Death on Demand (3 page)

Braking the Porsche in a swirl of gray dust, Max leaned out the window to peer at the sign. He could barely decipher days and times, but it did seem to indicate the ferry ran at 10:30
A.M.
and 3:30 P.M. on Sundays. He looked around. Not a creature stirred in any direction. At least, not a creature in a New Yorker’s vocabulary. No people. No cars. But the waterside teemed with life, and in the quiet after he turned off the throaty Porsche, he heard the rustle of the grasses in the on-shore breeze and the slap of water against the pilings of the ferry dock. Gulls skimmed just above the water and a V of brown pelicans expertly searched the water for mullet.

10:30. He had a little while. Max smiled ruefully at his
pell-mell dash down the Eastern seaboard. Patience had never been one of his virtues. He picked up the
Mobil Travel Guide
, flipped open to South Carolina, then searched for Broward’s Rock.

Max slapped the guide shut and opened the car door. He stretched, welcoming the sea-scented breeze, then walked to the end of the dock and looked out across the Sound, shadowing his eyes against the bright morning sun. That must be it, that dark green, dimly seen hump low in the water to the southeast.

It sounded like Eden.

Annie thumped the door with her fist and contemplated disaster. Every penny Uncle Ambrose left her was invested in renovating this store. Her uncle would have approved. Under his stewardship, Death On Demand had been a wonderful place, a pipe-smoky, dim, comfortable, welcoming center for writers, but she had taken the shabby, down-at-heels interior and fashioned it into a bookstore that even Carol Brener and Otto Penzler might envy, discarding Uncle Ambrose’s functional steel shelving for the softer orange-brown gleam of gum, reflooring with heart pine, and creating, on the right, between the diagonal shelves slanting off the central corridor and the south wall, an enclave of American Cozy, a cheerful space scattered with rattan chairs with soft yellow and red chintz cushions and cane-topped tables. Tangly green Whitmani ferns sprouted from raffia baskets. Onyx-based brass floorlamps spread golden pools of light, augmenting the high oval windows above the shelves along the south wall. In her heart, Annie knew this was what it would have been like in the sunroom of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s three-story house on Massachusetts Avenue.

She smoothed the silky black feathers of Edgar on his pedestal just inside the door. Just past the raven, hanging beads marked the arched doorway that led to the children’s corner, and its stock of all of the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys, plus lots of nail-biters by two-time Edgar winner Joan Lowery Nixon. Annie had pined for just such a corner full of treasures when she was a kid.

She rattled the hanging beads, then started down the central corridor. The shelves that slanted diagonally on either side contained categories of mysteries. She didn’t believe in lumping all the books together alphabetically. Cozy readers would never dream of picking up a horror story. Hardboiled enthusiasts would prefer the Yellow Pages to romantic suspense. The first case held all the Agatha Christies because, quite simply, these were and always would be Annie’s personal favorites. She never tired of Dame Agatha’s perceptive eye and clever plots. On the left side, the shelves held true crime books. These had been Uncle Ambrose’s specialty. Everything from Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper to the Boston Strangler and Capt. Jeff MacDonald was represented here. Annie
passed the spy novels and thrillers on the right and the caper and comedy mysteries to her left. From habit, she stopped to alphabetize the Craig Rice titles. Then came romantic suspense (all the Mary Stewarts) on one side of the aisle and psychological suspense and horror/science fiction on the other. The south wall held classic mystery books, John Dickson Carr through Edgar Wallace. Used books filled the shelving on the north wall She must remember later to pull a copy of A
Judgement in Stone
off the shelf for Capt. Mac.

She paused at the end of the aisle and Crowned unhappily at the coffee bar. This was where the Sunday Night Regulars always met. Not too much expense there. Five tables with straight-back chairs. Annie looked up at the east wall. This was her pièce de résistance, absolutely guaranteed to engender loud and sometimes acrimonious disputes. But it certainly brought in the customers, not only the mystery writers and readers, but the artists, too. Every month she huddled with an island artist, Annie providing the information, the artist creating the watercolors. The collaborations pictured scenes from famous mystery novels; the viewer’s challenge was to recognize and identify book and author. This month, there were five paintings. In the first, a rosy-cheeked, white-haired old lady tumbled in front of a speeding car on a crowded London street. In that instant before oblivion, her pink face mirrored horror, fear, an awful knowledge—and a curious lack of surprise. The second painting featured a delightfully antiquated butler, who raised an arthritic arm to open the blinds in an ornate drawing room. The artist beautifully captured the rheumy fuzziness in the butler’s pale blue eyes. The third watercolor was a still life, revealing the contents of a jumbled closet: two pairs of skis, a pair of oars, ten or twelve hippopotamus tusks, fishing gear, a bag of golf clubs, a stuffed elephant’s foot, a tiger skin. In the fourth painting, a young man supported himself with a cane. His face twisted in disgust as he handed a letter to a slim, pale-haired young woman. In the final watercolor, a group of guests in formal evening clothes sat around a supper-club table, looking up expectantly at a middle-aged man who stood, a fluted champagne glass in his upraised hand, obviously ready to make a toast.

The first person every month to figure out which books the scenes represented received a month’s free coffee and a new book. It wasn’t quite in the same category as Edgar Wallace’s £500 reward for the solution to
Four Just Men
in 1905. Still, it was unclear who enjoyed the contest more: Annie, or her customers.

