Better Off Read

by Nora Page

  A lunch in which one guest was hauled off by the police, another rushed to her aid, and two others rudely fled before dessert and cleaning up. Considering all that, Cleo thought she owed him a calmer meal. They could debate that later. “When this is over,” she said.

  “Soon, then,” said Henry, an optimist.

  As Cleo made her rounds in Words on Wheels later, she couldn’t help thinking of Priscilla and her many unsolved crimes. What if this crime was never solved, the killer never caught? Without a culprit, suspicion would shadow Mary-Rose and Ollie. Their lives would never be the same. Worse, a murderer would lurk in pretty Catalpa Springs.

  By the end of her day, Cleo’s feet and head throbbed in dull aches. She’d had a busy afternoon, the frustrating kind, overfilled with lots to do, yet not enough getting done. The library remained unfixed and threatened. The bookmobile needed to be restocked and sorted, but Leanna wouldn’t be in until tomorrow afternoon. Someone had sneaked gum on board and stuck the vile substance to the underside of a shelf. Maybelle? A child? Cleo decided to give children the benefit of the doubt.

  But the underlying source of worry was Ollie. Cleo had called Fred at his office. Her eldest son was grumpy. He complained about the police jumping to conclusions and about Ollie wandering off toward silly whims instead of a sensible job. He even complained about Mary-Rose and indirectly chastised Cleo.

  As if channeling his father, Fred asked Cleo to stay clear of her best friend. “Please, Mom. Look what trouble Mary-Rose has already caused. Oliver never would have gotten involved in this mess if it wasn’t for her. We don’t need any more trouble. I told Angela too: stay away from Mary-Rose. Focus only on Ollie. Not that she listens to me either.”

  Cleo had called Angela next. She talked to her daughter-in-law’s voicemail and later to Angela herself. Angela was much calmer than Fred. She said she had the “situation with Ollie” under control. “He won’t be charged,” she said briskly. “Surely. Most likely. Okay, probably. The police really don’t have anything concrete on him. He’s much better at keeping quiet than Mary-Rose.”

  Cleo didn’t like that final “probably.” Along her route, she parked the mobile library by the school and then downtown, within view of the wounded library. Several dozen patrons came by, many prodding her on the timing of repairs. Cleo gave what she hoped were rousing speeches supporting the library and instilling pro-fishing fears. She felt a little bit sullied, bad-mouthing fishing, but she justified her actions with the knowledge that the mayor—with his fish flags and banners and suspicious Vegas consultant—had started it.

  Back home, Cleo pulled Words on Wheels as deep as she could down her driveway, almost bumping the garage, where she stashed Daddy’s classic convertible. She hoped Wanda wasn’t lurking in her garden next door, waiting to gossip and complain. Rhett hopped out of his crate and mewed chirpily.

  “I’m glad to be back too,” Cleo said. Even after the most tiring days, her spirits lifted whenever she returned to her house, a homey Victorian painted in sunny yellow, with white trim and a shiny metal roof. She admired the garden—more flowers, trees, and shrubs than grass. The jasmine was growing tall and glossy this year. A sphinx moth was sipping from flowers. In shape, coloring, and movement, the big moth disguised itself as a hummingbird. Cleo watched it hover and zip over a patch of blooms. Whitney had come in disguise too, calling herself an outsider with no ties to Catalpa.

  Why bother with secrecy? Cleo wondered. Was the girl embarrassed by her eccentric uncle? Or was there a darker motive? Had she planned to kill Uncle Buford all along? Cleo rubbed at the tension thumping behind her temples. Rhett yelled meows at the porch door, wanting his dinner, but Cleo felt drawn down the garden path. She reached Ollie’s little cottage. The periwinkle door was closed up tight. The drapes were drawn, and no one answered her knock. Angela had warned Cleo that once Ollie was done at the police station, Fred wanted his eldest son to stay at their place for the night. Whitney would be a fool—or awfully conniving and clever—to hide out where she’d last been seen, not to mention right next door to a police officer.

  Cleo carefully felt under the right-hand flower box for the spare key. She opened the door, hoping the cottage was truly empty. A step inside assured her it was. The living room was dark and still and surprisingly tidier. The mess of papers was gone. So were the rucksack and the camouflage outfits. Cleo made her way to the bedroom. She found an unmade bed, but no evidence of a female visitor. No makeup—not that Whitney seemed the type to wear it. No female-sized shoes or toiletries and, most convincingly, no camo. It looked like Whitney was gone for good.

