Broken Bird (The Last Picks Book 4), page 1
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.
Broken Bird
Copyright © 2024 Gregory Ashe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests and all other inquiries, contact: contact@hodgkinandblount.com
Published by Hodgkin & Blount
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contact@hodgkinandblount.com
Published 2024
Printed in the United States of America
Version 1.04
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63621-086-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63621-085-8
Chapter 1
“Where’s Bobby?” I asked.
No one bothered to answer me, but that might have been because the library was so noisy. For a library, I mean—a low-grade roar of voices just begging to be shushed. Indira, Fox, Keme, Millie, and I took up a full row of seats in the multipurpose room. It looked like the whole town had turned out for tonight’s event; we’d even had to surrender the seat we’d been saving for Bobby to JaDonna Powers—which was honestly probably a good thing, because if she’d sat in front of us, I wouldn’t have been able to see past the mountain of church hair. Say what you would about Hastings Rock (its shockingly high murder rate, for example), the people here loved books. Tonight, thriller-writer extraordinaire Marshall Crowe (author of the Chase Thunder series) was stopping in Hastings Rock to promote his latest book (Thunder Clap, book seventeen in the Chase Thunder series).
The library’s multipurpose room was decked out for the occasion—well, for multiple occasions, which was probably the point of a multipurpose room. At the far end of the room was a temporary stage, complete with podium and chairs and an easel displaying a poster of Marshall Crowe’s handsomely grizzled face. (Chase Thunder, by no coincidence, was also handsomely grizzled, and in literally every book of the series, yet another tall, striking, dark-haired, Amazonesque woman fell prey to his charms—only to be abandoned when Chase Thunder inevitably moved on.)
But the library also had paper snowflakes hanging from the, admittedly, water-stained acoustic tiles, and it had glittery snowmen taped to the walls, and an enormous candy cane propped in the corner of the multipurpose room. (God only knew why they had it or what it could be used for—clubbing children over the head after they’d been lured inside a gingerbread house seemed like the only practical possibility.) Tinsel-strewn paper chains hung everywhere. With so many bodies crammed into such a small space, the smell of overheated synthetics mixed with the odors of aging bindings and carpet that needed to be torn up. One of the things that had struck me, when I’d first come to Hastings Rock, was that it was such a cute town, and everyone seemed to love books, but it had such a dingy little library—it just didn’t make sense.
Regardless, everyone seemed to be having a great time. Mr. Ratcliff was nosing around the stage, clearly hoping he’d pick up some interesting tidbit he could share with the rest of the town. Princess McAdams (not a real princess) had come dressed from head to toe in camouflage, and it looked like she’d brought the stock of a shotgun, presumably for Marshall to sign. And Mrs. Shufflebottom—librarian, wearer of uncomfortably tight cardigans, and apparently, for reasons unbeknownst to me, my self-appointed nemesis—was currently trying to force a family of six (tourists who had apparently wandered in during the off season) into the already overfull space. It was enough to make me, with my charmingly mild case of social anxiety, want to bite someone.
And still no Bobby. I checked my phone, but I didn’t have any missed messages from him.
“Dash, aren’t you SO EXCITED?”
Even over the hub of the crowd, Millie’s voice carried.
“I’m excited to get out of here,” I said. “Does anybody know where Bobby is?”
“You know who you should have invited?” Millie asked. (It wasn’t really a question.) “You should have invited DAMIAN!”
I scowled, but it didn’t have any effect. Damian was a bum—and a surfer—I’d met a few months before. He’d been irritatingly persistent about asking me out, in spite of my rejections. He was also Trouble, with a capital T. “Damian went to Hawaii. Permanently, I hope. Seriously, nobody knows where Bobby is?”
“He’s probably running late, dear,” Indira said.
“I know he’s running late,” I said. “I mean, he’s not here yet, is he?”
Indira looked at me. The thing about Indira is that she’s probably a good thirty years older than me, still strikingly handsome, utterly composed, and has a lock of white hair like a witch.
All of which were good reasons for me to mumble, “Sorry. It’s all these people.”
Keme snorted.
“But aren’t you excited,” Millie asked again, “to see your FRIEND?”
“He’s not my friend,” I said.
“But you brought him a Christmas present,” Millie said, looking at the parcel wrapped in brown paper (and string—that was my mom for you) under my chair.
“It’s from my parents; my parents are friends with him. They sent it to my house because they didn’t know which hotel he was going to be staying at.” My parents were both writers as well—my dad (Jonny Dane, the Talon Maverick series) leaned toward military thrillers, not too different from Marshall’s, and my mom (Patricia Lockley, The Echoes in the Cellar, We All Live in the Basement, The Matriarch’s Tooth) wrote psychological thrillers. In addition to the parcel for Marshall, I’d gotten a package of my own from my parents—handwritten edits on my latest short story (“And Then They Were Done,” and let me tell you, my parents did not like the title). “He probably doesn’t even remember me.”
