Murder at the Book Group (15 page)

We agreed to decaf and Lucy headed for the kitchen, cookies in hand. Annabel sat on the edge of the armchair seat, back straight with legs together and slanted to the right. I plopped down on the sofa and put my feet up on the table.

“Poor Evan,” Annabel said. “
Such
a nice man. Have you talked to him?”

“No. I left him a voice mail, but haven't heard back. According to Kat, he's coping. It has to be a horrific shock.”

“Any word on what it was that killed her?”

“No.” I lied, holding to my resolve to keep inside information under wraps.

I wanted to get Annabel going on the reason for this impromptu visit but figured Lucy would be furious if I started without her. So I forced myself to be patient as Annabel eased herself into the chair and set to twirling a lock of hair behind her ear. If Lucy didn't show up soon, I'd have to resort to small talk about the weather. As it turned out, the cats saved me from bland conversational efforts. The reserved Shammy hovered at the edge of the room, observing our visitor from afar, while the extroverted Daisy sniffed the toe of Annabel's sling-back pump. When she jumped up onto Annabel's lap and Annabel shrieked I shooed the cat away. She gave each of us a reproachful look before she joined Shammy and they trotted off.

“Sorry about that,” Annabel said as she brushed at her pants. “I'm not a cat person.” I remembered that Annabel had a preference for toy poodles.

Annabel went back to twirling that lock of hair and tapping her toe to a rhythm only she could hear. The dark circles under her eyes told of at least one sleepless night. When Lucy finally showed up with a tray laden with a carafe of decaf, mugs, and cookies, Annabel looked as relieved as I felt.

We went through the rituals of adding cream and stirring, leaving the sugar untouched. Lucy and I picked our favorite cookies—macadamia nut for her and oatmeal raisin for me. I felt a moment of unease, wondering if we had an antidote to any poison in the cookies. That begged the question: what was the antidote? As if by mutual agreement, Lucy and I waited for Annabel to eat her peanut butter cookie before taking tentative bites of our own. Then Annabel turned to me and, voice overly bright, began. “I wonder if I should talk to your friend Vince.” Her voice broke and tears spilled down her cheeks. “That is, if you still communicate—I saw him with that redhead at the signing.”

Lucy grabbed the box of tissues from the end table and handed it to Annabel. I waited a moment for her to collect herself before prompting, “How could Vince help you?”

Annabel didn't answer. Instead she hemmed and hawed for a full minute. Heaving a sigh she said, “I
guess
I can trust both of you. Right?” She looked at each of us in turn. When we agreed with her assessment of our trustworthiness, yet another sigh came forth. At last she began. “Do you remember Ronnie, that horrible woman Trudy Zimmerman brought to book group last summer?”

I nodded and, for Lucy's benefit, described Ronnie as a petite woman with oversized glasses who worked as a librarian at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She'd seemed pleasant enough to me, but Annabel's use of the word “horrible” suggested a darker side.

Annabel said, “She came up to me that night and said she remembered me from the library at UVA where I did research when I lived in Charlottesville. At first I thought she was a fan, but she quickly disabused me of that notion. You
won't
believe this, but she said that maybe I did that research for purposes other than my writing—for example, maybe for killing my dear husband.”

Annabel always referred to her late spouse as her “dear” husband, never as simply
husband
and never by his given name.

The tears started falling again and Annabel said, “She laughed but you don't kid around about things like that.”

Lucy asked, “Why would she think you killed your de—your husband?”

Again, Annabel didn't answer. She blotted her eyes and blew her nose. I considered that Annabel tested a murder method at book group. I read a mystery where a writer poisoned someone to try out the method for authenticity in her writing. The method had worked for that writer and, if Annabel did the same thing, it had worked for her as well. I set aside the what-if scenarios for later—I didn't want to miss any tidbits Annabel might drop.

“Last night she called and started right in with her needling. I guess Trudy told her the news about Carlene.” I didn't let on that Trudy was out of the country—but I imagined that Ronnie had other ways of getting information.

