Murder, She Wrote: Murder in Red - Hardcover

Chapter One

“Well, Jessica, at least I wasn’t murdered.”

The quote read by the priest presiding over Jean O’Neil’s funeral was received with a smidgen of laughter from those who’d packed the Cabot Cove Community Church. She’d been the town’s librarian from the time I’d first moved to our town, fond of greeting me with lines such as “What will it be, Jessica—more books on poisons?” She retired a few years ago when her multiple sclerosis finally grew too bad for her to continue negotiating the stacks.

In lieu of a eulogy, Jean had penned brief snippets directed at any number of town staples. I thought mine would take the cake, until Sheriff Mort Metzger’s—“Well, Mort, I guess I’m going to get away with not paying those parking tickets, after all”—got a louder laugh.

Meanwhile, the snippet for Seth Hazlitt, Cabot Cove’s resident family doctor, raised merely a collective giggle:

“I think you can cancel my next appointment, Seth.” But then “Sorry, but I don’t have a forwarding address to send my bill” got a louder reception.

I hate funerals, but then again, I don’t know anyone who likes them. Jean’s was different in the sense that she’d beaten the odds at every turn: first by outlasting the dreaded disease’s debilitating effects and then by drastically outliving her expected life span. She’d even enjoyed a final renaissance of sorts, thanks to an experimental new treatment provided by the Clifton Clinic, aka Clifton Care Partners, a state-of-the-art private hospital that had opened just outside town and was about to celebrate its first anniversary. Billed as a “rejuvenation” clinic as well as a hospital, the Clifton Clinic had drawn a steady flow of outsiders to our once bucolic town year-round, further roiling those of us who remembered what it had been like when we could greet everyone in Cabot Cove by name.

I learned a long time ago that you can’t fight change; even the beloved home I’d shared with my late husband, Frank, was undergoing extensive renovations in the wake of a fire that had nearly claimed my life. Funerals always make me think of Frank, which, I suppose, is why I’ve come to detest them so much. Frank and I practically raised our nephew Grady, which meant he grew up witnessing my fits and starts of writing back in my days substitute teaching high school English. It had been Grady who’d plucked my first manuscript, The Corpse Danced at Midnight, almost literally from the trash and given it to his girlfriend at the time, who happened to work for Coventry House, the imprint that would ultimately become my first publishing house.

And if it weren’t for him, I’d probably still be filling in for others instead of filling in the plot holes I inevitably found through my rewrite process.

Listening to the priest wax on with more of Jean O’Neil’s testimonials left me feeling I should invite Grady and his family up for a visit soon. It had been too long since I’d seen them, especially young Frank, named after my husband, and more like a grandson to me, given that his namesake and I had raised his father through a great measure of Grady’s youth. And he so enjoyed blaming some of the business scrapes he’d gotten himself into over the years pursuing this scheme or that one on having a fertile imagination to match mine.

Thinking of Grady and his family also made me realize it had been too long since I’d spoken with George Sutherland, the Scotland Yard inspector who was the only man I’d ever actually dated since Frank’s death, though I’m not sure our get-togethers were dates so much as two friends enjoying some mutual interests and each other’s company.

In other words, dates.

Since Jean had no family, the Friends of the Library had taken on the task of arranging her service and funeral arrangements, and passed on a wake or memorial in favor of a reception to follow her burial in Cabot Cove’s local cemetery, which was part of the National Historic Register. As chair of the Friends, I had the official greeting responsibilities, which I was dutifully performing outside the church when I spotted Mimi Van Dorn approaching.

“Wonderful service, Jessica,” she said, taking my hand affectionately. “I’m sure it would’ve made Jean proud.”

“Thanks, Mimi. I sure do miss her.”

Mimi looked around the front of our old church, shaking the platinum blond hair from her face. Once her natural color, it now came courtesy of a bottle. Mimi was several years older than I, but you wouldn’t know that from her appearance. She joined the Friends of the Library as soon as she moved to Cabot Cove nearly a decade ago, and we quickly bonded over our mutual love of books. Not just reading, but the need to support the printed page and, especially, libraries. I recall a particularly contentious town council meeting in which we needed to beat back a proposal to relocate our beloved library to make room for yet another high-end housing development. But Mimi launched into an impassioned speech that left those council members flirting with voting for the proposal abruptly changing their minds.

