As Darrow stared with dropped jaw the big bus ground to a halt 10 feet away. Clouds of steam fogged its windows.
The front door popped open and Hester McGarrigle, her face red as a beet, stumbled to the pavement.
Seeing Darrow, she started to speak, but all that came out was a squeak. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped in a faint just as Nate Darrow rushed forward to catch her.
“Oh, Ms. McGarrigle, we really need to stop meeting this way,” he said under his breath as he carried Hester to the First Aid tent.
Chapter 2
Tuesday, June 11
Sunday and Monday were the bookmobile crew’s customary days off, so there was plenty of time to recover from the heat. This morning, Pim was hot under the collar for a different reason.
“Why do they have to change our route? It was perfectly fine just as it was, and anytime they change it to make things more ‘efficient’ ” – she curled her stubby fingers in air quotes – “it just confuses the patrons and we show up at stops with nobody there!”
“And it complicates my job because I don’t know who’s going to show up at a new stop and what they might like to read,” Hester added. Unlike a regular library, the bookmobile catered to specific patrons on its different runs. Sometimes that meant stocking up on romances and westerns, or filling the shelves with movie-star biographies. Today Hester had tried to shelve a broader selection, including some young-adult novels in hopes of snagging a teen reader or two. “I can always dream!” she told Pim.
The librarian suspected her driver’s ire had to do with more than just the reading public, however. The change of stops also meant Madame Pim wouldn’t get to have lunch at the Onion-Aire burger stand by the Skyline bookmobile stop every Tuesday, Hester mused, suppressing a smile.
The Onion-Aire’s regular burgers came with two hefty beef patties, and Pim’s normal order was for an extra patty on top of that. The café had a standing challenge that if you ordered a burger with four patties – a Walla Walla Whomper – and finished it in one sitting, they’d give you another free. It was one of Pim’s long-standing ambitions.
“But then she’d explode,” Hester said to herself.
“What’s that you say?” Pim asked.
“Oh!” Hester looked up as Pim parked at the Skyline stop at 9 a.m., the new scheduled time for the hilltop lookout, which today was wrapped in thick fog. “Uh, I was just thanking our lucky stars this old bus didn’t explode coming up the hill. After it got so overheated in the parade.”
“Yeah, well, Bob Newall said he spent all day yesterday flushing out the radiator; he practically flooded the bookmobile barn,” Pim said, referring to the long-suffering mechanic who kept Portland’s Mobile Library Unit chugging along. “And I didn’t waste my days off. It gave me time to catch up on the Rose Medallion clues. Me and Millie Eubanks from the motor pool – you know that gal who almost got on ‘Jeopardy’? – we’re putting our heads together and I think we have a chance at it. And it comes with big bucks this time, did you hear?”
The Rose Medallion search was a longstanding, highly popular part of Rose Festival. Every June, a small bronze medallion about the size of an Olympic medal and engraved with a rosebud was hidden “in plain sight,” as contest organizers put it, somewhere around Portland. Clues to its whereabouts were published each morning in The Oregonian newspaper, starting out very vaguely and getting more obvious as the week wore on. Whoever was first to find the medallion won all sorts of donated prizes.
This year, in celebration of its 50th year in business, a local manufacturer of sport runners, Zeus Shoes, had put up $50,000 cash, stoking interest to a fevered pitch.
“That would sure put a nice bump in the double-wide fund,” Pim said with a wink over the top of her cateye glasses. Pim lived along the pretty Sandy River in an aging, mossy single-wide trailer house on 10 acres, part of a long-ago divorce settlement. She often complained of being “land rich.”
As Pim finished setting up the Instie-Circ, the portable circulation computer, Hester put out the step by the bookmobile’s rear door and waved through the murky mist to the day’s first patron, Mrs. Loman, who was just coming into focus down the walk with her customary two shopping bags of library books, one in each arm. Hester liked to think the bags acted as ballast to keep the wispy octogenarian from blowing away on the hilltop’s gusty winds.
