Because I was a fan of this kind of thriller, I knew that MI 5 stood for Military Intelligence, Section 5, and is the United Kingdom ’s counterintelligence and security agency. The Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS-also known as MI 6-was the country’s external intelligence agency. Roland’s fictional MI 9 went back and forth across those lines.
It was in the first book’s final authorial “thank you” that I found a name I recognized. The acknowledgement read: “I am grateful to British commando Willis H. Parker for helping me extract Roger Wilde from an impossible situation.”
According to the copyright date, that meant Gray and Parker had known each other for at least nine years.
No familiar names, not even Parker’s, were in Gray’s expressions of gratitude in the second book, but there was an intriguing reference to “the lovely lady who inspired the character of ‘French Toast.’ ”
I remembered that character in the book. “French Toast” was the playful nickname Roger Wilde gave to a woman who was in love with Wilde, but who went to bed with a vicious arms dealer in order to discover information that saved Wilde’s life. She paid for that act with her own life.
Thinking back over the novels in the series, all of which I’d read up until his most recent one, Secret Agent Roger Wilde had proved to be very bad luck for women. Every time he fell in love, the object of his affections died some kind of violent death near the end of the book, just when it seemed as though Wilde would be able to retire from fighting international master criminals and settle down in his beautiful seaside cottage on the Costa del Sol in Malaga, Spain.
Was French Toast a tribute to Yvette Dupree?
Books three and four yielded no familiar names, but in Wilde’s fifth adventure I found this acknowledgement: “My heartfelt appreciation to Eugene Long for his kind hospitality to Roger Wilde and company.”
Flipping again to the copyright date, I saw that book number five had been published four years ago, which indicated that Roland Gray and Eugene Long had known each other for at least that amount of time.
But neither of them had given any indication of it the night of the gala. Are-or were-they friends?
They both knew Yvette Dupree-and quite well, judging from what I’d learned so far. She had cooked for Roland and was an affectionate mother figure to Long’s daughter, Tina.
Thinking about Long and Tina, I remembered something that Phil Logan had told me the afternoon he announced that I was going to be a cook-off judge. While he was warning me that Eileen was going to be hurt by Keith Ingram because Ingram intended to marry superrich Tina Long, he gave me an example of what a doting father she had. Phil said that when Tina was struggling to graduate from a private high school, Long actually bought the school. Then Long had hired “a novelist” to write Tina’s co-valedictorian speech, but that the novelist hadn’t told Tina how to pronounce some of the words. The result was public embarrassment for Tina. I shuddered in sympathy, imagining how painful that must have been for the young girl.
And then I imagined how furious Long must have been at that novelist.
Was the novelist Roland Gray? If so, what had happened between that time and what must have been the previous year, when Gray thanked Long for his hospitality? Did Yvette have something to do with it?
Looking into people’s private lives made me feel uncomfortably like one of those sleuths who uncovered stories for the tabloids, but at least I wasn’t going to make anything I found out public-unless it had to do with Keith Ingram’s murder. I made a note to call Phil Logan as soon as I left the library. If anyone could find out the name of the novelist who had humiliated Tina Long, it was Phil.
There were no other familiar names in the Acknowledgments of books six, seven, and eight. So my next act was to see to whom Gray had dedicated these eight books. The first was to his mother, and the second “to the memory of my beloved mother.”
The next four books were dedicated to his agent, Alan Berger.
Book number seven broke Berger’s streak of dedications, although the agent was thanked warmly on the Acknowledgments page.
The dedication in the seventh Roger Wilde novel was: “To Frank R. Stockton, who understood both Ladies and Tigers.”
That one was easy to decode; it was a reference to the classic short story, written by Frank Stockton, called “The Lady, or the Tiger?” It was one of the most chilling tales I’d ever read. I taught it every year in my old high school English classes because the ending always provoked lively debate among the students. Their answers to my questions “What would you do if you were the hero?” and “What would you do if you were the princess?” revealed important clues about their personalities. From time to time what I learned from that exercise enabled me to motivate them to think about their own futures, and inspire them to get the most they could from their years in school. Sometimes; unfortunately, not often enough.
Enough of my memories; I needed to concentrate on my current challenge.
While I hadn’t learned the identity of the person to whom Roland had dedicated The Terror Master-“The one who got away”-what I did learn was that Roland met Eugene Long several years before the lethal cook-off. It was another piece of the puzzle, but whether it was material to the central picture or just a piece along the edge, I had yet to discover.
I decided I needed to see Eugene Long. Because I wasn’t an official part of the investigation into the murder of Ingram, I would have to come up with an innocent-seeming excuse in order to meet with him…
Then I realized that the road to Long was through his great big billion-dollar ego.
I closed the covers on Roland Gray’s novels, picked up the stack, and replaced them on the appropriate shelf in the library’s Fiction section.
As I was passing the checkout desk to leave, I saw a young woman, college age, beckoning to me. I didn’t know her name, but I recognized her face; she worked part-time at the library. She glanced around-furtively, it seemed-and gestured for me to come over to where she was organizing books into the cart she would push as she replaced them on their proper shelves.
I whispered, “Did you want me?”
She nodded. “I thought you should know that while you were reading, there was a man watching you. He’s gone now, but while he was here that’s all he was doing-just watching you.”
39
A man in the library had been watching me?
I felt a chill run through my body. “Do you know who it was?” I asked.
“No.”
She motioned for me to follow her over to an area in the corner of the library where we could speak privately, but she still kept her voice so low I had to lean close to hear her.
“It might even have been a woman,” she said. “The person was wearing a dark green hoodie sweatshirt and baggy sweatpants. I couldn’t see the face.”
I did a quick search of my memory to recall the people I’d noticed when I came into the library. I hadn’t been looking for anyone in particular, but being aware of my surroundings had become a habit ever since someone tried to kill me a few months ago.
“I didn’t see anyone in a hooded shirt,” I said.
“The person came in about a minute after you did. I noticed you because I recognized you from TV-I watch your show. Then when he-or she-came in after you they caught my attention because they did something peculiar.”
“What was that?”
“They took a magazine from the rack, but they didn’t actually touch the magazine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They picked it up using a tissue. I thought the person must be some kind of germophobe. It was strange, and we’re told to keep an eye out for anything unusual, so I kept glancing over that way. The person wasn’t reading. I could tell because he didn’t turn any pages. Instead, he was just pretending while he was watching you. I was positive about that because as soon as you closed the books you had on the table, they put the magazine down and hurried outside. I still couldn’t see the face because I was over on the side of the room, behind him-or her. I don’t
