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  Praise for Joan Hess and

  THE CLAIRE MALLOY SERIES

  “Well-paced suspense spiced with wry wit.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald on Closely Akin to Murder

  “Clever…irreverent murder and mayhem.”

  —Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate

  on Closely Akin to Murder

  “Wickedly amusing.”

  —Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine on Busy Bodies

  “Witty, pithy, and beautifully plotted…my favorite Claire Malloy so far.”

  — Patricia Moyes on Busy Bodies

  “Intriguing…an amusing look at the universal human comedy.”

  —Fort Smith Times Record

  “If you’ve never spent time with Claire and her crew, I feel sorry for you. Stop reading this nonsense and hop to it. You’ll see wit and humanity all wrapped up in a nifty murder mystery.”

  —Harlan Coben

  “Delightful…worthy of Hercule Poirot in the classic Death on the Nile.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Mummy Dearest

  “A good substitute for a trip to Egypt.”

  —Deadly Pleasures on Mummy Dearest

  “Hess fans will find much to entertain them.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Damsels in Distress

  MORE…

  “Lively, sharp, irreverent.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  on Poisoned Pins

  “Larcenous shenanigans…breezy throughout.”

  —Chicago Tribune on Poisoned Pins

  “With her wry asides, Claire makes a most engaging narrator. The author deftly juggles the various plot strands…the surprising denouement comes off with éclat.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Out on a Limb

  “A winning blend of soft-core feminism, trendy subplots, and a completely irreverent style that characterizes both the series and the sleuth.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A wildly entertaining series.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “Joan Hess is one of the best mystery writers in the world. She makes it look so easy that few readers and fewer critics realize what a rare talent hers is.”

  —Elizabeth Peters, author of Tomb of the Golden Bird

  “Joan Hess is seriously funny. Moreover, she is seriously kind as well as clever when depicting the follies, foibles, and fantasies of our lives. Viva Joan!”

  —Carolyn Hart, author of Dead Days of Summer

  “Fresh and funny…her trademark humor is stamped on every page.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Goodbye Body

  —The Drood Review

  Other Mysteries from

  JOAN HESS

  Strangled Prose

  The Murder at the Murder at the Mimosa Inn

  Dear Miss Demeanor

  A Really Cute Corpse

  A Diet to Die For

  Roll Over And Play Dead

  Death by the Light of the Moon

  Poisoned Pins

  A Holly, Jolly Murder

  A Conventional Corpse

  Out on a Limb

  The Goodbye Body

  Damsels in Distress

  Mummy Dearest

  Busy Bodies

  Available from the Minotaur Books line of

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  CLOSELY AKIN

  TO MURDER

  A Claire Malloy Mystery

  JOAN HESS

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  CLOSELY AKIN TO MURDER

  Copyright © 1996 by Joan Hess.

  Excerpt from The Merry Wives of Maggody copyright © 2009 by Joan Hess.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  EAN: 978-0-312-38463-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dutton edition published 1996

  Onyx edition / June 1997

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / October 2009

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CHAPTER 1

  Solitude can be a wonderful thing. It allows one to ponder the perplexities of the universe, to examine one’s strengths and imperfections (no matter how infinitesimal), or even to invite a billow of whimsical ideas into one’s mind. On the other hand, solitude is not a condition to be treasured when one relies on retail sales to pay the rent, and one’s accountant is forever harping about quarterly tax estimates and other dreary things of that nature.

  I’d dusted every rack in the Book Depot, my charmingly drafty store beside the abandoned railroad tracks. It’s situated on the main drag of Farberville, the home of thirty thousand or so good-natured souls and several thousand industrious college students. After lunch, I’d arranged an artful display of cookbooks and culinary mysteries in the front window, then stood out on the sidewalk under the portico to admire my effort as pedestrians streamed by, seemingly unimpressed. By mid-afternoon, I’d worked the crossword puzzle and was reduced to trying to decipher the personal ads (“SWCF seeks BMD with IRA”) when my solitude was interrupted. With a vengeance, I might add.

  “Mother,” Caron began as she stomped across the room, her face ablaze with the degree of indignation that only a sixteen-year-old can produce, “before you say anything, I just want you to know It Wasn’t My Fault.”

  Her best friend and co-conspirator, Inez Thornton, soulfully shook her head. “It really wasn’t, Mrs. Malloy.”

  I folded the newspaper and put it aside. Caron was maintaining a belligerent posture, but I could see apprehension lurking in her eyes. For the record, she and I share red hair, green eyes, and a complexion prone to random freckles. Without this physical evidence, I might have believed—or at least suspected—that she’d been swapped in the nursery, and somewhere out there was a child who spoke only in lower case letters and had never stolen frozen frogs from the high school biology department or been taken to the animal shelter in a gorilla suit. Caron has an impressively eclectic rap sheet for her age.

