept talking. She seemed
to take a malicious pleasure in enumerating Moosetookalook’s flaws,
making Dan realize that he’d been dead wrong in the advice he’d
given Liss. When he’d lobbied her to consider giving Jane Nedlinger
an interview, he’d assumed that the threat Liss had sensed was all
posturing and playacting on Jane’s part. In person, however, the
blogger was just as alarming as Liss had claimed. The potential
danger she posed could not easily be dismissed.
“Moosetookalook is a quiet little town,
Ms. Nedlinger,” he said, interrupting her.
“Jane.”
“We’re peaceable folk here, Jane.
Minding our own business. Trying to make a living. There’s no call
to make a fuss just because we had a few unfortunate ... incidents.
. . over the last couple of years.”
“Is that how you see it? Incidents? I
call them vile murders.” Her expression abruptly turned cold and
hard. “I hear you’re head of the chamber of commerce or whatever
you call it here, but I won’t be put off by the party line. You’re
sitting on a hotbed of crime and violence in this dinky little
sinkhole you call home. In fact, I think this story is bigger than
I first thought. I may just have to devote an entire week to the
Moosetookalook murders and Liss MacCrimmon’s part in
them.”
“Now hold on just a
minute!”
She talked right over his protest. “You
can tell Ms. MacCrimmon that I won’t need to ask her any questions
after all. I can get all I need for my exposé without her
input.”
Leaving Dan still sputtering, Jane
sailed away. Within seconds, she’d pounced on a new victim, a woman
who, by the color of her name tag, was a speaker at the conference.
He’d stopped by the registration table earlier, long enough to
observe that fans got white name tags while panelists wore light
green. Nola Ventress and her helpers sported bright
yellow.
The chatter in the room was loud, one
conversation bleeding into the next. As Liss passed various couples
and small groups, trailing after her aunt and Nola Ventress, she
caught a word here and a sentence there. Everyone sounded upbeat.
Some were talking about the next day’s panels and workshops. Others
were saying nice things about the hotel. One remarked that she
enjoyed the romantic suspense novels written by Maine writer Susan
Vaughan more than the quasi paranormals penned by Yvonne
Quinlan.
“Apples and oranges,” replied the woman
she was speaking to.
The remaining tidbits Liss overheard
were all about murder, but to her immense relief, the only crimes
anyone seemed interested in discussing were those that took place
between the covers of a book.
Nola looked surprised, and not
particularly pleased, to discover that both Margaret and Liss were
right behind her when she reached Yvonne’s side. Rather
perfunctorily, she introduced them to the actress-turned-writer and
to the man in the checked blazer. His name was Bill Stotz and he
was Yvonne’s manager.
Bill lavished praise on Nola for her
organizational skills, then seemed to lose interest when Liss
announced that she was one of the vendors from the dealers’ room.
He fished a stick of chewing gum out of his pocket, unwrapped it,
and popped it into his mouth. He let the wrapper fall to the floor
without bothering to look around for a trash
receptacle.
“Are you a bookseller?” Yvonne
asked.
“I sell gift items with a Scottish
theme,” Liss replied.
“I must make it a point to stop by and
see what you have to offer,” Yvonne said with a charming smile. “I
always find such delightful gifts in dealers’ rooms at small
conferences like this one.”
If Yvonne was suffering any residual
effects from her encounter with Jane Nedlinger, Liss couldn’t spot
them. Then again, Yvonne was a professional
actress.
“Was that Nedlinger person bothering
you?” Nola’s blunt question surprised Liss and thudded into the
conversation as awkwardly someone tripping over a piece of
furniture.
Bill Stotz scowled. Even Yvonne’s easy
smile faltered, but only for a millisecond.
“Of course not,” she said. “That
dreadful woman is just after a story, as always. And she wanted to
make sure I knew how much she hated my latest book.”
“She panned it?” Nola could not have
looked more stricken if it had been her own creation that Jane had
reviled.
