Graeme wet his lips. It was a small, lizard-like sound, and it carried through the silence in the ballroom.

  “After that, you knew you were in trouble. You didn’t have a plan. You hadn’t meant for this to happen. You ran. It was your bad luck that Vivienne was attending the conference. Of course she got involved. And you must have been terrified—I mean, this was the Vivienne Carver, the brilliant sleuth who always caught the killer. But she didn’t, did she?”

  “She did,” Graeme said, the words breathless. He wiped his hands on his trousers. “She caught Simona.”

  I shook my head. “Ten years went by, and everyone forgot about Robert Kessler and Simona Wolf. You must have thought you were in the clear. And then Vivienne Carver contacted you, announcing she was out of prison and interested in attending Northern Noir. You were in a bind—you didn’t want her to come back, because God only knew what she wanted or what might happen. But if you said no, that might make her suspicious. So, you had to make those last-minute arrangements for her.”

  “Vivienne Carver was one of the most famous novelists in the world,” Graeme said in that same weak voice. “Of course we wanted her to attend—”

  “When she contacted you,” I asked, “did she tell you she knew what you’d done?”

  Graeme stared back at me.

  “She must have said something,” I said, “because you realized you had to get rid of her before she could prove you were the one who killed Robert. That’s why you lured her down to the grotto, and you killed her the same way you killed Robert: you hit her on the head. But you didn’t expect Steven to know that Vivienne had been wrong about Simona. What did he do? Come to you? Ask if you remembered anything about Robert’s murder? Did you suggest a walk along the creek so you could speak privately?”

  In the silence that followed, the only sound was the distant rush of the HVAC system.

  “This is insane,” Graeme said. He ran his tongue over his lips again. “You’re as bad as she was—as bad as Vivienne.”

  The woman with the WITCH tote bag booed.

  “The sheriff arrested someone,” Graeme said. “I didn’t want to say this, but the sheriff arrested Whitney Smith this morning for Vivienne’s murder.”

  Murmurs ran through the audience.

  “Whitney didn’t kill Vivienne Carver,” I said. “And she didn’t kill Robert Kessler.”

  “The sheriff—”

  “I know,” I said. (It felt weirdly empowering to be the interrupt-er, instead of the interrupt-ee.) “And I know why the sheriff thinks Whitney might have done it. I know you made that anonymous call and told the sheriff that Whitney had left those one-star reviews. But Whitney didn’t kill anybody. You did.”

  Graeme shook his head. He adjusted his glasses as he turned from side to side, as though asking the audience to consider how unreasonable I was being. “But you don’t have any evidence. You have—you have this story. You can’t prove I was ever in Robert’s room. Yes, Simona backed out of her deal. And yes, Doorstopper went out of business. But I wouldn’t kill someone over it.”

  “You would,” I said. “And you did.”

  “You can’t prove it.” Graeme’s voice grew shrill. “You can’t prove I did any of it, that I went anywhere near Steven or Vivienne. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have time. I’ve been busy. Do you know how hard it is to run a conference?” He looked around again, wiping sweat from his forehead; hardened faces stared back at him. “You don’t have any proof!”

  “I do, actually,” I said. “You made a mistake—well, in all fairness, it wasn’t actually a mistake so much as bad luck. You couldn’t have expected Vivienne to do what she did. And you did try to fix it, but by then, it was too late.”

  “You don’t—” Graeme started.

  I pulled the schedule out of my pocket, the one Vivienne had given me—the one with her phone number written on it. I’d taken the time to put it in a plastic bag, and I held it up now as I addressed everyone in the ballroom. “This is the conference schedule. It’s Vivienne’s—you know it’s hers because she wrote her phone number on it, and her handwriting can be verified. Her fingerprints will be on it. And, importantly, so will Graeme’s. If you’ve got your conference schedule with you, take a look at Thursday night.”

  The rustling of hundreds of conference programs filled the ballroom.

