The Chocolate Book Bandit

by JoAnna Carl

  When I joined her at the table, her expression was worried.

  “I hope there’s nothing wrong,” she said.

  Nothing except a murder, I thought. But I didn’t say that. What I said was, “I just wanted to understand the library’s day-to-day operations.” Betty still looked wary.

  We each took a sandwich and a Diet Coke. Between bites, Betty described her work at the Warner Pier Public Library. The staff totaled six, she reported. Butch Cassidy, of course, was the director. Betty had the title assistant librarian, and there were four others classified as clerks. Betty and the other four watched the desk, shelved the books, helped the patrons find materials, and did clerical chores from ten a.m. until seven or eight p.m. Monday through Saturday, working staggered shifts. In the past the library director had taken a shift on the circulation desk, and Butch had indicated he planned to continue this. Betty was the staff member who posted the bills and kept track of the fines, then sent these figures to the director, who passed them on to the city treasurer. The library shared a custodian with another city office, and he came in at night.

  I didn’t ask about the basement, since I wasn’t trying to investigate the death of Abigail. No, my purpose was to understand the personal dynamics of the people who had been in the library building when Abigail died. But Betty did volunteer some information on the basement. The area, she said, was used only for storage. The night she stumbled over Abigail’s body, she had gone down to get paper for the copy machine.

  “I’ll never forget that,” she said. “It was horrible!”

  I made sympathetic noises and moved on to another subject.

  “How long have you worked at the library?”

  “Eighteen years,” Betty said. “I’m the employee with the longest service. But it’s a very small operation. I don’t understand why they decided to hire a professional librarian.”

  Betty definitely had given the word “professional” a special meaning, and it wasn’t a complimentary one.

  “Wasn’t Mrs. Smith a professional librarian?” I asked.

  “No. She had a degree in English. Just like me. But the library board decided to replace her with someone with a master’s of library science.”

  “Was that because of the new library building? I mean, did they want a more professional operation?”

  “It’s the same library! I don’t see why a new building should make a difference! It will have the same books, the same computers, the same Internet access that the old one has!”

  “Is the budget increasing?”

  “Somewhat.” The word came out grudgingly.

  Obviously this whole topic was a sore one to Betty Blake. I simply made a noncommittal sound. “Hmmm.”

  That was enough encouragement for Betty. She went on. “So they hired this man, Mr. Cassidy. He has an MLS. But his library experience is practically nil!”

  “Oh? The newspaper story said he’d worked in libraries for several years.”

  “Yes, while he was in graduate school. He checked out books in a city library, a very low-level job, then worked at the University of Michigan library. But a college library is quite different from a community library. I’m sure Mr. Cassidy knows about handling orders for books requested by professors, or helping students research esoteric topics. But he’s never planned programs for children. Or organized a teen book club. Or helped tourists check their e-mail. Or even worked on the Friends of the Library book sale. He’s nice enough, I guess, but he’s not experienced in the type of operation we have here in Warner Pier.”

  Betty ducked her head. “I can’t help feeling—cheated. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that!”

  “I won’t pass anything along you say.”

  I might as well have kept quiet. Betty wanted to talk, and I was the first person who had offered to listen to her.

  “It’s just that Catherine—Mrs. Smith—well, she promised me that once I got my degree and she retired, I would be in line to be considered for the position. Then that Mrs. Montgomery, well, she came up with that plan to ‘upgrade.’ That’s what she called it. She wanted to hire a ‘professional’ librarian.”

  “I see.”

  “She pushed the budget changes through with the vice mayor. Then she pushed her plan through the library board. So here I am. I worked all these years for my degree, and it was no use!”

  I tried to make soothing noises, but I could see how futile my efforts were. Betty had hoped to follow Mrs. Smith as director of the Warner Pier Public Library. She had worked hard, not only at her job, but at her education. And as a single mother in a low-paying job, this would have been a struggle. Then, just as she attained her bachelor’s degree, the game changed. The library board decided to hire someone with a master’s.

  I could understand her feelings entirely. But I could also understand the board’s desire to call for higher qualifications for the director.

  All I could do was cluck sympathetically, but noncommittally.

  Luckily, once she had her grievance off her chest, Betty seemed to feel a little better. “Everyone was sympathetic,” she said. “I talked to Miss Vanderklomp. But she said that she’s not an official member of the board. Of course, she forgets that when she wants to. If she’d been on my side . . . And Mrs. Ringer-Riley was highly sympathetic, but she didn’t support me either.

  “So here I am, with a useless degree.”

  “Oh, Betty, all that work! You can’t regard it as useless.”

  “I enjoyed the classes. I like to learn, and I love English literature.”

  “So it wasn’t a waste of effort. And you don’t have to work at the Warner Pier library forever. Have you tried Holland? Or one of the other library systems?”

  “I’d have to start at the bottom there. And I can’t look too far away from Warner Pier because I really can’t afford to move. I inherited my house from my parents, and I owned it mortgage free until I had to borrow money for repairs. And the city has good benefits! My daughter is still on my insurance.”

