Death on Demand Read online

  He looked down at her, his darkly handsome face tilted. When she’d first met him, she’d been mildly impressed. Physically, Elliot was an imposing man—tall, lean, and well-built, with a bold, uncompromising Roman face. She realized now that he always turned a little to the left to present his best profile. He had the same pose on his most recent book jacket. That book sat right now in a ten-deep pile on a table behind her that held local authors’ latest efforts.

  Annie had never before felt the urge to engage in book burning.

  Still, maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe she could keep disaster from happening.

  She made a muscle-hard effort to sound pleasant. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” Another wolfish smile. “Now what could you want to talk to me about?”

  A dull flush spread over her face. Oh, Lord, don’t let me lose my temper. He was obviously going to be difficult.

  Quirking an inquiring eyebrow, he lit one of his ever-present, abominable Turkish cigarettes.

  “Those are going to make you very sick someday,” Annie commented through clenched teeth. A wisp of acrid smoke spiraled past the No Smoking sign prominently posted over the raven’s head.

  He shrugged. “If I need a nursemaid, I’ll pick a nubile Swedish import. Besides, living too long is folly.”

  “If you keep on the way you’re going, you may not live past tonight.”

  That amused him.

  “Are some of the pigs squealing?”

  “Elliot, these are your friends. Why are you doing this?”

  “So who needs friends?”

  “Who do you think you are, Sam Spade?”

  “I was a private investigator once and a damn good one. Everybody will see that tonight.” He blew several perfect smoke rings, enjoying himself enormously.

  How could she ever have thought him attractive?

  He picked up on that, too.

  Elliot reached out and his fingers brushed her cheek. “Now, Annie, don’t be so damn soft-hearted. It will stir them up. They’ll probably all write best-sellers in revenge.”

  She jerked away from his hand. “It isn’t funny,” she snapped. “You know, Elliot, you’re a louse.”

  “Really?”

  “For the last time, will you change your topic tonight?”

  He drew deeply on the cigarette and pondered the smoke.

  “No.”

  Her hands clenched. His face was very unpleasant now, the heavy bones bunched up in a tight, hard frown.

  “Then the party’s off.”

  Lazily, he shook his head.

  Annie exploded. “Look, this is my bookstore—I set up these sessions—I can cancel them.”

  “Sure. But you won’t.”

  She dug her nails into her palms. “You didn’t listen. The party is off.”

  Taking one last puff on his cigarette, be moved casually around her to snuff it out in a small skull-and-crossbones tray on the cash desk, scattering paper dips. “I guess I never told you that I invested my money front Blood Tales in island real estate.”

  Annie looked at him blankly. Blood Tales, his most successful book, was a current Edgar nominee.

  He tossed his head toward the dim interior of the shop. “Check your lease, Ms. Laurance. This belongs to Pleasanton Realty, lock, stock, and John D. MacDonalds.” He paused, then said coolly, “And yours truly is Pleasanton Realty.”

  Elliot shook loose another cigarette. “Screw with me, baby, and you’d better be ready for a little increase in rent. Like another thou a month.”

  Annie took two quick steps and yanked open the door. “Get out of here, Elliot.”

  He didn’t hurry. He sauntered out onto the wooden porch, then looked back over his shoulder at Annie, a small, furious figure in the doorway.

  “I thought we might go eat clams, but something tells me you aren’t hungry. Oh well, I’ll live. See you tonight, Annie.”

  “Go to hell!”

  A weathered board proclaimed in faded letters: Broward’s Rock Ferry.

  Braking the Porsche in a swirl of gray dust, Max leaned out the window to peer at the sign. He could barely decipher days and times, but it did seem to indicate the ferry ran at 10:30 A.M. and 3:30 P.M. on Sundays. He looked around. Not a creature stirred in any direction. At least, not a creature in a New Yorker’s vocabulary. No people. No cars. But the waterside teemed with life, and in the quiet after he turned off the throaty Porsche, he heard the rustle of the grasses in the on-shore breeze and the slap of water against the pilings of the ferry dock. Gulls skimmed just above the water and a V of brown pelicans expertly searched the water for mullet.

