One Book In The Grave

Chapter 23

Shocked by what I’d just read, I sat, momentarily frozen, in my chair. Gazing blindly at the paper, I waited while my brain slowly began to figure out the true meaning behind the words.

Oh, great. Emily and Max were just starting to get things worked out. And now I was about to throw another stick in their spokes.

Seconds later, I jumped into gear and ran out of the room. “Max,” I shouted as I ran down the hall. “Emily!”

I stopped abruptly in the middle of the living room and looked around. “Max?”

But there was no answer and it chilled me to the bone. I’d been working in my room for the past hour. Had Solomon somehow gotten into the house and grabbed him?

“Emily?” She wasn’t at the dining room table, where I’d last seen her. I stopped in the middle of the living room and looked around. Where was she? I kept perfectly still as I considered my next move.

“Don’t panic,” I said under my breath.

I heard a brush of movement and whipped around. The sound had come from down the hall. I took a few steps in that direction, then stopped as it hit me in a flash. They were probably in the bedroom together.

“Okay.” I gulped, then sucked in a big breath and let it go. Way to freak out for nothing, I thought, mentally smacking my forehead.

A moment later, Max’s bedroom door opened and he walked out into the hall. His hair was mussed, and I knew I was right about what he’d been doing.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he said when he saw me standing there.

“You have to see this.” I thrust the letter at him.

“What is it?” He walked past me into the living room, ruffling the pages as he dropped down onto the couch and rested his socks-clad feet on the coffee table. He stared at the paper for another few seconds, then gave me a sharp look. “Where’d this come from? I’ve never seen it before.”

“I know. I just found it inside the pages of the Beauty and the Beast. She glued it in between two pages.”

“She what?” He shook his head as though my words were all jumbled up in the wrong order. “This was inside the book?”

“Yes?”

“For how long?”

I chewed my lower lip and thought of how easily the rubber cement had given. Plus there were certain timely references in the letter. “It can’t be more than a few weeks old.”

Grimacing, he asked, “And you think it’s real?”

Hands on my hips, I stared at him. “Did you read it, Max?”

“The first few lines,” he grumbled. He looked a little sick to his stomach and I couldn’t blame him. The note had been written by a pathologically damaged woman.

“Read the whole thing,” I said, waving my hand at the letter. “It’s real and it explains a lot.”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of.” He shifted his feet off the table and stood up, taking a few stiff breaths as though gearing up for some sort of battle. And I guess he was in a way. He wandered the room, holding the papers steady as he read the rambling letter that, as twisted as it was, explained everything.

Feeling a chill, I folded my arms tightly across my chest. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t relax. I was reminded of another fateful love letter I recently had discovered in a book that belonged to a friend of my mother. Maybe I would start warning people not to leave their love letters inside of books. They only led to misery and sometimes murder.

Restless and unsure what to do, I wandered around the room, waiting for Max to finish reading.

Dear Max,

I know this letter will be a surprise-okay, a shock! I have so much to tell you and I’ll try to be brief, but you know me!

First, let me say I’m sorry. And second, I love you. I’ve always loved you and I always will.

I still blame myself for Solomon going crazy three years ago and trying to kill you. He wanted me to love him and only him, completely and forever. I tried. But he knew I was still in love with you and he wanted you dead. I still have nightmares knowing what you went through all those years ago. That is my curse.

But, Max, once you were thought dead, Solomon was much more stable. We were actually happy for a few years. But as you know, Solomon never could be truly happy. He had to pick and pick, and we would fight, then make up, then fight again. But we got through the worst of it and were relatively happy for almost three years.

Recently, though, you have become so popular again that the Art Institute decided to hold a retrospective of your life’s works. All the attention directed toward your art in the last few months has made Solomon angrier and more paranoid than ever. He keeps threatening to kill somebody, and I’m so afraid it’ll be me.

Then last month, the strangest coincidence occurred. I found your copy of Beauty and the Beast in a used bookstore! I guess your darling Emily didn’t want the book, so when I found it on the shelf, I bought it. Call me sentimental, but the book reminded me of you.

But when Solomon saw the inscription you’d written in the book, he thought you had written it to me. I was your Beauty and you were my Beast! If only that were true!

Solomon went crazy. He demanded to know why I’d kept the book all these years if I weren’t still in love with you. I told him I had just found it recently, but he didn’t believe me. He beat me, Max. I thought he was going to kill me. I tried to stop him, but it was like throwing myself in front of a runaway train. He was unstoppable and all I could do was get off the tracks.

So I confessed. After years of pretending, I finally admitted the truth to Solomon and to the world: I loved you, Max, and I always would.

But that’s not the worst of it. I was so beaten down that in a moment of weakness, I revealed to Solomon that you were probably still alive.

