The Missing Chapter

“I am.” Wolfe looked at Patricia. She met his gaze steadily. “Miss Royce had been working on Mr. Childress’s personal computer to compose a novel because her computer had malfunctioned. Concurrently, he was writing a new Barnstable mystery. It is widely agreed, and I concur on the basis of reading one book, that his greatest weakness — although by no means his sole one — was a debilitating ineptness at constructing plots. Wilbur Hobbs had recently crucified Mr. Childress in his review of Death in the North Meadow for that very failing. That criticism rankled deeply. I surmise that one day, while at his computer, Charles Childress looked at Miss Royce’s work-in-progress, perhaps out of simple curiosity. And he found some — or perhaps all — of its plot to his liking. He quickly saw a way out of his own dilemma and he seized it. He plagiarized. Very likely, he took only a little of Miss Royce’s structure at firsts but like so many thieves, he grew increasingly bold, and soon he had co-opted much of her book’s structure, altering it of course to fit his characters and locale.”

“That sounds incredibly farfetched.” Horace Vinson was shaking his head.

“So it does,” Wolfe conceded. “But how else do you explain his latest manuscript being described by you, sir, as far superior to the previous efforts? A description with which I concur. Miss Royce undoubtedly looked at his work in the computer — also driven by curiosity — and what she saw enraged her. They had been friends and mutual supporters in their chosen vocations for years, and now she found that he was duplicitous. He had stolen something very precious to a writer — her creation.”

Cramer snorted. “Where’s your proof?”

“I have none,” Wolfe said, turning both palms up. “But is it not noteworthy that Miss Royce destroyed everything she had drafted for a novel that was reportedly nearing completion? Mr. Vinson, am I correct in stating that most authors preserve virtually everything they write?”

“Yes,” he said. “Even if a manuscript is rejected by a dozen publishers or if the writer is deeply dissatisfied with it, he or she will almost always squirrel it away, whether on paper or, more recently, on a computer disk. The material may get reworked at a later time. And sometimes portions are cannibalized and used as part of another opus — this occurs more frequently than most readers realize. There’s no question — authors are pack rats when it comes to their own prose. Nothing ever gets pitched.”

“Just so. Yet Miss Royce carelessly mentioned to Mr. Goodwin that she had destroyed a nearly completed manuscript. That was her fatal error. And why had she destroyed it? Because she realized that if Mr. Childress’s novel, much of which already was in the hands of his publisher, was to be posthumously published, hers never could be; the similarities would be so striking as to attract comparison. This in turn would raise cries of plagiarism — and probably also would cause speculation as to how Mr. Childress came to die. There was no question in Miss Royce’s mind: Her book had to go. It was a price she must pay because she had murdered him.”

“So I was right all the time!” Debra Mitchell crowed, turning again and smirking at Patricia as Purley moved in behind her.

“You were right about very little,” the writer replied mildly. “First, I had no romantic interest whatever in Charles at any time. Mr. Wolfe is quite correct; we were friends and supporters of each other’s work — until the end, that is. Second, Charles had absolutely no intention of marrying you. He couldn’t stomach your social pretensions and your shallowness. He told me he wanted to stop seeing you, but hadn’t worked up the courage to tell you.”

“That is a lie — the lie of a murderer!” Debra keened, her beautiful face grotesquely contorted into a mask of rage. “Charles wouldn’t have done that to me — he was a wonderful man!”

Patricia Royce smiled thinly. “You are wrong again. Charles was a twenty-four-karat bastard.”

She was still smiling as Purley Stebbins read her the Miranda warning.

Twenty-Two

Patricia Royce got a life term in a brief trial and now resides in one of the state institutions. Her attorney tried to make the case that she shot Childress in a rage, but the prosecution’s contention that the murder was premeditated held sway, as it should have.

Childress’s last book never did get published. After. Horace Vinson heard Wolfe’s revelation, he lost all interest. Presumably, we have read the last of the exploits of one Sergeant Orville Barnstable of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.