  Graeme’s color was grayish yellow, somewhere between passing out and jaundice, and he darted furtive glances around the room.

  “On the schedule of events for Thursday,” I said, giving the paper a wave, “we’ve got registration from three until eight. There’s session one at four, session two at five, and then one-on-one meetings with authors and agents from six until eight at the grotto. And let’s see—Vivienne’s first one-on-one is with Dashiell Dawson Dane.”

  “That’s wrong!” It was the woman with the tote, and she was waving her program frantically overhead. “The one-on-ones didn’t start until seven!”

  A massive man with a huge beard shot to his feet. “And it doesn’t say anything about the grotto!”

  A woman with her hair in curlers—yes, in curlers—got on top of her chair. She was holding a pen like she meant to stab someone with it, and she shouted, “And they don’t list individual meetings!”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Graeme changed it.” I turned to Graeme. “I kept wondering why Vivienne would have gone to the grotto by herself. She was smart. She was careful. She’d faced killers before. But she made an assumption—we all did. And the assumption was that the schedules were all the same. I heard Sam and Frodo complain about you double-checking their work on the author packets, but you weren’t double-checking at all, were you? You were changing the schedule in Vivienne’s packet. That’s why she went down to the grotto. That’s how I got signed up for that one-on-one. It should have been obvious to anyone who knew me that I would never sign up for extra time talking to anyone, let alone Vivienne Carver. I mean, the thought that I would willingly choose to spend additional time talking to people—”

  “Dash,” Indira said.

  “The matter at hand, please,” Fox said.

  “You donkey,” Keme said.

  Millie clapped her hands. “THE MURDER!”

  (One of the chandeliers tinkled).

  “Uh, right. Anyway, that’s how you did it. And I’ve got the proof right here.”

  About five seconds passed before Keme said, “That’s it?”

  “What do you mean, that’s it? That was good!” I turned back to Graeme. “Oh, and that’s why you attacked Charlie—because you saw us on the bus looking at the schedule, and you knew you needed to get Vivienne’s schedule back so no one could prove you tampered with it, and you thought I gave it to them. But I didn’t; I gave them mine. Instead, all you got was the printout of a Wikipedia article. Then you broke into Hemlock House, thinking I still had the schedule at home—which I did—but when I interrupted you in the study, you saw your opportunity and tried to kill me. I mean, it’s all kind of obvious now because I explained it, but I still felt like I needed to say it.”

  Out in the audience, Fox groaned.

  “Also—” I began.

  Graeme made this weird noise low in his throat that turned into something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You. You!”

  “Uh, that’s right: me.” (But even I didn’t sound convinced.)

  “You! My God, the fact that it’s you. It would be one thing if it were Vivienne, but you?”

  “Okay, well, now it’s getting rude—”

  “You can’t do anything right. And that stupid book you wrote. Cozy noir? What are you, an idiot? There’s no such thing as cozy noir. They’re opposites, you moron!”

  “Right, but you see—”

  “Every writer is exactly the same. Did you know that? You all think you’re these brilliant, one-of-a-kind geniuses. You all think you’re going to do something new, something nobody’s done before. And you are all idiots.”

  “In my defense, the noir part is more about, you know, the private eye aesthetic—”

  “And Vivienne was as stupid as the rest of you. Do you know what she said when she called me? She said we needed to talk. She said there’d been a grave error—those were her words, like she was writing another of her stupid pot boilers. There’d been a grave error about Robert Kessler’s murder, and she was looking forward to discussing it with me at the conference. I mean, she told me she knew I’d killed him. And the worst part is, she was always that stupid. It was just that nobody else could see it until someone even stupider came along and managed to screw up her plans.”

  “If the ‘someone even stupider’ is me—” I began.

  “It is,” Fox said.

  “—I want to point out that I succeeded through my wit and grace and charming personality—”

  “You donkey,” Keme said with something like despair.

  “Yay, Dash!” (Millie, at least, seemed to be on board.)

