Page 52 of By the Book

That roused me from the fog of my thoughts. “So, what? Colleen gets charged, even though you say she’ll plead down. George is dead. Wanda is gone. And that’s the end of it?”

“Of course not. We’ll lift Wanda’s fingerprints from the rental property. We’ll distribute as much information as we can about her. We’re still processing the site where George Chin’s body was found, and we’ll follow up on whatever that investigation turns up.”

The words went through my head like white noise. It was over. And nobody was going to pay for the deaths of two people. I grasped at the one good thing that seemed to have come out of this. “Mrs. Shufflebottom is cleared, then? You’re going to let her go?”

“I never arrested her,” the sheriff said with surprising gentleness. “She came in for questioning, that’s all. And even though it’s a moot point, she wasn’t a suspect anymore. I have no idea why she didn’t want to tell us where she went after leaving Hemlock House—or, for that matter, why she left in such a hurry—but we got security camera footage of her at the library from the other night. She went straight there after leaving Hemlock House, which means she didn’t have time to be involved in the mayor’s death.”

Nodding, I got to my feet. That was good. That was the only good thing about the whole night, it seemed.

“Thank you for your help,” the sheriff said. “You did a good job, Dash.”

And that was strange, I thought through my exhaustion as I let her lead me out of the interview room. Because it felt like I’d done a very bad one.

Chapter 13

I didn’t talk to my parents that night. We went home, and I texted Bobby, and when sleep finally dragged me under, he still hadn’t replied.

I had the worst dreams—gray, formless smoke broken by strange geometries that dissolved again immediately, as though I were stumbling through a great emptiness. When I woke, my body ached the way it does sometimes after a bad night. The sun was too high and too bright. My head throbbed. And my brain put together details: I was alone in bed, and the door to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom was closed. I knew what that meant, because it happened fairly regularly, although usually not under circumstances like these. When Bobby came home from a late shift and didn’t want to wake me, he did that. He shut the bathroom door, and he slept in his room. It was thoughtful, like so many things Bobby did. But I lay there, and I thought, He’s still mad.

Finally, I dragged myself out of bed. I showered. I found a pair of joggers and a ringer tee (it was super cute, light pink, with a stylized Princess Peach on the front, but even that couldn’t cheer me up this morning). I eased open the door to Bobby’s room, just to make sure. The sound of his slow, deep breaths should have been reassuring. He was home. He was safe. Instead, I felt like my heart dropped into a bucket as I shut the door again.

There was no sign of my parents. No sign of Millie. No sign of Keme. No sign of Indira, except for a plate of raspberry-muffins with honey butter on the side. I warmed them up. I slatheredthem with butter. I gave myself a coffee transfusion. And by degrees, I started to feel human again.

This would be good, I told myself as I rinsed the plate and loaded it in the dishwasher. This would be good for us. Every couple had disagreements, and we needed to learn how to work through them.

Of course, itwasn’tgood. It was proof that I was irresponsible. It was proof that I had bad judgment. It was proof that I couldn’t be trusted. And Bobby deserved someone trustworthy. He deserved someone responsible. He deserved someone who could be a true partner, not someone Bobby had to take care of.

After breakfast, I thought about dissolving into goop on the chesterfield while I played video games. Then I thought about how that would look when Bobby woke up and found me puddled in front of the TV. Not good. Not good at all. So, I slunk into the den and tried to write.

Triedwas the operative word in that sentence. I pulled up my as-yet-untitled manuscript of my Will Gower novel. And then I stared at it. In the last twenty-four hours, I had not experienced any strokes of genius, moments of inspiration, or acts of God. I was right where I’d left things, with the same problem: I needed to find a way to make my MacGuffin—whatever it was—meaningful to the story. That’s what the best mystery novels did. But I had zero idea how to do that.

And because it was easier to think about something else, my thoughts drifted back to the investigation.

Why had Wanda killed George Chin?Hadshe killed him? Or had Colleen/Joan somehow managed to create a perfect alibi?

