I spent the day shuffling from one multipurpose room to another.The panels themselves weren’t particularly illuminating—Whitney Smith wasn’t speaking at any of the events on the program today, so I picked sessions that looked like they might be interesting, or at least lessboring than others.The results were…mixed.At the first panel I went to, two women argued about the future of YA fiction, specifically with regard to their own stellar careers.(Great job, ladies.) In another, one of the panelists did a sudoku while the other panelists tried to conduct a “solve-your-own-murder” game, but they’d forgotten their handouts—and, apparently, the rules to their own game.In one panel, the authors speaking decided to abandon their topic in favor of proposing theories about who had killed Vivienne.They only came up with one, Matrika Nightingale, and they spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back for this brilliant deduction.
Another way of saying it might be this: I had alotof time to play on my phone.
I found a website for Whitney Smith.The woman in the picture looked like she’d been Photoshopped into the Ethereal Plane (some sort of filter or lens orsomethinghad been applied, and while she didn’t have any wrinkles, shedidhave an unearthly glow).Long, dark hair.An upturned nose.Something about her was vaguely familiar, which I attributed to the fact that if she was at the conference, I’d probably passed her in the hall a few times.According to her website, she had three standalone books out—psychological thrillers.They were the usual fare:Please Look at Me, andMommy’s Dearest is Lying, andThe Housekeeper’s Mistress.(That’s not a jab; my mom writes a lot of psychological thrillers, but they’re not my cup of tea.) It didn’t look like any of them had been breakouts, which was probably why I’d never heard of her before.
Big surprise: there was nothing on her website about being involved in a murder in the past, or about having murderous intentions toward anyone in the present.She didn’t have a blog post about her plans to kill Vivienne and Steven, for example, which would have been super helpful.
Once I’d exhausted Whitney’s website, I went back to the Wikipedia article on the Robert Kessler case.This time, I used my phone so that I could follow the hyperlinks.
Unfortunately, the full article didn’t add much to what the summary had already told me.Robert Kessler had been murdered in his hotel room by Simona Wolf.The cause of death had been blunt-force trauma to the head.(Gee, that was starting to sound familiar.) According to the article, Robert had not only been Simona’s editor—he had been her lover.There was mention again of Simona’s literary promise, with a quote from Robert about what a coup it had been to get the rights to Simona’s debut novel.A mention of Simona’s struggle with mental illness.
In the section labeled INVESTIGATION, the article walked me through how Vivienne had solved the case.It was fairly simple.First, she’d established that Simona didn’t have an alibi for the time of Robert’s death.And then she’d unearthed a motive: someone had been trying to tank Simona’s debut before it even came out by leaving dozens of one-star reviews on sites like Goodreads.I’d come across this before—there are a lot of crazy people in the publishing ecosystem—and I’d heard it called review bombing.The idea was that by flooding a book with one-star reviews before it even released, the book would flop.(Because, you know, people are petty like that.) Sometimes readers and reviewers did it, often without even having read the book, because they got caught up in a mob of internet trolls.Maybe a friend of a friend of a friend (or someone on social media) had revealed that the author was a Bad Person with Bad Opinions, and the book was a Bad Book, and so in a frenzy of moral outrage, everybody piled on the bandwagon and tried to destroy the book before it even came out.
(You can probably guess how I feel about those people.)
But sometimes—sometimes—other authors did it.Under fake accounts, yes.And not as often.But when it did happen, it was usually because the authors were somehow in competition: they were writing in the same genre, or their books had similar premises, or worse, they had books coming out on the same day.
According to the Wikipedia article, Whitney Smith, a friend of Simona’s, had discovered who was behind the fake reviews: Robert Kessler.Whitney had revealed this to Vivienne, and with this key piece of information, Vivienne had established beyond a reasonable doubt that Simona had killed Robert Kessler after discovering his treachery.
Boy, did that raise a little red flag at the back of my head.At the time, it had all probably seemed dramatic and explosive and compelling.But ten years later, I had questions.
First and foremost: why would Robert Kessler try to sink a book that he had worked so hard to acquire?
As it turned out, it ended up being a moot point.With Simona in prison, the contract was canceled.The book was never released.Simona might have found another publisher for it—as Steven had pointed out, murder never stopped anyone from being a successful author—but she died by suicide while she was still in prison.
