The moment of truth came today.
For Jack it came sharp and hard and quick, landing at the back of his skull. But the blow didn’t kill him. The gunshots did. To the head, to the face, to the heart. Enough to make sure Jack Shepard’s everlasting promise to his friend began today . . . along with his everlasting life.
CHAPTER 1
The Big Ending
Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life, except the murdered and sometimes the murderer’s.
—Nick Charles to Nora Charles in The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, 1933
Quindicott, Rhode Island Today
“We killed him!”
I was beside myself. In a frantic state of hand-wringing and head-shaking, I paced the length of the bookshop’s aisle from Christie to Grafton and back again.
“Calm down, dear,” said my aunt, her slight frame tipping the Shaker rocker back and forth with about as much anxiety as a retiree on a Palm Beach sundeck.
“How can I calm down?” I asked. “We killed a best-selling author on the first night of his book tour!”
“Well, the milk’s gone and spilled now. No use crying over it. If you need help calming down, why don’t you have a belt?”
I was not surprised by this rather unladylike suggestion from my aunt. Sadie may have been seventy-two, and barely four feet eleven, but for an aging bantamweight she had a big mouth and a good right hook. The Quindicott Business Owners’ Association never forgot the day she’d spotted a shoplifter at ten yards (putting a Hammett first edition down his pants). She’d taken him out with one sharp Patricia Cornwell to the head.
For decades, Sadie had run the bookstore as modestly as her late father had. Never once had she considered holding an author appearance like this one. It was stupid, presumptuous me, Mrs. Penelope Thornton “Know It All” McClure, who’d tried to bring twenty-first-century bookselling to Quindicott.
Why? Why in the world did I think I could pull it off?
Sure, right after college I had taken a job in the hard-nosed offices of New York City book publishing. But I hadn’t exactly been wildly successful at it (my nose being as squashy as a Stay Puft marshmallow). The one thing I thought I had gotten from the experience was the knowledge of how to create a hospitable, crowd-drawing store on the book tour circuit.
Of course, that was before Timothy Brennan—the very first best-selling author we were lucky enough to host—began choking in the middle of his televised lecture, then commenced flailing around like a big Irish goldfish ejected from its bowl, and finally dropped dead as a doorknob in the middle of the bookstore’s brand-new community events space.
“Someone get my niece a drink!” Aunt Sadie called from her rocker.
Linda Cooper-Logan heeded Sadie’s call. In her thirties, her short platinum hair still in the spiky, punkish style she’d first worn in the eighties, Linda appeared in a long, flowery skirt and worn denim jacket. Her jade and silver bracelets jangled as she held out a bottle of carrot juice. I reached for it, but Sadie interceded.
“Not that kind of drink,” said my aunt. “A real drink.”
“Oh!” said Linda. She put two fingers in her mouth. A sharp whistle caught the attention of Linda’s husband, Milner Logan. He was at the other end of the store, watching Officers Eddie Franzetti and Welsh Tibbet—one-quarter of the entire patrol division of Quindicott’s lilliputian police department—take down the names of guests who hadn’t already fled, and few had. After all, what better spectacle could be found tonight in the entire state of Rhode Island? Anyone present knew their “I watched Timothy Brennan drop dead” story would render them good as gold at every church social and backyard barbecue for the next ten years.
“Are you puckering up and blowing for me, Linda?” asked Milner sweetly. Quarter-blood Narragansett Native American, Milner frequented our store for crime novels, noir thrillers, and the occasional frontlist Tony Hillerman. Like his wife, he’d held on to some fashion trends of his own youth—a decade before Linda’s. He wore a small gold hoop in his left ear and his long hair in a ponytail, the strands looking more wiry salt-and-pepper these days than midnight black.
Together Linda and Milner ran the Cooper Family Bakery here in Quindicott. Linda handled the comfort food; Milner, the fancy French stuff. (He and Linda had met when Milner was teaching a cooking school class in Boston on the art of French pastry. Linda fell for him over a perfectly mixed ball of pâte sablée.)
Having their baked goods as part of tonight’s hospitality refreshments had been a coup for the bookstore. Milner had added French touches to so many of the old Cooper family recipes, the result was a table of goodies to die for—and, unfortunately, tonight someone actually had.
“We need a drink for Penelope!” Linda called to her husband.
“Oh?” Milner strolled closer in his fedora and double-breasted gray suit—like many of those who’d attended tonight’s event, Milner had come dressed as Jack Shield, the hard-boiled detective star of Timothy Brennan’s internationally best-selling series.
And I’d actually encouraged it.
From Providence and Boston to high-toned Newport and Greenwich, the newspaper ads I’d placed invited Brennan’s fans to come dressed as the famous hard-boiled detective. Every fan knew how Jack Shield dressed, of course, because Shield had been based on a real private investigator of the late 1940s named Jack Shepard. And Shepard’s chilling, anvil-chinned grimace appeared (in black-and-white) on the back flap of every Brennan dust jacket, right under the author’s own photo (in living color).
“You mean the hard stuff? Joy juice? Hooch?” asked Milner, nudging up the front brim of his fedora one-finger style, like Shield.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cried Sadie. “Just get the bottle from under the register already!”
Milner brought over the bottle of whiskey and a few paper cups. Sadie poured shots all around. “After the shock of tonight’s events, I’d say we could all use a belt.”
I didn’t want to partake, but Sadie pressed the cup into my wringing hands. “Now, Penelope, honey, listen to your elder. Drink.”
I did. The liquid burned, but I trusted my aunt knew what was best at the moment—at least she seemed much calmer than I.
“Feel better?” asked Sadie.
“Don’t worry, Pen,” said Milner. “I overheard Eddie say there’s going to be an autopsy, because it’s a suspicious death. It’s just like a crime novel. Kinda cool, actually.”
“What killed him?” I said, noting that the room was both too bright and too dark. Was that possible?
Milner shrugged.
I took another swig from the cup. “What’s going to happen, do you think?” I asked. “Because of Timothy Brennan’s death, I mean. Do you think we should close the store? Forever?”
He shrugged again.
I took another swig.
Hard liquor was new to me. A glass of white wine or light beer once a month or so was my usual consumption rate. Whiskey, it would seem, sure hit faster than Chardonnay.
Linda and Milner were speaking, saying something like all this was in no way the store’s fault, and I should just go on as if nothing had happened. But their voices seemed as fuzzy as their faces. And then the room began a slow spin.