It didn’t matter, I told myself. The case was closed, more or less. My part in it was done. The sheriff had told me I’d done a good job.

But the problem was that it didn’t make any sense. Why kill George? Everyone wanted to believe Wanda was the obvious explanation—she’d killed him because he’d tried to rip off a bad guy. But if this scary business guy wanted his money back, why not drive George back to Portland, force him to liquidate his assets, and then forget about him?

Not everything is about motive, I told that annoying voice in my head. Murders aren’t rational. Maybe Wanda got sick of George. Maybe she couldn’t stand listening to him for another minute. Maybe they argued about the money, and Wanda lost her temper. Maybe George tried to kill Wanda, and she got the better of him. There were lots of possible explanations. And, I reminded myself, it was none of my business.

If this were a book, that annoying little voice in my brain said.

No, I told it. Absolutely not.

But it was too late—the little writer inside my head was awake and alert now, poking at the events, prodding the sequence of the last few days, trying to make sense of it.

If this were a book, what would happen?

It depended on the book. That was the easy answer. And that was part of the problem. It could be an art heist. Art heist stories were a relatively small but popular genre. And they had a few predictable elements. The events of the last few days certainly sounded familiar: wealthy collectors, art forgery, the theft of an irreplaceable object, etc. One twist that featured regularly in heist stories was the job within a job. InThe Thomas Crown Affair(the 1999 one, and yes, technically it’s a movie, not a book—oh, also, spoiler alert), the heist appears to be about stealing a painting. Instead, though, it’s really about getting together with a girl—it’s kind of a long story. Maybe George had put the diary up for auction in order to achieve another goal—to get with Mrs.Shufflebottom? That didn’t seem likely. But it was kind of a fun idea.

Another common twist was that the stolen piece of art was actually something else. Sometimes it was a forgery. Sometimes it was a different piece of artwork. Sometimes it was less valuable than what you expected. Or sometimes the stolen artwork turns out to be an even morevaluable masterpiece. Or the art is cursed, and there’s a rash of mysterious, possibly paranormal, deaths. InThe Thomas Crown Affair(yes, again), they use a trick with a forgery being painted over another painting—a forged Pissarro (worthless) is painted over a real Monet (priceless). In our case, though, I wasn’t sure this helped. We already knewthe diary was a forgery.

There were also more, uh, action-oriented art heists. Daniel Silva, for example, had several books like that. InPortrait of an Unknown Woman,the discovery of a fake painting sends Gabriel Allon after a prolific forger (with lots of thrills along the way). I definitely didn’t want to have to repeat any of Gabriel Allon’s feats of bravery—the cardio alone would kill me—but in some ways, that book seemed to match what was going on here. George Chin had forged and sold at least two books. Of course, he’d been caught both times, so it wasn’t exactly like he was a criminal mastermind.

Maybe the best-known example of an art theft story, though, was the one I was already living with in my head:The Maltese Falcon. In a noir mystery, there was often a femme fatale manipulating—or attempting to manipulate—the detective. Nobody had tried to seduce me lately (rude!), so that didn’t seem like an option. There was the possibility that someone had tried to seduce Bobby. Honestly, I would have paid money to watch that. Bobby probably would have nodded and made polite conversation and then arrested them. Of course, if I everdidsee someone try to seduce Bobby, I wouldn’t be responsible formy actions. (Hair-pulling, followed by scratching, followed by ripping off his fake eyelashes.)

I dragged my thoughts back to the matter at hand. If this were a noir art heist story, George’s death would be part of the inevitable betrayal that always happens in that kind of book, one of the standard twists in the genre: the double-cross. So maybe someone had betrayed George—Colleen or Wanda seemed to be the most likely candidates. But if that was the case, why had they betrayed him? To what end? The problem with that theory was that there was nothing for them to fight over—they knew the diary was a fake, so they weren’t trying to steal it from each other. Colleen’s story about a rare book hidden at Hemlock House sounded like bunk to me. I’d never evenheardofAstor’s Arcadiabefore this weekend; I highly doubted there had been a copy of it hidden in my house.

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