Books Can Be Deceiving (26 page)

Everyone froze in place. It was Beth who moved first, dashing toward the stairs, yelling at students to get out of the building. As students poured toward the exits, Lindsey and Beth fought their way back up to Tim’s office.

An apple-cheeked student stood in the doorway. Her hand was pressed over her mouth, and her eyes were huge. Beth reached her first. “Are you okay?”

The girl pointed into the office. “Professor Cushion.”

Lindsey pushed around them and stumbled into the room. Tim was lying on the floor. A red rose of blood was blooming on his shoulder. Lindsey grabbed the bathrobe he’d been wearing earlier and stuffed it against the wound, trying to staunch the flow.

“Tim, can you hear me?” she asked.

His face was taut, and his eyes were glazed. He started to shiver, and Lindsey suspected he was going into shock.

“Call an ambulance!” she yelled at Beth, but Beth already had her phone to her ear and was giving information to the emergency dispatcher.

An ambulance with two EMTs arrived within minutes. They took Tim’s vitals and whisked him out of the building on a stretcher as if they were in a race against death. This did not comfort Lindsey, as she suspected that was exactly the race they were in.

It was only after Tim was taken away, and the campus police were clearing the building, that Lindsey thought to look for the photo they had left behind, but the table where Tim had put it was bare.

“Please tell me it isn’t our fault that Tim Cushion was shot.”

“How is that our fault?” Lindsey asked.

“We show him a photo, he identifies someone we thought was someone else and then winds up shot,” Beth said. Her voice held a note of hysteria. “This Astrid person is here. She’s following us. She knows what we’re doing, and she’s going to kill anyone we come into contact with. We have to tell the police.”

Lindsey grabbed Beth’s shoulders and forced her to look at her. “Beth, Tim is going to be okay. Now we have to calm down and think.”

“I can’t think,” Beth protested. “Lindsey, I’m scared.”

Lindsey nodded. She was, too. “The campus police told us it would just be a few minutes before they interview us,” she said. “We just have to wait a few more minutes, and then we can tell them everything. It’s going to be okay. You’ll see.”

They were standing outside the arts building, which had been cordoned off by yellow “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” tape, amid a swarm of students. The day had become overcast and cold, and Lindsey shivered in her hooded sweatshirt and wished she’d worn a warmer jacket.

The police had questioned the young woman who had found Professor Cushion and were now moving through the crowd asking whether anyone had seen or heard anything suspicious. The head of campus security had asked Lindsey and Beth to wait, as the police wanted to conduct a lengthier interview with them, so they stood cooling their heels, literally, while they waited for him to get to them.

“I’m freezing,” Beth said. “Do you suppose we could run to the car, so I could get my coat?”

“I don’t see why not,” Lindsey said. “It looks like this is going to take a while.”

They headed down the walkway to the Buick. It was easy to spot with its white top and olive body, and Lindsey longed to climb in and crank the heater. She unlocked the passenger door so that Beth could retrieve her jacket.

Once she’d locked the car again, they turned back to the building. The crowd was finally showing signs of thinning. They’d only gone a few steps when a woman wearing a New London School of Design sweatshirt stepped out from behind the directory.

With her brown hair in a ponytail and her face scrubbed clean of makeup, it took Lindsey a second to place her. It was a second too long.

“Sydney,” Beth breathed from beside her.

“No,” Lindsey said. “Astrid. Astrid Blunt.”

“M
ove back to the car,” Astrid ordered. “And don’t do anything stupid. As you know, I will use this.”

She pointed a small handgun out of her sleeve, and Lindsey assumed it was the same gun she’d used to shoot Tim.

Together, she and Beth backtracked to the car.

With shaky hands, Lindsey unlocked the doors. She had the irrational thought that she should be able to overpower Astrid and wrestle her to the ground, but the lethal-looking weapon the other woman carried made her pause. What if an innocent bystander got hurt? She couldn’t risk it.

“You drive,” Astrid said to Lindsey. “And I want your hands where I can see them, at ten and two on the wheel.”

Lindsey slid into the driver’s seat. Beth went to get into the back, but Astrid stopped her, pushing her forward.

