Murder, She Wrote: Panning For Murder: Panning For Murder (Murder She Wrote) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Teaser chapter

  “WITH BEST WISHES . . .”

  A commotion at the front door caused everyone, including me, to stop what we were doing and look in that direction. I saw Kathy come through the door, followed closely by the disheveled man from outside. The look on my friend’s face was sheer panic. The man shoved her ahead of him, propelling her into a group of people who’d already had their books signed and were chatting. Then I saw what the man carried besides his canvas bag. It was a lethal-looking hunting knife with a very long blade.

  “Sir,” I said, “why don’t you put down that knife and—”

  “Shut up!”

  I obeyed.

  He slammed the canvas bag down on the table, sending copies of my books flying in all directions. The hand holding the knife began to shake as he reached inside the bag, withdrew a copy of my new book, and slapped it in front of me.

  I know it sounds silly, but the only thing I could think of to say at that moment was, “Would you like me to sign that?”

  OTHER BOOKS IN THE Murder, She Wrote SERIES

  Manhattans & Murder

  Rum & Razors

  Brandy & Bullets

  Martinis & Mayhem

  A Deadly Judgment

  A Palette for Murder

  The Highland Fling Murders

  Murder on the QE2

  Murder in Moscow

  A Little Yuletide Murder

  Murder at the Powderhorn Ranch

  Knock ’Em Dead

  Gin & Daggers

  Trick or Treachery

  Blood on the Vine

  Murder in a Minor Key

  Provence—To Die For

  You Bet Your Life

  Majoring in Murder

  Destination Murder

  Dying to Retire

  A Vote for Murder

  The Maine Mutiny

  Margaritas & Murder

  A Question of Murder

  Three Strikes and You’re Dead

  Coffee, Tea, or Murder?

  Murder on Parade

  Obsidian

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  First Obsidian Mass Market Printing, September 2008

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Herbert Schaus III

  Authors’ Note

  This story is a melding of fact and fiction.

  We’ve given the cruise ship on which much of the action takes place a fictitious name—the Glacial Queen. But everything that occurs on it reflects what happens on real ships that ply Alaska’s Inner Passage.

  The main characters are, of course, figments of our imagination. Any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  However, Thelma Copeland, aka Dolly Arthur, was a very real and colorful person. Dolly was Alaska’s most famous brothel keeper—her former “sporting house” in Ketchikan remains a prime tourist attraction to this day. Her boyfriend, “Lefty,” was also real, although we’ve taken some liberties with how their relationship ended. Both are long dead.

  All the Alaskan historical material in the book is accurate, as are the descriptions of the various cities and towns visited by the Glacial Queen.

  Researching the book was a joy, and we urge everyone to make a visit to Alaska part of your future travel plans. It truly is a remarkable place.

  Jessica Fletcher

  Donald Bain

  New York, 2007

  Prologue

  Weeks Earlier

  “You must be beside yourself with worry,” I said.

  “I haven’t slept a wink since I received the call from the Alaska state police.”

  “She’s disappeared? I mean, really disappeared?”

  “Yes. At least that’s what the police said. She left the ship in Ketchikan and never returned. They have a system for tracking people who get off the ship to enjoy shore time in the ports. They scan your passenger card when you leave the ship, and again when you return. Their computers show her leaving the Glacial Queen at nine thirty in the morning, but she was never scanned as having returned.”

  “Maybe their computers made a mistake,” Seth Hazlitt said. My dear friend, and Cabot Cove’s most popular physician, has an inherent mistrust of computers. Whenever he sends something via e-mail, he insists that the recipients confirm that they’ve gotten it. And to my knowledge he’s never once used an ATM. “I prefer, thank you very much, to write checks,” he proudly proclaims, “and to stand in line at the bank to cash them. Besides, you get to know the bank perso
nnel that way. No sense in trying to get to know a machine.”

  We were gathered in my living room. It had been a particularly cold late spring, with some days when the temperature barely rose above freezing. I’d made a stew, whipped up a salad, and served a red wine recommended to me by my favorite Cabot Cove wine shop. After dinner, we retreated to my living room, where I had the fireplace going, and I served coffee and tea and a plate of cookies. With me were Seth; Sheriff Mort Metzger and his wife, Maureen; Charlene Sassi, owner of the town’s favorite bakery and the source of the cookies; Michael Cunniff, one of Cabot Cove’s leading attorneys; and Kathy Copeland, a dear friend of many years and the person relating this troublesome tale. She’d received the call about her sister five days earlier and had immediately flown to Alaska to confer with authorities there. She’d returned to Cabot Cove only yesterday.

  “I spoke with that officer in Alaska,” Mort said. “They seem like competent fellas.”

  “I’m sure they are,” I agreed.

  “Very nice and very professional,” Kathy said. “And I appreciate you taking the time to speak with them, Mort.”

  “Least I could do,” our sheriff replied.

  “Kathy, I don’t want to make light of your concern,” I said, “but your sister, Wilimena, has been known in the past to—well, to disappear for periods of time.”

  Kathy sat back in her chair, rolled her eyes, and sighed. “I know, I know,” she said. “Willie has always been a free spirit. There have been times when I wasn’t able to reach her for months at a stretch, but then she’d surface from wherever she’d gone and regale me with tales of her adventures. But this feels different.”

  She sat up straight and extended her hands as though to elicit our understanding and agreement with what she was about to say. “There’s no reason for her to leave the ship and not come back. Sure, Willie would take off at the drop of a hat and follow some whim, but not this way. I just know something terrible has happened to her.”

