The Megalodon Mix-Up Read online

  He didn’t look upset about that. “I think, after today, everyone will know.”

  “Chris and Hannah won’t. They’re in their own little world. Besides that, no one will say anything so it’s like nobody knows. That’s how I prefer it for the next few weeks.”

  “Okay.” I felt awkward as I sat next to him on the couch. “You’re okay, though, right? You’re not going to freak out or anything?”

  He arched an eyebrow, amused. “Why are you worried about me? You’re the one who swam with sharks.”

  That was true. I knew the memory would probably cause a few nightmares. “Yeah, but I was okay once I got back in the boat. You continued to freak out. It was weird.”

  “Weird?” He slid me a sidelong glance. “I think it was a little weird myself. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. All I could think about was getting you out of the water. Once that happened, I had a lot of excess energy to burn. It came out a little differently than I expected.”

  I was amused despite myself. “You mean general bossiness? You have that even when you don’t have excess energy to burn.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment.

  “You’re really okay?” he asked finally, his fingers gentle as they brushed a strand of my hair away from my face.

  “I’m fine. I was freaked out when it happened and thought for sure I was about to be eaten by a Megalodon, but I’m perfectly fine now.” I didn’t mention that I was convinced I would have nightmares. He needed to settle.

  “Those were bull sharks. They were nowhere near the size of a Megalodon.”

  “They seemed bigger in the water.”

  “Yeah. I thought you were going to get bitten by the one that charged you toward the end, but it turned away at the last second. I swear my heart stopped beating there for a bit.”

  That was the shark I turned away with my magic. “Well ... maybe he decided I didn’t look tasty.”

  “His loss.” Jack gave me a quick kiss and then stood. “Come on.” He extended his hand. “I didn’t get lunch and you haven’t eaten in eighteen hours. We should get something.”

  I took his hand. “Are you going to be a mother hen all day?”

  “Yes. Get used to it.”

  “Just checking.”

  WE PICKED A SIMPLE restaurant for lunch, a place with outdoor seating and away from the hustle of the resort. It was late in the afternoon for lunch, so most of the patrons inside were drinking rather than eating.

  “I think they spend their entire days drinking,” I noted as I sipped my iced tea and waited for the waitress to deliver our wraps. “They’re all wearing lanyards, which means they’re with the conference. How are they learning anything if they’re always drunk?”

  “Isn’t that the myth of the writer?” Jack challenged. “Write drunk, edit sober. That’s a saying. In fact, three of the guys at the tiki bar last night were wearing shirts that said that.”

  He’d obviously been paying closer attention than me. “It reminds me of college. People there started drinking at noon, too.”

  “I think there’s a difference. These people are on vacation. I doubt this is something they do day in and day out. It’s a break for them, a chance to hang with their peers. It’s not a regular thing.”

  “I guess.” I took a long swig of my iced tea, my eyes drifting toward the door when it opened. I almost crawled under the table when I realized the pimento cheese woman was standing there. “Oh, no.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jack was instantly alert. “Are you okay? Are you going to be sick?”

  I scowled. “It’s the pimento cheese woman.”

  He furrowed his brow. “The what?”

  “The pimento cheese woman,” I repeated, covering my face with one hand and pointing with the other. “The one who keeps trying to get me to go to her room and eat cheese.”

  Instead of being worried, or offended, Jack merely smiled. The expression erased many of the worry lines he’d been carrying for hours. “Ah. Your new girlfriend. I’m generally against sharing when it comes to romantic entanglements, but she’s pretty cute. You can sample her cheese if you want.”

  If I could’ve reached over the table and strangled him without garnering attention I would have. Instead, I tried to remain still so she wouldn’t notice me. It was a wasted effort.

  “Hey.” She sat at our table without invitation, gracing Jack with a pleasant smile before fixing her full attention on me. “They have crab salad wraps here that are to die for. Did you get one of those?”

  The question caught me off guard as I slowly lowered my hand. “You’re kind of obsessed with food, aren’t you?”

  “I totally am,” she agreed, extending her hand to Jack. “I’m Sarah Hilton. I write urban fantasy. Do you like pimento cheese?”

  I frowned. Was she offering Jack pimento cheese, too? How did that work?

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever had pimento cheese,” Jack hedged, licking his lips. “If I ever get a chance, I’ll definitely give it a whirl.”

  “You should.” Sarah flicked her eyes back to me. “I hear you’ve been asking questions about people who have motive to want to kill Shayne Rivers.”

  “How did you hear that?” I was genuinely curious.

  “It’s a small community. Gossip spreads fast. Carter told anyone who would listen that you guys were questioning those who fought with Shayne, trying to find a murderer and all that. You know he’s very suspicious of ‘The Man,’ right?”

  I searched my memory. “Carter Reagan Yates? The guy who writes zombie fiction?”

  “It’s not just zombie fiction. It’s post-apocalyptic fiction.”

  “Only serial killers go by three names,” Jack supplied. “I think he might be a little off.”

  Sarah snorted. “He’s actually a cool guy. He’s a little crazy about the end of the world — and if he offers to let you visit his hobbit hole, the answer is always no — but he’s taken care of a bunch of foster children and he donates his time to the community.”

