Ugh. This detective stuff was hard!

  Just then, there was a knock at the door and Carl got up. “Are there any more of you writer vigilantes out there?”

  “No, it’s just us three,” said Melody.

  Carl stalked over to the door. When he yanked it open and Detectives Mulligan and Mullet walked in, Bobbi winced, and so did Melody and Zita. For three writers who’d promised to stop sticking their noses where they didn’t belong, they weren’t doing a good job at keeping their promise.

  Chapter 26

  Zita, who’d been idly flipping pages of one of Carl’s Jim Preacher novels, quickly closed the book and returned it to the shelf. Mulligan, this time accompanied by his silent hirsute sidekick, stood glowering at them in the center of the living room.

  “And what have we here?” he asked, his face now resembling a well-worn baseball glove that’s been slowly simmering over a nice fire. “You wouldn’t be neglecting my advice now would you?”

  “And what advice would that be, Detective Mulligan?” asked Melody sweetly.

  She’d managed to defuse the tension between Bobbi and Carl and was clearly hoping to accomplish the same daring feat with Mulligan and Mullet. No such luck, as the detective’s next words indicated.

  “The advice to stick to what you do best: write books—and leave the detective work to the real detectives.”

  “We’re just paying a visit to our dear friend and colleague Carl Dennison,” said Bobbi, a statement which caused Carl’s eyebrows to shoot up in surprise. He’d gone from being accused of murder to Bobbi’s ‘dear friend and colleague’ in such a short space of time his head was clearly spinning.

  “I wasn’t aware that you knew Mr. Dennison?” said Mulligan, turning to the famous writer.

  “I… wasn’t aware myself,” said the man, looking confused.

  A writer who comes to Upswing, Georgia so he can enjoy the isolation its writer’s retreat provides isn’t well equipped to deal with nosy amateur sleuths and cops barging into his cabin after hours, eating up all that precious writing, plotting and pondering time.

  Mulligan turned to Bobbi, who he seemed to have singled out as the evil genius behind this amateur sleuth invasion. His expression seemed to say, ‘Aha! I knew it!’

  Before he could voice this genius deduction, Melody said, “Who is your favorite writer, Detective Mulligan? I bet it’s Raymond Chandler, isn’t it? Or Dashiell Hammett? Oh, do please tell us. I’m dying to find out.”

  It was an injudicious choice of words, and Mulligan wasn’t mollified. “Don’t mind who my favorite writer is. What I want to know is why you insist on harassing people even when I specifically told you not to!”

  Melody looked appropriately sheepish, even if Bobbi wasn’t. “We’re really sorry, Detective Mulligan. It’s not that we’re investigating Marty’s murder, it’s just that we’re so, so shocked by what happened that we simply have to discuss what happened with the only people who share our grief.” She gestured to Carl, who stood following the discussion with a dazed look on his face. Like a traffic cop at a busy intersection, he didn’t know where to look first, even as he wondered why all these people were in his cozy little nook and why they all seemed to be angry at one another for some reason that was beyond his comprehension.

  “Melody’s right, Detective,” said Zita, coming to her friend’s aid. “We’re all grieving, you see, and it’s only natural that we should reach out to other people whose lives have been touched by that dear, dear Marty George.”

  “Hrmph,” Mullet grumbled. It was the first word Zita had heard the great silent cop utter in her presence, though ‘word’ was probably the wrong word for the brief utterance.

  “Too true, Mullet,” said Mulligan. “A lot of bullcrap is what I think this is.” He narrowed his eyes. “And what’s more—I’m beginning to suspect that there’s more going on here. Do you want to know what I’m beginning to suspect?”

  “Ooh, I can’t wait, Detective,” cooed Melody, practically clapping her hands with glee. “Have you found Marty’s killer?”

  He ignored her. “As professionals we see this over and over: how the killer will insert himself into the investigation. How the killer can’t seem to stay away from the scene of the crime. How he will talk to friends and relatives of the murdered man. And how he will hound the police, trying to find out what they know and how close they are to cracking the case!”

