Alison made a copy of both sides of the business card and gave the original back to her son.
“Would Laura like to talk with us, or is she reluctant?”
“Not at all. She’s in a hurry, as usual, to get this cleared up. Funny thing, though, she says she didn’t feel anything when she met this guy and expected that she should because of what she’s read about twins separated at birth when they finally meet up, even fraternal twins.”
“I’ll keep that in mind as I start digging, son.”
* * *
By the time the New Library was closing for the day, Laura had located and printed two copies of enough information to keep both her and the entire library staff busy over the next few days. The first readings would be fun, but it might take time before decisions could be made on what to include in the Old Library display.
Laura was pleased with her research thus far and especially so, when she scanned quickly through the sign-out pages, a number of which she printed for samples of every few years. She discovered the page for the day Lorelei disappeared and was flabbergasted to see that Lorelei had not only returned her book to the library that day, but she had also checked out another one called Old Ghost Tales in Minnesota. Judging from her return that day which was another book of ghost stories, the child must have been fascinated with tales of the supernatural, typical of her age.
She had also discovered in the Library Rules that the maintenance on the library usually occurred at set times and was managed by someone named Barnabas Evers. The name sounded familiar, so Laura jotted it in her notebook to research at home. The timing of the scheduled maintenance, both inside and outside, was listed in the rules book, but that didn’t explain why maintenance was being conducted on the day that Lorelei disappeared, three months later than scheduled…according to several newspaper archives. Laura knew that librarians kept to schedules. Instead of everything happening in late spring in 1918, it occurred, instead, in late June.
Glenda rejoined Laura and happily accepted the New Library’s copy of the printouts and took them to lock up in her desk. Melba joined Laura in the lobby and thanked her for the help in putting these records together.
“My pleasure. Hey, those little stuffed animals you were talking about at the holiday committee meeting the other night? How long has the library been doing that? I don’t remember it from when I was here.”
“I think it was a few years after you left with Rose to go to Maryland. So we haven’t been doing it for a long time, but long enough that we’ve seen a difference.”
“I was just wondering. I’ll be back to find some more goodies for the display.”
But on her way home, Laura’s brain was in overdrive.
Book checked out on the day Lorelei disappeared.
Library card lost in the library.
And someone with a familiar name who was running the maintenance operation off-schedule.
When Laura got back to her apartment, she logged into the library catalog system remotely from her laptop and looked up the name of the book Lorelei had checked out on the day she disappeared. It was there. In the stacks. And available. That made it another anomaly and she surmised it was likely the book never left the library.
She added more dots to her white board that evening. The number was growing. And the name Barnabas Evers was indeed already on her white board. He was a Dowell whose family vanished sometime during the 1930s. She wished more dots would get connected. Connor would warn her that while more dots are being added, they could not draw any conclusions until more facts were known and all lines were drawn.
Then Laura turned to a new Internet search, this one, for Barnabas Evers. She came up with newspaper articles in both the Raging Ford Bulletin and the Duluth News Tribune. One story appeared about the Raging Ford library maintenance in 1918 that was stalled until late June. These were not in the searches she had conducted in Charlie’s archives. There had been a fire in the warehouse where the whitewash, tar paper, and roof tar were stored. While the whitewash itself wasn’t flammable, its containers burned, rendering the lime whitewash contaminated and unusable. The black smoke from the burning tar and tar paper covered the skies for weeks. The delay in maintenance resulted from waiting for new supplies to arrive from Connecticut.
The work wasn’t begun on the Old Library until the third week in June 1918. Lorelei Rage disappeared on June 24, 1918, right smack in the middle of the re-tarring, whitewashing and interior painting.
Chapter 30
Memorial Day
Connor was at Laura’s back door before seven o’clock in the morning, dinging her iPhone and waking her.
“Come on in,” she texted back, realizing it must be important or he would not be here so early. She threw on a light robe and fuzzy slippers and met him in the workroom behind the shop, running her fingers through her hair to straighten it a bit.
“I have to do this in person,” he began, lowering his voice.
“You have to do what in person?”
“Pass along a lunch invitation for Wednesday in Duluth.”
She knew that meant the FBI was involved.
“This is the thing at the Old Library that you can’t talk about, right? Who will be there? You, Nolan, and me?”
“Correct. Nolan, you, me, Chief Mallory, my father, and a couple of other important people. They’ll tell you everything.”
“Wow,” she said. “It must be pretty big.”
He nodded.
“So wear something professional, like a suit.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll pick you up at eleven-thirty sharp. Oh, and my mother is happy to cover your shop for you that day. She had a lot of fun the last time.”
“I was just about to ask you that. See you then. Anything else you want to talk about?”
“Not at this time,” he said and was gone.
Without a hug and without a kiss.
And worse, without her being able to tell him what she discovered at the library or about the Old Library maintenance in 1918.
