The Hiding Place

by Paula Munier

  “That’s a lot of books,” said Troy.

  “I suspect she was a lonely child.”

  “Books were her friends.” Mercy started a pile for romance and a pile for mystery.

  “Yes.” Louise smiled. “And her education and her entertainment and her escape.” Her smile faded. “I don’t think she had many friends. She kept herself to herself.”

  “She was shy?” asked Troy.

  “I don’t know if it was shyness or timidity or both.” Louise sighed. “I suppose you know the story. Her mother took off when she was young and left her alone with her father, a wretched man completely unequipped to raise a young girl.” The librarian frowned. “Not a reader.”

  “My grandfather arrested him more than once.” Mercy added a new heap for cookbooks.

  “A very difficult man.” Louise nodded. “He kept her under his thumb, that was clear. She was such a bright girl. She should have gone to college.”

  “She got married instead,” said Mercy.

  “A very unfortunate turn of events.”

  “Out of the frying pan into the fire,” said Troy.

  “Indeed.” Louise rested her elbows on the desk and leaned in. “That husband of hers was a bully. I would see the signs, you know, from time to time: a black eye here, a bruised arm there.”

  “The broken nose,” said Mercy.

  “Yes.” Louise gave her a sharp look. “She was a pretty little thing, but at the rate that man was going she wouldn’t be for very long.”

  “He abused her.” Troy looked up from his notebook to confirm this.

  “Yes, and he controlled her every move. She had to sneak into the library.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She would always stop here on her way home from food shopping. She always put the books she checked out in her recyclable grocery bags.”

  “To hide them from him.” Mercy thought about that as she began a new pile for plays, several slim paperback volumes of Shakespeare among them. She tried to imagine having to hide books from your husband. Tried and failed.

  “I believe so. Good thing he didn’t read or he might have noticed she was always reading a different book.” Louise watched Mercy as she dismantled another tower of books and started going through them. Most of the books she was sorting through now were mysteries and thrillers, modern bestsellers as well as Golden Age classics and noir.

  “I worried about her,” admitted Louise. “But she never said anything, and when I tried to talk to her about it, she changed the subject. You can’t help people who aren’t prepared to help themselves.”

  “She was too scared.” Mercy had seen what fear did to people, and it was never pretty.

  “I often wonder what happened to her,” said Louise. “I can’t imagine that she’s any happier in California with that man than she was here.”

  “Fear follows you wherever you go,” said Mercy.

  “Yes.” Louise put the ledger back on the desk. “Once it takes root in you, it’s hard to get out. It simply grows back.”

  “People can conquer their fears,” said Troy.

  “They need help to do that,” said Louise. “Support. I suppose I failed her there.”

  “You gave her the gift of stories,” said Mercy. “Shakespeare helps me be brave.”

  “Of course he does,” said Troy, with a smile.

  “Beth read Shakespeare,” said Louise. “She read everything there was to read—low-brow and high-brow, genre and literary, old and new. She tended to read in cycles—all romance and then all historical fiction and then Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. And she ordered lots of books. We put in many special orders for her, many of which had to do with New England.” Louise opened the ledger and picked up her pen. “That’s another reason I couldn’t believe she’d move to California. She loved being a Vermonter. She loved New England.”

  “What was Beth reading when she disappeared?” Mercy retrieved an empty cardboard box from the supply in the corner and dragged the first stack of sorted titles over to it.

  “It was such a long time ago,” said Louise. “I’m not sure I can remember exact titles.”

  “Are there no borrowing records you can look up?” asked Troy.

  “Not really.” Louise sniffed. “We didn’t go completely digital until 2005. And as I’m sure you already know we purge our user data on a regular basis.”

  “So Ms. Vo informed us,” he said. “What system did you use prior to 2005?”

  “We used the old card system. But a fire destroyed all those records.”

  Mercy knew that like any good cop Troy would be suspicious of any evidence destroyed by fire. As she would be, too. But librarians made no secret of the fact that they did not like to reveal the borrowing records of their patrons.

