The Sequel Read online

  No longer in private detective mode, he was now a cop.

  An hour later, Lowell was in another rental car, angrily bounding over the rough approach to the shack in Westchester.

  He noted several cars outside, one he didn’t recognize. Maybe it belonged to the thief they hired. He couldn’t imagine Stoddard sneaking into his office in the middle of the night himself. For a moment he wondered if he could be in danger. But Frederick Lowell didn’t care. He was furious.

  He skidded to a stop, strode through the mud up to the door, and pounded on it.

  There was a shuffle of sounds from inside.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Frederick.”

  As soon as Stoddard opened the door, Lowell pushed inside, looking around with a frown as if he’d spot the manuscript half-hidden under the couch.

  Stoddard blinked and said, “This is a surprise.”

  “You could’ve called,” Beth said, clearly put out by his presence.

  Anna looked him over with, for a change, sober eyes. Today it seemed she was actually drinking coffee from the coffee mug. Her face glowed. “Did you bring it? We’re very excited.”

  Lowell hoped that the perpetrators of the theft were Stoddard and Beth only; he liked Anna and was rooting for her innocence. Her comment suggested that she knew nothing of the crime.

  Or, like many addicts, perhaps she was a very, very good actress.

  Stoddard was more blunt. “What’s this all about?” His role would require him to be both confused and irritated by the unexpected presence. He’d probably be prepping his indignation too.

  The other man—the thief?—was burly. He rose and turned toward Lowell.

  Was he about to be shot? Or beaten to death?

  But Lowell’s anger possessed him and he ignored the large man. “Where is it?” he demanded, staring into Stoddard’s eyes.

  “Where is what?”

  “I know the truth. I know what you did.”

  “Frederick, what the hell do you mean? I’d appreciate it if you’d explain what this is all about.”

  “Someone stole the sequel last night.”

  “What?” Anna gasped. “Did you have a copy?”

  “They stole that too. Broke into my office.”

  “And what?” Stoddard asked. “You think we did it?”

  The indignation arrived on cue.

  Curiously, though, Stoddard didn’t seem to be acting guilty. Beth looked horrified. “Someone stole our manuscript? What do the police say?”

  “I haven’t gone to them yet.”

  “Why not?” she asked stridently.

  Because I know the guilty parties, he thought.

  Then qualified: I’m pretty sure I do.

  Stoddard muttered, “And why do you think we stole it?”

  “Because your father didn’t write it. It was dated after he died. And if he didn’t write the sequel, he probably didn’t write Cedar Hills, either.”

  “My God,” Beth said.

  Anna shook her head, frowning. “I can’t believe that. Impossible, Frederick.”

  Lowell filled in the facts he’d learned in his investigation. “You’re the most logical suspects. Because if the sequel was published, word might get out that it was a fraud. All your royalties would dry up.”

  “Royalties?” Stoddard asked. “Wouldn’t be the end of the world. The checks were getting smaller and smaller every year anyway.”

  Lowell blinked, not understanding. “But…what would you do for money without the royalty income? You’d be destitute.”

  “Destitute?” Beth said, an uncharacteristic laugh tumbling from her throat.

  Stoddard was smiling too. “Frederick, you know how much money Cedar Hills has earned us over the years?”

  “Yes,” Lowell said, “of course I do. Close to twenty million dollars.”

  “And do you know how much we have in the bank and the stock market?”

  Lowell’s response was to look around the shabby shack.

  Stoddard said, “At least forty million, between us. Anna’s got a bit less than we do.”

  His sister grimaced. “Some bad choices in the marriage department. But I guess I’m still worth eight figures or so.”

  Stoddard said, “We’ve invested it. And very carefully.”

  “But—” Another look at the shack.

  Beth caught on. She said sourly, “I told you this was temporary. We sold our old house last month and bought this property—thirty acres—to build on. Anna’s going to put up a place on the land too.” Looking at her sister-in-law, she said, “Anna’s admitted she’s got some problems and we’re going to help her get over that. We thought it would be best for everybody if we all lived nearby.”