  10:30. He had a little while. Max smiled ruefully at his pell-mell dash down the Eastern seaboard. Patience had never been one of his virtues. He picked up the Mobil Travel Guide, flipped open to South Carolina, then searched for Broward’s Rock.

  BROWARD’S ROCK ISLAND

  Pop: 890 Area Code: 803 Zip: 29929

  An all-year resort island, Broward’s Rock was first settled four thousand years ago by hunter-gatherers. Traces can still be seen today of their descendants in the famous Indian Shell Mound, which contains oyster shells, animal bones, and clay pottery dating to 1450 B.C. White settlement began in 1724 with the arrival of Capt. Josiah Broward, who established the first plantation. Its ruins are visible today in the Island Forest Preserve. The island contains the remnants of Civil War fortifications. The sea-cotton economy of Broward’s Rock was devastated by the War, and did not recover until the late 1960s, when construction began of a resort community patterned after its more famous neighbor, Hilton Head island. Two-thirds of Broward’s Rock is a controlled access community with several hundred villas and condominiums. There are two golf courses, forty-five tennis courts, and eighteen miles of bicycle paths. The island is skillet shaped, seven miles long and five miles at its widest. It is home to deer, raccoons, alligators, and the endangered Atlantic loggerhead sea turtles, which can reach 400 pounds in weight. Climate is subtropical with more than 280 growing days a year. The island can be reached only by ferry, a 20-minute trip across Port Royal Sound.

  Max slapped the guide shut and opened the car door. He stretched, welcoming the sea-scented breeze, then walked to the end of the dock and looked out across the Sound, shadowing his eyes against the bright morning sun. That must be it, that dark green, dimly seen hump low in the water to the southeast.

  It sounded like Eden.

  Annie thumped the door with her fist and contemplated disaster. Every penny Uncle Ambrose left her was invested in renovating this store. Her uncle would have approved. Under his stewardship, Death On Demand had been a wonderful place, a pipe-smoky, dim, comfortable, welcoming center for writers, but she had taken the shabby, down-at-heels interior and fashioned it into a bookstore that even Carol Brener and Otto Penzler might envy, discarding Uncle Ambrose’s functional steel shelving for the softer orange-brown gleam of gum, reflooring with heart pine, and creating, on the right, between the diagonal shelves slanting off the central corridor and the south wall, an enclave of American Cozy, a cheerful space scattered with rattan chairs with soft yellow and red chintz cushions and cane-topped tables. Tangly green Whitmani ferns sprouted from raffia baskets. Onyx-based brass floorlamps spread golden pools of light, augmenting the high oval windows above the shelves along the south wall. In her heart, Annie knew this was what it would have been like in the sunroom of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s three-story house on Massachusetts Avenue.

  She smoothed the silky black feathers of Edgar on his pedestal just inside the door. Just past the raven, hanging beads marked the arched doorway that led to the children’s corner, and its stock of all of the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys, plus lots of nail-biters by two-time Edgar winner Joan Lowery Nixon. Annie had pined for just such a corner full of treasures when she was a kid.

  She rattled the hanging beads, then started down the central corridor. The shelves that slanted diagonally on either side contained categories of mysteries. She did
n’t believe in lumping all the books together alphabetically. Cozy readers would never dream of picking up a horror story. Hardboiled enthusiasts would prefer the Yellow Pages to romantic suspense. The first case held all the Agatha Christies because, quite simply, these were and always would be Annie’s personal favorites. She never tired of Dame Agatha’s perceptive eye and clever plots. On the left side, the shelves held true crime books. These had been Uncle Ambrose’s specialty. Everything from Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper to the Boston Strangler and Capt. Jeff MacDonald was represented here. Annie passed the spy novels and thrillers on the right and the caper and comedy mysteries to her left. From habit, she stopped to alphabetize the Craig Rice titles. Then came romantic suspense (all the Mary Stewarts) on one side of the aisle and psychological suspense and horror/science fiction on the other. The south wall held classic mystery books, John Dickson Carr through Edgar Wallace. Used books filled the shelving on the north wall She must remember later to pull a copy of A Judgement in Stone off the shelf for Capt. Mac.

