by Leslie Leigh
By the time the search party formed a line on the north side of the church, a television crew had arrived with their satellite truck in tow, and were beaming live transmissions of this “latest violent crime to rock the tiny tourist town of Lake Hare,” as the photogenic female reporter so alliteratively phrased it.
The three men set off across the grass, and hadn’t traversed 30 feet before Deputy Jimmy bent to pick something up. The others froze as Jimmy rose, holding a dead pigeon above his head. I heard Bergman’s camera clicking away.
“Don’t touch that thing, Jimmy!” the Chief admonished. “It’s poisoned!” Despite wearing gloves, Jimmy flung the bird away like a red-hot briquette. There was laughter from the crowd, reassembled with the arrival of the TV crew. The men continued their trek.
“Excuse me,” a woman’s quivering voice said softly. “Miss Reed?”
I looked over and saw Mrs. Wilson, the church cleaning lady. Pastor Paul stood next to her, his hand on her shoulder.
“How are you, Mrs. Wilson?” I stepped back so that she could have a better view of the search.
“Oh, I’ve been better, believe me,” she smiled nervously. “Pastor Paul told me I should talk with you.”
“Oh? About what?” She seemed agitated, troubled.
“Well, I’m afraid I’ve done some very bad things. I’ve tried to be good, but I’ve had…lapses.”
I looked at Donald. “This sounds like it would be more up your alley, than mine.”
“Please, hear her out, Melody,” Donald said.
I looked down at her beefy, aged frame and the sadness in her eyes, and a creepy feeling came over me. “What sort of bad things, Mrs. Wilson?”
“You know…” she said, not finding the words. She pointed out at the three men in the grass. “This!”
I knew what she was saying, but a part of me couldn’t compute the correlation between this barely ambulatory, elderly, stooped woman and the activities being undertaken by the three men.
“You poisoned the two men?”
She nodded her head, not looking at me, not looking at anything, her eyes closed as if avoiding staring into the future that awaited her.
“But why? Why would you do that?”
“I felt so bad for them, but I had no right to do what I did,” she croaked. “They were God’s children, too, but they’d wandered so far astray that they didn’t know it anymore. They were tortured souls. And poor, Pastor Paul, he was tortured as well.”
I looked at Donald, but he gave a slight shrug. He couldn’t understand, either.
“Poor Pastor Paul, no food in the kitchen, cupboards bare, no help to give, much as he wanted to. When they came around, I gave what I could, but they’d keep coming back, and you’d have to get angry. It was the only way. And the guilt was on me, same as the pastor. We’re supposed to help, but we failed.”
“I really think you should tell this to the police, Mrs. Wilson.”
“Oh, I tried, but the Chief, he had his mind made up. He said I was confused. They knew who the killer was. He told me to be good; stop feeding the pigeons. I felt bad about the pigeons… God’s creatures, too.”
I became aware that the crowd had become very quiet. Mrs. Wilson’s voice, though weakened with age, managed to transmit a woeful pitch that pierced the air. Looking around, I saw the TV reporter with her microphone held over my shoulder, capturing the confession. I took a step back, allowing her to fill the vacuum of space near Mrs. Wilson.
Donald closed ranks beside me, but kept a comforting hand on her shoulder. I felt that familiar numbness setting in, the disbelief I felt from the more I learned. What a crazy world we live in. But there was a difference this time. After learning of Chief Benson’s machinations, I felt disheartened by the overwhelming presence of a system that could turn everything inside out, upend all that you thought you knew, and cause you to feel that you needed to change your way of thinking in order to expect and accept less from the world.
This was different. As I stepped back from the mad logic Mrs. Wilson invoked, I realized that the world was not to blame for all the wrongs we’d read about and fretted over but, rather, it was merely people who’d made wrong decisions, terribly wrong mistakes, who’d never learned the error of their ways, or how it affected others, but learned to twist their brains and their hearts in order to justify all the wrongs they committed against others every day. They had to live in the world they’d created, but, thankfully, we didn’t.
Deputy Jimmy held the missing bottle triumphantly over his head, and the crowd roared its approval. As the three searchers turned our way, Chief Benson spied Mrs. Wilson and the reporter and quickened his pace. As he got nearer, he waved his arms and called out, demanding that the coverage be stopped.
“You can’t do this,” he panted. “This woman is not well. You just…you just leave her alone!” He tried grabbing at the reporter’s microphone, but she evaded him, stepping back and allowing the camera to capture Chief Benson in all of his desperation.
Michael sidled up to me. “What’s going on, sis?”
I took him by the arm and walked away from the crowd. “While you were out taking a stroll, I solved your murder. Murders.” I corrected myself. “Both of them.”
“Well, good for you!” he said. Have you ever considered a career in law enforcement?”
I looked over at the Chief, still sputtering and swatting his arms for the viewers at home. “There just may be a vacancy in the near future,” I predicted.
Chapter 19
Actually, I was quite content with my drab, quiet life as a librarian. As April wound down, I looked forward to an infusion of youthful readers let loose from their classrooms. Perhaps I was being naïve. Lake Hare was nothing if not a great place for kids to enjoy the outdoors. Fishing, canoeing, hiking: there were a multitude of things to do, and I hoped that today’s youth was still enthralled by nature’s lure, despite all the sedentary, digital, streaming and compressed alternatives that beckoned.
I was looking forward to it, too. I wanted to see if I could recapture some of the youthful magic I felt growing up here. I hoped I wasn’t too jaded or domesticated or housebound to enjoy long walks, bike rides, or just lazing in the shade of a tree. No more ant farm apartment complexes for me, no more slog up some corporate or bureaucratic ladder, tolerating city life in order to earn a few more dollars or add a few notches to my resume.
I was so lucky to be here.
And I was also eagerly anticipating some musical adventures as well. Mr. Van Dyke assured me that his feelers were sure to find worthy additions to the store’s accordion section, and he was still holding me to my commitment to do some sort of presentation. He wouldn’t catch me off-guard. I’d been dusting off some ideas, and I loved getting excited about older music at least as much as I did new music.
But, for now, there was lots of work to do at the library. Now that I was responsible for the closing ritual each night, along with the dimming of lights and locking of doors, I’d added one extra duty of my own. I took a dust cloth from my bottom desk drawer and walked to a set of shelves. There, on the next-to-top shelf, I picked up a clay urn and gave it a brush. I carefully replaced it on the shelf, which was near the chair where Jacob liked to sit, in the place where he’d felt warm, and safe and happy.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19