  “Ooh!” Melody cried. “And who is this man?”

  “When I say ‘he’ I don’t mean ‘he,’ Miss Pen,” Mulligan snarled. “When I say ‘he’ I actually mean ‘you’ and when I say ‘you’ I actually mean your little gang of three!”

  Melody seemed taken aback by this. Not Bobbi, who immediately shot back, “You’re accusing us of being Marty’s killers? That’s preposterous. We didn’t even know the man.”

  Mulligan drew himself up to his full height, and Mullet’s blond beard was waggling frantically, flapping in a non-existent breeze as the great detective launched into a regular harangue. Zita thought he looked like a peacock, but without the feathers. “You were probably the last ones to see Martin George alive. Fact! You claim to have come upon the body but no one can support that claim. Fact! You are three writers of dubious talent who are struggling to come up with an idea for your next book. Fact!” He fixed them with a nasty look. “What happened yesterday, eh? Did you ask Marty to help you write your next book and he turned you down? Did you lose your temper and strike him over the head?” He shot out an accusing finger in Bobbi’s direction. “I’m looking at you, Miss Boulder.”

  “Me?! I wasn’t even there!”

  “Oh, yes, you were. You were there, and so were your cohorts. You lost your temper and you killed Marty then you fled, relying on your friends to cover for you. Confess!”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Bobbi. “I wasn’t there and you know it. Just ask Carl.”

  Carl, who’d been moving in the direction of the kitchen, probably hoping to find another bottle of Jack Daniels, now looked up, caught. “Huh?” he asked, eloquently.

  “You saw Melody and Zita but you didn’t see me, right?”

  All eyes now on him, he nodded stiffly. “Uh-huh.”

  “And you can ask Stan Thurber the same question. He saw Melody and Zita pass by his cabin on their way to Marty’s. He didn’t see me for the simple reason I wasn’t there.”

  This seemed to give Detective Mulligan pause, and he appeared baffled for a moment. Finally, he said, “Don’t leave town,” and ostentatiously turned his back on them.

  It was clear the interview was over, so Zita, Bobbi and Melody took their leave.

  And even as she closed the door, Melody caught the look of suspicion Detective Mullet was casting in her direction. His mobile beard was doing all the talking, undulating relentlessly, as if harboring an entire family of mice. She now took this as a bad sign.

  She closed the door and blew out a sigh of relief. So now they were the suspects, huh? This Marty murder business was getting weirder and weirder by the minute.

  “We better catch that killer,” she said as she caught up with Bobbi and Zita. “Cause if we don’t, Mulligan will be looking at us for Marty’s murder. He’s going to arrest us and throw us in jail if we’re not careful.”

  The fact that her two friends greeted her words with a heavy silence spoke volumes.

  The three of them were now effectively Mulligan’s Number One Suspects.

  Chapter 27

  When they arrived at their cabin, the door was ajar and immediately Melody was on edge. “He’s inside! The killer is inside!”

  But Bobbi pointed to the Toyota Yaris parked out in front. “It’s just Lois, hon.”

  Melody pressed a hand to her chest, where her heart was making valiant attempts to burst through her ribcage. “Oh, my God. I really thought the killer had come back for us!”

  “Now why would Marty’s killer come for us?” Zita asked reasonably.

  “I don’t know. Killers are like that, right? They like to kill. When they haven’t had a kill for a while they get antsy and then they go looking around for their next victim.”

  Zita directed a stern look at Bobbi. “Have you been giving her Patterson novels again? You know she shouldn’t be reading no Patterson. Serial killers are bad for her.”

  “I haven’t given her anything!”

  “It’s this whole Marty business,” said Melody. “And now the police think that we did it! Which is why they won’t be looking for the real killer, who’ll be getting away! And then he’ll kill us and make it look like a suicide because that way he can pin the blame on us!”

  Bobbi was shaking her head. “Never give a romance writer thrillers to read,” she muttered as she stepped inside.

