Charlaine Harris - Crimes by Moonlight

Stella came back into the room five minutes before the hour was up, and Mark could tell she was as anxious as he was. Half the people were watching the clock, while the others were watching the door. One minute before the time was up, Ramon came into the room, grinning widely. “I believe we have the missing item,” he said. His assistants came behind him pushing Geoff into the room ahead of them, still alive, but with only one arm.

Mark turned to Stella, who was smiling at him, and neither of them noticed that Reinette had fainted again.

“IT was the joke of a lifetime!” Ramon said admiringly.

“Perhaps not so funny to Reinette,” Stella said.

They had gotten the whole story out of Geoff. It was a classic case of buyer’s remorse. After signing Reinette’s contract for far more money than he should have spent, he’d had to meet the terms even as the economy drained his pocketbook. As Mark had verified with a quick audit, Geoff was fast approaching bankruptcy, and the monthly gifts of jewelry were the last straw.

So he’d staged his own death, spreading around the dust he’d brought in the velvet bag Reinette was so covetous of and cutting off his own arm to add the right touch of horror.

“Because he’d rather lose his arm than lose face,” Mark said.

Stella rolled her eyes. “Aren’t Ramon’s jokes enough?”

“Sorry.”

After setting the stage, Geoff snuck out of the room and locked the door behind him before going to hide in the attic.

“I’m surprised it took so long to find him,” Mark said to Ramon. “I told you to look up there first.”

“Oh, we found him in the first ten minutes. We only waited to make a better entrance.”

There was nothing Mark could say to that, and no point, anyway. Ramon was incorrigible.

Geoff had planned to escape from the mansion at the earliest opportunity and had already arranged a new identity to use for as long as necessary. He’d assumed that Reinette wouldn’t survive long as Alexis’s belonging, but that by the time he reemerged from hiding, nobody would care enough to bring a case against him. Reinette was not well-liked.

Once the plot was revealed, Reinette, with prompting from Mark, asked for judgment against Geoff for trying to skip out on their contract. Alexis, furious that he’d dishonored her line, had supported the concubine.

Stella’s judgment was that Reinette be released from her contract but that she immediately receive everything promised to her, including the jewelry or its cash value, which would drive Geoff into poverty. Moreover, since Geoff had been willing to go without an arm, he could continue to do so. Each time it grew back, it would be cut off again. For a full five years. Knowing how much it hurt to regrow a finger, let alone an arm, even Vilmos winced at Stella’s decision, while Alexis offered up another one of her rare smiles.

Reinette was so grateful that she offered to feed Mark right then and there, but he respectfully declined. He hadn’t wanted her enslaved, but that didn’t mean he liked her. He did accept her emerald ring as a thank-you gift and planned to give it to Stella at the first opportunity.

“I think Reinette has learned something from all this,” Ramon said. “She’s going to change her life around, perhaps attend college or go into charity work.”

Mark and Stella stared at him.

Ramon chortled. “Just kidding. As far as I know, her only goal is to see how fast she can spend Geoff’s money. When that gets old, she may sign another contract. Or perhaps I’ll offer her the Choice.”

“Ramon, tell me you’re joking,” Mark said, aghast.

“Oh, I know that she’s vapid and vain and greedy, and honestly, not terribly bright.”

“Then why?”

“Because I’m in love with the little bitch!” Ramon snapped. Then he gathered himself enough to put the clown mask back up. “It would give me somebody else to play jokes on instead of you, Marcus-won’t that be a relief? Maybe after a decade or two or three, she’ll grow up.”

He sauntered off, leaving Mark and Stella to enjoy their first time alone in what seemed like days. They took advantage of it promptly.

Afterward, Mark said, “I just realized that Ramon purposely maneuvered me into defending Reinette.”

“That’s quite a compliment, to put the life of his beloved in your hands.”

“That kind of compliment I can do without. Setting me against you, then dragging out the search for Geoff to the last minute. Which reminds me. I never thanked you for giving me that hour.”

“You’re welcome. Besides, I needed it, too.”

“Oh?”

She looked embarrassed. “It took me most of that time to get in touch with a sorcerer I know. He was ready to teleport into the house on my signal, and teleport out with Reinette.”

“You mean you would have-?”

“I know you, Mark. You wouldn’t have defended Reinette unless you thought she was innocent, and could never have accepted what would have happened to her if I had found her guilty. That helped me realize that I couldn’t, either.”

There was no way he could say anything to match that, so he didn’t try. Instead, he showed her how he felt even more enthusiastically than before.

By the time he’d exhausted his gratitude, dawn was nearly upon them.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Mark said. “Why did you give me the Choice instead of making me your concubine?”

“I knew five years with you wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “I was taking the long view.”

Author and journalist Steve Brewer has published sixteen books, including the comic Bubba Mabry private eye series and the recent thriller Cutthroat. The first Bubba book, Lonely Street, was made into an independent Hollywood film starring Jay Mohr, Robert Patrick, and Joe Mantegna. Brewer’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Damn Near Dead and The Last Noel. A longtime newspaperman and syndicated columnist, he now writes a column for www.anewscafe.com, an online magazine in Redding, California, where he’s lived since 2003. Brewer has served on the national board of directors of Mystery Writers of America, and has twice been an Edgar® Award judge. More at www.stevebrewerbooks.com.

In addition to her award-winning archaeology mysteries, Dana Cameron’s Fangborn short story, “The Night Things Changed” (in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner), won a 2008 Agatha and a 2009 Macavity and was nominated for a 2009 Anthony award. Her historical short story, “Femme Sole,” appears in Boston Noir (edited by Dennis Lehane). Dana lives in Massachusetts with her husband and is hard at work on a Fangborn novel. Learn more about her writing at www.danacameron.com.

Barbara D’Amato has won the Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction, the Agatha twice, the Anthony twice, the Macavity, the first Mary Higgins Clark Award, and several Lovies. She is a past president of Mystery Writers of America and of Sisters in Crime. She divides her time between Chicago and Michigan.

Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of eleven novels and more than one hundred short stories. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and have also earned him three Edgar® Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

Jack Fredrickson’s latest mystery, Honestly Dearest, You’re Dead, is a selection of the Mystery Guild and received a starred review from Library Journal. His first novel, A Safe Place for Dying, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was nominated for a Shamus Award. His short fiction appears in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (most recently, “For the Jingle,” May 2009) and is anthologized in Chicago Blues and in Michael Connelly’s The Blue Religion. His most recent essay appeared in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. His next novel, Hunting Sweetie Rose, comes out from St. Martin ’s in January 2011. Jack lives west of Chicago. Check him out at www.JackFredrickson.com.