And that, as far as Wikipedia was concerned, was that.
I did a quick search on Simona Wolf, but I didn’t find much, and most of what I did see was connected to the murder.There was a guest blog from Simona about what she called “writing deep,” which apparently meant digging into your trauma and your secrets to tell a powerful story.I wondered if maybe there was something to that idea that would shed some light on what had happened, but nothing came immediately to mind.There was a little note about Simona selling the rights to her book,Wolf Woman, to Doorstopper.And there was a photo of Simona and Whitney.
This was before Whitney had been filtered into a human lightbulb.Her dark hair had highlights, and she was wearing a bow and a velvet choker.She was beaming at the camera as she hugged Simona.Next to her, Simona held herself stiffly, arms folded around her waist.She was tall, blond, her hair severely swept straight back, her gaze frank, almost cold.I didn’t know her.I’d never seen her before.And I had that impossible question people always had when they saw someone who had been accused of killing: did she look like someone who could commit murder?Not really.But then, that was true for a lot of killers.
The next bit was a leap, but a small one.If the Robert Kessler murder was the one that Vivienne had believed—at some point—she had gotten wrong, then had she figured out her mistake when she’d been writingDropped Stitches?It seemed likely.Heck, it seemed probable.Something had shaken Vivienne’s faith in herself to the point that, in a moment of bad judgment, she’d expressed her fears to Steven.
And for another—and this was the part that felt true to me, even if I couldn’t prove it—writing the book was when Vivienne would be most likely to have discovered it because writing was a form of thinking.It required crystallizing thoughts into words.Arranging those words into a coherent order.And, if you were Vivienne, whose prose was sharp and clear, there couldn’t be any fogginess in the thinking either.Add to that the difficulty of telling a complicated mess of events like a real-life murder in a streamlined narrative that the average reader would enjoy, and you have a process that demands rigorous re-analysis of everything.In other words, an ideal opportunity to realize you’d slipped up.
I opened the browser on my phone to find a copy ofDropped Stitches.Big surprise, the book—which was almost ten years old now—was out of print.(It had 4.3 stars on Goodreads.One reviewer said,I thought it was about knitting, which goes to show you can’t please everyone.) And while there were plenty of used copies floating around, shipping said three to five business days everywhere I checked.
In three to five business days, the conference would be over, and everyone would have gone home—including the killer.The Hastings Rock Public Library might have a copy; Vivienne had been a resident celebrity, and on top of that, Mrs.Shufflebottom, the librarian, was a particular fan.But Mrs.Shufflebottom preferred Vivienne’s fiction, and she also was ruthless about weeding old books from the collection—
And then I almost laughed.(Thank God I didn’t, though, because I was in another panel, and one of the writers was sobbing into a handkerchief about the time in her childhood when her mom hadn’t let her play on the Burger King playground.) (The panel was aboutWriting Real Characters.) (No, I have no idea what was going on.) (Do I suspect it was related to those Burger King commercials with the King who had that giant plastic head?Yes.)
Anyway.
I hesitated a moment, trying to decide if I should stay—but this was the last session of the day, and once the conference officially ended for the day, the attendees would disperse.My chance of finding Whitney, already low, would drop even further.
So, I slid out of my seat and headed to the door, because I knew where there was a copy ofDropped Stitches, and I had exclusive access to it.
It was in Vivienne’s study, with all the rest of her books.
Chapter 13
When I pulled up to Hemlock House, the sun had slipped below the horizon, and the last light of day hammered coppery divots into the water.The windows of the old house glowed against the coming darkness, which was good—it meant someone was home.It was disorienting to realize I’d lost most of the day at the conference, but as I got out of the Jeep, my stomach rumbled; I’d also missed at least one meal (or three hobbit meals), a matter I was determined to rectify as soon as I had a copy ofDropped Stitchesin my hand.
I crossed the vestibule, stepped into the hall, and called out, “I’m home,” as I made my way to the stairs.The doors to the billiard room were open, and the lights were on.Indira stood there, facing the billiard room, hugging herself.She glanced over at me.And I know I make a big deal out of the whole witch thing, but I swear to God, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
One foot on the stairs.“Everything okay?”
No response.But she was still looking at me, and I sensed a bad case of frog coming on if I didn’t do something, and fast.