Mrs. Loman’s sweet nature belied an insatiable appetite for murder mysteries. Hester reached into a cupboard for the new J.A. Jance she had saved for her favorite patron, who rewarded Hester with a smile made even wider by a pair of ill-fitting dentures.
“Did you see us in the parade, Mrs. L?” Pim asked, almost shouting to compensate for Mrs. Loman’s hearing loss.
“What’s that? I’m fine if you don’t mumble, dear,” she warbled.
“Parade! Parade!” Pim bellowed.
“Oh, I love charades!” she said, looking slightly befuddled. “Is the library having another Seniors Parlor Game Night?”
Hester smiled, nodded and handed Mrs. Loman a library events calendar.
Next to climb aboard were the Donaldson sisters, identical twins, both widowed in their late 60s, who dressed alike and lately had taken to checking out books with one another’s library cards in a giggly effort to trick Hester.
Behind them, a recent new patron at this stop was Mr. O’Leary, a recently retired accountant and self-proclaimed “available specimen” with too much time on his hands who was making a study of mathematician biographies.
“Hullo, Hester,” he said through his walrus mustache, its tips waxed to a point. “I saw the trouble you had in the parade. The TV said the bookmobile almost took out an entire high-school class!”
“Well, it really wasn’t like that, you know how they exaggerate,” she said, giving him her “Hester Sunshine” voice.
“And they’re saying now that it has to do with that van Dyke, that there’s some sort of investigation of how he’s mishandled library funds. I guess he was supposed to use a bunch of donated money to buy you gals a brand-spanking new bus, not this tarted up old thing, eh?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,” Hester said, handing him a biography of Alexandre Grothendieck, father of the Theory of Schemes, which Mr. O’Leary had ordered on interlibrary loan from Boston Public Library. It was the only known copy in North America.
Hester had been doing her best in recent weeks to divert this overly attentive patron’s attentions to the Donaldson sisters, who were known, as Pim put it, “to take a shine to anything in long trousers.” But every time Hester delivered a special book he ordered, O’Leary acted as if she had done him a personal favor. The red-faced little man ordered special books all the time.
“Oh, my favorite librarian in the world has another prize for me!” O’Leary brayed, with both chins wagging. “Thank you, Saint Hester!”
Hester sighed deeply, readjusted the nametag pinned to her sweater and suddenly busied herself helping a young mother with a 2-year-old in a tie-dyed onesie over by the children’s shelves.
“Let’s get moving, Pim, before Mr. Mustachio comes back,” Hester hissed a half-hour later as she pulled in the step. “I swear, I’m going to have to ask Bob to fumigate this thing with Pine-Sol to get rid of the curse of Aramis. He must bathe in the stuff.”
The fog that wrapped the city was a welcome cooling agent after the weekend’s heat. And it was persistent. Pim leaned over the big steering wheel to peer through the windshield. She flicked the wipers to squeal across the moist glass a few times as they made their way slowly downhill to a new stop edging Forest Park in Northwest Portland.
“I’m glad I studied my Thomas Guide to get us to this new spot, ’cuz this pea soup sure as heck-fire isn’t helping,” said Pim, never losing a chance to sing the praises of the map book that she called her Bookmobile Bible. “But I sure wish the siting committee would drive out to these spots before sending us to the back of beyond. Look at this!”
Pim was carefully threa
ding the big bus down a narrow street with just enough room between solid rows of parked cars to squeak through if …
“Nope, can’t do it, hang on a second!” Pim clucked as she yanked on the parking brake, leapt from her seat, barreled out the rear door, ran to the front and folded in both side mirrors, then scuffled back to her driver’s seat.
“OK, now I think we can make it, but where we’re going to park down here, Jumping Jehosephat knows!”
Hester studied the “Location Information Missive” that had been sent along by Dora, the library’s bookkeeper and “Head Bossy Boots,” as Pim called her. Dora’s “missives” were supposed to tell where it was OK for the bookmobile to park and turn around at each designated stop.
“It says something in hieroglyphics here about ‘Horseshoe pt. OK 4 pkg. Posts hv. bn. remved.’ But I haven’t a clue what that means,” Hester groaned as Pim came to the road’s end. “Why does she have to write these instructions like she’s a code specialist moving a MASH unit into enemy territory?”
