A Dark and Stormy Murder (A Writer's Apprentice Mystery) by Julia Buckley Page A

returning—reluctantly—to reality. I walked into my kitchen, where my mother was preparing dinner. I often think of her there, at the stove or the sink, cooking or cleaning and never receiving a word of thanks from me. “Mom,” I said, almost accusingly. “Have you ever read a book by Camilla Graham?”
    My mother turned, surprised, and said, “Oh, yes. Isn’t she great? I read a lot of her stuff back in the seventies and eighties. I didn’t know you liked romantic suspense, or I would have told you about her long ago.”
    After that we were like a club, my mother and me. She reread all the books with me, and we would exchange them and talk about the characters. Nothing bonds two people so well as loving the same books. I smiled at the memory—that special time of discovering the wonderful Graham novels and spending precious moments with my mother. I couldn’t have known that we had few years left together.
    Now new thoughts forced their way into my mind, and my head began spinning with what felt like millions of details about the day—just one day!—that I had spent in Blue Lake. Despite the demise of poor Martin Jonas, I felt that my best bet was to put everything out of my mind. I looked out of my large window and saw that the dark clouds had lifted and a trace of pink stretched across the sky just above the lake. What I needed was a distraction, and I had a wonderful one sitting across the room.
    I went over to the desk and sat in the wooden chair. There was a pencil holder sitting in one corner; it held a variety of writing utensils. I grabbed a soft-lead green pencil and sat down, pulling
The Salzburg Train
toward me. Later, I was sure, I would look back at this as one of the most triumphant moments of my life.
    I pushed aside the title page and found myself looking at Chapter One. The first sentence said, “When Johanna Garamond boarded the Salzburg train in the autumn of her twenty-eighth year, she bade farewell to her lovely mountain town and its splendid, rushing river, and rode through the night to face murder on the other side.”
    “Oh, boy. Lestrade, this is going to be one heck of a ride,” I said. Lestrade said nothing; I peered over my shoulder to see that he had dozed off on the pillow.
    I went back to the book and smiled down at the page.
    I got through five wonderful chapters before outside thoughts began to intrude into Camilla Graham’s plot. I thought of Allison telling me that Camilla Graham was in her knitting group—and yet I had seen no knitting needles in her sitting room, nor any sort of bag with yarn in it. Interrupting that thought was an image of Sam West, smoking his cigarettes and looking angry at the foot of his long driveway. Why did Douglas Heller dislike him, and vice versa? And why was West convinced that people were spying on him? Was he paranoid after his wife’s disappearance? Meanwhile, there was a dead man on the sand, shot by an unknown assailant. A dead body that I had found on my very first day in town.
    I shook my head. I would not let the terrible event ruin my experience. It had happened, and I felt bad for thefamily of Martin Jonas, but I would have to put that aside and concentrate on my job.
    I looked at my watch and saw that it was seven o’clock. Camilla had said dinner would be ready then, and I was hungry.
    I left my green pencil sitting on the beginning of Chapter Six and went down the creaking stairs to the shadowy landing.
    *   *   *
    A T A GRAND oak table in Camilla Graham’s dining room, we dined on fresh spinach salad with chunks of feta cheese, chopped walnuts, and an herb vinaigrette dressing. After that came a delicious casserole that Camilla’s chef had left for us to bake and serve, filled with chicken, fresh vegetables, and a hint of sherry. Camilla looked tired, but she proved to be a gracious conversationalist. While I polished off the last of my salad (I found that I was famished after the day’s events), she asked me about