Murder in the Locked Library

by Ellery Adams

  “But your role—” Uncle Aloysius began.

  “Needs to be redefined.” Jane had cut him off. She’d softened her tone and added, “My role almost cost me my sons. I cannot lose the man I love because I am Guardian to Storyton Hall. I’m going, and I need at least one Fin to come with me.”

  Jane had refused to discuss the matter further. There’d be logistics to work out and the twins’ care and safety to see to, which was where her announcement to the Cover Girls came in.

  Looking at them now, Jane said, “As you know, I very rarely leave Storyton. But in a few weeks, as long as the boys are totally and completely okay, I plan to take a short trip. In my absence, I’ll need one of you to look after Fitz and Hem.”

  Nearly all the Cover Girls jumped at the offer. Only Eloise remained quiet, staring at Jane with a mixture of surprise and confusion.

  And why wouldn’t she? Jane thought. My sons were just abducted. Here I am, hours later, talking about leaving them.

  “Why do you need to go away now? So soon, after everything that’s happened?” Eloise asked after the rest of the women had fallen silent.

  Jane reached across the table and took her friend’s hand. She loved Eloise’s candor. She loved how protective her best friend was of Jane’s entire family. She loved Eloise’s loyalty and her passion for books, her neighbors, and her friends. It wasn’t just for her sake that she had to rescue Edwin; it was for Eloise’s as well.

  “‘Not all those who wander are lost,’” Jane said to her friend, repeating the line from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. “But some are. And they need the people who love them to find them and bring them home.”

  She saw that Eloise understood. Her oldest and truest friend smiled and quoted another line from Tolkien, “‘Deep roots are not reached by the frost.’ Let me keep the boys, Jane. It would make me so happy.”

  Jane nodded and, after glancing at the clock, told the Cover Girls that she wanted to spend the rest of the day alone with her sons. She thanked them for the treats, the company, and the comfort. As they passed through her gate, her hand automatically moved to touch her locket.

  And then, she remembered.

  She hadn’t put the locket back on following last night’s ordeal. It was in her jewelry box, sitting next to the owl brooch Edwin had given her.

  Jane realized that Randall had been right about a few things and that it was time to update her role as Guardian. That included where she hid the key to Storyton’s secret library. There would be many changes ahead, but like the new season, Jane had faith that they’d be for the best.

  After taking a moment to breathe in the air, which was perfumed by fresh-cut grass warmed by the September sun, Jane went back inside to read to her sons.

  Read on for a sneak peek of the next

  The Secret, Book & Scone Society mystery,

  THE WHISPERED WORD,

  coming soon from Kensington Publishing Corporation.

  Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody

  forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies.

  Yoko Ono

  “That girl’s got one foot in the grave.”

  Nora Pennington, proprietress of the only bookshop in Miracle Springs, North Carolina, glanced from her friend to the empty chair where she expected to find the fragile, slip of a girl who’d hidden in the stacks until past closing time. However, the girl wasn’t there.

  Recalling the hospital ID bracelet encircling the girl’s bony wrist, Nora returned her attention to her friend. “June, did she say anything to you? Or to Hester or Estella?”

  June grunted. “Oh, sure. She told the three of us her whole story. Yes, ma’am. She donated a kidney to the love of her life and the surgery took place without a hitch, but when the sweethearts woke up, Miss-Skinny-As-A-Broom-Handle found out that Mister Right was Mister Seriously Wrong. According to a news report, he was an escaped serial killer. No, that wasn’t it. He ran a cult. So she bolted from the hospital when the nurses weren’t watching, snatched a housedress from a clothesline, and hopped a train to Miracle Springs.”

  The woman behind June issued a throaty chuckle.

