Death In The Stacks: An Elinor & Dot library mystery

by Linda S. Bingham

  “A cleansing,” Rexie said. “A cleansing ritual to heal and restore balance. I know a shaman…”

  “I was thinking of asking Claire Holmes to say a few words.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess that would work too.”

  “You checked these out at 4:23 Saturday, I see.” Elinor raised her eyes from the computer screen.

  “I already told DeWayne Ratliff I didn’t see anything. The place was packed, but I didn’t know very many of them. Mr. Weathers, of course, and Patrick Allen Childers, you, and that lady in the turban.”

  “Dot Hardwick. The turban is for the children. Dot does Story Time on Saturday afternoons.”

  For security reasons, they shelved the digital materials within view of the front desk, making it unnecessary for the girl to go deeper into the stacks.

  “Patrick Allen Childers must be a friend of yours.” Elinor scanned the labels of the replacement DVDs.

  “I thought he was everybody’s friend,” Rexie said. “Whether they vote or not. He’s always trying to get me to register, but I said, look, I’m apolitical. Still, he’s good for a nice chin-wag, if you know what I mean.”

  “He does like to spread himself around. I’ve heard he makes a practice of visiting all the churches on a rotating basis.”

  “Hmmm,” Rexie commented. “Dishes a little to get a little. He’s like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything he can get his hands on, clicking away on his phone all the time. Sometimes I think he’s taking down every word I say. Me, I don’t even own a computer.”

  “Surely an inconvenience in this day and age?”

  “Nope. I’m not getting pulled into all that materialistic crap.”

  “You’ve got a TV, evidently, and a DVD player,” Elinor said, handing over the DVD’s.

  Rexie shook a playful finger at her. “You’d make a good detective, Mrs. Woodward.”

  *****

  Another good detective was Patrick Allen Childers, who was anxious to follow up on the interesting and potentially explosive information Rexie had given him on Saturday. The weekend had been busy. Saturday night he and Lucy had attended a fundraiser for one of his allies on council, Shelby Jacks, who was also running for re-election. And on Sunday they had spent the day seeing and being seen, attending, not one, not two, but three church services, thanks to a funeral at the black church. Lucy promised to take her revenge in shoes.

  He was thinking about Lucy and her endearing little fetish for fancy footwear as he unlocked his office building that Monday morning. Fortunately, he could afford Lucy and her shoe habit. His income derived from tenants in this building as well as a thriving insurance agency.

  His secretary wasn’t in yet. Patrick put on a pot of coffee in the kitchenette and parked himself at his desk to boot up his computer. He drummed on the blotter waiting for icons to populate the screen. “Guy Pettibone,” he said outloud. “Why does that name sound familiar?” From way back though. Guy’s Garage had only been around a year or so. A Google search turned up a State Farm agent in Arkansas named Guy Pettibone. They probably belonged to the same association, had met at some regional conference or convention. Well, two people could have the same name, even an odd one like Pettibone.

  Patrick searched through a few dozen of the nearly half million hits before giving up. Typing “Guy’s Garage” into the search box yielded nothing in Oklahoma. He tried pairing the name with “automotive,” “mechanic,” and “Johns Valley,” but failed to uncover anything useful. Apparently, other than the State Farm agent in Arkansas and somebody in the UK, Guy Pettibone of Guy’s Garage did not exist.

  Stumped, Patrick left his desk and went to pour himself a cup of fresh-brewed coffee. He needed more information. What if this guy—Guy—was a criminal staying one step ahead of the law? Horrified, he made the connection between a criminal turning up in their community and the mysterious and violent death of an old woman in the library. The front door opened and Ann Berry came in.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” he said. “I’m going out.”

  “Looks like you just poured yourself a cup of coffee.”

  “It can wait.”

  *****

  Monday was usually Janie Calender’s favorite day, a day to stay home and put the house to rights after the weekend. Mathew cleared out immediately after breakfast, intent on making some headway on the canoe taking shape in his workshop out back. As usual, he didn’t have much to say about his stay on the mountain, nor what had brought him down a week earlier than she had expected him. On Sunday the family had attended church together, eaten Sunday dinner, then, as always, scattered. I’m the only constant here, Janie thought, sitting amidst the ruins of a breakfast she had served in shifts.

