A Murder Like No Author: Main Street Book Club Mysteries, Book 3

by Amy Lillard

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

It's movie time in Sugar Springs, and the whole town is pitching together to get the historical Coliseum Theater ready for the event of the year - the premiere of Missing Girl, local author Wally Harrison's best-selling novel turned film. Thrilled to bring tourists to Sugar Springs, the town comes together to host the late author's event. 

But when a stranger arrives, boasting he has definitive proof that Wally didn't write Missing Girl...well, drama leaps from the page into real life. Mishaps start taking place around the theater - and then the stranger is discovered dead in his hotel room right before his press conference. Can Arlo and her Friday Night Book Club sleuth out the killer and solve the mystery before the town's Hollywood dreams go up in smoke?

 

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Release date: November 30, 2021

Publisher:

Sample

1

Her cell phone started to ring as Arlo Stanley rounded the corner of Main and started toward her bookstore. Great, she thought as she shuffled around in her bag trying to locate her phone. Why was it that, every time she needed it, it was always at the bottom of said bag hiding among the empty gum wrappers and random paper clips? Paper clips she never remembered dropping into the tote in the first place.

Truth be known, Arlo and Chloe’s Books and More was not simply her bookstore; it was so much more than that. Yes, it was a bookstore located on charming Main Street in quaint little Sugar Springs, Mississippi, situated between Memphis, Tennessee, and The Shoals of Alabama. Yes, it bore her name, but also that of her best friend and business partner, Chloe Carter. Chloe was in charge of the more part of Books and More, serving up specialty coffee drinks as well as a few baked goods to the locals. Though since her son had moved into her cottage, Chloe baked less and less. Arlo couldn’t blame her. Sometimes that’s just how things went.

Arlo finally managed to locate her ringing phone and dragged it from the depths of her bag. She checked the screen. Elly. Her nickname for Helen Johnson, the woman who had served as Arlo’s guardian when she had needed one—after she had told her nomadic parents that she wanted to make Sugar Springs her forever home. She had been sixteen at the time and desperate for roots. She had moved in with Helen, and the rest, as they say, was history.

“Elly?” she greeted. Thankfully she had picked it up before it had transferred to voice mail. Helen’s messages tended to be long and rambling.

“Arlo.” The one word was strained. A little choked but firm. It wavered a bit, but sometimes that was expected. Helen was in her eighties, after all.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, bracing the phone between her shoulder and her cheek as she shifted everything to one arm so she could get the door. On clear, sunny days like today, when the weather wasn’t sweltering hot, she and Chloe kept the doors propped open, but that didn’t happen until Arlo came in. Otherwise, Chloe kept them shut tight. This was something that had started last year when Wally Harrison had been found dead on the sidewalk in front of the store.

Arlo used one foot to flip down the doorstop, but the darn thing was stuck. She tried again. “Elly?”

Before Helen could respond, a voice interrupted the quiet street behind Arlo.

“Hold that door.” Daisy James-Harrison, widow of Wally Harrison, bustled across Main with a pale pink box in her arms. Since moving to Sugar Springs, Daisy had opened her very own bakery and sweet shop right across from Books and More. Lately, With Sugar on Top had become an unofficial extension of the bookstore, and Daisy’s baking skills had nudged Chloe further out of the treats game. Just in the last month or so, Chloe had pretty much stopped baking altogether, and instead Books and More featured a few tasty items from With Sugar on Top.

Okay, so Daisy’s muffins were better than Chloe’s, though no one said it aloud. And seeing as how Chloe and her son, Jayden, had lived apart for the last couple of years, no one in town begrudged the changes, including Chloe, who came into the store a little later after sending Jayden off to school.

To even things out on the muffin front, Daisy kept only regular coffee and decaf on hand, so if people wanted something more, they had to go see Chloe. So far, the arrangement was working out well.

“Hang on, Elly. I’m just getting to the store.” Arlo smiled at Daisy and stood with her back to the door, holding it open as her newfound friend hurried onto the sidewalk.

“Thanks,” she called, the words trailing behind her as she passed Arlo and swept inside Books and More.

As usual, Daisy was dressed New York chic in a slinky dress and high heels. Arlo looked down at her own, definitely more comfortable, footwear. Such was life. Though for all her seeming airs and big city ways, Daisy was as down to earth as they came. Looking at her, a person would never know that she had grown up on a mushroom farm in Missouri. But it was the honest-to-God truth. Further proof that truth was stranger than fiction.