  Cleo made sure Rhett was outside and then locked up. “A Krandall,” she said again, still scandalized. She wondered if Mary-Rose knew. Mary-Rose was always good at faces. Cleo tried to call her friend. The phone rang and rang, the rings oddly echoing.

  Rhett perked up his ears and tail and trotted back to the main house. Cleo followed the cat and the melodic rings. She found Mary-Rose coming up her front steps carrying a pie.

  “Hang on, my phone’s ringing,” Mary-Rose said, thrusting the pie at Cleo.

  “It’s me.” Cleo, now holding pie, was unwilling to risk tipping it to hang up.

  Mary-Rose stopped the phones and took back the pie so Cleo could unlock the door. “I figured we needed this,” she said.

  Cleo eagerly agreed and ushered Mary-Rose into the kitchen.

  Her friend plunked the pie down, then herself. “It’s as low-sugar as my baker could do without artificial sweeteners. Raspberry curd with lots of meringue.”

  The meringue soared like snowy peaked mountains. Cleo worried she might drool.

  Mary-Rose was saying she had more pie in a cooler in her car. “Chocolate pecan, Ollie’s favorite. I have another for Angela, for her lawyering help. I know I drove her to fits.” She shook her head. Her hair had come loose from its twist, and stands frizzed around her ears. Not even her rosy sundress brought color to her face. “Pie and apologies aren’t enough. I heard. The police told me. I was consorting with a Krandall! I swear, Cleo, I had no idea. I never would have called S.O.S. if I’d known. I feel tricked and used and a big old fool, and now poor Ollie…”

  “No, no,” Cleo murmured soothingly, and busied herself filling the teapot and setting out cups and plates. Rhett upped his food demands. Cleo gave him an entire can of Fancy Tuna Feast to keep him happy and quiet.

  “We don’t know if Whitney did anything,” Cleo pointed out. “Perhaps she did come up here to help with Pancake Spring. We can’t judge all Krandalls based on Buford’s bad-neighbor behavior. She could be completely innocent.”

  But in that case, why did she run away? Cleo told herself that pie would help her think. She sliced, admiring the glorious red raspberry and perfect fluffy topping.

  “True,” Mary-Rose said glumly. “Innocent until proven guilty, although try telling that to Chief Culpepper. What if Whitney is the killer? What if…” Mary-Rose jabbed her fork violently at the airy meringue. “What if she seduced Ollie into helping her?”

  “No,” Cleo said firmly. “Ollie would never get that far lost. He has a strong moral compass, if not a geographic one.”

  The teakettle whistled. Cleo laid out herbal tea packets and porcelain cups. How many hours had she and Mary-Rose sat in this kitchen? They always took the same seats. Cleo faced the stove, since she often had something cooking, baking, or boiling. Mary-Rose, the guest, got the view of the garden through the French doors. In the old days, Mary-Rose would visit in the afternoons and always leave by five. Any later and Richard, bless him, would fret about a delay in his five-thirty supper hour. Mary-Rose had sat right here with Cleo on the awful day Richard passed. They’d gotten through difficult times together. They’d get through this too.

  Cleo put down her fork. “What happened when Buford shot at you?”

  Mary-Rose fiddled with her cup. She dunked the peppermint tea bag and clinked the spoon. “It’s all a mess and a half, isn’t it? We were arguing
and yelling, that’s all. I was telling him to shut down that drill, and he was laughing at me, saying he’d get me for good this time. That’s when he shot at me. Well, not at me. He aimed for one of his own shelves, nowhere near me. I still can’t believe Zoe saw. How horrible! She must have taken our so-called ‘secret’ path through the woods.” Mary-Rose moaned and held her head. “If Zoe’s mom finds out, I’ll never get to host grandmother weekends again.”

  “Let’s hope we have it all resolved by the time her parents return,” Cleo said. “When is that? In a week or a little more?”

  Mary-Rose slumped deep into her chair, staring out to the garden. “A week and a half. I don’t know how we’ll figure out anything, Cleo. Whitney’s disappeared, and who else is there? Other than me, of course. And Ollie, heaven forbid.”

