Mel hurried to the staircase in the middle of the building. It was empty, so there went her theory of an employee on a break. She climbed the short staircase and tugged on the glass door. To her surprise it opened. She wasn’t sure if she should enter or not. She didn’t want to terrify anyone who might be at work, but she didn’t want to walk away if there was a situation happening and someone needed help. Dilemma.
Mel decided to sneak in and take a peek. If everything was normal, she would back out the way she’d come and pretend she’d never been here.
The back door opened into a hallway, which had two restrooms. At the end of the hall on the right was the door that opened to the offices, the workroom, and the stockroom. Mel crept to the end of the hallway. She glanced out at the store in front of her. It was empty, eerily so.
It was then that she noticed the horrible smell in the shop. She wondered if it was a gas leak. Maybe that was why the shop was closed. But why would the back door be open, and wouldn’t they have closed the neighboring shops? Besides, it wasn’t a sulfuric gas smell; it was acrid.
Mel couldn’t place it, but she knew it was noxious, the sort that could give a person a powerful headache if they were exposed to it for too long. Perhaps that was why the store was closed, but again, why was the back door unlocked? It didn’t make sense.
The hinky feeling in her belly twisted, and she glanced at the door to the offices. It was closed. During all the visits she’d made to the bookstore, she’d never seen the office closed. She pressed her ear against the wood. She could hear someone shuffling about the room, then there was a thump.
It wasn’t a good thump. It was the sort of noise made when a person kicked something. Hard.
Instinct propelled Mel forward. Without overthinking it, she pounded on the door. The side of her fist met the thick wood with three solid bangs.
“Cassie, are you in there?” She raised her voice. “It’s Mel. Cassie, answer me.”
Where there had been shuffling before, there was now an absence of noise. It reminded Mel of how the songbirds went quiet when Captain Jack slipped out of the house to stalk them in the backyard. It was as if they thought if they made no noise he would simply turn around and go away. He never did, and Mel wasn’t about to, either.
Twenty-three
She raised her fist to bang on the door again. She connected once, but then the door was yanked open and her fist slipped through the open air to drop awkwardly to her waist as the smell that had been toxic before now made her eyes water.
She blinked as she took in the scene before her. Standing in front of her holding a long match was a tiny little bird of a woman, as fragile and as plain looking as a sparrow. With glasses that were too big for her face, she tipped her head to the side as if trying to figure what Mel could possibly be doing here.
“Janie,” Mel said.
The horror of what she had interrupted made a shiver run down her spine. The stench was clearly an accelerant like turpentine, and a quick glance past the small woman showed Cassie bound and gagged and propped up on a pile of what appeared to be pages torn from a book. Mel didn’t have to work too hard to guess which book.
Janie holding a match clinched the ugly truth. Janie was planning to kill Cassie by lighting her on fire using copies of the book from which she’d been left out. Mel thought she might throw up.
It was cold comfort that she’d been right. The killer was not someone in the fictionalized tell-all, but rather a person who wasn’t. The killer was this petite little woman who looked like she couldn’t harm a mosquito, never mind kill four people in cold blood.
Janie with an ie instead of a y. Janie, who hadn’t even merited a mention in the tawdry tale Elise had penned. Janie, who clearly wanted to be noticed, to matter, to be counted, and who in her fury at being ignored had turned to murder.
Mel studied her. There was a detachment in her eyes that was more alarming than any rage she might have displayed.
“You’re the cupcake baker,” Janie said. “Elise liked you.”
“Liked is such a strong word,” Mel said. She didn’t think being a friend of Elise’s was such a good thing at the moment. “I mean I hardly knew her.”
A thump sounded from behind Janie. Mel knew it had to be Cassie. Was she hurt, wounded, bleeding from an injury Mel couldn’t see, while Mel stood here making chitchat with Crazy Train?
“How about we go grab a cup of coffee and you can tell me all about your years living in the Palms?” Mel asked.
“No,” Janie said. “You should leave.”
She began to close the door and Mel knew that she couldn’t let her. She stepped forward, using her foot to wedge the door open. She peeked over Janie’s head and saw Cassie, struggling with her bonds, her eyes streaming from the harsh smell that wafted up from the papers piled around her.
“Oh, Janie, no,” Mel said. “You can’t do this.”
Janie’s back went rigid. “Yes, I can. I can do whatever I want, and you want to know why? Because I’m insignificant, I don’t matter, no one ever notices me. I’ve been able to kill them all, but no one ever suspected little Janie Fulton.”
“That’s not true,” Mel protested. “You do matter.”
“Sure I do,” Janie said.
