If Looks Could Kill (13 page)

"We thought we'd try it out on the town," Victor said. "You know, like test marketing. See if they liked the idea before taking it up to St. Louis for our next audition... oh, yes, Chris, I'm sorry."

Chris pulled her gaze from the sartorially splendid Lester to Victor's sudden discomfort. "About what?"

"Why we came by."

"You didn't come to show me Lester?"

"Well, that too. But, you see, we were just over at the How Do... to get some flowers for Mother's grave, don't you know."

"He's such a good boy," Lester interjected nastily, still in Elvis's voice.

Chris let it go.

Victor shrugged uncomfortably. "Eloise said to get you. That your editor had called twice already, and not on your phone, but the shop's, and it's still only ten o'clock their time, so it must be important, don't you know. She figured he had a clue about the killer."

As hard as Chris had tried, the news about the increased body count had swept the town like chicken pox. Everyone was offering support and solutions in about an equal ratio. Miss Harmonia Mae Switzer had offered sanctuary. Harlan had offered salvation. Shawntell Malone, the hairdresser at the S and J Salon, had offered to read Chris's crystals. From all reports, the geological karma was not good.

"Thanks, guys. I'll get on down there."

Victor gave a jerky nod of his head, his eyes once again down. "Do you like gladioli, Chris? Do you think Mother would like them?"

"I think she'd love them," Chris assured him with her best smile. Actually she thought his mother was about five years past caring in the least what kind of flowers Victor brought her. Phyllis Hellerman was a box of ashes behind a marble wall down at Pleasant Grove, nothing more. And gladioli, as far as Chris was concerned, were the most hideous creations in the flower world, conceived for the specific purpose of weighting down the air in funeral homes everywhere. Chris hated gladioli.

Actually, she hated funeral homes. Ashes to ashes and amniotic fluid to formaldehyde. Complicated rituals invented to disguise the bald terror of death's inevitability. Futility versus fantasy. And since gladioli seemed designed to mask the stench of death with the cloying perfume of pretense, she guessed it made sense she had no time for them.

"The pink ones," she said, knowing that that was what Victor had already bought, and knowing that all that mattered was that he felt better for it.

His smile was radiant. "Yes. I thought so, too... Chris?"

She'd been all set to turn back inside to get her shoes. "Yes?"

Victor blushed again, shrank a little. Lester gave a curious huffing sound and turned to her. "He wants to say that if you need anything... well, we're here for you."

Funny the things that made a person want to cry. Instead, Chris opened the door and deposited a kiss on both human and wooden heads. "Thanks, you two. I appreciate it."

That was all Victor could take. Without another word, he scurried back to his house.

* * *

There were times Chris was tempted to buy Trey a ventriloquist's dummy of his own. It might help him get past that tendency to whine and just let loose.

"Sergeant Lawson threatened me," he complained.

Pinned to her chair by a thirty-pound calico, Chris drowned her sorrows in a cup of highly caffeinated coffee and watched Eloise make up peach and cinnamon silk bouquets for the Pritchard wedding. "She considers that foreplay, Trey."

He wasn't amused. "Well, it's not as if I don't have anything else to do. I got stuck with most of Marianne's workload when she went on maternity leave, ya know. I'm getting an ulcer."

"You wouldn't be a real editor without one." The cat stretched and fell off onto the floor with a solid thunk. Chris grinned. There were some things she depended on more than others, constants by which she could fix her star. Sue's common sense, Dinah's tart wit, Trey's overreacting.

It never failed to amaze her how effectively he used the tactic. After all, it was the author's God-given right to moan and groan, not the editor's. This was an aberration in the natural order of things.

Chris had been both blessed and cursed by a variety of editors in her career. She'd had a visionary and an illiterate, a storm trooper and a space ranger with a taste for S and M. And, of course, Wanda the Comma Commando from Hell. For all Trey's annoyingly effective dependence on the higher vocal register to get his point across, he was a hell of an editor. Chris couldn't think of a time his insights into her work had been wrong. He had a penchant for the twisted and dark in fiction that was as strong as hers, and he thoroughly enjoyed the verbal skirmishes they had over manuscripts. He kept Chris on her toes, and editors who could do that were a rare species these days.

"So, what is it you so desperately needed me for?" she asked. "I was going to call in this week as usual."

"The letter," he said, and suddenly Chris's smile died.

"What letter?"

It seemed that he could actually be compelled by something other than his workload. Chris could hear his chair squeak as he pulled closer to his desk. She heard the shuffling of paper. She heard him stretch out his dramatic pause and knew she should have never opened the door to Victor.

"We got it a couple of weeks ago," Trey said. "The mailroom by mistake put it in the pile we were forwarding to you. I just got hold of it."

Chris suddenly didn't have any patience. "Hold of what?"

"Did you go through your correspondence?" he asked. "That sergeant told you to go through yours, too, didn't she?"

"Trey," she threatened. "What letter?"

She had gone through her correspondence. Well, at least the majority of it, all as unremarkable as she'd remembered it. Nothing even to share with the chief, which had sent his mood tumbling a couple of notches. Chris had actually thought that maybe it would all go away again. Well, she'd hoped it would.

"You want me to read it to you?" he asked.

With what felt like superhuman effort, Chris kept her temper. She was still stale from last night, jittery with old adrenaline and new uncertainties, her hard-earned optimism eroded by phantoms and fears. She was still feeling invaded by the thought that someone out there had attempted to reach past her anonymity and touch her. And Trey wanted to play game show host.

Her silence must have been sufficiently intimidating.

