“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it,” her brother said grimly.
The new apartment was not a happy place these days. Somehow, Elaine’s lice seemed to have migrated to KiKi’s head, and he’d begun sleeping on the couch in his home office for fear of getting them himself.
Nevertheless, because of tears and promises and probably sex, too, Abby thought scornfully, Dad met her at the school as winter break began and told her that the lice were completely gone. They would be spending the holidays on Manhattan’s East Side after all.
Abby nodded and handed him her backpack. “I need to say goodbye to one of the little kids I’ve been tutoring,” she said and hurried back into the building.
Luckily, the lower-school girls were still struggling into their coats and mufflers, and they were glad for her help. In all the happy chatter about Santa Claus and what they were going to get for Christmas, no one noticed as Abby lingered with six-year-old Miranda Randolph, who was due for her second comb-out the very next day and was used to having her hair picked at.
Abby carefully transferred three adult nits and several eggs to the small pill bottle she had started carrying last fall. With a little luck, this Christmas present for Dad would be the final straw in the bundle she had already piled onto the camel’s back.
MARGARET MARON has written thirty novels and two collections of short stories. Winner of the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, her works are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature. She has served as national president of Sisters in Crime and of Mystery Writers of America, which named her grand master in 2013. In 2008 she received the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor. Vist her at www.MargaretMaron.com.
SUTTON DEATH OVERTIME
Judith Kelman
Dinner that night at Café Autore featured veal milanese, three murders, a drug bust, and a heist by the audacious jewel thief “Diamond Slim.”
Reuben Jeffers, a doughy reporter from the daily online tabloid A-List, scratched notes on a spiral-bound pad. His pinched eyes bounced from that to his iPhone. “Cool idea, Joe! Love your books. Dig in soon as they come out.” Jeffers had promised to be a fly on the wall of this venerable monthly gathering of top New York mystery writers, but his presence seemed more like a fly in the soup.
“Ah.” Aside from the dozens of volumes in his four popular detective series, handsome lantern-jawed Joe Ransom was a man of meager words.
Not so the reporter. “Must say, this Diamond Slim character sounds like your best yet. Imagine, a robber so rail thin, he can hide in plain sight. Slip through tight spaces like a light beam. Has to be computer generated, right? Or green-screen technology? Don’t tell me. Anyhow, brilliant. When did you come up with him?”
“Eighty-two.”
L. C. Crocker, ponytailed and bespectacled, looked down his eagle-beak nose. He was no fan of Jeffers, who had placed his latest police procedural at the top of an A-List roundup entitled “The Worst of Crimes.” The YouTube takeoff “L. C. Crocker Shlock Shocker” had gone viral. Still, Colleen O’Day, the brightest star in their glittery firmament, had asked L. C. to bury the hatchet (though not, as he’d gleefully suggested, in the reporter’s skull) and let him do a story on the group. Almost no one said no to Colleen.
“Remember, Jeffers. Anything we say about works in progress is off the record.”
The reporter cocked his finger and fired an imaginary round. “Sure, L. C. Gotcha.”
“And stash that damned phone! No tweets, no posts. Capisce?”
“Gotcha.”
“Love the Diamond Slim series, Joe. Can’t wait for this one.” Stephanie Harris, an affable FBI agent turned true-crime writer, gazed over the battlefield of sauce drips and fractured breadsticks at the regal presence across the table. “Now to you, Colleen. We’ve missed you! What have you been working on?”
The grand lady spoke in a conspiratorial hush. “Remember the Bitsy Grainger case?”
“Vaguely,” said Tony Baker, impish author of nightmare-inducing horror tales.
L. C. tapped his tented fingers. “Was that the psychiatrist whose patient slipped strychnine into her chai tea latte?”
“That was Dr. Betty Barringer. Bitsy Grainger was the young woman who vanished in the early seventies.”
“Sorry. Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Tonya Finerman, a winsome twenty-something whose novel Done to Death had been optioned by Spielberg and sold for a seven-figure advance.
“Of course, it doesn’t.” Jeffers sniffed. “Seventies were way before your time, Tonya. Ancient history, really.”
“Maybe so,” said Colleen. “But history can be fascinating, especially stories that lack a definite ending. Absent a complete narrative, we fill in the blanks. That’s human nature. I believe it’s also the reason many of us are drawn to writing.”