The Gun Also Rises

by Sherry Harris

  “It wasn’t deliberate,” I said. At least I hoped it wasn’t.

  “I can’t believe my life has come down to spending time with sketch artists, police, and state troopers,” Roger said.

  “How’d the sketch come out?” I asked.

  “A darn good job, considering the little I could help out with. It’s as if I blocked out the hooligan’s face.”

  “Any luck with security cameras?” I asked.

  “Not much, apparently. As Officer Bossum said, most cameras aren’t that high-quality.”

  “Can I see the sketch?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Roger said. He pulled out his phone and found it.

  It was kind of a generic-looking white guy wearing a ball cap, with no distinguishing marks or tattoos. Part of me had been hoping it would be Bull, and the police could track him down and get him out of my life. I passed the phone to Miss Belle.

  “Do you recognize him?” I asked.

  She studied the photo and then shook her head. “No. I don’t know this man.”

  “I guess that would have been too easy.” My phone buzzed. “My Uber driver is here. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  * * *

  I directed the Uber driver to the alley behind Carol’s store. It didn’t seem as if anyone was lurking around, and thankfully, there was no sign of Bull. A few minutes later, Carol and I had a roast beef sandwich from DiNapoli’s she’d picked up spread on a table in her back room. Even half of one of these was too much for two people.

  I dug in. “This is heaven,” I said after swallowing.

  “How do they make any money with their low prices and large portions?”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. The meat was tendered and piled high, and there was provolone cheese and an au jus dipping sauce. I caught up on Carol’s family’s goings-on while we ate. After we finished, I decided to get down to what had brought me here. I filled her in on finding the scrapbook and its connection to Sebastian’s family.

  “What are you going to do?” Carol asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do.”

  “But I want you to.”

  Carol shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

  “What about telling me what you’d do if you were in my shoes?” I asked.

  Carol pointed at my shoes. A pair of pink Cole Hahn flats I’d found at a sale for a buck. “I don’t wear flats.”

  I wrinkled my brow at her.

  “In other words, I’m not in your shoes, so I can’t tell you what to do,” Carol said.

  “Some friend you turned out to be.” I smiled at her to take the edge off the words.

  “You’re smart. You’ll figure it out. In fact, you probably already know what to do,” Carol said.

  Did I? Not yet; not that I knew of. This was the joy and curse of being single. I made all the decisions; no one else told me what to do. But sometimes, like now, it wasn’t easy.

  “I’ve been thinking about something else. Something to do with CJ.”

  “What?” Carol’s voice came out sharp.

  I got that. She’d been through the wringer with CJ and me the past couple of years. There for every high and low. “In our divorce settlement, I ended up getting half his retirement pay.”

  “As you should,” Carol said.

  “I’ve been thinking about stopping it. I feel as if I’ll never be completely free of CJ if I continue to take it.”

  “Are you nuts? Of course you’re going to keep taking it.” Carol jumped up and started gathering the remains of our lunch. “You earned it. You followed him around. Don’t you even think about doing that.”

  “What happened to not telling me what to do?” I asked.

  “This is completely different.” Carol wrapped the leftover half of a sandwich and stuck it in her fridge. I got up and tossed our napkins and paper plates in the trash. “I always hoped you and CJ could work things out, but this last move of his was unconscionable.”

  It was. It had been the proverbial last straw, and it still stung.

  “Taking what’s yours isn’t keeping you tied to him. Only you can do that. Think of it as the US government paying you for your service. For sacrificing your career. For helping a thousand strangers who crossed your path in all your moves. Being a commander’s wife is a full-time volunteer job, with little recognition, no chance for advancement, and a bunch of people bitching behind your back no matter what you do. And what do you get out of it at the end? A certificate signed by the president thanking you.”

  “Wow. I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said.

  “I sound bitter, don’t I? You know I loved being a military spouse. Most of the time,” Carol said. “My point is, you earned that money, and I don’t want to hear another thing about it.”

  “Okay. I appreciate your input. What’s on your agenda for the rest of the day?”

  “Ironically, I have two military spouses’ groups coming in. One at two and another at seven. Want to come?”

  “No, I’ve got my hands full.” I gave Carol a quick hug and left. My thoughts quickly turned back to the book and manuscripts. Who set all this up? And how the heck was I going to answer that question.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Luck was on my side. I managed to retrieve the Beetle and drive off without anyone spotting me. I needed to get back to Miss Belle’s, but I decided to swing by the police station to see if I could track down either Pellner or Awesome. I’d rather talk to one of them than the state police, who might think I was making wild conjectures. I hoped I wasn’t. I parked across the street from the police station near a tot lot. Red-faced kids were running around while moms sat watching in the shade. The whole scene put a smile on my face.

  As I walked toward the station, one of the police SUVs pulled up beside me. The window rolled down. Pellner.

  “Just the man I wanted to see,” I said.

  “Hop in,” he said.

  The SUV was cool despite all the equipment running in it. Police vehicles looked more like the inside of a spaceship these days, with their computers and communications equipment. Long gone were the radios on a long curly cord.

  “What’s up?” Pellner asked once I was strapped in. Instead of just parking, he took off down past the town hall.