  Graeme didn’t respond, though. He pulled off his glasses and wiped his face. He was shaking. He’d turned a deep red, his cheeks almost purple. And then he slid the glasses back on and took a shuddering breath.

  “If someone would call the sheriff,” I said, “I think we can—”

  Graeme brought the microphone up like a club, screamed, and lunged at me.

  He was fast, and he caught me off guard, and only instinct and reflex saved me. I stumbled back, and the first blow missed by centimeters—the whiff of displaced air brushed my face. But my foot turned under me, and I fell. When I hit the floor, the shock of the impact left me stunned. Graeme loomed over me, but he seemed much farther off, and his screams were thin and distant. He brought the mic up again, and I told my body to move, but the connection between body and brain was still disrupted, and so I lay there and waited.

  Graeme brought the mic down.

  A gunshot rang out.

  Graeme turned at the waist, as though someone had shoved him in the shoulder. And then he took a faltering step to regain his balance. He glanced down at the bloodstains flowing down the sleeve of his shirt, and then he looked up. His face was wide with confusion.

  “But—” He licked his lips again. “You can’t.”

  Bobby, gun still trained on Graeme, emerged from the crowd. He gave me a quick, assessing scan and then turned his attention back to Graeme.

  And, in his perfectly Bobby way, he asked, “Why not?”

  Chapter 27

  The sheriff arrived, along with Deputy Dahlberg and—ugh—Deputy Dairek. They took Graeme away; a gunshot wound to the arm was serious, but he’d survive. He didn’t shout or make dramatic pronouncements of revenge. Mostly, he looked like he was in shock. (And like he was about to throw up.)

  It was a long, tedious process: managing the crowd of terrified people, collecting names and statements, beginning the work that would take this from a dramatic showdown to a solid prosecution. It helped that several hundred people had witnessed Graeme’s quasi-confession and attack. Bobby and I waited in one of the empty multipurpose rooms. Deputy Dahlberg got me a bottle of water, and I drank half of it and then sat there, hands wrapped around it so that they wouldn’t shake.

  Eventually, Sheriff Acosta came to take my statement. It was as straightforward as it could get, with me explaining—more cogently this time—what Graeme had done and why.

  “He wanted us to find those reviews,” the sheriff said grimly. “He wanted us to know Whitney posted them.”

  “He wanted somebody else to take the blame,” I said. “But you didn’t take the bait that I’d killed Vivienne—his first plan. And Thatcher decided to alibi Margaux. And then Graeme had to kill Steven to keep him from talking. He was running out of options.”

  The sheriff shook her head. Fatigue lined her face; she’d had two murders and an officer-involved shooting in the last week, and if I were her, I’d be thinking about a long, well-deserved vacation in Bali (or, let’s be real, at home, but I’d pretend I was gone and I wouldn’t answer my phone). Finally, she said, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  Bobby drove me home.

  We were quiet for most of the drive. It was only mid-afternoon, but it was overcast, with a hissing kind of rain that wasn’t strong enough to break the fog but kept up an uneven staccato against the windshield. Sitka spruce and lodgepole pines emerged out of the gloom one by one, zipping past us and then dissolving again. The air from the vents smelled faintly like turpentine.

  “I’m sorry you had to shoot him,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t think—I mean, we were in a crowded room. I didn’t think he’d try anything.”

  “Dash, I’m not upset I shot him. I wanted to shoot him.”

  “Uh.”

  “I would have felt bad if I’d killed him, but he’ll be fine.”

  “Oh.” The tires whispered against wet pavement. “I wanted you to shoot him too.”

  Bobby looked over at me. And then, slowly, the goofy grin slipped out, and I surprised myself by laughing.

  “It’ll be okay,” Bobby said.

  “But they have to investigate you.”

  “Of course. And they should. But there’s a roomful of people who saw Graeme attack you, and I wasn’t close enough to stop him any other way.” In a gentler voice, he said again, “It’ll be okay. I promise.”

  I knew that wasn’t something anybody could promise. But it was still nice to hear it. And if anybody could promise it, it would definitely be Bobby.