  I was mildly ashamed of myself for jumping to certain conclusions. “He was carrying around an adult sippy cup last night.”

  “He likes his rum runners,” Sarah agreed. “He only goes by three names because the letters spell out cry — you know, C, R, Y. He uses it as a marketing gimmick.”

  “Oh.” Being an author was apparently more work than I realized. “Well, I promise not to give him too hard a time about the hobbit holes he’s built into the hills behind his house to survive the apocalypse.”

  “That’s my motto.” Sarah bobbed her head and grabbed a breadstick from the basket at the center of the table. “You’re going to have a hard time narrowing your field of suspects because everyone hated Shayne. She wasn’t exactly popular.”

  “That’s what we’ve been told,” Jack said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “Did you have words with her?”

  “Oh, definitely.” Sarah wasn’t shy in the least to admit it. I couldn’t help but notice she had on another cat shirt today. This one featured a grumpy-looking feline and an admonishment about Mondays. “We crossed paths when I started my career. She blasted one of my books to her mailing list. I hadn’t heard the stories about her at that point, so I didn’t know any better.”

  “What stories are you referring to?” Jack asked.

  “She’s a narcissist,” Sarah answered without hesitation. “I’m not just throwing that word around either. She definitely has narcissistic personality disorder. She thinks the world revolves around her.

  “She’s great at building people up at the start because she wants to make them loyal to her,” she continued. “She’ll turn on you fast, though, if you don’t do exactly what she wants on her timetable. When she turns on you, she incites all the other people she’s charmed to attack. We call them her flying monkeys.”

  Huh. Sarah may have been obsessed with cheese,
but she was a fount of useful information. “If everyone hated her, where did she get these flying monkeys?”

  “I guess I should’ve phrased that better. Most of the people who have been around for a bit recognized her for what she was ... a predator. She cons the newbies who are desperate and need visibility. Those newbies stand by her out of a mixture of loyalty and fear. They’ve seen what she does to other people and they’re afraid she’ll turn on them. So they stick up for her in the hope she has no reason to turn on them.”

  “That sounds fairly terrible,” Jack said. “Although ... we are talking about adults. What can she really do to them?”

  “It depends. She could motivate her followers to one-star books. If the rating isn’t good enough, advertising it is impossible, so she can basically kill an author’s momentum by being evil.”

  “Has she done that?”

  “She denies it, but yeah. She crippled a few authors. She also makes up stories and always plays the victim. She would attack authors she didn’t like, and when those people retaliated she would say they were jealous and wanted to hurt her family, even going so far as to say someone issued a death threat.”

  “Did anyone issue a death threat?” Jack was intrigued. “I mean ... did anyone come right out and say they wanted to kill her?”

  “No one is that stupid,” Sarah answered. “One woman, a JAFF writer, did get into some trouble. Her sister made an offhand comment that she knew where to hide a body, and Shayne called it a death threat.”

  “I don’t think that’s how death threats work,” I said.

  “Definitely not,” Sarah agreed. “That’s why she was a master manipulator. She twisted things.”

  “Can you give us an example?” Jack pressed.

  “Sure. Penelope Waters is a paranormal romance author. She used Shayne’s services for a book blast and claimed she didn’t get any downloads. She wanted a refund. Shayne refused to give the refund and Penelope had a meltdown about Shayne stealing from her. Instead of ignoring it or fighting back in a normal way, Shayne told everyone that Penelope had been bitten by an opossum and had rabies.”

  My mouth dropped open. “But ... why?”

  “That’s an absurd story,” Jack noted. “Who would believe that?”

  “Only people who fall for lies, but those were the kinds of people Shayne surrounded herself with,” Sarah explained. “Shayne told her followers they weren’t to attack Penelope because she was clearly suffering from rabies and that was the only reason she would say the things she said. She was adamant that poor Penelope was a victim in all this and she didn’t mind being Penelope’s whipping post, even though it hurt her feelings. Do you know what Shayne’s followers did?”

  As a matter of fact, that wasn’t hard to figure out. “They attacked Penelope on Shayne’s behalf,” I answered.

  Sarah nodded. “Bingo.”

  “How did you know that?” Jack asked, impressed.

  “It’s basic pack mentality when dealing with teenage girls,” I replied, my mind busy. “It’s a manipulation thing. It happened to me a lot when I was in middle and high school.”

  “Someone accused you of having rabies?”

  “No, but that absurd story is probably only one instance of what this woman was doing,” I said. “My guess is that she was masterful when it came to dividing people, making others feel sorry for her. She was always the victim, right?”

  “Definitely. Once she burned someone, she lost them. The group of people who hated her was much bigger than the group who liked her. That’s why your suspect pool will be seemingly endless.”

  “What about you?” Jack asked. “Do you think you should be in our suspect pool?”

  Sarah’s smile was easy. “Of course. I’m the weird girl constantly talking about food during a murder investigation. I should be your main suspect.”

  Jack returned her smile, bemused. “I’ll put you at the top of our list.”