  I hadn’t thought about benefits. Jobs around Warner Pier are not easy to find unless the job seeker is in certain categories. And by joining with other small municipalities, the city is able to offer a nice benefit package. A person with the problems Betty had had would find that attractive.

  On the other hand, property is worth quite a bit in Warner Pier. Even if Betty’s house needed repairs . . .

  I opened my mouth, then shut it without saying anything. Betty hadn’t asked me for financial guidance. A lot of Joe’s clients are in deep financial doo-doo, so if she did ask for advice, Joe could help her find an adviser. But it wasn’t my place to make suggestions on how Betty handled her money. Or suggest that she quit her job and move elsewhere.

  Betty and I seemed to have reached the end of our conversation. But I had one more question.

  “Betty,” I said, “why didn’t you want anyone to know we were meeting for lunch?”

  Betty turned as red as one of Michigan’s prize apples. “Oh, I didn’t want to hide anything!”

  “But you said that you preferred to meet here, rather than at the Sidewalk Café, because then we wouldn’t see anyone we didn’t want to see us together.”

  “Oh! Did I say that? I didn’t mean anything by it. I just didn’t want anyone to think I was talking out of school. I guess I thought you might want to talk about something a little touchier.”

  “Like what? What’s touchy about the library? Other than Abigail Montgomery being killed, of course.”

  “Oh, but that has nothing to do with the library!”

  “It happened there.”

  “But it must have been an accident! I’m sure it was.”

  I shut up again. Hogan hadn’t announced that he believed Abigail’s death had been caused deliberately. I wasn’t supposed to know that, much less spread it around.

 
“Anyway,” Betty went on, “I’ll be glad to discuss the library anytime. The everyday operations. The finances. Anything. Just call me.”

  I assured her that I appreciated her information.

  Having confided in me—human nature being what it is—Betty was now regretting what she’d said. And I was a bit embarrassed that I’d encouraged her to tell me her secrets. We said good-bye a little stiffly and gathered up our sacks, paper napkins, and Coke cans to put them in the proper bins. I thanked Betty effusively for giving me an inside look at the library from a staffer’s viewpoint.

  She smiled wistfully. “It’s so nice to see a board member really take an interest in the library,” she said. “Most of them just seem to swallow whatever the director tells them.”

  Her comment made me feel a bit guilty. If Hogan hadn’t instructed me to look into the interactions of the board members, well, I’d have been a board member who just swallowed whatever the director told me.

  I drove away, wondering. Had I learned anything from Betty?

  Yes, I decided.

  First, some people had said that Abigail Montgomery was negligible as a member of the library board, that she didn’t take an active part in the organization’s business. Apparently that wasn’t correct. According to Betty, Abigail had been the big pusher in the effort to upgrade the qualifications of the library director. She had gotten Butch Cassidy his job.

  Hmm. Had she and the other supporters of the upgrade had Butch in mind for the job all along? This has been known to happen. Had one or more of them known him earlier? Or had they been genuinely convinced that the Warner Pier Public Library should have a director with an MLS, and Butch happened to be the best-qualified applicant?

  I decided that I wanted to find out. Who could I ask?

  How about the president of the board, Rhonda Ringer-Riley?

  I pulled my van into a handy parking lot, looked up Rhonda’s phone number on my cell phone, and called her. Her answering machine promised she’d call me back.

  I left my number and clicked my phone off, then drove on. Until I heard from Rhonda, I could do nothing about the library. I realized I was sorry I couldn’t talk to her immediately. It was so much better to worry about the death of Abigail Montgomery than to worry about Joe and Meg getting together. Once I put the library out of my mind, that problem settled on my shoulders like a portable fog.

  I drove back to the office and spent a miserable hour staring at my computer, not thinking about the accounts it displayed, wishing I could go home and curl up in a ball, and being determined not to do that. No, whatever the threat to my life—love life, personal life, married life—I couldn’t fight it by quitting.

  But how could I fight Meg? What weapon did I have to use against her past, against Joe’s past? Whatever happened between them back in high school still haunted Joe. How could I break that pattern?

  I was worrying so hard that when the phone rang I nearly fell off my chair.

  “Lee? It’s Betty.”

  For a moment I couldn’t think of who I knew named Betty. My answer must have sounded completely blank. “Yes?”

  “I was looking through my financial files, Lee, because I needed to post the latest bills. I’ve run across something really odd. Could I talk to you about it?”

  Now I knew who it was. Betty Blake, of course. “Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Probably nothing. But I can’t talk now. Gwen’s setting up for the movie, and I need to help her. Could you drop by here after work?”

  “Of course. But what’s the problem?”

  “It’s not a problem exactly. It’s just something odd. You’ll probably be able to explain it right away.”

  “I’ll be there around five.”

  “Thanks.” She hung up.

  What was all that about?

  At four forty-five I gave up trying to work and walked the three blocks to the library. The place was rocking. The reading room had been turned into a TV viewing area, and about twenty-five kids were watching some Disney flick. It was hard to tell which was noisier, the kids or the movie.

