Page 25 of By the Book

Bobby jogged back to the car while I placed the call. I didn’t recognize the voice on dispatch tonight, so I identified myself and explained where I was and what I’d seen. It’s hard to convey the urgency of seeing a hand—I mean, I knew that there were all sorts of explanations for why the mayor might be lying on the floor. The most obvious one, of course, was that she’d had too much to drink. But sometimes, you can know something without knowing all the details. And when I’d seen that hand, I’d known. I couldn’t explain that to the dispatcher, so I settled for saying that Deputy Mai was on the scene and had told me to call for backup.

By that point, Bobby was back with a J-tool, which was one of the things he carried in the Pilot. He worked it between the French doors—doing a masterful job, by the way, of ignoring my parents, who were telling him to “Put it in straight-ways” and “Now yank it up” and then “Go back, show me how you did that”—and in one smooth, clean movement, flipped the latch. One of the doors swung inward, and Bobby said, “Stay out here.”

It was a nice try, but look who he was talking to. (I guess I can say at least I come by it honestly.)

As we moved through the house, I saw what I’d missed before. In the entertainment center, a cabinet door hung open, revealing rows of DVDs inside (apparently, the mayor had been a fan ofCHiPs). Books had been pulled from the shelves and were strewn across the floor, including an entire set of theEncyclopædia Britannica. One wall had been given over to what appeared to be theater memorabilia, with framed playbills and ticket stubs and even actor headshots. Several of these had been thrown to the floor, their glass shattered, their contents scattered around the room. Board games spilled their pieces everywhere—I stepped on a wishbone from Operation before I could stop myself. Someone had been here, I thought again. Someone had been looking for something.

Then we reached the mayor. She lay on the floor. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing. I caught a faint whiff of her perfume again as Bobby knelt next to her and tried to find a pulse. After several seconds, he shook his head. I couldn’t see any injuries, and my mind jumped immediately to the wine—poison, maybe?

My dad broke the silence. “What are we supposed to do? CPR?”

His voice was scratchy and thick, and I realized, from a long-off point in my brain, that he looked overwhelmed. My mom, too. She was clutching his arm, and he was clutching hers right back.

“Don’t touch anything,” Bobby said. He glanced around.

And I said what we were both thinking. “It’s not here. The diary. It isn’t here.”

Chapter 7

Deputy Tripple got there first. He was middle-aged, White, and completely bald in a way that was slightly upsetting because sometimes you could see his whole scalp quiver. He separated us, and since there was nowhere to hold us, he spaced us out on the mayor’s lawn.

“Date night, huh?” he said as he left me.

I didn’t respond.

Deputy Dahlberg got there next—a ’90s blonde whom I’d once seen break a board with her bare hands. An ambulance came, lights flashing but no siren. And then Sheriff Acosta herself, looking every inch put together, from the little baby hairs gelled to her forehead all the way down to her perfectly polished boots.

The sheriff took our statements. She started with Bobby, and then my mom, and then my dad. It was moderately awful, having to stand there, shivering every time the wind picked up (which was all the time), while the ambulance lights spun across the grass and the distant sound of voices floated out of reach. What made it worse was that, even though I couldn’t hear what my parents were saying, I could tell from their body language that they were somewhere between total shock and about to throw up. As I’d learned myself not so long ago, writing about murder didn’t make you immune to the impact of discovering a real body.

“Mr. Dane,” Sheriff Acosta said as she approached me.

“I’m really sorry about this.”

She nodded and glanced at the notebook in her hand and said, “Why don’t we start at the beginning?”

I walked her through it, all the way from when I’d agreed to let Mrs. Shufflebottom use Hemlock House for the fundraiser, and working my way to the end, when we’d found the mayor.

“Just to confirm,” Sheriff Acosta said, “no one saw the mayor go into the billiard room, correct?”

“No.”

“And no one saw her with this diary? At any point in the evening?”

“No. But, I mean, she pushed me, didn’t she? She wanted to cause a disruption with the cupcakes. And she’s dead. And someone was obviously looking for something in her house.”

The sheriff nodded and said, “I’ll probably have follow-up questions for you tomorrow.”

“Wait, what does that mean? You don’t think she stole the diary?” A beat passed. “What’s the other explanation? This was some kind of robbery gone wrong?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Dane. I’m still gathering information.” She closed her notebook with a snap, but then she seemed to struggle with what to say next. “Mr. Dane, I hope I don’t have to tell you that this investigation is going to attract a lot of attention.”

I waited, and when nothing more seemed to be coming, I said, “I could help. If you wanted, I mean.”

“I don’t want to put you in a bad situation.”

“I’d be happy to help.”

“You have your parents visiting.”

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