  Cleo fortified herself with a sweet bite of pie before she answered. “Buford insinuated that he had something on Mayor Jeb Day, and the mayor had banned Buford from City Hall. Something was going on between those two.” She took another bite and then described the mayor’s consultant, Jimmy Teeks. “Henry and I wonder if he’s a mobster.”

  “Oh, you and Henry?” Mary-Rose said with a twinkle in her tone.

  Cleo forged on. “Then there’s Kat Krandall-Stykes. I like her, so I hope she’s innocent, but a spouse is an obvious suspect, especially one engaged in such a drawn-out divorce.”

  Mary-Rose shoved a piece of crust around her plate with her fork, looking hardly comforted by the pie or Cleo’s list.

  Cleo tried again. She’d been saving her biggest prospect for last. She filled Mary-Rose in on Priscilla Pawpaw, her books, and Buford’s super-fan interest in Priscilla’s research notes. “It could be my librarian’s predisposition speaking,” Cleo said. “But I think Buford’s death connects to something in those books.”

  “Miss Pawpaw comes to the Pancake Mill,” Mary-Rose said. “She always requests a table by an exit and won’t put syrup on her pancakes. It’s not even allowed on the table.”

  Cleo added the syrup information to her mental list, filing it under “suspicious.”

  Mary-Rose waggled her fork. “I remember when Priscilla Pawpaw gave a reading for the Happy Trails residents about two years back. She terrified everyone. Mom ordered new locks for her doors and didn’t sleep for days. I bought one of Priscilla’s books because I wanted to be supportive. The title’s something like Getting Away with Murder.”

  “A Guide to Getting Away with Murder?” Cleo asked, quelling an image of the book by the same title lying crumpled beside Buford’s body. The police had taken the book as evidence, and she’d be fine with them keeping it. Cleo wasn’t superstitious, but that particular copy wouldn’t be returning to her library shelves.

  Mary-Rose shivered. “That’s it. I didn’t dare read it. Even her autograph was scary, in red ink and saying something like ‘Lock yourself in with a good murder.’ I have a scarf from her too. Looks like crime-scene tape. I kept it for Halloween. Where else would one wear that?”

  Cleo had an idea, not about scarves, but about books. “I have her Killings in Cotton Country. It was left back at the library in the returns box, still checked out to Buford Krandall. What if we each read our respective Pawpaw books and then swap? We could look for anyone or any case we recognize. Someone from Catalpa Springs, a crime near here, a connection. Perhaps Buford recognized someone. What do you say? Want to make a new book group?”

  Mary-Rose shivered. “Honestly? No. This sounds like a lousy book group. But I’ll do it. I got us all into this.”

  “Together we’ll all get out of it,” Cleo said with more confidence than she felt.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cleo faced a bright Wednesday morning with bleary eyes, a fuzzy head, and ears chafing at a mockingbird’s cheerful trill. For two nights in a row, she’d stayed up late, reading. The night before, she’d spent with Killings in Cotton Country. Last night, she’d endured A Guide to Getting Away with Murder, swapped from her reluctant book-club partner, Mary-Rose. Each night Cleo read far past midnight, till hours when the frogs and crickets and night birds went silent and her old house awoke in creaks and groans.

  Cleo added extra coffee to the percolator. She opened the refrigerator and stared, forgetting what she wanted. She eventually retrieved milk and realized what was happening. She had a hangover. A book hangover.

  A library patron had told her the term, giving a name to a condition Cleo had known since childhood. Like the alcohol-induced variety, a book hangover came from overindulgence, from becoming so immersed in a world of words that one couldn’t fully return to reality. Depending on the book, the hangover could render the reader dreamy or sorrowful, nostalgic or elated, or trapped in a distant land or time. Or—in the case of two straight nights of Priscilla Pawpaw—dazed, jumpy, and slightly queasy. Cleo opened the fridge again, retrieved the leftover raspberry meringue pie, and considered what she’d learned.

  As promised by Priscilla Pawpaw’s titles, Cleo knew a lot about murder. More than she ever wanted to know, and by methods she wished she could forget. She’d never look at snapping turtles the same again. Dear gracious. Or ironing boards or port-a-potties … heavens! Now she knew why Priscilla avoided maple syrup, but she didn’t want to think about it. She rubbed her forehead. The worst was, she’d only read two of the nine Priscilla Pawpaw books Buford Krandall checked out. She didn’t yet have a clue to his interest. As of yesterday, when she and Mary-Rose had exchanged books, her friend didn’t have any insight either.

