Misery Loves Company (8 page)

THIS IS A TERRIBLE MOVE.

Chris nodded. He knew that was what Jason would say if he were sitting in the seat next to him. But then again, Chris argued in his head, this was his wife they were talking about. Jason had been fiercely protective of Jules. One time, at a Christmas party, some of the guys had made harmless remarks about Jules’s “hotness.” Chris watched helplessly as Jason rose, walked the length of the room in long strides, and in a tone so cool and measured it sounded rehearsed, let the four detectives know where they could shove it.

It definitely kept Chris on guard. It was a side of Jason he’d never seen. In fact, he would’ve described Jason as wholly
placid before that night. Nothing rattled the guy. Once, a rare earthquake hit the coast. They’d been eating breakfast at the diner when the entire place shook. Chris had hopped up in a lame attempt to do something, like save his own life, and was seconds away from diving under a table when the shaking stopped. Jason just smiled and sipped his coffee, most of which had actually sloshed from his cup.

As the morning café crowd buzzed with excitement, Chris had found his seat. He raised an eyebrow. “You were awfully calm.”

“Spent a couple of years in California as a kid.” Jason grinned. “We mostly just wonder where the epicenter is.”

“What if it was right here?” Chris asked.

“Then you’re probably not going to be asking any more questions.” They’d laughed for days about it and Chris had to endure some good ribbing as Jason reenacted his reaction for the guys.

Chris gulped his coffee, trying to chase away the memory and grogginess. He hadn’t been sleeping.

Through the night, he wrestled with the conversation he’d had with the captain. The captain had said all the right things, but there was something to his tone. Something placating. The idea that they could get a search warrant without Patrick Reagan around was ludicrous. Chris knew he’d failed to establish probable cause. He hadn’t even established that a crime had been committed. Unless the DA owed the captain his life, there wasn’t going to be a search warrant coming.

And Chris wasn’t willing to wait three days for the captain to call and say it wasn’t going to happen.

So he’d continued poking around this morning, questioning neighbors. Had they seen Reagan? They all said no and that he never came around in the winter. Chris asked the closest neighbor if he’d seen any activity.

“None, except the cleaning lady who comes twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday.”

“She comes even in the winter?”

“Faithfully, all year-round.”

“What time?” Chris had asked.

“Around noon.”

So here he sat, waiting for her. Drinking coffee as his eyelids fluttered. He never would’ve been good on a stakeout.

Suddenly the iron gate swung open and a small, dark sedan pulled into the drive. He started his car and pulled in a few feet behind the cleaning lady. The gate didn’t close after him. And she didn’t seem to notice. She parked her car around back and out of sight. Chris pulled into the front, circular drive.

He waited a few minutes, then rang the doorbell. He wasn’t on duty, but he was in his uniform, breaking every code and law he knew.

The cleaning lady greeted him with wide eyes and broken English. “What is matter?”

“Probably nothing, ma’am. But I need to ask you a few questions. May I come in?”

“ID?”

He showed his badge. She nodded slowly and let him in, looking nervous. “The sir no like anyone here.”

“Well, I’m not anyone. I am the police.” Not on duty nor with permission, but that information didn’t need to be discussed. “There is probably no reason to worry, but we were asked to check in on Mr. Reagan by a close friend.” Another lie. Wow. This seemed to be coming a little too easily for him because lying wasn’t his talent.

He glanced around at the large marble foyer. The chandelier could kill a colony if it fell.

“A close friend? He no have close friends.”

“Editor.”

“Ah. Okay. Yes.”

“I understand that he does not live here in the winter. Have you seen him?”

“No, no. He has no been here at all.”

“But you’ve been getting paid? Everything is going normally?”

“Yes, yes. He very good about paying right time.”

“Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary going on that you know of?”

She shook her head.

“I am going to have to take a look around.”

“Of course. Just do not touch. No touch. You understand?”

“I know you’ve got a job to do, so I’ll let myself out. This will just take a couple of minutes.”

She nodded and carried her cleaning supplies upstairs.
Chris turned and took in the enormous house. Stately and rich with historic detail, it looked as if it had been restored, since it was built over 150 years ago. He could see a spiral staircase, a massive kitchen and formal dining area, and plenty of space between several sitting rooms. He walked carefully, studying the details. It was a house, but not a home. There seemed to be no warmth.

At the far end of the house, next to a back door that led to gardens and maybe a pool, was a study. The doors to the room were iron. Inside, bookshelves lined two walls, filled to capacity. A shiny wooden desk sat in the dead center on an expensive-looking Oriental rug. The walls that did not house books were filled with large, framed pictures of Reagan’s book covers. Award plaques filled in the empty spaces.

Chris glanced around at the covers and the titles. All seemed to be pretty grim. He was more of a lighthearted guy himself. Never understood the appeal of horror or the like.

But these things didn’t keep his attention for long. Instead, it was drawn to the white paper strewn across the entire room, as if hundreds of pages had been tossed into the air and allowed to float haplessly to the ground. Some pages were crumpled. Others torn.

“Maybe he wasn’t happy with his latest book either,” Chris said with a smile to himself. He tried to get a feel for what he was looking at. Words filled every page he could see. He picked one up and read a few sentences. It was definitely part of a novel.