Although that, at least, definitely wasn’t true. Because when I’d turned twelve, Marshall had happened to be visiting my parents, and he’d been kind enough to give me a BB gun—and then been crushed to learn I didn’t want to go hunting with him and my dad. I hadn’t been all that surprised when, a couple of books later in the Chase Thunder series, Chase had been saddled with a pansy twelve-year-old who didn’t want to hunt, had zero self-confidence, oh, and ultimately got butchered in particularly disturbing detail. (To put your minds at rest, yes, Chase went on to exact about two hundred pages of bloody revenge.)
In other words, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to seeing Marshall again. Which was part of why I looked around one more time. If nothing else, Bobby could shoot Marshall if he got particularly annoying. Not that Bobby would, because he was too kind. But maybe he’d let me borrow his gun.
Unfortunately, though, as had become more and more often the case, there was no sign of Bobby. Things had certainly been different since he’d broken up with West and moved into Hemlock House. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected—okay, I had some very clear hopes and dreams, and yes, maybe one of them involved a bubble bath. But I also understood that Bobby was just a friend, and as far as I could tell, that’s all he wanted to be.
In fact, considering how things had gone lately, he might not even want that. He was hardly ever home. He went to the gym. He went surfing (yes, God, in the winter). He worked as many shifts as he could get at the sheriff’s office. And when he was home, he was busy, or the rest of the Last Picks were there, or he headed to his room. Slowly, over the last couple of months, I’d realized that I saw less of Bobby now that we were roommates than I ever had when he’d been engaged and living with his fiancé.
“I’m sure Marshall remembers you,” Fox said. Tonight, they’d gone with Corpse Bride meets James Fenimore Cooper as their fashion choice: a striped, ruffled dress over buckskin leggings and clonky boots. “Who wouldn’t remember you?”
“Uh, thank you?”
Keme and Fox both got a good laugh out of that.
I would have responded to that (probably), except raised voices drew my gaze.
At the back of the multipurpose room, my other self-appointed nemesis, Pippi Parker, was trying to clear people away from the coffee station. Pippi was yet another author—Hastings Rock was lousy with them, it turned out. She was a middle-aged white lady with platinum-colored hair in a pixie cut that looked like it had been blow-dried within an inch of catching fire. She wrote cozy mysteries. You know the type: everyone is friends, everyone gets along (well, except whoever got murdered, I suppose), calories don’t count, and nobody says bad words, not even when Keme was hiding in your bedroom and he jumped out and screamed, and then you screamed, and then you had a minor heart attack, and Keme and Fox laughed so hard that Fox fell over and you had to take them to the urgent care because, according to them, the fall had made their sciatica flare up (painful and believable) and they needed their laudanum refilled (less believable).
Right then, Pippi was directing her family as they began unpacking the bags they were carrying. Accompanying Pippi tonight were her beloved husband Stephen, balding, in a reindeer sweater vest, and her three sons (their names were Dylan, Christian, and Carter, although I couldn’t have told you which one was which; all three of them looked the same, with dishwater blond hair and obnoxiously friendly smiles, a
“Good Lord,” Fox said. “She has her own water bottles?”
Sure enough, a sticker with Pippi Parker’s face had been pasted over the water bottle labels. All I could do was watch as Stephen hustled to the stage and started setting out the branded water bottles for Marshall and whoever else might end up sitting there.
“It does seem like a bit much,” Indira said.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Millie said. “Dash, we should put your face on everything we drink.”
“I think I’ve got a little more class—” I began to say.
And at that exact moment, of course, the room fell into one of those conversational lulls that occasionally happen.
“—than to slap my face on every available surface.”
Every eye turned toward me as my words rang out through the multipurpose room.
Mrs. Shufflebottom recovered first, glaring at me, one hand pinching the cardigan shut at her throat. “Mr. Dane,” she stage-whispered, “this is a library. If you cannot keep your voice down, I will have to ask you to leave.”
Some bozo—I thought it sounded like one of the Archer clan—made a familiar high school noise, the one that suggested: a) I’d gotten in trouble, and b) this was going to be good.
“But,” I said, and I made a flailing gesture at the roomful of people who had chosen that particular instant to fall silent. I tried not to see Pippi’s death stare. “Everyone was—I mean, I wasn’t trying to—it was so loud in here—”
“Mr. Dane,” Mrs. Shufflebottom snapped. And then, yanking the cardigan up a few inches: “Control yourself.”
I sank down in my seat.
And then Millie waved. “HI, MRS. SHUFFLEBOTTOM.”
A few of the people closest to us were knocked backward by the gale-force winds.
“Well, hello, Millicent,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said, her voice changing to that syrupy sweetness I associated with librarians who spent too much of their lives doing story time. “Aren’t you looking lovely this evening?”
To be fair, Millie was looking lovely this evening—you could tell by the fact that Keme practically fainted every time Millie said something to him—but the injustice of it still made me whisper, “How is that fair? I barely said anything—”
“Mr. Dane!”
I sank down even further and clamped my mouth shut.
Slowly, nervous chatter began, and the volume began to build again.
“She really doesn’t like you,” Fox informed me.