  Waiting for the coffee to burble, Cleo gazed across her backyard. The little cottage seemed lonely. Strangely, so did her house, where she rarely felt alone even when she was. Cleo sighed and poured kibbles into Rhett’s food bowl.

  “What was that Buford Krandall doing?” she murmured. She didn’t expect her cat to answer, but she did expect him to be there. She looked around. No Rhett.

  “Rhett?” She went to the staircase, leaned on the banister, and called upward. Was Rhett still in bed? He did enjoy wrinkling a freshly smoothed comforter. However, usually he’d hurtle downstairs when he heard Cleo in the kitchen.

  No mews or thump or creaking floorboards indicated a large Persian overhead.

  “Rhett Butler!” Cleo sang out. He had to be around somewhere. He’d slept at the foot of her bed last night. In early morning, he’d chased a moth, stomping on her head in pursuit. Perhaps he was sunning on the porch. A cat door in the sunroom allowed Rhett access to the screened porch. Richard had installed it years ago for a previous cat, a lovely but pushy Siamese who demanded to be let in and out, in and out, driving Richard mad.

  Cleo opened the front door, called her cat’s name again. She was relieved to hear a chirpy merp in response. A furry face emerged, frowning over the edge of a cardboard box.

  “Rhett, silly boy, what are you doing? Come get your breakfast.” Cleo held the door. If a human was present to open doors for him, Rhett refused to stoop to his cat flap. Rhett yawned, showing his fangs. He hopped out of the cardboard box and languidly stretched. Like most cats, he couldn’t resist boxes. Cat traps, Ollie called them.

  “Come along, coffee and kibble are waiting,” Cleo said. Rhett trotted to her, tail and head raised proudly. Cleo blinked. That box … it hadn’t been there yesterday. It wasn’t hers.

  The box featured an image of Vidalia onions with the word “Sweet” printed below. It was empty of onions and most everything else, save a few papers. The pages were blue lined, their edges scruffy, as if torn from an old-fashioned school notebook. Anyone could have left the box. Cleo kept the screen door unlocked so visitors could reach the doorbell and the mailman could access the mail slot to her foyer.

  Rhett head-bumped her shin, demanding his breakfast.

  “Now, just wait,” Cleo said. She didn’t want to touch the papers. Rhett had already done enough possible damage by sitting on them. She gripped the box with her fingertips and carried it to a table that collected odds and ends and gardening bits. She read the
top sheet. The handwriting was slanted and scrawled, the ink smudged, suggesting a leftie. The text described a house fire near Tampa and a family tragically lost. Foul play. Arson. Murder. Cleo remembered an arson account in Killings in Cotton Country. She bet the scribbler was Priscilla Pawpaw. Priscilla knew Cleo was interested in her research notes. Had the author left them for her? But Priscilla had also passionately warned Cleo not to get involved in solving crimes.

  Cleo returned to the screen door and scanned her front garden. The only movement was a flash of red, a cardinal high in the magnolia. The air carried spring perfume and the soft sounds of violence, the chop, chop, chop of Wanda Boxer gardening. Cleo debated whether to go chat with her neighbor. It would surely be a distressing sight. Wanda employed a slash-and-hack approach to her property. She scalped her lawn, denuded the hedges, and ruthlessly beheaded flowers. Cleo thought that perhaps Wanda’s nephew, Mayor Jebson Day, had inherited some of those genes, applying them to destroying nice things around town, instead of vegetation. However, Wanda also had sharp eyes and ears, and sometimes her gossip was even true. Ignoring Rhett’s grumpy protests, Cleo stepped out.

  “Hello, Wanda. Lovely morning, isn’t it?” Cleo’s bright greeting earned a scowl.

  “Lubbers,” Wanda said in reply. “They got my parsley and my begonias. Nothing lovely about lubbers.”

  There was always something folks could agree on, Cleo thought. With herself and Buford Krandall, it was their shared love of books and libraries. With Wanda, it was the reasonable and passionate dislike of lubbers. The massive grasshoppers were voracious and armored, as thick and long as fat fingers. Mama called them the devil’s horses, an appropriate name, for lubbers could destroy an entire garden in the speed of a stampede. Cleo narrowed her eyes and scanned for signs of chewing. She listened for a lubber’s devilish hiss.