  Inez does, too, although as an accomplice rather than a master criminal. She’s soft-spoken, when she can get in a word, and she tends to observe Caron with the solemnity of a barn owl. Then again, hawks and owls are perceived differently, but that matters very little to a mouse caught in the moonlight.

  “What’s not your fault?” I asked reluctantly, assuming we were not about to discuss volcanic eruptions, EuroDisney, or the federal deficit.

  Caron sighed. “All I was doin
g was trying to see who was in Rhonda’s car with her. Louis has basketball practice until five, so it couldn’t have been him. If she’s going steady with him like she claims, then why would she have another guy in her car?”

  “It was like in a movie,” volunteered Inez “We stayed back so she wouldn’t notice us in the rearview mirror. But then—”

  “Then a moving van got in the way,” Caron cut in, deftly regaining center stage. She gave me a moment to ponder the enormity of this outrage, then continued. “When we got to the corner of Willow and Thurber, Rhonda’s car had vanished. I explained it to the cop.”

  Maternal perspicacity failed me. “Explained what?” I asked her.

  “That I had to catch up with Rhonda. If the stupid moving van hadn’t pulled out right in front of me, we could have found out who was in her car when they got to wherever they were going. If anyone deserved a ticket, it was the guy driving the van. I practically had to slam on the brakes not to crash into him and end up in traction at the hospital. Or paralyzed for the rest of my life.”

  I swooped in on the key word, which she’d tried to cloak in the torrent of verbiage. “You got a ticket, right?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she said as she drifted behind the science fiction rack. “I may not have come to a complete stop when I turned onto Willow, but it wasn’t like I barreled around the corner at fifty miles an hour and ran over some little kid on a bicycle.”

  I looked at Inez, who had her lower lip firmly clamped beneath her teeth. She aspires to achieve Caron’s level of disregard for the facts, but she’s not yet a proficient liar. “The ticket was for running a stop sign?”

  “He wasn’t very nice about it, especially after Caron pointed out that he’d ruined any chance we had of finding Rhonda.”

  I tried not to imagine that conversation. “How much does the ticket cost, Caron?”

  “Seventy-five dollars,” she said, peering at me over the rack to appraise my reaction. “But there’s good news, too. If I take some idiotic defensive driving class, then the violation doesn’t go on my record and your insurance won’t go up too much. The class only costs twenty-five dollars.”

  “So playing private eye is going to cost you a hundred dollars,” I said. “How much do you have in your piggy bank these days?”

  “Nowhere near that much. I was thinking you could pay for everything, and then Inez and I can work it off here next month. You’re always saying how busy you are in December, and gawd knows you could use some help with the window display. What’s there now is pathetic.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The conversation from this point on did not take on any overtones of jocularity. Once we’d established that I was more perturbed by the cost of the crime rather than its nature, we discussed various financial strategies. The more lucrative possibilities at the mall were summarily dismissed, in that their totalitarian demands might interfere with Christmas shopping. Babysitting was much too tedious, and house work was compared to slavery in the salt mines of Siberia.

  I finally gestured at the door. “Your driving privileges are suspended until this is resolved. We’ll talk about it to night.”

  Caron’s lower lip shot out. “But it’s Friday night and there’s a football game. How are we supposed to get there?”

  “Don’t go,” I said without sympathy. “If I remember correctly, a year ago you decided football was, and I quote, ‘nothing more than a philistine ritual in which the players’ IQs are displayed on their jerseys.’ ”

  “That was last year,” she said, then shrugged and started for the door. “By the way, some woman called last night while you were at the movie with Peter. She said she’d try again. Come on Inez, let’s take the railroad tracks to the bridge and go up the path. If we’re lucky, no one will see us and we won’t be the laughingstock of the high school Monday morning.”

  “Who called?” I asked.

  Caron paused only long enough to say, “I think her name was Veronica Landonwood.”

  Seconds later the bell above the door jangled and they were gone. And I was staring at the door, my jaw dangling and my heart beating entirely too quickly. The store was drafty, but the sudden chill that raised goosebumps on my arms came from within me.

  Even though I put on a sweater and kicked the rebellious boiler into a semblance of cooperation, I was still shivering when Lieutenant Peter Rosen of the Farberville CID arrived later that afternoon. He was dressed as usual in an exquisitely tailored suit and Italian shoes, courtesy of a family trust fund; he looked as if he would be more at home in a high-powered law firm than in a squad room. Even in baggy gym shorts and a sweatshirt, he’s handsome enough to merit a page in a calendar. Curly brown hair, molasses-colored eyes, an aristocratic nose, flawless white teeth, and a cute derriere constitute eligibility.

