He started to stand again but hesitated. “You won’t whack me with the book again, will you?”
“Not unless you give me reason to.” This time I smiled at him. I felt awful about the contusion on his head, now turning an ugly shade of reddish blue, and I was rather ashamed for intimidating him in this way. Yet I didn’t want to give up my advantage until I felt confident that Jude was innocent.
He inserted the key into the file cabinet lock. My pulse quickened with excitement as Jude slid open the drawer and began riffling through the files.
“What the hell?” He looked up with a puzzled expression and then pushed himself to his feet and carefully examined every file in the drawer.
Bewildered by his reaction, I peered into the drawer, watching the label of each file flip by. After he’d examined the last one, Jude stared at me in shock.
“It’s gone, Lila. The original manuscript is gone!”
Chapter 14
AFTER JUDE LOCKED UP THE OFFICE, I DROVE MY VESPA home through the sticky evening. Wisps of damp hair clung to my cheeks and neck, and my shirt was plastered to my lower back. I decided to take a shower before supper. How I hoped to wash the day off me, to let the fear and confusion I’d felt in Jude’s office go down the drain in a spiral of soap and water.
Althea was closeted in the kitchen with a client, so I sat out on the back porch with wet hair and a notebook. I wanted to put my thoughts about the case on paper, hoping to sort out my suspicions and theories. First, I made a list of my coworkers and then drew lines through their names as I ruled them out as killers. When I reached Jude’s, I left a question mark beside it. He had seemed genuinely distraught over the missing manuscript, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure that he hadn’t been involved in a crime.
“Who stole the manuscript?” I murmured softly, but my words were swallowed by the creaks of the rocking chair.
Scenes from The Great Train Robbery, The Maltese Falcon, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” played themselves out like a movie montage in my mind. In heist novels, everyone’s after money, rare artifacts, or jewels, but in this real-life investigation, the stolen item was an idea.
Marlette had dreamed up an original, saleable idea and had turned it into a book. I could easily picture his angular scrawl filling page after page of watermarked paper as the scenes bloomed in his head like the wildflowers in his hidden meadow.
With his masterpiece complete, he began to query Novel Idea. Desperate to have his novel read, he appeared in person day after day until finally, someone took a few minutes to scan the lines of his letter. If Jude had been telling the truth, then that “someone” was Bentley, Luella, or the previous intern, Addison.
Making a quick note to speak to Addison during tomorrow’s lunch break, I returned my focus to the next conundrum, which was puzzling out how someone had gotten their hands on Marlette’s copy of the manuscript without his knowledge. After all, he’d hardly continue to appear at the literary agency bearing flowers and a fresh query letter if his novel had gone missing. There was only one explanation: Marlette didn’t know that his book had been stolen. Again and again, he blindly climbed the stairs to the reception area clutching a bouquet and a dream.
In one of Agatha Christie’s novels, Hercule Poirot claims that “every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.” For once, I disagreed with the intrepid Belgian detective. I believed that Marlette’s killer had been his enemy from the first. Bentley? Carson? Luella? She had never been his old friend. Even in the past, when she was just a young woman named Sue Ann Grey, Luella had tried to manipulate Marlette. Failing to do so, she immediately set out to tarnish his reputation. She was an enemy.
Years later, she could have read his query letter and hurriedly discovered the location of the manuscript. How she met Carson and the extent of his involvement in the scheme to claim Marlette’s book as his own were vague, but I was certain my revealing Luella as Sue Ann Grey to the authorities had put someone’s well-laid plans at risk.
I stared at the names on my list. “Did you kill Luella, Carson? What was she to you? Lover? Business partner? Both?”
Then my eyes fell on Bentley’s name. “And where do you fit into this terrible plot? I really hope I’m not working for a criminal.” I sighed. “Maybe I should have become a freelance reporter. Far less dangerous.”