  Anna smiled. “I know we haven’t always gotten along but, you know, in the end they’ve really come through for me.”

  “Oh.” Lowell was blushing. He hoped it wasn’t too obvious.

  “Ah, you were wondering why I asked about the next royalty check,” Stoddard continued. “I just didn’t want to sell any stock with the market down the other day. Timing was bad. But the Dow soared the next day and I sold quite a bit—mostly Facebook, by the way. Made plenty to pay the deposit for the construction and then some.” He nodded at the bulky man, who’d been standing silently. Stoddard introduced them. He was their builder, it seemed, who’d come to show them blueprints for the new houses.

  Not a thief.

  “I stand corrected,” Lowell said.

  Then, filling the extremely awkward silence, he added, “But who stole the manuscript? Who doesn’t want it published?”

  The Siblings, in unison, shrugged.

  Then an idea occurred to Lowell: “Malone! Preston Malone.”

  “Oh, the biographer,” Anna recalled.

  “Yes! He saw the date on the front page of the manuscript I’d sent. He would have realized that it was written after your father died. And probably went back through his own notes. He’d have figured out the truth too and knew he had to make sure no one found out that Coe was the author. Your father’s the center of his universe. His only claim to fame is the biography—he’d be ruined if the truth came out.” He was seething again. “I’m going to call him now. See what he has to say for himself.”

  As he was dialing, Lowell happened to glance at the mantelpiece and noticed a picture of Edward Goodwin with his wife, from the fifties it seemed. They were sitting at a café in Paris, presumably on the Left Bank. It was a Hemingway image if ever there was one.

  Malone answered the phone. “Frederick! I’ve been waiting for your call.”

  Lowell didn’t say anything. He was staring at the photograph.

  Paris.

  Oh.

  “Hello, Frederick? This is your number on caller ID, right? Are you there?”

  Instead of delivering the news about the manuscript’s disappearance, Lowell said to the biographer, “I have a question for you.”

  “Surely.”

  “Did Edward Goodwin spend much time in Europe?”

  Stoddard and Beth regarded each other with curious gazes then turned back to Lowell. He didn’t meet their eyes.

  Malone said, “Yes, yes, he was educated there, in France mostly. And he and his wife lived there and in Germany for nearly fifteen years.”

  Lowell sighed. “And when he wrote dates did he write them month-day-year or day-month-year?”

  “Oh, always the European style. Day-month-year.”

  “So that title page of the sequel I faxed you, the date on it? It was February eighth of ’67. Not August second.”

  “How could it have been dated August second? Edward died in June. But the manuscript?” the biographer said impatiently. “Did you read it? What’s the story about? What happens to Jesse? Did Jonas get back to Ohio before he died?”

  “I’ll call you back,” Lowell repeated.

  “But—”

  Click.

  Lowell sat down. “So, I suppose he was the author after a
ll. There’s no other evidence to suggest he wasn’t.”

  Anna was returning from her bedroom, holding several yellowing sheets of paper. She offered them to Lowell. “Frederick, you mentioned the upper case letters and the strike-throughs on the first page of the sequel? Look at these. They’re early drafts of some of Dad’s articles he wrote for the Chicago Tribune. He sent them to me when I was in school and he was encouraging me to be a writer. He told me, ‘Hemingway said there are no great writers; there are only great rewriters.’ He showed me his drafts so I could see how he revised.”

  Lowell took them. The capitalization and crossed-out words were identical. And the typewriter typeface seemed the same as on the first page of Anderson’s Hope.

  The dates of the draft were 1960—years before Goodwin had even met Coe.

  The manuscript was authentic.

  Lowell sighed and offered in a weak voice: “I’m sorry. But somebody stole an important piece of literary history? Who? Why?”

  Stoddard gave a sour laugh. “Jesus, Frederick, aren’t you missing something? I mean, with all respect to Dad, it’s only a book.”