"It says," Trey informed her portentously, "that somebody's been sending you letters you're not paying attention to."

"Word for word," Chris insisted, the cats forgotten, Eloise no more than a shuffle at the back of her mind.

Trey offered a beat of his own silence in chastisement.

"'Dear Editor,'" he finally intoned dramatically. " You'd better have some words with her. She's not listening to me, no matter how hard I try. And soon—'" There was another microscopic pause, evidence of Trey's theatre training. His timing was impeccable. "'—it will be too late.'" Pause, breath for effect. "What do you think it means?"

Chris mentally reviewed what she'd already read from her files, a small mountain of typed and handwritten notes, letters, cards from people who had found some humor, some justice, some... something in her work. She didn't have to review any phone messages, because until the moment she'd called Sergeant Lawson, all C. J. Turner's contact with the outside world had come through the mailroom of the publishing house or through Dinah.

She tried to remember anything that might have connected with the words. Something niggled, something vague and distant. But Chris didn't trust her memory, so she pulled over her scratch pad again.

"Tell me about the letter," she insisted.

"I just did."

She uncapped her favorite pen. "No, I mean the mechanics. What kind of paper? Is it handwritten or typed?" And, the most important of all, the one that curled like a feral thing in her stomach. "What's the postmark?"

"Chris," Trey admonished. "This isn't one of your books."

"No, it isn't," she agreed. "It's more important than that. Now, stop screwing around and tell me."

"I don't know," he whined again, crinkling at the paper that had probably suffered from the fingerprints of at least a hundred people by now. If it had been sitting in the mailroom that long, God knows what all it had been contaminated with. "It's regular paper. Cheap, like a person gets at the drugstore. Typed. Maybe a computer."

She lifted her head. "Computer?"

Chris could almost hear him nodding. "A good dot matrix, maybe. Anyway, it's not an old hunt-and-peck job. It's really neat."

"Where was it posted, Trey?"

That was the question that seemed to yank him right through the reality door. With no more than a moment's hesitation, he lost his whine and actually sounded hushed.

"You mean, where does your fan from hell actually live?"

Fan from hell. One person. No more coincidence, no possibility of hyperactive imaginations. If Trey was right, if this was really about the murders, someone was trying to talk directly to her.

Someone had been talking, and she hadn't heard.

Chris took a slow, unsteady breath, trying very hard to quell the sudden nausea. "Well, where's he mailing his letters?"

She heard the faint rustling again and another of Trey's Pinteresque silences.

"You're not going to like it."

"I don't like it already."

"It was mailed from St. Louis."

Chris took another slow breath and silently let it out, her gaze firmly fixed on the still pristine paper beneath her pen, her hand trembling. "Well, at least we know he doesn't have to go far to fulfill his fantasies."

* * *

Chris was beginning to lose her sense of humor. She was already two weeks late on starting her next book, she had another contract to worry about, a steady increase in reruns of the nightmare of the damned that prevented slumber parties and kept her bed from being over-used, and Sergeant Lawson was overdue to show up at her door. And now Chris was wading through letters that only served to heighten her eternal sense of inadequacy and fraudulence, looking for the kind of clue Livvy would have spotted in thirty seconds.

She was going to have to use this in a book. The author of pretend crime-solving exposed as a sham. It was humiliating.

It was decidedly unnerving.

"Chris?"

She'd left the door wide when she'd gotten home, the first day she'd been able to let the spring in through the screens. It was sacred tradition with her, that first time she could open up, invite in the easy waltz-time of town life, the occasional car, the bright chatter of schoolchildren like passing flocks of excited birds, the chiming of church bells and slamming of neighboring doors.

The world was turning, unfolding itself slowly to the sunlight of spring, and Chris worshiped it. She could smell the rich perfume of humus, could taste the fresh life in the breeze. Opening her door was always a major feast day on her private liturgical calendar. This year, when she needed it the most, she'd lost it in the tumble of multicolored rectangles on her coffee table and the whispers of suspicion in an anonymous letter a thousand miles away.

And the first visitor to her open door was here on business.

"Come on in, Chief."

The hinges squealed and boots clacked on her hardwood floor. Chris still didn't look up. She was searching for secret meanings to the words,
I've read all your books
.

"Sue said you had a new problem."

She tossed that note away and reached for another. "A new problem, the same problem. I thought maybe you'd be better at this than me."

"Than I."

Startled, Chris looked up to see the kind of deadpan expression on his face that betrayed the instinctive response.

"Fine," she retorted sourly. "On top of everything else, I get the only police chief in the States with a degree in English grammar."

"No degree. A grade school run by the Sisters of Perpetual Punishment. They had short tempers and big rulers."

Chris grimaced. "Is that why Pentecostals can't diagram a sentence like Catholics can? Okay, I thought you'd be better at this than I. Happy?"

His reaction was characteristically small. "Depends on what I'm better at."

Chris motioned to the two piles of stationery. "Finding clues."

MacNamara pulled off his cap and ran a hand through his hair. "I thought you'd done that."

"I thought I had, too. The publishing house got a rather cryptic letter that might just sound like somebody trying for the longest time to get my attention about something important."

She handed over the message she'd finally gotten Trey to repeat slowly enough for her to copy down. The script was just a bit shaky, the letters small, as if by printing them closely she could keep the import of the news from Eloise. It would have been just as easy to sneak a tank through the mail.

Mac took a minute to read the note, absently stroking his upper lip. His brows gathered together, and Chris felt worse.

"Her," he said.

"What?"

He looked up. "The letter says 'her.' The writer knows you're a woman."