Nevertheless, because of tears and promises and probably sex, too, Abby thought scornfully, Dad met her at the school as winter break began and told her that the lice were completely gone. They would be spending the holidays on Manhattan’s East Side after all.
Abby nodded and handed him her backpack. “I need to say goodbye to one of the little kids I’ve been tutoring,” she said and hurried back into the building.
Luckily, the lower-school girls were still struggling into their coats and mufflers, and they were glad for her help. In all the happy chatter about Santa Claus and what they were going to get for Christmas, no one noticed as Abby lingered with six-year-old Miranda Randolph, who was due for her second comb-out the very next day and was used to having her hair picked at.
Abby carefully transferred three adult nits and several eggs to the small pill bottle she had started carrying last fall. With a little luck, this Christmas present for Dad would be the final straw in the bundle she had already piled onto the camel’s back.
MARGARET MARON has written thirty novels and two collections of short stories. Winner of the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, her works are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature. She has served as national president of Sisters in Crime and of Mystery Writers of America, which named her grand master in 2013. In 2008 she received the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor. Vist her at www.MargaretMaron.com.
SUTTON DEATH OVERTIME by Judith Kelman
Dinner that night at Café Autore featured veal milanese, three murders, a drug bust, and a heist by the audacious jewel thief “Diamond Slim.”
Reuben Jeffers, a doughy reporter from the daily online tabloid A-List, scratched notes on a spiral-bound pad. His pinched eyes bounced from that to his iPhone. “Cool idea, Joe! Love your books. Dig in soon as they come out.” Jeffers had promised to be a fly on the wall of this venerable monthly gathering of top New York mystery writers, but his presence seemed more like a fly in the soup.
“Ah.” Aside from the dozens of volumes in his four popular detective series, handsome lantern-jawed Joe Ransom was a man of meager words.
Not so the reporter. “Must say, this Diamond Slim character sounds like your best yet. Imagine, a robber so rail thin, he can hide in plain sight. Slip through tight spaces like a light beam. Has to be computer generated, right? Or green-screen technology? Don’t tell me. Anyhow, brilliant. When did you come up with him?”
“Eighty-two.”
L. C. Crocker, ponytailed and bespectacled, looked down his eagle-beak nose. He was no fan of Jeffers, who had placed his latest police procedural at the top of an A-List roundup entitled “The Worst of Crimes.” The YouTube takeoff “L. C. Crocker Shlock Shocker” had gone viral. Still, Colleen O’Day, the brightest star in their glittery firmament, had asked L. C. to bury the hatchet (though not, as he’d gleefully suggested, in the reporter’s skull) and let him do a story on the group. Almost no one said no to Colleen.
“Remember, Jeffers. Anything we say about works in progress is off the record.”
The reporter cocked his finger and fired an imaginary round. “Sure, L. C. Gotcha.”
“And stash that damned phone! No tweets, no posts. Capisce?”
“Gotcha.”
“Love the Diamond Slim series, Joe. Can’t wait for this one.” Stephanie Harris, an affable FBI agent turned true-crime writer, gazed over the battlefield of sauce drips and fractured breadsticks at the regal presence across the table. “Now to you, Colleen. We’ve missed you! What have you been working on?”
The grand lady spoke in a conspiratorial hush. “Remember the Bitsy Grainger case?”
“Vaguely,” said Tony Baker, impish author of nightmare-inducing horror tales.
L. C. tapped his tented fingers. “Was that the psychiatrist whose patient slipped strychnine into her chai tea latte?”
“That was Dr. Betty Barringer. Bitsy Grainger was the young woman who vanished in the early seventies.”
“Sorry. Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Tonya Finerman, a winsome twenty-something whose novel Done to Death had been optioned by Spielberg and sold for a seven-figure advance.
“Of course, it doesn’t.” Jeffers sniffed. “Seventies were way before your time, Tonya. Ancient history, really.”
“Maybe so,” said Colleen. “But history can be fascinating, especially stories that lack a definite ending. Absent a complete narrative, we fill in the blanks. That’s human nature. I believe it’s also the reason many of us are drawn to writing.”
“Beautifully put,” said Stephanie.
“Gotcha. Not going to argue, Ms. O’Day, especially with someone who has permanent parking at the top of the Times list. But why that case? Why now?” The reporter twirled his Uniball, summoning another Maker’s Mark. “Why you?”
“Not easy questions to answer, Mr. Jeffers. Bitsy was a friend of mine, so of course I was terribly upset when it happened and troubled by her disappearance for many years. But in time, the worst sting of memory fades.
“Then, last October, after that freak early snowstorm, I began thinking about the case more and more, turning it over and over in my mind.
“One night, Bitsy Grainger came to me in a dream. She was caught in a ferocious blizzard, hunched in a tattered camel coat. Matted fur around the hood obscured everything but her eyes. Howling wind swallowed her words. But in the warped logic of dreams, I heard her clearly. ‘Help me! Somebody. Please!’ I called out. I struggled to get to her. But the storm kept forcing me back. There was nothing I could do.
“I awoke to the sound of my own screams. My throat was raw, heart stammering. It took a few moments for me to separate that horrid dream from reality. But once the fog of sleep lifted, I realized there was something I could do. I could base a book on Bitsy Grainger and solve the mystery of her disappearance at last.”
“You mean make something up,” Jeffers said.
“Of course I could, if need be. I write fiction, after all. But I’ve been studying the case for months, and I’ve figured out what became of her.”
“For real? Or you trying to build a buzz?” Jeffers leveled his pen and chuckled. “Clever girl. So what’s the story you came up with? Who was this Bitsy Grainger person? And what kind of name is Bitsy anyway? Sounds like a one of those silly mix dogs: a poobrador or, maybe, a cockerdoodledoo.”
Colleen ignored him as she would a nasty smell. Her story unspooled against the chicken scratch of Jeffers’s pen. “Bitsy was a lovely person, beautiful inside and out. When she went missing, the press infested the Grainger’s Sutton Place neighborhood. They skulked in the bushes. Rooted through the garbage. One reporter posed as a gas company repairman to get into the house. Another tried to bribe their housekeeper. Bitsy’s husband finally went into hiding to escape them. They had no boundaries, no decency. They acted as if everything was fair game.”
“All due respect,” Jeffers said, “everything is fair game. Sure I don’t have to remind you about the public’s right to know.”
“And I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of your right to remain silent,” L. C. said. “So remain the hell silent, will you? Now, go on, Colleen, my dear. You were saying.”
“I couldn’t get my mind around it. How could a bright, talented young woman with everything to live for simply vanish? It defies expectation, logic, even the laws of physics.