An Uncollected Death

by Meg Wolfe

daughter within a few weeks or not for a year. The difference between driving a safe vehicle, or none at all. The difference between being able to rebuild her writing career, or to look for a job she wasn’t guaranteed to find. She wished she had more time to decide, but knew in fairness that if it was going to draw buyers and go for a higher price, she had to let Martin Stanton know this afternoon.

  Josh, who had been going from room to room making notes, heard her laugh and smiled shyly as he approached her. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Just fine, Josh. I’m okay with everything and I’m ready to move on.”

  He looked relieved, and scratched at his arm in the sling. “It can hit people pretty hard sometimes. Especially old people who have lived in the same house for fifty years.”

  Charlotte was uncertain if Josh included her among “old people,” but gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I can well imagine. I guess I laughed because I actually feel lucky that I’m not going to be one of them, and that’s worth more than all the material things in the world.”

  “That’s awesome, Mrs. Anthony.” His tablet slipped out of his sling. Charlotte caught it before it fell and helped him get it settled in his sling again.

  “What happened to the arm?” she asked.

  “It’s a sprained wrist, actually. Playing basketball and fell. So I got put in charge of the charts today,” he shrugged in resignation, and held up the stylus for the tablet with his right hand. “I’m left-handed, wouldn’t you know it. But it’s a lot easier than a pen.”

  Charlotte looked at the checklist on the tablet and understood what he meant. The check marks were clear; the notes were typed in with an on-screen touch keypad.

  “So Martin wasn’t kidding when he said you were trying to get the day off, hmm?” she teased him.

  He laughed. “Glad I can still work, to be honest. The other guy can’t even put his shirt on without help.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Rotator cuff. We collided. I landed on my wrist and he landed on his arm and shoulder. He’s a tennis coach, and it’s really going to mess him up, at least for a while. Might even need surgery.”

  “Well, I hope you both heal quickly,” she said, and he thanked her and continued down the stairs.

  Charlotte was impressed by how something like a tablet could make it possible for an injured person to work, and in her usual way her mind wandered from there to other kinds of technology that helped people perform tasks. She remembered when she went from using a typewriter to a word processor, and then to a personal computer, and had difficulty imagining how she would have done her job over the past ten years using just a typewriter, although that was the way it had been done for most of the previous century. But certain things still required extra help. The tennis player wouldn’t be able to use a racquet with an untreated rotator cuff injury. She imagined other kinds of activities that would be difficult, like painting on a large canvas, or, her eye caught by the sunlight reflecting off the tools of some roofers several houses away, carpentry. Just about any kind of sport, tennis, baseball—

  Baseball. You couldn’t pitch a baseball with an injured shoulder—or swing a bat. Olivia’s arm was injured enough to prevent her from writing for months, and even recently still prevented her from lifting—quite likely a rotator cuff injury or something similar, caused by being roughly grabbed by Ronson. It still bothered her as recently as two days before the incident at her house, when Charlotte met her and she said she needed help finding the notebooks because she couldn’t lift much. At the moment, everyone assumed Olivia had hit Wesley Warren over the head with the bat. If she had an untreated injury, there was no way she could have swung that bat at all, let alone hard enough to draw blood, unless perhaps she had used her other hand.

  Charlotte hurried back down to her office and checked the notebooks, and saw that the older ones had much better handwriting. Yes, Olivia was right-handed. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the scene of the crime. Was the baseball bat in Olivia’s right hand or left? Olivia was mostly on her back on the floor, the bookshelves to her right. The bat, Charlotte was certain, lay between Olivia’s leg and the bookshelves, meaning it was in her right hand, the one she definitely couldn’t have used. That meant that someone had put it there.

  Someone else had been there, the mysterious “third party” Detective Barnes suggested, someone who could have hit Wesley Warren with the bat, loaded him into the car, and pushed the car into the pond. The same person who also likely knocked down Olivia and left her for dead, who might have even intended to kill her.