“I take it you didn’t see the review.”
Yvonne sounded remarkably cheerful. “She loathed everything about
it.”
“I’ve been too busy with the conference
to read her blog for the last couple of days,” Nola admitted. She
seemed extraordinarily shaken by Yvonne’s announcement. “Oh, my. I
never thought ... I hoped ...”
When her incoherent words trailed off,
Yvonne filled in the blanks. “You sent her a review copy, didn’t
you, Nola?”
A study in misery, Nola
nodded.
“Don’t give it another thought,” Yvonne
advised her. “None of us should allow that awful creature to spoil
our day.”
“Doesn’t bad press bother you?” Liss
asked, genuinely curious.
“Well, of course it does,” Yvonne said.
“No one enjoys a scathing review. But you
have to consider the source. I learned a long time ago not to let
petty people get under my skin. Not for more than about a minute
and a half, anyway.” She gave a light, infectious
laugh.
Liss found herself smiling back at the
actress-turned-mystery-author. “Good advice. Too bad it’s so hard
to follow.”
“It takes years of practice,” Yvonne
admitted. “Are you a writer, too?”
“Oh, no. Just a reader.”
“There’s no just
about being a reader. We writers wouldn’t have much in the way of
careers if no one read what we wrote.”
“Well, I do enjoy your books, Ms.
Quinlan.”
“Yvonne, please.”
“Yvonne, then. I’m curious, though. You
have a successful career in television, but you made your fictional
detective a bit-part actress.”
At first glance the character, Toni
Starling, might have seemed an unlikely amateur sleuth. She lived
in Vancouver, where many U.S. action series and movies were filmed,
and worked pretty steadily as “woman number two,” “first waitress,”
and the like. Many of the crimes she solved had to do with the film
industry. What made the series unique, however, was that Toni had
assistance on her cases from a mysterious associate who might ...
or might not ... be a vampire. That gimmick had attracted hordes of
readers to the books because Yvonne herself had played one of the
undead for nearly a decade—a character named Caroline Sweet in the
hit television show Vamped.
“Toni isn’t me,” Yvonne said with
another soft laugh, the kind that invited the listener to share in
the joke. “Besides, if you think about it, unsuccessful actors have
to be more observant than successful ones—constantly on the alert
for opportunities to show off their skills. That’s a good quality
in a sleuth, too, don’t you think?”
“True. And Simon? Is he really a
vampire?”
This time Yvonne’s laughter was so
full-bodied it attracted attention from all corners of the room. “I
leave that up to the reader to decide.”
For a moment, Liss considered the
question seriously. She’d read all the books, some of them twice.
“We never see Simon bite anyone. And there aren’t any bodies
drained of blood lying around. On the other hand, he never goes out
in the daylight.”
“That you know of.” Yvonne’s smile was
secretive and her dark brown eyes glinted with mischief. “Vampires
don’t have to kill these days, do they? And
sometimes they kill in other ways. It’s very easy for them to break
someone’s neck, for example. Just a quick twist and the deed is
done.” She mimed the action.
Liss found herself both fascinated and
repelled by this conversation. She couldn’t resist asking another
question. “Is that possible? I mean, is it really so easy to break
someone’s neck?” She’d seen it done countless times on both the big
and little screens, but reality and Hollywood—or Vancouver—weren’t
always in the same universe. Screenplays certainly got a great many
other things wrong, a point Yvonne made over and over again in her
mystery novels.
“It is if you know how,” Yvonne assured
her. “I did a brief stint as a stuntwoman before I got my first gig
as an actress. They taught me what to do. Or rather, what
not to do. Fatal accidents on the set are
never good for business.”
Two young women had joined the group
surrounding Yvonne and had been hanging on every word the actress
spoke. Hesitantly, one ventured a comment.