  “There are a lot of people who should be at the top of your list with me. Shayne was truly hated.”

  “Who would you put as a close second?”

  “Start with Clark Savage,” Sarah answered without hesitation. “He believes women should be barefoot and pregnant — unless he’s hiring a professional to get him off in the shadows. And he has issues with anyone who doesn’t follow his politics. He’s got a bad temper and has been known to snap.”

  Jack steepled his fingers, thoughtful. “Would he have the constitution to throw a woman in the water and let her be eaten by sharks?”

  “I think he’s capable of almost anything.”

  “Then I guess he’s a good place to start.”

  Eleven

  Jack managed to unwind after Sarah departed — although it was incrementally — and he was almost back to his normal self by the time we’d finished eating. Our lunch setting was much more low key than the fancy restaurant the previous evening, which seemed to help the cause.

  He simply appeared to need time to decompress, which I gave him. I was more interested in watching the authors interact with one another. I found the entire group fascinating.

  “What are you staring at, Charlie?” Jack asked finally, breaking the silence he instigated.

  I shrugged as I munched on a potato chip. “That guy over there. Do you remember his name?”

  Jack followed my gaze toward the militant gun nut who ended up in the bushes with what could only be described as a professional the previous night.

  Jack nodded, his gaze darkening. “Clark Savage. I ran his name this morning before we left on the cutter. He’s the guy your pimento-cheese-loving friend was talking about.”

  “You ran him?” I was surprised. Jack didn’t show specific interest in the man while we were hanging out at the tiki bar. “Why?”

  “Because there was something about him I didn’t like,” Jack answered honestly. “He was rude, crude and ready to pick a fight.”

  That was interesting. “You didn’t fight with him. I watched you, even when we were separated.”

  Jack’s lips quirked. “Why were you watching me? I’m guessing it’s because you’re hot for me.”

  My cheeks burned as I forced myself to hold his gaze. I recognized what he was trying to do — tease me into relaxing and make me feel better at the same time — and I appreciated the effort. That didn’t mean I wasn’t mildly embarrassed. “I wanted to make sure none of those randy romance writers took advantage of you.”

  “Lusty,” Jack corrected. “That’s the word they kept throwing around. They’re all upset about the word lusty being trademarked.”

  “Yeah. I picked up on that.” I sobered as I rubbed the back of my neck. “Doesn’t that seem like a weird word to be able to trademark? I mean ... it’s a single word. I don’t know a lot about trademark law, but that seems like it runs counter to everything I’ve heard.”

  Jack was silent for a beat, and then his lips curved. “As a parapsychologist, did you do much research on trademark law in college?”

  I frowned. “I had other classes. One of them was a basic law class. I actually found it intriguing.”

  “You get more interesting every single day, Charlie.” His eyes were light and full of life. “I don’t know much about trademark law. I think Millie does, so you might want to talk to her about it.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Jack’s smile remained fixed. “As for what you said, I tend to agree with you. I’m not sure I understand all the hoopla about this. That’s why I Googled that court case this morning, too.”

  “It seems you were busy on the internet while the rest of us were sleeping.”

  “Yes, well, I didn’t sleep well.” He pursed his lips, as if he were lost in deep thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “Anyway, the trademark thing seems to be a big deal. Our victim managed to trademark the word because nobody expected her to try something so brazen. And she actually got the trademark through before anyone realized what was going on.

  “The iss
ue is that she’s been going after anyone who uses that word in a title or series name. And before you ask, I only know this because people on the internet laid it out for me as if I was twelve,” he continued. “So, while I think it’s funny that things like Lusty Literary Novelists — seriously, what is that? — and Lusty Labor Day seem to have the writer world up in arms, I do understand where some of the anger comes from. She was filing nasty cease-and-desist letters and causing other authors to lose their livelihood.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t really thought about it at that level. “I think money is often a motivating factor in murder. But I want to go on the record and say I still think it was a Megalodon. I don’t happen to believe it was murder.”

  Jack leaned back in his chair and rested his linked fingers on his stomach. “There is no Megalodon.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Charlie ... .” He looked pained as he collected himself and worked hard to keep from snapping at me.

  “Something clearly ate Shayne Rivers,” I persisted. “It was a shark ... a big one.”

  “Or someone killed her and threw her body in the ocean and multiple smaller sharks munched on her after the fact,” he countered, his temper getting the better of him as his eyes filled with irritation. I wasn’t a fan of arguing, but I liked seeing him get his anger groove back in this particular instance. That meant he was putting the events of the day behind him. “We have no idea how she died. Her body was in terrible shape. You saw it.”

  I thought to the small misshapen hunk of woman I saw in the morgue. “I did.” I felt sick to my stomach and pushed my empty plate away. “It was awful.”

  Jack’s expression softened. “I’m sorry for bringing that up. I forgot you got queasy when you saw the body. After everything you went through today, that doesn’t exactly seem fair.”

  My annoyance ratcheted up a notch. He thought I was a weak female because of what happened in the medical examiner’s office. I couldn’t tell him the truth — at least not yet — and I had to play my role as fainter extraordinaire.