  I didn’t want to bring up the scrapbook yet but filled him in on Alicia Blackmore and my suspicions about Rena’s conveniently timed inheritance.

  Pellner whistled when I finished. “That’s a pretty amazing story.” He’d been weaving his way around some neighborhoods while I’d talked.

  “I know. But between the missing manuscripts and the missing limited-edition book, we’re talking millions of dollars. Her inheritance could have been a small investment really.”

  “I’ll see if our web wonder woman can dig anything up about the inheritance. And we’ll follow up with the Blackmore Agency. I know that a state trooper talked to them, but maybe he didn’t ask the right questions or he asked the wrong person. Also one of the state troopers has been delving into Kay’s finances.”

  “Has he found anything interesting?”

  Pellner didn’t answer.

  “What have you found out about Kay?” I asked. “Does she have family?”

  “I’m only sharing this because they’ve been notified, and it will be in the papers.”

  I nodded.

  “She’s from New Bedford. A middle-class family. Parents divorced when she was young. Her father died when he was fifty-six.”

  New Bedford was on the coast down near Rhode Island. “What did she do before she worked for Miss Belle?” I asked. “Does she have a record?”

  He pulled back up to the station. “Here you go.”

  “In other words, you aren’t going to answer me?”

  Pellner flashed his dimples at me.

  “Has anything come from the sketch of the guy who attacked Roger?”

  “Nothing yet.” Pellner opene
d a folder and handed me the sketch.

  It was easier to see on an eight-by-ten piece of paper than on Roger’s phone. I stared down at it, frowning.

  “What, do you recognize him?” Pellner asked.

  “I’m not sure.” I grabbed my purse, dug around in it, and pulled out a pen.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Give me a minute.” I drew dark-framed glasses on the picture and changed the baseball cap to some semblance of a tweed hat. Carol would be much better at this than I was.

  “Who do you think it is?” Pellner sounded impatient.

  “Trevor Hunter, one of the League of Literary Treasure Hunter members.” I frowned at the picture. “He’s the first of the group I met. Warned me off from another person, Bull Hardwick.”

  “Have you seen him since?” Pellner asked.

  “No, but I’ve talked to him. I asked him to tell his group to quit following me.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No.” I turned in my seat so I was facing Pellner. “If Trevor is bad, does that mean Bull is good?”

  “Not necessarily. Bad guys always know other bad guys. They might be from competing crime groups.” Pellner took the sketch from me. “You’re sure these two men are the same person?”

  “Yes, but let me show you his picture from the League of Literary Treasure Hunters website.” I found the picture and pulled it up. “Look at his nose and cheekbones. Shaving off his beard, waxing his eyebrows, and adding glasses doesn’t change them.”

  Pellner studied both photos. “They do look similar. I’ll take this back to the station to see what I can find out.”

  “I have his phone number.”

  “Send it to me.” He stared out the windshield for a moment. “We might need you to come down to the station to call him to arrange a meeting you won’t be going to. In the meantime, if you run into this Hunter character again, call 911.”

  I climbed out. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He waved and drove off.

  * * *

  I got back to Miss Belle’s house and went straight up to the attic to work. I wished I could turn off my brain and concentrate, but I couldn’t, so I called Pellner again.

  “I’ve been thinking about how all this happened,” I said when he answered. “Say all those years ago, someone in Sebastian’s family took the overnight case. It got stored somewhere until someday another family member realized what they had, the lost Hemingway manuscripts.”

  “Why didn’t they shout it to the world or try to sell them?”

  “I can think of a couple of reasons. If it’s a prominent family like the Winthrop Granvilles, they wouldn’t want to sully their reputation to admit they had a thief among them. Mrs. Winthrop Granville’s family seems to be bibliophiles, so maybe having something so rare and valuable gave them some kind of hidden pleasure.” I could just picture someone coming up to the attic to visit the manuscripts. Chortling with secret joy over owning them. “Who really knows what motivates people to do what they do?”

  “So you think Kay just overheard you talking to Miss Belle and took advantage of the opportunity?” Pellner asked.

  “No. It seemed too well planned for that.” I launched into the theory I’d shared with Luke, that someone knew about the limited-edition book and that the manuscripts were just a bonus. “After Kay heard about the manuscripts, she must have accelerated the plan to meet a buyer in the woods. Otherwise they wouldn’t have come back and searched the woods for them.”

  “Probably. But how would they know about the manuscripts?”

  “Mrs. Winthrop Granville is having memory problems. What if she started talking about the manuscripts to Ruth after she’d already moved them to Belle’s house? Ruth has a tough job and probably isn’t well compensated. Maybe she decided this was her way of getting back.”

  “She couldn’t have done it alone.” Pellner rubbed the back of his neck.

  “I agree. She teamed up with someone else along the way. Someone with enough money to bankroll the operation and get Rena out of the way. There must be some connection between Kay and Ruth that we don’t know about. Get rid of Rena and put Kay in place.” Now that I thought about it, Rena was lucky to be alive. “They could have just killed Rena.”

  “But that would draw attention to Miss Belle’s house, which they wouldn’t want.”

