Bell, Book, and Scandal

Shelley had the grace to admit it. 'I guess I see what you mean. Sort of. And it was dahlias, not petunias.'

'What are we doing the rest of the day?' Jane asked.

'Shopping until Mel's next session?'

Jane replied, 'I'm shopped out and you know how surly I can become when I reach that point. There's a mystery trivia contest in the next session. Want to sit in on it with me?'

'No, thanks. I haven't read half the mysteries you have. I don't go places where I'm bound to feel stupid,' Shelley said. 'Isn't there some sort of awards party tonight? And a dinner we paid for in our fees?'

'If I'm remembering right, it's just a snack-anddrink thing. I wish one of us had brought along the schedule. The registration booth is closed temporarily, and the only way to get one is to steal someone else's. Why don't you go up to the suite and find one and make our plans for the rest of the conference? We're both free now to do whatever we want. Although I'd really rather leave and go home and work on my book after Mel's second talk.'

'Jane, don't say that. Not only have you paid for the whole conference, there might still be things you can learn that will be useful.'

'Maybe you're right,' Jane admitted. 'I'll stick it out.' She added wistfully, 'I just wish I could remember…'

'Stop working at remembering whatever it was. Your subconscious won't be forced to disgorge it until it's ready. Think about something else. Like dahlias.'

The mystery trivia contest was fun and clever. It was run by Chester Griffith, the bookseller who knew so much about virtually every book he'd ever read. Jane had so much enjoyed his earlier presentation and was looking forward to this one.

At first it was easy. He'd recite a short paragraph from a mystery novel. The first person to raise his or her hand would be allowed to answer. The contest was on the honor system.

The first two questions contained the name of the sleuth. You received one point for identifying the author right. If you knew the title of the book, you earned an extra ten points. If you also knew the first date of publication, you'd tally up another twenty points. Almost all of the participants knew who the author was on the first question. It was Ngaio Marsh because Griffith chose a paragraph that mentioned Roderick Alleyn. Even Jane knew that one. Another half dozen, including Jane, knew which book it was from, 'Black as He's Painted.'

Only one participant guessed the right publishing year, and she was an attractive, though somewhat overweight, young woman at the very back of the room. Several guessed the decade. Jane failed utterly on this part, though she thought itwas probably in the fifties because it involved a black African friend Alleyn had been in school with and was surprisingly politically correct for the time it was written.

The next question was easy as well. Miss Marple was named in the paragraph, and Jane knew it was the first Agatha Christie book to feature Miss Marple but couldn't remember the title, though she remembered quite a bit of the plot.

Again, the young woman at the back of the room had the name of the author, the name of the book, and only missed the publication date by one year. Many of the participants also remembered the title.

The third quote was a little bit harder. It didn't mention the sleuth's name, but gave his sidekick's name instead. Many of them knew the author immediately. Even Jane, and only because she'd dipped into one of the Dorothy Simpson books she'd purchased the day before. The sidekick was Mike Lineman, Luke Thanet's assistant.

Nobody except the young woman at the back of the room knew which title it was, and even she didn't come up with a date of publication.

The quotes became progressively harder and harder to identify. Every now and then one happened to come from one of the participants' very favorite mystery, and a few of them gained on the young woman's score.

Jane eventually gave up trying to guess when it came down to mention of minor continuing characters, like the usual pathologist in the series. She was awfully glad that Shelley had taken a pass on coming to this event. Shelley would have been completely at sea and mad as the dickens about it.

By the end of the forty-five-minute session, the quotes were so obscure that practically nobody had any answers. Even the young woman who'd started out so brilliantly was stymied by a few of the last questions. But she did win the contest. Chester Griffith presented her with a rare mystery of Wilkie Collins's and asked her to introduce herself. Jane vaguely recognized the book, which had been in a glass cabinet in the booksellers' room and labeled for sale for over a hundred dollars.

'I'm LaLane Jones. I teach a writing class in a college here in town on the history of the mystery genre and the science fiction genre.'

There were groans from the rest of the audience and a few good-natured remarks about this not being fair. LaLane Jones admitted it with a laugh.

Jane thought about her as she went back to the suite. As much as Jane herself enjoyed mysteries, she had no desire to be an expert on them the way Ms. Jones did. She wondered if Ms. Jones, as young and attractive as she was, had a real life. She hoped so.

But doubted it.

This made Jane a bit sad, and she tried to cheerherself back up by thinking how nice it had been that neither the dreadful Vernetta nor Gaylord had bothered to attend.

That, at least, was a valuable perk. Maybe they'd even gone home.

Fifteen

Mel's second speech was even better than the first because he'd had plenty of time to prepare it. After it was done, his cell phone rang again and he took the call, then told Jane that he was leaving the hotel without staying the second night.

'That call didn't have something to do with Zac, did it?' Jane asked.

'No. It's a simple shoplifting a few doors down from here. I'm back on duty.'

On the one hand, Jane hated to see him go. On the other hand, she was hoping that there would still be something interesting to learn if she stuck out the rest of the conference.

Unfortunately, the Strausmanns hadn't gone home. At the snack supper Vernetta was dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and Gaylord was adorned with sheets of aluminum foil, pasted together with duct tape, being the Tin Man.

'They should be locked up in some institution,' Shelley said. 'At least Vernetta should. Gaylord

made the mistake of sitting down and has already split the back of his pants and looks deeply embarrassed. Poor man. Those are some flashy undies he's wearing.'

'Rich man, you mean,' Jane said. 'He's going to live in his wife's mansion and drive a Mercedes. He might even buy a flock of them in every color. Letting himself be made a fool in public isn't such a high price to pay.'

'I'll bet he becomes fed up with it soon,' Shelley predicted. 'I'd bet good money that he runs off with a shy, blonde, seventeen-year-old anorexic bimbo within a year. Maybe two years. He'll probably be allowed to keep ownership of half the house and all of the cars.'

'Do you really think so?'

'I can but hope,' Shelley said. 'Let's go to a real dinner. I can't bear to be in the same room with these people.'

'Okay by me,' Jane said. As they were heading for the nicest of the hotel restaurants, she said, 'I don't understand it. Vernetta doesn't even know how to speak English. And I'd guess she has no idea how to spell anything over four letters long. She's so utterly ignorant about human nature. Except her own, of course. How could she possibly write a good novel? It seems to me that making up characters that seem real, especially if they're nothing like the writer who creates them, is the essence of fiction.'

'That's exactly what I've been wondering. Iwonder if it simply has a lot of really good sex scenes.'