  “June Dixon, I believe you could write fiction if you had the notion,” declared Estella Sadler in an exaggerated Southern accent. Estella uncrossed her shapely legs and stood up. Jerking a thumb toward the back of the bookstore, she said, “Unless you need help evicting your bubble wrap refugee, I’m calling it a night. You know I live for excitement, but even I need a break. Besides, if I’m planning to add Good Samaritan to my resume—a title I never thought I’d add—then I could use a decent night’s sleep. Sweet dreams, ladies.”

  Nora turned to Hester Winthrop, the fourth member of The Secret, Book & Scone Society, and arched her brows. “Bubble wrap refugee?”

  “You’ll see,” Hester said as she picked up her handbag. “I need to get going too. The bread won’t knead itself at five in the morning and I’ll be baking extra loaves starting tomorrow to put in our secret gift bags.”

  June shook her head. “I don’t know many people who wake up when it’s dark out and work all day long without taking a break. With your freckles and endless energy, you remind me of Pippi Longstocking.”

  Hester grinned. “Except Estella’s the redhead, not me.”

  June grunted again. “Estella’s no Pippi. She’s catlike. She moves with slow grace until it’s time to pounce. Who does she remind me of?” She tapped her finger against her chin. “Shere Khan. That’s it! The tiger from The Jungle Book.”

  “And what book character are you?” Nora asked, unable to avoid being drawn in by the subject.

  June put her hand over her heart. “When I worked at the nursing home, one of my favorite patients called me a Black Mary Poppins.”

  Seeing the shock on Hester’s face, June burst into laughter. “Honey, I wasn’t offended. This lady meant it as a compliment. She wanted me to know that she could see how I tried to put a little magic into the residents’ lives.”

  Hester gestured in the direction of Nora’s small stockroom. “I don’t think there’s been much magic in that one’s life lately. What are you going to do about her, Nora?”

  Nora shrugged. She’d moved to Miracle Springs in search of peace and privacy. She hadn’t wanted a single responsibility beyond owning her tiny house and her one-of-a-kind bookstore. She hadn’t wanted any pets. Or close relationships. She refused to join a place of worship or participate in charity events. She didn’t sponsor children’s athletic teams, enter bake offs or gardening competitions, or take sides in local politics. She didn’t seek out anyone’s company. Despite her reclusive nature, people sought her out.

  Strangers came looking for her. People from other states and sometimes, other countries. People with skin of every color. People with an array of stories to tell. People carrying a burden they were incapable of putting down.

  These weary souls came to her, the “woman who might have been beautiful, had she not been burned,” or “the bib-liotherapist with the burn scars.” These were examples of how the Miracle Springs Lodge staff members referred to Nora. They made these remarks without malice, for the majority of the hotel and spa employees liked her. Or, more accurately, they liked her bookstore. It was difficult not to. In fact, it was virtually impossible not to fall in love with the place.

  Meandering through the bookshop was like falling in love for the very first time.

  In the beginning, Nora’s customers would hesitate near the front door in case they wanted to beat a hasty retreat. Many entered fearing the store would be stocked with only New Age titles and crystals—a reasonable concern in a town built upon the premise of healing.

  People had been traveling to the region’s hot springs and thermal pools for nearly two centuries in search of pain relief—whether of body or spirit—and the waters continued to draw the broken, the injured, and the spent to the remote hamlet. Because Nora had never bathed in the hot springs, she couldn’t say if the waters had re
storative powers.

  But she believed books had the power to heal. She believed that the experiences of an author, rendered into carefully chosen words, gifted readers with the ability to let go of their painful past and continue their story anew.

  Because of this, Nora’s store was stuffed with books of every imaginable format and genre. There were the latest bestsellers with glossy hardcovers. There were dog-eared, yellowed, used paperbacks. There were first editions, signed books, and beautiful, leather-bound books with gilt lettering. Some books had no words at all, but were filled with exquisite illustrations or paper sculptures. To Nora Pennington, every book had value. Every story had meaning.

