Somebody Killed His Editor: Holmes & Moriarity, Book 1 (20 page)

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Somebody Killed His Editor

I watched the firelight flickering across the open beams of the ceiling. Did I owe J.X. that truth? He’d pretty much made it clear he didn’t give a damn one way or the other, and me still harping on it might, in fact, lead someone to think that it was
I
who had feelings for
him
.

Did I?

I mean, surely I had enough wrong in my life without looking for more trouble?

But…it had been extraordinarily pleasant to be held, to be kissed and made love to—because that’s what it had felt like. Like J.X. was making love to me.

On that strangely soothing thought, I fell asleep.

My dreams were not soothing, though. I found myself trying to explain my bad decisions to Steven Krass, who ridiculed them—and me—while he stood at a potbellied stove cooking flapjacks for everyone at the lodge. Even Peaches was there, looking disturbingly dead in her plum-colored pajamas as she sat at a long picnic table with the other guests. I looked down the row of familiar—and unfamiliar—faces. Even Edgar, Rita and Debbie were seated, scarfing down flapjacks like there was no tomorrow.
One of these
people is a murderer
, I thought in my dream. And then, in that way dreams can seem suddenly portentous, I thought…
where’s J.X.?

I jerked awake. It took me a few seconds to place where I was, my first impression being that I had fallen into a Very Special episode of
Little House on the Prairie
. The room was cold and smelt of old wood fires and recent sex. The rain continued its unceasing drum on the roof. I rolled over to look at the clock, but there was only blackness where the face of the clock should have been. I remembered that the power was out.

I snuggled into the blankets, and wished that J.X. had stayed the night. It would have been warmer with him. Oh hell, it would have been better all around with him.

By the way, where the hell did he get off giving me attitude about David when he was married himself?

Only this time around it’s David you’re treating badly.

My eyes flew open. J.X. thought David and I were still together. I lay perfectly motionless absorbing this. No wonder he didn’t have the highest opinion of me. Not that he was in any position to be making moral judgments, but…

Yeah, that made a difference. A big difference. To both of us. I threw the covers back and rolled out of bed, feeling around for my clothes. I dragged a heavy sweater over my nakedness. Finding my wristwatch on the night table, I pressed for the luminous dial. One o’clock in the a.m. J.X. had said he was going up to the lodge, but he would be back in his cabin by now.

I stumbled around, nearly falling over my suitcase, and then rifling through its contents for a dry pair of jeans. I found the jeans—and clean socks—dressing unsteadily in the darkness. Feeling my way back to www.samhainpublishing.com 117

Josh Lanyon

the night table, I groped for the key J.X. had tossed to me. I inadvertently swiped it off the table surface and then spent several minutes feeling for it under the bed.

At last I had the key, and I clambered to my feet and found my coat, which was still damp from my last sojourn hours earlier. I pulled it on and let myself out. The door about tore out of my grasp in the gale.

The irony was it was lighter outside my cabin than it was inside. I could see J.X.’s cabin a few yards down. Smoke wafted gently from the chimney, white against the stormy sky. I locked my cabin and sloshed my way down to J.X.’s.

I knocked on his door.

Nothing.

I turned my collar up and knocked harder.

The eternal silence of the grave…

Now why the hell did I have to think of that now? I cast an uneasy look over my shoulder and slammed my palm against the rough door a few times.

Nothing. This was getting monotonous.

I tried the door and to my surprise, it swung open. Not sure why I was surprised since doors always swing open in mystery novels…it’s simply that real life is rarely as accommodating.

I called, “J.X.?”

There was a fire burning in the fireplace, sending shadows licking across the floor. I could make out the outline of the bed. It was empty. There was a suitcase sitting open on the desk. I stepped inside the cabin. I could discern the outline of the bathroom door standing wide open. He wasn’t in here. The bed was rumpled but still made.

Okay. Well, he hadn’t been home when I called last night either. Maybe he was checking on the icehouse guests again.

Or maybe not.

