Written Off (13 page)

“It’s organized, but not obsessively,” I said. “She can work without worrying about glare from the deck reflecting in her computer screen, but she can turn her chair toward the glass doors and look out on the backyard anytime she wants. The printer is close by, but not so close that she can’t pick up
documents without getting out of her chair. She can write on the desk, again by turning the chair. But the keyboard is ergonomically placed and has a wrist rest on it to avoid carpal tunnel.”

“Good,” Duffy said. “Keep going.”

“Keep going? What do you expect me to see, a hologram of what happened when she was taken? That’s it.” I looked around the room again, fighting the growing feeling that it would be really good if I could work there instead of Sunny, because that was cruel and petty. There are times I’m not crazy about being in the same head as myself.

“You see more; you just don’t know it yet.” Duffy was doing his best to speak with a soft, moderated tone, trying not to break the mood. He stood to one side, positioning himself away from me and in as innocuous a spot as he could find, under one of Sunny’s Agatha Awards (given out for best traditional mystery) on a shelf with some books from other authors.

One of them was mine.
Olly Olly Oxen Free
. I immediately felt even worse about any thoughts I’d had about Sunny that weren’t warm and positive. I wondered if I should go over and autograph it for her and caught myself in that burst of ego, meaning now I was completely ashamed of myself.

I walked to the exact center of the room and bore down to the task. I was going to find Sunny Maugham, and I’d do it before anybody else because I was determined and I had special talents. Duffy, or whoever he was, had said so himself.

What was there? This looked like a very standard office, albeit a very nice one. It was, as I had noted, the very kind of
space in which I wished I could work. That meant it was the kind of space in which many writers like me would have liked to create. So maybe I needed to experience it myself to see how it would drive on the real highway.

Without asking Duffy, I walked to the desk and sat down on the swivel chair. Real leather. I have some ethical objections, but I had to admit that it felt really good. There was a strong possibility that I might take a nap at Sunny’s desk before I left the room.

I swiveled toward the desk. The computer, which the police had no doubt examined within an inch of its life, was still turned on but in “sleep” mode. So I hit the
S
key (in honor of Sunny) and it came to life. The screen began to glow.

There was no way I’d be able to interpret Sunny’s files. Also, I had no desire to see anything she hadn’t decided was ready for public consumption yet. That would be prying. I would shudder to think of anyone reading my work before I declared it ready. Her desktop was not terribly idiosyncratic; things were labeled “2nd Draft—Riches” and “First-Pass Pages—Cradle,” no doubt two upcoming manuscripts in various stages of editing.

I want it stated for the record that I did not open Sunny’s hard drive or look at any personal files. I was here to try to find clues to her location, a reason someone would want to abduct her. But I did take a quick peek at one file: “1st Draft—Stand-alone,” just to get a glimpse of one page. I would not read for content, I decided, but for format and style of work.

I didn’t learn anything except that Sunny couldn’t spell or punctuate. Her gift was for storytelling. I closed it quickly, feeling like a Peeping Tom.

“There’s an e-mail she saved as a Word file,” I said to Duffy. “It’s from her agent, I think. I’m going to print it out.” The activity would give me an idea of how her office worked. Duffy had probably already seen the e-mail.

When I hit “print,” however, I was rewarded with a message that the printer was out of paper. And there wasn’t any in her desk drawers.

I stood up again. Okay, so this home office wasn’t set up at all like mine, where everything could be seen mostly because it was never put away. I noticed a door cut into one wall, dark and unobtrusive. I walked toward it.

Duffy noted where I was going and said, “That’s a supply closet.”

“Exactly what I’m looking for,” I told him, and reached for the doorknob.

Of all the things I’ve done in my life, I most wish I hadn’t reached for that doorknob and opened that door.

It was a standard supply closet, small, with shelves on both sides and directly in front of me. A light went on overhead as the door opened; it must have had a motion detector that sensed when the door was open, an ergonomic touch I found very intelligent.

Slumped on the floor of the closet was Sunny Maugham. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t seeing anything.