  Frederick Lowell didn’t represent any mystery and thriller writers, which he always regretted because he passionately loved crime novels—believing that the authors were not only among the best storytellers but were the most disciplined and least self-indulgent of writers, unlike many of those who penned “literature.” So it was with great pleasure that he was allowed to come along to the arrest of the perp who’d broken into his office the week before and stolen Anderson’s Hope.

  The Pennsylvania State Police detective, a nice crew-cut young fellow named Brynne, decided it was the least he could do since Lowell was responsible for the information that led to the impending arrest.

  Though, in fairness, it was Stoddard Goodwin’s comment, seemingly disparaging about Cedar Hills being “only” a book, that was the flash of brilliance that led to the unraveling of the mystery.

  Why indeed did Lowell assume that the thief was after Anderson’s Hope? Could he not have been after something else in the carton delivered to Asheville and forwarded to New York?

  The answer was yes. And to learn who was behind the theft, one needed only to consider the one person he’d mentioned the sequel to who had no interest in it.

  Dr. Samuel Coe.

  Lowell had contacted New York City, Bucks County, and Pennsylvania State Police officials and reported that he believed Dr. Coe had stolen the carton because he was afraid it contained information about the death of his mother many years ago—a murder that the Sam Spade within Lowell now believed the doctor himself had committed. Detective Brynne decided to look into the case and reviewed the transcripts and witness reports from the original investigation. He tracked down family members and friends who were still alive. He discovered that while Mary Coe—herself a bit unhinged—did nag her mentally ill son a great deal, the pressure on Jon didn’t compare to the abuse she put her other children through.

  “Tiger Mom on steroids,” was how Brynne described her. A family friend reported one incident in which she whipped young Samuel with a lamp wire for secretly listening to a ballgame in his room when he should have been studying for a test. His younger sister too endured much the same treatment.

  The detective speculated that teenage Samuel had snapped and either talked his brother into killing the woman and then blamed him for it, or killed her himself and made it appear that Jon was responsible.

  As for the theft of the manuscript, records revealed that Samuel Coe had traveled to New York City at eight p.m. on that day and took the last train back to Bucks County. Security cameras showed him arriving at Penn Station without a carton in his possession but leaving with one, which Lowell said looked much like the box that was stolen from the law office.

  The implication was that Samuel believed the box, with its pages of notes on the crime, and possibly even the manuscript itself, contained information suggesting that Samuel—not Jon—had murdered their mother.

  A warrant was issued in Pennsylvania to search Dr. Coe’s house and Frederick Lowell had practically begged Brynne to bring him along.

  Lowell wasn’t permitted inside, of course, as the warrant was being executed. There might be gunplay, the police said, though Dr. Coe was in his late sixties and it didn’t seem he was much of a threat. Lowell waited in the car a half hour before the portly, balding doctor was led out in handcuffs, his face ashen. There’d been no resistance.

  Detective Brynne joined Lowell beside the squad car. He gave a grin. “He confessed, sir. Got him cold.”

  Lowell asked, “What happened? Did he talk his brother into the crime? Or kill her himself?”

  “Did it himself. He stabbed her to death and then called his brother into the room and handed him the knife, started screaming, why did he do it? Jon was in a delusional state then and probably believed that he had killed his mother.” Brynne then nodded toward the house. “We’ve recovered what he stole. Could you identify it, please?”

  “Be happy to,” Lowell said. This was, of course, the real reason he’d wanted to come. Not to watch the arrest but to talk the police out of one of the manuscripts of Anderson’s Hope. They probably wouldn’t need both of them for evidence.

  They walked through the house and then out the back door. Brynne nodded to another detective, who approached with a small plastic bag in a blue-gloved hand. “Sir, is this the mailing label of the box that was stolen from your office?”

  Lowell’s face fell.

  “Sir?”

  He whispered, “It is, but…my God.”

