We are 36,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean when my husband asks me to plan a murder.
“How about defenestration from the top of the bell tower?”
“Didn’t we do that already in Death Takes the Castle?” I counter.
He rolls his eyes and I notice that he looks tired. Usually by this point in the flight he’d have his footrest up, his eye mask on, and be out until landing, but something has him on edge. Hence the murder plotting, an activity that has always soothed him. “We’ll be hard-pressed to find a murder method we haven’t used. We’ve littered the globe with our victims.”
“The tour of the bell tower isn’t on the itinerary until the second day and that’s a bit long to wait for the first murder,” I point out, which only causes more eye rolling. He’s always made fun of my itineraries along with my outlines. Fred is the original pantser, while I am the die-hard plotter, in writing as in life, which might as well be the motto for our mystery series, Death Takes a Holiday. We should have it translated into Latin and use it for the epigraph of our next book. I open my notebook and scribble down a note: Translate into Latin: “In Writing as in Life.” What’s the Latin word for writing? In scriptis? My college Latin professor would be appalled at how much I’ve forgotten.
“Plotting a murder, Thea?” Fred asks hopefully.
“Yes,” I lie, shutting my notebook before he can see anything else. “I think the first murder should be poison by Aperol Spritz at the reception.”
“Let me guess, in a drink meant for someone else?”
“Of course—or at least that’s what’s assumed—”
“Like in Triangle at Rhodes,” he says.
“Yes,” I agree warily. Fred always cites Agatha Christie when he wants something from me. “That was a Pink Gin.”
“Isn’t that how the first victim dies in Death Takes the Castle?” he asks.
“Oh,” I say, abashed that I’d forgotten. Usually, I’m the one who keeps track of our past books and maintains the series “bible.” I eye his leather satchel, tucked into the seat back pouch, suspiciously. “Is that a copy of Death Takes the Castle?” I ask. “Have you been rereading it?”
“Guilty,” he says, blushing as if he really had committed a crime. He once told me he couldn’t bear to reread our books. “Deb asked me to help her with the treasure hunt for the conference. She’s basing it on clues in Death Takes the Castle.”
“Really?” I ask, surprised and a little hurt. Deb Andersen, retired librarian and executive director of International Murder Writers, is an old friend and one of my favorite people in the industry. “Why didn’t she ask me?”
“You mean because you’re the official historian and I’m so unreliable?”
“I didn’t mean—”
He holds up a hand to halt my clarification. “She asked me because she didn’t want to bother you. She figured you were too busy working on the last novel’s revision with Aleister.”
Fred pronounces the name of our editor with his usual note of disdain. He’s never made a secret of his feelings about him, which is why I’ve been the point person on editorial communications, making me the middleman, the bearer of bad news, apologist, and peacemaker. It’s also why I talked to Aleister about my decision before talking to Fred, which I feel guilty about. But Fred has been unusually unavailable, almost as if he’s been avoiding me all summer, and yes, I had been busy getting ready for this trip and editing our last novel and finishing the outline for the next book, but it still stings a little that Deb asked Fred instead of me. Now we’re on a plane headed to Italy for this year’s MurderCon, where we have been nominated for the prestigious Poirot Prize for Best Mystery Series. Aleister will be at the conference (he and our agent, Penelope, are behind us in business class) and I can’t risk Fred finding out I told Aleister about my decision first. Besides, Fred will know as soon as I show him the outline for the next book.
“Look,” I begin, turning to my writing partner and husband of twenty years. “There’s something I have to tell you—”
The plane lurches as if the pilot, too, were wary of Fred’s reaction to my news. Does he think Fred will respond by hijacking the plane and demanding we fly back to New York? It’s what Rick Charles, Fred’s alter ego in the Death Takes a Holiday series, does in Death Takes a Spin, but that was only a little Cessna. Even Rick Charles, former Navy SEAL, kung fu black belt, and—let’s face it—fictional hero, would have second thoughts about taking over a Boeing 767 jet.
“Are you okay?” he asks with a solicitude I haven’t heard from him in a while. “Do you need a Xanax? I know flying makes you anxious.”
“It’s not the flight,” I say truthfully, although now that he mentions it, a Xanax would not go amiss. “It’s the announcement at the reception. I told PR that I didn’t like the idea of doing it on our first day—”
“And?” he interrupts. “Why is it still in the schedule? If I’d known how you felt about it, I’d have talked to Ava and insisted we reschedule.”
And, of course, Ava, the head of publicity, would have listened to him because she has a soft spot for Fred and also because when a man asks for something, he gets it, while a woman just gets a reputation for being difficult. Fred has long maintained that I’m a pushover, but what he doesn’t understand is how often I have greased the wheels behind the scenes—soothed bruised egos, explained away Fred’s snits—to get what we needed from our publishing company.