Annabel reenacted the conversation with Ronnie, giving herself a normal voice and Ronnie a chipmunk one. “She said, ‘Funny thing, Ms. Annabel, you're involved in not one but
two
suspicious deaths.' I reminded the twit that Carlene committed suicide. ‘Yeah, right! According to whom?' ‘According to a
note
that she left.' ‘How do we know she wrote the note? I can't help but wonder about you, Annabel . . . I mean, you know so much about killing. You spent hours here at the library poring over books about murder methods and I'm
sure
that your fingerprints remain. Wasn't your first book about a woman killing her husband? It sure would be interesting to match the prints on all the books you handled here at the library with the ones on the note. But maybe now you're too smart to leave your prints. Too bad you weren't so smart years ago.' By this time the woman was
cackling
.

“Like I'd have killed my dear husband. I
loved
him!” Annabel blew her nose again.

Had she? Was her husband really “dear”? Was Annabel using her killer characters to write obliquely about herself? Did she have personal knowledge of a killer's mind?

I asked, “How long ago did your husband die?”

“Ten years next month. I've never gotten over it.
Never
.” She continued to weep and rail. “Can you believe the gall of that woman, the total lack of feeling?”

“Would your prints still be there on the books? How long do they last? And wouldn't other people have used the books in the meantime?”

Annabel held up her hand in a wait-a-minute gesture. Somewhat composed, but with her face still scarlet with emotion, she said, “I don't know how long prints last on paper. As for other people using the books, there are plenty of mystery writers in Charlottesville, so I imagine some of them have availed themselves of the same books.” She took a fresh tissue and mopped her eyes. I hoped our supply would last, but there was always toilet paper. Maybe Annabel was the last of the weeping women we'd have to console. With all the tears of late I regretted not buying stock in a tissue company.

“So, anyway, I think she intends to blackmail me.”

Unfortunately I had a mouthful of decaf. Choking, I managed to swallow it without spitting any on myself. “Blackmail?” I asked with alarm and more than a little disbelief. I remembered posing the question to Lucy about Carlene blackmailing Annabel—but I was just pulling ideas out of thin air. Did blackmail even exist in the real world? I realized that it did, but I'd never known it to touch the lives of anyone of even my remotest acquaintance. But I'd never known murder to touch their lives either. Had I read one too many murder mysteries and now found myself passing eternity in the pages of one, à la
The Twilight Zone
? “What do you mean she
intends
to blackmail you? Why didn't she do it when you were on the phone?”

“The blackmail was
implied
.” Annabel's pressed her lips in a grim line. “She broadly hinted that she could be persuaded not to call the police about the prints. I told her I'd sue her for libel or slander. Whatever.”

I still felt stunned about the word “blackmail,” but Lucy took up the slack. “Frankly, I'm missing something here . . . Why does this Ronnie think you killed Carlene?”

Annabel groaned. “Oh, no doubt it all goes back to the whole thing between Carlene, Randy, and me. I'm sure Trudy told Ronnie the whole sordid story. Or as much of it as she knew to tell—I was never sure just what Trudy knew. So now Ronnie's intimating that I killed Carlene out of revenge. Over Randy! The guy's
nothing
. That's when she went into the wild thing about my fingerprints. She said she'll notify the police about my fingerprints, and that they'll take her seriously because of my close connection with two deaths.”

“Whoa! Let's back up a bit—who's Randy?” Annabel didn't have to know that I already knew about him.

“Yes, um, Randy. Well, he wasn't any big deal. No real loss at all. Despite what
he
thought about himself.” Annabel tossed her already well-tossed hair.

“So, who
is
he?”

“Randy Baker. Trudy's ex. No real loss,” she repeated. Despite her airy tone, I caught a hint of pain and wistfulness crossing Annabel's face. Perhaps Randy was a bigger loss than she cared to admit. Annabel's speech got pressured as she continued, “But another woman might not have taken it so lightly when her man was snatched away from her.”

I thought of a twangy country lament about tragic love. “It sounds like . . . first you were seeing Randy, then Carlene was seeing him. Is that right?”