He carefully picked through each piece, trying to find a
cover page or some indication of who wrote this and what it was. Each page had a number at the bottom, but no author name.

It took about ten minutes, but he finally found the first page, wadded up in a corner of the room. Very simply, in type barely bigger than the rest of the manuscript’s and centered on the page, it read,
The Daring Life of Enoch Mandon by Blake Timble
.

“Not a fan, I guess,” Chris said as he turned and peered around the room again. Something had set Reagan off, and most likely, Chris was holding the crumpled culprit in his hand.

Chris’s cell phone rang. “Yeah?”

“Chris, it’s the captain.”

“Hi . . .” Chris dropped the page he was holding as if Captain Perry could see him.

“Listen, it’s going to be a no go on that search warrant. I’m sorry, but you knew it was a long shot.”

“Sure. Thanks for trying.”

“I was thinking . . . I might send you with Detective Walker to New York, see if we can get any information from Reagan’s editor or agent.”

Chris clutched the phone. “Really?” It was unusual to be sent in person, but every good detective liked to look people in the eye.

“I know you and Jason were close. I get how personal this is to you. I mean, the chances are that we won’t find anything. But I think it’s worth a try.”

“I’d appreciate that, sir.”

“Good. Walker’s on the phone with them now and is going to try to get you both on a flight up there this afternoon. If you’ve got important plans, drop ’em.”

“Very good. Thank you.”

“I’m only doing this for Jason.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

Chris slid his phone back into his pocket and walked out of the office, quietly closing the doors behind him, but not before glimpsing one more time the sea of white madness that covered what in all other respects seemed to be a very tidy study. Maybe this wasn’t a clue to what happened to Jules, but it certainly pointed to the man’s state of mind. And whoever Blake Timble was, he ought to watch out.

“What are you doing?” Jules looked up at Patrick as he stood over her. “Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?”

“It’s called
The Living End
.”

“I don’t care what it’s called. It’s cruel.”

“It’s necessary.” He peered sharply at her.

“I don’t want to read a scene about how my husband . . .”

“You think this is about your husband?”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence, no.” She glared at him. “Did you have something to do with his death? Is that what this is all about?”

He walked away from the table for a moment, pacing
a bit and seemingly distracted from the tense conversation they were engaged in. He was rubbing his brow furiously and mumbling to himself.

“Speak up,” Jules growled. “I can’t hear you.”

He stopped and turned to her. “That’s because you are not listening. You believe you know, but you don’t. You don’t know anything!”

“Then why don’t you explain it to me?”

“Because you’re obtuse! All of your generation is obtuse! Unwilling to scrape at the bottom to find deeply buried truths. You want to scratch the surface of everything you write about. You want to merely play, tickle a feather across the parched and cracked land and call it observation.”

Jules wiped her eyes, vaguely aware that there were still tears in them. His nonsense was beginning to terrify her.

“And they call you brilliant. Brilliant! All of you.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Jules clutched the edge of the table.

“Do you not think that I understand what they’re trying to tell me? They send me a manuscript, ask for my blessing. ‘It’s won this award and that award,’ they declare. They want an endorsement, but what they are really trying to impart to me is the idea that I’ve become irrelevant. But truth is never irrelevant. And these new, celebrated young writers who break all the rules and write with some perceived wizardry or magic undertones are celebrated. Celebrated! They’re hacks. Blake Timble is a hack!”

Jules froze as the words spewed out of his mouth. His
face turned red and his eyes narrowed, slicing back and forth between each breath he took.

“This is the fluff that the publishing world wants now?” he continued. “This is asking a lot of questions and solving nothing. This is pretending to be relevant when in reality, it’s only smoke and mirrors. Blake Timble cannot go where he needs to go to make his book what it needs to be.” Then, as though he’d suddenly been bathed in some kind of sedative, Patrick seemed to realize he was ranting. He glanced at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. His hand ran across his chest like he was making sure he still had a heartbeat. The other hand pulled at an earlobe, what appeared to be a nervous habit. But he seemed to have resolved inside of himself that he should calm down.

He cleared his throat. “You will take those pages, and you will read them in your room. You may come out when you are finished, and we shall discuss them like two civilized human beings. Understood?”

Jules stared at the stark paper on the table. “This hurts,” she said. “You’re hurting me. Do you get that?”

Patrick nodded. “You have a lot to learn, Juliet. And learning is painful. Pain is the greatest teacher. We learn that the first time we reach our little hands up to touch a hot stove. You cannot come to any real conclusions without suffering. I truly believe that. It’s just that many people are not strong enough to endure. But you’re strong enough.”

Jules was trying to decide whether she was hearing a compliment or a threat.

“I see brilliance in you,” he said as tenderly as if she were a baby rabbit sitting in his cupped hands. “And you must believe me when I say this is for your own good.” He waved his finger in the air. “I sense talent in you. I see heart. I feel your soul but, right now, only its edge.”

Jules clutched the pages. “I don’t want to read these.”

“I will call you when dinner is ready.” He nodded toward the bedroom. “Don’t go in there and pout and feel sorry for yourself. Learn, Juliet. Learn the power of the gift. We will discuss it all over dinner, more matter-of-factly than now, as I understand you’re still in shock.” He shooed her with his hands. “You will find a red pen in the drawer next to the bed. Use it wisely. Find my weak points, but more importantly, find yours.”