The Christie Caper Read Online Free PDF

still Annie felt chilled. The words were a curse in every sense. Annie had never, in the several years she’d known Emma, seen the author this furious.
    “Emma, who is Neil Bledsoe? What did he do?” And whatkind of scene was going to occur at her conference, the wonderful conference she’d planned and worked on for almost a year?
    The cool blue eyes swung toward Annie questioningly, then back to the road. Emma’s voice was neutral when she answered. “It’s hard to believe you’ve never heard of Neil Bledsoe, Annie. But he is a little before your time. The man self-promotes like crazy. He’s worn almost every hat in publishing—editor, agent, critic. Everything but write fiction. Oh, he turns out reams of nonfiction, blathering glorification of the iron balls kind of mystery. He worships at the feet of the tough-guy writers.” The Jaguar leapt as if stung.
    Annie clung to the door handle. “But what has he done that’s so awful?”
    “What
hasn’t
he done?”
    As Annie started to speak, Emma held up a hand. Sunlight sparked off the enormous ruby ring she wore. “All right. But I don’t know if you’ll understand. It all has to do with vulnerability.” Another appraising glance from those probing blue eyes. “You don’t strike me as being particularly vulnerable. You are—”
    Emma paused as she signaled right to turn onto a blacktop road lying in the deep shade of an avenue of live oaks. Ghostly fingers of Spanish moss dangled in silvery-gray splendor. The Jaguar curved smoothly onto the road.
    “—a fighter, Annie. Scrappy. You’d tell a bully to stick it.” Again, that cool appraisal. “You don’t have enough imagination to let anyone play tricks with your mind.”
    Ordinarily, Annie wouldn’t have let that snide comment slide. But she didn’t want to distract Emma.
    “You see,” and the Jaguar zoomed to sixty, “you aren’t an author. If somebody told you Death on Demand was stupidly arranged, poorly advertised, and sloppily run, what would you do?”
    Thinking of her computerized inventory, her quick turnaround of stock, her thousand-plus mailing list, Annie snapped, “Laugh all the way to the bank.”
    “Right.” Emma’s lips almost twitched into a smile. “You’d go on the offensive. If the slam came from a competitor, you’d take out an ad, put in a color graph of your profit margin, list your assets, tout your customer list.”
    Annie’s head bobbed in agreement.
    “That’s you. But you’re a bookseller, not a writer. Just for a moment, pretend you’re a writer, a successful one. Very. You write the light, charming kind of mystery that provides a golden circle of peace—just for the duration of the book—to readers who seek respite, readers who are in pain. And there are so many of them, Annie. Pretend you are Fleur Calloway. What would you do if a powerful critic whose column is read by everyone in the mystery world sneered at your books, called them romantic twaddle, dismissed them as silly and juvenile. Described them as arch. That one’s a killer. It’s better to be boring than arch. Oh, Neil did a superb hatchet job. Used that favorite phrase, ‘the author’s characters are paper thin.’ Said the plots were hackneyed, second-rate Christie, the writing
uneven.
Accused you of making light of murder.”
    Emma braked briefly as a mother white-tail deer followed by two nearly grown fawns bounded across the road.
    Annie pondered.
    The sports car picked up speed again. Over the sticky air pumping through the windows and the sun roof, Emma answered for her. “You’d bellow. Tell him to go to hell. But all that would get you is a tag for whining. Americans don’t like whiners. If you complained that the critic was a louse and a liar and deliberately trying to hurt you—well, then the cry of sour grapes would go up.” Emma’s voice was weary.
    Annie was puzzled. “Emma, whoever this Neil Bledsoe is, he couldn’t really hurt Fleur Calloway. All she had to do was