I didn’t have to think too hard which it was. Hank had never liked being the center of attention or the cause of folks adjusting their lives to line up with his. It was easy to be shy where we lived.
I squared myself. Jaeger was right; nothing was going to happen. I cast my attention to Betty. “There’s a list of instructions on the nightstand.”
She nodded and forced a smile. “I understand.”
“I won’t be long, two hours at the most,” I said, as I made my way over to kiss Hank goodbye. Such a show of affection would embarrass him even more if he could see.
“It’s such a shame about Miss Eltmore,” Betty said. Calla was Miss Eltmore to most all of Dickinson. She had always been the spinster librarian who had never married. Miss. Always Miss, never missus.
“It is,” I said, then leaned down and pecked Hank quickly on the forehead.
He winced and exhaled slightly at the same time. “I’ll be fine. Go on, now. Get your questions answered. It’ll do you good to get away from me and your work.”
“Try to be kind to this young girl,” I ordered him.
Hank squished his forehead together and pursed his lips at the same time, like he was going to say something rash but decided not to. He just nodded slightly.
I pulled back from him and headed toward the door. As I passed by Betty, she said, “I just can’t imagine a person doing such a thing.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. Ice water shot through my veins. “What do you mean by that?” It was not a gentle question. It was a demand.
Betty drew back. “I didn’t mean anything, Mrs. Trumaine; I was just sayin’ that I didn’t understand is all.”
“Understand what, Betty?”
I had stopped so I was shoulder to shoulder with Jaeger. “She thought you knew,” he said. “Betty hears a lot of things at the drugstore. You surely had to know that.”
“Heard what?” My heart raced, and I suddenly found it very difficult to breathe. All I could smell was Betty’s cheap perfume and the antiseptic tang of Hank’s skin. I thought I was going to be sick.
“Miss Eltmore killed herself,” Jaeger said. “Put a gun to her head right there at her desk and pulled the trigger. A sad act to be sure.”
“Was that in the Press?” I whispered, trembling.
Jaeger shook his head. “Probably a good thing it wasn’t if you ask me. I’m sorry,” he said, easing his hand to my shoulder. “I know she was your friend.”
I couldn’t contain myself any longer. Tears burst out of my eyes and my chest heaved. The truth of Calla’s death was too much to bear. The cause of it wasn’t something I had considered other than by natural means. There had been no need to. Calla Eltmore had always seemed like the least likely person in the world to commit suicide.
Jaeger spun me around and wrapped his arms around me. I didn’t resist the gesture, the comfort of his caring embrace. I couldn’t have resisted even if I’d wanted to.
CHAPTER 8
As a mere child I wrote down everything that I saw, what I needed to remember, what I wanted to accomplish in a day and in my life. My childhood writing desk had been constantly littered with all sizes of paper, with lists of ducks and songbirds—the species, the Latin name, the date that I first saw them, and the date I last saw them. The same with mammals and wildflowers. My father could barely restrain his immense pride at my interest in the outside world. He’d encouraged it by filling my bookshelves with beginner field guides, little books bought at the Ben Franklin for a quarter—they still sat on my shelf—and in long walks on the prairie, sharing his stories and knowledge with me. He wouldn’t have been surprised a bit by my vocation as an indexer. I could imagine him holding the Common Plants book with such pride you would have thought it was a grandson.
There was no question that once I had learned to read and write making lists came as easily to me as breathing. That skill had been perfectly honed long before I knew what an index was. But being organized came later, slowly. Recognizing order, knowing instinctively where one thing fit into the world and another thing didn’t, took experience, time, and loads of failed efforts. More than once I’d been admonished by my mother in the kitchen for putting a pan or skillet in the wrong place. Nothing had thrilled Momma more than when I learned the alphabet, at her prodding, so I could retrieve and replace a spice from the cabinet without making a mess of her world. She was the organized one. Everything had its place. Even me.