I glared at them.
Keme was smirking, so I gave him a dose too.
“What did you do to her?” Millie asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” I whispered furiously. “I’ve been nothing but charming and polite and charming and—”
“Polite?” Fox murmured.
While I tried to ratchet up the glare a few degrees, Indira said, “It’s not your fault, Dashiell.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re a lovely young man.”
“Thank—wait, why does it sound bad when you say it like that?”
“I think you and Mrs. Shufflebottom got off on the wrong foot,” Millie said. “Because you came to town, and you killed Mrs. Shufflebottom’s favorite author—”
“I didn’t kill anyone!”
“—and then it turned out that you didn’t kill her, but you exposed her as a murderer, and you destroyed her reputation, and you destroyed her legacy in Hastings Rock—well, her legacy all over the world, actually—”
“I didn’t destroy anything!”
“—and then you spilled that hot chocolate all over her library books—”
“That was Keme’s fault! What would you do if he jumped out of the closet at you and you were holding a nice, big mug of delicious hot chocolate?”
“—so Mrs. Shufflebottom probably just, you know, needs to get to know you.”
“If she has a chance to get to know me,” I said, “she’ll probably bonk me with that candy cane and turn me into kidney pie.”
“Oh no, Mrs. Shufflebottom is the SWEETEST. She did the best story times. I was always her favorite because I was the BEST at being QUIET!”
The excitement at the end meant a little ramp-up from ear-splitting to ear-shattering. Even Indira’s eyes widened slightly.
Once again, I was spared having to respond. A wave of interested murmurs ran through the crowd, and I craned my head to see Marshall Crowe enter the multipurpose room. He hadn’t changed much since the last time I’d seen him. He was tall and muscular, although at his age, muscular meant a build that leaned toward stocky. His hair was dark with presidential gray at the temples, and he wore a black military jacket over a black tee, with black jeans and black boots. I guessed black underwear was involved at some point. I knew for a fact that he needed reading glasses, and I was looking forward to when he had to pull out a pair of cheaters.
Behind him came two much younger people: a man and a woman. The woman was white, in her twenties, her mousy hair in a bun held by two pencils. Cardigan, cameo locket, pearl earrings, and dark pantyhose all suggested a Carter-era schoolmarm, and her face was set in grim severity. I pegged the man as close to my age, Black, his hair in twists. He was around my height, but muscular instead of, uh, whatever I was. (Slender. I should have said slender.) He wore a tweed blazer with a pocket square that, yes, somehow he actually pulled off, and he gave the general impression of a guy who owned a fedora (in a GQ way, not in a neckbeard way—did anybody still read GQ? Should I be reading it?)
“Who are they?” Millie whispered, which meant Mrs. Shufflebottom’s head came up and whipped around, and I tried to use Fox as cover.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’m going to get this over with. Wish me luck.”
“GOOD LUCK!”
I swear, one of the acoustic tiles shifted overhead.
A few of Hastings Rock’s best and brightest hovered nearby, clearly waiting for a chance to approach Marshall. I wasn’t sure they were going to get it—as I watched, Marshall looked up from his conversation with the young woman who’d accompanied him and scowled at JaDonna Powers (church hair) as she made an approach. JaDonna swerved left, her face flushed as she scurried back to her seat.
I was jealous; I would have loved to scurry back to my seat. To scurry back to Hemlock House, as a matter of fact. But if I didn’t give Marshall his parcel now, I’d have to find an opportunity to do it later, and that would probably mean drinks, and a meal, and more drinks—and I could see the evening getting longer and longer. And why would any sensible person spend all that time in a bar or a restaurant, around other people, when they could be safely at home, in their pajamas, on the couch, watching, for the fourteenth time, season two of Supernatural? (With no one talking to them.)
So, I crossed the no-man’s-land of open floor between the crowd and Marshall. Marshall hadn’t noticed me yet, his head bent as he whispered furiously to the woman who had arrived with him. As I got closer, I caught the tail end of his words.
“—don’t know why you’re acting like this,” Marshall said. “Anybody else would feel lucky to be in your position.”
The woman opened her mouth, and then she saw me. Something in her expression must have alerted Marshall because he turned. He didn’t recognize me. And then he did, and he pasted on a smile as he roared, “Killer!”
Egad. I’d forgotten about that stupid nickname.
Before I could recover, Marshall wrapped me in a bear hug. Then, with a shake, he released me. “Well—” And then Marshall chose to use several colorful expressions favored by Chase Thunder, which weren’t exactly fit for public consumption. “I was wondering when you’d pop your head up. Where’s Hubert?”
“Hugo,” I said. “And we broke up. That’s why I’m here, as I’m sure my parents told you. Dramatic flight across the country. Total mental and emotional breakdown. I have a pet seal now who makes all my financial decisions.”
I don’t know why I threw in the pet seal thing; to get a rise out of him, I guess. As usual, though, Marshall ignored it. He said another of Chase Thunder’s favorite words, and then “Really? That’s too bad; I liked him.”
