4

I want all of them. Every last one of them.”

The penetrating voice grated on Annie Laurence’s ear drum. Her hand tightened on the receiver, but she kept her reply light and cheerful. Think of it this way, she lectured herself, every demand by Mrs. Brawley translated into a cordial hum on the cash register.

“I don’t believe they’ve all been reprinted yet. But I’ll be glad to order them as they’re scheduled.”

“Hildegarde Withers is wonderful! It’s a crime they’ve been out of print all these years.” The tone was accusing.

Annie didn’t quite see it as a capital offense, but she murmured agreement. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Brawley, I’ll order them for you. And, if you like, I can round up all the Stuart Palmer titles second-hand—”

“I want new books.”

“Oh, certainly. By all means. Now, I have your number. I’ll let you know as soon as the first title arrives.”

It took several seconds more to end the conversation. Mrs. Brawley’s singleminded pursuit of a goal ranked high on any all-time list, neck-and-neck with Carrie Nation, Johnny Appleseed, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Once free of the phone, Annie returned to a jollier pastime, reading mystery reviews in Publishers Weekly. The latest Robert Barnard sounded marvelous. And there was a new book by Sister Carol Anne O’Marie. She would—

The front doorbell sang. Annie dropped the magazine on the wicker table, pushed up from her favorite rattan easy chair, the one with the softest red and yellow cushions, brushed by a flourishing Whitmani fern, and stepped into the broad central corridor of Death on Demand. She hurried past the angled gum shelving with the various mystery categories toward the front desk and the rather stunning woman who was surveying the interior of the bookstore as if it were a Peruvian slum.

Annie’s smile tightened. You don’t have to like customers, she reminded herself, although, as a general rule, she did. Mystery readers, as a class, were bright, well-informed, and articulate. This well-preserved blonde was a stranger to her. Maybe she’d just moved to Broward’s Rock. She certainly looked prosperous enough to afford the island’s casual but expensive lifestyle. Annie swiftly appraised the elegant cream suede suit, the crimson silk tie, the brown alligator pumps and handbag, and a wedding ring that glittered like the Waldorf chandelier.

“Good morning. May I help you?”

Deeply blue eyes flicked disdainfully from Edgar’s sleek feathers to a splashily bright poster affixed to the True Crime section, which advertised the latest book on the luckless headmistress with the unfortunate love life. Carnelian lips thinned in disgust.

Annie could feel a rush of heat to the back of her neck. Steady, she thought, foreseeing lurid headlines. MYSTERY SHOP OWNER BLUDGEONS OBNOXIOUS CUSTOMER.

“I’m looking for a Miss Annie Laurance.” The tone indicated the same eagerness that might be experienced upon searching for a boa constrictor.

“I’m Annie Laurance.” And to hell with you, lady.

“Oh.” Frosty eyes scanned her. The artfully darkened blonde brows drew down in a delicate frown. “You’re very young.”

Tempted to respond with a combative, “So?,” Annie evinced exemplary restraint, and merely said again, a little more insistently, “May I help you?”

“I’m Corinne Prichard Webster.”

Annie waited.

“From Chastain.”

“Chastain. That’s not far from Beaufort. I understand it’s a lovely old town.”

“You’ve never been to Chastain?” Incredulity lifted the well-modulated voice.

“Not yet,” Annie admitted, her smile now unforced.

“Oh, well. I don’t know what to say.”

Annie was beginning to feel trapped in a surrealistic conversation. It was time to hack her way out of this encounter. Maybe this expensive blonde was a nut. “Are you looking for a particular book?”

“A book. A mystery? Oh, heavens, no. I don’t read them.” Her moral superiority was clearly established.

“This is a mystery bookstore.”

“Yes, I know. I’m here on behalf of the Chastain Historical Preservation Society. One of our Board members, Roscoe Merrill, recommended you.”

Merrill. Merrill. Then she remembered him, a stocky lawyer with a shiny bald head and humorless brown eyes. But he liked Rumpole, so there had to be a spark of humanity beneath that pinstriped exterior. What on earth, she wondered, had Merrill recommended her for?

Mrs. Webster didn’t seem cheered by the recommendation. “Are you familiar with the annual house-and-garden tours in Chastain?” She looked at Annie doubtfully.

Recalling the chaste gray and pink poster she’d seen in the hallway of the Broward’s Rock Public Library, Annie nodded.