Above them, a high, arching bridge soared above the park entrance and carried Thurman Street to the upper west side of town. A walkway from the road’s end threaded beneath the bridge and followed a stream reputed for its resident trout population. On weekend mornings, the path transported legions of joggers and dog-walkers into the huge wooded preserve, known as the nation’s largest park inside city boundaries.
Just ahead of the bookmobile a narrow driveway led to a building with restrooms.
“Well, this is just dandy, folks, how am I supposed to turn this thing around?” Pim blustered as the big bus ground to a halt. But not one to be daunted by any challenge, she immediately ground the gears, inched forward and started maneuvering up and back in what turned into a 16-point turn to get the bookmobile facing the other direction.
Only once did Hester wince when a corner of the front bumper pulled a branch off a little ginkgo tree “planted by Mrs. Rasmussen’s Third Grade Class in honor of the Challenger astronauts,” according to a plaque.
“OK, now where do we park so we’re not in the way? I can’t really see a dang thing in this fog, but it looks like there’s a sandy area there next to the restrooms that could take us. I’m backing in!” Pim declared, jumping out of her seat to unfold the mirrors again.
“Aha, Pim – sandy area? Could it be a horseshoe pit? I think I just made sense of Dora’s gibberish!” Hester laughed when her driver climbed back in her seat. “And it says the iron posts have been removed so we’re good to go!”
As she steered by the mirrors, there was a moment when the big bus seemed to stall, but Pim “just gunned it,” as she liked to say, and the bookmobile bumped and swayed to a resting point.
Only a few patrons found them this first day in the new stop, but Hester was happy to check out a copy of “Treasure Island” to a shy 10-year-old boy and the latest Thomas Jefferson biography to his father.
Like a theater curtain rising, the fog finally lifted. A cloud of blue smoke took its place as Pim revved the diesel and readied for departure. Just as Hester opened the rear door to pull up the portable step, she looked up into the smiling face of a runner in an Oregon Ducks sweatshirt, his thighs sheathed in tight green nylon running shorts.
“Hester, what the heck are you doing here?” asked a panting and sweaty Nate Darrow, the police detective who lived upstairs from her in an apartment building less than a mile away.
“Oh, Nate! This is where you go trail-running! Of course!”
As was often the case when she unexpectedly ran into her neighbor, she found herself blushing, which she never could quite explain. Frankly, it was getting a little irritating.
“It’s a new bookmobile stop, our first day here,” she finally blurted in answer to his question, forcing her eyes away from the tan, muscled calves that Darrow was now leaning over to massage.
Too late. His eye caught hers.
“Sorry, I’ve been cramping up for no good reason, for the last three miles,” he said through gritted teeth.
“What, you’ve been running half-naked in a cold and penetrating fog of which Dickens would be proud and you can’t figure out why your muscles are knotting up?” Hester asked.
Darrow shot her a look.
“Anyway, you’re just in time to help guide us out of here, if you’d be so kind,” Hester chirped, happy to regain her equilibrium. “Pim is a little worried about getting stuck in this darn sand.”
Darrow waved them ahead as Pim slowly eased the bus forward, but again it hung up halfway along and the engine stalled. Pim cranked it back to life, then gradually eased out the clutch. With another bounce and jounce, they cleared the sand.
Hester stuck her head out the side window to thank Darrow, but suddenly she couldn’t see him. “Where the heck did he go, Pim?”
She got up and trotted to the rear door, swung it open and hopped out to see Darrow staring at the sand pit behind the bookmobile.
He looked up at her as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Oh my God, not again, Hester,” he croaked.
He stepped forward to stop her, but she turned and got a quick glimpse of Pieter van Dyke, nude except for his tidy-whitie Fruit of the Looms, spread-eagled in the sand. His hands and feet were duct-taped to horseshoe posts pounded deep into the ground.
Tire tracks edged one side of his tubby torso, and his eyes stared sightlessly into the now-blue June sky.
