Али Брэндон - Double Booked For Death

It was barely noon, and already yesterday’s positive thoughts were drifting perilously back toward negative territory. Was the payoff for this night’s event going to be worth the agony they all already were feeling? The first fans had already been in line at seven a.m. when Darla’s alarm clock went off. Girlish squeals had reached all the way to the third floor, sending her rushing to the window to see close to twenty black-caped girls of indeterminate age already queued up at the bottom step.

Fortunately, Valerie’s fans had been the only ones lined up. Darla had resigned herself to finding a busload of Bible-carrying activists milling about, so she’d been pleasantly surprised to find the sidewalk free of both Mrs. Bobby Jennings’s (a.k.a. Marnie’s) fellow congregation members and the presumably unaffiliated but equally unwelcome Lone Protester.

By ten o’clock, when the barricade guy finally showed up, the line of fans had reached the end of the block. Now, with the official barrier in place to keep the crowd in check, Jake had started handing out the coveted wristbands guaranteeing access to the signing that evening.

But though the fans may have been physically contained behind the barricades, their exuberance was not. The sound of laughing and shouting teenage girls was audible inside the store, drowning out the New Age soundtrack Darla had playing. Which meant the actual noise level outside must be getting up there in decibels. Adding to the ruckus were the occasional honks from passing vehicles—traffic control wasn’t due for a few more hours—with the inevitable shouted question, “Early for Halloween, aren’t you?” The occasional answering middle finger from one of the black-draped girls brought a few pithy comments in return, but none worse than Darla normally heard on a walk through the neighborhood.

Thank God, no one is complaining . . . yet , she thought, mentally crossing her fingers that her fellow shop owners would continue to take the situation in stride.

She’d forewarned her neighbors of the event so they could make their own preparations for the expected crush. Some were fans of Valerie Baylor’s and were thrilled to have her in the proximity; others simply saw the influx of hundreds of people, plus the inevitable press that would be covering the event, as a positive. The few who were not with the program simply gritted their teeth and chose to close early rather than weather the fan-girl storm.

“Wow, check this out!”

Lizzie, wearing her official Haunted High black cape over a sensible smocked blouse and a pair of mom jeans, held up her phone to display its small screen. A self-proclaimed middle-aged techno geek, she’d had her phone out most of the morning, checking the various social networks to see if word of Valerie’s appearance was making the rounds. Hers was one of those high-end models that surfed the Internet, served as a GPS, took photos and videos . . . and occasionally even was used to make calls.

“Darla, you should be proud. As of now, Pettistone’s Fine Books is one of the top trends on Twitter, and we’re showing as a hot topic on Alexa,” she confirmed. “Oh, and we’ve had the same number of hits on our website in just the past two hours as we usually get in a month. And that Facebook page for the store that I set up last week already has almost a thousand fans now.”

“Well, let’s just hope some of that momentum keeps up after Valerie has come and gone,” Darla muttered as she rang up the latest celebrity diet book for a bleached blond matron dressed two decades too young for her likely true age. “We could use an infusion of new customers. Not that we don’t love all our regular folks,” she clarified with a smile for the woman before her.

The customer rolled her heavily made-up eyes. “These teenage girls, what’s with them and their ghosts and vampires and wizards? They should try reading something more wholesome like we did when we were kids. Like Nancy Drew.”

“So long as they’re reading, I’m happy,” Darla replied. That catchphrase had become her mantra and kept her from succumbing to James-like snobbery anytime a customer hauled the latest blockbuster movie novelization to the register.

The woman sniffed again in disapproval; then, catching a glimpse of Hamlet lounging behind the counter, her demeanor promptly changed.

“Oh, how cute,” she squealed, drawing a cold green squint from the feline in question. “Kitty gets to go to work with Mommy. I bet she’s a hard worker, too. What’s her name?”

“ His name is Hamlet,” Darla replied, managing not to laugh at the gender confusion and the presumed cuddly relationship between the two of them.

The woman looked suitably impressed. “Oh, is he named after those cats at the Algonquin Hotel?”

Darla had heard this question before. Her customer was referring to the successive feline mascots that had been a tradition for several decades at the New York City landmark hotel. Most of those cats had been named Hamlet, too—though the most recent female holder of that post had broken tradition by being dubbed Matilda. Darla recalled reading of the famous Algonquin cats as a child, but she had forgotten about that quaint tradition until she moved to New York.

Now, she shook her head. “Nope, no relation,” she said with a smile. “Our Hamlet came by his name on his own.”

The story James had told her was that Hamlet, then a scrawny little kitten, had simply shown up in the store one day. Somehow, without anyone noticing him, he’d managed to pull a volume of Shakespeare down from one of the shelves and made himself a little bed. He was fast asleep on it when Great-Aunt Dee found him, his little paws pointing to the word “Hamlet” on the cover. So, Hamlet he became.

Darla finished checking out the woman, whose Hamlet sighting had seemingly blunted her pique over Valerie Baylor’s black-clad fans. Then she excused herself to sign for a UPS package. Lizzie, meanwhile, tucked her cell back into her pocket and began ringing up the next person. James had abandoned his post at the main phone— I refuse to speak with another crazed sixteen-year-old , he’d said—and was helping the handful of noncrazed customers who were actually shopping.

Returning from the stockroom after dropping off the package, Darla glanced at her watch again to see that time was doing a pretty fair semblance of freezing. The words “a long, long day” echoed in her mind. Sometimes it was the anticipation and not the actual event that was the killer, she thought with an inner grimace.

“Hold down the fort. I’ll be back,” Darla told the others and headed out the front door to see how things were going outside.

Controlled mayhem was the best description of what awaited her. All five hundred allowed fans must have been already standing in the line, which wrapped from the front of the store and around the block.

Oh my God, it’s like an undertakers’ convention , was Darla’s first thought upon seeing the sea of black . . . not that the color wasn’t already the official uniform of a large percentage of New York City’s women. That had been one of the first things she’d noticed after her move there; though, as Jake had pointed out with a grin, the pastels and earth tones that Darla favored made it easy to spot her in a crowd.

But few of the city’s stylish black-clad working women wore hooded black capes over long black shifts as did almost every one of these girls of various ages and ethnicities. Darla spotted several random teen boys among the crowd—fans, she wondered, or simply there to pick up girls?—dressed in black to match their female counterparts. And where in the heck had they all found these cloaks, anyhow? She sure hadn’t seen any Capes R Us stores back in the malls in Dallas. Clearly New York City had more shops catering to goth outerwear.