Annabel huffed a sigh and said, “Okay.” She poured more decaf, added milk, and sipped. Fortified, she began. “You know that Carlene and I were neighbors in the Fan, don't you?” She didn't wait for us to affirm before going on. “We rented the same duplex where I live now.” She took another sip of her decaf. “Anyway, Randy and I met at a signing for
Jack Hit the Road
. He claimed he was a big fan of mine. And so we started dating.”

Lucy asked, “How long did you two date?”

“Oh, a couple of months, I guess. Until the night we went out to dinner with Carlene and her man of the moment. The next thing I knew Carlene and Randy were seeing each other and I was out in the cold. Along with the man of the moment. What was his name?” Annabel looked at us like she expected us to provide the answer. Then she snapped her fingers in triumph. “Tom. Tom something.”

Any regard I had for Carlene was taking a serious nosedive. “Well, that was a crappy thing for them to do! I'm so sorry, Annabel.”

Annabel waved a hand in dismissal. “All in the past. At the time I was pissed, I'll tell you that right now. Not because I especially liked Randy. Truth is, I was about to dump him and he beat me to it. It was the principle of the thing. You know, we never even slept together. I have morals, I don't just jump into bed with men willy-nilly,” she sniffed. “I make them wait. What's all the fuss about sex anyway?”

From her sniffing I guessed she was putting herself above someone who did jump into bed with men willy-nilly. And I had a good idea who that someone was. “And Carlene?”

Annabel, involved in converting a tissue into an origami creation, laughed. “She most definitely didn't make men wait, and Randy was no exception. I heard that headboard banging against my wall the same night as the double date. I thought she was with . . . what did I say his name was?”

“Tom. Tom ‘something,' ” Lucy supplied.

“But the next morning I saw
Randy
leaving.” Annabel paused, perhaps to emphasize the implications of her statement. Lucy and I looked appropriately appalled and Annabel gave a harsh laugh. “I could write a book based on the woman's sex life.”

I felt tempted to advise her that writing about vicarious sex didn't work. It might work for some writers but most needed to have a sex life or at least enjoy sex. As far as I knew, Annabel didn't fit in either category. As for myself, I fit in the second category and hoped that soon I'd fit in the first.

“The walls in those Fan duplexes are thick but not thick enough. Oh shoot!” Annabel spilled decaf on her jacket and we devoted the next couple of minutes to cleaning up the mess. Between Daisy and the decaf, Annabel's dress-for-success outfit wasn't faring well.

“Now where was I?” Annabel asked.

When Lucy prompted with “the walls in the duplex not being thick enough,” Annabel said, “Right. Her bed was on the other side of the wall from mine, so night after night, I had to listen to them. I wound up changing bedrooms. And then,” she said with a dramatic flourish, “one day, it was around dinnertime, I went to Carlene's kitchen door to ask if she'd feed my dog while I went out of town.” As she leaned forward and lowered her voice, I could tell she was enjoying herself. “Did you two see
Fatal Attraction
?”

“Ah, the famous kitchen scene,” I said. We laughed as we recalled the intense kitchen sex between Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. It brought to mind the kitchen sex scene Georgia had told me about, the one that sent Carlene's L.A. roommate packing.

“Randy and Carlene could have been reenacting that scene. There they were, Carlene up on the edge of the sink and Randy's naked behind facing me.”

We laughed all the more. Tears running down my face, I asked, “Did they see you?”

“I don't think so. They were too . . . involved. And I think he was standing on a stool or something. He was quite short.”

“What did you do?”

“Do? Why—I walked away and resolved
never
to approach her door unannounced. The next day I called her from work and asked about my dog. I didn't mention the scene from the night before. She agreed to take care of Yvonne and that was that.”

Lucy said, “So, it sounds like you remained friends with Carlene. If not, you wouldn't ask her to take care of Yvonne. Hazel and I wouldn't let anyone we didn't like tend to Daisy and Shammy.”

At the mention of their names, the cats appeared. They made their way to my side, giving Annabel a wide berth. Lucy checked her watch. “It's nine o'clock. Treat time.” Lucy got up to dispense the treats. “Can I get anything else while I'm in the kitchen?”