Arlo nodded in response to Daisy, having shifted a few things back and once again holding her phone to her ear. “Elly?” she asked, thinking perhaps they had been cut off. Helen had been on the phone for a while and hadn’t said a word. Of course, Arlo’s attention had been split, as was the way with cell phones.

“I’m here,” Helen said, her voice still holding a firm, almost forced note.

“Can I call you back?” she asked. “Things here are—”

“No!” Helen raised her voice. “No,” she continued, in a more normal tone. “I’ll wait.”

Arlo gave a small sigh. She had a busy day ahead of her, and Elly was making her antsy. Plus all the hype that had been going on with the movie premiere. She supposed that all of it was amplified, since despite the hectic feel of this Monday morning, it had been a quiet winter. Arlo and Sam hadn’t been on any more dates during these colder months, though from time to time they found themselves at the same party. Sugar Springs wasn’t the kind of place you lived if you wanted to keep your dating/love life low-key. But Arlo knew that, despite the dates they had gone on before, Sam couldn’t allow his attention to stray too far from his mother these days. After seemingly going into remission, Marjorie Tucker had taken a turn for the worse. Now the whole town waited to see when she would finally succumb.

Mads, of course, was as brooding as ever, but considering the year they had had, the quiet was good for a change. The chief of police had had two murders, which was unheard of in their little town, and he’d had to deal with Arlo’s book club thinking that they needed to get involved in the crime solving. But for now, things were back to normal for sleepy little Sugar Springs.

And then there was the book club. Even though they had gone months without a mystery to solve, somehow all the ladies found themselves at the bookstore each day. They were still reading and still arguing over what to read, but these days they found themselves trying to solve the mystery of why Sandy Green, the Realtor, had dyed her hair pink—you know, when her name was green and all.

Arlo shook her head at the memory, flipped the doorstop down—third time’s a charm—then she waved to Chloe as she stepped into Books and More behind Daisy.

“Are you ready for today?” Daisy asked Chloe, though she looked back toward Arlo as she said the words.

“Rawk! Big day,” Faulkner squawked from his cage. Chloe had left the bird covered when she had come in. Not that Arlo could blame her. She had thought the bird would be a great addition to the bookstore—hypo-allergenic, he could actually “talk” to the customers, and with a name like Faulkner…well, he belonged in a bookstore, didn’t he?—but sometimes (okay, more often than not) the Amazon Parrot proved himself to be a pest. He loved attention, loved the people coming into the store all day, and enjoyed his life at the bookstore. Sometimes a little too much.

“Arlo?” Helen asked, her voice timidly seeping through the phone line.

“I’m here.” All she heard was silence on the other end. She nodded toward Chloe and Daisy, who had started to talk about the day ahead. There were two weeks left until the premiere of Missing Girl, the movie made from the book written by Wally Harrison, local author, now deceased. And since Wally had died just outside Books and More last year—thank heavens the city finally managed to get the spot on the sidewalk to be the same color as the rest—the event was of great importance to them all. Practically the entire town was on the beautification committee formed to work on restoring the historic Coliseum theater to its near turn-of-the-century (twentieth, not twenty-first) glory.

“Elly? What’s going on?” Helen was unusually quiet today, but there was so much happening in the store that maybe she was waiting on a calm moment to continue.

“Just a sec.” Her tone was starting to worry Arlo.

“Is everything okay?”

“Gimme a minute.” Same quavering voice, same strained note.

Arlo waited for Helen to continue as she made her way through the downstairs section of Books and More and into the tiny office she shared with Chloe. She dumped her bag next to her desk, which was really a table with chairs on both sides, but it served them well.

She slipped out of her light spring jacket and tossed it over the back of her chair. It was that time in Mississippi when the mornings were chilly and a little damp, and then the afternoons turned off warm and humid. Summer was on the way.

“There’s a problem,” Helen finally said.

Normally Helen wasn’t the one for dramatics. Of all the book club members, she was the one with a level head, even more so than Camille, who maintained something of an Aussie-British calm in every situation. Or perhaps that was because she had a mysterious white handbag with heaven only knew what inside. It seemed as if when anyone needed anything, Camille had it at the ready, stored in that mystical white bag of hers. That sort of preparedness would make anyone calm.

No, the hothead of the bunch was Fern Conley, who Arlo was sure must have worked at the FBI or the CIA, or perhaps the KGB. Who knew with Fern? She was as dependable as dirt and as unpredictable as the wind. And like the rest of the ladies in her Friday night book club, Arlo loved her with everything she had.

“What kind of problem?” Arlo asked.

“A problem problem.”

Maybe Helen was a little more high-strung today than usual.

