Poisoned Prose (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

to beat from somewhere in the back of the store, and Flynn came out of the storeroom wearing an American Indian headdress. He danced forward until he stood at the edge of the alphabet rug and then froze. “Who wants to hear a story?” he asked in a dramatic whisper.
    “We do!” the children shouted in unison, and Olivia sensed this wasn’t the first time they’d been entertained by Flynn.
    “We have two special guests here today. One of them is from the mountains like me, and the other guest was born in South Carolina. Have any of you been to South Carolina?”
    Hands shot into the air. “Daddy took us to the giant peach water tower!” a boy declared. “My brother said it looked like a huge butt crack!”
    Laughter erupted from the audience, and even Millay, who looked like she hadn’t gotten much sleep lately, couldn’t help but smile.
    Instead of shushing the boy, Flynn pretended to be very interested in his comment. “I don’t believe Mr. Rapson is going to share any stories about enormous butt cracks, but then again, he just might. Let’s see what happens, okay?”
    The kids giggled and nodded in agreement.
    The drumbeats continued, and a man and woman emerged from the back room. The man held a gray wolf mask in front of his face. Its mouth was set in a toothy snarl, and some of the children stiffened at the sight of it. The second wolf was white and appeared to be grinning. Both of the storytellers wore black clothes and long tails made of mop heads.
    “This is the story of two wolves. It is called ‘The Two Wolves Within,’” the woman began in a booming voice.
    “It comes from Cherokee legend,” the man said, lowering his mask. “I am the grandfather and this is my grandson.”
    The woman put her mask aside and squatted. She rubbed her hands together and held them out as if she were warming herself at a campfire.
    The grandfather sat in a chair and mimed smoking a pipe while his grandson complained about a boy who’d been mean to him that day. Olivia recognized it as a tale about bullying, and she could see that many of the children identified with the grandson. Many of them shook their heads or frowned over the cruelty inflicted on Amabel’s character. It was obvious that they no longer saw her as an adult woman. To them, she’d become another child.
    Olivia studied Amabel carefully. She was an attractive woman with molasses-brown hair and eyes the color of deep water. Her face was so expressive that Olivia could read each of the grandson character’s emotions perfectly, and when she told the grandfather that her heart was filled with hate, her eyes burned with such a cold light that Olivia had to repress the urge to shudder.
    Millay leaned over and murmured, “She’s creepy.”
    “If you hold on to hate, it will poison your heart.” The male storyteller spoke in a slow, deep voice. He sounded ancient and wise. “I have an angry wolf inside me too. We all do. Listen.” He held up the mask and growled, startling several of the children. A little girl climbed into her father’s lap and hid her face.
    Amabel raised her mask. “I know that a kind wolf also lives inside you and me. He doesn’t like to fight. He tries to get along with everyone.” She
woofed
like a playful cub and then moved the mask again. “But how do you decide which wolf to listen to, Grandfather?”
    “The wolf I feed will control me,” he said. “So if you stay angry, you feed the angry wolf. He grows strong and powerful, and will take over.”
    “He’ll control me?” Amabel asked, sounding a little afraid.
    The grandfather nodded.
    “Then I will only feed the gentle wolf. I won’t fight with the boy who was mean to me.”
    “That is good,” the grandfather said and handed his mask to Amabel. “But he still lives in you. You cannot change that. We all have two wolves within us. Feed the gentle wolf and starve the angry one.”
    And with that, Amabel raised the snarling mask and growled quietly while Greg Rapson took the grinning wolf face, hopping around in a circle, howling. His antics made the children laugh, and eventually, Amabel crept away.
    Shedding their masks and mop head tails, the pair told several more stories, each longer and more elaborate than the last. Greg tried to dominate the performance, but Amabel’s facial expressions were more engaging than his theatrics.
    As she watched the two of them, Olivia couldn’t help but wonder why people who competed against one another for