“And she explained that the first day at the conference would be our best opportunity for press coverage. Announcing that we’re returning to Castellarosa for our”—I stop myself before saying last—“next book will garner a lot of goodwill in the Italian press.”
“I don’t understand why we need it,” he says, downing the last of his (second? third?) scotch. “The books sell. Why else would we have gotten this nomination?”
I could show him our declining sales on BookScan (I have a spreadsheet) and explain that we’ve gotten the award not just because the books are good (most of them), but because of all the years we’ve put in at this conference and others, all the hours we’ve spent (or rather, I have spent while Fred hangs out at the bar) arranging panels, mentoring newbies, judging contests, blurbing up-and-coming authors (some of whom have done so well that we’ve had to beg blurbs off them in turn), tweeting, retweeting, posting, reposting, and generally being attentive to our readers and supporting our fellow mystery writers. This is how the industry rewards its team players.
Not that the Death Takes a Holiday books aren’t good. At least the first twelve were. Book #13, Death Takes a Siesta, nearly tanked our career. It was, according to a Publishers Weekly review burned into my amygdala, as if we’d written it while asleep after a few too many shots of tequila. Which was, to be fair, kind of true considering that one of us was asleep while the other was drinking a lot of tequila during the writing of that one. It had been an uphill climb after that disaster to reclaim our reputation and readership but we (meaning I) had done it through hard work and the goodwill of our editor, Aleister Crown. No series lasts forever, though, and the reviews and sales for the last book had been cautionary.
I don’t say any of that because I know Fred will counter with competing statistics and a lecture on how statistics can be manipulated and how no one knows what they’re doing in publishing anyway and didn’t that reviewer at PW have it in for us? Besides, Agatha Christie wrote far more books than we have and no one complained when she was repetitive. All forms of magical thinking, but Fred is a persuasive debater and can argue me stupid. Instead, I remind him that we’re contractually obligated to assist in publicizing the series.
“Besides,” I say, “we might as well get the most we can out of this nomination. I—I’ve been thinking . . .” I pause, waiting for another altitude drop
to interrupt me, but the plane glides smoothly through the upper atmosphere. Damn. “I’ve been thinking that this would be a good time to end things.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, staring at me with those gray-blue eyes that show up so nicely in author photos. I realize that the way I’ve put it makes it sound like I’m talking about ending myself—that’s the problem with writing about murder for twenty years; everything ends up being about death—and I start to clarify but the next thing out of his mouth tells me that my individual welfare and mental health are not his primary concern. “Are you talking about ending the series?”
“Well,” I say, piqued into honesty at last, “Rick and Dora are getting a bit long in the tooth for the kind of hijinks we put them through. I’m afraid the series is getting a bit . . . stale.”
“Poirot lasted for thirty-three novels and over fifty short stories—”
“And poor Agatha Christie was so sick to death of him she killed him off in Curtain thirty-five years before the world let her get rid of him.”
“She put the manuscript in a vault to be published after her death. Are you talking about killing off Rick and Dora? If you really want to do that, I’ll be happy to hold on to the manuscript until after your death.”
I raise an eyebrow, tempted to point out that women live longer and I’m a year younger than him, but instead opt for something less contentious. “We don’t have to kill them. We could give them a happy retirement.”
“You mean like a condo in Boca?” he shouts so loudly that the dozing passengers in the Delta One cabin stir beneath their puffy blankets and sleep masks.
“You’re right,” I say, “it might be more romantic if they go out in a blaze of glory.” More romantic and more final, I think, leery that if we leave Rick and Dora alive our fans—and Fred—will plead for a sequel. “Think of how satisfying that would be to write. Rick could make a grand gesture to sacrifice himself for Dora. It could be like the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—”
“You want Rick and Dora to get shot to pieces at the end?”
“Well, maybe not anything that bloody; our readers don’t go for gruesome. I just think it would be better to write them a great ending while they’re at the top of their game—”
“You just said that sales were declining,” he says in a warning voice that makes the hairs at the back of my neck prickle.
“Declining but not at rock bottom yet,” I say. “If we write a great finale now with all the publicity from the nomination, the book will be a bestseller. We can bank the royalties—maybe even get a streaming deal out of it. You’ve always wanted to write for television. Or you could do something different—write that literary novel you were working on when we met—”
“I wrote Death Takes the Castle instead,” he says.
“We wrote Death Takes the Castle,” I amend, bristling.
“I wrote the first draft,” he counters.
“From my outline,” I say, “and I did all the edits.”
He shrugs. He’s never thought much of my outlines or of the editing process. “You did make it more commercially viable,” he concedes. “It could have been a great literary novel.”
“Instead, it launched a twenty-book series and made us pretty comfortable financially,” I point out, the last salvo in an argument we’ve had so many times that we could each recite our lines in our sleep. “But now you can go back to the kind of book you always wanted to write.”
