Featured Excerpt: Booked for Murder by P.J. Nelson

One

October can be a summer month in South Georgia. Temperatures in the nineties, leaves still green and locked onto the trees; humidity so thick that a small fish could swim in it. And the gnats were everywhere. I’d forgotten about the gnats.

I left my bags in the beat-up old Fiat I sometimes referred to as Igor owing to several unfortunate accidents that had left it misshapen.

The steps up to the porch creaked out a warning, but I didn’t pay any attention. If I’d paid attention to warnings, I’d never have followed Aunt Rose into the ridiculous world of the theatre.

Now I was too old for the ingenue, too young for the character parts, and you can only go to so many auditions for parts you don’t get before you start considering that job in catering. Inheriting a bookstore felt like a rescue plan. The front porch was the same as it had always been. Dried leaves from other autumns, dust from a thousand summer nights, five bentwood rocking chairs, two with broken cane seats.

I couldn’t have said why my hand hesitated, holding the old-fashioned brass key at the front door lock, but I stood there frozen for a moment, hearing Rose singing softly to herself just inside the door. Sometimes, apparently, the memory of melody lingers long after the song is gone.

I grew up in Enigma, Georgia. It’s near Mystic and not far from Omega, and if you don’t believe that, look at a map. We trust in the arcane in this part of Georgia. We existed first for turpentine, then for lumber. There was no reason for a private liberal arts college to be anywhere near us, but Barnsley College was thriving in the wilderness. And there was even less explanation for my aunt Rose, born in Enigma, raised near the railroad tracks, and then inexplicably bathed in the bright lights of Broadway for most of her life. She founded the Old Juniper Bookshop when she retired from the stage and returned to Enigma.

And when she died, she left it to me.

Down from Atlanta, what should have been a three-hour drive took nearly five thanks to a disagreement between a refrigerated eighteen-wheeler and a pretty blue Volvo. I arrived exhausted. Driving down the lonely main street I was a little surprised by all the empty buildings, places I used to go when I was a kid, now out of business. And at the end of that road, I pulled into the gravel driveway of the old Victorian mansion just at sunset.

And there it was: the castle of my childhood, with all its foreboding shadows.

Three stories tall, gingerbread trim, peeling paint, wraparound porch, balconies, gables, and ripple-glass windows, the house itself was a character from some lost Hawthorne novel. The burgundy and dark green color palette had been an effort to restore its look to something like the original, but the final result was more Boo Radley than Southern Belle.

I grew up here more than in my parents’ house. I’d idolized my aunt Rose. She’d run away from home at seventeen and landed a job on Broadway the first week she was in New York, an understudy in Anyone Can Whistle. It opened April 4, 1964, and closed after nine performances, one of Sondheim’s less-than-successful efforts according to the critics at the time. But Rose kept getting work, mostly in the chorus or as an understudy. Still, it was a life in the theatre, and she filled my head with her stories.

Those stories buzzing in my brain, I opened the door, and there it was: dust motes, musty air, the smell of old books, and I was in heaven. In that compendium of smells, I found my childhood, and all the long hours spent reading in the shop, talking with Aunt Rose, making plans and dreaming dreams.

I loved the ramshackle disorder of the place. It made me think of Colin Lamb’s observation, “Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about,” which was my aunt’s organizational philosophy. The books, she always said, had told her where they wanted to be. So finding anything in the entire place was more an adventure than a destination.

In the last beam of gold from the setting sun, as the dust motes danced in the air, the smallest ballerinas in the universe, I had a deep sense of home.

Then the silence set in. I stood still there in the doorway and thought I’d gone deaf. The house was alone at the end of the block on the edge of town, with nearly an acre of land for the backyard garden.

Suddenly the song of a brown thrasher shot through the air. It was so loud that it startled me, and I was worried that the bird might be in the house, an omen.

I stepped inside and realized that someone had opened all the windows, at least on the first floor of the house. It hadn’t done anything for the faint smell of mildew, but it had allowed the thrasher’s music to come in, a better welcome than creaking stairs or stale air.

