Death In The Stacks: An Elinor & Dot library mystery

by Linda S. Bingham

  No, it was best all around that she bear up to the occasional bout of self-reflection, self-questioning. And if those feelings threatened to turn into full-blown self-pity, she could always count on Dot to shake her out of it.

  After eating her scrambled eggs and toast, Elinor washed and dried her plate and utensils, put away the butter. She was still wearing her good clothes. She walked down the hall to the bedroom to change, but instead slipped off her shoes and laid across the coverlet.

  It seemed that Bill had come into the room and was waiting for her to wake up. She wanted to wake up. “Oh, Bill! Oh, dearest Bill.” She hadn’t known he was here. She would’ve prepared. She reached toward him but he remained just out of reach. “Where were you?” she cried. “Elinor,” he said, stubbornly reasonable, “I was in the library all the time.”

  The light in the house had shifted to its afternoon aspect. She tried to hang on to the dream. It felt so real. Bill, right there in the room with her. But he had never seen this house. The dream, as all dreams do, slipped away. Now the only part that remained was the feeling in her body, one that bespoke Bill and all he meant to her. Feeling comforted, she got up and took off her good clothes, pulled on some easy ones and went into the den to turn on TV. It was shockingly late. She never slept in the daytime. It felt as if she had lost a day. Already the scene that had greeted them in the library that morning, the dark, weirdly arranged body with obvious trauma to the neck, seemed like something she had seen in a movie. Nothing to do with her. She barely knew Eula Wyckham. What could a home health nurse have done to bring such violence on herself? Such hatred? Oh, sure, blame the victim, she chastised herself.

  DeWayne’s theory was surely the correct one. The murder of Eula Wyckham was a random act. A stranger had come through the unlocked door off the alley, a mad man, a tramp, slipping unseen into the back of a random building, perhaps seeking shelter from the blistering heat, and finding a female sitting there, absorbed in whatever it was Eula Wyckham did in that carrel. An easy victim, he thought, silencing her with a ferocious slash to the throat. She couldn’t cry out, not with a severed jugular, couldn’t fight off her attacker.

  And for what? A purse? A laptop? Did he know she was a nurse? Did he hope to find drugs in her bag, purse, or whatever she kept her car keys in? Did this person, whoever it was, have her car keys now? Why had he not taken her car? Maybe, like Elinor, he didn’t know what she drove, which added weight to DeWayne’s hypothesis that Eula Wyckham’s killer didn’t know her. And where was her car now? Where would the police have taken the car of a murder victim, a car they didn’t have the key to?

  Elinor, Elinor, she chided herself. It was pointless trying to make sense of some crimes. On her TV screen more violence was playing out on an American street. Police with military style weapons, helmeted, dressed in black, closed in on a shooter. She reached for the remote and shut off the TV. She couldn’t face that tonight.

  But her mind wouldn’t leave the image of the murdered woman. Was she really seeing the scene as it was, or had her mind already begun to fill in where memory failed? She was certain of one thing. Eula Wyckham had fallen face forward into the keyboard of the library’s #3 machine. That meant she had been using the machine. Were it her laptop, she would have shoved the keyboard aside to make room for it. Maybe it was immaterial that she owned a laptop that wasn’t found at the crime scene. Maybe Dot’s memory was the faulty one and Eula Wyckham wasn’t interested in genealogy.

  It seemed to Elinor that she had seen the woman pass through the library fairly often, yet she couldn’t recall a single time Eula Wyckham had ever checked out a book or asked for a reference item. In fact, the only time they had ever spoken was that time Ms. Wyckham asked how to log on to the public wi-fi system. Months ago, surely. So, which machine did she use in that carrel? The big desktop available to the public, or her own laptop? If it was the public computer, did her killer reach over Eula Wyckham’s dead body and hit the power button after she was dead?

  The ringing phone shattered the stillness. It was Dot. “Elinor, I’m feeling a little shaky. How about you? Want to come sit with me for a while?”

  It was as good a reason as any to get out of that big empty house.