“I leave you with this, ladies and gentlemen,” Mimi had concluded, turning to face the standing-room-only crowd. “This isn’t just a choice between books and buildings, wood and words; it’s also a choice between dreams and development.

Mimi won me there and we’d been close ever since. She was one of my closest friends in town, having taught me how to play bridge, canasta, and pinochle, though gin rummy remained my favorite. She had come from old money and had settled in Cabot Cove long before it became fashionable to do so. We seldom, if ever, talked about our personal lives, but rather our favorite books over the years. We rarely agreed, which seemed to draw us even closer. I’ve bonded with people over many things through the years, but never over anything as effectively as books.

“Well, I intend to make a sizable donation to the library in Jean’s name,” Mimi said. “Perhaps to name a new collection. What was her favorite genre?”

“Anything but mystery,” I told her.

“I’m being serious here, Jessica.”

“So am I. She was a fan of classical fiction and looked forward to the day, she used to say, when I finally wrote a real book.”

“You’re joking.”

“Maybe, but only in part. She used to read my books only to offer me critiques of what she deemed the more relevant parts, all of three or four pages, normally. She did that for all forty-seven of my books, and I’ll miss her doing it when number forty-eight comes out.”

“A clever way of letting you know she’d read them.” Mimi nodded, dabbing her eyes with a folded-over handkerchief, more to keep her makeup in place than out of grief.

Mimi hadn’t seemed to have aged in the years I’d known her; if anything, she looked younger. I knew how vain she was about her appearance, just as I knew how loath she was to the surgical methods to which many women resorted. She’d become a health fiend in recent years and an obsessive follower of new diets meant to assure eternal youth. We’d first met when she caught me jogging along the sea and then again when I was riding my bicycle through town. She’d thought I’d eschewed driving to get more exercise until I confessed it was because I never learned how to drive.

“But I heard you had your pilot’s license,” she’d remarked.

“I do, thanks to my late husband, Frank, who taught me how to fly.”

“But not drive? Really?”

“Not a lot of accidents up in the air, Ms. Van Dorn,” I’d said.

“So long as you don’t run out of fuel,” she’d quipped. “And call me Mimi.”

“I’ll see you at the reception, then,” Mimi resumed today, angling away from me to cross the street toward her car, parked away from the funeral procession.

Most of the rest of the crowd had moved toward the parking lot that adjoined the church. I saw Mimi reach the street and noticed she’d dropped her handkerchief on the grassy strip we’d been standing on. I stooped to retrieve it, rising to see her pause in the middle of the road, speaking heatedly into her cell phone—as an SUV, an old Jeep Cherokee, suddenly wheeled around the corner, picking up speed, headed directly at Mimi.

I lurched into motion, charging into the street and practically leaping into Mimi just before the Jeep would have struck her, the two of us locked in an uneasy embrace as we spun to the other side of the road and squeezed between two parked cars.

“Jessica,” a white-faced Mimi managed to utter, stiff and pale with shock.

“One funeral for the day is enough,” I said, forcing a smile even though I was shaking like a leaf.

I walked off toward the car belonging to the Friends of the Library member who’d be driving me to the reception to get things prepared. Cocking my gaze backward to make sure Mimi was okay, I spotted her back on her phone, yelling at whoever was on the other end of the line. Then I peered down the street, as if expecting the old Jeep Cherokee to come roaring back.

But it had disappeared.

Chapter Two

The Cabot Cove Friends of the Library thought it fitting to host a reception at the library after Jean’s funeral. Her replacement, the great Doris Ann, had missed the ceremony in order to supervise the catering team’s setup and to make sure they didn’t damage any of the books in the process. Doris Ann didn’t greet me with the likes of “What will it be, Jessica—more books on poisons?” but she was always there to guide my research efforts, whether they be by traditional page or Internet site. Doris Ann had brought our little library into the twenty-first century, making it more popular, and relevant, than ever, and she’d jumped at the chance to organize the reception to honor her predecessor as Cabot Cove librarian.

Still shaken by Mimi’s nearly being struck by that Jeep, I ducked away from the funeral cortege and skipped the grave-site portion in order to help Doris Ann and to act as official greeter for arriving guests on behalf of the Friends. I’d been going to more and more funerals as I grew older—expected for sure, but no easier to stomach. When the number reached as many real-life murders as I’d solved, maybe I should take that as a sign to move somewhere where nobody was older than thirty.