“It has been suggested—” The smooth voice thinned just a trifle, and Annie detected a ripple of irritation. “The Board decided that we could enhance the success of our annual house-and-garden tours if we offered a further enticement.” She enunciated each word as if she were sucking a lemon.

The Board of the Chastain Historical Preservation Society must be hard up for support if it’d sent an emissary all the way to an off-lying island. Annie was looking forward to an unctuous refusal to harbor promotional material, something on the lines of, “This is a mystery bookstore, and we only offer information of interest to mystery readers,” when the magic words “some kind of mystery program” registered.

“Mystery program?”

“Yes. Now, of course, if you don’t feel that you can handle an assignment of this nature, it would be understandable. After all, you certainly are very young, and there isn’t much time to develop it. We would need to have the scripts, if that’s how it’s done, by next Thursday. If you feel the time is insufficient, I will explain to the Board and perhaps another year—”

“Mystery program?” A happy surge of adrenaline tingled from her ears to her toes. “You mean, figure out the plot and create the clues and run the whole thing? Oh, God, I’d kill to do it!”

When the door finally closed behind Corinne Webster’s trim figure, Annie unclenched her hands and felt the tightness ease from her neck and shoulders. What a poisonous creature! A Gila monster would have a certain charm in comparison. But the chance to run her very own mystery nights program was too exciting to lose, so she’d ignored the Board president’s clear distaste for the entire idea. Something funny there. Obviously, the little tyrant had been maneuvered into approving the Mystery Nights. Be interesting to meet the other Board members. Well, she’d have her chance on Thursday when she presented them with her wonderful Mystery Nights program. And she could thank Roscoe Merrill for suggesting her for the job. Annie felt utterly confident that she would indeed create a super-duper mystery. How could she miss? She’d read every mystery from Les Miserables to Death From a Top Hat. Her mind teemed with ideas—a mannequin which turns into a body, babies switched at birth, letters hidden in the attic. Grinning, she reached for the phone and called Ingrid to see if she could work full-time for the next few weeks. Then, she hurried down the aisle to make a fresh pot of Kona coffee. The better to think with.

Ingrid arrived before the brew was finished. Annie filled mugs for both of them, and Ingrid settled in behind the front desk, emitting enthusiastic coos as Annie described her new project.

“The House-and-Garden tours start Monday, April 7. I’m going to put on a mystery program the first four nights, and end up with a Denouement Ball on Friday night. And they’re going to pay me $1,000!”

Ingrid applauded.

Delighted with herself and the prospect, Annie freshened her mug and wandered happily among the shelves. There were so many interesting ways to commit murder. Douglas Clark used castor-oil beans in Premedicated Murder. V. C. Clinton-Baddeley took honors for originality when he created a poison of ant’s brew in Death’s Bright Dart. H. F. Heard opted for a swarm of deadly bees in A Taste of Honey, and Elspeth Huxley aimed a poison-tipped stick in The African Poison Murders.

And think of the fascinating variety among victims: a charming, likable woman with good intentions in Dorothy Simpson’s Last Seen Alive, the narcissistic coed in Jane Langton’s Emily Dickinson Is Dead, an arrogant braggart who made the fatal mistake of collecting killers in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table, a woman who married too many times in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, and the socially impeccable Cogswells in Virginia Rich’s The Baked Bean Supper Murders.

Where to begin? With victim or detective? Margaret Truman recommends starting with the victim, and Robert B. Parker insists the point of mystery fiction is the detective, not detection.

Should her mystery take advantage of its setting in one of South Carolina’s oldest coastal towns, as Leslie Ford milked the atmosphere for every last drop of Spanish moss in Murder with Southern Hospitality? Or should she appeal to the mystery addict’s interest in faraway places, as Mary Stewart did in My Brother Michael and James McClure in The Steam Pig?

She bent to straighten the row of Ruth Rendell titles. Now those kinds of stories wouldn’t do at all for this genteel group. No, better something more on the order of Mary Roberts Rinehart or Louisa Revell. Or perhaps—The bell above the door rang. She stepped into the central aisle, looked toward the front, and saw Max peering at her determinedly from the doorway. Ingrid beamed at Max, then shot her a shamefaced glance. Ingrid was the most wonderful employee in this or any other bookstore, but she was clearly on his side now.

The newcomer grinned at Ingrid, but his eyes were on Annie.