  Inside the bag was a three-by-four-inch scrap of paper, scorched on all sides. Lowell looked behind the officer and found himself staring at the red-brick barbecue pit. He walked—staggered really—to it and looked down at the grill. “Is this…? Did he burn it? Did he burn everything?”

  The forensic cop said, “That’s right, sir. Some of the carton itself survived—like the label. But everything else, a couple of thousand sheets of paper, I guess, is gone. Sometimes the crime lab boys can find writing or images. Not with this. It’s as fine as flour.”

  Staring at the gray mound in the barbecue, Frederick Lowell thought of a more appropriate simile: as fine as ash in a funeral urn.

  Frederick Lowell’s life returned to normal.

  No more secret manuscripts, no family drama, no ghosts from the past. He negotiated contracts, fought with publishers, made difficult or joyous calls to authors, kept an eye on the literary marketplace, and pestered countries in the eurozone for timely payments of royalties. Imprudent borrowing by the government was not, he emphasized time and again, his authors’ problem.

  One interesting development was that he’d taken on a new client. Anna Goodwin had decided to take up her father’s fallen standard and write a book about the Coe murder—updated, of course, to include the recent developments.

  One day, Lowell returned from a Midtown lunch with a publisher, sat down at his desk, and looked over a stack of contracts.

  Caitlin appeared in the doorway.

  “New ink?” he asked, eyeing her wrist.

  She beamed. In Lowell’s father’s day a boss would earn points for spotting a secretary’s new bracelet or hair style. Now, it was a tattoo he was admiring. A tasteful butterfly.

  “Like it?”

  “Beautiful. Hurt?”

  “Can’t begin to describe it. This just arrived.”

  She handed him a package marked “Personal and Confidential.” No return address, though the postmark was Beverly Hills, CA.

  He opened it up. And gasped as he stared down at a copy of Anderson’s Hope.

  There was a note attached.

  Franklin:

  Way super chatting with you a month ago.

  Read in the paper about that crazy f’er burning up those copies of that sequel you were interested in. Thought I’d check our archives. Seems that Goodwin sent somebody here a copy in the spring of ‘67. Found it.
r />   Thought I’d plane it your way.

  Ira Lepke

  p.s. Shot the pages to my devel people here. They eyeballed it but decided it didn’t atmosphere. Wasn’t Shia or Tatum worthy. You know how it is. Sorry.

  Lowell gave a breathless laugh. Oh, my God…

  He put both hands on the manuscript, took a deep breath, and then flipped through it—in part to make sure it actually contained printed pages, rather than blank ones, a possibility that made no sense but wouldn’t have surprised him one bit.

  But, yes, all 540 pages were filled with Goodwin’s prose, from the title to The End.

  And then he shook his head ruefully at the producer’s decision to decline to make a movie sequel to Cedar Hills Road.

  You know how it is.

  Frederick Lowell had been selling, or not selling, properties to Hollywood for years. Yes, he knew how it was.

  He called to Caitlin, “Cancel everything for this afternoon.”

  “Sure, Frederick. You have a meeting?”

  “No, I’ll be here. I’ve got some reading to do.”

  Two weeks later, at around seven p.m., the huge form of Preston Malone settled into a couch in Lowell’s Seventh Avenue office. The two men had planned a celebratory dinner this evening.

  Before Malone had arrived from Long Island, Caitlin, bless her heart, had voluntarily wiped down most surfaces, as least those where elbows met wood, so the men’s sleeves would remain largely grit-free. Today, the construction work outside had been particularly vigorous.

  It was now that interstitial period after Working Manhattan has faded and Evening Manhattan has yet to shake the water from its wings and get on with the serious business of food, culture, and romance.

  The streets were, in short, peaceful.

  A serenity that was aided and abetted by the silken air of a spring evening.

  “Bourbon?” the lawyer asked. The American beverage seemed a better choice for celebration than French Champagne.

  “Ah.”

  Glasses appeared—grit-free, Lowell was proud to note. Some Maker’s Mark splashed into the faux crystal.

  “I’m afraid there’s no ice.”