  She paused at the end of the aisle and Crowned unhappily at the coffee bar. This was where the Sunday Night Regulars always met. Not too much expense there. Five tables with straight-back chairs. Annie looked up at the east wall. This was her pièce de résistance, absolutely guaranteed to engender loud and sometimes acrimonious disputes. But it certainly brought in the customers, not only the mystery writers and readers, but the artists, too. Every month she huddled with an island artist, Annie providing the information, the artist creating the watercolors. The collaborations pictured scenes from famous mystery novels; the viewer’s challenge was to recognize and identify book and author. This month, there were five paintings. In the first, a rosy-cheeked, white-haired old lady tumbled in front of a speeding car on a crowded London street. In that instant before oblivion, her pink face mirrored horror, fear, an awful knowledge—and a curious lack of surprise. The second painting featured a delightfully antiquated butler, who raised an arthritic arm to open the blinds in an ornate drawing room. The artist beautifully captured the rheumy fuzziness in the butler’s pale blue eyes. The third watercolor was a still life, revealing the contents of a jumbled closet: two pairs of skis, a pair of oars, ten or twelve hippopotamus tusks, fishing gear, a bag of golf clubs, a stuffed elephant’s foot, a tiger skin. In the fourth painting, a young man supported himself with a cane. His face twisted in disgust as he handed a letter to a slim, pale-haired young woman. In the final watercolor, a group of guests in formal evening clothes sat around a supper-club table, looking up expectantly at a middle-aged man who stood, a fluted champagne glass in his upraised hand, obviously ready to make a toast.

  The first person every month to figure out which books the scenes represented received a month’s free coffee and a new book. It wasn’t quite in the same category as Edgar Wallace’s £500 reward for the solution to Four Just Men in 1905. Still, it was unclear who enjoyed the contest more: Annie, or her customers.

  And Elliot Morgan wanted to take all of this away from her. For a week, she’d known this coming evening held peril, but it had never occurred to her that she was personally vulnerable.

  Annie paced slowly into the fern and rattan enclave, kicked at the rug, then sprawled in a cane chair. She wished she’d never come to the store today. On Sundays after early church, she usually jogged or swam. Now, she fervently regretted that she hadn’t kept to her regular schedule. Normally, she loved Sundays, especially now that it was October and the island once again belonged to its own. She smiled at her calm assumption of belonging after three months in permanent residence. (Since it had taken Max three months to find her, he couldn’t be too distraught at her leaving New York.) But she almost qualified as an old islander. As a girl, especially when her mother was so sick, she’d visited Uncle Ambrose every summer. That was when he’d introduced her to the delights of mysteries. Everything ultimately comes right in a mystery, and that made those uncertain teenage years easier for Annie. So she had a former summer visitor’s approval for summer people, and now she had an islander’s appreciation for their spending clout. But now that it was October, the summer people were gone. Their generous spending would be missed. Their penchant for dripping mustard from hot dogs or Coke from leaky cups would not. She had a sign at the front of the store, of course, that said No Food, No Drinks, Except for Coffee in the Bear. It was fascinating that people who seemed to be shopping for books were apparently selective in their reading skills. Her part-time helper, Ingrid Jones, never minded scolding, “No food, please, no food,” but Annie found it difficult. After all, these were customers. And money was so tight.

  She twisted in the chair. Time was running out. The Regulars would arrive on schedule at 7:30 P.M. unless she canceled.

  Damn Elliot.

  She was so proud of the Regulars. They had been her invention, too, although under Uncle Ambrose the store had long been the community center for area mystery writers. At first, Annie was astounded at their number, but Emma Clyde, doyenne of the mystery world, had explained.

  “This is the only mystery bookstore this side of Atlanta, Annie. Of course we all come here.”

  Annie had looked at her in bemusement. “How can one little island have all these writers?”

  “This isn’t just any island, my dear.”

  Emma’s point was well made. Broward’s Rock wasn’t just another low-slung swamp off the South Carolina coast. It was rapidly gaining in fame on Hilton Head and Kiawah Island.