She waved her hand at him. “Come on in. The floor isn’t mined.” He was obviously girding for battle, still confident that he would prevail. Dammit, she loved him, the silly ass, but she wasn’t going to be swayed.

He still stood, half in and half out of Death on Demand, and she thought about Calvin Gates’s first encounter with Mr. Moto in Mr. Moto Is So Sorry, the two at cross purposes, Calvin tenaciously pursuing his destiny, and Mr. Moto intent upon his own ends. Even the enormous stuffed raven beside the door seemed to be looking at Max sympathetically. Was everybody, dead birds included, on Max’s side? And Agatha, of course, was moving languidly toward him. Where was her sense of loyalty? Didn’t she know who her mistress was? But the small, silky-furred black cat was already twined gracefully around his leg. Absently, he reached down to pet her, then cleared his throat decisively.

She hurried to forestall him. She wasn’t up to another discussion today. Besides, even though they were at odds, Max would be delighted at her good fortune.

“Guess what? I get to plan my own murders. For money! And I can’t decide between cyanide or electrocution or maybe defenestration. But don’t you think cyanide in champagne has a lovely ring?”

“In a glass or bottle?” he inquired mildly. He finally came all the way inside. Ingrid patted his arm as he passed her and was rewarded with his sexy grin. Annie struggled to concentrate on her immediate task, but she felt the old familiar thrill, the unmistakable tingly delight at his presence. He looked freshly scrubbed, as if he’d just stepped from a shower and into his crisp white shirt and gray poplin slacks. Was there a hint of dampness in his thick blond hair? For a moment, she thought about Max in his shower, the water slapping against his tanned, muscled chest, then she firmly brought her mind to heel.

“What’s the difference?”

“Cyanide in a bottle, if mixed in a punch, could fell hundreds. Are you and Ingrid planning a reception for the store?”

“I prefer to entertain my customers, not kill them,” she retorted. She glanced around. Actually, the increase in customers at Death on Demand this spring had been phenomenal—and she didn’t believe it had anything to do with her notoriety as half of the team which solved the first murders in modern times on Broward’s Rock. At least not much. They came because they wanted to see the shop. Some wanted books. After all, she carried the best selection of mystery and suspense novels this side of Atlanta. Some were readers who relished matching the painted scenes on the back wall to favorite books. Local artists vied for the right to paint new scenes every month, and the contest successfully lured patrons in month after month. And, of course, all the area mystery writers liked to come, too, though they’d been a little slow to return after last fall’s excitement. Hopefully, everyone was starting to forget about the murder in the shop.

“I guess I’d better put the cyanide in a glass.”

He moved so close she had trouble concentrating on her topic.

Casually, she stepped back a pace, then realized she was wedged between Max and the romantic suspense section.

“Whose? Anybody I know? I thought I was the only person you were mad at right now.” He managed to look both injured and appealing. Dammit, why did he have to remind her of a Brittany spaniel? What was there about Max that she found so irresistible? Well, she was going to avoid any further discussion of their dilemma, no matter how pathetic he managed to look. It was a pose, of course. He was a bullheaded, insensitive, money-flaunting brute.

“Come on and have some coffee,” she said brusquely, wriggling past him into the aisle and leading the way to the back of the shop. Behind the coffee bar, several hundred white mugs sat on shelving. Each mug carried the name of a book which had earned recognition as an all-time great in mystery fiction. She poured Max a fresh cup and refilled hers. Max lifted his mug and sniffed it suspiciously.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Just making sure the cyanide hasn’t popped from the champagne to the coffee.”

She laughed. “I’m not that mad at you. I’m thinking about cyanide for the Chastain Mystery Nights.” She described Mrs. Webster’s visit. “Although it’s going to be a royal pain to work with Her Highness.”

Max took time to see which famous mystery title was written in red script on his white mug (The Lone Wolf). He raised an eyebrow quizzically.

She hastened to reassure him. “Nothing profound is intended. My mugs are not fortune cookies.” And she waggled her own, which carried the legend, The Beast Must Die.

He lounged comfortably against the bar, drank some coffee, and sighed.

It was wonderful the way good coffee could improve his disposition. She must remember that for future mornings together—if those mornings ever materialized. The prospect didn’t look so good at the moment.

“So you’re being unleashed to develop a murder program. Do they have any realization they may have uncapped a bloodthirsty genie from a bottle?”

