Lorna Barrett: Bookmarked For Death

“I told you so,” Angelica piped up. “And I haven’t had a chance to talk to Zoë yet. Where is she, anyway?”

Ginny ignored her, turning back to Tricia. “How much stock will you have her sign?”

“All of it. Besides being a best seller she’s a local author, even if she is abandoning Stoneham.”

“Let’s hope you can sell them to tourists. Her handler turned off a number of the locals we’d managed to lure in here tonight.”

Tricia sighed. “What did Kimberly say to you?”

“Nothing too insulting. Just implied my career aspirations must be pretty low to ‘settle’ for a job in retail. I had to bite my tongue to keep from mentioning that I didn’t have to depend on nepotism to keep me employed.”

Tricia looked around the shop. “Where is Zoë? As soon as she signs that stock, I can shut the door and scrounge some dinner.” She hadn’t even managed to snag a piece of Nikki’s cake, of which only crumbs remained—not that she was often seduced by sweets or desserts. Too hard on the figure.

“I didn’t see her go,” Ginny admitted.

Mr. Everett and Grace were rounding up icing-stained forks and plates, depositing them in a big black plastic trash bag. “Did Zoë leave?” Tricia asked them.

Mr. Everett shook his head, pointed to the coat still slung over the back of one of the signing table’s chairs.

“I think she went to the restroom,” Grace said. She frowned. “Didn’t that awful niece of hers say she needed to take her medication at eight o’clock?” She glanced at the diamond watch on her wrist. “Oh, my, she’s been in there quite a while.”

They looked uneasily at each other. “I’ll go see,” Tricia said.

Tricia had sacrificed her utility closet to add the small washroom a couple of months before. Most of her clientele arrived via bus tours, and one of the first stops the mostly elderly ladies and gents wanted to make was a bathroom.

Since the front of her store had been outfitted to look like the Victorian facade of Sherlock Holmes’s beloved 221B Baker Street, Tricia had carried out the decoration of her restroom in the same manner, with an antique pedestal sink and an oak mirror overhead, a high-tank toilet, dark beaded board, and reproduction hunter green flocked wallpaper. Unfortunately, she was the one who got to clean the little room every evening after the shop closed. Not the most glamorous part of owning her own business. In lieu of the closet, she’d had a wall erected to hide the boxes of stock and dollies, and had added shaker pegs higher on the wall for herself and her staff to hang their coats. Simple, but effective.

Tricia passed the last of the bookshelves and felt a draft. Bypassing the washroom, she hurried to the back of the shop, noticing that the rear door, which was always locked except for deliveries, was open a crack. Thank goodness her cat, Miss Marple, had been banished to her loft apartment during the signing. If she’d gotten out . . .

Tricia quickly closed the door and threw the deadbolt. Shoplifters had used the back exit for an escape route before, but the security system should have alerted her when the door was opened during business hours. It wasn’t likely Ginny or Mr. Everett had circumvented the system, but whenever Angelica was around, unusual things seemed to occur.

Remembering why she’d come to the back of the store, Tricia stepped over to the closed washroom door. The little sign on it said occupied. She bent close and listened.

No sound.

She knocked.

“Zoë? Is everything all right in there?”

No answer.

Tricia leaned in closer, listening harder.

Still no sound.

Ginny approached. “Anything wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Tricia said. She rested her hand on the door handle. It turned. Since the room was tiny, the door opened out.

Tricia’s breath caught in her throat and she backed away, bumping into the wall behind her.

Zoë Carter was seated on the lid of the commode, her dark skirt pulled primly over her knees, her mouth stuffed with paper napkins, and her face mottled a shade of purple Tricia had never seen. Scrapes marred her wattled neck, and some fingers from both hands were caught in the kelly green bungee cord that was knotted at her throat.

Sheriff Wendy Adams glowered at Tricia. “You have a penchant for finding dead bodies, Ms. Miles.” She referred, of course, to the body Tricia had found in a neighboring store some seven months before.

Tricia looked away from the tall, bulky, uniformed woman who towered above her. Seated in one of the upholstered chairs in Haven’t Got a Clue’s readers’ nook, she held a cardboard cup of cold coffee in one hand, a balled-up, damp tissue in the other. “Believe me, Sheriff, finding a body is not on my top ten list of things to do.” She closed her eyes, and found the image of Zoë’s distorted face imprinted on her mind once again.

“What is it with you, Sheriff? Do you find pleasure in badgering traumatized witnesses?” Angelica asked.

Tricia opened her eyes to see that her angry sister had insinuated herself between Tricia and the sheriff.

“Now, dear,” Bob Kelly murmured, resting a gentle restraining hand on her arm, but Angelica shook him off. Bob had shown up—late—intending to take Angelica to dinner. Instead, he’d declined to leave once he saw the sheriff’s patrol car outside and, as the head of the Chamber of Commerce and one of Stoneham’s leading citizens, no one had asked him to leave.

“Back off, Bob,” Angelica ordered, unaccountably surly. To Tricia’s knowledge, Angelica had never said a cross word to her “good friend,” as she called him. She folded her arms across her chest, and Tricia allowed herself a twinge of sisterly pride at the sight.

“Why don’t you wait outside, Mrs. Prescott,” the sheriff said, her spine stiffening. “I’ll get your statement in due time.”

“Sure, I’ll just go out on the sidewalk and stand in the goose poop that the Board of Selectmen hasn’t been addressing,” she growled. “And by the way, I am no longer Mrs. Prescott. I’ve taken my maiden name once again. You may call me Ms. Miles.”

Sheriff Adams jerked a thumb in the direction of the exit. “Outside. Everyone. You’ll get your turn to give me your sides of the story. Placer”—she addressed the deputy—“don’t let them talk about the crime. I want to hear everyone’s story in their own unique way, without them contaminating each other.”

The deputy stepped forward to usher everyone outside. Dutifully they filed out, sans coats, which were hung on pegs at the back of the store, next to where the body was still located. Once the door closed, the sheriff turned her attention back to Tricia. “Well?”

Tricia heaved a sigh. “I found her. Just like—” She risked a glance over her shoulder. “Like she is.”

“And you didn’t kill her.”

Tricia’s jaw dropped. “Of course not. She was my guest.”

“Did she argue with anyone tonight?”

“No.” She thought about it. “Although she had a little tiff with her niece, Kimberly Peters. And Kimberly did leave in a rush. I suppose she could’ve come back, snuck in through the open back door and . . .” The thought was too terrible to contemplate. A family member killing for—what? Money, revenge? Weren’t they the usual motives?

“Kimberly also let it slip that her aunt was being blackmailed.”

The sheriff raised an eyebrow, and Tricia explained.

“Was she teasing or serious?”

“That I couldn’t say.”

Wendy Adams grunted. “I’ll need a list of everyone who was at the signing tonight.”

“I can’t give you one. I mean, I don’t know everyone who came. I sent press releases to the Stoneham Weekly News and the Nashua newspaper, and advertising circulars. We had a good crowd. Maybe twenty-five people in all.”