Death In The Stacks: An Elinor & Dot library mystery

by Linda S. Bingham

  “I notice her office is locked.”

  “Our secure space—locked unless occupied. You wouldn’t believe the people I’ve found wandering through here looking for the drug or sex addicts.”

  *****

  Kate and all three of the younger Jacks were waiting for Elinor when she got home.

  “There she is! There’s Aunt Elinor!” Enid shouted, jumping up and down.

  “I wasn’t expecting you guys,” Elinor said, getting out of the car.

  “We have a surprise! A surprise,” Enid screamed.

  “Hush, sweetie,” Kate said.

  The boys came from across the yard, and now Elinor saw what all the excitement was about. Her nephew Steve was holding a puppy, a growing puppy, wiggly and almost too big to be contained in the 7th grader’s arms.

  “Oh, you got a dog for the kids,” Elinor said. “Good for you, Kate.”

  “It’s not their dog,” Kate said firmly. “It’s your dog, and you are by gosh going to take it.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. I didn’t…” Elinor trailed off as the puppy ceased wriggling and sniffed her hand. Without meaning to, she accepted the armload of dog and the two eyed one another.

  “He’s a pound puppy, Aunt Elinor,” Enid told her. “We saved his life.”

  “He likes shoes,” Gary volunteered. “Look, he chewed a hole in my flip-flop.”

  “He’ll need some training, then,” Elinor said. “Kate, I really don’t have time…”

  “I’m not leaving you alone in this house another day, Aunt Elinor! Rexie Roberts told me what happened here last night. He’s not much use right now, but he’ll grow up to be a good guard dog. Now, bond with him. I brought some lunch.” Kate turned to get bags from the back of her SUV.

  *****

  “I really couldn’t refuse,” Elinor told Dot over the phone later. “Although how I’m going to raise a puppy right now, I just don’t know.”

  “What’s that racket?”

  “He’s howling in the laundry room. I put down newspaper.”

  “Maybe the pound will take him back.”

  “And maybe I’ll live long enough for Kate and the children to forgive me. I’ll take him for a walk as soon as it cools off a bit. We didn’t talk about Mathew Calender’s arrest in front of the children, but she did let me know that Shelby and DeWayne were still at it.”

  “How are you feeling? Has the bump on your head gone down?”

  “I feel fine, actually.”

  “You got an awfully late start on church. I suspect you didn’t go just to hear a good sermon.”

  “You’re right. I wanted to follow up on something Claire Holmes said when we went to see Lucy Childers. When I told her about Patrick’s digital calendar, she mentioned that she had an appointment with him.”

  “The night he was killed?”

  “No, no, sometime later. It was one of those little details that keep me awake at night. What was the appointment for? I’ve sat on dozens of church committees, and I know how they do things. Claire thinks they’re paying too much for her long-term care policy.”

  “I got a quote from Patrick Allen Childers. Saved me fifty bucks a year on car insurance.”

  “Must run, Dot. I’ve got a dog to take care of.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. It will come to me by and by. He has one blue eye.”

  “That’s a start.”

  “None of Rusty’s old doggy things will fit him. I have to buy food, too. Kate means well, but she didn’t half put enough thought into this gesture.”

  “Sometimes I feel lucky I’m the last of my tribe,” Dot reflected. “This is one of those times. When I hang up, I’m going to lay on the couch and work the Sunday crossword. I might get sleepy and take another nap, too.”

  “Don’t rub it in. I’m heading back to town to buy dog food and something to go around this youngster’s neck. See you tomorrow, Dot.”

  *****

  The puppy, lying on the rug next to Elinor’s feet, had exhausted himself with his new chew toy. The television was on, but Elinor’s mind refused to take in the evening news. She kept seeing Mathew Calender’s downcast posture as he was led away in handcuffs, the look on his face, shame, sorrow, not the defiance one would expect from a man whose lies and evil deeds have finally caught up with him. Did he do it for Janie’s sake? Had he overheard Eula Wyckham talking to his wife, and was there some part of that conversation that caused him to follow the woman to the library, enter through the back door, and kill her? And, having done so, did he stash the nurse’s totebag behind a row of dusty reference books, along with the boning knife and single latex glove? Why carry off her laptop and hide it in his shop? Mathew had gone to his mountain retreat the very next day, Sunday. He could’ve taken the computer with him and disposed of it where no one would ever find it. Why was it important to keep it handy?