“A real vampire would drain the
victim’s blood,” she said. She had long, straight hair and wore the
conference uniform of jeans and a T-shirt. The shirt featured a
skeleton sitting on a bench at a bus stop. The caption read:
“Waiting for a Good Agent.”
“That’s right,” her companion agreed.
“Breaking someone’s neck and leaving the body to rot is just
wasteful.” Her face was slightly rounder than the first woman’s and
her hair was shorter. Her black T-shirt had no artwork on it, only
words. It read: “And then Buffy staked Edward. The
End.”
“But for a vampire to do that,” her
friend said in an authoritative voice, “is a sign of contempt.
Remember that episode of Buffy where
Angel—”
“Please,” Yvonne interrupted, her smile
slipping. “At least choose an example from my show.” Vamped had lasted
longer than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Liss
recalled, but it had debuted back when Joss Whedon’s cult classic
was still on the air. Liss supposed it was only natural that there
had been some rivalry between the two shows.
“Will you sign my book?” the first fan
asked. Then her face fell. “Oh. I left it in my room. I’ll have to
go get it.”
Bill Stotz paused in the act of
stuffing a second stick of gum into his mouth to object to
autographing outside the established signing hours. Maybe it was
the third stick of gum, Liss thought, studying him. Bill was
starting to look like a chipmunk storing up nuts for the winter in
his cheeks, and she could smell the spearmint on his breath from
two feet away.
“It’s okay, Bill.” Yvonne made a little
shooing motion with one hand. “I’ll tell you what,” she said to her
fan. “Why don’t you go fetch your copy of my book right now? I’m
not going anywhere. When you get back, we’ll find a quiet spot
where the three of us can sit and chat.”
“I think that Simon is hot,” the second
woman said as they were leaving. “Way hotter than Vampire
Bill.”
Liss blinked and glanced at Bill Stotz
before she remembered that Vampire Bill was a character in yet
another paranormal mystery series, the one written by Charlaine
Harris. She had to disagree on the hotness factor, she
thought.
Since she’d obviously not been included
in the invitation to chat, she looked around for Nola, intending to
steer her back to Jane Nedlinger, but Nola had wandered off. Liss
didn’t immediately see either her or Jane.
Human, gum-chewing Bill slipped away as
soon as Yvonne spotted an empty table where she and her two
starry-eyed admirers could settle in. Liss and Margaret continued
to chat with the actress/writer until the fans returned with
Yvonne’s latest novel in hand and the three of them headed for an
empty table.
Margaret stooped to pick up Bill’s
discarded gum wrappers before they moved on. “She’s a real
powerhouse, isn’t she?”
“And gracious. Talented, too,” Liss
agreed. “She must be to have written so many novels while working
full-time as an actress.”
“She probably had a lot of free time on
the set,” Margaret mused, tossing the litter into the trash can
near one of the buffet tables. Angeline’s crew was already hard at
work clearing away the empty platters and plates and used utensils.
“I can easily imagine her scribbling madly into a notebook while
she waited to shoot the next scene.”
More likely she wrote on a laptop, Liss
thought, but she said nothing to dispel her aunt’s
illusions.
When Margaret veered off to make sure
there were no last-minute problems with the rooms where the classic
movie night features were to be shown, Liss looked around for Dan.
He was Nedlinger-free but on the far side of the room.
She took her time getting to him. It
was still early, and the attendees at the First Annual Maine-ly
Cozy Con were an outgoing bunch. She was twice drawn into
conversations with complete strangers and once found herself being
surveyed for her opinion on how early the first body should turn up
in a cozy mystery. Liss found these brief encounters stimulating.
She might not have known any of these folks before they arrived at
The Spruces, but they all read the same books she did. That was
enough to create an instant bond.
Dan’s face was set in a fearsome scowl
by the time Liss finally reached his side.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, although she
suspected she already knew.
“You were right about that woman,” Dan
admitted. “That Jane Nedlinger. She’s out to cause trouble, and we
have to do something to stop her.”