  “We would have destroyed them ourselves sooner or later,” said Louise.

  “I’m ready to pack these up if you’re ready to record them.”

  “Go ahead,” said Louise.

  Mercy rattled off the titles as she placed each book in the box. “The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Killing Floor, by Lee Child. The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett.” She looked up at the librarian to make certain that she wasn’t going too fast.

  Louise dropped her pen and snapped her fingers. “That’s it. I remember now. Beth was on a crime fiction kick. Noir especially. She was reading the classics mostly, but contemporary stories too. James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, that sort of thing.

  “Pretty dark stuff,” said Mercy.

  “Yes,” said Troy. “But then Beth was leading a pretty dark life.”

  Louise nodded. “Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place comes to my mind. That may have been the last book she checked out, because I remember hoping that wherever she was, she was no longer in a lonely place.”

  “I’m sure she never felt lonely here in your library,” Mercy said. “This was her haven. She had a friend in you.”

  “I was her friendly librarian. Not the same thing. But she may have had one real friend. Ruby Rucker.”

  Mercy and Troy exchanged looks. “Ruby Rucker?”

  “I never figured her for a big reader,” said Troy. “Not based on what we’ve learned about her so far.”

  “She wasn’t. Sometimes she’d read the fashion and home décor magazines. Or check out travel books. I think she was bored to tears with our little village.”

  “So you knew her.”

  Louise laughed, a surprising titter that took both her and Troy by surprise. “Everyone in town knew Ruby Rucker. Or at least of her.”

  “Seems like a very Odd Couple kind of friendship.”

  “Indeed. But they shared an interest in film.”

  “Film?”

  “Ruby mostly came to the library to check out movies. She liked action-adventure, romance, that sort of thing. Blockbusters. Beth preferred art films. I saw them together sometimes at the Two Rivers Theater,” said Louise. “That’s the independent theater here in town, on Main Street. They play second-run movies and art films.”

  “I’m surprised her husband let her go to the movies.”

  “I doubt he even knew. They were always matinées.” Louise smiled. “Matinées are filled with people sneaking off from work and family to take in a show.”

  “You?”

  “I like films, too, you know. Especially ones with George Clooney.” Louise grinned at them. “Hubba hubba.”

  Mercy and Troy laughed.

  “The theater shows old movies, classics, on Thursday afternoons. They serve wine and soda and popcorn with real butter. You should go sometime. It’s all well and good to watch movies at home on a big-screen TV. But it’s still not the same as the theater. A real theater.”

  “Do you remember which movies were playing when you saw Beth and Ruby?”

  Louise shook her head. “I’m afraid not. But it must have been one of those Thursdays, because that’s the only afternoon I could usually get away back then. And I love those old films. N
ow my time is more my own and I can go whenever I please.”

  “Did Beth ever talk to you about Ruby, or going to the movies?”

  “Never.” Louise sighed. “And I never mentioned seeing her there to her or Ruby or anyone else. It was Beth’s one little rebellion, reading books and seeing films.”

  “Well, we know how subversive you librarians can be,” said Mercy.

  The librarian smiled. “Yes, we are subversive. Reading is subversive. What rebel there was inside Beth Kilgore was the reader in her.”

  Mercy finished up packing the books she’d sorted while Troy went out to the truck to check on the dogs. She thanked Louise Minnette, promising to return the next time she was in Lamoille County, and left, the librarian’s last words ringing in her brain.

  Reading is subversive.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Troy sat in the truck with the dogs. He watched Mercy jog from the library entrance to his vehicle, appreciating the view. She was one of the few people he knew who looked good running.

  “Time to eat,” said Troy.

  “I’m not hungry.” Mercy slammed the door and put on her seat belt. “Let’s go.”

  “You have to eat. Did you even have breakfast?”

  At the word breakfast both Elvis and Susie Bear barked their approval.

  “We’ve got a solid lead now. We know that Beth and Ruby were friends.”

  “Do you want to tell them we’re not taking a break for breakfast? Because I’m not doing it.”

