The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala (24 page)

A
white Ford Fusion was pulling out of the Columbine's driveway as I drove up. I caught no more than a glimpse of what seemed to be a hat atop the driver's head, and instinctively maneuvered the van across the driveway's entrance. If it wasn't Francesca driving the car, I would simply apologize and back up. The car door opened. Francesca got out and marched toward me, face flushed with irritation.

I got out to meet her. She wore a plum-colored pants suit over a gray blouse with a floppy bow tie. I'd worn something like that blouse to a 1980s-themed party in college. The poppies on her hat bobbed with each step.

“Don't get out,” she greeted me impatiently. “You've got to move. Can't you see you're blocking the driveway? I need to get to DIA to catch my flight, so hustle up.” She turned around, confident I would do as she asked, I guessed.

She was halfway back to the rental before I asked, “Who is Frank Bugg?”

She froze. I waited.

After thirty seconds of immobility and silence, she pivoted slowly. Tension made her stiff as a robot, and
made the tendons in her neck stand out like rigid cables. “Why do you ask?”

She knew him! I gave a mental fist pump. Keeping the elation I felt off my face, I said, “Because that name was on the manuscript you bought at the auction.” I watched her closely, seeing her consider and discard several lies before the tendons in her neck relaxed and she said, “He's my father.”

“Your father?” I parroted. “Then why—?” I couldn't think why her manuscript would have her father's name as the author, but I also couldn't see why that was such a secret. Had she stolen a manuscript from him like the Stewarts had from Eloise Hufnagle? Surely not.

“It's a long story,” she said.

“Then the sooner you start telling it, the better your chances of catching your plane,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

“I don't want to do this in the driveway. You'd better come in.” Giving in to the inevitable, Francesca plodded up the six stone steps to the Columbine and pushed through the door.

Sandy was in the foyer, polishing the woodwork with lemon oil. She looked up in surprise. “I thought you'd gone,” she said. “Forget something?”

“Do you think I could have a glass of water?” Francesca asked.

Clearly sensing that something was amiss, Sandy nodded. When she had disappeared down the hall leading to the kitchen, Francesca started to walk into the small parlor, but I was leery of being behind closed
doors with her. My experience with the Stewarts the other day was too fresh. “This is good,” I said, plumping myself into one of the two lyre-backed chairs in the foyer. Francesca ignored the other chair and looked out the narrow window on one side of the double doors. She spoke without facing me and I had to scoot the chair closer to hear her.

“I don't know where to start,” she said. “I've never told anyone this story, although I knew this day would come, that we couldn't keep the secret forever.”

Impatience and curiosity fizzed through me. “What secret?”

Francesca wasn't willing to be rushed. Still not looking at me, she said, “I've wanted to be a writer always. Always. I can remember lying in bed, covers pulled up to my chin, listening while my mother or father read bedtime stories. We had almost no money, so they couldn't buy books, but my mother had a collection of fairy tales with beautiful illustrations from when she was a girl, and we had the Bible, so I grew up with the swan princess and Noah, Cinderella and the Good Samaritan. I can remember thinking when I was no more than four or five that I wanted to write stories like that. I wrote my first story when I was six and I haven't stopped from that day to this.” She twiddled the blinds wand, letting stripes of sun in, shutting them out.

“I wrote all through high school and won awards for my stories, including a partial scholarship to the community college. I worked as a waitress and a housecleaner to put myself through school. When I graduated, I kept waitressing and cleaning, making enough to
support myself, barely, while I wrote. I sent manuscripts off to agents, but never landed one. Lots of agents liked my writing style, but I couldn't seem to hit on an idea that wasn't hackneyed and trite. Yes, both those words came up in my rejection letters. By the time I was thirty, I had given up on making a living as a writer, and gotten a ‘real' job.” She sneered the word “real.”

I shifted on the uncomfortable chair. The needlepoint pad had looked comfy enough, but the padding had wadded into pea-sized lumps over the decades. I heard a rustling noise behind me, but I didn't take my eyes off Francesca Bugle to look around.