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.” She walked back out of the office, pointing to the phone and mouthing sorry as Daisy and Chloe looked to her.

“That guy,” Helen said. “You know the one.”

Arlo bit back a sigh. It seemed the part of Fern would be played by Helen today. “What guy?” she asked as patiently as she could.

Arlo had a full day ahead; she wasn’t up for added histrionics. The children from the elementary school were coming over for a mini book fair and book reading, and Arlo had several cases of Wally’s book scheduled for delivery today to stock up for the movie premiere. Arlo figured the balance of customers in the area who hadn’t read the book yet would surely want a copy now that the movie was out.

“Rwark!” Faulkner screeched. “Let me outta here! Let me outta here. I’m dying over here.” The latter was spoken with a New York cabbie accent, though Arlo had no idea where it had come from. The bird was like a finicky sponge absorbing all the bad phrases and habits and leaving the positivity quotes Arlo tried to teach him for the other poor suckers who wandered in.

She gave an apologetic look to Chloe and Daisy, mouthing “Helen” so they would understand, then she made her way over to the bird’s free-standing cage. She braced the phone between her cheek and shoulder as she removed the cover and folded it.

“The guy,” Helen said again, as if that explained anything at all.

Arlo stuffed the cover in the cubby under the cage and straightened.

“Open the gate! Open the gate!” Faulkner screeched, but Arlo ignored his pleas for freedom. She hadn’t seen Sam this morning, but he could be upstairs, which meant Auggie, the orange tabby who lived in his office, could be lurking around. Auggie took every opportunity he could to come down to Books and More and terrorize Faulkner, an activity that had mixed results, seeing as the bird was a good-sized parrot. And this morning, Arlo simply wasn’t in the mood for their shenanigans.

“Oh, yeah. Him.” Arlo drawled sarcastically.

“Don’t get cheeky,” Helen said, her voice taking on a hard, nervous edge. “The guy from yesterday.”

“Hey, lady,” Faulkner called as she moved away from his cage. “Laaaadeeee.”

Arlo ignored him once again. “The foreign guy?” As soon as she said the words, she wished she could call them back. She preached to the ladies in her book club constantly about political correctness, and here she went classifying people with terms most might not consider to be respectful.

“Yeah, the one with the accent. He was going around yesterday saying he had proof that Wally didn’t write Missing Girl.”

“I remember.” How could she forget?

When she had left Books and More the day before, a crowd had been on its way toward the town square, just a few blocks up Main from the bookstore. It was a typical town square with park benches situated all around, a courthouse with wide concrete steps, and large oaks providing shade on all four corners.

The man, Chenko she believed he said his name was, had been standing on those wide concrete steps that led to the pale brick courthouse, a microphone from a Memphis television station shoved in under his chin. Arlo had recognized several other call letters of stations from Tupelo and Columbus as well as Jackson, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama.

The stranger had claimed he was having a press conference today to tell the world his proof that Wallace J. Harrison had not written Missing Girl and that in fact his assistant (and possibly lover) Inna Kolisnychenko had written it.

Gasps had gone up in the crowd from spectators and media alike. At the time and even now, Arlo wondered what kind of proof he had and, if he did indeed have proof, what it would do the sales of Missing Girl. She supposed it could go either way. After all, Helen still owned her cassette tape of Milli Vanilli. She played it and danced around her large boarding house when she thought no one was watching.

As the news reporters tried to get this newcomer to spill his secrets, the man just shook his head. “Tomorrow,” he promised in his slight Slavic accent, “I vill show all tomorrow.”

“I know him,” Helen continued. “He’s been staying at the inn.”

“Yes.” Arlo already knew this as well. Helen had called her right after he checked in to say that he had rented a room for two weeks, obviously planning to stay and make his statement more than once. Perhaps he would even show up and try to ruin the premiere…

“Good morning, all!” Phil from next door sauntered into Books and More for his usual morning coffee. Phil was a good neighbor, even though Arlo wasn’t sure how he kept his video rental store open in these times of streaming. Maybe it had something to do with his quarter arcade that drew the younger crowd in after school.

“And he’s having a press conference today,” she reminded Helen, giving Phil a cursory wave by way of greeting. He waved back, the light glinting off his slick bald head, which was interrupted only by the fringe of dark hair that ran from ear to ear and matched his thick moustache.

“No,” she returned. “He’s not.”

“Good,” Arlo replied. They didn’t need a bunch of drama to muck up their small-town life. Not with the premiere only a couple of weeks away.

“You don’t understand,” Helen said. “He’s not coming to the press conference because he’s dead.”