She had a fountain pen sticking out of her neck.

I’d never screamed in horror before. It doesn’t help.

Duffy was at my side in an instant, gently pulling me by the upper arms away from the closet and directing my eyes away from the hideous sight inside. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Hang on. I’ll take care of it.”

“Take
care
of it? That’s Sunny Maugham!” As if there had been any question at all about that point.

“I know,” he said. “Let me call my office so we can do something about this.”

I would have pointed out that it was clear there was nothing anyone could do to help Sunny, but hyperventilating makes it so difficult to speak coherently. I sat down in Sunny’s chair—feeling guilty about that, of all things—and put my head down, forcing myself to breathe more slowly than I wanted to.

In the background, which meant that he was probably directly next to me but my mind was in another state entirely, I heard Duffy talking on his cell phone to someone or another,
and the words “deceased,” “homicide,” and “immediately” were the only ones that got through to my foggy brain.

Keeping my head down was helping. It wasn’t helping with the fact that Sunny Maugham, possibly the best-loved author on the mystery circuit, was lying dead less than ten feet from where I sat, clearly the victim of a terrible crime. I’d been asked repeatedly over the past two days to come to her house for a look around and had avoided it until this moment. Could I have prevented this by showing up sooner?

I don’t remember much of the next fifteen minutes, except for Duffy, after he got off the phone, kneeling down on the floor next to where I sat, my head still hanging down, and trying to soothe me.

“People are on their way,” he said. “They’ll help you. They’ll get you out of this room, out of this house. Do you feel like you could walk outside now? We can wait outside.”

I just shook my head hard.

“Okay,” Duffy crooned. “You can stay there. That’s fine. We’re going to do everything we can.”

I felt cold and clammy. I felt the way I imagined Sunny felt. Let’s just say that I wasn’t handling it especially well, and that’s why I think Duffy’s next words were inspired less by his tremendous empathy—as I write him, he doesn’t score strongly in that area—and more out of a grim concern that if I couldn’t actually be removed and didn’t stop behaving like I was, there was a strong possibility I might throw up all over his crime scene.

“I told the executive producer at Monarch Entertainment about your book,
Little Boy Lost
,” he said out of nowhere.

Oddly, that had exactly the effect Duffy had no doubt desired. I focused, lifted my head, breathed normally, and looked at him. “How did you even
know
anyone in the movie business?” I asked.

“Clearly, from one of the cases you did not make up,” Duffy explained. “I know Mr. Ventnor after having worked on a case that involved his company’s New York office. He recognized my name. I thought perhaps I could help.”

“That was very nice of you.” Being in shock makes you sound like an idiot.

“It was nothing at all,” Duffy said. “I hope it helped.”

Before I could answer, there were people in the room. Other people. Some of them were in uniform. Some of them were not. One who was in uniform, though not a police officer’s, seemed to pay special attention to me and helped me get up and walk out of the room. When I instinctively turned to look into the closet, she made sure she blocked my view and said, “You don’t need to see that.”

I wished I never had seen that, so she definitely had a point.

The outside air, hot as it was, felt good. It smelled of whatever trees those were outside Sunny’s front door, and it felt real, not like the artificial environment air conditioning had created inside that awful room. I’d never want to work in a room like that one.

The woman in the EMT uniform sat next to me on a bench outside Sunny’s house, talking while she took my blood pressure and pulse readings. I think she might have taken my
temperature at one point, too. I’m pretty sure she did so with an oral thermometer.

My mind wasn’t clearing, so when Ben Preston arrived at my side, I was surprised and confused. Ben took my hands and asked me what had happened. In retrospect, he must have gone inside before I’d been aware of him, talked to Duffy, and decided Ben was the best one to debrief me.

It wasn’t as difficult as I’d anticipated to tell him what had happened. For one thing, Duffy had been in the room when I’d discovered Sunny’s . . . body . . . and could corroborate anything I said or even add details I had undoubtedly missed.

There was also the fact that I really didn’t know anything other than what I’d seen in the closet, and that was more than enough.