  As Emma said, most writers valued exclusivity almost as much as fame—but not quite. Annie’s uncle had been quick to see the possibilities, and his beloved Death On Demand became the place for writers to meet, drink choice coffee, tout their latest novels, gossip, argue, and talk shop.

  Uncle Ambrose. She was so very glad she’d come for her regular summer visit this year, since it was to be their last. When he was gone, and her visit drawn out because of the funeral and the need to settle his business affairs, every passing day had made New York seem farther away and less of a home. She had thought about her apartment, a one-room closet, actually, and her valiant but unrewarded efforts as an actress (seventeen tryouts without one callback). Then she had thought about Max and the future. The decision to stay on Broward’s Rock was astonishingly easy to make, and she threw herself headlong into renovating her favorite bookstore in all the world. That was three months ago.

  Until now, she hadn’t regretted it once. That wasn’t to say that some moonlit nights didn’t cause a twinge when she thought of Max, but she was nobody’s fool, and she especially wasn’t going to be Max Darling’s fool.

  Max Darling.

  She’d accused him once of making up the name. He’d answered rather stiffly that the Darlings were a long-established family with illustrious antecedents, that it was his mother’s maiden name, and that he used it in preference to his father’s because he got damn tired of people either resenting him or fawning when they recognized his father’s surname as that of one of the great financial clans of America.

  Annie had answered sharply. “You don’t need to change your name. You need to change your habits.”

  “You sound like my prep school counselors,” he retorted equably. “And you’re much too pretty for that.”

  “Don’t be condescending. Look, you’re smart and capable. Why don’t you—”

  He interrupted primly, “Live up to your potential?” He shook his head. “I’ve heard it all, Annie, chapter and verse. ‘Maxwell, it’s such a waste. Why don’t you become a lawyer/journalist/doctor/foreign service attaché/stockbroker?’”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Lovey, my great-great-grandfather made enough money to buy anything the world has to offer.” The laughter fell away. “The funny thing is, there isn’t anything I want to buy. The world isn’t clamoring for my services. I’m a fair writer, a competent actor, a damn fool at figures. I’m bored by business, I hate quarrels, and my interest in science stopped with a sixth-grade film about a tur
tle giving birth in the sand.”

  “What do you like?”

  The grin was back. “People. People in all their wonder. I hawked sausages at the World’s Fair in New Orleans.”

  “I’ve dived for pearls off Japan. Now I’m massaging talent as an off-Broadway producer. What the hell, Annie. Why can’t you go with the flow?”

  But she couldn’t. She bunched a pillow more comfortably behind her. Damn him. Why did he have to reappear in her life?

  Irritably she slapped her hand against the chair arm. She had to decide what to do about Elliot and the Regulars tonight.

  Tonight.

  The Regulars.

  There was no way she could afford another thousand a month in rent. Could Elliot really do that? Her lease expired in two months. She groaned. He probably could. The only shop presently vacant on the harbor front was much too small. He probably owned that one, too.

  She couldn’t lose her bookstore. It was the first thing in all her life that had been her own, and it was her only link with the happiest portion of her past, those idyllic summer days, curled up in a hammock behind Uncle Ambrose’s tiny house, poring over the adventures of mousey Miss Silver, elegant Lord Wimsey, and gimlet-eyed Miss Marple.

  Annie relished running Death On Demand. She’d loved mysteries since her first Nancy Drew. She loved mystery readers, who ran the gamut of society, with a small s. She enjoyed tipping readers to new, good writers, such as Jane Dentinger, Dorothy Cannell, and Charlaine Harris. She liked the way readers could surprise you: the wispy-haired spinster who never missed a McBain, the island plumber whose favorite author was Amanda Cross. Now, there was an accomplishment: to become a best-selling mystery writer and also win tenure at Columbia—the twin achievement of Carolyn Heilbrun, who writes as Amanda Cross.

  She’d enjoyed meeting writers during her summer visits, but she’d never until now had a chance to know any of them well. She had to admit she didn’t exactly love all these mystery writers. Still, she liked some of them a lot. Elliot was a stinker.