  Faced with this overwhelming cornucopia of books, Nora’s first-time customers needed a minute to get their bearings. After all, there was so much to see. A warren of shelves immediately invited them to wander—to become lost in a labyrinth of colorful spines. And yet, something close at hand also tempted them to pause. This temptation was often a beautiful book cover. At other times, it was a shelf enhancer.

  Nora created the term “shelf enhancer” before ever opening Miracle Books. One day, when she was still assembling her initial inventory, she’d been rummaging through a box of books at the local flea market when she’d come across a pair of bronze owl bookends. They weren’t in perfect shape. There was minor flaking to the bronze in several places, undoubtedly due to age. Regardless of their flaws, Nora liked the owls. Their gaze was stern, almost severe. And their talons were hooked over a stack of thick tomes, lending the impression that they were guarding the knowledge held within the books.

  “If you buy the set of Nancy Drews, I’ll give you a discount on the owls,” the vendor had said to Nora while overtly studying her burn scars.

  Though Nora was used to being stared at, she wasn’t used to bargaining. Still, she knew that she’d have to buy every book at rock bottom prices if she wanted her business to succeed, so she turned the bookends over in her hands and thought of how much more interesting her future store would be if her shelves were enhanced by unique, eye-catching, vintage items. And then, she’d begun to haggle.

  The shelf enhancers became impulse buys for locals and visitors alike. Now, as Nora moved deeper into the stacks, she walked by a wooden mortar filled with crushed lavender, a marble and brass letter holder, a picture frame in pink Lucite, a Victorian child’s porcelain tea set, and an Art Nouveau trumpet vase. And those were just some of the treasures displayed in the Contemporary Romance section.

  As Nora rounded the corner of a bookcase crammed with pulp fiction novels toward the back of the shop, she heard the loud clang of brass bells smacking against wood. The bells, which had once been attached to a horse harness, now hung from a strip of leather behind Nora’s front door.

  The sound meant that her friends had left.

  Nora was alone with her books and the pale, thin girl.

  And there she was, curled into a fetal position on top of a layer of bubble wrap and white packing paper in Nora’s stock room. She looked like an undernourished Goldilocks who’d passed out after a night of too much partying.

  Nora studied the stranger in the dim light. Though her lithe figure and pallid skin made her appear childlike, Nora guessed that she was well out of her teens.

  “What am I supposed to do with you?” she murmured under her breath.

  Nora had intended to live an uncomplicated life in Miracle Springs, but despite her attempts to keep people at arm’s length, she’d recently become friends with three remarkable women and had formed The Secret, Book & Scone Society. In the middle of their investigation into the murder of a visiting businessman, Estella, June, and Hester had each shared their deepest secret with Nora. And eventually, she’d entrusted them with hers—the terrible truth behind the jellyfish burn scar swimming up her right arm and the pod of tiny bubbly octopi scars floating up her shoulder and neck to caress her cheek with their puckered tentacles.

  I’ve already risked enough, Nora thought, staring down at the sleeping girl.

  Miracle Springs was still reeling following the abrupt closing of the community bank. Dozens of people had lost their jobs. Others had been jailed. The town needed to recover. So did Nora.

  But she was torn. Part of her wanted to shake the girl awake and tell her to move on.

  “This is a bookstore, not a hotel,” she could hear herself saying.

  The other part of her remembered how the girl had caressed the book spines when she thought no one had been watching. There had been such tenderness in that touch. And longing. There’d been loss too.

  Nora had seen herself in that moment. Because of that, she strode to one of the shop’s many reading nooks, grabbed the throw blanket from the back of the fainting couch, and draped it over the slumbering girl.

  I wish I could sleep that soundly, Nora thought. But the girl’s hospital bracelet and ill-fitting clothing hinted at a sleep that was anything but sound. This young woman’s sleep was of the bone weary kind. It was the sleep of someone who’d been running and running and had finally run out of steam.

  Nora lingered for a moment to consider why a person would run away from a hospital before she decided that she didn’t want to know the answer to that question. She didn’t want to get involved. She would give the girl food and shelter. For now. That was all.