  Even knowing the identity of the killer did not answer the question of why he did it. What was the connection between the two murders? Rather, which of the many connections was worth paying attention to? The first victim, Mathew Calender’s mother-in-law, scarcely figured in his life until her death. The second victim, Patrick Allen Childers, was the person who had discovered the relationship between Mathew Calender’s teenaged daughter and Guy Pettibone. Were both murders somehow attempts to protect his wife and daughter?

  Elinor remembered the night Mathew Calender had brought his children to the Little Rays banquet. She thought he looked protective, strong, a parental shield against anyone who dared cast a stone. He could’ve taken those children home and returned to town, confronted Childers in the alley, and plunged a knife into his throat. But how did Mathew know Childers would be there? Unless he was the person who had made the appointment.

  As it turned out, quite a few people found the mayor that night. Rexie Roberts said she noticed his office lights burning. Buck Weathers had circled repeatedly and eventually found him, dead, or so he claimed. And Patrick’s wife Lucy, who didn’t call the police to report him missing, was turned away merely seeing Rexie Robert’s car in front of her husband’s office. Each had a different reason for seeking Childers out that night. What was Mathew Calender’s reason? Was it for the phone? He didn’t find it, of course, nor did Buck Weathers, because Rexie had taken it.

  Thwarted in his first attempt to get the phone, Mathew Calender had come after it during the storm, but how did he know it was in Elinor’s handbag? Suddenly she remembered Jeffrey Calender sitting behind them in the Sooner Drive-In. Did the boy tell his father? Or his sister? Which of them drove Sara’s VW through the mud last night?

  “Oh, dear. My ball of yarn is getting untidy again,” Elinor told the new puppy. He raised his head and looked at her with his blue eye, then swung his head in the direction of the road. A small but adult-sounding rrrruff came out of his mouth. “Well, I’ll be, you little rascal. You hear a car, don’t you?” Elinor could hear it for herself now. Someone had turned into her driveway. Headlights glanced off the TV screen.

  Elinor got up and walked down the hall, the puppy scrambling to follow, sounding his tiny but serious bark. Elinor flipped on the porch light and looked out the side glass at Betty Blanton and a tall young man. She opened the door to them. Betty Blanton wasted no time on preliminaries.

  “Ms. Woodward, this young man says you’re trying to figure out a password for the insurance agent’s cell phone. Is that true?”

  “Hello, Jeffrey.”

  His cheeks scarlet, he mumbled a hello.

  “Let’s all go sit down, shall we?” Elinor suggested, leading the way back to the den. The boy distributed his height across the couch and the puppy scrambled into his lap to cover his face with puppy kisses.

  “Jeffrey, did you overhear me talking about that phone in the Sooner Drive-In?” Elinor asked.

  “Bethany texted me.”

  “Bethany Childers told you? Does she know about your dad?”

  Betty Blanton broke
in. “He’s not answering any questions about his father.”

  “Are you representing Mathew?” Elinor asked her.

  “I practice family law. I referred Mr. Calender to a colleague. Jeffrey will answer questions about his father in due time.”

  “My dad would never kill anyone!” Jeffrey blurted. “Not in a million years. He uses knives to gut fish and skin things, but he wouldn’t use it on a person.”

  “We’re here to talk about passwords, Jeffrey,” Betty Blanton told him. “Do not jeopardize your father’s defense by volunteering anything, hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you know anything about Mr. Childers’ passwords?” Elinor asked.

  “No. But I’m good at figuring stuff like that out.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have the cell phone any more.”

  “In that case… ” Betty Blanton rose to her feet.

  Elinor stopped her. “Now wait a minute. There may be another way to view the data stored on that phone. Patrick Allen Childers maintained a database on his home computer. If that machine syncs to cloud storage, we might be able to access his schedule and find out who he had an appointment with that night.”