And so it was that I found myself lost without a way to organize myself into understanding the concept of suicide. The vision of Calla Eltmore raising a gun to her temple and pulling the trigger was as foreign to me as the inside of a television or a radio. I had no working knowledge of such things. My tenuous relationship with the Lutheran church didn’t help matters much. If I had been left to my childhood religious teachings, then I could only consider that Calla Eltmore had committed the gravest of sins and would be damned to hell for all of eternity. It was a thought that I couldn’t hold on to, Calla being damned, suffering and burning for an act that none of us knew the reason for.
I couldn’t imagine a reason to commit suicide. Calla loved books, her job. I’d always just assumed that she was happy with her life. She never complained, but she didn’t readily share details, either. Calla had never truly confided her deepest, darkest thoughts and secrets to me. I suppose I had never expected her to, but there were times when I thought she looked lonely, and I wondered if she’d ever known true love.
My speculation that Calla and Herbert Frakes, the longtime janitor at the library, were having a secret relationship was more for my own comfort than Calla’s. I’d always hoped that she had someone to hold in the deep darkness of night, when life was tough and fear was at the door, that she knew love like Elizabeth Barrett, Calla’s favorite poet, had known for Robert Browning. How do I love thee, let me count the ways . . . But I’d been wrong about Calla. Life was miserable enough for her to end it suddenly and without so much as a goodbye.
I pulled away from the house with an ugly, unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. It felt like I had been punched by some invisible force, and the pain of the blow lingered with the threat of staying on permanently. I had no choice but to go into town, not only to get my question answered but to find out as much as I could about Calla’s fate. I wasn’t going to rely on the Press or Betty Walsh for any kind of update or the full story. A story that, truth be told, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. The ending of it, Calla’s suicide, was awful. I could only imagine the beginning and the middle.
The Studebaker had always ridden like a hay wagon with a temperamental engine, but the weather was drier than normal lately, and the rutted gravel road that led away from the house bounced and jarred me physically, almost enough to match what I felt inside my mind and in my heart.
I was surrounded by dun brown fields that went on for as far as the eye could see. There were slight rolls in the land, offering a wide vista, but mostly it was flat, unobscured, with the exception of faraway buttes. What trees that did poke up alongside the road had lost their leaves to the pushing wind a month prior. Most of them looked like skeleton hands reaching up to the broad blue sky for help. Spring was a long way off.
The road was lonely except for the sight of an occasional jackrabbit or a hawk gliding in the distance. I had the radio off only because I didn’t want to blare the volume. The rumble and roar underneath the truck sounded like a constant explosion. A dust plume spewed from the tail-end of the Studebaker, and it would have taken little imagination to pretend that I was inside a rocket ship, leaving the world once and for all.
I reached over to my purse, pulled it next to me, then opened it—all the while keeping one eye on the road. I grabbed hold of my pack of cigarettes—Salems, the package green and white—then let them go as quickly as I’d grabbed them.
Calla and I had shared a cigarette nearly every time I’d stopped in the library to visit with her or pick up some errant piece of information that I’d
needed. That would never happen again. I could hardly bear the thought of it, and I nearly started crying again. I steeled myself, though, mainly from the embarrassment that I’d felt by breaking down in front of Jaeger and Betty.
I picked up the pack of cigarettes again, eased one into my mouth, put the pack back where it belonged, and pushed in the dashboard lighter. I could taste the mint on the edge of my lip and found no calming effect to it at all. I hoped that would come in the form of a puff or two.
Hank had never smoked, though he was fond of a chaw of Redman tobacco on occasion—mostly when there were men about, working on the engine of one machine or another. He would never chew or spit in front of me, or any other woman for that matter. Nor did Hank like it that I smoked. I wasn’t regular about it, but it steadied my nerves when I needed it to. I’d hid my smoking from him before Lida and Erik had been murdered, but not so much anymore—though I would go outside when I felt the need to light one up.