  We fell silent as we contemplated what she’d said, and avoided further comment by each of us in turn taking much longer than necessary to choose a cookie from the platter. Mort broke the silence.

  “You say you brought back some of her things,” he said to Kathy.

  “Yes. The cruise authorities sealed off her cabin and secured all of her personal belongings.”

  “Did the Alaskan police examine those things?” I asked.

  “Some of them, Jessica. Willie always took along a large envelope in which to keep her receipts from a trip. The police photocopied them for me.”

  “Those receipts would give some indication of where she went and what she might have done in the various ports of call,” I offered.

  “Did you look through them yourself?” Michael Cunniff asked. He had been practicing law in Cabot Cove for as long as I’d lived there. He was in his late seventies but hadn’t lost a step mentally. Physically, however, he was a mass of orthopedic maladies that necessitated his walking with a cane. With long, flowing silver hair and a penchant for colorful bow ties to accompany his many suits, he was an attorney right out of central casting—or maybe a U.S. senator of yesteryear.

  “I must have gone over them a dozen times on the flight home,” Kathy replied, referring to her sister’s receipts. “They were all from the ports the ship had visited earlier, Juneau and Sitka. Ketchikan was the last stop in Alaska before returning to Seattle.”

  “And?” I asked.

  Kathy shrugged. “They mean nothing to me. Just receipts from shops and restaurants Willie visited in those ports, and a bunch of shipboard receipts, too, from the various lounges and shops.”

  “I’d like to see them,” Michael said. He’d been Kathy’s attorney since she moved to Cabot Cove forty years ago.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Are the Alaskan police at all confident about finding Wilimena?” Seth asked.

  “They said they would do all they could,” Kathy answered, “but they also reminded me that Alaska is a very big place, especially . . .”

  “Especially what?” I asked.

  “Especially if Willie doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it, Jess, that you’ll soon be heading for Alaska?” Maureen said.

  It was true. I’d visited our forty-ninth state years ago on a whirlwind book promotion tour, with Anchorage my only stop. It was one of those insane trips in which you fly into a city in the morning, are met by an energetic local PR person who runs you ragged from one radio and TV station to the next, then lunch with a local newspaper writer, book signings in the afternoon, a talk at a library, and no time for dinner because your plane leaves at six for the next stop. So although I literally had visited Alaska, I’d never seen it, and I had decided to rectify that by booking an Inland Passage cruise—the same one Kathy’s sister, Wilimena, had taken and from which she’d vanished, on the Glacial Queen, a relatively new ship. I’d booked the cruise months in advance, combining it with a long weekend in Seattle prior to the ship’s departure. I have a favorite mystery bookstore there run by a marvelous gentleman, Bill Farley, who always arranges for a book signing whenever I’m within striking distance of his store on Cherry Street.

  My reason for choosing an Alaskan cruise, as opposed to visiting other places on the globe, was a nagging need to get closer to nature. It had been building in me all winter, and by the time January rolled around, it had become almost an obsession. True, Maine teems with wildlife, which is one of many reasons I love living here. But Alaska has a very different lure for those of us enamored of nature and the remarkable array of creatures with whom we share our planet. So many of my friends have returned from up north filled with lifelong memories of having sailed into the midst of a pod of orca whales or having seen majestic bald eagles in virtually every treetop. Witnessing nature up close and personal has always helped me put things, includingmyself, in perspective, affirming my place in this world.

  “Maybe you could ask a few questions while you’re there, Mrs. F.,” Mort suggested. “You know, check in with the local police and see if they’ve made any progress in finding Wilimena.”

  “I’d be happy to do that,” I said, “although I’m not sure they’d be anxious to share anything with me.”

  “But they would with me,” Kathy said.

  “Of course they would,” said Mort. “You’re the missing person’s sister.”

  Kathy looked at me and said, “What I meant, Jessica, was . . . um . . . I was wondering whether you’d mind a traveling companion.”

  “A traveling companion?”

  She nodded. “I don’t mean to impose myself on you and your trip. Believe me, I know how much this trip means to you, and I wouldn’t for a second intrude. But considering what’s happened to Wilimena—and that you’re taking the same cruise as she did, on the same ship—it just seemed to me that, well, that maybe retracing her steps would help me come to grips with her disappearance.”

  “I, ah . . .”

  Truth was, I was looking forward to the Alaska cruise as a means of getting away from everything and anything and basking in a week of solitude, with whales, sea lions, otters, and eagles as traveling companions.

  I looked over at Seth, who knew exactly what I was thinking, not only because he knows me so well but also because I’d spoken to him about my need to escape on a solo jaunt.

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Mike Cunniff said, running his hands through his hair. “Besides, Jessica, you seem to have a knack for getting to the bottom of things rather quickly, especially when it involves—”

  He’d almost said “murder,” and I was glad he hadn’t.

  “What a great idea,” Maureen said to me. “You’d have company and—”

  “Mo and I talked about taking that cruise with you, Mrs. F.,” Mort said, “but it’s a bad time of the year for me.”

  Startled, I turned to him. “I didn’t know you’d been considering coming,” I said.

  “Will
George be joining you?” Charlene Sassi asked, referring to George Sutherland, the Scotland Yard inspector with whom I’d become close.

  “No,” I answered. “Why would you think he would be?”

  Charlene gave me a sly, knowing smile.