  “I brought capuccinos and chocolate chip cookies,” announced my candidate for Mr. November. His smile faded as he looked more closely at me. “What’s wrong, Claire? Are you coming down with the flu?”

  “You probably should say that I look as though I’d seen a ghost,” I said with an unconvincing laugh, “because in a way, I have.”

  “Has Mr. Grimaldi arisen from eternal rest to demand you stop contaminating his precious bookstore with romance novels, study guides, and sorority stationery?”

  “Come into the office and I’ll tell you,” I said, allowing him to put his arm around me and give me a quick kiss. Peter and I have been working at a relationship for several years, and I regret to say that despite our ages, we tend to approach it with what might be described as adolescent ineptitude. We’d come perilously close to sharing bed and board to determine if we had any hope of long-range compatibility, but he’d been drawn into a sleazy drug case and the issue had been shelved. For the moment, anyway.

  I sat down behind the desk and accepted a Styrofoam cup. “According to Caron, last night I had a call from Veronica Landonwood.”

  “Should I recognize that name?”

  “I had a cousin with that name, although everyone called her Ronnie. She was seven years older than I, so we weren’t particularly close. She was always very nice to me, though, and I was in awe of her because she lived in Hollywood. Well, technically in Brentwood, but it was close to Hollywood.”

  Peter took a sip of capuccino, his eyes narrowed as he watched me above the rim. “And she called last night?”

  “Somebody called last night, but if it was Ronnie, I’m going to have to rethink my views on the possibility of afterlife. She died thirty years ago, Peter. I was ten at the time, and I was devastated. My only experience with death had been the loss of a nasty yellow tomcat named Colonel Mustard.”

  “How did she die?”

  “She and her parents were in Mexico for a vacation, and their car went off a mountain road. I’d received a postcard from her only a few days before I was told about the wreck. I still have that postcard packed away somewhere.”

  Peter came behind me and began to massage my shoulders as I blinked back tears. “Then this is just a grotesque coincidence,” he said, “or Caron wasn’t paying attention and got the name wrong.”

  “Maybe,” I said. Despite my efforts, my hand was shaking so violently I could barely raise the cup to my mouth. A wake-up call from the grave can do that.

  I lingered at the bookstore well past closing time, trying to convince myself that trivial chores were, in reality, consequential. By seven o’clock, however, all my pencils were perfectly aligned and the plastic paper clips were sorted by size and color. I locked the store and drove home to the duplex across from the Farber College campus. In winter I have a view of the condemned landmark that once housed the English faculty (one of whom had been my deceased husband, Carlton, who’d had an unfortunate encounter with a chicken truck; our turbulent marriage was responsible for my current reluctance to make a commitment to Peter). The downstairs tenants moved in and out on an irregular basis. The current one was a somewhat bald, bewildered retiree from the
architecture department whose wife had kicked him out of their house and taken up with her aromatherapist. Neither of us was sure what this implied.

  Caron had left a note indicating that despite my hard-hearted scheme to destroy her life, she’d found a ride to the football game and would be spending the night at Inez’s. I suppose I might have saved it for reference when I got around to writing my memoirs, but I tossed it in the trash and made myself a drink.

  Shortly thereafter, I was in my robe and curled up on the sofa with a mystery novel. The muted strains of a Brahms concerto from the first floor mingled with the rustling of leaves outside the window and an occasional car. I was so engrossed in the wily amateur sleuth’s exploration of the darkened conservatory that I let out an undignified yelp when the telephone rang.

  I finally persuaded myself to pick up the receiver. “Hello?” I said with such timidity that I wasn’t sure the word had been audible.

  “Claire, this is Ronnie—Ronnie Landonwood.”

  “If this is some kind of prank, it isn’t the least bit amusing. I don’t know who you are or why you’re doing this, but I can have a trace put on my—”

  “On your seventh birthday, I sent you a tutu that I’d worn in a dance recital. You wrote me a stiff thank you note saying you planned to be a detective when you grew up and would prefer a magnifying glass on your next birthday. When you were nine, you fell out of a tree and broke your arm. Later that summer you sent me a poem that vilified Joyce Kilmer. Shall I continue?”

  “Hold on a minute, please,” I said, then put down the receiver and went into the kitchen to splash some cold water on my face and some scotch in a glass. I sat back down on the sofa and, after a couple of sips, wiped my decidedly damp palms on my robe and picked up the receiver. “Would you care to explain?”

  The woman exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath all the time I’d been trying to regain my composure. “It’s a complicated story. My parents and I went to Acapulco in December of 1965. My father, who was a second-rate screenwriter, was hoping to cozy up to Oliver Pickett. Oliver was one of the most influential directors in the business, and was scouting locations in that area for his next film. He’d won an Oscar that year for a much-acclaimed medieval epic.”