  With the ease that comes from practice, Jeffrey Calender’s thumbs twitched over the screen of his phone. He looked up and grinned at them through his braces. “Bethany says we should come over right now.”

  “Jeffrey, some people… some parents track their teenagers with a phone app so they don’t worry about them. Do your parents do that?”

  “My dad doesn’t even own a cell phone.”

  “Your mom, then.”

  “Mom does all right, but mostly she just uses her computer for accounting and stuff like that.”

  *****

  Had Elinor not known who lived in that house, she wouldn’t have connected the diminutive person who answered the door to the remembered version of Patrick Allen Childers’ wife Lucy, the immaculately coifed and dressed woman she had last seen standing next to him on the church steps, shaking as many hands as possible. Bereft of makeup, her salon hairdo destroyed from days of lying on it, Mrs. Childers appeared perfectly composed, one might even say, sedated.

  “I was expecting you,” she said.

  Betty Blanton took the lead. “We’re sorry to barge in like this, but Jeffrey Calender and your daughter are trying to help Mrs. Woodward gain access to your husband’s computer records. Is that all right with you?”

  “I don’t know what Patrick did with computers. He always had one in his hands.”

  “I understand. Can we come in?”

  Bethany had appeared behind her mother. She, too, projected a calm that belied the feelings she might have toward a classmate whose father had confessed to the murder of her own father. Jeffrey wants to prove to this girl that his father had nothing to do with it, Elinor thought. She hoped he was right.

  Bethany led the way to her father’s office. The alcove space was too small to accommodate all five of them. Jeffrey seated himself at the desk while Bethany watched over his shoulder. Elinor found herself inches away from the framed artwork, which she noticed had been signed by the artist. Jeffrey rebooted the computer and typed in commands to bypass security features.

  “Okay. I’m in,” he said, offering the desk chair to Elinor.

  Elinor wished that Dot had come along. “I hardly know…” she said. The screen held a number of folders, cryptically labeled aruba, martinq, polyn, fiji. “Islands?” she guessed. “May I?”

  “I dunno,” Bethany said. “Mom?”

  “I never knew what he was working on,” Lucy Childers reiterated. “I hope it’s not…” She didn’t finish the thought.

  Elinor would have preferred not to uncover the dead man’s secrets with his wife and daughter looking on. However, they seemed as eager as she to find out what sort of files Patrick Allen Childers kept and never told them about. She moved the cursor over “aruba” and chose a file called “ch1.” A page of text opened.

  “What is it?” Bethany said, leaning down to read the small print.

  “It appears to be a work of fiction set in the Bahamas,” Elinor said, scrolling down the page. “Your father was writing a novel.”

  “A novel?” Lucy echoed from the doorway. “What sort of novel?”

  “I can’t be sure without reading more… but it looks like romance.”

  Other folders, too, contained novels-in-progress set in exotic locales.

  “I’ll be jiggered,” Betty Blanton said.

  “Daddy wrote books?” Bethany said.

  Patrick Allen Childers’ obsessive note-taking seemed to have been in support of his literary ambitions. Here were plot ideas, character sketches, descriptions of romantic settings he had likely only visited second-hand. But nowhere was there a clue as to what was stored on his cell phone.

  “At least it wasn’t, you know, disgusting,” Lucy Childers said. “I never dreamed…”

  “He left you something of himself that I hope gives you comfort,” Elinor said. “Perhaps you inspired him more than you realized. He was writing about… ” Her eyes darted to the print on the wall. Four letters. L-O-V-E. Was it a clue? If so, it was one that couldn’t be tested. Not without the missing cell phone.

  Chapter 12

  Fall arrived, at least on the calendar. It was still hot as blazes in southeastern Oklahoma. The drought continued. Students were back in classrooms. Civic life, disrupted by a double homicide, resumed its flow. The Elks met. The Rotary Club filled the partitioned dining room of the Magnolia Café. Claire Holmes changed robes, from ivory to black. Library patrons ventured again, unafraid, into the stacks in pursuit of armchair adventure. Beyond the wall the library shared with Johns Valley Police Department, a muffled hum told of a return to calls about double-parked cars and graffiti on back fences.

