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This is Mark Rogowski, Olivia Sands’s agent. To whom am I speaking?”
Philip looked around and, seeing no one handy but Jessica who couldn’t use a phone unless it had a voice-to-text feature, said, “Philip Carr. How are you?”
“Not too well, obviously. I’ve just heard that my favorite author and my best client is dead. And they’re calling it murder. How do think I am?”
“We’re all feeling the same, I assure you. How can I help you?”
“I need to pick up Olivia’s car. I have her power of attorney, and I’m trying to put her affairs in order. What a mess. No will, no accountant, no addresses—of anybody. The police are holding her phone as evidence. I don’t even know what her mother’s name is!”
“Other than her car, there’s nothing here. The police have it all,” Philip said.
“What about manuscripts? Did she leave any of her writing with you?” Rogowski asked.
“No. I don’t think so, but I’ll look around.”
“Very good, but if you do find anything, save it. Anything she wrote is now a part of her estate and I’m responsible for it!”
The line went dead. Philip looked at Jessica and repeated what Rogowski had told him.
Atlas whined and Philip said he probably wanted to go out and pee. Rather than hook him up for an outing, he shuffled to his room and opened the door to the enclosed patio. Jessica slipped through her own room and used her own exterior door to join him. Trey and Kim padded along behind her.
They discussed the phone call from Mark Rogowski and decided to say nothing about it to their housemates while they waited for the agent to show up. They couldn’t trust Daniel Harlow and therefore, they couldn’t trust his mother, either. As far as they both knew, Alex and Ashley were okay, but who knew? Ashley seemed to be teetering on the brink of a meltdown. Philip and Alex had a mutual lack of admiration. Sophie was too busy to talk.
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Sophie needed Philip’s help to muscle the crab pot onto the stove. She had loaded it up with a bushel of crabs (delivered that morning), vinegar, a liberal sprinkling of her own special crab boil consisting of Old Bay seasoning, pepper, salt, and her secret Italian seasoning. The result weighed, Philip guessed, about sixty pounds. At the bottom of the outside stairs sat a bushel of oysters awaiting the attention of a man from the seafood store who would open them at the appropriate time.
A Toyota Prius pulled into the parking area and a tall, heavy, man stepped out carrying a briefcase. He handed a card to the Uber driver, then walked straight to Olivia’s red Alfa Romeo. He tried the door. It was locked.
Philip and Jessica were watching from the living room above. Philip stepped out the screen door and called to him.
“You’ll need a key.”
The man fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a key fob which opened the car doors with a chirp. He turned to meet Philip, who was already half-way down the stairs.
“Mark Rogowski,” he said.
“I assume you’ve got that power of attorney sheet with you?”
Rogowski opened his briefcase and pulled out a printed form.
Philip glanced at the signature and the stamp of the notary, then handed it back. “Are you planning to take it now?” When Rogowski nodded, Philip added, “We’re getting ready for a crab pickin’. Plenty of beer. Want to join us?”
The Uber driver handed Rogowski his card back and drove off.
Both men hesitated as the new man weighed the offer. Rogowski was at least four hours from his home, and the crabs were coming to a boil.
“Hadn’t really thought about it, but it’d be nice to stop in at that Holiday Inn Express I noticed on the way here. I could stay there and do that long drive back in the morning.” Rogowski looked at the picnic table already set up in the parking area under the house.
“Beer? Or sangria. We got both,” Philip said.
Philip watched as the agent opened the trunk of Olivia’s car, saw that it was crammed full of boxes, then opened the door on the passenger side. An avalanche of fast-food containers, empty Pepsi cans, hair brushes, and a travel makeup kit tumbled out. He turned and saw Alex Archer watching the procedure with undisguised envy.
“Are you a local man?” Alex joined Philip and Rogowski at the door of Olivia’s car. He shook the agent’s hand and introduced himself. “I ask that because some people don’t know how to pick their own crabs. If you’ve never done it before you’ll need instructions.”
“Actually, I’m from New York. We pick crabmeat off the menu.”