She felt a surge of relief. She had successfully deflected him from the purpose of his visit. With luck, she could keep the conversation on cyanide and murder and away from the dangerous topic of September.

She put her mug on the yellow formica top of the coffee bar and smiled at him rapturously. “It’s going to be so much fun. Max, do you want to help?” she asked eagerly. “No kidding. We can do it together.” She ignored the quick gleam in his eye. “I mean, like Frances and Richard Lockridge. Or the Gordons. Or Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall.” She bent over the bar, fished out a notebook and flipped it open, then scrounged vainly in the pocket of her white slacks for a pen. Max obligingly handed her one. “Look, what do you think? Should we do a locked-room mystery like John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man or Clayton Rawson’s The Footprints On the Ceiling? Maybe we should consider psychological suspense like Helen McCloy’s The Slayer and the Slain or Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief. Or an academic murder, like Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position or Gwendolyn Butler’s Coffin in Oxford. And there’re always sporting murders. Let’s see, it was archery in Death at St. Asprey’s School by Leo Bruce, bullfighting in Puzzle for Pilgrims by Patrick Quentin, running in Dead Heat by Linda Barnes, basketball in The Giant Kill by Kin Platt, golf in—”

“Annie. Annie. ANNIE!”

She paused, images still flashing in her brain like neon on a rainy Saturday night.

“Quiet now. Take a deep breath.”

Obediently, she breathed. Then she shook her head impatiently. “I’m not choking.”

“I thought you were hyperventilating. Take it easy. Approach it logically.” His voice was low, deep, soothing, and extraordinarily irritating.

“I am fine, thank you. It’s just that there are so many wonderful possibilities—”

Max was trying hard not to laugh. He set his mug down and reached out to ruffle her hair. “Annie, love, I do enjoy you so.”

She looked at him skeptically. “Are you making fun of me?”

“I’d never do that,” he said virtuously, but the corner of his mouth twitched suspiciously.

They both laughed, and she realized this was the happiest she’d been in weeks, immersed in mysteries and laughing companionably with Max. Agatha leaped gracefully up to the bar to join in the merriment. Annie stroked her and felt ridiculously happy. It was almost as if she and Max hadn’t quarreled. Well, it wasn’t exactly a quarrel. But it was a disagreement. In spades. This moment forcibly reminded her in what direction happiness lay. But she had to retain her independence.

Oblivious to her unspoken soliloquy, Max reached for the notebook and took his pen.

“Okay. First things first. Who will play the role of the suspects?”

She understood at once. “Oh, sure. That limits some of the possibilities.” Her mind ran over and discarded murder in the Himalayas, on a submarine, or while deep-sea fishing. “The roles will be played by members of the Historical Preservation Society.”

He quirked an expressive eyebrow. “If they are anything like the women in my grandmother’s bridge club …”

“Allowing for cultural distinctions between Connecticut and South Carolina, I would imagine they are soulmates.”

Devilment glinting in his dark blue eyes, Max leaned forward. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Make the victim a Hollywood producer in 1926 and have the suspects be a bunch of young starlets. Oh wow, can you see these old ladies in vamp clothes and beads and bangles …” He melted in laughter.

She laughed, too, then mused, “Actually, I can see casting that horrid Mrs. Webster as an aging star, who everybody hates. Maybe an old folks’ home for retired actors and actresses, and she has a chance for a big role, and all the other old-lady stars are jealous and one of them spikes her bedtime toddy with cyanide.”

He shook his head, half in awe, half in despair. “You do have a fertile mind, love, but let’s skirt any possibility of slander. Your Mrs. Webster probably wouldn’t like that role at all.”

His caution surprised her. Max could act like a lawyer most unexpectedly. But how marvelous that he wasn’t predictable. Now, what was she doing mooning on about Max? The mystery was the thing.

“She’s not my Mrs. Webster. But, you’re probably right. I’d better not use her as the victim.” Absently, her face scrunched in thought, she stood on tiptoe and stretched. Her mind worked better when her muscles were loose. “Okay, we’re going to build a story that centers around upper-class, middle-aged suspects.”

He poised the pen over the notebook. “How do we go about it?”

“Just like Agatha Christie did. We think.” She ran her hand excitedly through her short blonde hair. “Did I ever tell you my favorite Christie story?” She charged ahead: “One day when walking in her garden with a friend, Christie abruptly announced her book was finished. This excited her companion, who had always wanted to read one of Agatha’s books before it was published. The friend asked for permission to read the manuscript. Dame Agatha looked very surprised, then responded, ‘Oh, I haven’t written it yet.’ ”

“Oh, that’s great.”