  Elinor’s new puppy, whom she had named Ruff, was a leggy adolescent who couldn’t be trusted to stay in his own yard and had to spend his days in the laundry room/kennel when Elinor was away. Yet, when she opened the door to her house and heard his joyous clamor, she knew that all was well within.

  “I hear you, Ruff. Okay, out you go. Run around the yard for a bit.”

  She stepped out the back door to watch him run in circles. Inside, the phone rang. “Oh, drat. Who could that be? I’ve talked to everybody in the world today.” She went into the kitchen and answered the wall phone.

  “Finally home, are you?” DeWayne Ratliff said.

  “What’s it to you?” Elinor retorted.

  “I’m heading your way. Is anybody with you?”

  “My dog is with me.”

  “Don’t say anything to anybody till we’ve talked.” He hung up.

  “Good grief,” Elinor said. “You’re on your own, Ruff. I’ve got to put on some tea.”

  This would be about Mathew Calender, she thought. There had been rumors all week that the police were unable to make their case against him, even with a confession in hand. Elinor opened a new jar of peach preserves and set out a few slices of store-bought pound cake. It would have to do.

  Arriving alone in his private vehicle, a sleek silver pickup, Police Chief DeWayne Ratliff wore a chambray workshirt, running shoes, and a gimme cap, for all the world like a young suburbanite puttering around his yard when struck with the sudden urge to pay a visit to his old English teacher. He had never been to her house before and looked around him with frank curiosity.

  “Pretty big place for one person,” he said.

  “You mean for a little old lady librarian?”

  He grinned at her. “Who just happens to be sharp as a tack.”

  “I see my reputation precedes me. I think it’s cool enough we can sit on the back porch. Mind the dog. His name is Ruff.”

  A few minutes later she carried out a tray containing glasses of iced tea and the plate of cake slices and preserves. DeWayne was throwing a tennis ball for the dog, although Ruff had yet to form the concept of returning the ball so it could b
e thrown again. Wiping sweat on his sleeve, DeWayne joined her on the porch and looked with distaste at the glass of tea.

  “No beer?”

  “Tuh. I hear you’re having a hard time making a case against Mathew Calender.”

  “There’s no physical evidence against the man, just the laptop we recovered.”

  “Were there fingerprints on that machine?”

  “Mathew Calender and Jeffrey both handled it, but only Eula Wyckham’s prints were on the keyboard.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me that Mathew Calender didn’t open that machine. Jeffrey said his father doesn’t know the first thing about electronic gizmos. But it seems to me that a digitally savvy young man would want to explore. He must have been interrupted before he got the chance.”

  “Mathew Calender is a free man. The grand jury no-billed him. We’re back to nothing. Not even a suspect.”

  “I never thought Mathew was guilty. We’ve identified half a dozen people with the means and opportunity to commit murder, but there’s not one solid motive among them. Was there anything interesting in Eula Wyckham’s computer files?”

  “There weren’t any files.”

  “The machine had been wiped clean?”

  “I mean she just used it to surf the web, had a Yahoo mail account. Needless to say, we don’t know the password.”

  “What websites did she visit?”

  “Medical stuff mostly.”

  “Dot thought she was doing genealogy research, possibly looking for Janie Calender’s biological father.”

  “Eula Wyckham wasn’t her mother.”

  “Oh, my! What about the cancer?”

  “That part’s true. She had it all over her body. She wasn’t going to last long. First time I read the report, I thought ‘nullipara’ was something about her cancer, but I looked it up and it means—”

  “It means a woman who has never borne a child. How could Janie have gotten that wrong? Or did Eula Wyckham mislead her? We know from Dot’s research that the woman who raised Janie was Eula Wyckham’s younger sister, Ada, who died from a resistant strain of tuberculosis. The nursing sister seems to have relocated from the Kansas City area to look after her and, perhaps keep an eye on Janie. It puzzled me greatly that Ada Pritchett, knowing how gravely ill she was, didn’t tell Janie the truth. Having an aunt is the next closest thing to having a mother, as Kate will tell you.”