  When we got home, it was too early to go to bed. (My preferred option in almost every scenario.) Instead, I showered to get rid of the flop sweat (Eau de Confession is not going to be a bestseller), and then I lay on the bed while Bobby cleaned up. I must have fallen asleep—so much for my theory about it being too early—because I stirred briefly when he climbed into bed next to me, and he kissed my shoulder, and then I slept again.

  I woke, and it was still dark, and—a rare change—Bobby was still next to me. His breathing was slow and even, and he lay on his back, one hand resting on my arm. Like I might, in the middle of the night, get away somehow. Moonlight puddled on the floor where it passed between gaps in the curtains, and the room seemed unusually bright, so that even when I closed my eyes, I couldn’t fall back asleep. Familiar sounds wrapped themselves around me: the shift and settle of the old house. The wind in the hemlocks. The rhythm of the waves.

  After a while, I slipped my arm out from under Bobby’s hand, found my glasses, and padded into the bathroom. I shut the door before turning on the light. I peed. In the mirror, I stared back at myself.

  Why did you get your glasses?

  I turned off the light and let myself out through the opposite door—the one that led into what was technically Bobby’s room. I made my way through the dark, into the thicker, velvet darkness of the hall, and the smell of furniture polish and floor wax and the slight mustiness of chilly days, before we turned on the heat. The ticking of one of the big, old clocks, and nothing else. Not even a mouse—but that was at Christmas, anyway.

  Light came into Vivienne’s study from the sleeping porch, where the curtains hadn’t been closed after Graeme had broken into the house—gray, pale, hourless light. The sound of the waves crashing against the bluffs was louder here. I closed the door to the hall and turned on the lamps.

  It was still a mess: papers everywhere, books on the floor, drawers ajar. I stood there for a while, arms wrapped around myself, considering it. I picked up a few pages and let them flutter back to the floor.

  Before I could think about it too much, I grabbed the trash can from under Vivienne’s desk and went to work. I gave each piece of paper a cursory glance—anything that might have been related to a crime went into one pile. Around the world, I suspected, men and women were appealing—and would continue to appeal—their convictions; nothing helped an appeal, I suspected, like the revelation that the person who had put you in prison had manufactured evidence in some of her most famous cases.

  Anything financial went into a separate pile. Someone would have to deal with Vivienne’s estate. She would have a lawyer. Or, eventually, the probate court would handle it. And they might need some of the information here. But tomorrow—er, later today—everything in those piles was going down to the cellar, and I never wanted to see it again.

  Everything else seemed to be about writing, and that went into the trash can. Outlines and notes for books in the Matron of Murder series. Research material. Sketches of ideas. Synopses. Letters—yes, honest-to-God letters, because Vivienne had been writing for forty years—to and from editors and agents.

  In spite of my determination to get this job done, I couldn’t help slowing as I worked my way through the papers. I’d grown up reading the Matron of Murder books. Vivienne had been—well, not an idol, but someone whose writing I’d enjoyed and respected. And I was, after all, a massive nerd; there was something fascinating about seeing the thought and planning that had gone into those books behind the scenes. Maybe I was doing a disservice to the world. Maybe I should have boxed up these papers as well and donated them to a college or a university or a library. The Vivienne Carver Collection. (Which also sounded like it could be a home décor line or, uh, intimate apparel for the mature woman.) But the thought was small, buzzing at the back of my head, and I kept going.

  As papers went into the trash and I worked my way across the floor, older outlines and notes gave way to more recent projects. Many of these were unfinished, or preliminary sketches that even I could tell were, to put it politely, half-baked. Ideas for several new series—in one, Vivienne planned to follow the madcap adventures of a murderous nanny as she took her charges with her on a quest for revenge. Also, there was a bit of magic in there, and at least one scene of them flying over London, so it was kind of like the Quentin Tarantino version of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Not my cup of tea, but listen, every book has its ideal reader somewhere.