Death on Demand Read online

  Death in the Dark

  Annie’s fingers found the circuit box—and its open door.

  She pulled the panel all the way open. The breakers were flipped to the right, all four of them, which would indicate some kind of massive overload.

  One by one, she clicked them back to the left.

  As the second breaker moved, the lights in the coffee area came on, and the light spilled through the storeroom door.

  Someone screamed again, but this time the scream began high and held and held.

  Annie jerked around and ran across the storeroom to the doorway, then stopped short and clung to the frame.

  There wasn’t much blood, just a trickle. It was almost obscured by the dark spreading pool of coffee….

  Bantam Books by Carolyn G. Hart

  Death on Demand Mysteries

  DEATH ON DEMAND

  DESIGN FOR MURDER

  SOMETHING WICKED

  HONEYMOON WITH MURDER

  A LITTLE CLASS ON MURDER

  DEADLY VALENTINE

  THE CHRISTIE CAPER

  SOUTHERN GHOST

  MINT JULEP MURDER

  Henrie O Mysteries

  DEAD MAN’S ISLAND

  SCANDAL IN FAIR HAVEN

  To Kate Miciak, an imaginative, creative, exciting editor.

  Alone, each item was insignificant. Some were easily found. A few were stolen from friends or acquaintances, but their value was so slight that the losses occasioned mild puzzlement and nothing more.

  A pair of doctor’s rubber gloves.

  A spool of black extra-strong button-and-carpet thread.

  A handful of assorted keys.

  Clear fingernail polish.

  Polish remover.

  One dart.

  There was just one more item, the most important one of all.

  The big collie barked first, then the cockers chimed in shrilly, shifting nervously in their pens. The deep-throated woof of the German shepherd boomed against the plastered walls.

  In the hallway, the figure bending near the keyhole of the third door stiffened.

  Goddam those goddam dogs.

  Sweat slid between skin and the tight sheath of the rubber gloves, making it hard to work the keys.

  All the dogs barked now, even the sleepy, ancient dachshund.

  The fourth key worked. The lock clicked and the door swung open. Once inside, the figure shut the door, then switched on the flashlight. The bright beam danced over the immaculate linoleum floor, bounced up to the work-table, then to the rows of wooden cabinets. These, too, were locked.

  It took patience. The dogs continued to bark, and the frantic yelps rebounded from the walls and tore at the senses. When the fifth cabinet door was open, a gloved hand reached up to pull out the third drawer. There were two small plastic vials in that drawer. The labels read Succostrin.

  Jill Kearney always drove too fast, with the windows down. She loved the feel of the cool October night air against her face. She’d always liked nighttime. Nothing looked quite the same after dark, not even this road, a road she knew so well she could drive it automatically. She hummed softly. What a wonderful job she had, even if everyone thought she was crazy to love it. Usually, she didn’t have to go back to the hospital after her ten o’clock check, but that big Doberman had to be turned every three hours after his surgery to prevent pneumonia.

  The road dipped just before her turnoff. The lights from the Honda skimmed across an automobile parked deep in the shadow of a live oak. Odd place to park. Must have had car trouble. The Honda picked up speed, and she leaned into the curve. Because the road curved so sharply, the Honda’s lights flashed up into the sky, and the moving beam of light in the third window on the east side of the clinic was sharply distinct.

  As the Honda squealed to a stop, Jill flicked off the motor and the headlights, staring at the now dark row of windows.

  Something had disturbed the dogs. Even out here in the parking lot, the sound of their frantic barking rose and fell.

  A light had moved behind one of the windows. She was sure of it.

  She looked around the graveled parking lot. It was empty, of course. No one had any business at the Island Hills Veterinary Clinic at one o’clock in the morning. No one but she.

  Perhaps she had imagined the light, but she wasn’t imagining the barking. She’d better check the rooms on the east side. Just to be sure. She picked up her ring of keys and slipped out of the car.

  Opening the back door, she flipped on the hall lights. Except for the almost deafening rumble of barks, accented by the high-pitched yapping of the cockers, everything seemed just as usual: the hall floors glistened from their final swab of the day, the air smelled of disinfectant and dogs.