Why the hell would he leave his cabin unlocked?

By the dying firelight I could see there was something black and shiny lying on the floor. For one lightheaded moment I feared it was a puddle of blood. Then I realized it was a large black trash bag.

Now why did that trigger an easy recollection?

Where had I last seen a trash bag?

Edgar handing J.X. a black trash bag in which to wrap the sawed-off oak limb that had been used to
hit Peaches.

I crossed to the fireplace and looked in, but all burning wood looks pretty much the same once it hits the point of turning into a bed of orange coals.

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Somebody Killed His Editor

Looking around, I made out the glint of a flashlight on the bed table. I picked the flashlight up and examined the interior of the trash bag. There were bits of pine needle and tree bark. J.X. was burning the murder weapon.

My legs seemed to give out and I dropped down on the foot of the bed. Mystery writer though I was, I couldn’t come up with a single innocent reason for such a thing.

Unless…

Unless J.X. wasn’t burning the murder weapon. Unless someone else was burning it…

Where
was
J.X.? Why hadn’t he taken the flashlight with him? Why would he leave his cabin unlocked?

I shone the flashlight around the empty room and noticed something I had missed before. J.X.’s jacket was hanging on the back of the chair tucked in the desk.

I crossed over to the desk and touched the jacket. The leather felt cool and mysteriously, strangely alive. It also felt slightly damp because he had been wearing it earlier, and I couldn’t think of a single good reason for him not to be wearing it now since he clearly was not in this cabin.

Too much imagination is part of the mystery writer job description, but this time my brain was presenting me with a series of facts that I could not—refused—to make sense of.

Because it did
not
make sense. No murderer would be crazy enough to tackle J.X. What would be the point of doing such a thing?

Or was the point turning to cinders in the fireplace right now?

I stared unseeingly at the red ribs of the wood in the grate. Attacking J.X. did not make sense, but neither did it make sense that he had gone off without his jacket and flashlight—leaving his cabin unlocked.

Well, but maybe he had another jacket and another flashlight. And maybe he had only stepped away.

Stepped away where?

But if someone had attacked J.X… Say it. If someone had killed J.X., where was the body? Why hide his body when the killer hadn’t hidden anyone else’s? Why hide evidence of this crime?

Because there was no crime. Because J.X. had gone out voluntarily.

After destroying evidence in a murder investigation?

Who was in better position to do so? He had argued with Peaches the night before she was killed, and he declined to say why. He was clearly leading a sexual double life. Krass had taunted him in the bar.

Well, maybe he hadn’t specifically taunted J.X., but he had been taunting the murderer, hadn’t he?

And then he’d wound up dead too. And J.X. certainly had the insider’s track on the Murderer’s Things to Do List. And he’d been quick to shut me up every time I tried to defend myself—he’d got me isolated out here—

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Now I was scaring myself. If J.X. was the killer, I did not want to be discovered standing here watching the evidence against him going up in smoke.

I headed for the door, checking on the stoop and making sure the coast was clear. The row of cabins stood silver gray in the night and the world smelled of mud and rain and wood smoke. The rain had dwindled to a misty drizzle. I squelched hastily back to my own cabin and let myself inside. I locked the door behind me and went to the window where I stood watching the darkness, wondering what I was waiting for.

I was still waiting when morning came.

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They were not happy to see me at the lodge.

Velma—Debbie, that is—would probably have slammed the door on me, but I got my boot through the opening between door and frame when she cautiously looked out. I grabbed the edge of the door and thrust it back, and she staggered a few steps. Her eyes were enormous behind the glasses.

“I need to talk to your dad,” I told her. “I’ll wait here, but go get him now.”

“What the hell is going on now?” Rita appeared with a stack of much-laundered towels in her arms.

“He got in,” Debbie quavered, making it sound like one of the undead had slipped past the garlic wreath on the door. Come to think of it, I felt like one of the undead. Lack of sleep and a permanent state of chills was beginning to affect my normally sweet disposition.

“Is J.X. here?” I demanded of Rita.