“Oh, no, I want you in front with your hands on the dashboard.”

Astrid climbed into the backseat and leaned over the bench seat, so her head was solidly in between Lindsey’s and Beth’s. There would be no whispered plan to get rid of her.

Beth was pitched forward at an awkward angle with her hands on the dash. Lindsey turned the key, and the engine purred to life.

“Turn on the heater,” Astrid ordered. “It’s freezing out there.”

Lindsey did as she was told and then asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“Briar Creek,” Astrid said. Her voice sounded smug. “Back where it all began.”

Lindsey put the car in reverse and slowly backed out of the parking lot. She was hoping the head of security would see her and stop them. But no matter how slowly she drove, no one paid them any attention. With a sigh, she pulled out onto the main road and headed for the highway.

She had a feeling this was one road trip that was not going to end well.

She was just merging onto the highway when Beth looked over her shoulder at Astrid, and in a voice that trembled, she asked, “Why? Why did you kill him?”

“I’m assuming you mean Ernie, or rather Rick, as you knew him?” Astrid asked. Her voice was irritated as if she found Beth’s question tiresome.

Lindsey glanced in the rearview mirror to see Astrid’s face. One eyebrow was raised and her lips curled into a sneer.

“I would think you, of all people, would thank me,” she said.

“Thank you?” Beth choked. “He was my boyfriend and you killed him. Why would I thank you?”

“Oh, please, you dumped him before I killed him. Obviously, you were over him.”

Beth was making choked sputtering noises, so Lindsey figured she’d better intervene and draw the attention away from Beth.

She intentionally moved her hands on the wheel, dipping the right one down and out of sight. She felt the hard metal tip of the handgun press into her right temple.

“Ten and two,” Astrid repeated.

“Sorry,” Lindsey said. She returned her hands to their original positions.

“No matter what he did, he didn’t deserve to die,” Beth said.

Lindsey had to navigate the Buick in between a tractortrailer truck and a Mercedes, so she couldn’t see Astrid’s expression, but she could hear the tone of her voice clearly enough, and it was scathing.

“You don’t know anything,” Astrid said. “What are you, a children’s librarian with aspirations to write a children’s book? Big deal.”

“It is to me,” Beth said. “I’ve worked for years on my story.”

“And your boyfriend stole it,” Astrid said. “Boo hoo. I’m so sad for you.”

Beth looked ready to snap, but Lindsey turned her head and caught her eye. She gave a slight shake of her head, and Beth took a deep breath in a visible effort to calm down.

“Try sinking yourself into a debt hole so deep you can’t find a way out,” Astrid said. “That’s what I did with student loans so I could have the über-art-school education.”

“How does that . . .” Beth began but Astrid cut her off, “Shut up. I’m not finished.”

Astrid took a deep breath and continued. “Then imagine falling in love with the most talented boy at the school, a boy who makes you think you’re his everything, only to walk in on him in bed with the school’s pretty girl.”

“So, Ernie cheated on you?” Lindsey asked. “That happens to everyone at some point or another. You don’t paint
LIAR
on their forehead and gut them like a fish.”

“Well, maybe if we did, they’d be less likely to cheat,” Astrid snapped.

Lindsey had a quick vision of John, her ex, tied up and mortally wounded. It didn’t comfort and it did nothing to make the betrayal less.

“It’s no solution,” she said.

“Oh, what do you know? Besides, he did more than cheat on me,” Astrid said. “He messed with my heart and my mind. After I caught him, he begged me to come back, said it had all been a drunken mistake and that I was his muse and he couldn’t work without me. I believed him and I was powerless to resist. I loved him with everything I had.”

“So, you took him back,” Beth said.

“Again and again and again,” Astrid said.

Lindsey caught the expression of self-loathing that passed over Astrid’s face.

“We were living together,” she said. “I was working days as a waitress and then working on my picture books at night. He didn’t have a job because, well, it would hamper his creativity.”

Beth’s mouth turned down in one corner, and Lindsey wondered if she had heard this same rationale from Rick.

“Then one day I came home and he was gone,” Astrid said.