But when he asked me, gently, about how Sunny had looked, I had to think hard. You’d guess that such a sight would be seared into my retinas for life, but the mind has a way of removing the things that are especially horrible just to keep us going through the day. Unfortunately, that is not an especially useful brain function when a crime is being investigated. For Ben’s purposes, it would be better if I could remember every detail.

“It was a black fountain pen,” I remember telling him. “It must have had one of those metal nibs on it, you know?” My mind began to let me remember what I’d seen, which was really somewhat cruel of it. Never had the term
blissful ignorance
been more apropos. Stupid mind, letting me remember.

“I know,” Ben said with concern in his voice. “What else did you see in the closet?”

I stared at him. “Wasn’t that enough?” I asked.

“I mean, what other details did you notice? Maybe you saw something I didn’t. You write about murders. What clues did you see?” He was trying to get me to focus; I understood the technique. That doesn’t mean it didn’t still piss me off.

“I don’t know.”

“Think.” Ben was getting less attractive by the second.

“I
am
thinking.”

“I know,” he said calmly. “But if you were writing that scene, what would you expect to see?”

“What I saw. I’d never write that scene. I don’t write anything that bloody.” Duffy Madison, in my novels, solves missing persons cases. There isn’t always even a murder.

“
Was
it bloody?” Ben asked.

That got me, and I considered. “Come to think of it, no.”

“You’re the mystery writer. What does that tell you?”

My head was starting to clear a little. Ben was good at what he did. “She wasn’t killed in the closet; she was brought there from somewhere else, in the house or outside, and posed there for us—for
me
—to find.”

“Very good. And that tells us something very useful about the guy behind all this. We didn’t necessarily know that in the other three cases. If he changed his method for this, that would be surprising. If he didn’t, well, that helps us with the other three.”

I shook my head; it was still too much. “But Sunny’s dead,” I moaned, the words coming out of me with difficulty. “I didn’t come here yesterday because I was out with you, and
I didn’t come here the night before because I thought Duffy was creepy, and now Sunny’s dead.”

Ben put an arm around my shoulder. “I know, and I wish it weren’t true,” he said. Cops usually go with, “I’m sorry for your loss,” but he was showing a little more sympathy (and versatility) than that. “But don’t for a minute think it would have made any difference if you’d shown up yesterday or the day before. There’s no chance she was dead that long. You would have found an empty house.”

That shouldn’t have made me feel any better; Sunny was just as dead. But for some reason, Ben saying what he said had lifted the patina of guilt I’d been covered with since I opened the closet door. Okay, since I stopped screaming after opening the closet door.

“Thanks,” I croaked. His arm stayed around my shoulder and squeezed it a little.

“No charge,” he said. “Now, I have to get back inside. You okay out here?”

I nodded. It was a lie, but it was what he needed me to do, and I did it. I was not okay and wasn’t going to be for some time, but I was strong enough that I didn’t need to keep Ben Preston from his work. He got up and walked inside.

It was the twenty-first century and I was looking at more than seven seconds of downtime, so I checked my voice mail. I could have checked my e-mail, but a new message from my gruesome pen pal was the last thing I needed to see at that moment.

There was a voice message from my agent. “Get in touch,” Adam Resnick said with a note of urgency in his voice. “It’s about
Little Boy Lost
.”

Well, there’s psychological trauma and despair, but then there’s an encouraging call from your agent. I pressed Adam’s speed-dial button and waited.

“Resnick, Resnick, and Johnson.”

“Who are you kidding? You’re the only one in the office,” I chided.

“Yeah,” Adam said. “But it looks so good on the stationery. Are you ready for some news?”

I could have told him about Sunny. I
should
have told him about Sunny. The publishing world is nothing if not an enormous circle of gossip. But I wanted to hear about my book, the one I’d been slaving over, the one that could get me out of my current rut and get me—dare I say it?—money. “Hell yes, I’m ready for news,” I answered. “What’s up? Did the producer call with an offer?”

