the collectibles and first editions. He’d also explained how, to avoid damage, it was better to clean on a regular basis, rather than making it an hours-long project on occasion. And so Darla tried to tackle the place with her collection of cloths and dusters whenever she had a slow period during the week.
She had barely gotten started on the first shelf, however, when she heard the distinctive thud of a book hitting the wood floor.
“Hamlet?”
Darla peered around the corner of the shelf to see the cat still stretched out on his rug near the door. Hearing his name, he yawned, showing sharp white teeth and a bubblegum pink tongue, and then settled his chin back on his paws to sleep.
Frowning, she set down her dusters and headed in the direction from where the sound had come. Sure enough, in the classics section she found a single paperback book lying on the floor. Her frown deepened. The last time that Hamlet had pulled books off the store’s shelves, he’d been trying to communicate a murderer’s identity. Maybe he was at it again. But could the touchy feline have rushed over, snagged the book, and flown back to his sleeping spot that quickly?
Curious, she picked up the volume and flipped it over. “The Man in the Iron Mask,” she read aloud, followed by a thoughtful, “Hmmm.”
Of course, Hamlet might have had nothing to do with the book at all. Maybe the customer who’d picked up the copy of Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe had accidentally dislodged this Alexandre Dumas book from its spot on the D shelf, with gravity eventually doing the rest of the work. But how often did she have to pick up fallen books after a customer left the store?
Not too often. Darla pursed her lips and nodded. For the moment, she would assume that it had been Hamlet who had pulled down the book as a clue—no matter that he was being even vaguer than previously in his hints.
“How about sometime you give me a book title that’s an actual name?” she told Hamlet as she carried the book to the counter. “You know, like Anna Karenina or David Copperfield or Jonathan Livingston Seagull. That would really help narrow down the suspect list, you know?”
Hamlet did not deign to reply.
“Fine, so I’ll play twenty questions by my lonesome,” she told him. “You speak up if I get it right.”
Dragging out a pen and sheet of paper, she scribbled Man in Iron Mask at the top of the page. Then she halted, momentarily stumped. She hadn’t read the book since high school, and even then she’d skimmed it. For better or worse, she’d seen the movie version—which likely bore only a nominal resemblance to the original novel—but that had been quite a while ago. Her memory of the characters’ names and the plot was hazy.
“Let’s take it a face value and assume that the killer is male . . . as in, Man,” she said and underlined that word on her page. “Help me out, Hamlet. How about D’Artagnan or Aramis or Porthos or Athos? Any of those ring a bell?”
Once more, the feline remained provokingly silent. “Okay, maybe I need to back up. Since the author is Alexandre Dumas, let’s try Alexander for the killer.”
Darla wrote down that name, followed by a large question mark. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know any Alexanders, but maybe Curt had. Or maybe he knew an Al or Alec or an—
“Alex,” she exclaimed with a triumphant smile, writing that name in large letters and circling it. “Robert’s buddy Alex Putin, the Russian mafia guy. He’s in construction, and he’s probably killed a bunch of people before.”
Not that she had firsthand knowledge of this—either the Russian mafia connections or any actual killings—but his name was as good a place as any to start.
She added Alex Putin to her budding list as a second possibility; then, with a snort, she crossed out that name and glanced toward the cat.
“Too easy. If the killer was Alex Putin, you’d have snagged something from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or else a Vladimir Putin bio, wouldn’t you? Besides, there’s no reason to believe that Curt has ever even met the man, just because they’re both in construction.”
Then she frowned. The more obvious candidate was Porn Shop Bill, though how he could possibly be tied to Dumas’s work, she couldn’t guess. Maybe there was a “William” somewhere in the story? She turned to her keyboard and did a quick online