  Elvis leaned his muzzle in and pressed his cold nose against Mercy’s pale neck. “Okay, okay.”

  “We passed a little place on Main Street that looked good. We can order take-out.”

  “Fine.”

  Wyetta’s Café was deserted. It was around 10:30 A.M. now, that dead time between breakfast and lunch. It was a cute place with orange walls filled with brightly colored textile art, one long room with a lunch counter on one side with stools that twirled, a long row of booths on the other side, and a scattering of butcher block tables with yellow tulip chairs between. He could tell Mercy liked it. Especially the art.

  They went up to the counter and sat down on the yellow vinyl stools. Mercy twirled her stool around a couple of times, and he did, too. Just for heck of it. She grinned at him, and in that moment, he saw the fourteen-year-old girl she was when he met her for the first time at the town pool one hot summer long ago.

  A tall, striking woman appeared behind the counter. She had long dreads pulled away from her face in a wide headband and an orange uniform the same color as the walls. A yellow apron was slung around her hips. Wyetta’s Café was embroidered in yellow over her breast pocket.

  “Sit anywhere you want,” she said. “As you can see, you got the place to yourselves.”

  “We just want to order take-out,” said Mercy. “We can’t stay long. We’ve got dogs in the car.”

  “Dogs.” She looked at them as if she were not sure they could be trusted to care properly for a dog. “You’re not from around here.”

  “No.” Troy offered her his hand. “I’m Game Warden Troy Warner, and this is Mercy Carr.”

  “Wyetta Wright.” She shook his hand with a grip worthy of Captain Thrasher and nodded at Mercy. “What kind of dogs?”

  “Newfoundland retriever mix and a Belgian Malinois.”

  “Working dogs.” She whistled, and a brown-and-white basset hound with ears that skimmed the floor shuffled out from behind the counter. “This is James Earl Jones. Earl for short.”

  Earl plodded over to Mercy. She leaned over and gave the droopy-eyed dog a scratch between his Dumbo ears.

  “Are your dogs chill?” asked Wyetta.

  “They’d love Earl,” said Mercy, “if that’s what you mean.”

  Wyetta put her hands on her hips. “And they must be well-trained.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Troy.

  She smiled. “Well, then, bring them on in.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “We appreciate it, but—”

  “I insist,” she interrupted. “It’s cold out there, even for your heavy-coated breeds. And then you can all sit and enjoy my fine cooking the way God intended.”

  “I’ll get them.” Mercy was out the door before he could say anything. So he just smiled back at Wyetta and rubbed Earl’s long belly until she returned with Elvis and Susie Bear flanking her at her hips in perfect heels.

  “That’s a lot of dog,” said Wyetta.

  Earl rolled over and scuttled to his feet, standing as tall as he could on his short legs. Elvis and Susie Bear loomed over him, but he maintained his dignity, at least until the sniffing and snorting began as the three canines got to know each other.

  “That’s enough.” Wyetta led them all over to a booth and handed them menus. Mercy pointed to the framed story quilt that hung above the booth. The fabric painting portrayed two African American women in church hats standing outside a classic white-steepled New England church surrounded by trees under a bright blue sky.

  “I love this piece.” Mercy waved her hand at the art on all the walls. “I love all these pieces.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re the artist?”

  “Yes.” Wyetta gave a little bow. “I’ll be right back with coffee.”

  “Thank you.”

  “She’s an amazing talent,” Mercy said to Troy as she slid into the booth. “Her work should be hanging in galleries.”

  Troy settled in across from her. Now he could face her directly, something he’d missed on the ride up. She picked up the menu and held it before her, obscuring her face again. But she couldn’t do that the whole time. She’d find it harder to avoid his gaze, and he could gauge her reactions better.

  Wyetta was back with coffee for them and water for the dogs. “So, what would you like?”

  “Fried chicken and waffles,” said Troy. “And a burger for Susie Bear.”

  “Breakfast and lunch.” Mercy grinned. “Works for me. We’ll have the same.”