And Elliot Morgan wanted to take all of this away from her. For a week, she’d known this coming evening held peril, but it had never occurred to her that she was personally vulnerable.

Annie paced slowly into the fern and rattan enclave, kicked at the rug, then sprawled in a cane chair. She wished she’d never come to the store today. On Sundays after early church, she usually jogged or swam. Now, she fervently regretted that she hadn’t kept to her regular schedule. Normally, she loved Sundays, especially now that it was October and the island once again belonged to its own. She smiled at her calm assumption of belonging after three months in permanent residence. (Since it had taken Max three months to find her, he couldn’t be too distraught at her leaving New York.) But she almost qualified as an old islander. As a girl, especially when her mother was so sick, she’d visited Uncle Ambrose every summer. That was when he’d introduced her to the delights of mysteries. Everything ultimately comes right in a mystery, and that made those uncertain teenage years easier for Annie. So she had a former summer visitor’s approval for summer people, and now she had an islander’s appreciation for their spending clout. But now that it was October, the summer people were gone. Their generous spending would be missed. Their penchant for dripping mustard from hot dogs or Coke from leaky cups would not. She had a sign at the front of the store, of course, that said No Food, No Drinks, Except for Coffee in the Bear. It was fascinating that people who seemed to be shopping for books were apparently selective in their reading skills. Her part-time helper, Ingrid Jones, never minded scolding, “No food, please, no food,” but Annie found it difficult. After all, these were
customers.
And money was so tight.

She twisted in the chair. Time was running out. The
Regulars would arrive on schedule at 7:30 P.M. unless she canceled.

Damn Elliot.

She was so proud of the Regulars. They had been her invention, too, although under Uncle Ambrose the store had long been the community center for area mystery writers. At first, Annie was astounded at their number, but Emma Clyde, doyenne of the mystery world, had explained.

“This is the only mystery bookstore this side of Atlanta, Annie. Of course we all come here.”

Annie had looked at her in bemusement. “How can one little island have all these writers?”

“This isn’t just any island, my dear.”

Emma’s point was well made. Broward’s Rock wasn’t just another low-slung swamp off the South Carolina coast. It was rapidly gaining in fame on Hilton Head and Kiawah Island.

As Emma said, most writers valued exclusivity almost as much as fame—but not quite. Annie’s uncle had been quick to see the possibilities, and his beloved Death On Demand became
the
place for writers to meet, drink choice coffee, tout their latest novels, gossip, argue, and talk shop.

Uncle Ambrose. She was so very glad she’d come for her regular summer visit this year, since it was to be their last. When he was gone, and her visit drawn out because of the funeral and the need to settle his business affairs, every passing day had made New York seem farther away and less of a home. She had thought about her apartment, a one-room closet, actually, and her valiant but unrewarded efforts as an actress (seventeen tryouts without one callback). Then she had thought about Max and the future. The decision to stay on Broward’s Rock was astonishingly easy to make, and she threw herself headlong into renovating her favorite bookstore in all the world. That was three months ago.

Until now, she hadn’t regretted it once. That wasn’t to say that some moonlit nights didn’t cause a twinge when she thought of Max, but she was nobody’s fool, and she especially wasn’t going to be Max Darling’s fool.

Max Darling.

She’d accused him once of making up the name. He’d
answered rather stiffly that the Darlings were a long-established family with illustrious antecedents, that it was his mother’s maiden name, and that he used it in preference to his father’s because he got damn tired of people either resenting him or fawning when they recognized his father’s surname as that of one of the great financial clans of America.

Annie had answered sharply. “You don’t need to change your name. You need to change your habits.”

“You sound like my prep school counselors,” he retorted equably. “And you’re much too pretty for that.”

“Don’t be condescending. Look, you’re smart and capable. Why don’t you—”

He interrupted primly, “Live up to your potential?” He shook his head. “I’ve heard it all, Annie, chapter and verse. ‘Maxwell, it’s such a waste. Why don’t you become a lawyer/journalist/doctor/foreign service attaché/stockbroker?’”

“Why don’t you?”

“Lovey, my great-great-grandfather made enough money to buy anything the world has to offer.” The laughter fell away. “The funny thing is, there isn’t anything I want to buy. The world isn’t clamoring for my services. I’m a fair writer, a competent actor, a damn fool at figures. I’m bored by business, I hate quarrels, and my interest in science stopped with a sixth-grade film about a turtle giving birth in the sand.”

“What do you like?”

The grin was back. “People. People in all their wonder. I hawked sausages at the World’s Fair in New Orleans.”

“I’ve dived for pearls off Japan. Now I’m massaging talent as an off-Broadway producer. What the hell, Annie. Why can’t you go with the flow?”

But she couldn’t. She bunched a pillow more comfortably behind her. Damn him. Why did he have to reappear in her life?

Irritably she slapped her hand against the chair arm. She had to decide what to do about Elliot and the Regulars tonight.

Tonight.

The Regulars.

There was no way she could afford another thousand a
month in rent. Could Elliot really do that? Her lease expired in two months. She groaned. He probably could. The only shop presently vacant on the harbor front was much too small. He probably owned that one, too.