  Jill hesitated, then pivoted and walked up the hallway, unlocking doors as she went.

  She unlocked the third door, the door that led into the dispensary, pushed it open, and reached out to turn on the light.

  Her hand never touched the switch. The side of her head exploded in an agony of pain.

  Annie Laurance stared first at the telephone, then at the list she held in her hand. Should she call all of them? Tell them it was canceled? What could she say? That she had smallpox? She took a deep breath and glared at the telephone. It was her shop, her Sunday evenings. If she wanted to call it off she …

  Beneath her hand the phone rang. Annie and her black cat, Agatha, both jumped.

  “Agatha, love, it’s all right,” she called, but Agatha was already streaking toward her usual hiding place.

  The phone shrilled again.

  Annie yanked it up, remembering at the last moment to insert a modicum of cheer in her voice.

  “Death On Demand.”

  There was an instant’s pause, then a familiar voice, an upsettingly familiar voice, inquired mildly, “Do you provide a choice? Defenestration, evisceration, assassination?”

  “Max!”

  She winced at the enthusiasm of her greeting. Determined to put that right, she repeated crisply, “Max,” the inflection pleasingly even.

  “I liked the first Max better,” he said in that lazy, good-humored, oh-so-Max-satisfied voice.

  “Where are you?”

  “Dear Annie. Always straight to the point.”

  “Look, Max, I’m busy, and I’ve—”

  “No time for old friends? Dear friends?”

  She could picture him, leaning casually against something, a newel post perhaps, as if it were a play. Or he might have a cellular phone in his Porsche. Max always liked to have the latest in everything. His blond hair would be rumpled, his mouth quirked in an expressive grin, and his blue eyes, those damnably vivid blue eyes, alight with laughter.

  “I’ve had the devil’s own time finding you, love. You could at least ask me how I did it.”

  She waited. Max never needed encouragement to display his cleverness.

  “They were very friendly to me at your old alma mater, via long distance, of course. I spent enough to keep Sprint solvent for another quarter.”

  “You called SMU?” She heard the bleat in her voice and winced again.

  “Did you think I didn’t listen to your tales of college days?”

  “You have a brain like a sponge.”

  “I will take that as a compliment. When I explained to the drama secretary that I was casting director of a new off-Broadway play, and that we’d lost your number … Well, it worked like magic.”

  Annie objected, “They don’t know where I am.”

  “But they knew the name of your best chum, one Miss Margaret Melinda Howard, who now lives in Lubbock, which sounds like a cross between a hillock and a sick sailor. I chatted long enough with Ms. Howard to finance a major promotional campaign by Sprint. She was t
hrilled to tell me that you, her most favorite orphan friend, had inherited the not-quite-beneficent estate of your crusty uncle Ambrose and were now living on an island off the coast of South Carolina, which I brilliantly located on a large-scale map.”

  Annie almost corrected him. She wasn’t really an orphan. Her parents had divorced when she was three, so she didn’t remember her father, and the fact that he was apparently alive and well in California wasn’t important. Margaret knew of her mother’s death, of course. Annie realized she was twiddling her mind with every extraneous detail possible to avoid responding to Max’s magnetism. It was to no avail. She felt the same old weak-kneed dizziness that swept over her every time he used to come around her tiny Greenwich Village apartment. But she had settled with that, done with it once and for all, and she wasn’t going to stand here and let it all start up again. Besides—she glanced at the antique clock above the mantel—she was running out of time.

  “Look, Max, it’s great to hear from you. But I’ve got to make some phone calls, something I have to attend to.”

  Unintentionally, the worry throbbing deep inside spilled over into her voice. She knew he heard it just as clearly as she did.

  “What’s wrong, Annie?” The light tone was gone.

  “Nothing big,” she said lightly. “Just some stuff with the shop.”

  “You’re upset.”

  She took a deep breath. Upset was putting it mildly; and if she didn’t get busy on the phone right this minute …

  “Max, it isn’t your problem.”

