Book Club Bloodshed (6 page)

Missy got to work a few minutes early, which was a miracle considering how much running around she’d done this morning.

Her boss, Brett, was outside sweeping the walk in front of the bookstore. Books and Crannies had once been part of a local chain, offering new titles, but once the big stores got a foothold in the area and began consolidating, it became a used bookstore.

Books and Crannies stayed open through low prices and sheer volume, thus catering to the voracious readers in the community. Many times in the last year, Brett had hinted darkly of a probable closure in the near future. At first, Missy had worried about her job but these days was almost used to the uncertainty. She knew she should probably get a new job, one that was more secure, but there was always so much going on, too many things to do, and truth be told, she loved working in the bookstore. Part of her wanted to ride it out as long as she could.

She felt bad for the owner, Brett, though. He was early fifties, so at least a decade if not more away from retirement. It was the worst age to find a new job, and given how lean the store was running she doubted he had much cash sitting around to start something else. He likely wouldn’t be able to keep the store going until he was ready to collect Social Security. Despite all this, though, Brett was his usual chipper self, as always wearing his loose sneaks, jeans, t-shirt, and cardigan.

He went to get the door for her but stopped and did a double-take. “You losing weight, Miss?”

Oh no.

Oh
no.

Missy hated when people asked her this question. Because nothing good ever came of it. By dieting you were admitting you were fat. When you told people you were dieting they protested loudly and falsely, claiming you didn’t need to, that you were fine the way you were. At first they cheered you on, but later, when you began your inevitable climb back up the scale, they got a different look in their eyes.

Acknowledgement. As if all along, they’d been expecting you to fail and just waiting for it.

“I don’t know.” She smiled. “Maybe.”

“Well, you look great.”

“Thanks.”

Inside, the store was crammed with books as always. But there were no customers. Missy dropped her bag off in the back, kept her phone with her, and then got behind the register. She’d brought her Kindle with her out of habit, though she really didn’t think she could read right now. Her mind was too distracted.

“I’m sorry to hear about Anne,” Brett said.

Missy nodded. “Thanks.”

He shrugged. “She was kind of a you-know-what, but still, you don’t like to see anybody go out like that.”

“I know what you mean.”

“So.” Brett stood in front of the desk and made an awkward face, like he’d just swallowed something that tasted awful. “Noreen.”

Missy hadn’t even thought through the repercussions. Noreen was Brett’s only other employee. And starting tomorrow, he was supposed to be on vacation.

Brett was talking. “…know she’s innocent and Tyler is a good man. I’m sure the truth will out and in a few days, this will all blow over for her. But until then, I’m afraid we have a scheduling conflict.”

Brett hadn’t taken more than a day off in about…Missy couldn’t even put a number on it. Had he ever taken a vacation since she’d been here? One that wasn’t just a long weekend?

“I’d cancel if I could, Miss, but you know about my mother…”

She knew his mother had just been diagnosed with cancer. Fortunately they’d caught it early, but she was seventy-five. Brett had to go see her.

“I know this is a lot to ask, Missy, but can you work open to close till Monday?”

She wanted to say yes, but that was four days of working around the clock. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem…

But Brett had always been good to her, never refusing her time off even when it was unexpected. He gave them both bonuses whenever he could, and almost always whenever they had an especially good month. Looking back now on working at Books and Crannies for all these years, and hearing from her friends some of the horror stories of working for a bad manager, she realized that Brett was a really good boss. The wolves might have been at the door perpetually, but he kept them at bay and never took it out on his staff.

She’d taken too long to answer, so Brett filled the silence.

“How about a shortened day? We’re busiest from eleven to two and then again from five to eight. Could you work those—”

“Yes,” she quickly blurted out, feeling bad for even hesitating. She’d just have to make the time to investigate Anne Baxter’s death when she wasn’t working. Brett had told her she could close up for a few hours in the middle of the day if need be. And if it was really slow, she could always make phone calls to run down leads.

Ideally she should have asked Brett for the next two days off. Noreen’s life was more important than this job. And Brett probably would have said yes. But she didn’t want to take advantage of his usual generosity.

“Oh, that’s great. Thank you, Missy. Thank you.” He surprised her with a hug, then grabbed his car keys off the desk. “Now I’m headed out to lunch. I’ll be back in an hour.”

***

An hour later, Brett wasn’t back and only one person had entered the store. And that person hadn’t even been a customer. It was a little old lady asking for directions.

Missy had used the hour wisely though. Taking out a pad of paper from the back, she decided to generate her list of suspects. At the top, she wrote ANON COP, and under that she began filling in the names of everybody at the Book Club.

As she wrote their names, she realized she had basically identified everybody that had a grudge against Anne Baxter, before the woman had even died. She had been trying to cheer Ruby the librarian up, assuring her that a few people didn’t like Anne and that the woman was probably not long for the Book Club. As it turned out, Missy had been right.

She crossed Noreen’s, Ruby’s, Alison’s, and Gloria’s names off the list. She knew in her heart of hearts, no matter what the preliminary evidence suggested, that Noreen hadn’t killed Anne. Gloria Campbell was Anne’s only close friend in the Book Club. And Missy just couldn’t think of a reason why Ruby Kellogg would kill Anne. The younger woman was a rather timid librarian and had never said a mean thing to anybody as far as Missy knew.

Alison Breckmyer was relatively new to town and barely knew any of them, let alone Anne Baxter enough to kill her. Alison came from Delaware so Missy doubted there was a past connection to Alison she didn’t know about. If there had been, it would have come up by now in conversation at the Book Club.

Still, for all Missy knew about the woman, she could have been a sociopath. She didn’t really know her at all. It wasn’t a good idea to be so dismissive of her as a suspect.