They walked the agent across the sand to the picnic table. A large tub full of ice and oysters sat beside the table and a fire pit sat a few feet away. There was a tub of beer and soft drinks in ice under the table. Alex introduced Rogowski to Sophie, Ashley, and Jessica. “We have two more people. A new member and her son. They’ll be joining us shortly.” Alex neglected to mention that the son he was talking about was the one Olivia Sands had charged with stalking her.
Philip and Jessica glanced at each other, knowing they were both wondering how Rogowski would react when he found out.
Sophie spoke to the man in charge of opening oysters and said she had to go and check on the crabs. Philip ducked behind the privacy fence that hid the trash cans. He emerged lugging a plastic bag full of trash from the living room and the bedrooms. He struck a kitchen match and used it to light a piece of paper, then stuffed it under the kindling strips he had arranged over the wood earlier. In a minute, the fire started to catch.
Alex handed Rogowski the first oyster with a little flourish.
Philip pulled some trash out of the plastic bag he found behind the fence to add to the fire. It was almost all paper—the bad ideas and rejected efforts of a house full of writers.
“Stop!” Jessica yelled as Philip started to add another handful of trash to the fire. She grabbed for the trash and several eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of paper fell to the ground. Trey, Jessica’s trusty sidekick, moved forward and stretched his neck to sniff the item she held in her hand. “It’s—it’s the pillowcase!”
Everyone except Rogowski knew what pillowcase she was talking about. They had all sat together that morning while the sheriff and his deputy searched the bedroom upstairs. They had talked about the missing pillowcase and wondered where it was.
Unsure what to do with it, Jessica ran upstairs to her own room, shooting off a message to Sheriff Deane as she ran. Was he still on duty or had he left the office for the night? What to do with it? Why was it in that bag? Who put it there? She decided to stick it in one of the drawers of the empty dresser in her bedroom. She had yet to unpack her own clothes. She held up the pillowcase and looked at both sides. A smear of lipstick. Wrinkles. A tiny black streak. Mascara? And on the other side, a brown smear that looked like dried blood.
Jessica studied the location of these marks. The lipstick and possible mascara were on one side, about half way between the two ends. The blood was on the opposite side, close to one of the ends. She was getting a horrible picture. Someone holding a pillow over the face of someone wearing makeup. Someone biting in desperation. Biting the thumb of a hand holding the pillow against the face, hard enough to draw blood.
Jessica turned around. Three dogs stood, practically drooling, teeth chattering, necks craning, to reach that pillowcase. Trey and Kim stood rigid, their curly tails quivering. But Atlas, the only one of the three who had been trained by a police officer, was pawing at the floor, as if he smelled murder.
Jessica had to think fast. If she stayed in her room too long, someone would come looking for her and she wasn’t ready to tell anyone what she now suspected. When she had left the group outside, it was obvious that she was taking the pillowcase and there was only one pillowcase of any possible importance. They knew she was hiding it.
Are the crabs out yet? She ran to the window in Alex and Ashley’s bedroom and looked out. They were still drinking beer and downing oysters. Is everyone there? Where is Ashley?
Jessica dashed up the stairs and onto a porch. Looking down, she spied Ashley rummaging through the trunk of her and Alex’s car. Everyone else was gathered around the fire. Philip was pulling another fistful of papers from the trash bag.
Jessica returned to her room, closed the door, and sat on the side of the bed. She thought. Who could it be? Who put that pillowcase in the trash?
If it had been left in Olivia’s room, the police would have found it and recognized it as important. It couldn’t have been left in the kitchen, or it would be covered with the messy sort of thing that always ends up in kitchen trash—tomato paste cans, plastic covers, not-quite-empty wine bottles, milk bottles, Pepsi cans. Was there a wastebasket in the living room? She thought not. That left the bedrooms and the bathrooms, but whose bedroom? Whose bathroom?