  Sara had left the house early, saying she had something going with the cheerleaders. Janie heard the VW chug down the long steep drive to the highway. Jeffrey, after breakfast, moped around downstairs for a while, then went up to his room. Above her now, Janie could hear the lugubrious tones of the trombone, an instrument which rarely seemed to carry the melody. Despite her determination to maintain a cheerful outlook on life, Janie felt a looming sense of hopelessness. Was it even possible to summon the mental energy to clear the table, do the dishes, put on a stewpot for dinner that evening?

  She looked around at her bright kitchen. She had worked so hard to make life happy and cheerful for herself, for the kids. All she had ever wanted was a family unlike the one she came from. The bright yellows and oranges of the kitchen attested to her efforts to wring cheer from the very wallpaper and dishtowels. A row of windows across the sink filled the room with gloom-destroying light. Why was it such a struggle to fight the darkness? Where did the tide of darkness come from? Did she carry it around inside her, making it impossible to escape? Her father was probably clinically depressed, and had to deal besides with the endless misery of a slow-dying wife. He had seen the job through, only to finish himself off when she died. He had lost the ability to imagine a happier future for himself. If Janie’s mother had been beset by moods, she suffered them alone, behind the closed door of her sickroom.

  Janie had told the lady lawyer about her mother’s illness, but the words did not convey the reality of living with an invalid whose very breath was treated as poisonous. They had moved often, once, Janie heard the landlord say, because he didn’t want his house infected so that no one else would want to live there. Her father was a surveyor and could theoretically make his living anywhere, but only if he was sober. The move to Johns Valley was their last. It was where the family finally broke down, like an old car that couldn’t make another mile. Her mother grew too fragile to move.

  Janie could remember a time when her mother wasn’t bedridden, not confined to her room, when the dishes and utensils she used didn’t have to be boiled. She remembered a mother who loved to sew and make herself pretty dresses. She remembered taking a walk to a little creek one time and seeing the cold water splash over the rocks. But gradually that mother had disappeared and her father began doing the cooking, cleaning, sending her off to school, somehow earning enough money to hold the family together.

  They were poor. But so were lots of people. Janie saw the regulars every month at the commodities distribution center, picking up government surplus butter, cheese, peanut butter, dried milk, canned meat. Their father put a positive spin on the hand-out. Said if they didn’t take it, the government would throw it away.

  Some families are emotionally resourceful enough to handle chronic illness, but it broke Janie’s family. As her mother coughed herself to death, as her father drifted along in an alcoholic haze obtained from Mason jars of moonshine hooch, Janie sought achievement and joy outside the home. Elementary school had been a confusion of new schools, new faces. Once, she didn’t know where to go home at the end of the school day, so the principal drove her around while she looked for something familiar. Finally, in Johns Valley, she got the chance to put down roots and blossom.

  She had never liked to read, but she had
a good head for numbers and did well in math class. In high school, she took accounting and dreamed of going to college and becoming a bookkeeper, even a CPA. Big dreams for a girl who got her clothes at the church rummage sale. The year her mother died, her father succeeded in drinking himself to death, leaving his only child, just weeks from graduation, facing the unhappy prospect of dropping out of school and going to work, untrained, unskilled, and seventeen years old. And so she would have done were it not for Eula Wyckham.

  Why, as an adult, had she never thanked the woman? Why had she avoided eye contact if she spotted the tall, thin, gray-haired figure in the grocery store or post office? Why turn away from her intended destination when she saw the dark blue sedan at an intersection? Why did the very sight of Eula Wyckham evoke avoidance and fear? She couldn’t even bear to examine the impulse to turn away. If pressed—which she never had been—she would’ve said that Eula Wyckham was too closely associated with the worst year of her life.

