Page 26 of Top Secret Vampire

Biting down on her lower lip, she shook her head. “She’s my first and only assistant. Some authors have more than one, and I’ve thought of hiring more, maybe one to handle marketing while another does graphics and manages my newsletter, but Tracy always insisted she wanted to do as many of those tasks as she could. I’m kind of a control freak, and I still do a lot of things myself, so it was easy to let her handle the things I wasn’t good at and do the rest on my own.”

“Let’s not forget Mary,” I said, tapping my paper with my pen.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Mary?”

“His hawk.”

“You think he told the seagull to attack me?”

“You said he runs a bird sanctuary, and he stated himself that he raised and trained Mary. Does he work with seagulls as well?”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh.”

“Tracy and Wilber can stay on the list as well as Flint, though I can’t imagine why he’d endanger his career at the college to come after me. Who else is on your list?”

“No one else so far. Do you have family or friends who might be eager to ruin your career or drive you away from Mystic Harbor? Those are our primary motives right now.”

We’d talked about other reasons but kept coming back to her career and her recent move to this area.

“I wish I’d kept the blender parts so you could look at them, but they went out in my trash pick-up. But no, no family or friends I can think of who might want to do something like that.”

“Please list your family members and any close friends who might still be in the area. I’ll look into their backgrounds and see if any should be added to my list.”

“Aunt Beverly is my only surviving family other than my mom. She’s never liked me, but I doubt she’d try to ruin me. She never married and has no children. I’m sure I have second or third cousins living somewhere in the country who I’ve never met, but I don’t even know their names. I could ask my mother.”

I wrote her aunt and mother down for further investigation.

“As for friends, I didn’t stay in touch with anyone other than a few from college, and I haven’t spoken with them in at least a year. None live locally. They came here to go to college and left to take jobs.”

“Names?”

She listed three I’d look up online. “I suppose you could add Charmaine to the list. She and I were best friends in college, but we argued—”

“About what?”

“Her older brother, of all things. He had a crush on me, and she kept insisting I should go out with him. But I wasn’t interested.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Hodgkins.”

I wrote it down.

“Funny, but I swear I saw Charmaine in town before we found my tires slashed. But when I waved, whoever it was turned and walked away. If it was her, I swear she would’ve responded in some way. Sure, we argued, but we shared everything back then.” Her lips thinned. “It couldn’t have been her.”

Perhaps not, but I’d investigate any clue, even those that seemed improbable.

“Anyone else?” Reese asked.

“There’s only one other suspect.”

“Who?”

“Jolene Molson.”

Chapter 11

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