  “She’s right, you know,” said Zita. “You don’t handle thrillers well, hon. You should probably stick to Hallmark mysteries if you want to see something exciting.”

  Melody nodded. She knew her friends were right. She simply wasn’t used to all this terror and blood and gore. Bobbi and Zita had the stomach for it but she didn’t. Which is why she presided over Janet Lee Parker and Jack Black’s continuing love story and nothing else. And she was just about to follow Zita and Bobbi into the cabin when a voice arrested her attention.

  “Hey. Are you Melody Pen?” the voice asked.

  She slowly turned, already going through the defensive moves she once learned in a self-defense class for writers she took with Bobbi and Zita at a writer’s conference. But when her eyes landed on a young man of singularly handsome aspect, her inner warrior relaxed and she smiled. “That’s me. Who’s asking?”

  He returned her smile and added some wattage of his own. “Jack Parker. I work for the Texas Telegraph.”

  “Texas! My, aren’t you far from home?”

  He displayed a lopsided grin, dimple and all, and Melody’s heart made a backflip. “Marty George was one of my favorite writers, and he was very popular in my home state. So when I heard about what happened I volunteered to travel out here and cover his death.” Jack Parker had the clearest blue eyes Melody had ever seen, and the cutest cowlick that stood out in his thick crop of dark hair. He was dressed casually, in blue jeans and a down jacket open at the collar, displaying a plaid shirt. “So is it true?” he asked.

  “Mh?” she asked, horrified when she realized she’d been staring at the tiny tuft of hair that came peeking from his shirt collar. “True? What’s true?”

  “That you and your friends were the ones to find Marty?”

  “Oh, yes. It was horrible.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  That cowlick. She wanted to touch it. Just a little flick of the finger. “Simply horrible. In fact it was me and Zita who found him. We were just going over there to ask him to help us with the plot for our next book and that’s when we found him—lying on the floor of his office. Dead. Murdered, actually, even though we didn’t know at the time, of course.”

  “Murdered!”

  Too late she realized this probably wasn’t common knowledge yet. “Well, dead, anyway.”

  “That must have been quite a shock.”

  “It was! I’d never seen a dead person before so that was definitely a first.”

  “And have you talked to the police? Do they actually think Marty was murdered?”

  “Um…” Don’t go there, Mel. Don’t even think about it. “You’d have to ask them. They don’t talk to us, I’m afraid. We’re just three silly writers who get in the way of their big investigation.”

  Now why did she have to go and tell him that?! But when he laughed, flashing not one but two dimples, she laughed, too, and even stepped down from the porch to join him. “So you’re a crime reporter, huh? That must be very exciting. Writing about crime and stuff.” Uh, Mel. Is that the best you can do? “I mean, more exciting than… other stuff.” Lame!

  “It is what it is,” he said, eyeing her keenly. “Do you think I could sit down for an interview with you and your friends? We could talk about Marty but also about the three of you. Your careers and how you came to be out here, next door to the great Marty George.”

  Yay, and it was a score! “Sure. I would love to do an interview with you, Jack.”

  “Great,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “What about after the meeting?”

  “Meeting? What meeting?”

  “The big meeting? They didn’t tell you guys?”

  “Tell us what?”

  “The mayor is organizing a town hall meeting. About Marty. Everyone in town is pretty upset about what happened and he wants to address the rumors swirling about.”

  “Rumors? What rumors?”

  “That Marty was murdered. Lots of people think he was, you know.”

  “Oh,” she said, wondering why no one had told them about the meeting. “So… are the police going to be there?”

  “They’re the ones conducting the meeting.” He frowned. “A Detective, um, Mulligan? I’m sure you guys are invited.” He gestured to the other cabins, neatly concealed behind the shrubbery, saplings and conifers that were such a feature of this particular area. “All writers are invited, I guess. A chance for you to reminisce about Marty and swap stories and maybe help the police catch his killer.” He was smiling again. “So I’ll see you there, right? And then after we’ll do the interview?”

  “Sounds great,” she said. “We’ll be there.”

