Page 34 of Again with Feeling

Okay, Itried. But it turned out, tumbling down a hill while strapped inside a couple of tons of metal and fiberglass takes a toll on the body. Every inch of me ached. My neck and shoulders were so stiff that I moved with the grace and poise of a young Frankenstein’s monster. And the headache that had started last night had settled into what felt like permanent residency behind my eyes.

Eventually, though, I dragged myself into the bathroom. A hot shower helped. A longer, hotter soak in the tub helped even more. Best of all was the combo of acetaminophen and ibuprofen. By the time I was pulling on jeans and a tee (call me a pessimist, but this one just said GAME OVER and showed one of those ghosts from Pac-Man), I almost felt human.

As I made my way down to the kitchen, the sounds of my steps echoed back in the stillness of Hemlock House. Bobby had gone to work, of course, and Indira was probably at the farmer’s market—I was fairly sure today was a Sunday. If Keme was around, he was probably in the billiard room slaughtering people on Xbox, but he might have gone surfing or to hang out with Millie or, as was often the case, simply disappeared, the way cats do, to do his secret Keme things.

Indira, bless her heart, had left me big, fat Belgian waffles, the ones with the sugar pearls, as well as fruit and whipped cream for toppings. I warmed up the waffles in the toaster (that’s a life hack) and, uh, ate a reasonable amount. Look, there wasfruit involved—take that, Bobby and everyone else who worries I’m going to get scurvy!

I was finishing my fifth (reasonable!) waffle when I made up my mind. Yes, I needed to do some writing with Hugo. Yes, I needed to do some of my own writing (I was more flexible on this point). But I couldn’t stop thinking about the attack last night.

Because that was what it had been—someone (not an editor, not my parents, not Hugo) wanted me dead. Someone had tried tokillme. And although I wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, I didn’t regularly have people trying to end my life. At least, I hadn’t before I moved to Hastings Rock. (Try not to act so surprised.) Which meant, as far as I was concerned, that whoever had tried to kill me had done so because I was looking into Richard’s death.

That fact woke up the writer part of my brain. One of the necessary considerations for a cold case-style mystery was a reason for people in the present to care about a murder in the past. Often, it was easy enough to give someone a reason to want the investigation to succeed—a bereaved family member or friend wanted justice, etc. (Although, as my conversations with Vivienne’s family had taught me, this wasn’t, apparently, universally the case.) Slightly more difficult was creating reasons for people in the present to care about obstructing or ending an investigation. The easiest answer was that the killer was still alive and didn’t want the truth to come out. The second one that came to mind was that someone was hiding a secret that wasn’t necessarily about the killing, but that was somehow adjacent to it. Like, they’d done something they were ashamed of—or that maybe was illegal—and it might come to light in the course of the investigation.

So, what were we dealing with here?

And now that my writer brain was waking up, there were other pieces of this puzzle that I was trying to fit into place.When Bobby had asked me how sleuths in mystery novels solved cold cases, I’d told him about interviews, historical research, etc. And that was all true. But had I missed something? I ran through the examples that came to mind.

The easiest was, of course, the masterpiece: Agatha Christie’sNemesis. The book is stellar for a number of reasons. It’s one of the later Miss Marple books, and by that point, Christie had honed her craft to perfection. Miss Marple isn’t the cardboard cutout she is in the early books; she’s grown and become more nuanced and complicated, and instead of being on the sidelines, offering advice to the police, she’s now investigating crimes on her own. In fact, the premise of the book is so much better than just a cold case mystery (but it’s Agatha Christie, so that’s not a surprise). Miss Marple gets hired to investigate a crime—but she’s not told what the crime is. Instead, she gets sent on a private tour, and, of course, she discovers not only the crime, but the killer. And, as usual, she does so through her usual combination of intuitive interviews and an intimate knowledge of human nature. But, since I wasn’t particularly intuitive or incisive about human nature, I wasn’t sure that example was going to help.

Another of the classics was Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant novelThe Daughter of Time. This one was about as different from Christie as you could get. Police inspector Alan Grant, who has already successfully investigated other twisty mysteries in previous books, is laid up in hospital with a broken leg. In fact, he’s confined to the hospital for the whole book. (Another coup, honestly.) Since he doesn’t have anything better to do—because nobody had invented the internet,Crime Cats, or Xbox yet—he decides he’s going to solve a mystery that’s hundreds of years old: did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? (I guess if you’re Josephine Tey, you play big or you go home.) He does the whole investigation from his bed by reading historicaldocuments, interviewing physicians about the wounds and illnesses he finds in them, even by examining children’s books. Super cool stuff, and a triumph of pushing the mystery genre to a new boundary, but it didn’t give me anything new to work with. (Except, honestly, the idea of solving mysteries in bed. Maybe Bobby would have fewer objections if I took that approach? Or maybe Will Gower was, like, in a coma, but he could talk through some kind of brain-scanning-computer-thingy? I needed to work on the details.)

Vivienne herself had written a cold case mystery for her Matron of Murder series. It was darker than the Golden Age stuff, of course, like much of Vivienne’s work. I couldn’t remember the details, but it had to do with a married couple who turned out to be brother and sister. (And this was beforeGame of Thrones!) Oh, and they’d murdered their parents together. So, you know, that was a thing.

I toyed briefly with the idea that maybe the book had been based on a real experience, but Vivienne’s father was very much (scarily) alive, and she certainly hadn’t married her brother. Maybe there had been some taboo interest on her part? But even that didn’t feel right—and Jane or Neil or Candy would have noticed.

Without anything better that came to mind, I decided I wanted to talk to Candy—without Arlen around to interrupt. I thought I had an idea how I might do that.

After loading my plate in the dishwasher, I ran up to my room (healed by the miracle of waffles) and grabbed a hoodie, my Mexico 66s, and my keys. Then I stopped because—oh yeah—the Jeep was currently in the possession of Mr. Del Real of Swift Lift Towing.

Well, shoot.

I took out my phone (which Mr. Del Real had returned to me after towing the Jeep away) and debated calling Millie. I didn’t want to get her involved, but maybe she’d lend me her car—

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I didn’tquitejump out of my Mexico 66s, but it was close.

Keme, arms folded, glowered at me from the doorway. His dark hair was wet, and he wore his usual attire—a sun-faded and fraying Ripcurl tee, board shorts that were clearly a size too big for him, and his ancient, cracking slides. None of that, though, kept him from generating a surprising amount of menace.

“Jeez, you almost gave me a heart attack,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Keeping an eye on you so you don’t do something stupid.”

“Wait, how long have you—” I held up a finger. “In the first place, three of those waffles were defective.”

Keme’s expression didn’t change much, but he did, somehow, manage to look disappointed in me.

“And second, what do you mean you’re keeping an eye on me?”

“Bobby said—”

“What?”

(I might have lost control of my volume at that point.)

Keme must have realized he’d already said too much, though, because he just set his jaw and stared back at me.

“What exactly did Bobby say to you?”

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