  *****

  Shelby Jacks came home just in time to catch Gary aiming an imaginary pistol at Enid’s head. “Don’t do that!” his father yelled. “I swear, you’re gonna grow up to be a… ” Kate appeared in the doorway to the kitchen and shook her head. They had agreed not to let their son know they feared he had a violent future ahead of him. Shelby brought the smell of the feedlot in with him, a not unpleasant mixture of coastal Bermuda, sunshine, cows, and manure.

  “What about the, um, item found at the library?” Kate said.

  “I’m not talking to you about that. You’ll just pass it on to that nosy old aunt of yours.”

  “Aunt Elinor is not nosy! It’s simple human interest. After all, she found the… the item.” She was aware of the sudden silence in the living room. The children knew something important was being kept from them.

  “Anyway, nothing to it,” Shelby said. “Illegal hopped off a train, tried a back door and found it unlocked. That old woman didn’t look like she had two nickels to rub together. He didn’t even take her car.”

  “You’d think, if he jumped off a moving train, he would need a car to make his getaway,” Kate said, trying not to sound sarcastic.

  “It would take a pretty brazen criminal to hang around a police station long enough to find the car that fit that key.”

  Alerted by his wife’s expression, Shelby swung around. Gary and Enid, united in curiosity, stood in the doorway. “What happened to her, Daddy?” Enid said. “Stevie said she got murdered.”

  *****

  Dot did indeed look a bit gray. “Not like me to carry on like this,” she said apologetically.

  “I’ll make us some tea, Dot. Did you eat anything today?”

  “Left my sandwich at work. I packed the last two slices of that good apple pie I made too. I was going to give one to you.”

  “Let me rustle up something for you. You’re probably just hungry.”

  Elinor went into the kitchen and stifled the “tuh” that came to her lips. Dot had never been much of a housekeeper, never had to answer to any but her own standards. The kitchen, not to mention every other part of her house, was cluttered with books, newspapers, ripening tomatoes from her backyard, drying herbs, piles of unsorted recycling, empty Mason jars, the morning’s breakfast dishes.

  Elinor did her best to ignore the disorder and focus on her task. It would serve no purpose to chide Dot for her slovenly habits, not at her age, not just now when she was feeling fragile. This is why I live alone, Elinor thought. I can’t bear the chaos in other people’s lives. She opened Dot’s refrigerator and studied the contents. Someone, no doubt who owned a cow, had given her a rounded pat of fresh butter. And there was bread.

  “I’ll make us some toast,” she called. “Where are those peach preserves I brought you yesterday, Dot?”

  “I had one jar for supper last night,” Dot said. “The other one should be on the table there somewhere.”

  This time a “tuh” escaped her. “You have the eating habits of an eighth grader, Dot.”

  Eventually Elinor returned to the living room with a pizza box acting as a tray for two cups of herbal tea and a stack of buttered toast. Dot sat up from the couch and reached for a cup. Elinor looked around for a place to sit and finally shoved aside a mound of crossword puzzles and magazines from the easy chair.

  “Really, Dot. You’re going to wind up one of those creatures they find buried under a mountain of her own belongings.”

  “Has it gotten that bad?” Dot looked around as if seeing her home through another’s eyes.

  Elinor was annoyed with herself for saying anything. “Well, I should talk. I got home today, missed Rusty again, looked around and felt suddenly that I had made a terrible mistake buying that big old farm hou
se too far out from town. I should’ve gotten a cozy little cottage in town. Remember that little house I rented when I first started teaching? I only had the left half. It was about the size of your living room.”

  “I wouldn’t care to be out in the country,” Dot said. “Maybe you should get another dog.”

  “I couldn’t go through that again, Dot. Nearly broke my heart when the vet put Rusty down. No, my dog-owning days are over. You know, he chose me, not the other way around. I never wanted a dog. You may remember that I advertised in the paper for weeks trying to find his owner.”

  “Rusty was a lot of company to you. Me, I’ve never even owned a cat. Never wanted to take care of anything else.”

