Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Eighteen

Someone had gotten into my office while I’d been away.

I had never really considered anything in the office worth stealing, with the exception of my laptop, and everything on that was backed up, here and on my Mac at home and on the all-powerful and all-seeing cloud. All of my artwork, other than whatever piece in the office I was working on at the moment — usually when bored waiting for a paying client to walk through the door — was also at the house I still thought of as Melanie Joan’s, by sheer force of habit.

I had a file cabinet I didn’t really need. Also out of force of habit, an antique from before you could do everything digitally except get your nails done.

I had a decent deadbolt lock on the door, and an alarm system, one I consistently neglected to set. I knew it wouldn’t take much for an artist like Ghost Garrity to get past the lock, or the alarm when it was set, and storm the citadel.

But now someone else had managed. I gave a cursory search of the room, and of my desk, and decided that the only thing different from the last time I’d been inside was a small stack of papers on my desk.

Yellow, handwritten pages, slightly faded blue ink, the script like schoolgirl handwriting out of the past.

I liked a neat desk. Despite my line of work, and despite the fact that my personal and professional lives so frequently skewed toward being a bit of a mess, I actually hated chaos.

And clutter.

And I tried to do something about both when I could, if only for the sake of appearances.

“You keep trying to find your inner neat freak,” Spike said. “You just never quite get there.”

The stack of papers was the only thing on my blotter. No note on top, or on the side. The small framed photographs on my desk exactly where they’d been before.

Just the handwritten pages in the schoolgirl script were new.

I sat down and counted them. Ten pages in all.

“Chapter One” was on top of the first page, followed in this way:

I got up then and walked across the room to the inlaid bookcase that I’d had built, with the permission of my landlord, when I’d leased this space. On the top shelf was a signed first edition of Melanie Joan’s breakthrough debut novel.

The title was A Girl and Not a God.

It was the book that began with Cassandra Demeter sharing, in the first person, that she was about to tell us about love and heartbreak. And about a life of great adventure. That was how Melanie Joan’s prologue started, about a girl who said her name came out of mythology, who said she wanted the whole world to know her name.

Okay, I thought, so maybe this was a first draft of Melanie Joan’s, somehow recaptured from the way-back machine.

Now I flipped back to the title and author page, where she had inscribed the book to me:

“To Sunny. One in a million. MJ.”

I carried the book across the room, sat back down at my desk, opened the book again to the inscription, and laid it next to the pages in front of me.

Not the same handwriting.

Maybe a first draft, but not Melanie Joan Hall’s.

“Oh, ho,” I said.