He stares at me, his eyes moving back and forth the way they do when he’s calculating. I’ve reached him, I think. This won’t be as hard as I feared. But instead of embracing the opportunity—the freedom!—I’ve offered him, he narrows his eyes and asks in a dangerously low growl, “Where is this coming from?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, feigning innocence.
“It’s Aleister, isn’t it,” he accuses.
“No,” I say truthfully. “Aleister doesn’t want to end the series. Even if the sales are flagging, the new books sell the backlist—”
“You’ve discussed this with Aleister already?” he asks in a cold, flat voice. Mixed with the usual disdain is a note of jealousy I thought he had gotten past.
“Only because you haven’t been available—Look,” I say, laying my hand on his arm. His warm flesh sparks a memory of a shuttered room in San Miguel—the scent of mimosa, the coo of mourning doves, slatted light on bare flesh—that softens something in me. Maybe this is a mistake, a voice whispers in my ear, but then I recall what came after those magical nights in San Miguel and harden my resolve. “This isn’t coming from Aleister or the publisher. It’s coming from me. I can’t keep on writing the series and pretending we have a real marriage. I want to end the series—and the ruse of our marriage.”
Maybe you’ve heard of us? Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane (it was Fred’s idea to hyphenate our last names because he thought it made us sound like posh Brits, while I thought it made us sound like a law firm). Or maybe you know our alter egos, Rick and Dora Charles, the detective duo in the Death Takes a Holiday series. Our first novel, Death Takes the Castle, set in the Italian medieval walled village of Castellarosa, introduced Rick and Dora to each other and to the world. It won Best First Novel at the Edgars and Agathas that year and got us a lucrative five-book deal.
Castellarosa is also where Fred and I met. I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation on twelfth-century female scribes and medieval love poetry. I’d gone there because there was a legend attached to the castle that I thought might have inspired a poem by an anonymous twelfth-century poet. I’d been spending my days exploring the walled city, hiking in the surrounding forest of holm oaks and myrtle and hawthorn, picking violets and cyclamen and hellebore and pressing them into my notebook. After having spent the last three years cloistered in a library researching my dissertation, I felt like I had been let loose into a living medieval millefleur tapestry. In the evenings I sat at an old taverna built into the city walls filling my notebooks—only not with the scholarly work I was meant to be writing. Instead, I began a story about a young medieval girl named Bianca Rosa who had fallen in love with a knight on his way to the Crusades and the modern woman who discovers her secret and sets her ghost free. A fairy tale. An indulgence, I thought. A warm-up for the academic book I was meant to be writing.
One night I realized I wasn’t the only one writing at the taverna. There was a young man about my age, in jeans and a tattered denim shirt that perfectly matched his eyes, sitting at a little table in the corner, with his own notebook spread out in front of him. Only instead of writing he seemed to be spending most of his time staring into space—or, I realized when I lifted my gaze from my story to meet his denim-colored eyes, staring at me.
“Mi dispiace,” he said in American-accented Italian, “I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that I’ve never seen anyone so lost in their work. You must be writing a masterpiece.”
“I have no idea what I’m writing,” I admitted, “but it’s certainly not the book I’m supposed to be writing.”
“Ah,” he said, tapping his forehead as if he saw deep into my head, “that’s your secret. You’re cheating on one book with another. No greater pleasure than the illicit.”
I felt my face flame in the candlelight and thought about my dissertation adviser, Fraser Halliday, with whom I’d been having an illicit affair. I wasn’t blushing because of the shame of that affair, though, but because I suddenly knew, looking into those deep blue eyes, that it was over. And then, because I was such a nerd that I always resorted to other sources when rattled, I quoted (from Proverbs, no less): “Stolen water is sweeter and food eaten in secret tastes better.”
He grinned back at me (he had one lopsided dimple, I noticed, and a slight gap between his front teeth). “Maybe that’s what I need, too, to cheat on this book with another”—he raised his hand to one side of his mouth as if shielding his notebook from what he was saying—“because this one seems to be dead in the water.”
“Ouch,” I said, side-eyeing his notebook. “What did it die of? I think my dissertation has died of exposure to the sunlight like the bloodsucking vampire it is.”
He laughed so hard he spit out his wine and thumped his hand on his notebook. “I wish someone would drive a stake through this monster’s heart and put us both out of our misery.”
He was writing a novel, I soon learned, and had been since dropping out of his MFA program (Iowa, no less!) three years before and taking to the road to write the great ex-pat bildungsroman. His models were Hemingway and Cervantes. He’d written some 200,000 words but still didn’t have a plot.
“What you need,” I told him, realizing over our second bottle of wine that it was what I needed, too, “is a murder.” ...
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