  She watched him walk away, a youthful spring in his step, presumably to root out more writers and visit them in their lairs. It was a little bit like poking bears, she thought as she returned indoors. You never knew how they might react.

  She closed the door and found Bobbi, Zita and Lois in conference in the kitchen. They turned to her when she joined them.

  “Did you know there’s going to be a town hall meeting?” asked Bobbi, looking concerned.

  “This nice reporter person just told me,” she said. “Why? We’re not invited, right?”

  “Oh, we are invited,” said Bobbi, indicating Lois, who was grim-faced.

  “Everybody will be there,” the housekeeper said. “Last time we had a town hall meeting was when a forest fire threatened to engulf the whole town.” She was shaking her head, her customary jovial attitude slightly diminished by this news. “No idea why the mayor wants to drag us all out there. Can’t the police simply do their job and catch this killer? I have better things to do than spend my evening listening to that windbag Mulligan and so does everyone else in town.”

  “So you’ve met Detective Mulligan, have you?” asked Melody.

  “Have I met him? He seemed to think I had something to do with Marty’s death. The way he was looking at me. Very unpleasant individual. Very unpleasant indeed.”

  “What does he think you did?” Melody asked, surprised.

  Lois rolled her eyes dramatically. “He didn’t say. Just gave me that constipated look of his—like a chicken about to lay an egg—and said he was keeping an eye on me and Hackman. Him and his weird sidekick. Detective Muffin or something.”

  “Mullet,” said Bobbi with a grin.

  “Whatever,” said Lois, waving an annoyed hand.

  Melody turned to the others. “Maybe he’s like that with everybody.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Zita.

  “Which means he doesn’t really suspect us,” said Bobbi, nodding. “He just wants to rattle us.”

  “It’s psychological warfare,” said Zita. “He just goes around making everyone feel guilty, hoping the real killer will become nervous and come forward and confess.”

  “Anyway—consider yourselves hereby formally invited to the town hall meeting,” said Lois. “And now I’m off. I have a dozen other writers to invite, and Mulligan said that if they don’t show up he’s holding me personally responsible.” She fixed the three of them with a faux stern look. “So you better don’t stand me up, you hear? I don’t want to be arrested by Detective Pompous for failing to drag my writers into that silly meeting of his.”

  Chapter 28

  “There’s been more news stories about your murdered writer,” said Beau.

  “He’s not my murdered writer,” said Bobbi into her phone while she stirred the boiling pasta. Darkness had fallen outside and soon they’d be leaving for the now notorious town hall meeting but first they had to feed the outer woman—or was it the inner woman? “He’s just a murdered writer.”

  “A very famous murdered writer. Hey, you know what? I just had an idea. Why don’t you write about him? For your next Janet Lee Parker. Unless you’re too far along in that real estate scam plot, of course. I wouldn’t want you to throw away all the work you did.”

  “That’s a great idea. And we can always use the real estate plot on the next one.”

  “There was a big story on CNN. Something to do with Marty George having an affair with Ferdinanda Zebra? They interviewed her, you know, and she confirmed the affair. Said they were in love and how she’s completely devastated by the news. She and him were going to get married as soon as his divorce came through. They met on the set of Game of Bones and never looked back. He called her his muse. Said he’d never felt so alive, and how she inspired him to turn what was supposed to be a seven-book series into fifteen books. Invigorated is the word he used. He felt invigorated.”

  “Sounds like someone was snacking on little blue pills.”

  “Yeah, he was old enough to be her grandfather.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Nineteen. He was close to seventy.”

  “We talked to Teodora, Marty’s wife. She didn’t mention a divorce.”

  “She wouldn’t, would she? Not if she killed him.”

  “You think she’s the one?”

  “My money is on her, honey bunch. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and all that.”

  “But she’s supposed to be having an affair with a plastic surgeon.” Or Marty’s ‘best friend’ Carl Dennison.

  “One doesn’t exclude the other. She could have been having an affair and still be upset that her husband chose a teenager over her. If I were you I’d take a closer look at this Teodora. Remember, it’s usually—”