  A half dozen people were lined up at the circulation desk. One of them was Tony Herrera Jr., who is sort of my nephew, being the son of Joe’s stepbrother and my friend Lindy. He’s a good-looking guy of thirteen. We gave each other a casual wave.

  “Hi, Tony.” I gestured at the sheaf of photocopies he was holding. “Working on a report?”

  “Yeah. I’m ready to go home, as soon as Alicia gets out of the movie, but I gotta pay for my copies, and there’s nobody here to take my money.”

  The teenaged girl in line ahead of him gave a deep sigh. “Where did Mrs. Blake disappear to? I’m going to be late to work if I don’t get these books checked out.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Mrs. Blake is so conscientious. Isn’t there anyone else around?”

  “That new guy was here a little while ago,” Tony said.

  “I’ll look in his office.”

  I went to the back of the building. The door to the director’s office was closed. When I knocked, Butch’s baritone answered. “Come in.”

  My stomach fluttered, but I pretended it hadn’t and opened the door. I asked Butch if he knew where Betty was, explaining that she seemed to have disappeared.

  “Odd,” Butch said, getting up. “I can fill in. But I wonder where Betty is.”

  “I’ll look upstairs. Maybe she’s been treed by an irate patron and is stuck on top of one of the stacks.”

  Butch laughed and headed toward the circulation desk.

  I glanced up and down the aisles of the downstairs and walked through the staff workroom. When I peeked out the back door I saw that the basement was still sealed. Then I went back into the main room and climbed the stairway to the second floor, home of adult books.

  At first, the whole floor appeared to be deserted. Where could Betty have gone? Had she left the building? Why would she ask me to come over, then not be there?

  I walked through the shelves, looking over sections for mysteries and science fiction. No Betty. Then I ventured into general fiction—everything from Cervantes to Elinor Glyn—and moved toward nonfiction.

  When I reached the back corner I gave an enormous gasp. I almost screamed.

  One of the shelving units had fallen over, landing so that it was propped against the outside wall. All the books had tumbled out and were lying heaped on the floor.

  And a pair of shoes was sticking out from under the books.

  Chapter 14

  I guess I kept my head. I pulled out my phone and called 9-1-1. Then I did something that might seem cold-blooded: I took a quick photo of the scene with my phone. Next, I ran to the stairway, wanting to get attention from someone downstairs.

  I couldn’t yell for Butch, who was still standing at the desk, because of the noise from the movie and the children. Luckily, Tony was still in line, and I was able to catch his attention. I pointed to Butch and motioned that he should come upstairs.

  I ran back to Betty, and again I used my phone to take a picture of the scene. I wanted to get the books off of Betty, but I knew Hogan would want to see the scene as I had originally found it.

  These were a lot of different activities, but I don’t think more than a minute went by between the time I first saw Betty and the time when I crawled under the leaning bookshelf and began to haul books off her motionless body.

  The shoes had immediately told me Betty was the person under the books. They were the same run-over loafers she’d been wearing when we met for lunch.

  Tony, as curious as any kid, ran upstairs to see what was going on. I tried to block his view of those horrible feet, and I sent him back down to wait at the front door and show the EMTs where to come. I had some vague hope that having a job would keep him away from the scene and, maybe, from being traumatized.

 
Of course, the 9-1-1 operator had wanted to follow the usual procedure and keep me on the line, but I told her if she had the EMTs on the way I was hanging up. I stuck the phone in my pocket, and I kept tossing books aside. In a few minutes Butch came upstairs, looking puzzled. As soon as he saw what had happened, he also began to dig through the books, throwing them behind him.

  The EMTs and the Warner Pier patrolman got there within ten minutes. They made us move away from the fallen shelf, of course; I think they were afraid that it would slip and knock more shelves over. They didn’t want more victims.

  Hogan also came quickly. He suggested that Butch and I make lists of the people present downstairs. “Just the adults,” he said. “And don’t try to keep people here. It’s better for that mob of kids to leave.”

  When we went down the movie had ended, and the children were louder than ever. Gwen asked me what had happened, and I whispered a quick explanation. She offered to help with the lists of names. Butch furnished each of us with paper and pencil. Then he announced to the whole room that there had been an accident upstairs and suggested that everybody leave. But he would like to have the adults’ names, he said, just in case witnesses were needed later.

  I don’t think I would have gotten away with that, but Butch had that authoritative voice. All those moms and grandmas and babysitters and kids obeyed him. There were two or three other patrons there as well, including Corny Cornwall. Corny offered to stay and help, but Butch told him it wasn’t necessary. After fifteen or twenty minutes no one was left but Gwen and her two kids, and Tony. His younger sister was waiting in front of the library.

  I thanked Tony for helping out. He looked upset, of course. “Lee, was there someone under those books?”

  “I’m afraid so, Tony. The EMTs are getting her out now.”

  “I guess she’s dead.”