I’m so sorry, Max!!

Solomon’s jealousy has boiled over into madness. You know he’s part of that crazy church group, but lately he’s become more involved with their more fringe survivalist members, who collect guns and practice shooting all day. I’m worried that he’s become even more dangerous and unbalanced than he was three years ago when he harassed you so badly that you had to fake your own death to escape him.

Now I wonder if I will have to do the same.

I’ve decided that the only way to warn you is to put this book back on the market in just the right way that it will get to the right person. I’ve done my homework, but the rest is up to the fates.

The book will end up at Covington Library. When the curator sees the damage I’ve deliberately done to the book, I am confident that he will call in a book restoration expert. My research points to your old friend Brooklyn as the most likely person to restore the book. I’m counting on her being as single-minded and obstinate as she was years ago. She will find this letter and track you down. Fitting, isn’t it? Since she was the one who gave you the book in the first place. I love a circle!

So, if you are reading this letter, it means you’re still alive-thank God! Please, Max, be careful. Solomon wants you dead. For real this time. Don’t underestimate his reach. He will find you and kill you.

I’m frantic with worry. Things have spiraled out of control. You might still blame me for ruining your life, but I am innocent. Solomon ruined both our lives, Max. We have that much in common, at least.

If the world is fair, if the universe sees fit to reunite true lovers, you and I will be together someday. But if it isn’t meant to be, my one last wish for you, Max, is to be happy.

I love you. I love you. I love you!!

Your Angelica

“The woman thought of everything,” I muttered, kicking the bricks that lined the hearth. “Right down to the tattered, overly glued turn-ins.”

“Incredible,” he muttered.

“And you know she’s lying about finding the book in a used bookstore. She was the one who broke into Emily’s house and stole the book. She was a liar then and she still was when she wrote this letter.”

“She wants me to be happy? After everything she pulled?” Max crumpled up the note and threw it against the wall. “What a lying load of crap.” He spat out the words.

“She did her homework about me,” I said, feeling a little sick that I had played such a key role in her maneuverings. I picked up the letter he’d tossed, knowing the police would want it as evidence in Angelica’s death. Carrying it into the kitchen, I grabbed a Ziploc bag from the drawer and tucked the pages inside. “In order for you to get the letter, she had to have worked backward, starting with me.”

“Right,” he said. “If she could get the book to you, then you would be able to track me down.”

“But how did she know I gave you the book in the first place?”

“Damn it.” He slapped his forehead. “I made it easy for her.”

“How’d you do that?”

He leaned back against the sliding-glass door and closed his eyes. “Angelica kept calling me, even after Emily and I were engaged.”

“But why? You mentioned that before, but you said she’d gone back to Solomon. So what was her deal?”

“It was all a game,” he said, pacing again. “Always a game with her. I’m sure she kept calling me just to make Solomon jealous.”

“That’s the way she operated.”

“Yeah. She called after my engagement party to rant about Emily, saying Emily wasn’t good enough for me.” He shook his head. “If only she knew how wrong she was.”

“Of course she was wrong, Max.”

He went on. “I argued with Angelica, then mentioned that you’d given me that book as a gift because the story symbolized Emily’s and my deep love for each other.”

“Oh, nice going.”

“I know, I know. I was feeding the flames,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “But I was so damn grateful to be out of Angie’s sick web, I wanted to rub her nose in it. You know?”

“Well, that backfired,” I said, stating the obvious. “Anyway, she knew I gave you the book, so she had that to work with. Evidently, she did some digging and found out I was friends with Ian and that he hired me for a lot of restoration projects. She also must’ve found out that Joe Taylor did a lot of selling to the Covington.”

Busy, busy, I thought.

He nodded. “That’s probably how it all went down.”

“She planned this whole thing, Max.” I shook my head at the amazing intricacies of Angelica’s plot. “She warned you and warned you about Solomon, so when your car went over the cliff, she must have thought you took her advice and faked your own death.”

He frowned. “But how did she know Solomon wasn’t actually responsible for that? How did she know I was still alive?”

I threw my hands up in the air. “I don’t know. Maybe she was following you all that time, wanting to know if any of Solomon’s dirty tricks worked. Maybe she saw that you got your car fixed after the brake line was cut, so she knew you couldn’t have lost your brakes in Big Sur. Or maybe she just hoped you were still alive. Who knows for sure?”

“Who knows for sure?” he muttered.

“So when the retrospective became a reality, she must have decided it was time to resurrect you.” I paced the room as I went through the steps Angelica might have taken. “So she put the book out on the market through Joe, then fed him all the right suggestions. Then she went back and killed Joe so she couldn’t be tracked down.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Max said. “There’s another possibility. Maybe Solomon killed Joe as a warning to Angelica.”