“So we have to do the same. We have to figure everything out.” Her eyes narrowed in concentration.

He tapped the paper with the pen. “How do we do it?”

“Here’s what we need,” she explained confidently. “Victim. Five suspects. Motives. Alibis. Clues.” She traced the outline of the title on her cup. “I mean real clues, like half of a torn letter, a smudged postmark, cigarette butts, a box of insecticide. I’ll scatter clues around the crime scene for the detectives to find.”

“Who’s the victim?” He scratched at his thick blonde hair with the stub end of the pen.

She pressed her fingers against her temples for a long moment, then nodded. “How about a bank president? Think of the lust, greed, and general hatred that can swirl around a bank president.” She pictured Roscoe Merrill’s shiny bald head. Any prosperous lawyer could look like a bank president.

“Dark secrets in the hallways of high finance,” Max intoned.

“We’ll call the bank president Thompson Hatfield—and we’ll use Kansas as a setting. Agricultural banks are nosediving all over the place in the Middle West. Now, here’s what happens,” and she leaned close to Max. They were elbow to elbow as he wrote furiously to keep up with her bullet-fast pronouncements. “Motives abound. His wife’s in love with another man, he’s about to foreclose on a huge ranch run by his brother-in-law, his stepson’s been embezzling, the vice president of the bank wants his job, he’s going to fire the PR director, and he’s the only man who won’t agree to merging with another town bank to save it from going under.”

“And somebody slips cyanide into his coffee thermos,” Max suggested. “See, there’s your cyanide.”

Clues to be found at the murder scene: The name of his wife’s lover written in his appointment book, the torn foreclosure notice for his brother-in-law’s ranch, a key chain belonging to the vice president who wants his job, a gun registered in the name of the PR director, a Stetson hat that belongs to the president of the rival, failing bank, and a strand of hair belonging to his wife. (She is a redhead.)

“Well, now that that’s settled,” Max began, and once again he had that determined, bullheaded September look in his dark blue eyes.

She threw herself into the breach. “Oh, no, we’ve just started. We have to figure out the information to give to the suspects.”

The phone rang at the front desk, but Annie knew Ingrid would answer it.

“Let’s see, we’d better draw up a timetable, then we’ll decide who was where and—”

“Max,” Ingrid’s voice warbled cheerfully. “It’s for you.”

He reached for the extension behind the coffee bar. “Hi, Barbie. Sure, I’m free. I’ll be right back.” He hung up and whistled. “Barbie said this guy’s waiting to see me, and he’s talking a thousand-dollar retainer.”

Annie was tickled. Max actually sounded interested. It wouldn’t be the money, of course, but the chance to have a job. Perhaps he was reforming. Max excited at the prospect of work!

He paused at the front door and called back meaningfully, “I’ll be back in a little while. We’ve got to talk.”

She stood by the coffee bar, her arms folded. Ingrid, her springy gray hair in tight curls from a new permanent, bobbed down the center aisle like a curious but ladylike bird. She had decided opinions on Annie and Max’s disagreement, but she practiced her own brand of tact. After she poured both Annie and herself fresh coffee, she said, “Sounded like you were having fun for a while.”

“Yeah.” She refused to meet Ingrid’s eyes.

Ingrid gently touched her arm and once again backed into her subject. “You know the old saying about pride. Well, pride is a mighty cold bedfellow. And people, if you hurt them too much, you can lose their friendship. And that would be a shame.”

Annie felt a sick ache in her heart. Lose Max? It seemed such a small thing, really, to want to plan the wedding her own way. A simple, small ceremony here on the island, paid for by her. But Max was obstinately insisting on a magnificent, grandiose, immense wedding in his hometown, at his expense.

She took a gulp of the hot coffee. “I’d better see if that delivery’s come,” and she carried her coffee mug past the scattered tables to the storeroom.

“Call me if you need any help,” Ingrid offered, before turning up the central aisle to the cash desk. Annie knew she was offering more than assistance with unloading boxes, and she was torn between affection and irritation. Darn it, did everybody think Max was right—except her? She put her coffee on the worktable and attacked the unopened carton of used books, bought from a collector in California. Wrestling the box open, she started pulling out the wads of crumpled newspaper. The top volume, well-wrapped in plastic, was an autographed first-edition copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps. It was a wonderful find, but she didn’t enjoy the usual flip-flop of pleasure. Instead, she slapped the cardboard carton shut, retrieved her coffee mug, and wandered back out into the bookstore. She’d not thought in terms of losing Max. Why, any fool could see how much fun they had together.