  “I laid down this afternoon. Almost never do that. Went right to sleep.”

  “It was the shock, I expect.”

  “I dreamed something about Bill. He came into the room and I was so glad to see him. Oh, my! I wanted to hold his dear face but I couldn’t. I couldn’t reach him. It was just a dream. He said, ‘I was in the library all the time.’”

  “Really? You don’t have a library. You call it a study, don’t you?”

  Elinor thought for a moment. “I don’t think he meant my study. I think he meant… Dot, what if the person who killed Eula Wyckham wasn’t some stranger who came through the back door? What if it was somebody who was already in the library, and after doing the deed, simply browsed his way through the stacks and left by the front door?”

  “You mean we might have seen the killer?”

  “Why not? We wouldn’t know he—or she—had just put a knife through someone’s throat in the back carrel.”

  Dot’s face twisted. “But surely that person would have blood on him? On his hands?”

  Elinor sighed. “I don’t know enough about anatomy to answer that. I should think severing the jugular would cause some sort of spurting.”

  The two librarians sat for a moment in silence, each replaying on the movie screen of her mind the gruesome scene they had happened on only that morning, smelling again that awful cloying scent, which, even now, seemed to fill the nostrils. If an odor registered on a scale of some sort, Elinor calculated, one degree further would be the stench of death.

  “It seems to me, from the brutality of the act, that it had to be someone who knew her, hated her,” Elinor said. “DeWayne and Shelby have their own theory. They think it was a stranger, a random act of violence. A vagrant. The railroad tracks are only two blocks away. A person could slip in, maybe think she had money in her purse.”

  “She was a nurse. If her killer knew that, he might think she had drugs on her. Or maybe they were after her money or laptop,” Dot said.

  “Forget the laptop, Dot. If she was using her own machine, she would have shoved aside that #3 keyboard to have a place to put it.”

  “Good point. I know Libby made sure nothing was running on the network—we were shutting down for a long weekend. So if Eula Wyckham wasn’t using her own computer, and she wasn’t using #3, what was she doing in that carrel?”

  “We don’t know that she hadn’t been using the computer. The killer could’ve turned it off, reached over and hit the power button.”

  “Why bother?” Dot thought for a moment. “Unless it was to keep us from coming back there to turn it off ourselves and finding her body sooner.”

  “Another reason this doesn’t look like a random act, Dot. If it wasn’t theft, if the killer knew Eula Wyckham and wanted her dead, her belongings might be immaterial.”

  Dot’s sobriquet in high school wasn’t “Brain” for nothing. “So, why take them? Why risk leaving the library carrying out somebody else’s stuff? Her purse, keys, laptop?”

  “We were busy, but we might’ve noticed a man carrying a purse,” Elinor said slowly. “Or a woman carrying two of them. DeWayne thinks the fact that her things are missing is proof the killer came and went by the back door.”

  “If she wasn’t killed for her possessions, that stuff might still be in the stacks.” Dot leaned back against the cushions. “Oh, my.”

  After a moment, Elinor said: “The weapon might be there, too.”

  Chapter 3

  FRIDAY, July 7

  Dot, who barely cleared five feet and had never played sports, took the low shelves. Elinor, a former basketball player, stood on a stool and pulled books from the top, searching for anything that might have been stashed between rows of books in the rear stacks. Against the wall behind them was the carrel that had been the scene of a horrific murder, now cleared of its chair, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. The crime lab had left the CPU. Because there was no blood on it? Or because they saw no value in finding out what, if anything, the murdered woman had been doing on that computer?

  On the other side of the poorly insulated wall the library shared with the police station, they could hear DeWayne on his telephone. Toward the front, the dispatcher was yelling into a two-way radio, trying to make herself understood to a unit out in the field, and as background to it all, a 24-hour news channel out of Oklahoma City monotonously looped on a television set. The police were in full investigative mode, but only now was the library reopening.