“I became an office manager at an over-the-road trucking company. I was good at it, and it wasn't miserable, but it wasn't writing. I did that for over ten years. Then—” Francesca took in a deep breath that swelled her back. “Then, my father went to prison.”

I stifled a gasp.

“He was sixty. With all that time on his hands, he took up writing. I visited him at least twice a month, and one day he handed me a three-inch stack of paper and asked me to read it. I took it home to humor him, and read it that night. The whole thing. The grammar was iffy and the characters lame, but the story and pacing gripped me, kept me turning the pages, even though I had work the next day. I thought about that book all the next day, while I was doing accounts receivable, counseling an employee, ordering supplies. By the time I got home, I knew what I was going to do. I might not have been able to come up with a good
story idea of my own, but I recognized one, a hook that would grab readers, when I saw it.”

“You sent it off to a publisher,” I said, unable to stand the suspense of her drawn-out story.

“Not yet.” She opened and closed the blinds a few more times; if anyone from across the street was watching, he probably thought she was sending Morse code messages. No, only Maud would leap to that conclusion. “I rewrote it, gave it my stamp. Then, I talked to my father and he agreed that I could send it out. We compromised on a pen name, Francesca Bugle. I'm really Patty Bugg. Doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?” She gave a bitter laugh, her breath fogging the window momentarily.

“That book went to auction and was an immediate success. The next one hit the
New York Times
extended list, and the third one debuted in the top twenty. I quit my job. Now
Barbary Close
is going to be next summer's blockbuster. It's funny how things work out, isn't it?” She let go of the wand, which swung against the blinds with a muted tink, and began playing with the cord that raised and lowered them, wrapping it around her index finger.

I leaned sideways, trying to read her profile. Sadness and resignation chased across her features. The unforgiving sun deepened the grooves around her mouth and made her complexion slightly sallow.

“I was finally a bestselling author, but it didn't feel the way I thought it would.” Her index finger was swollen and purple at the tip. It must have throbbed, because she unwrapped the cord tourniquet.

She was silent so long, I finally prompted, “So where does Van Allen fit in?”

She jerked the blinds cord so hard the metal slats jangled. “He was my father's cellmate.”

A gasp sounded from behind us, and Francesca whirled so quickly she stumbled. Still holding the blinds cord, she pitched toward the floor and the blinds ripped from their valance and clattered down. I had hopped up, and turned to look, too, and I discovered that we had an audience in the balcony, as it were; both the Stewarts and all three of the Aldringhams stood on the upstairs landing, peering over the banister like they were watching a play. All they were missing was Playbills and opera glasses. Sandy stood in the shadow of the hallway, holding a glass of water. They'd all clearly been listening for quite a while.

I reached a hand down to help Francesca up, but she ignored it, disentangling herself from the blinds and using her hands on her thighs to push herself upright. She glared at the audience, her face first flushing a plummy red that matched her outfit, and then blanching white. I thought she might cry, pass out, or possibly explode, but then she started laughing. It was a weak, wheezy sound at first, but it grew into her usual ribald guffaw tinged with a hysterical edge. “Oh, my God,” she said when she could catch her breath. “I guess the secret's out in a big way, huh?”

A nervous titter and some chuckling came from the others and the tension dissipated. I figured it would ratchet up again when everyone realized, as I did, that Francesca was a murderer. Van Allen had obviously
been trying to blackmail her with his knowledge of her faux authorship. If her father's prison was coed, she might end up in the cell next to him.

“What was your father in for?” Lucas Stewart asked. Mary tried to shush him, but he shook off her hand and leaned farther over the banister.

“Well, that's the kicker, isn't it?” Francesca said. She widened her stance and pulled her shoulders back as if bracing herself. “He's a sex offender. I really don't want to go into details.”

“Oh, my,” Constance breathed.

Everyone else was silent.

“You can see,” Francesca went on with an effort, “why it would be damaging to sales if word got out.”

