Turning her back on Dan, Liss set off after Nola and Margaret.
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Dan held his ground with an effort. He had a feeling that if he tried to back away from the formidable woman in front of him, she'd pace him like a lioness stalking her prey.
“Moosetookalook appears to be the murder capital of Maine,” Jane Nedlinger repeated. “Wouldn't you say that's correct?” She edged a little farther into his personal space. She seemed to use up more than her fair share of oxygen, too.
“Seems a stretch to me.” Dan slid into the laconic drawl he sometimes adopted for the benefit of tourists. In the popular opinion of the rest of the country, all Mainers were laid back and folksy, fished for lobster in their spare time, and said “ayuh” a lot, never mind that most of the state was nowhere near the rockbound coast.
“Oh, come now, Mr. Ruskin! May I call you Dan?” She didn't wait for permission, just assumed it would be forthcoming. “Now, Dan, there's no sense in hiding the truth. Not from a seasoned newshound like me. I was an investigative reporter once, you know. I worked for one of the big Boston papers. There's no deflecting me when I'm chasing a hot story.”
And the juicier, the better, Dan assumed. She was all but smacking her lips over this one.
“Sorry, ma'am,” he said aloud, “but I don't have anything to say to you. You'd best talk to the police if you're interested in the details of a criminal investigation.”
“Investigations. Plural. And the way I hear it, you and your little girlfriend had more to do with solving those cases than the cops did.”
Little girlfriend?
Oh, Liss was going to love that one! Since Dan couldn't think of a single reply that wouldn't come back to haunt him, he wisely remained silent.
Jane Nedlinger kept talking. She seemed to take a malicious pleasure in enumerating Moosetookalook's flaws, making Dan realize that he'd been dead wrong in the advice he'd given Liss. When he'd lobbied her to consider giving Jane Nedlinger an interview, he'd assumed that the threat Liss had sensed was all posturing and playacting on Jane's part. In person, however, the blogger was just as alarming as Liss had claimed. The potential danger she posed could not easily be dismissed.
“Moosetookalook is a quiet little town, Ms. Nedlinger,” he said, interrupting her.
“Jane.”
“We're peaceable folk here, Jane. Minding our own business. Trying to make a living. There's no call to make a fuss just because we had a few unfortunate ... incidents. . . over the last couple of years.”
“Is that how you see it? Incidents? I call them vile murders.” Her expression abruptly turned cold and hard. “I hear you're head of the chamber of commerce or whatever you call it here, but I won't be put off by the party line. You're sitting on a hotbed of crime and violence in this dinky little sinkhole you call home. In fact, I think this story is bigger than I first thought. I may just have to devote an entire week to the Moosetookalook murders and Liss MacCrimmon's part in them.”
“Now hold on just a minute!”
She talked right over his protest. “You can tell Ms. MacCrimmon that I won't need to ask her any questions after all. I can get all I need for my exposé without her input.”
Leaving Dan still sputtering, Jane sailed away. Within seconds, she'd pounced on a new victim, a woman who, by the color of her name tag, was a speaker at the conference. He'd stopped by the registration table earlier, long enough to observe that fans got white name tags while panelists wore light green. Nola Ventress and her helpers sported bright yellow.
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The chatter in the room was loud, one conversation bleeding into the next. As Liss passed various couples and small groups, trailing after her aunt and Nola Ventress, she caught a word here and a sentence there. Everyone sounded upbeat. Some were talking about the next day's panels and workshops. Others were saying nice things about the hotel. One remarked that she enjoyed the romantic suspense novels written by Maine writer Susan Vaughan more than the quasi paranormals penned by Yvonne Quinlan.
“Apples and oranges,” replied the woman she was speaking to.
The remaining tidbits Liss overheard were all about murder, but to her immense relief, the only crimes anyone seemed interested in discussing were those that took place between the covers of a book.
Nola looked surprised, and not particularly pleased, to discover that both Margaret and Liss were right behind her when she reached Yvonne's side. Rather perfunctorily, she introduced them to the actress-turned-writer and to the man in the checked blazer. His name was Bill Stotz and he was Yvonne's manager.
Bill lavished praise on Nola for her organizational skills, then seemed to lose interest when Liss announced that she was one of the vendors from the dealers' room. He fished a stick of chewing gum out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth. He let the wrapper fall to the floor without bothering to look around for a trash receptacle.
“Are you a bookseller?” Yvonne asked.
“I sell gift items with a Scottish theme,” Liss replied.
“I must make it a point to stop by and see what you have to offer,” Yvonne said with a charming smile. “I always find such delightful gifts in dealers' rooms at small conferences like this one.”
If Yvonne was suffering any residual effects from her encounter with Jane Nedlinger, Liss couldn't spot them. Then again, Yvonne
was
a professional actress.
“Was that Nedlinger person bothering you?” Nola's blunt question surprised Liss and thudded into the conversation as awkwardly someone tripping over a piece of furniture.
Bill Stotz scowled. Even Yvonne's easy smile faltered, but only for a millisecond.
“Of course not,” she said. “That dreadful woman is just after a story, as always. And she wanted to make sure I knew how much she hated my latest book.”
“She panned it?” Nola could not have looked more stricken if it had been her own creation that Jane had reviled.
“I take it you didn't see the review.” Yvonne sounded remarkably cheerful. “She loathed everything about it.”
“I've been too busy with the conference to read her blog for the last couple of days,” Nola admitted. She seemed extraordinarily shaken by Yvonne's announcement. “Oh, my. I never thought ... I hoped ...”
