“You don’t—” Graeme started.
I pulled the schedule out of my pocket, the one Vivienne had given me—the one with her phone number written on it.I’d taken the time to put it in a plastic bag, and I held it up now as I addressed everyone in the ballroom.“This is the conference schedule.It’s Vivienne’s—you know it’s hers because she wrote her phone number on it, and her handwriting can be verified.Her fingerprints will be on it.And, importantly, so will Graeme’s.If you’ve got your conference schedule with you, take a look at Thursday night.”
The rustling of hundreds of conference programs filled the ballroom.
Graeme’s color was grayish yellow, somewhere between passing out and jaundice, and he darted furtive glances around the room.
“On the schedule of events for Thursday,” I said, giving the paper a wave, “we’ve got registration from three until eight.There’s session one at four, session two at five, and then one-on-one meetings with authors and agents from six until eight at the grotto.And let’s see—Vivienne’s first one-on-one is with Dashiell Dawson Dane.”
“That’s wrong!”It was the woman with the tote, and she was waving her program frantically overhead.“The one-on-ones didn’t start until seven!”
A massive man with a huge beard shot to his feet.“And it doesn’t say anything about the grotto!”
A woman with her hair in curlers—yes, incurlers—got on top of her chair.She was holding a pen like she meant to stab someone with it, and she shouted, “And they don’t list individual meetings!”
“That’s right,” I said.“Graeme changed it.”I turned to Graeme.“I kept wondering why Vivienne would have gone to the grotto by herself.She was smart.She was careful.She’d faced killers before.But she made an assumption—we all did.And the assumption was that the schedules were all the same.I heard Sam and Frodo complain about you double-checking their work on the author packets, but you weren’t double-checking at all, were you?You were changing the schedule in Vivienne’s packet.That’s why she went down to the grotto.That’s how I got signed up for that one-on-one.It should have been obvious to anyone who knew me that I would never sign up forextratime talking to anyone, let alone Vivienne Carver.I mean, the thought that I would willingly choose to spend additional timetalkingto people—”
“Dash,” Indira said.
“The matter at hand, please,” Fox said.
“You donkey,” Keme said.
Millie clapped her hands.“THE MURDER!”
(One of the chandelierstinkled).
“Uh, right.Anyway, that’s how you did it.And I’ve got the proof right here.”
About five seconds passed before Keme said, “That’s it?”
“What do you mean, that’s it?That was good!”I turned back to Graeme.“Oh, and that’s why you attacked Charlie—because you saw us on the bus looking at the schedule, and you knew you needed to get Vivienne’s schedule back so no one could prove you tampered with it, and you thought I gave it to them.But I didn’t; I gave them mine.Instead, all you got was the printout of a Wikipedia article.Then you broke into Hemlock House, thinking I still had the schedule at home—which I did—but when I interrupted you in the study, you saw your opportunity and tried to kill me.I mean, it’s all kind of obvious now because I explained it, but I still felt like I needed to say it.”
Out in the audience, Fox groaned.
“Also—” I began.
Graeme made this weird noise low in his throat that turned into something that wasn’t quite a laugh.“You.You!”
“Uh, that’s right: me.”(But even I didn’t sound convinced.)
“You!My God, the fact that it’syou.It would be one thing if it were Vivienne, butyou?”
“Okay, well, now it’s getting rude—”
“You can’t do anything right.And thatstupidbook you wrote.Cozy noir?What are you, an idiot?There’s no such thing as cozy noir.They’re opposites, you moron!”
“Right, but you see—”
“Every writer is exactly the same.Did you know that?You all think you’re these brilliant, one-of-a-kind geniuses.You all think you’re going to do something new, something nobody’s done before.And you areallidiots.”
“In my defense, the noir part is more about, you know, the private eye aesthetic—”
“And Vivienne was as stupid as the rest of you.Do you know what she said when she called me?She said we needed to talk.She said there’d been a grave error—those were her words, like she was writing another of her stupid pot boilers.There’d been a grave error about Robert Kessler’s murder, and she was looking forward to discussing it with me at the conference.I mean, shetoldme she knew I’d killed him.And the worst part is, she wasalwaysthat stupid.It was just that nobody else could see it until someone even stupider came along and managed to screw up her plans.”
“If the ‘someone even stupider’ is me—” I began.
“It is,” Fox said.
