Chapter One
Annie Laurance Darling moved swiftly. Or as swiftly as she
could propel her body through air thicker than congealing
Jell-O. Her hair curled in tendrils. Her skin felt as
moist as pond scum. If it got any more humid, Calcutta
would be a resort in comparison. She thought longingly of
cool air. Maybe she would read The Yellow Room by Mary
Roberts Rinehart. It was always cool in Maine. Rinehart's
heroine shivered. And lit fires.
Why had she ever come to this island where the summer air
was heavier than mercury? She had a sudden, unsettling,
cold sensation. She knew why she'd come to the land of no-
see-ums, swamps and fragrant magnolias. She'd come to
Broward's Rock a few years earlier because she was running
away from a close encounter with one Maxwell Darling. How
weird! What if Max hadn't, in his own imperturbable,
incredibly determined way, followed her? What if now she
wasn't Annie Laurance Darling, but just Annie Laurance? It
would be a cold world indeed. She felt like flinging out
her arms and embracing the humid, spongy air. What did a
little heat matter?
Annie stopped at the door of her store and grinned. What
could be better than a nice hot day in her own very happy
corner of the world? Dear Max. And her wonderful store.
She studied the name with pleasure -- DEATH ON DEMAND --
in tasteful gold letters. Without doubt it was the finest
name for the finest mystery bookstore east of Atlanta.
Smaller letters, also in gold, announced: "Annie Laurance
Darling, Prop." She felt warm all over, a nice,
comfortable, happy inner warmth that had nothing to do
with humidity. Max. Her store. Her books. Hers to enjoy.
It would, in fact, be an utterly lovely day -- except for
the library board. She had tried to ignore a niggling
sense of uneasiness all day. But her nerves quivered like
snapping flags heralding a coming storm. The solution was
obvious. Easy. No. She knew how to say no. That was all
that was required to stay free of the controversy swirling
around the library.
Determinedly, she stared at the Death on Demand window.
She didn't really need to look at the window. After all,
she'd put in the new display only last week. But it was
clever, if she said so herself: a cherry-and-green-striped
parasol open behind a mound of golden sand, a tipped-over
beach bucket with a shower of brightly colored paperbacks
spilling out -- Miss Zukas and the Library Murders by Jo
Dereske, Something's Cooking by Joanne Pence, Murder on a
Girls' Night Out by Anne George, Memory Can Be Murder by
Elizabeth Daniels Squire, and Blooming Murder by Jean
Hager.
Good mysteries. Fun mysteries. And that's what summer was
all about: snow cones and walking fast on hot sand to
plunge into cool water and mounds of mysteries; buckets of
clams and kissing in the moonlight and piles of paperbacks
with smoking guns or blood-dripping daggers on front
covers, yellow, red and blue crime scenes on back covers.
Of course, those colorful covers were declasse today. But
Paperback mysteries published in the forties and fifties,
oh, what great back covers they had -- drawings of the
manor house, sketches of the library where X marked the
spot, maps of the village showing the rectory and the
church, the graveyard and the shops along the high street.
And, even more fun, the reader often found inside an
equally colorful description of the book's contents, such
as:
What This Mystery's About --
A bloodstained handkerchief.
The reason the cat meowed at midnight.
A dog named Petunia.
The contents of the rosewood box.
A woman with one husband, two lovers, and an angry sister.
A gun, a dagger, and a missing rhinoceros.
Golly, those were the great days of the mystery. And she
always remembered Uncle Ambrose when she thought about
old, great mysteries. Death on Demand had been his store
originally, a smaller, much more masculine retreat. He'd
welcomed his sister's daughter there every summer through
her childhood and carefully chosen books for her. The
Ivory Dagger by Patricia Wentworth, The Franchise Affair
by Josephine Tey, The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes,
offering them with a gruff "Think you'll like these." Like
them! She'd loved every sentence, every paragraph, every
page. And especially the wonderful mysteries with maps on
the back cover...For a moment, Annie forgot all about the
heat and the boxes of books to be unpacked and the mouse
heads that Dorothy L. kept depositing on the kitchen steps
at home and the increasing bitterness of the schism on the
library board. She stood with a finger to her lip,
wondering if anyone had a complete collection of all the
Dell Mysteries with crime maps on the back. Now that would
be --
"Annie."
Annie didn't turn at the swift, sharp clatter of shoes on
the boardwalk. She recognized the voice despite its
unaccustomed ferocity. Annie knew the fury wasn't directed
at her. Nonetheless, she thought plaintively, this wasn't
what summer was all about. But, as she took a deep breath
and practiced saying no in her mind, this is what
mysteries were all about -- anger, power, and fractured
relationships. Annie wanted to contain misery between the
bright covers of books where everything came out right in
the end.
Henny Brawley, Annie's best customer, a retired teacher,
and a mainstay of the Broward's Rock library board, didn't
bother with a salutation. Her angular face sharp-edged as
a red-tailed hawk diving for a rat, Henny yanked open the
door to Death on Demand and stalked inside.
Annie followed, welcoming the initially icy waft of air-
conditioning that almost instantly seemed tepid, proof
indeed of the summer heat, into the nineties and climbing.