I followed her inside, where a variety of sweets from Sassi’s Bakery were laid out on my dining room table, along with carafes of coffee and open bottles of wine. A half-dozen smaller signs reading GLOTCOYB had been taped to the walls.
“But why. . . ?” I said.
“We thought we’d help get your artistic juices flowing,” Josh said. “We all love having a bestselling writer living in our midst, especially this one. And we knew you needed inspiration.”
I didn’t intend for my expression to be glum, even annoyed, but it reflected what I was feeling. I’d spent so much time worrying about those letters, wasting time trying to decipher them. I turned to Josh. “You were in Ohio on your last business trip, weren’t you? You sent those letters while you were traveling.”
“Sure did,” he proudly proclaimed. “Pretty clever of me, huh? Bet they had you guessing for a while.”
“For too much time,” I said. “Do you realize how much anxiety those letters caused me? I even took them to Sheriff Metzger, and he brought them to the state crime lab for fingerprint analysis. Getting those letters day after day has been extremely stressful.”
Josh and Beth’s faces fell. “Gee, Jessica, we just wanted to have fun and motivate you,” she said. “We wanted to give you a mystery to solve.”
“If we thought you’d take it this way, we never would have done it,” Josh said.
Susan Shevlin, who’d witnessed the exchange and read the expression on my face, sidled up and said into my ear, “I told them it was a dumb idea, Jess, but they wanted to do it. They didn’t mean any harm, but . . .”
I looked across the room at Richard Koser, who shrugged, threw up his hands, and grabbed a cream puff from the table.
Seth had stayed at my side. He placed a hand on my elbow and whispered, “They meant well, Jessica. They’re good friends who care about you and who went a little overboard, that’s all.”
“Were
you
in on this?”
“Only as of yesterday. Beth came in for a physical and told me about it. She asked me to get you out of the house this evening.”
I looked at the dozen people who stood around my table, waiting for me to say something that would lift the pall that had descended over the room. I pointed at Lee, our postmistress. “You!” I said. “You pooh-poohed those letters when I brought them into the post office, and even wished me luck in my writing.”
“Actually, to be precise, I wished you ‘good luck on the completion of your book,’ ” she said.
I laughed and that broke the tension. “All right,” I said to those gathered, “I appreciate your good wishes. I admit I was upset when the letters started arriving, but I know you did it out of love.”
“That’s right,” Josh said, raising his wineglass in a toast. “To Jessica Fletcher, one of the world’s best mystery writers and our beloved neighbor.”
Others joined in the toast.
“To Jessica!” they said in concert.
“To the completion of her latest murder mystery!”
“Here, here!”
There didn’t seem to be much of a choice for me, so I, too, went to the table, where Kathy Copeland poured white wine into a glass. I picked it up, raised it, and said, “Speaking of murder, my initial reaction was to want to strangle all of you.”
“I’d have to lock you up then, Mrs. F,” Mort said.
“When did you find out about this, Mort?” I asked. “You seemed serious about trying to trace the letters.”
“Only today, Mrs. F. I
was
serious. Glad it turned out to be only some good-natured fun.”
“The only reason I’m stifling the urge to commit murder right here in my dining room is because I don’t want to end up behind bars. Besides, maybe you did help me break through the difficulties I was having with the book. It’s almost finished. And I was pretty close to figuring out what GLOTCOYB meant, too.”
“Maybe we should have given you another day to work on it,” Josh said.
“Oh, no. This has gone on long enough,” I said. I held my glass high and looked at the smiling faces around the room. “To my friends in Cabot Cove!”
I finished my book
almost
on time, delivering it to my publisher three days late. Memories of that year’s Thanksgiving stayed with me, the pleasant and the not so pleasant. With Christmas looming, I knew I had to make a decision about spending it with George in London. While I looked forward to spending the holidays with my friends in Cabot Cove, the contemplation of seeing George again, hopefully without a murder to gum things up, was powerful. I made my decision in mid-December, and e-mailed him:
I’m hoping your invitation to spend Christmas with you in London still holds, George—because I’ll be there!