Our little library dated back to the time when Cabot Cove had been no more than a fishing village, offering entertaining respite to wives while their husbands were at sea for weeks at a time. I can picture any number of them devouring Hawthorne and Melville, though I suspect Moby-Dick never ranked among their favorites. Losing themselves in this book or that by candlelight would’ve made for the ideal distraction from the long nights spent alone fretting over the fate of their husbands, while their children slept soundly. I like to think that the many readers of J. B. Fletcher come to my mysteries for a similarly entertaining distraction, and I revel more than anything in those who profess to have lost themselves in my books, for a short time anyway.

In addition to the classics, Jean O’Neil’s tastes in fiction seemed to run to more exotic, far-flung adventures, as she used her reading as a travelogue to visit places her deteriorating body prevented her from ever seeing in person. I recall she had a special fascination with Tahiti, but I never learned precisely why.

And now I never would. As Doris Ann and I supervised the efforts of Cabot Cove Catering in repurposing our local world of books, I tried not to fixate on the finality that came with funerals and the increasing number of them I’d been attending. I resolved again to reach out to Grady to schedule a visit.

The first guests started streaming in the very moment the setup was complete. Most seemed to bypass the cold cuts and salads for the dessert table, accompanied by old-fashioned urns of the coffee that Cabot Cove Catering was known for. Dr. Seth Hazlitt, Cabot Cove’s own resident physician, was grousing in a corner with cup in hand, looking warm and uncomfortable in a dark tweed suit that made for a stark contrast with the white or khaki linen garb that had long been his trademark around town.

“Hiding, Seth?” I said, tossing a smile his way.

“If I wanted to hide in a library, Jess, I’d take up post in the science section, since nobody reads science anymore.”

“There are far too many who don’t read anything at all these days.”

He toasted me with his cup. “Then it’s a good thing for you that there are enough that still do, ayuh.” Seth hesitated, his entire demeanor seeming to stiffen. “She fired me, you know.”

“Who fired you?”

“Jean O’Neil. I’d been treating her MS for years, even consulted with experts down at the Brigham in Boston for the latest treatments and protocols. Then she fired me.”

“I didn’t know a patient could fire a doctor.”

“Okay, replaced. With that clinic the zoning board approved for some ungodly reason.”

“Technically, the Clifton Clinic is a private hospital, Seth, and they didn’t need anyone’s permission in Cabot Cove because they set up shop outside our boundaries.”

“Still claim a Cabot Cove address, though, don’t they, Jess?”

“Like I said—technically.”

Seth took another sip of his coffee. “I think they killed her.”

“Multiple sclerosis killed Jean. She credited them with buying her another year, thanks to that clinical trial.”

Seth’s expression was hovering somewhere between a snicker and a snarl. “A clinical trial Brigham and Women’s Hospital knew nothing about.”

“It’s a big world out there.”

“Not in medicine, it’s not. I may be an old country doctor, but I’ve been working the Internet since I delivered the Mercer twins back in 1996, and I can’t find anything about this experimental protocol anywhere.”

“It bought Jean another nine decent months, Seth.”

“Which I couldn’t buy her.”

“I didn’t say that,” I said, the loudening hum of voices in my ear telling me the lobby was starting to fill up.

“You didn’t have to,” Seth Hazlitt said, in a tone I’d never quite heard him use before. “Jean did when she fired me. Go on now, Jess. Leave an old man to his misery and continue with your hosting duties.”

“Maybe I’d rather talk to you.”

He drained the rest of his coffee. “I need a refill,” he said, and walked off.

No sooner had Seth Hazlitt taken his leave than Mimi Van Dorn appeared in almost the very spot he’d occupied, looking none the worse for wear after nearly being struck by that Jeep Cherokee.

“You certainly know how to throw a bash, Jessica,” she said, as the many residents of Cabot Cove continued to stream in to pay their respects.

“I think the credit for that belongs to Jean.”

I reached out and brushed some stray crumbs from the jacket of Mimi’s designer suit. “Don’t want anything to make you less becoming, especially while wearing black.”

Her eyes scorned me. “Such a keen eye for observation, and yet the suit is charcoal gray.”

“So it is,” I said, still not able to tell the difference.

“And if it hadn’t been you, it would be stained with red right now and plenty of it. And I’d be somewhere else entirely.”

“Wh...