She rewrote Alison’s name under the others. Better to keep her on the list.

That left three people other than the anonymous cop.

Ellen Stein.

Trudy Shaw.

Kylie Thompson.

Missy went through one by one in detail.

Ellen Stein’s long-term fiancé, Marco, had gotten cold feet and called off the wedding. Not more than two weeks later, he was spotted out with Anne Baxter at Carney’s of all places. And pretty soon, Marco and Anne had tied the knot. That marriage had lasted all of two minutes. Nobody knew for sure that Marco had cheated on Ellen with Anne, but anybody with half a brain would have suspected it. Though that was pretty horrible of Anne, it had been many years ago. As a matter of fact, she’d once overheard Ellen and Anne joking about Marco, and Ellen hadn’t felt strongly enough to object to Anne’s participation in the Book Club. Still, though, it was motive so it needed to be checked out.

Kylie Thompson’s hapless but sweet brother, Robert, had never been able to hold onto a job mainly due to his drinking. Robert had finally gotten the help he needed last year and had been on the wagon ever since. He’d managed to keep his act together long enough to land a job working in the deli of the main grocery store that Anne’s family owned, right in the center of town. Robert had been a good employee but from what Missy had heard, just didn’t get along with one of the managers at the store. The guy wasn’t even his boss, but he’d reported Robert for drinking on the job. Accounts differed as to whether this was true or not, so Missy had no idea. Facing a he-said, he-said situation, Anne had sided with the manager who’d been working for her family for twenty years, trusting him over Robert who was more likely to have had a drink than not, truth be told. By the time Robert was let go, the Book Club had been going strong for a year and Anne was already part of it. Kylie didn’t make a stink about Anne still being a member and had decided to keep coming herself.

And last, and probably least, there was Trudy Shaw.

Trudy Shaw and her husband had decided a few years ago to leave their jobs and start flipping houses. Missy envied their entrepreneurial spirit, though she was way too risk adverse to think of quitting Books and Crannies and putting all her eggs into the one temperamental basket of real estate. She flipped much smaller things—mostly old furniture that she refurbished—at flea markets. Sure, the profit was much smaller, only a few hundred here and there. But Missy never had to worry about going into debt. Then again, she only had a few thousand dollars in her savings account at any given time (she just never seemed to get ahead) so maybe her “safe” way of living wasn’t really that safe at all.

Trudy and her husband, Jason, had been flipping houses for four years now, though, so they must have been doing something right. They had even ventured into the even more speculative pursuit of purchasing undeveloped tracts of land. A particularly attractive parcel had come to their attention and they’d moved in quickly, hoping to snatch it up before too many others had gotten wind.

They didn’t move fast enough. Trudy had mentioned this in passing at one of the Book Clubs during a break to Ellen Stein. It had not been intended for Anne’s ears, but she had been within earshot. But next thing they knew, the seller was balking at the last minute and finally rejected their offer which he’d agreed upon. He sold the land for an undisclosed price to Anne of course. When Trudy confronted her, Anne had pretended to know nothing of her involvement, claiming she had only ever dealt with the seller and didn’t even know there were other buyers interested. Of course, nobody believed her but nobody could prove she’d known.

Now that Missy thought of it, Anne had been bragging about the sale a month ago. She’d subdivided the tract and sold it off in pieces. For once she’d been polite enough not to share the actual profit with the group, but that must have been enough to set Trudy off. She and her husband had probably missed out on a huge opportunity. But was lost profit enough motive?

Missy dropped the pen on the pad and sat back. Dragging the rubber band out of her hair, she refixed her ponytail. Her dark red, wavy hair was in bad need of a cut, full of split ends. A few greys had even poked their heads out, like meerkats on a prairie.

If she’d learned anything, money was always enough motive to kill. A real estate deal gone bad had been the root cause of the last murder she investigated. Of the three then, Trudy was the most likely killer. Anne hadn’t fired Kylie, she’d fired Kylie’s brother who might have been drinking on the job anyway. And yes, Anne had stolen Ellen’s fiancée but that had been a long time ago. It would have been strange for that to come to a head now.

The door opened and Missy looked up, expecting to see Brett returning from lunch. But instead, she saw a man with thinning hair and a mustache (a mustache!) that covered his top lip enter. He was short and thin and wore an overcoat that reminded her of Columbo. He smiled when he saw her, like they were old friends.

For a moment, Missy worried that she did know him but didn’t recognize him. He could have been somebody from high school. Her graduating class had been over four hundred, and by now she’d surely forgotten a few of them.

The short, thin, mustached man walked to the desk and nodded at her. “You Missy?”

“Yes?”

He nodded again, his lower lip jutting out. Missy didn’t understand what emotion he was trying to convey with the expression.

“Yeah, you are.”

She squirmed under his stare. Since he’d entered the store, his eyes hadn’t left her. “And you are?”

His eyes kept elevatoring up and down. God, she hated it when men did that.

“We have a…mutual friend, if you know what I mean.” He rubbed the side of his nose. At first Missy thought he was trying wipe a booger off it, then she realized he was gesturing at her like they shared a secret.

“I actually don’t know what you mean.”

He opened his arms and the overcoat opened also. For one horrifying moment, she worried he wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

With palms out, the man acted hurt. “Hello? Lee Greenberg. You know, Lee?”

It took Missy five seconds to get it. “
You’re
the private detective.”

“In the flesh.” He raised his eyebrows several times. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Lee didn’t do you justice.”

He stuck his hand out. Missy didn’t really want to shake. The guy gave off a sleazy vibe. Gravity, or some other force, kept pulling his eyes down in the neighborhood of her boobs.