Death in the Stacks

by Jenn McKinlay

  “I screwed up,” Paula said. “I shouldn’t have touched the knife, but I was so shocked. I wasn’t thinking. Oh my God, Emma is going to think I did it! Everyone is going to think I’m a murderer!”

  She pressed her fingertips to her temples, looking as if she was trying to keep herself from completely freaking out.

  “You can’t worry about what others will think,” Lindsey said. “Even if they do, I was right there with you, so they’d have to accuse me of it as well.”

  Paula glanced up at her. It was clear that she didn’t think this was as helpful as Lindsey did, and Lindsey had to agree, although she didn’t say as much.

  Given that Olive had called her out in front of all of the guests at Dinner in the Stacks, would it really be surprising if everyone looked at Lindsey as the murderer? The thought was disturbing, and she felt the need to go and help Emma with the investigation in any way that she could.

  No, nope, she wasn’t going to do it. After almost getting herself and others killed last spring, she’d made a promise to herself and to Sully that she would not investigate any more murders, and she wouldn’t stick her nose into any business that wasn’t library business.

  Of course, technically, with Olive being on the board and the murder happening in the library, Lindsey could make the argument that it was library business. Very much library business, in fact, but she didn’t think Sully would go for it, and she really didn’t want to worry him any more. They were in a really good place in their relationship, and she feared that investigating a murder might damage it.

  So, no more asking questions, doing research or, as some liked to say, being a buttinsky. She was going to live a normal and safe life, leaving all of the crime solving to Emma and the police department. Really, she was.

  When Paula was steady on her feet, she and Lindsey left the office to join the others. Everyone there had been questioned, and Emma had announced that they were free to go. Aidan and Beth were going to take Paula home, since her date, Hannah, had left earlier in the evening as she had to coach the high school cross-country team early in the morning. The rest of the library crew had rides. It was a subdued group that left the building.

  Because they were too shaky to drive, Robbie offered to take Olive’s friends home. As the three friends left the building, they looked shocked and distraught, as if they couldn’t wrap their heads around what had happened.

  As director, Lindsey stayed behind to make certain the library was locked up after Olive’s body was removed to the mortuary. She and Sully stayed out of the way, sitting on the edge of the dais on the far side of the main room.

  Sully didn’t say anything but sat beside her with his hand on her back in a comforting show of support that she appreciated so much, since it felt like it was the only thing keeping her from falling apart.

  They watched as the body bag was taken from the building. Lindsey felt her heart thump hard in her chest at the sight. Life was such a fleeting thing, and it could be cut short so swiftly. She shivered, and Sully pulled her into his side.

  When Robbie returned from driving Olive’s friends home, he trailed Emma, trying to help even though she told him repeatedly to go away. He made his way over to Lindsey and Sully and sat on her other side.

  “Not the end to the evening I had hoped,” he said.

  “No,” Lindsey agreed. “You did an amazing job with the auction though. It was the most money we’ve ever raised.”

  “Nice work,” Sully said.

  Robbie frowned at him. “Are we mates now?”

  “If you mean friends, maybe,” Sully said. He gave Robbie a considering look. “A big maybe.”

  “I can live with that,” Robbie said. He glanced at Lindsey. “So where do we begin?”

  “Begin what?”

  “Our investigation,” he said. “Obviously, it’s time for the dynamic duo to help solve this case.”

  “And our friendship is over,” Sully said. “Lindsey doesn’t investigate anymore.”

  “What?” Robbie looked shocked. “I thought that was just a lot of codswallop because you almost got killed.”

  “Not codswallop,” Lindsey said. “I meant it. I’m out. You need to find a new partner.”

  “But—”

  “Aren’t you dating the chief of police?” Sully interrupted. “Surely, if you’re going to play detective, it should be with her.”

  “Emma gets cranky about my being a civilian and an actor,” he grumbled. “She says I’m not qualified, even though I played Detective Inspector Gordon on Masterpiece for years. I’m a method actor, you know. I learned quite a lot about being a detective to convincingly play that role.”

  “Well, DI, you’re on your own,” Lindsey said. “Or maybe you’ve been promoted. You were my sidekick, the Watson to my female Sherlock, before. Now it’s time to find your own sidekick.”

  Robbie rubbed his chin. “You might be right. But it won’t be the same without you, pet. I don’t wear skirts nearly as well as you do.”

  Lindsey smiled, and Sully shook his head at Robbie and said, “Please don’t try.”

  “There’s the love from sailor boy that I’ve been missing,” Robbie said.

  Lindsey glanced between the two men, and as she did so, she saw Emma walking toward them. She looked grim, and Lindsey felt a sense of foreboding creep over her skin like a wintery draft. Something was wrong, very wrong.

  “Lindsey, can I have a word?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Lindsey waited.

  “Alone,” Emma clarified.

  “I’m sure anything you have to say to Lindsey, you can say to us,” Robbie said. “We’ll keep it in the strictest confidence.”

  “Absolutely,” Sully agreed.

  “No,” Emma said.

  The two men looked at each other. Emma had given them nowhere to take their argument. Lindsey rose to her feet and made a mental note to practice her firm no for the next time she was asked to volunteer for something she didn’t want to do. Truly, it was like a roadblock. Even Robbie couldn’t figure out how to navigate around it.