“So you killed him because he left you?” Beth asked.

“No,” Astrid said. Her voice made it clear that she thought Beth was dumber than a sack of hammers. “I killed him because when he left he took all of my work with him.”

Beth’s eyes went wide.

“Yeah, the Caldecott that he won as Rick Eckman, that should have been mine. He took everything, every scrap of art that I had produced. He even took the computer I used to archive my work.”

“Oh, my God,” Beth muttered.

“You didn’t think you were the first, did you?”

“I thought maybe he did it because he had writer’s block,” Beth said. “I thought maybe he was panicking about his reputation.”

“Tell me, did he seem to be clearing out his belongings in his cabin?” Astrid asked.

“I don’t know,” Beth said. “I was rarely allowed on his island. In fact, I had only been there twice before the day we found his body.”

“Whoa, sister, and I thought I was pathetic.” Astrid sneered. “You really were taken for a ride.”

“How did you find him?” Lindsey asked. “He’d been hiding on that island for five years.”

“Well, it took some doing,” Astrid said. “First, I was completely broke, so when an offer to work at the school came up, I took it. Then one day the alumni association was having a big to-do, and I heard Sydney’s name come up. I knew if Ernie had kept in touch with anyone, it would be her. He always had a thing for her.

“When I confronted her, she denied it. But I was able to find out that she had gone on to be a children’s book editor, and from there it was just a matter of tracing all of her clients. When Ernie won the Caldecott for a book that was so obviously a rip-off of mine, I threatened Sydney to tell me where he was, but of course she wouldn’t. She couldn’t have me suing her best author, after all. He had her so convinced that I was just a crazy stalker. She didn’t believe me when I told her the work was mine.”

“What you said to me in the Blue Anchor that day, ‘Surely you’re not suggesting he stole his idea from her. Why would he? No one would ever believe it,’” Lindsey quoted. “That was what Sydney said to you, wasn’t it?”

Astrid gave a bitter laugh. “Verbatim. Once I took care of Ernie, I knew I had to get rid of her. I knew the police would contact the real Sydney in New York. I knew it wouldn’t take much for her to put together that I had finally found Ernie and given him exactly what he deserved. I couldn’t risk it. Of course, I didn’t count on you two figuring out who he was before he was Rick Eckman.”

“You were the one who broke into my apartment,” Lindsey said. “You were trying to recover his things.”

“I couldn’t risk anyone linking him back to me. I found out where he was about a year ago. Once I decided I was going to confront him, I spent the next year wiping out any trace of a personal connection between Ernie and me. The few faculty who knew about us have since retired, and the students, well, like Sydney, most have gone on to fabulous careers where they certainly don’t remember meek little Astrid,” Astrid said, her voice dripping with bitterness. Then she cocked her head to the side and considered Lindsey. “In a way, I was trying to save your life. You found the last link between us. I really wish you hadn’t gotten the photo album.”

“I’m sort of wishing that myself now,” Lindsey said. Astrid met her gaze in the rearview mirror and gave her a small smile that seemed more like the baring of teeth from a feral animal. It sent a chill from the nape of Lindsey’s neck all the way down to her tailbone.

“It’s getting dark,” Lindsey said. “I need to turn on my headlights.”

“Do it, but I’m watching your every move.”

Lindsey felt the gun press against her temple again, and she had to squash a surge of anger. She hated feeling helpless, and she hated that this woman had them at her mercy. Never had she ever wanted to punch anyone in the face as much as she wanted to punch this woman now.

She switched on her headlights and put her hands back at ten and two.

“I don’t understand,” Beth said. “Why would he do this?”

“Because he was a failure,” Astrid said. “A miserable, washed-up failure. He was like a high school football hero who doesn’t get scouted for a college and spends the rest of his life as a townie, haunting the football field with a belly full of beer and bitterness.”

Silence fell over the car, and Lindsey realized they were rapidly approaching the Briar Creek exit.

“So, because we figured out that you murdered Rick and Sydney, your plan is to kill us now?” she asked.

“It’s nothing personal,” Astrid said. “In fact, if things were different, maybe we’d even be friends.”