Maybe Rorkman doesn’t just steal jewels in order to satisfy his rich clients and line his own pockets? Perhaps he has a softer side, too? Maybe he also uses the money he makes in order to…
Travis tapped the pen again, deep in thought as he searched for the solution he wanted.
Maybe he also uses the money to fund a home for orphaned children? To pay for their care and proper schooling? Or maybe he dishes out anonymous money gifts to people in desperate need, and could point to hundreds of people he’s helped out of crises over the years, but who never knew he was their secret guardian angel?
Travis liked these ideas, or at least the general gist of them. They needed refining and also quite a bit of work to get the tone right. Rorkman was a dastardly villain, and quite an amusing one at that, too, and Travis didn’t want to lose those characteristics by turning him into something else entirely, which meant he’d have to tread carefully if he were to reveal this different aspect of Rorkman’s personality.
And then there was the question of what any of this would mean for Rorkman’s interactions with Maura Shaw. Travis wondered if learning about another side to Rorkman that Maura never dreamt existed would make her see the man in an entirely new light—as a villainous jewel thief, yes, but also as something more, too.
Might this whole set up—with the ploy to lure Rorkman out and use him to pick the crypt locks at the castle—be the first step not only towards Maura understanding more about thejewel thief and who he really was, but also a step towards her developing completely unexpected feelings for him, too?
Travis felt excitement bubble at this idea. With eight books under his belt in the Maura Shaw mystery series, perhaps the whiff of a surprising and trouble-filled romance was exactly the sort of fuel needed to keep the engine roaring.
His mind whirring with the possibilities he’d uncovered, Travis dropped his pen and set aside his notepad and began typing again at the keyboard, his fingers flying to keep up with the new ideas sparked by his brain-storming and what they might mean for the scene he was currently writing.
He’d only committed a few fresh sentences to the page when he became aware of a beeping sound coming from somewhere nearby. Lost as he was in the story, it took a moment for him to acknowledge the sound and realise where it was coming from.
Looking up from the computer screen, Travis blinked, taking in the room where he was working as his mind shifted from his fictional world and back into the real world. Sunshine flooded through the tall bay window that looked out onto Foxglove Street, and from the desk where he worked he had a view of the cherry trees in the front garden, frothing with pink blossoms as birds chirped and fluttered between the branches.
On a small coffee table beside the window, Travis saw his phone and realised it was ringing.
Frowning, he rose from the desk chair and crossed the room, wondering how on earth the device could be ringing. When he was writing, he always put his phone in silent mode to prevent interruptions. Phone calls, text messages, social media notifications, emails—all those things were deadly distractions for a novelist who worked at his peak when fully immersed in his fictional world.
You couldn’t become immersed in your fictional world if your evil phone was constantly reminding you about what wasgoing on in the real world. Travis had learned long ago to put the phone on silent until he’d finished his words for the day. No interruptions or distractions were allowed, nor were they welcomed.
So why was his phone ringing when he knew he’d turned the phone to silent?
Grabbing it up from the table, he saw his sister’s name on the screen. He wondered why she was calling him—she of all people knew his mornings were sacrosanct writing time—and he wondered, too, how her call had made it through to the ringer in the first place.
He tapped the screen to answer.
“Travis!” Michaela said in an urgent voice on the other end of the line. “You forgot all about today, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” Travis said.
This prompted a long-suffering sigh from his sister. “You’re supposed to be giving a talk at Hamblehurst library right now! But you’re not there! And the reason I know you’re not there is because my friend at the library called me to ask if I knew where you were. Obviously, when she phoned you, it went straight to your voice mail.”
Travis frowned as the cogs inside his brain started working. There was something vaguely familiar about what Michaela was saying. Hurrying back to his computer with the phone still clasped to his ear, he pulled up the calendar and scanned his schedule for the day.
And there it was, the appointment he’d forgotten all about.
Book club talk at Hamblehurst library, 1.00pm.
Travis checked his watch. It was already five minutes past one. He hadn’t even realised it was already the afternoon.
“Michaela, I’m sorry. I forgot all about this.”
“No surprise there,” she replied, her frustrated tone tinged with a hint of amusement. “I know what you’re like when you’rewriting. And I knew when I rang your phone and it went straight to your voice mail that you must be writing right now. It took three attempts to get through to you and bypass your phone’s silent mode.”
The technical explanation for the ringing phone now crystallised. As Travis had listed his sister as a close contact in his phone, the device automatically by-passed silent mode if she attempted to call him more than two times in quick succession, a fail-safe way to connect in an emergency situation.
Which, apparently, this was.
“Sorry,” Travis said again. “I lost track of time while I was writing.”
“No surprise there, either,” Michaela replied with a soft chuckle. “Look, I know I twisted your arm into agreeing to speak to the local book club people, but youdidsay you’d do it…”
“I know.”