The foyer hadn’t been swept in a while; it was difficult to see the other rooms in the failing light. I reached for the button switch beside the door, but when I pushed it, nothing happened. So first job in the morning: have the electricity turned on.

I remembered that Rose always kept candles in the desk that she used as her cash register. The desk was in the parlor to the left, and that room was especially dark. But I knew it well enough to get to the desk and find several long tapers and a large box of kitchen matches. Two of the candles were already in their own pewter holders. I lit one and set it on the desk, the other I carried with me. Sunlight was fading fast, and the candle in my hand gave the parlor a distinct luster of melancholy, made the room more recollection than reality.

I almost saw Rose sitting at her desk.

And there I was, at sixteen, reclined on the antique French sofa and arguing with Rose about FSU.

“It’s the best theatre school in the south!” I’d told her.

She’d shook her head. “That’s like saying ‘the best bagel in Wyoming.’ You need to study in New York.”

Still, when I got a scholarship to FSU, Rose had paid all the rest of my expenses to go there. Would she have been proud of my so-called acting career in Atlanta?

The thrasher cried out again, and I suddenly had the impression that the noise was panic, not song. I battled a moment of horror-film fear—the proverbial dark, empty, haunted house with no electricity and a taper in my hand—and went to fetch a few of my things from Igor. I only got my suitcases. The rest of it would be safe in the car. I hadn’t brought that much with me. I’d left most of my stuff in a storage place in Atlanta. I didn’t know what else to do with it.

Back inside, I considered calling Rusty Thompson, Rose’s lawyer, the one who’d told me about my odd inheritance, just to let him know I’d arrived. But I decided to leave that for the morning.

Struggling with the bags and the candle, I made more noise than necessary clattering up the stairs to the second floor where Rose had lived. There was a master suite, but that was Rose’s domain, and I wasn’t comfortable taking it over, not just yet. So I opted for the greenroom, the one I always slept in whenever I stayed over.

I dropped one of my bags at the doorway going into the room and I let the other fall to the floor several steps later.

The room, even in candlelight, was cheery. The walls had been painted long ago with climbing Lady Banks roses and pale blue wisteria. The antique oak Lincoln bed, the art nouveau lamps, the two-hundred-year-old Persian rugs all gave the room an air of such comfort that I once again had the sensation of homecoming.

I nudged my suitcases with my feet in the general direction of the closet. Then I got a look at myself in the mirror of the vanity next to the closet. My hair was up and wound in such a way as to hide most of the premature gray. The Irish sweater, comfortable in Atlanta’s version of autumn, was too hot in Enigma’s humidity. And why had I worn the jeans with the torn knees? Wasn’t I getting just a little too old for that look, my mother would have asked?

I shook off that particular ghost and then headed back downstairs, taper in hand.

I knew it was too much to hope that there might be something to eat in the kitchen, but that’s where I went nevertheless, because hope springs eternal in the hungry stomach.

The kitchen was in a back corner of the house, and it was small, but Rose had decked it out with the best: a Wolf dual-fuel range that must have cost a fortune, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, almost as expensive. The kitchen table had once belonged to Flannery O’Connor. There was a cast-iron skillet somewhere that she had stolen from the Broadway set of The Fantasticks. And in the cupboard, there was china given to her by Gwen Verdon when Rose had been in the chorus of Chicago. Where the money had come from or how she’d grown so close to such famous people were mysteries gone to the grave with my aunt.

Unfortunately, most of the food items left in the fridge and pantry had also gone to graves of their own. Blue chicken, fuzzy bread, and blossoming cheese were all to be thrown out in the morning. A lonely can of pinto beans and a nearly empty bag of jasmine rice would have to do for my evening meal.

But before I could find pans for the pathetic repast, a smell of burning juniper suddenly assaulted the kitchen air, the unique, bittersweet combination of fresh pine and earthy balsamic. Juniper was a protector, Rose always told me—it’s why she planted so much around the house and garden. She said that when Mary and Joseph were trying to keep baby Jesus from Herod, a juniper tree hid them.

I stood there in the dark room trying to understand where the smell was coming from when a flickering red light began to spatter the back windowpanes. I took a few steps toward the window before I saw the flames.

The gazebo in the backyard garden was on fire.