Chapter 3
For the second time in four months, yellow police-line tape surrounded Portland’s magenta bookmobile. But to Hester McGarrigle’s eye, there was nothing cheery about the complementary colors.
Sitting in the passenger seat of a parked police cruiser, she now noticed an old wooden sign next to the horseshoe pit proclaiming it one of the practice sites for the venerable Rose City Horseshoe Club (“Est. 1922”). In the sign’s center, an elaborate logo featured a horseshoe intertwined with a vine of red roses. The police car’s endlessly strobing red and blue lights reflected off the sign and, next to it, the bookmobile’s bright finish.
“Nobody better be epileptic or they’ll have a fit for sure,” she complained through a grating to Pim, who occupied the cruiser’s back seat. “It’s worse than a disco ball in the Jelly Belly factory. I wonder if I could turn them off?” she pondered, lightly fingering a panel of switches beneath the car’s dashboard.
“Hester, don’t go punching any buttons and getting us in worse trouble than we already are!” Pim whispered in agitation. “Unless you see one marked ‘ejector seat.’ These back seats aren’t exactly made for full-figured gals.”
Hester chuckled nervously, then took a deep breath and blew it out with a “whoosh.”
“Oh, God, Pim, how could this have happened – again?” she asked, bunching a fist to her mouth.
The previous February, Hester had been the first to discover the body of the retired head librarian, Sara Duffy, in the bookmobile’s back cupboard. After finally confessing, the murderer drove the old bus off a cliff. The replacement bus was named in Duffy’s honor.
Hester shuddered at the memories. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to process this morning’s events. When she looked up again, Detective Darrow was just opening the car door to slip into the driver’s seat. He had found some rain pants in the cruiser’s trunk and borrowed a nylon jacket, navy blue with large yellow letters on the back spelling P-O-L-I-C-E.
“So, you two,” he said, pursing his lips and staring through the windshield at the densely wooded ridge rising abruptly above the industry-lined Willamette River. Along the ridgeline the top branches of myriad fir trees formed an inky, dark filigree pattern against blue sky. Darrow drummed his fingers on the dashboard.
Hester looked at him with searching eyes. “Nate, uh, did the bookmobile actually… ”
Darrow spoke quickly and matter-of-factly.
“There’s clear evidence that one set of rear dual tires ran over the victim. It’s by no means clear whether that caused his death. There’
s a lot of blood in the sand and a lot of sand caked on the body. The medical examiner is doing a preliminary look now.”
Hester’s breath whistled between her teeth. In the rear of the car, Pim was moaning softly and holding her head in her hands.
“Pim, there was no way you could have seen him, it was way too murky out there,” Hester comforted.
Darrow hung his head for a moment and then looked up at Hester.
“Look, I’m sorry you both have to go through all this again, but I think it would be best if you went into the office and gave your statements there,” he said, watching in a mirror as a KSNZ News van pulled onto the grass next to the trail and a crew quickly raised a satellite dish atop the roof. Darrow recognized reporter Misty Day as she peered at her reflection in the van’s passenger window and applied fresh coral-colored lipstick.
Darrow also noted with some concern that quite a crowd had gathered at the outer perimeter of the police tape. He momentarily noticed that their expressions went beyond the usual morbid curiosity common to a murder scene, instead bordering on … indignation?
Several waved folded newspapers. What was up with that?
In answer, there came a sudden tapping on the car window. Darrow lowered the window to his plainclothes colleague, Harry Harrington, a slightly built man of conservative dress whose demeanor tended to alternate between inexplicable optimist and hopeless worry wart. A wave of coffee breath filled the car as Harrington leaned in a little too far and hissed some news that Hester couldn’t help overhearing.
“Nate, we got trouble! I know this sounds crazy, but there’s a whole passel of maniacs out there who insist that the Rose Medallion is hidden in that damn horseshoe pit! They say there’s hardly any doubt from the clue in this morning’s paper. Look at this!”
Darrow took the newspaper Harrington thrust at him and peered at some circled text:
Gallop north by Nor’west to a park called For-est.
B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery Page 2