“The cop? I think he had breakfast, didn’t he?” She looked at Debbie who shrugged. “Or maybe that was yesterday. Why?” Her gaze fairly crackled with suspicion and hostility.

“Is he here
or not
?” I yelled, and they both jumped.

I could hear doors banging open from upstairs and voices rising as the hens woke up to the fact the fox was inside the fence.

Edgar strode down the hallway toward us. “Something wrong?” He looked around as though expecting to see J.X. on my heels.

I said, “I think something’s happened to J.X. He’s not in his cabin.”

Edgar turned to Rita. She retorted, “How the hell should I know? He was in and out all day yesterday, poking around places he had no business poking.”

“What makes you think something happened to him?” Edgar was frowning but there was none of the alarmed distrust of his womenfolk.

See, real mystery writers would rather die than ever use the words
I have a bad feeling,
so I launched right into my reasoning: the unlocked cabin, the bed that hadn’t been slept in, the jacket and flashlight left behind, the burned murder weapon.

The three of them listened dumfounded as I concluded, “I checked his cabin again on the way up here this morning, and he’s still not there.”

“How’d you get out of your cabin?” Rita inquired.

“He left the key with me last night.”

Josh Lanyon

“Why would he do that?”

Edgar glanced at her and nodded, considering. “Sounds like maybe he was planning to disappear and left the key so you could get out if you needed to.” Adding, in case I’d missed the point, “Since he wouldn’t be around.”

I hadn’t thought of that, and it did give me pause. I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Why wouldn’t he take his jacket and flashlight?”

“Maybe he had another jacket and flashlight,” Edgar said.

“How many people bring two jackets to a writing conference? And the flashlight would be one of your own. Did you give him another flashlight?”

Edgar shook his head slowly.

“Why should we listen to you?” Debbie said shrilly. “You killed Peaches and Mr. Krass.”

Her mother shushed her, her harsh face softening fleetingly. That kid was certainly the apple of Rita’s eye. I wondered briefly how far Rita would go to protect her baby. But protect her from what?

“I did not kill anyone,” I said, snapping out each word for the benefit of the ladies lining up on the staircase to gawk down at us. By then I was all out of patience. “If I had, I wouldn’t be up here now pointing out that J.X. is missing.”

Rita said, “You might. Maybe you overpowered him last night and killed him too. We have only your word for it that he gave you that key.”

“If I’d killed him, why would I—?”

“To try and fix yourself an alibi,” a male voice interrupted loudly. The four of us looked toward the crowded staircase as George Lacey made his way down the steps. “To try and throw us off the track,” he continued, reaching the bottom and joining us. He was still fastening his belt, in his great hurry to drop the noose over my head.

“You weren’t
on
the track,” I said. “You’re not even on the field. Hell, you’re not even in the goddamned
ballpark
.” I turned back to Edgar. “If I had anything to do with this, why would I tell you all that the murder weapon has been burned? I’d have replaced the real thing with a log from the pile out back.

Only four of us knew about the branch that was used to kill Peaches—you, me, J.X. and the murderer.”

Edgar gave me a long, thoughtful look.

“I’m telling you, something has happened to him. And the longer we wait—” To my amazement, I couldn’t finish it. Couldn’t put it into words. Could barely stand to think it. “We’re wasting
time,
” I pleaded.

“All right,” Edgar said at last. “You’ve convinced me. Give us a chance to get organized here, and we’ll split up in groups and see if we can find him.”

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Somebody Killed His Editor

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” a new voice chimed in triumphantly. We all turned back to the staircase to see Mindy Newburgh wrestling her way through the pink flock. It had to be sleep deprivation, but I began to feel like I had wandered into the last half of
Murder by Death.
Not a film I ever cared for.

“What?” the Crofts and George asked on cue.

Mindy reached the bottom slightly breathless and slightly disheveled. “All of this makes perfect sense if…
J.X. is the murderer
.” She paused as though waiting for the accolade. The others exchanged dubious glances.