When her incoherent words trailed off, Yvonne filled in the blanks. “You sent her a review copy, didn't you, Nola?”
A study in misery, Nola nodded.
“Don't give it another thought,” Yvonne advised her. “None of us should allow that awful creature to spoil our day.”
“Doesn't bad press bother you?” Liss asked, genuinely curious.
“Well, of course it does,” Yvonne said. “No one
enjoys
a scathing review. But you have to consider the source. I learned a long time ago not to let petty people get under my skin. Not for more than about a minute and a half, anyway.” She gave a light, infectious laugh.
Liss found herself smiling back at the actress-turned-mystery-author. “Good advice. Too bad it's so hard to follow.”
“It takes years of practice,” Yvonne admitted. “Are you a writer, too?”
“Oh, no. Just a reader.”
“There's no
just
about being a reader. We writers wouldn't have much in the way of careers if no one read what we wrote.”
“Well, I do enjoy your books, Ms. Quinlan.”
“Yvonne, please.”
“Yvonne, then. I'm curious, though. You have a successful career in television, but you made your fictional detective a bit-part actress.”
At first glance the character, Toni Starling, might have seemed an unlikely amateur sleuth. She lived in Vancouver, where many U.S. action series and movies were filmed, and worked pretty steadily as “woman number two,” “first waitress,” and the like. Many of the crimes she solved had to do with the film industry. What made the series unique, however, was that Toni had assistance on her cases from a mysterious associate who might ... or might not ... be a vampire. That gimmick had attracted hordes of readers to the books because Yvonne herself had played one of the undead for nearly a decadeâa character named Caroline Sweet in the hit television show
Vamped
.
“Toni isn't me,” Yvonne said with another soft laugh, the kind that invited the listener to share in the joke. “Besides, if you think about it, unsuccessful actors have to be more observant than successful onesâconstantly on the alert for opportunities to show off their skills. That's a good quality in a sleuth, too, don't you think?”
“True. And Simon? Is he really a vampire?”
This time Yvonne's laughter was so full-bodied it attracted attention from all corners of the room. “I leave that up to the reader to decide.”
For a moment, Liss considered the question seriously. She'd read all the books, some of them twice. “We never see Simon bite anyone. And there aren't any bodies drained of blood lying around. On the other hand, he never goes out in the daylight.”
“That you know of.” Yvonne's smile was secretive and her dark brown eyes glinted with mischief. “Vampires don't
have
to kill these days, do they? And sometimes they kill in other ways. It's very easy for them to break someone's neck, for example. Just a quick twist and the deed is done.” She mimed the action.
Liss found herself both fascinated and repelled by this conversation. She couldn't resist asking another question. “Is that possible? I mean, is it really so easy to break someone's neck?” She'd seen it done countless times on both the big and little screens, but reality and Hollywoodâor Vancouverâweren't always in the same universe. Screenplays certainly got a great many other things wrong, a point Yvonne made over and over again in her mystery novels.
“It is if you know how,” Yvonne assured her. “I did a brief stint as a stuntwoman before I got my first gig as an actress. They taught me what to do. Or rather, what
not
to do. Fatal accidents on the set are never good for business.”
Two young women had joined the group surrounding Yvonne and had been hanging on every word the actress spoke. Hesitantly, one ventured a comment.
“A real vampire would drain the victim's blood,” she said. She had long, straight hair and wore the conference uniform of jeans and a T-shirt. The shirt featured a skeleton sitting on a bench at a bus stop. The caption read: “Waiting for a Good Agent.”
“That's right,” her companion agreed. “Breaking someone's neck and leaving the body to rot is just wasteful.” Her face was slightly rounder than the first woman's and her hair was shorter. Her black T-shirt had no artwork on it, only words. It read: “And then Buffy staked Edward. The End.”
“But for a vampire to do that,” her friend said in an authoritative voice, “is a sign of contempt. Remember that episode of
Buffy
where Angelâ”
“Please,” Yvonne interrupted, her smile slipping. “At least choose an example from
my
show.”
Vamped
had lasted longer than
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, Liss recalled, but it had debuted back when Joss Whedon's cult classic was still on the air. Liss supposed it was only natural that there had been some rivalry between the two shows.
“Will you sign my book?” the first fan asked. Then her face fell. “Oh. I left it in my room. I'll have to go get it.”
Bill Stotz paused in the act of stuffing a second stick of gum into his mouth to object to autographing outside the established signing hours. Maybe it was the third stick of gum, Liss thought, studying him. Bill was starting to look like a chipmunk storing up nuts for the winter in his cheeks, and she could smell the spearmint on his breath from two feet away.
“It's okay, Bill.” Yvonne made a little shooing motion with one hand. “I'll tell you what,” she said to her fan. “Why don't you go fetch your copy of my book right now? I'm not going anywhere. When you get back, we'll find a quiet spot where the three of us can sit and chat.”
“I think that Simon is hot,” the second woman said as they were leaving. “Way hotter than Vampire Bill.”
Liss blinked and glanced at Bill Stotz before she remembered that Vampire Bill was a character in yet another paranormal mystery series, the one written by Charlaine Harris. She had to disagree on the hotness factor, she thought.
Since she'd obviously not been included in the invitation to chat, she looked around for Nola, intending to steer her back to Jane Nedlinger, but Nola had wandered off. Liss didn't immediately see either her or Jane.
Human, gum-chewing Bill slipped away as soon as Yvonne spotted an empty table where she and her two starry-eyed admirers could settle in. Liss and Margaret continued to chat with the actress/writer until the fans returned with Yvonne's latest novel in hand and the three of them headed for an empty table.