  “You got it.” Wyetta whistled for Earl and they both disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Let’s hear it,” said Troy.

  “What?”

  “Whatever is going on in that supercharged brain of yours. You must have a theory by now.” He leaned toward her conspiratorially. “You know, whatever you’re thinking that you don’t want me to tell Harrington.”

  Mercy sipped her coffee. “I’m not sure what to think. Grandpa Red must have suspected a connection between the two women. That’s why the Vegas postcard was in Beth Kilgore’s cold case files. And he was right. There was actually a link between Ruby and Beth. They were friends. Their friendship must mean something.”

  “It’s hard to imagine two more different women, from what we know about them.”

  “They had some things in common. They were both lonely, unhappy people. Both stuck in situations neither liked.”

  “Ruby got out of hers.”

  “But Beth did not. As far as we know, anyway.” Mercy leaned forward, her elbows on the table between them. A curly tangle of red hair fell into her face, and he resisted the urge to brush it away.

  “People were always abandoning Beth,” she went on. “First her mother abandoned her to her father. Then her father abandoned her to Thomas Kilgore. And finally Ruby abandoned her for Sin City.”

  “You can’t blame Ruby Rucker for that,” said Troy. “Beth Kilgore was a fearful person. I can’t see her defying her husband. Any more than she defied her father.”

  “Maybe she changed.”

  “People don’t change.”

  “Don’t they?” She looked at him and he flushed.

  “No.” He should have seen that landmine coming. And stepped around it. “Not that much.”

  “I thought you were the optimist.”

  She was teasing him now. At least he hoped she was teasing. “I am. But not when it comes a person’s character. How many people do you know who have truly changed?”

  �
�For the better?”

  “Yes, for the better. Changing for the worse is easy. We see people change for the worse all the time in law enforcement.”

  “You must know some alcoholics who stopped drinking for good,” said Mercy, her blue eyes bright in her pale freckled face. “Like my cousin Ed.”

  “True enough.” When they were teenagers, Ed’s drinking had landed him in jail more than once. The second time he’d been driving under the influence, and he’d come within inches of killing a child on a bicycle. That sobered him up, and he’d been a model citizen ever since. “They usually have to hit rock bottom first.”

  “Maybe she hit rock bottom.” Mercy leaned back and put her hands in her lap as Wyetta approached with their food. “Or maybe she finally saw things as they really were.”

  “Smells good,” Troy told Wyetta, as she laid down two platters full of the best-looking fried chicken and waffles he’d ever seen.

  “Wow,” said Mercy.

  “Enjoy.” Wyetta placed two paper plates topped with open-faced burgers on the floor for the dogs. Both Elvis and Susie Bear sat there, waiting politely as they’d been trained to do.

  “Impressive,” she told them. “Go on and eat now.” They chowed down and she waltzed away.

  They ate in silence for a few moments. Mercy seemed totally focused on her food, but Troy was still mulling over her last remark. Sometimes she talked in riddles. “What did you mean exactly, when you said maybe Beth Kilgore finally saw things for what they really were?”

  Mercy poured more Slopeside Syrup on her waffles. The woman could eat, that was for sure. How she stayed so slim, he didn’t know. Must be a strong metabolism and all that hiking she did with Elvis.

  “Martinez told me a story once about fear,” she began.

  Martinez again, thought Troy. He wondered if she’d ever talk about him the way she talked about her lost fiancé. If he were wasting his time hoping for something more than friendship to develop between them.

  “There once was a man whose village was under attack from a neighboring tribe. He was captured by the enemy and locked in a cell overnight with a coiled snake whose venom was known to be lethal. He didn’t dare budge an inch or the snake would strike and he’d die a terrible death. So he cowered in the corner of the cell, as far away from the snake as possible, paralyzed by fear. He waited in dread all night long, terrified of moving or sleeping or even breathing too hard. As the sun began to rise and the dark form of the snake began to take shape across the room, he congratulated himself for keeping so still that he survived the night. But as the rich light of dawn filled the cell, the snake was fully illuminated.”