Even the excitement of working on the upcoming Mystery Nights waned as she considered Ingrid’s unsettling but well-meant warning. Restlessly, she paced into the American Cozy area, full of rattan chairs, wicker tables, and tangly ferns in raffia baskets. But the mingled smell of recently watered greenery and both musty and new books lacked its usual charm. Absently she noticed that Agatha had been chewing again on the fern closest to the Christie shelves. On a normal day, she would steal a half hour at least to look at her newest acquisitions, and perhaps succumb to the temptation to forget all duties, pressing or otherwise, and just curl up with one. Only yesterday she’d received a mystery she’d been seeking for years, Sax Rohmer’s Fire-Tongue. This was the famous book that he started without a solution, couldn’t solve himself, and finally had to ask his friend Harry Houdini to solve for him.

But not today. Fire-Tongue could wait until she’d completed the Mystery Night scripts—and stopped brooding about Max.

Come on, Annie, she instructed herself sternly, don’t be a gothic wimp. Everything would be all right with Max. She felt a flood of good cheer, with just a faint undercurrent of apprehension. Okay, she’d get back to work on her very own murder. Humming “Happy Days Are Here Again,” she returned to the coffee bar, put down her mug, and reached for the notebook. Now, what would cast members need to know about their characters to portray them successfully? She leaned against the bar and stared upward, and her eyes paused on the watercolors pinned to the back wall. By golly, these were a triumph.

In the first watercolor, a large, slope-shouldered man in a gray suit knelt beside a long, thin body in a black overcoat. The kneeling figure, with the face of a blond Satan, gripped a flaming cigarette lighter in his left hand. The flame flickered close to an open, immobile eye. His empty bloodstained right hand was raised. A football-shaped parcel wrapped in brown paper lay beside the body.

In the second picture, the strong-jawed, brown-eyed private detective in a wet trenchcoat clutched his dripping hat in one hand and looked impassively at the young, slim, naked woman sitting stiffly, in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, in a highbacked teakwood chair. Her eyes were opened wide in a witless stare. Her mouth was agape, her small, pointed white teeth as shiny as porcelain. Long jade earrings dangled from her delicate ears. A corpse lay face up on the floor near a tripod camera. He wore Chinese slippers, black satin pajama pants, and his embroidered Chinese coat seeped blood from three wounds. Strips of Chinese embroidery and Chinese and Japanese prints in wood-grained frames decorated the brown plaster walls of the low-beamed room.

Annie’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Maybe they were too easy.

In the third sketch, a body lay sprawled on the floor of a cabana overlooking surging ocean waters, a single crimson bullet wound in the head. A husky, dark-haired man with a scraped and bruised face and weary gray-blue eyes looked questioningly at his friend in the doorway and the .32 target pistol in his hand.

In the fourth painting, a yellow jeep with a front-end blade accelerated directly at the big, aging jock standing by an open pit in a subtropical pasture. Visible in the pit was the glossy, red-brown body of a dead horse. The driver of the jeep was shirtless, a mat of black hair on his tanned, muscular chest. He wore a white canvas cap and oval aviator’s sunglasses. His quarry, crouched by the pit, ready to spring out of the jeep’s charge, had light eyes and dark hair. He wore boat pants, sandals, and a faded white shirt. A vulture hovered overhead in the yellowish sky.

In the final painting, an athletic, savvy-looking man stood poised in the archway of the living room of an old apartment, a gun in his hand. Velveteen hangings covered the walls. Skulls flanked an altar. A naked girl, her body painted with cabalistic and astrological signs, was tied to a cross, which hung from the ceiling. The cult’s almost naked priest, wearing only a hood, stood near the cross, brandishing a stubby stick.

The old-familiar thrills coursed through her. Mysteries, the stuff of life. She bent over the bar and began to write, as fast as her hand could fly. By golly, this was going to be a wonderful mystery. And all her own. She whistled cheerfully as she worked. The Mystery Nights would be a smash and everything, of course, would ultimately come right between her and Max. He would see reason and agree to her plan for the wedding.

As Annie would later say, had she but known.…