The lighter clicked and ejected outward. I grabbed it and put the red hot coil to the end of the Salem and sucked in as deep as I could. Something needed to calm me down before I got into town. Smoking was the only thing I could think of.
“To Calla,” I said aloud as I exhaled, obscuring my vision for a second, filling it with a gray cloud that lingered, then blew back and stung my eyes. It was a good thing I wasn’t in downtown Dickinson or I might’ve wrecked the truck and really found myself up a tree.
CHAPTER 9
The Dickinson Public Library sat on a tree-lined street at the very edge of the residential and business district of town. I’d always thought that the people who lived within walking distance of the library were the luckiest people in the world, especially in winter when all they had to do was bundle up and make an easy trek to the warm, old building. For me, a trip into town could take an hour or two in the middle of January, a half hour at most other times of the year. Time spent at the library was usually tagged onto some other reason for making the journey to town; a doctor’s appointment, stocking up on meat, or running into the Rexall for a necessity of one kind or another. Except today. This trip was all about the library, all about Calla Eltmore.
The library, like so many, had been built with the help of a financial gift from Andrew Carnegie. It had opened to readers in 1910. The building was a simple design, yellow brick, a large window on each side of a grand set of steps that led up to the door, the interior was two thousand square feet at the most. The inside ceiling was high, intricately tapped tin that had weathered the years beautifully. Not quite a cathedral, but as close as there was to one as far as I was concerned. A west wing with a full basement had been added on in 1938 by Roosevelt’s WPA program. Father called the WPA the We Poke Along Society, and for years that’s exactly what I thought the acronym stood for. Some men were offended by the suggestion that they didn’t work hard for their relief during the Depression, but others agreed with Father. Still, the craftsmanship of the building had endured, so the task had been undertaken with a high amount of skill and respect. I was glad of that.
Calla had become the librarian a year after the renovation and was just as much a fixture at the library, as were the bookshelves that held a multitude of volumes of pleasure and knowledge. The library was hallowed ground to me, even though the Lutheran church was a few blocks away. My soul had been nourished far more by the time I’d spent in the library than it had in the time I had spent in any pew.
I sat in the Studebaker, parked on the opposite side of the street, staring at the building, still unable to believe that Calla was dead, that she wouldn’t be there to greet me with a surprised smile when I walked through the front doors unannounced.
I had to look away from the building for fear of tearing up all over again. Get yourself together, Marjorie.
I looked in the rearview mirror and flipped a stray strand of hair from my forehead. My hair was cut shoulder-length and had some natural waves to it. A few wiry sprigs of gray had started to sprout at my temples, but I’d never been tempted to pluck them.
A car passed, drawing my attention away from my reflection in the mirror. It went on down to 1st Street and turned right. You’re going to have to face this sooner or later, Marjorie, I thought to myself as I pushed open the truck door. Might as well get on with it.
I wasn’t sure if they were my words I was hearing or my mother’s. She had little use for dilly-dallying. She was hard as nails on the outside and soft as pudding on the inside. Some of her rigidness was due to the conditions of life on the plains, what it demanded of you. I think she was just born with the rest, determined to pass on her steel spine to me. Most days I appreciated her insistence on character, but on this day I could have used some pudding.
The wind rushed straight down 3rd Street, careening out of the north, bringing with it a push of October cold; a harbinger of things to come. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees since I’d left home. I immediately glanced up at the sky before crossing the street. The perfect blue dome was being replaced by a sullen gray blanket. The sun glowed like a shimmering white plate hanging by an invisible thread, and I wondered if I would see it clearly again before the coming of spring.
The smell of burning leaves touched my nose, and I worried that someone would be careless with the flames. Grass fires could get out of control easily, especially since it had been dry recently. Fire was a fear the community held in unison, both out in the country and in town—making an exception for Twelfth Night, when we all gathered at the Lutheran church to burn our Christmas trees. Nature didn’t just toss its wrath down from the sky—it was a threat at nearly every step, as I well knew. Damn gopher hole.