  After writing a brief note, Nora locked the girl in the bookstore for the night.

  * * *

  The next morning, Nora woke early. She hadn’t slept well and her thoughts were focused entirely on coffee.

  She was well into her second cup when she remembered her stock room Goldilocks.

  “Damn it,” she muttered. She showered, dressed, and made a plate of food for the girl.

  Nora walked the short distance from her tiny house, affectionately dubbed Caboose Cottage by the townsfolk, and unlocked the back door to Miracle Books.

  “It’s Nora! The shop owner!” she called out upon entering. She didn’t want to scare the girl and it was possible that she was still sleeping.

  However, the stock room was empty.

  Nora stood in the doorway and tried to comprehend what she was seeing. The room had been completely altered. The boxes had been flattened and lined up neatly along one wall. There wasn’t a shred of bubble wrap or packing paper in sight.

  Moving through the store to the ticket agent’s booth, Nora glanced around for signs of life. Had the girl used one of the hundred coffee mugs hanging from the pegboard to make herself a cup of coffee or tea? If she had, she’d already washed it and hung it back up.

  “I have fresh bread. It’s lightly toasted and buttered,” Nora said, her voice resonating through the stacks. “Hester baked it. You met her last night. She’s the one with the freckles and the frizzy, blonde hair.” Nora continued on to the checkout counter. “I also have blackberries that I picked yesterday morning. And farmer’s cheese. I could make you a cappuccino or a latte if you’d like.”

  By this time, Nora had reached the register. She set down the plate of food on the counter and stopped to listen. The girl was still here. She could feel her presence. But why was she hiding?

  Nora threaded her way to the front of the store. She was immediately struck by the foreignness of the display window. It had not looked like that last night.

  “What the—?”

  Digging the brass skeleton key that unlocked the front door of what had once been the train depot for Miracle Springs, Nora rushed outside to view the window from the sidewalk.

  What she saw was so magical that she could hardly believe it was real.

  The scene had been created entirely out of packing materials. The central figure was a woman sculptured using clear packing tape. The transparent tape woman held a string fastened to an enormous balloon made of bubble wrap. Both woman and balloon were surrounded by hundreds of origami birds of various sizes fashioned from white paper. The birds swayed and spun, coaxed into subtle movement by the air exiting a nearby duct.


  For a moment, Nora felt as if she were in motion. She almost glanced down, half-expecting the concrete slabs under her feet to have transformed into a moving sidewalk.

  When she looked at the window again, she saw the books. Books with blue covers dangled from the ceiling. White string dug into each gutter, forcing the books to flap open, creating an illusion of wings. Nora found herself shifting left and right in an effort to read every title.

  The girl—for she must be the artist behind this masterpiece—had selected books from a variety of genres. There was Cat in the Hat, Go Set a Watchman, Wonder, All the Light We Cannot See, The Great Gatsby, Eragon, The Mystery at Moss-Covered Mansion, A Brief History of Time, and a dozen more. On the bottom of the window, a whimsical set of cardboard letters spelled out the phrase, “MY BLUE HEAVEN.”

  Nora reentered the store and found the girl standing next to the plate of food. She hadn’t touched it, but was hovering so close to it that her hunger was almost palpable.

  “It’s beautiful.” Nora gestured at the window behind her. “Did you spend all night making that?”

  The girl took a long time to reply. When she finally spoke, her voice was a faint whisper, like a breeze winding through reeds. “It took a few hours.”

  “I think you’ve earned your breakfast,” Nora said, indicating the plate. “Come on. I’ll make you a coffee while you eat.”

  Though the girl said nothing, she picked up the plate and followed Nora to the circle of chairs near the ticket agent’s booth.

  Nora tapped the chalkboard menu affixed to the wall next to the ticket window and asked, “What would you like?”

  The girl stepped up to the menu. Her lips moved as she murmured every word aloud.

  The Ernest Hemingway—Dark Roast