  Avoidance, distraction, were coping mechanisms that Janie Calender perfected. A happy face and relentless cheerfulness, good works in the community, trotting out a happy family on Sundays, helped her keep it together. That and one other secret ingredient….

  Yes, she should have been more grateful to the home health nurse for giving her the opportunity to finish school with her classmates. Instead, she felt a vague resentment, as if Eula Wyckham were to blame that she had lost so much and had no other option but to accept the offer of shelter from a near stranger. She missed her parents, however imperfect they were.

  It might have made a difference if Eula Wyckham’s home had been more cheerful, the woman herself less somber, but it was clear from the start that she had never shared her home, much less her thoughts and feelings, with anyone. Tight-lipped and introverted, constant in her habits, plain-spoken, Miss Wyckham had Janie’s dinner waiting for her when she came home from school, a single place-setting, food nourishing and plain. Breakfast was laid out in similar fashion. They never shared a meal. Miss Wyckham did not ask for help with the chores. Janie found her laundry washed, folded, and laid out on the foot of her bed.

  Miss Wyckham seemed ignorant of the fact that other teenaged girls had curfews and specific rules of behavior. Exploring the limits of her new freedom, Janie discovered that she could stay out as late and as often as she pleased without repercussion. The unflappable Miss Wyckham said nothing, not even the time Janie was delivered home so drunk she climbed into the wrong bed. Miss Wyckham merely sat bolt upright and said, “I believe you’re in the wrong room, miss!”

  Having more freedom than her classmates, Janie discovered a new popularity with the boys. In fact, it took several boyfriends to make sure she never had to spend an evening at home watching TV with Miss Wyckham. She dated her way through the senior class, then set her sights on first year teacher Mathew Calender who taught shop and civics. Without a mother’s guidance, Janie mistakenly believed that Mathew was exotic because he came from Texas and was over twenty-one. Their relationship was forbidden, too, which added to its allure. Shy and socially inept, Mathew Calender allowed the vivacious high school senior and dominant personality to absorb him. They were married three days after she graduated, and she had her first child nine months after that. She never did go to college. And she never thanked Eula Wyckham.

  But one Sunday the woman turned up at New Community Church and Janie welcomed her and sold her a ticket to the Little Rays of Sunshine banquet. Neither mentioned their old connection. It was easier, now that she was older, for Janie to draw a curtain over the past and view Eula Wyckham in a new and impersonal context. And so she might have stayed if not for the woman’s absurd last will and testament.

  In seventeen years, people had come and gone in Johns Valley. Not many remembered that Janie Calender had spent a few weeks of her teenaged years living with Nurse Wyckham. Now, everyone knew, and they expected her to grieve over the death of a woman she barely knew. She had spent a lifetime forgetting that sad and dreary time; now she was asked to make decisions about what Eula Wyckham had left behind. She owned the dreary little house and dark blue sedan she had so obstinately avoided in the past. She would be getting money when the estate was settled, though probably it wouldn’t amount to much. The woman had lived like a miser. The whole thing was ridiculous. Why did Eula Wyckham emerge from obscurity and place herself squarely in Janie’s path, forcing her to recognize, remember?

  We always think of people from our past, if not ceasing to exist altogether, as staying the way we remember them. On the rare occasions Eula Wyckham had come to mind over the past dozen years, Janie had pictured her going off on her rounds in the morning, returning to a solitary meal in that small dark kitchen, sitting till bedtime in her poky little living room. Kate Jacks, the real estate agent, had thought Janie unfeeling and a little strange that she didn’t want to see the house that was hers now.

  “Are you sure?” she pressed. “Betty Blanton wanted you to have the opportunity.”

  “No,” Janie told her. “I would feel weird going in that house, going through her things.”

  “Of course! I’m so sorry.” Kate thought she didn’t want to see the house because the woman had been murdered, and Janie didn’t tell her otherwise. “We’ll price it to sell and get it cleared out. I’ll let Ms. Blanton know when we have a buyer.”