  “Come on, my love. What’s upset you?”

  She forced a laugh. “Nothing. I just need to cancel a party for tonight.”

  “Where’s the party?”

  She was so obsessed with her problem that she’d forgotten everybody didn’t know. “It’s here at the bookstore.”

  “Bookstore? Oh, hey, I like that—Death On Demand.”

  She glanced at the clock. “Look, Max, it’s swell to talk to you.” It wasn’t swell. She steadied her voice—good, straight, crisp inflection. Good girl, Annie. Always knew there was a superb actress in you. “But I’ve got to get off the phone and cancel that party.”

  “Don’t cancel it, Annie. You know I love a good party.”

  She stiffened. “Look, Max, you are in New York, aren’t you?”

  He chuckled. “Not by a long damn shot. See you at the party.”

  The line went dead. Annie glared at the humming receiver.

  He couldn’t be in South Carolina.

  Max here. She looked out the front windows of the shop at the green water surging against the rock wall of the harbor. He couldn’t actually be here.

  Before she could assimilate the thought and order her emotions, her heart—that untrustworthy, undisciplined, irritating member—gave a happy leap.

  Annie banged down the receiver. All right. Let him come. If he’d ferreted out her new home, followed her down here, just let him come. She’d never change her mind, no matter how much he piled on his careless charm.

  They were poles apart, and apart they should stay.

  She was poor.

  Max was rich.

  She’d grown up in a shabby frame house in a Texas prairie town.

  Max had lived in lots of houses: a white stone mansion high above a Connecticut river, a rambling, weathered summer home with its own tennis court on Long Island, a penthouse high above Fifth Avenue, a medieval castle near a Scottish loch.

  She’d scrimped through school on a drama scholarship.

  Max lounged languidly through Princeton.

  She liked life to be foursquare, aboveboard, and predictable.

  He delighted in ambiguities, disdained certainties, and loved above anything to puncture pretensions.

  But oh how happiness bubbled inside her. Max in South Carolina.

  Footsteps sounded on the wooden porch. The shop was closed on Sundays, so it couldn’t be a customer.

  But it was. Annie felt a spurt of irritation and wished she had a flag just like Dell Shannon’s, complete with a striking snake and the legend DONT TREAD ON ME, to hoist outside the main door when she wished to be undisturbed. Of course, Shannon raised her flag when she was hard at work on a new Luis Mendoza. And Annie doubted whether any flag would ward off Mrs. Brawley, who now stood with her fox-sharp nose squashed against the north window. Her snapping black eyes quite clearly saw Annie standing beside the cash desk next to the phone. Trust Mrs. Brawley. She must have followed Annie here from the early service at St. Mary’s-By-The-Sea.

  Mrs. Brawley tapped on the window.

  Mrs. Brawley bought books by the carload.

  Resignedly, Annie moved through the foyer. She opened the door and stepped out onto the slatted wooden planks of the verandah which fronted all the shops. The smile she managed wasn’t exactly hospitable, but it would do for a Sunday morning.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brawley, Death On Demand isn’t open now. I’m just here to catch up on—”

  Mrs. Brawley had learned early on in life that persistence might outrage, but it was effective. She ignored Annie’s opening salvo.

  “Miss Laurance, you promised you would get the latest Mrs. Pollifax for me. I came by the store Friday, and here it is Sunday, and I thought it might have come in on the late ferry yesterday. Couldn’t you just check your shipments and see?”

  But Annie, standing with the shop door open, wasn’t listening. Her eyes were on the tall figure striding negligently across the plaza, obviously en route to Death On Demand. A wolfish smile exposed strong white teeth as Elliot Morgan looked up and saw her discomfiture.

  Elliot Morgan. The last person in the world she wanted to see right now.

  Max pressed the switch on the dash and a softly humming electric motor opened the Porsche’s sunroof. The marsh-scented air swirled gently around him. Damn, he liked this country! Enormous pines hugged the narrow blacktop. The dense woodland was broken by watery stretches where golden-stalked grasses rimmed dark green pools. He began to whistle, a slightly off-key but cheerful rendering of an almost forgotten tune about a happy wanderer. And that’s what he was, a happy wanderer. His goal was almost at hand.