I could indeed see. If Francesca wrote thrillers, or caper novels, the details of her father's imprisonment might not matter so much. But she wrote gothic romance verging on erotica. No buyer or reader in the world was going to be able to read her more passionate passages again if word got around about the true author's proclivities. I gulped. It made a dandy motive for murder. And Van Allen's death was in vain, since now more than half a dozen people knew the truth.

“How did Van Allen track you down? What did he say?” I asked.

“Shortly before he was due to be released, he stole a completed manuscript from my father and smuggled it out of the prison somehow.”

“He mailed it to his girlfriend,” I supplied.

Francesca cocked her head in acknowledgment. “Then Van Allen looked up my schedule on my Web
site and followed me here. He approached me after the panel at the bookstore, and said he had a manuscript he thought I might be interested in. I thought he was one of those wannabe authors who wanted me to read his great American novel and pass it along to my agent or editor—people ask me to do things like that sometimes.”

“The nerve of some people, right?” Mary chimed in. “That happens to me at least twice a month, too.”

Constance nodded to indicate she'd been approached like that before, as well.

Francesca continued. “I refused to meet with him; in fact, I was pretty dismissive. To prove his point or to get back at me, he snuck part of the manuscript into the auction. I about had a heart attack when the auctioneer read off the title and almost blurted out my father's name. Well, I knew Van Allen was telling the truth, so I got a message to my father—said there was a family emergency—and he called me. He was livid, almost incoherent with fury, mostly because he felt betrayed, I think. If he'd been able to get his hands on Van Allen, he'd have strangled him.”

“Frankie
Bugg
—Frankie the Cockroach!” I exclaimed, as enlightenment dawned. Noticing everyone's puzzled expressions, I said, “Sharla—Van Allen's girlfriend—said something about ‘Frankie the Cockroach' being pissed off. She meant your dad, right?”

Francesca nodded. “That's what they call him. Frankie the Cockroach.”

I thought I heard someone mutter something about sex offenders being worse than cockroaches, but
Francesca didn't seem to hear. Before she could go on, the front door opened and Kerry came in. “Sorry I'm late,” she said. She stopped just inside the door, registering the unexpected crowd. “I didn't realize we were having a party.”

“Francesca was telling us about how Van Allen was trying to blackmail her,” I said. I knew Kerry had more questions, but I wanted to keep Francesca talking, so I turned to her. “How much did he want?”

“Half a million,” she said. “He slipped a note under my door here, his way of telling me he could get to me at any time, I think. I should have paid it and been done with this. Instead . . .”

“Instead, you met him at the Club and killed him,” I finished.

More gasps and a “got what he deserved” filtered from the upstairs landing. I didn't look up to see who had said it. I kept my eyes fixed on Francesca.

Francesca reared back as if I'd slapped her. “What? Hell, no. He told me he'd meet me at the costume ball, that he'd have the manuscript and I should have the money. His note said to hang loose and he'd make contact. I was like a cat on hot coals the whole evening, practically hyperventilating anytime someone came up behind me. I saw him a couple of times from a distance at the party, but he never approached me. By the time I decided I should make a move and seek him out, there was that brouhaha with the fake blood and then I heard someone had found a body. When I learned it was Van Allen, I didn't know what to think. I was scared, relieved, skeptical.”

“That's simply implausible,” Constance announced. Francesca and I looked up at her. Her cream-colored pashmina was trailing over the banister. “No reader would buy that. There's simply no chance that your antagonist was randomly killed by someone else. You'd get a raft of one-star Amazon reviews for that, my dear.” She pulled up the trailing end of her pashmina and flipped it over her shoulder.

“This isn't a book, Connie. This is real life,” Francesca said through gritted teeth. “Van Allen was a crook and a lowlife and I'm glad he's dead, but I didn't kill him. End of story.”

She pivoted her head and tried to make eye contact with everyone in the room. Most of them refused to meet her eyes. They all thought she was guilty of Van Allen's murder—I could tell. I was beginning to have doubts, though. She seemed so open about it all. But, I reminded myself, she'd lived a lie for almost a decade, pretending to be the author of books her father had written.