* * *
It was too distracting for Laura to pay any attention to Memorial Day town activities. Typically, this was the weekend when everyone went on vacation, or to the lake for the weekend, or had picnics after the parade. From what she had heard through the ever-waving grapevines, however, the town folk were thrilled with the flyers and the pictures and mention of veterans. Families of veterans who hadn’t made it home were equally touched by the mention of their loved ones who gave everything to preserve democracy. With so many other things poking at her from so many sides, she had to ignore the day, at least this year.
After restocking the store, Laura was intent on finding anything else online that she could about this Barnabas Evers. Beyond what she discovered last evening, there was little else she could find. However, she did discover, embedded in the library “rules” book that the library typically closed half of its mezzanines whenever the maintenance was happening. So, first the left side was closed for about a week until the work was completed, then the right. Apparently, they always started on the left side. Left, as in when you walked through the front double-door and looked toward the back.
So Laura figured that if they started fairly late in June in 1918 and Lorelei disappeared on June 24, it would have been in the middle of the right side of the library being closed for maintenance. That would be the side of the Old Library where they had seen the ghost.
If someone had needed a book from a closed area, a librarian would go up the staircase and retrieve it, but no books were put back until the workers were finished. Instead, they sat on rolling carts in the librarians’ work room on the ground level.
Laura added all of this information to the library maintenance white board.
So far, the white boards were lopsided. There were tons of facts for the maintenance, but very little about Lorelei on her white board except for her library card and a book she checked out on the day she disappeared. And that book was still cur
rently in the library.
Laura pulled over a kitchen chair, sat back, crossed her arms, and stared at the boards.
Then she remembered she needed a professional suit for the Wednesday meeting and dashed to her closet to see if she had brought one. Success! Next, a blouse or shell to go under the suit. Now she was set for the meeting to find out what was going on at the Old Library.
Chapter 31
While Laura was flipping the Closed sign to Open on Tuesday morning and unlocking the front door to Second Treasures, someone else was sitting across the street in the Valencia Café at a window table focused intently on Laura’s shop. His phone was pressed against his left ear and his right hand speared the last bite of French toast, a trick when his Rolex slipped to the heel of his thumb. He glanced into his cup, was disappointed to discover he had already polished off the cappuccino, and returned his attention to the shop on the other side of Taylor Street.
Marie Vandergard was not in the café this morning, and whenever she wasn’t there, her husband Barry kept an eye on the customers from his kitchen domain. He signaled to the table server to bring another cup of cappuccino to the customer at the table by the front window. This customer always had at least two cups. He noticed that today the customer was distracted and barely acknowledged the server or the new cup, so absorbed was he in watching the store across the street and completing his call.
The server did hear, however, the last part of the customer’s phone conversation right before he ended the call.
“Yes, I’ll be at the medical center shortly.”
At just that moment, when he turned his head toward the table server to thank her for the cappuccino and ask for his bill, he missed seeing someone go into Second Treasures.
* * *
Laura looked up as a shadow at the shop’s front door caught her eye and drew her away from making sure she had enough register tape rolls in the drawer under the counter.
She saw a look of excitement on Eric Williams’s face as he exploded into the shop and was at her counter in less than two seconds.
“I need a bunch of those sparkler hats—lots of them! Everybody in my office loved mine and wants one.”
“Your…office.”
“Yes. My office.” He covertly glanced about the shop to make sure they were alone then realized how futile that was when he knew where all the cameras were and exactly how many people would watch this video feed.
“How many do you need?”
“Well, let me think,” he said, looking into the middle distance and mumbling first names as he counted on his fingers.
“Eric, go over there,” she said, pointing to a bin of the hats. “Be sure you try out all the switches. They come with batteries, but you never know.”
“They light up?” he asked, in awe.
She nodded, and he disappeared into the corner with the bin.
The door bells jangled and a couple of customers entered. Right behind them was Dr. Colin Anderson. He smiled at Laura and walked up to the counter, as he often did. He glanced back at the front door as if expecting Eric Williams to follow him in, but unbeknownst to him, Eric was already there.
“Hi Laura,” Colin said. “You know I like to check on you from time to time. You’ve been dealt a rough hand from life, and I want you to know that if you ever need anything at all, please don’t hesitate to ask. I gave you my cell number.”
She noticed he was fresh and well-dressed, and good looking, all as usual, but it still took her from the depths of her being, the core of her soul, or whether it was just sheer will power, to produce a warm smile that radiated to her eyes. Sometimes a person had no choice but to do that, and this was one of those times, regardless of how hard it stuck in one’s craw.
“Thank you, Colin. I appreciate that. Right now, I’m good,” she said, telling one of those white lies her mother had brought her up to believe were justified. It was the thing her mother said might happen only a few times in her life, but she had to trust her gut when it did and react appropriately.
He leaned his arms on the register top. Thankfully, there was no cat.