I squared my shoulders, looked up and down the street, and found as much resolve as I could to take a step forward. I clutched my purse with both hands, worried that my lipstick wasn’t as fresh as it could be, and hoping that my coat didn’t smell of cigarette smoke. I moved on, hurrying toward the front doors of the library.
I was halfway up the stairs when I saw a woman push her way out the front doors of the library. She was shorter than I was, and older by at least twenty years. Her hair was salt and pepper gray, nicely coifed, not a hair out of place, and she was dressed in an outfit that had surely been bought off-the-rack at one of the fine women’s stores in Bismarck. Her wool skirt was a lustrous tan, a result of well-fed sheep tended to under a tumultuous Scottish sky, and her jacket was a big brown plaid. Even from a distance the woman was strikingly beautiful—with the exception of her puffy red eyes and the smear of makeup on her right cheek.
The woman noticed me as she stepped off the first step. She put her unmarred heel in a place that wasn’t there, and she instantly lurched forward, sending a pile of books straight up into the air. She tried to capture them. Tried to hang onto the ones that she could like they were made of fragile china and would shatter to pieces on impact. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The books rained down with predictable thuds. They sounded like soft rocks falling from the sky, hitting the cement as solidly as if they’d been thrown on purpose.
The wind screamed, but no sound came from the woman’s mouth as she relented to the fall and realized that she wasn’t capable of saving the books—or herself. She hit the ground with the same soft thud as the books, rolled a bit, then bounced down two steps and came to a stop on her shoulder without a whimper or a moan. It all happened in the blink of an eye, and I didn’t know whether to stop or run to her.
Honestly, I thought she was dead.
CHAPTER 10
A pair of rimless glasses landed at my feet. The left lens had cracked from one corner to the other. The right one was missing altogether. There had been all kinds of noise as the woman tumbled my way; soft flesh hitting hard cement, and books flying without wings and landing harshly on the ground.
“Oh, my,” I gasped, then hurried to the women without another thought.
She lay on the ground, not moving a muscle, her arm tucked on her right side and he
r knees pulled up in a fetal position. To my relief, her eyes were fully open, with life still in them. A trickle of fresh blood trailed out of the corner of her mouth.
A car passed on the street behind me, but it went on, leaving only the woman and me. There was no one around as I kneeled beside her and looked for help at the same time.
She began to move her right arm in an awkward and painful attempt to prop herself up and try to stand. Her lips twisted into a grimace. There was only a hint of lipstick remaining on them—probably smeared off for a reason, long before the fall.
“Don’t move,” I said. My words were soft, overridden by the push of the chilly north wind. I wasn’t sure the woman had heard me, so I said it again, more emphatically. “Don’t move.” It was definitely my mother’s voice, commanding, sharp with authority.
The woman nodded and surrendered. I’d always wondered whether Hank would have ended up paralyzed if he had been handled a little more gently. I’d never blamed anyone for helping him, for rushing him out of the grouse field as quickly as they could. He was going to be blind—the angle of the shotgun when it had gone off had made sure of that—but the paralysis, that was another thing entirely.
“Does anything feel broken?” I said.
She didn’t answer straight away; she just stared up at me, then at the sky. I didn’t think she was reading the clouds for coming weather or wind, just making sure they were still there.
Her lips trembled, then she closed her eyes slowly, softly, like some hidden door for the final time.
“Can you wiggle your toes and fingers?” I said.
“Yes, I’m fine. Really,” she said as she opened her eyes again. They were hazel, the tint of an uncertain summer day. Her skin was pale, fragile white alabaster, but the color had started to return to her face. “I need to get home. Claude doesn’t know that I left the house. I have a roast in the oven. It’ll burn.” She stopped speaking, but I knew the fear of a man in another woman’s voice when I heard it. And there’d be hell to pay, I assumed she would have said, finishing the sentence, if she’d known me better.
See Also Deception Page 4