I considered this. “I don’t doubt that he is crazy enough to do it, but why would he? The letter indicates that Angie’s the one who set the whole thing into motion with Beauty.”

He turned and faced me. “But what if Angie wrote this letter and put it in the book, and then Solomon took it before Angie could start the ball rolling? She says that he thought I wrote the dedication to Angelica.”

“So he started the ball rolling to get the book to you, to kill you.”

Max shook his head. “This is making me crazy.”

“Right there with you,” I muttered. “My head’s exploding just trying to keep up with the two of them.”

“So Solomon brings the book to Joe; then he has to go back and kill Joe and then, later, Angie.”

“It’s all way too complicated,” I said, needing either aspirin or wine. I knew which one I preferred, but it was a little early in the day to start drinking.

“No, it’s all speculative,” Max corrected.

“But it’s all possible, too.”

Max stared at the ceiling for a full minute, then shouted out an epithet. “I’m so pissed off. My life was turned upside down and backward for three long years because these two idiotic children decided to play some kind of sick game with me.”

“You’re giving children a bad name,” I muttered in disgust. “Let’s call it what it was. They were control freaks. Psychopaths. That’s why they were so close. They each recognized that same twisted mentality in the other.”

“And I played right into their hands,” he admitted quietly. “I was attracted to Angelica because she was a gorgeous, experienced woman, but she was never in love with me. She didn’t know the meaning of the word.” He scratched his head in frustration. “I’m an idiot.”

“Yeah, you were.”

“Thanks.” He shook his head in disgust. “Everything Angie ever did was calculated and manipulative.”

“True.” I sighed. “Look, I’m going to give Derek a call. He needs to see this note.” I walked toward the hall.

“Wait,” he said, following me. “Let me have the letter. I want to show it to Emily. She should know the truth about what happened.”

“Okay, but be careful with it. We’ll need to show it to Inspector Lee. I’ll be in my room, on the phone with Derek.”

“Where’d Emily go?” He looked around, confused. “She was sitting right there at the dining room table a few minutes ago.”

I frowned. “I thought she was in your room with you.”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He headed down the hall, calling her name, but got no response. He came jogging back to the living room. “Is she in the kitchen?”

“No.” We could both see the kitchen from the dining room. “Maybe she’s outside.”

“Okay, you check the garage. I’ll check the yard.”

I grabbed his arm. “Don’t worry. She knows better than to walk too far away.”

Fear was alive and glittering in his eyes. “I know, but earlier she was talking about hiking down to the stream.” He opened the sliding-glass door.

A woman’s piercing scream echoed through the canyon.

“That’s her. Emily!” Max shouted, and dashed out the door. He crossed the small terrace in two strides and raced toward the top of the narrow footpath we’d found the other day. Within seconds, he disappeared down the steep hill.

I sprinted back into the house and down the hall to my room, where I grabbed my cell phone. Then I bolted outside and over to the edge of the canyon to watch Max’s progress as he hurtled dangerously down the treacherous dirt path. I cringed as a miniature rock slide caused his feet to wobble and he had to stop a few times to regain his balance.

“Be careful,” I shouted. Okay, that wasn’t helpful advice at this point, so I did the only other useful thing I could think of. I wanted to call Derek, but Gabriel was closer, so I pressed his number on speed dial.

He answered on the first ring and I’d never been so happy to hear his voice.

“Emily’s been kidnapped,” I said in a breathless rush. I didn’t know that for sure, but why else would she scream? Why else would she be gone? “Please come quickly. And can you call Derek and ask him to get up here? Hurry, Gabriel. I’m going into the canyon with Max to look for her.”

“Damn it, Brook-”

“Can’t wait, Gabriel. I have to go.”

“Br-”

I ended the call before he could start shouting. And if I didn’t want to hear Gabriel’s shouts, I really didn’t want to hear Derek’s. I hated knowing he would worry for the next hour, all the way over from San Francisco. But I couldn’t think about that right now. I shoved the phone into my pocket and followed Max down into the canyon.

I was halfway down the canyon when I skidded on a patch of loose rock. I fell on my ass, but managed to grab hold of a small, prickly bush. My hand was stinging and my butt ached, but I couldn’t complain. The little bush had kept me from plummeting headfirst down the steep, rocky hill.

I pushed myself up off the ground, then jolted at the sound of car tires screeching in the distance. A plume of dust and dirt rose into the air from the bottom of the canyon a few hundred yards away.

“Son of a bitch!” Max shouted, his voice echoing against the solid rock walls. And I knew without a doubt that Emily was gone.

I sat down in the dirt and called Gabriel back.