“I hear you’re putting together a booklet of the history of Raging Ford for the Heritage Days Festival.”
“Yes, I am. We’re almost ready to go to press.”
“That’s a really good thing to do. I know everyone here will appreciate it. Did you find out anything in your research we didn’t know about the town?”
To give Anderson credit, it was difficult to startle someone always in control like him. But start he did when Eric Williams suddenly spoke up behind him.
Eric had heard Colin’s question, leaned around the register and said conspiratorially, “Yes, what have you found out? Any deep, dark secrets? Any ghosts in some of our closets?”
She caught a blink by Colin who easily smoothed his ruffles.
“This town has a lot of history starting right after the Civil War, Eric. I was curious if Laura was putting together a detailed history or just an overview.”
“Overview,” she replied, laughing. “Anything in depth would run several hundred pages.”
“Darn!” Eric said. “I was hoping for something juicy or scary that would keep me up at night.”
He turned to Colin with a face filled with hope, which looked ludicrous considering the two armfuls of blinking sparkler hats he was carrying. He had switched on the lights in every one.
Colin put up a hand.
“No fly fishing,” he said, referring to their previous conversation.
“You’d really like it. People resist until they try it.”
“Both of you have a nice day,” Colin said, adjusting the band on his Rolex, and made for the door. It might have been a successful and graceful exit except for the typical Tuesday morning invasion that surged into Laura’s shop at just that moment.
She rang up Eric’s hats and bagged them, sent him on his way, and he actually made it out the door right behind the doctor. Laura watched through the crowd as Colin shook his head, put up his hand again to ward off any of Eric’s offers, and turned right to head to his car, presumably.
Another customer showed up that she hadn’t anticipated: Denny Eldridge from the Pickens studio. He wanted one of those sparkler hats, as well, once he saw kids walking around town wearing them.
“These will be as good as any toy I have to distract the kids. I’ll wear it, turn on the blinker lights and voilà! I have their attention. Maybe I’ll get three.”
“Three it is,” Laura responded. “You know, Denny, these hats are turning into the best thing since chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.”
Denny laughed as he pulled three caps from the bin, now half empty, and brought them to the counter.
“Your bin’s getting low,” he said, pulling out his wallet.
“I know. I’ve more in the back. Eric Williams just about wiped me out. Hey, Denny,” Laura continued. “Speaking of the toys and animals you use to distract the kids for photos, how long have you been doing that?”
“Not long, but it’s made all the difference in the world. Got the idea from Norm Burns at the Raging Ford studio, you know, the guys who do all the school photographs?”
“Oh yeah. I remember them. They must have used little toys and animals for a long time, I guess.”
“Actually, toys yes, animals no. He got the idea from the school, around the same time he told me about it—I’m guessing about five or six years ago. One of the teachers pulled out her stash and it made everything go smoothly.”
And she smiled because now she couldn’t get the image of Eric Williams grinning with those two armfuls of blinking sparkler hats out of her head. And she had eliminated the photo studios completely, as the third was just a drive-through.
Chapter 32
Meeting with Nolan Frye was becoming a regular Wednesday thing. Today’s meeting with him and the rest of the important people took place in the same restaurant as before, but this time they were in a private room. The drap
es were drawn with inside lighting provided courtesy of romantic sconces. Today they were anything but romantic and turned up to the max. Once everyone was in place and drinks and luncheon delights were placed along the table for the taking, the two doors to the outside world were closed.
Laura sat between Connor and Chief Mallory as the meeting opened. Mallory introduced Laura around the table and explained who everyone was: Deputy Chief Michael Fitzpatrick, his Duluth S.W.A.T. team commander Blaise Winslow, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Minnesota bureau chief Corker Duncan, FBI special agent Nolan Frye, and Chief Arthur Mallory and Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick, both of the Raging Ford Police Department.
Corker Duncan opened the discussion by explaining they knew of the fentanyl operation, just not where it was taking place.
“Our Confidential Informants either weren’t talking or they didn’t know. I believe they didn’t know. Everybody was tight-lipped about this op. We received a tip from an individual with exceptional observational skills. So now we know where it is and need to get in fast and shut it down because, from what we’ve seen and heard through the cameras in the passageways of the library, they are finishing up their final three batches and are getting ready to deliver their stuff.”
At Laura’s specific request, she was not identified as the person who noticed odd things about the Old Library’s satellite pictures. But everyone at the table knew.
“Anything special about this particular operation?” Mallory asked.
“This group likes to bring in a chemist to create their own special, generic fentanyl made from cheaper ingredients. It’s designed to look like the real thing and work just well enough not to raise any suspicions. Then they start swapping the generic fentanyl with quantities of non-working ingredients, little by little, in larger proportions in subsequent batches, until their final batch which is nothing but inert ingredients, and sell the products, take the money before anyone catches on, shut down and set up a new op somewhere else.”
Deadly Cost of Goods Page 16