  I could tell Pellner was warming to my theory.

  “So how did Kay end up dead?” he asked.

  “Maybe she tried to cut her own deal with the middleman. Whoever fronted the money to get Rena out of the way. She hid the overnight case in the woods, after all. Or maybe it was Ruth out in the woods that day, waiting for her. Kay tries to up her cut of the sale of the manuscripts. Ruth wasn’t happy and killed her.”

  “Now we just have to prove your theory,” Pellner said. “Any thoughts on how to do that?”

  He sounded a wee bit sarcastic. “Not yet, but between me, the entire police department, and the state troopers, you’d think we could come up with something.”

  Pellner chuckled. “I’m sure we can. Just don’t go off on your own.”

  “Do I ever?” I asked.

  “I’ve got to go,” said Pellner.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I couldn’t concentrate on pricing books. So I Googled Ruth Stewart. There really wasn’t much about her online. Ruth had a Facebook page but didn’t post to it often. She’d gone to a high school in a small town in Maine. It didn’t seem Winnie would approve of her using social media anyway.

  Then I searched for Kay Kimble. She was almost twenty years younger than Ruth. Pellner had told me she grew up in New Bedford, a town known historically for its whaling, and currently for its commercial fishing. People there worked hard, and life wasn’t always easy. So Kay and Ruth weren’t from the same town, not even the same state. It made me wonder if I was wrong about a Ruth-Kay connection. I was getting nowhere, so I decide to talk to Miss Belle about my discovery in the scrapbooks.

  I found her in her study, pulling one book after the other off the shelf.

  “Still trying to find The Sun Also Rises?” I asked. “I thought you’d already searched in here.”

  She nodded. “Do you think it’s a fool’s errand? I keep thinking it might have been missed, or it’s wedged somewhere.”

  “I don’t know. For all we know, Sebastian returned the book the week after he borrowed it.”

  “Roger would have gone through his brother’s things when Harold died,” Miss Belle said. “If it had been returned he’d have known it.”

  I nodded. “I supposed he would have.”

  “Of course his brother could have sold it at some point,” Miss Belle said.

  “Then why doesn’t anyone know where it is? Although if it was a private sale there isn’t necessarily a record.” Again, I was struck with how many variables played into all of this. It was the worst jigsaw puzzle ever. None of the pieces fit.

  “No one knew Harold had it, as far as I can tell. It’s all very perplexing,” Miss Belle said.

  I nodded. When I told her about my suspicions about Winnie and Sebastian’s ancestors, she’d be even more perplexed. “I found the old scrapbooks upstairs. They seem to be from Sebastian’s family, not yours.” Miss Belle raised her eyebrows. “I could see the resemblance between Mrs. Winthrop Granville and some of the women in the albums.”

  “I knew they were here. They were some of the things we moved over recently.”

  “Did she go up to the attic to look at them?” I asked. Maybe Winnie had used that as an excuse to visit the manuscripts.

  “No. I don’t think she knew they were here. I did enjoy Winnie’s stories about traveling through Europe with her mother as a child. Apparently, her mother was something of a bon vivant.”

  “It doesn’t have seemed to rub off on her.”

  Miss Belle laughed. “Not at all.” She stopped and frowned. “How did she end up with the Hemingway stories in the first place? When did
you say they were stolen?”

  “In 1922 in Paris.”

  “She wouldn’t have been born yet. She was born in 1927.”

  “What about her mom?” I asked. Maybe I needed to go up to get the scrapbook. But I was still hesitant. It seemed like evidence, although the statute of limitations would have been up years ago.

  Miss Belle scrunched up her face. “I should know. The Winthrop Granville family history has been pounded in to me at every meal we’ve shared since Sebastian and I married.” She took a moment. “Her mother traveled Europe after she graduated from high school. As I said, a bon vivant.”

  Miss Belle began pulling books off the shelf again. I went over to her. We’d take several books off and look in and behind them before setting them back.

  “I might as well tell you, because you saw my mother-in-law take the paperweight. It’s been a problem for years. But the family always managed to keep it out of the papers. If she was going shopping, there would be a discreet call to the manager of the store to make sure things that were taken were charged to their account. Or she’d have a companion who went with her and made sure to pay for whatever she took.” Miss Belle shook her head. “It was an awful burden for the whole family.”

  “Why didn’t she get help?”

  “Help?” Miss Belle made a snorting sound. “And admit something was wrong with a member of the Winthrop Granville family? It’s no wonder Sebastian wanted to move out here, and why we traveled so much.”

  We worked silently for a while. Moving from shelf to shelf, looking, clearing, reshelving. My phone binged, alerting me a text had come in. It was Tracy, asking me to meet her. I agreed to meet her at the tot lot across the street from the police station.

  “I have to run an errand. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  “Thanks for all you’ve done.”

  “Listen. Please don’t tell anyone about my suspicions about your mother-in-law.”

  “Why?”

  “Let the police handle it.”

  “They know about this?” Miss Belle’s voice lost its soft Southern edge.

  I nodded guiltily. “I talked to Officer Pellner this afternoon, when I started putting things together.”