  Janie got up from the table and began clearing the dishes. What she needed was a few hours at another table, the one up at Kiamichi Lodge. She had worked up some new numbers and was anxious to give them a try. She leaned over the sink and looked out at Mathew’s shop. She could hear the band saw screeching and see sawdust flying out the door in a golden cloud. He would never notice she was gone.

  *****

  Patrick Allen Childers pulled up in front of Guy’s Garage and was disappointed to see the bay doors rolled down. Monday morning, and Guy’s was closed. Empty cars sat waiting for service.

  “Huh!” Patrick looked for business hours posted somewhere, but didn’t see any. “Keeps whatever hours he likes, I guess. Wonder where the fellow lives?” Rexie might know. She dated him for a while, though she claimed she could feel toxic chemicals oozing out of him. He decided to walk next door to the salvage yard and see if they might know.

  “Fellow likes to keep to himself,” the owner of this establishment told him, a surly individual named Fred Donahue. “What’s your business with him?”

  “My wife brought my car in for service last week, and now I hear a funny rattle under the hood.”

  “Did you lift the hood to see what it was?”

  Patrick demurred. “Oh, no. I don’t do cars.” He handed over a business card. “But I do insure them. How are you fixed for liability insurance, Mr. Donahue?”

  “I keep a ten-gauge under the counter. That’s all the insurance I need.”

  “Well, that won’t help much if somebody hurts themselves on your property.” Patrick switched hats. “Are you a registered voter, Mr. Donahue?”

  “I know you’re the mayor, Mr. Bigshot. I seen you on the fire truck last week throwing suckers at the kiddies. But you see that sign right out there on the highway? That’s the city limits. I’m outside it. I can’t vote for you.” His expression said that he wouldn’t even if he could.

  Patrick Allen Childers, undaunted as either insurance salesman or political candidate, refused to give up. “You probably know people who do, though, Fred, and I’d like to give you a little something to keep for yourself or pass along.” Patrick whipped out a plastic ruler stamped with his image and the phrase “Patrick Allen Childers, the man with a plan.”

  “I’ll treasure it forever,” Fred Donahue said nastily.

  “Well, okay, then. I’ll come back another time. You think Guy might be open tomorrow?”

  “You never know. Why don’t you call him on the phone? He answers the phone.”

  “Right. Well. I’ll do that. Thank you for your time, Mr. Donahue.”

  “No prob. You come again, hear?�
�

  Patrick Allen Childers walked back to his car. “Asshole.” He picked up his cell phone and called DeWayne Ratliff.

  *****

  “My mom got married the minute she graduated,” Sara said. “And to one of her teachers who was a lot older than her. She couldn’t say a thing about it if I was to do the same thing.”

  Guy Pettibone gently freed his arm from behind her head. The two of them barely fit in the bed that would shortly transform back into a table. “I don’t know, sweet thing. I never thought of myself as the marrying kind.”

  “Come on, Guy. You know you can’t live without me. You just said so. Don’t make me go back to that house. Let’s just take off. I don’t even care if I finish school.”

  “What’s wrong with your house?”

  “It’s lonesome.”

  “How can that be, honey? You got both parents. That’s more than I ever had, and a brother.”

  “Don’t count my dad—he’s only there when you don’t want him to be. And Mom is so busy running the world she doesn’t have time for me. Jeffrey’s okay. He didn’t tell on me like I thought he would. But he’s a creepy little guy, always listening in on things when he thinks no one’s paying attention.”

  “Hush for a minute,” Guy said. “Did you hear something?”

  “Just that jet engine of an air-conditioner,” Sara said. “I half expect this whole thing to lift off.”

  Guy slipped out of bed and shut the unit off. “Shhh! Listen.”

  “I don’t hear anything.” Nevertheless, Sara sat up and reached for her t-shirt. Guy had moved to the window over the sink to peek out.

  “Holy shit! It’s the friggin’ swat team.”

  “What!” Sara shrieked. “Oh my god, what’ll we do?” She fumbled frantically through the tangle of sheets trying to find her underwear.

  Guy rolled out the tiny window over the sink. “Hey, out there!” he shouted. “Hold your fire. We’re not armed.”

  Sara burrowed under the pillows.