“Better.”

Better? What’s better than a movie producer wanting to buy my book?
“The producer called twice?” I suggested.

The smirk was audible. “Better,” he repeated.

“Okay, you’ve passed cute and are headed directly toward obnoxious,” I told Adam. “What the hell is going on?”

“I got a call from another production company. They want to read
Little Boy Lost
with an eye toward making a Duffy Madison TV series.”

All right, so maybe that
was
better than a producer calling. “Really?”

“No, I’m making it up. The one thing they teach you in agent school is always call up your clients with fake good news because they love that.”

He said that someone at Beverly Hills Productions (which apparently was based in Santa Monica), a guy named Glenn Waterman, called his office unsolicited, saying that he’d “heard good things” about something called the Duffy Madison mysteries, which he’d never heard of. (Thanks for the ego boost, Adam—you could have left that last part out!)

He said there had been no market in Hollywood for mysteries lately, then someone had made a TV movie for a “women’s channel” and gotten ratings through the roof. Waterman wanted to jump on what he’d decided would be a bandwagon and had remembered he’d heard something about
Little Boy Lost
, so he ordered his assistant to read it and write “coverage,” which is the Hollywood version of a book report. She (the assistants are always women) read
Little Boy Lost
and made a recommendation.

Waterman bought it himself as an e-book, then immediately didn’t read it and called Adam. Then he had signed disclaimers saying he wouldn’t steal my work—which seemed damned nice of him—and gotten to the point that he and Adam were talking about an “option,” which Adam explained is when a producer “rents” your book in the hope of selling it to a studio or network. Waterman had not read the book; he wanted to meet the author first because “that’s where the power is.” Hollywood people are crazy.

“That’s amazing,” I said when he was done with his tale. “Do you think there’s really a chance?” Having a movie made of your book greatly improves sales on your current and previous books and can make you, if not a household name, the author of a household name. But a TV series was the gravy
train. They have to pay you every time they make a new episode and every time they show it. The money, for sure, was not bad. I might be able to afford an office like the one Sunny had.

Oh yeah. Sunny.

“There’s always a chance, baby,” Adam said. “And since Waterman called on his own, without me breathing down his neck about it, I’d say the chance is pretty good.”

I thanked him profusely, even though the renewed thoughts of Sunny were making me less ecstatic than I would have been under other circumstances.

I stood up and didn’t feel light-headed; that was an improvement. “How long before I should start annoying you about this?” I asked Adam.

“I’d give it a couple of weeks, easy. People in Hollywood don’t like reading. It requires too much imagination.”

We hung up, and I walked over toward the inevitable ambulance. Someone would have to cart Sunny’s body away after the detectives and everyone else was finished with the crime scene. I wondered if they had contacted Sunny’s sister yet, the one who had first called with some concerns.

I never write the scene where the victim’s family is notified. I don’t do sorrow well. I’m much better at anger and repressed tension. Maybe I just don’t want to face the open, over-the-top emotion that goes with irreplaceable loss. I never make Duffy inform the family, either. For one thing, he’s not an official employee of the law enforcement agency, and for another, I hate to burden him with that kind of pain. It would really damage him to be the bearer of horrific news.

So why was I walking toward the ambulance? Shouldn’t I be headed in the opposite direction?

All but one EMT were inside, taking the necessary readings and recording all the data they found for the investigation and, perhaps, a trial if the killer was found and brought to a courtroom. None of which seemed terribly likely at the moment. I was starting to conclude that this man was somehow superhuman, able to outwit any investigator (Duffy
never
doesn’t find the victim in time!), incapable of being tracked or discovered. He would do whatever he wanted to do and get away with it.

Believe me, I was not forgetting that the next thing he would want would be to do to me what he did to Sunny, only in another creative “author” way.

A woman hit with a manual typewriter, one electrocuted with her word processor, one suffocated with rejection letters, and now Sunny, stabbed in the neck with a fountain pen. What was he planning to do to me? Bury me under dozens of volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica? Could you even find those anymore?