  Annie.

  He frowned slightly. Annie with her sunny smile and serious gray eyes. Flyaway hair that couldn’t quite decide between spun gold and chipmunk brown. His happy … Max’s frown deepened. Not so happy at the moment, from the sound of her voice when they talked that morning. Well, whatever it was, he would soon put it right.

  Coolness suddenly tingled beneath the warm sweep of air as a cloud briefly obscured the sun. He looked up, then squinted against the brightness as the cloud sped on. A road sign flashed by. Broward’s Bock Ferry, 5 Miles. He grinned and again sounded the song’s refrain. Nice place, all right. But he would be happy slogging up a rutted trail in the Mojave Desert if Annie waited at journey’s end. Still, South Carolina charmed him, although this narrow road left a little to be desired. Finally the Texaco truck straddling the center line pulled off into a two-pump country station. For the moment, the road lay straight and empty before him.

  Leaning forward, he pressed the accelerator. The Porsche leaped ahead, and the handful of varicolored speeding tickets jammed behind the visor fluttered hard.

  Intent on her mission, Mrs. Brawley ignored Elliot Morgan. “I don’t want to be a bother,” she prodded, clearly not meaning a word of it, “but if you will just check your storeroom.” Her ingratiating smile had all the charm of the shark in Jaws.

  “Mrs. Brawley, I phoned the publisher on Friday to place a special order, but even special orders take a few days.”

  The sharp eyes flickered past Annie to the open bookstore door. “I talked to Mr. Parotti and asked him if you received any packages this weekend. He said you did.”

  Annie accepted defeat.

  Both Mrs. Brawley and Elliot followed her down the central aisle, and they all turned left to troop into the storeroom at the back, where Annie slit open the shipping carton and di
splayed forty copies of the latest Dick Francis—and nothing else, despite Mrs. Brawley’s energetically skeptical probes into the packing material.

  “Well,” she sighed. “I do so want that latest Mrs. Pollifax.”

  Annie took her firmly by the elbow, without a great deal of subtlety, and tugged her away from the storeroom.

  When they were even with the watercolors displayed along the back wall, Mrs. Brawley jerked to a stop.

  “Miss Laurance, I’ve just got one question about that second one—”

  “No hints,” Annie replied firmly, and gave a little shove toward the central corridor.

  Deigning to move, Mrs. Brawley twisted her head to stare back at the paintings.

  “These are just too hard,” she complained peevishly. She hugged a worn brown purse to her skinny chest and wriggled her bony shoulders in irritation. Then her face brightened. “I’m ahead of everyone else. This time I’m going to win. Just you wait and see.” She shook free of Annie’s restraining fingers. “If I figure out that one, then I’m going to be the winner this month—and I’ll get my Mrs. Pollifax free.” She peered anxiously at Annie. “Have you heard anything about it? Is it supposed to be as good as the others?”

  “I’m sure it will be wonderful, and I’ll call you as soon as it arrives.” One last push, and Mrs. Brawley was out the door and onto the porch.

  Annie closed the door, took a deep breath, and turned to face Elliot Morgan.

  “One of the joys of running a bookstore—dealing with book lovers,” he observed.

  “Don’t enjoy it so much,” she said sourly. “I was just going to phone you.”

  He grinned. Again she was reminded of a wolf, dark eyes deep set, pugnacious jaw. He stood at ease beside the enormous stuffed raven which perched on a pedestal just inside the door. The raven’s feathers shone a glossy black, uncannily like Elliots hair.

  “Two minds that work as one?” he inquired lightly. “I dropped by to see if you wanted to lunch at Smuggler’s Inn.”

  Annie was nonplussed, then infuriated. How could he possibly think she would lunch with him—ever—after his performance last week at the meeting of the Sunday Night Regulars? She stared at him, feeling wordless rage begin to boil.