  Charlotte suddenly realized that if there was a third party, she and Helene were also likely in danger, unless the killer had succeeded in finding whatever it was he came for. Given Donovan’s general distress and Mitchell’s hold over him, Charlotte’s intuition told her that whatever “it” was, it remained elusive. Olivia’s last words to Helene, “It’s my book,” only added to the sense that the threat remained. And there were the books on the floor. And Bosley Warren found a first edition of Least Objects, by an author connected to Olivia’s days in Paris, one she quite probably knew.

  Books. Everything seemed to be connected to books—notebooks, rare books, secret books, ledger books, writing books, writers. The detective said that he didn’t like coincidences, especially in a small town, and Charlotte had to agree with him, at least up to a point. As a detective, he would ferret out the facts, gather the evidence, and assess whatever information would suggest motive in order to lead to apprehending a criminal. Coincidences in a narrow context, such as a small town, would lead to a smaller and likelier range of suspects.

  Charlotte, however, saw things in terms of trends. If two or three designers suddenly use wicker, paisley, or turquoise green, a trend is set. Young fashionistas rediscover go-go boots from the 1960’s in thrift shops, and another trend is set. Color predictions are developed and refined over decades; an economic recession meant certain colors would be more favored than others. Skirt lengths, too, although that was becoming less predictable as fashion styles became less rigid.

  It was not enough, however, for a writer to spot trends—the trends had to mean something, to signify something about an individual or a group or society. A trend rarely consisted of a single item. If, for instance, tall riding boots were a trend, there would be an accompanying trend of jodhpurs or tucked-in pants, tweed jackets and hats, and other elements of an idealized “horsey-set” lifestyle. When a radically different trend occurred, it could create a domino effect, causing entire homes to be refurnished from lamps to rugs, entire wardrobes to be revamped. The significance of a single object to its owner could cause the acquisition of more, related objects which shared that meaning, the representation of a certain lifestyle to which the owner aspires.

  Collectors were a special breed of consumer, however. Sometimes a collection reflected taste, whim, or aspiration, and had nothing to do with trends in the larger world.  But quite often a collection only revealed an interest in the process of acquisition, and as a result many collectors had more than one collection. Such hunter-collectors are inspired by elements outside of themselves: articles on a famous person’s collection, decorating trends, items bringing high prices at auctions, and items purportedly in limited quantity.

  Olivia had countless collections. Her husband, from all accounts, only had one—baseball cards. His pursuit was much more likely heartfelt, while hers were simply something to do while going on the hunt with him. But the one collection she was passionate about, the one she tried to hide from him, and didn’t fully indulge in until after his death, was her books.

  Books, again. Whatever the motive, whatever the actual crime, Charlotte sensed that it had to do with books.

  “Mrs. Anthony?” came a voice from the doorway, and Charlotte looked up. It was a young female Stanton crew member, who looked even younger than Ellis. She approached and placed on the desk an old lidded cardboard box, one that Charlotte had long forgotten about. �
��This one looks like it has photos and mementos, and I thought you’d might like to look through it first.”

  Charlotte thanked her and opened it when she left. It contained various things from high school and her first year or two in college, yearbooks, concert posters, a pom-pom from pep squad, programs from classical concerts in Chicago, ticket stubs to rock concerts, a few issues of the campus literary magazine in which she’d published her first poems and short stories, a book of poetry signed by the author during a campus visit—and a deck of Tarot cards. Oh, those cards! She’d gotten pretty good at reading them, and for a semester or two the girls in the dorm would come down to her room and ask her to tell them if their boyfriends were cheating or if they’d get a scholarship. She held the deck to her nose. It still smelled faintly of incense, the smell of her personal silly season.

  It was a traditionally designed deck of cards, and she shuffled them, laid them out in the only arrangement she could remember, a Celtic Cross spread to help the questioner determine a course of action. The center card was the present situation, and on top of it, laid crosswise, was the challenge. Around these cards she laid the distant past, immediate past, immediate future, best outcome, and to the