Bell, Book, and Scandal

Shelley threw the camera into her purse and walked out of the suite.

Jane wished her well. But didn't want to follow her and draw attention to the two of them together.

Shelley was back in an hour. She took a little gadget out of the camera and plugged it into a slot in her computer, hit a couple of keys, and a picture of the woman calling herself Lucille Weirather popped up on the screen. It wasn't an especially good photo. It was dark and murky.

'I didn't want to use the flash and alert her,' Shelley said. 'I took a lot of shots but this one isn't useful. She's in profile and other people are standing behind her. I don't want that.'

One by one, she displayed the rest of the photos on the screen. Of the eight pictures Shelley had taken, only two were acceptable. And one of those had another person in the frame.

'I could fix that by cropping the other woman out, if I had to, but I think I'll just go with the other one. Would you call and ask that copy center if they can use disks to print pictures?'

Jane did what she was told. 'They can. They're only open for another hour though. We need to hurry.'

Shelley asked the copy shop to print up fifty 4-by-6-inch shots. And she purchased several sheets of sticky labels.

On the way back to the hotel, Jane asked, 'Are you really sure you want to do this?'

'It's a public service, Jane. She's a slimy eavesdropper and a vicious gossip. Somebody has to blow her cover and it might as well be us. Or rather Enid and Olga. Now let me print up these labels to put at the bottom of each picture.'

The labels said, 'This is Miss Mystery. Authors, be careful of what you say in her presence.'

'Aren't you skirting close to libel or slander, whichever it is?' Jane asked.

'No. I didn't say anything specific enough. I didn't claim she eavesdrops or says nasty things she overheard.'

Shelley gave one sheet of labels to Jane, and they sat sticking the labels to the bottom of each picture. 'Give Felicity a call, if you would. I'm sure she'd like a few copies for her writing pals.'

'May we drop in on you for a moment?' Jane asked Felicity. 'Have you seen Miss Mystery's post about Vernetta and us on her web site?'

'No, but someone mentioned it in the elevator. I meant to look it up but have been too busy trying to pack all these things I've accumulated. Come on down.' She gave her room number.

Jane and Shelley took along a printout of the web page and all the pictures.

'Wow, that's unusually nasty of her,' Felicity said when she'd read the printout. 'I don't remember her ever going after anyone except authors and the jerks who post their loony notes on her bulletin board section. She had no right to cite you two. Even though Enid and Olga don't exist.'

Then she took a look at the pile of pictures. 'How did you make her stand still to be photographed?'

Shelley said, 'I trailed her for an hour, lurking where she couldn't see me and my tiny camera. I didn't dare use the flash and most of them were murky or had other people in the picture. This was the only good one.'

'So what are you doing with so many of these?' Felicity asked.

'I want to put one on the conference bulletin board. It will probably disappear when the people staffing it come back in the morning. The rest… well, I thought you might want to share them with your writer friends so everyone will know what she looks like.'

'That's a brilliant idea. I'll become a heroine. Let me put my shoes on and we'll go downstairs.'

Twenty-six

In the rush to have the pictures done of Miss Mystery, Jane and Shelley didn't fail to enjoy their late-night dessert. They both ordered hot fudge sundaes and regretted this choice all night long. They each got up twice during the night to take antacids.

'The real cure for this is bland food,' Shelley said. 'We're supposed to meet Felicity for breakfast. We can enjoy watching what she eats while we stick with very slightly buttered toast.'

When they reached the lobby shortly after eight in the morning, the whole place was awash in black-and- white copies of Miss Mystery's picture. The woman claiming to be Lucille Weirather was frantically rushing around the lobby and meeting rooms, trying to find and destroy them. But new ones kept reappearing as if by magic.

Felicity had asked them to meet her at the door of the restaurant and they joined her, laughing like loons.

'How did you do that?' Jane asked.

'I gave out the color copies to several writing friends who had access to copiers. They distributed them everywhere at about six this morning. The one we put on the registration bulletin board has disappeared, as we expected. We've done the entire world of mystery writers an enormous favor. She won't ever again get away with this eavesdropping at conferences. Her cover's been blown.'

'We've annoyed the planners,' Shelley said with a hint of regret. 'But it pays them back for posting a notice telling us which subjects we weren't supposed to talk about.'

'They'll recover from it,' Felicity said. 'Often somebody commits an outrage at these conferences. I once went to one where a woman was carrying around a live chicken. Vernetta's offense was a worse one than ours.'

'I'm still wondering about who originally wrote the parts from the woman's viewpoint in Vernetta's book,' Jane said. 'Writers who are concerned should download the e-pubbed version before it's taken off the Internet.'

'Most of us who might have been her victims already did so the minute the story got out,' Felicity assured them. 'Orla put it on a computer disk and made copies for those of our friends who aren't here. At least it's not something of mine. I couldn't have been that boring, even when I was much younger.''I envy you your circle of friends,' Jane said.

'You have me. And Felicity. We're all you need,' Shelley said, patting Jane's arm.

'Shelley's right,' Felicity said. 'One really good friend who understands is worth ten who don't.'

Shifting mental gears back to writing, Felicity went on, 'What I really find most unbelievable about this is that Sophie ever bought it. It's really a horrible book. Putting aside all the typos and misspellings, it has virtually nothing to recommend it. The characters are cardboard, always whining to themselves about why they're obsessing about this person in their dreams and doing nothing about it. It's far too long and tedious. There's no sense of time or place. No good phrases that make you think 'I wish I'd written that.' '

'Maybe she never read it?' Jane speculated. She'd learned through the publishing magazine she'd subscribed to that there were lowly first readers who cleared out the worst of the manuscripts that arrived by the hundreds every week at publishing houses.

'I doubt it,' Felicity said. 'Sophie's really choosy about who she thinks should be paid that kind of money.'

'What if someone else, say someone higher up than her, had loved it? One of those Harvard Business School people who've never read good fiction and thought it was 'Literature' with a capital L?' Jane asked.

Felicity thought this over for a moment. 'I still doubt it. It is possible, though. Publishing has changed a lot in the last few years with all these conglomerates who made their money selling toilet tissue or safe-deposit boxes. Corporate executives who think publishers are ripe plums to be picked at random to raise their profile as intellectuals. People who are nearly illiterate are making important and catastrophic decisions. It's certainly food for thought.'

'If that is what happened, isn't Sophie powerful enough to go after whoever did it to her with hammer and tongs?'

'Probably not, if Felicity's right,' Shelley said. 'Sophie's exalted position might be in danger as well.'

'That's a happy thought,' Felicity said with a grin. 'She'd never be able to derail any new writer's budding career again.'

'There are plenty of new young people coming up to do that, judging by my own experience here at the