The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [24]
“… saw somebody behind the bushes …”
“… he ran away …”
“… saw him throw the gun. I saw it …”
“… a splash. Wasn’t a fish …”
Red-faced from exertion, a pudgy young man trotted up to the boardwalk and announced importantly, “The shots came from there,” and he pointed at the huge mass of shrubbery, sweet-smelling white-flowered pittosporum, that had grown almost twelve feet tall on the bank at the end of the harbor. It marked the site of the island’s original playhouse, which had burned several years before. Behind the shrubbery rose tall, dark pines. The newcomer, gesturing in excitement, launched into a labored account of where he’d been when he heard the shots, what he did next, how he’d yelled for help. “Gosh, I never thought when I came to the island for a mystery conference that there’d really be a mystery!”
One of her conference-goers. Annie noted his name tag. JAMES BENTLEY, Brooklyn. She’d noticed him in the bookstore earlier, curly-haired and overweight, absorbed in the hard-boiled section. Annie didn’t like his present expression of avid pleasure. After all, someone—and she had a damn good idea who—had shot at her store, and she sure didn’t consider it part of the evening’s entertainment.
Pounding footsteps down the boardwalk stairs signaled Neil Bledsoe’s mad bull rush toward the site. Customers spilled out the front door and gathered around Annie. Harbor visitors who had taken cover now gathered, talking excitedly, pointing toward Death on Demand and the bank of shrubbery.
“Oh, shit!” Saulter exclaimed, sprinting after Bledsoe. He yelled orders as he ran, “Annie, keep everyone inside the store. Get their names. Call Billy. Max, round up everyone who was in the harbor area!”
It took most of an hour to sort it all out. Billy Cameron, Saulter’s assistant, roared up to the harbor area on his motorcycle and took over from Max the task of collecting the names of those who had been walking leisurely on the boardwalk when the gunfire erupted. Annie dutifully herded her reception attendees back inside Death on Demand and as tactfully as possible obtained names, addresses, and phone numbers. Aside from a few island residents, most were registered at the Palmetto House for The Christie Caper. Laurel offered to help, but Annie felt that Laurel’s death’s-head fountain pen (ivory?) was perhaps not the most tactful means of transcribing the information. However, she smiled appreciatively at her mother-in-law and suggested that she man the coffee bar. “Free, of course.”
“Certainly,” Laurel murmured, but before turning away, she shook her head commiseratingly. “Dear Annie, I have this sense”—a dramatic placement of hand over heart—“of gloom. And doom.” The husky voice dropped yet another register. “‘While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down!’” The exclamation point was Laurel’s.
“Nobody died,” Annie replied crisply. She was proud of her cool, restrained answer because, within, she was seething. Somebody was going to pay for this—and she didn’t mean just the broken window. Nobody was going to shoot at her bookstore and get away with it.
Henny looked up from her study of the shattered window. “Somebody sure as hell could have died.”
Laurel was on her way to the coffee bar when she saw Edgar beak-down in the glass shards that littered the floor. “Oh, oh, oh.” Before Annie could intervene, Laurel darted past her and scooped up the stuffed raven. “Edgar!” she wailed, holding the bird aloft.
Annie blinked. Oh, good grief! One of the bullets had lodged squarely in the center of Edgar’s feathered head. Annie was irresistibly reminded of Louisa Revell’s The Men with Three Eyes. Laughter bubbled up inside her, but the anguish in her mother-in-law’s plaintive cry was genuine, so she stifled a giggle and said hurriedly, “Laurel, after all, it’s just a namesake. I mean, don’t take it to heart. Besides, this will be good for the chief. Now he’ll have a bullet to trace,