There was no way to know. The trash had become all mixed together in the big plastic bag. Jessica tried to think if there was anyone she could eliminate. How about the Harlows? When had they arrived? Before or after the murder? It was after, wasn’t it? She had seen the headlights of their car down below as she was on her way upstairs to check on Olivia. They arrived after Olivia was dead. They were in the clear. But what if they weren’t arriving for the first time? What if one of them, maybe Daniel, had come in earlier and left? He could have left his mother somewhere else, driven here, climbed the outside stairs, done the deed, then went back and picked up his mother. That didn’t sound likely, but given Ruth Harlow’s avid defense of her son, right or wrong, might she have sat in the car and waited for him to finish the deed? Might she not have done it herself?
Jessica thought her imagination was running away with her.
Philip: Philip was tortured by the possibility that he had sent an innocent person to prison. Or that he had missed an obvious clue and let a guilty one escape. Olivia had been a journalist who investigated crimes. Might she have discovered something that Philip hoped no one ever would?
Sophie: Italian. Mafia. Jessica mentally slapped herself for the unfair stereotyping. Sophie? No way.
Ashley: Unstable, to say the least. Her refusal to read, the close call in the water after she’d been warned. Very strange, but murder? Why?
Alex: International espionage. World traveler. Spies. Olivia had lots of connections in Washington D.C. Politicians. Lobbyists. Could be anything, couldn’t it?
The bedroom door shook with the scratches of little paws. Jessica figured it was time to rejoin the party.
She rejoined the festivities in time to see Philip and Alex muscling the huge steamer pot to the picnic table Sophie had cleared off for them. They dumped the entire load of crabs, now bright red and covered with spices, on the table. Everyone gathered around, but Alex halted them before they could pick up a crab.
“This man needs a lesson,” he said, slapping Rogowski on the shoulder. “He’s never picked a crab.” Alex chose a crab from the pile on the table and unceremoniously ripped its claws off. He peeled off the crab’s carapace and twisted the body in two. When he got to the claws, he showed Rogowski how to crack them with one of the little wooden hammers Sophie had dropped around. They all watched as Olivia’s agent decimated his first crab and dipped the lovely white meat into a dish of cocktail sauce. It wasn’t a professional job, but it was enough to win him a round of applause.
Jessica had lost all desire for crabs. She was juggling a dozen events, memories of the last couple of days, in her mind. Where are the dogs? She spotted them across the parking area, near the sandy boundary of the property, where Olivia had parked her car. They were sniffing around the dry collection of debris at the edge of the lot. Kim, as usual for her, was digging. Atlas was running in circles around the two little dogs, across to the fire pit, around the table where everyone was eating, around the man opening oysters, and back to the two little dogs. Around and around. What is he doing?
In a flash, she got it. A Briard is a herding dog, bred to round up sheep. Or dogs. Or people. Whatever is alive but not in a neat bunch. Atlas, like all of his kind, could not stand to see living things scattered about.
Laughing at the sight, Jessica called to her dogs. Trey paid no attention to her. Kim kept digging. “Help me round up these little sheep,” she told Atlas. She plodded over to the red sports car and saw that trash was strewn across the sand near the passenger side door. She recalled the small avalanche of trash that had fallen out when Mark Rogowski had opened the car door. Kim was pawing at something in the sand a few feet away. Jessica bent over and picked it up. A memory stick, much like the ones Jessica herself used when she needed to save or transport her work to another computer. It was sandy, but otherwise it looked pristine. As if it had not been out here long. She stuck it in her shorts pocket.
Traipsing back to join the others, Jessica saw the word Fentanyl in her mind’s eye. Why did she think that? As a deaf person, she had developed the habit of jotting down things she thought people said, always remembering she might be wrong. She had to rely on her visual memory. She could remember words she had not actually heard much better when she jotted them down. The letter “F” is especially easy for lip readers to spot. Fentanyl. She had thought this was what Olivia had said, then later decided she must have been mistaken. But what if she wasn’t? She had jotted it on the margin of her own paper. She had intended to ask Olivia to explain why that apparently unconnected sentence had appeared in her story.