  Elinor and Dot had agreed to arrive early to carry out their plan of searching the stacks before unlocking the doors. They could’ve mentioned Dot’s idea to DeWayne and let the professionals do the looking, but he had made clear his disdain for civilian input, for old women in general, and for elderly library volunteers in particular. The best proof they weren’t fools was to find Eula Wyckham’s belongings themselves. And if they didn’t find anything, no one need know they had tried.

  It didn’t take them long. Dot, pulling a row of massive volumes from a lower shelf, remarked that they really needed to dust down there, then caught her breath. Elinor hopped down from her stool to join Dot on her knees.

  “Don’t touch anything, Dot.”

  The volumes were a matching set of classical works they catalogued as “rare,” left to the library by a dead judge. No one ever asked for these books, but they couldn’t get rid of them since the judge still had family in the area.

  “I suppose you want me to go get DeWayne,” Dot said.

  “We don’t know it’s Eula Wyckham’s bag. Wouldn’t hurt to peek in and see if we were right about the laptop.”

  “It’s canvas. It won’t have fingerprints,” Dot pointed out.

  Gingerly, Elinor eased the black tote from its hiding place. Pulling the two halves of a magnetic closure apart, she and Dot peered into the depths. They could see a set of keys, a stethoscope, a day-planner, and some sort of blade, a boning knife, Elinor thought. Twisted untidily around the handle of this knife was a wad of latex.

  “Gloves,” Elinor said, reclosing the bag. “They won’t find any fingerprints at this crime scene. Eula Wyckham’s killer came prepared. All right, Dot, go and fetch that knucklehead DeWayne.”

  *****

  Janie Calender had been seated some twenty minutes in Betty Blanton’s outer office, long enough to exhaust any interest she might have had in Field & Stream, Ladies Home Journal, and a two-year-old issue of People magazine. Too polite to openly express impatience, she smiled at Betty Blanton’s secretary Alice Simms, seated nearby in front of a computer screen, headphones covering her ears, fingers flying over a keyboard. In Janie’s own office at the church, no visitor ever came calling without being offered a cold drink, some conversation, and, like as not, a ticket to the latest fundraiser. Janie discreetly checked her watch. What on earth was this about?

  Finally the conversation on the other side of the wall ceased and Betty Blanton flung the door open. “Hey there, Mrs. Calender. Come on in. Sorry to keep you waiting. Caught the judge I needed to talk to and couldn’t get off the phone. Have a seat.”

  “Goodness,” Janie said. “This is making me so nervous. What’s it about?”

  “It’s about the estate of Eula Wyckham.”

  “Her estate?”

  “You do know that Ms. Wyc
kham is dead?”

  “Oh, yes. We’re all just… our own library, too. It’s so awful.”

  “I drew up her will not long ago. There’s a copy for you.” Betty Blanton pushed a blue-bound and stapled packet forward on her desk. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but Ms. Wyckham left her entire estate to you. Didn’t she tell you?”

  Speechless, Janie Calender dropped suddenly into the client chair. “Why, no, she didn’t. We weren’t close. She started coming to our church not long ago and I sold her a ticket….” Reminded of her constant quest to sell tickets, Janie reached for her purse, but the lawyer brought her back on point.

  “Doesn’t surprise me. She was a very private individual. She did tell me that you had once lived with her.”

  “That’s right. Eula Wyckham did some nursing in our home when I was in high school. My mother was sick. I wish you wouldn’t mention this—there’s still such a stigma about TB. Daddy couldn’t cope and ended his own life. One day Miss Wyckham caught me crying my eyes out and I told her I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. She was a no-nonsense kind of person, very matter-of-fact. ‘Well, you’ll just have to come live with me,’ she said. The day I showed up with my suitcase, she said she hoped I wouldn’t be a bother because she wasn’t used to having a teenager around.” Janie stifled a giggle. “Sorry. I must be giddy.”

  “Sounds like she never forgot you, Mrs. Calender.”

  “So, what does that mean, her entire estate?”

  “Other than her house and car, I’m not sure what assets she owned. As her executor, it will be my job to liquidate those assets, pay off any debts she had, and turn over the residue to you. I’ll be in touch.”