Rubbing the memory stick in her pocket with her fingers, she rejoined the group. Mark Rogowski was talking to them about the difficulties of dealing with publishers these days. Jessica grabbed a crab and one of the small wooden hammers. Alex was interrupting Mark after almost every sentence and Jessica noted that he was slurring his words. The trash can under the table was filling up with empty beer cans.
“Since everyone is into self-publishing these days, it’s impossible to figure out the market,” Mark Rogowski said. “It used to be easy. You could take a manuscript to a publisher that does the sort of book you’re trying to sell. They read it and decide. The agent simply hypes the book he’s got and waits to see what happens. Now? Whole new ballgame, right?” He took a big gulp of his beer. A small tendril of crab meat clung to his chin.
“It seems like the agent would have nothing to do now,” Jessica said.
“Oddly, we have more to do,” Mark said. “The average writer doesn’t know the market, doesn’t know how to find the really good editors, doesn’t know all kinds of things that a book needs to go from first draft to best seller.”
“And a really good editor is important,” Philip said. By now, he had made a three-inch-high pile of shells on the table in front of him. He picked up another crab, wrenched the carapace off, and punctured his own thumb in the process. He flinched, looked at the tiny drop of blood, and stuck his thumb in his mouth.
It reminded Jessica of the blood on the pillowcase. A lab would be able to sequence its DNA. Would it match the DNA of one of them? More than likely. The house cleaner would have a soiled pillowcase and tossed it in the bin. She felt as if the clouds of confusion might be lifting.
Philip was talking about his search for a good and reliable editor. “The woman I’m working with now is good, but when she says ‘I’ll get it to you by next week,’ she really means next month.”
“Michael Pacifico,” Alex said. He wiped a bit of spicy crab boil from his mouth with the back of his hand. “He’s my editor, but he’s always booked up. Lots of luck, hiring him.”
Jessica was a firm believer in connections. Connections were what made a story believable. Here was an odd connection. Olivia Sands and Alex used the same editor. Her own editor had finally adjusted to receiving only electronic submissions, but Pacifico was one of those who still needed a paper copy for his red pen. All that wasted paper. No more than one in fifty would ever see publication. She checked her shorts pocket to feel the memory stick that Kim had dug up. What was on it? Had it fallen out of Olivia’s car or had it been lying there in the sand for a long time?
Jessica excused herself and left the party.
Back in her own room, she slipped the memory stick into the USB port on her own laptop. She clicked on the first file and read: The Ghosts of Ashton Hall. A novel by Ashley Marie Fagen.
Scrolling down, she began reading chapter one. She felt like a peeping Tom.
She began reading and was soon lost in the world of Virginia’s James River Basin. The main character was a guide at an old mansion, now open to the public. The house was apparently haunted, but the story was taking some strange paths. The guides at the house were college students who were into partying after the tourists left.
Jessica told herself to hurry up. She didn’t want to abandon the group at the crab feast, but curiosity was drawing her into the story. The bedroom door shook slightly. She set her laptop on the bed and opened the door. It was Kim, begging to come in. She let the little dog in and returned to the story.
“It’s lucky you called me when you did,” the doctor said. “Fentanyl is nothing to mess with.”
Jessica stopped. Where had she read this before? It didn’t take long for her to recall the note she had scribbled on her own paper when Olivia Sands was reading from her work. Was Ashley plagiarizing Olivia’s work? Apparently so. There was too much similarity to believe otherwise. But the work Olivia read from was political thriller. The first one she had ever written. Jessica remembered why she had written that note to herself. She also remembered looking at Ashley and seeing that she had gone pale.
She sat on her bed, trying to work it out. It still didn’t make sense. Olivia had been reading from a work in progress. No title yet. It had nothing to do with drugs or with calling a doctor. But the sentence did make sense in a story involving Capitol pages. The one that was still at the publisher’s. The one titled Peril on the Potomac.
Philip and Atlas appeared in the sliding glass door to the patio. Jessica got up and slid it open. “I’m trying to work out something very strange,” she told him. “And I need to run my really weird theory past you.”
Philip pulled a folding lawn chair from the stack leaning against the house and sat.