  Emma led Lindsey to the far side of the room. It was surreal to be dressed in party clothes and have the chief of police wanting to talk to her about the murder of the president of her library board. If an elephant in a tutu came dancing through the room right now, Lindsey would be so relieved, because it would mean she actually was dreaming and this horrible evening wasn’t real. No elephant appeared. It was real.

  “When I spoke to you and Paula earlier, she said that when Olive’s friends arrived, she was cleaning up the circulation desk,” Emma said.

  “That’s right,” Lindsey agreed.

  “Well, according to Ms. Cole, she was cleaning up the circulation desk,” Emma said.

  “They might have been working on it together,” Lindsey said. She felt her stomach sink like an anchor.

  “No, because when I asked Ms. Cole if anyone was with her, she said no,” Emma said. “When I interviewed the staff to see if they remembered who was where and when, no one mentioned seeing Paula anywhere.”

  “She was probably confused,” Lindsey said. “Maybe she was working in the break room or taking a cigarette break.”

  “Does she smoke?” Emma looked hopeful.

  “No,” Lindsey said. “But it could be something like that.”

  Emma heaved a heavy sigh. “I know you want to protect your staff, I do, but, Lindsey, Paula lied to us about where she was. Maybe she had a good reason, but it doesn’t look good. I’m going to have to interview her again, but I wanted to warn you to be extra careful around her.”

  “You don’t really think—”

  “As of right now, she is my prime suspect,” Emma said. “And just so we’re clear, yeah, I really do think she could be our murderer, but then again I think that about everyone.”

  10
/>   When Sully dropped Lindsey off at home, he offered to stay with her, but she knew he had an early morning boat tour to give, and she suspected she would be tossing and turning all night, trying to process what had happened, and she didn’t want to keep him up.

  “Call me if you need me—anytime,” he said. He waited while she unlocked the front door to the house where she rented a third-floor apartment.

  “I will. I promise,” she said.

  As soon as she pushed the door open, a black ball of fur, otherwise known as her dog, Heathcliff, came dashing out of his dog sitter’s first-floor apartment, wagging his tail and rising up on his back legs so he could hug her knee.

  “Hey, buddy.” Lindsey dropped her keys and her purse and bent over to hug her dog. As if he sensed her distress, he licked her face, and Lindsey smiled, releasing him so she could wipe the slobber off with the back of her hand.

  “If you didn’t have him, I wouldn’t be comfortable leaving you alone,” Sully said. He bent down, and Heathcliff wagged his way over to his favorite male person. The boys had a lovefest of their own, and then Sully stood to enfold Lindsey in his arms one more time.

  He pressed a kiss against her hair and said, “Lock the door behind me.”

  “I will,” she said.

  He gave her one more squeeze and a lingering kiss and then he was gone. Lindsey shut and locked the door behind him, almost changing her mind and calling him back, but she resisted. When she turned to look up the stairwell to her third-floor apartment, she wondered if it was always this dark and creepy or if it was just tonight.

  Nancy had left the door to her first-floor apartment open, so Heathcliff could greet Lindsey when she arrived. Lindsey knocked on the doorjamb to let Nancy know she was there on the off chance she hadn’t heard Heathcliff barking.

  “Come in.”

  Lindsey followed the sound of Nancy’s voice, which mingled with the scent of cinnamon on the air to lead her right to the kitchen where Nancy was finishing a batch of molasses cookies. Nancy was known throughout the village for her cookie-baking skills. Not surprisingly, there was a plate of cookies and a couple of mugs of cocoa sitting on the island counter as if waiting for Lindsey.

  “I gather you heard the news,” Lindsey asked.

  “Everyone heard,” Nancy confirmed. She put her cookie sheet down, took off her pot holders and leaned over the counter to give Lindsey a hug. “I was so upset I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I started baking. Olive Boyle made a lot of enemies in this town, but still, to murder her—that’s vicious.”

  Nancy shook her head as if she couldn’t fathom how a person could ever take another’s life. Lindsey was right there with her. She sipped the hot chocolate and was immediately soothed.

  “Sully’s recipe?” she asked.

  “Always,” Nancy said. “Where is he? I thought he’d come in with you.”

  “He has an early tour of the islands,” Lindsey said. “I didn’t want to keep him up.”

  Nancy nodded. “We do seem to have a lot of autumn visitors this year, from all over the world no less.”

  Lindsey put down her cocoa and picked up a cookie, then she put it down, her eyes wide. “Do you suppose one of them murdered Olive?”

  “No!” Nancy protested. “I don’t think so. I mean the ones at the dinner all seemed so nice, but I guess anything is possible.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Lindsey asked. She bit into her cookie. Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. Perfection.

  She hadn’t thought of it before, but Nancy was right. Olive might have been murdered by a total stranger, one of those Londoners, maybe, or those people from Arizona. Who knew how far Olive had spread her poison?

  “It’s a good thing you’ve made a promise not to investigate anymore, huh?” Nancy asked. Her look was sly.

  “Yeah, I suppose it is,” Lindsey agreed. She put the remnants of her cookie back down. A smear of the sugary glaze Nancy drizzled on the cookies stuck to her finger, and she licked it off. “It’s just—”

  An image of Olive’s body flashed in Lindsey’s mind and she shivered.

  “Just?” Nancy asked. She sipped her cocoa and pushed Lindsey’s mug in her direction, encouraging her to have more.

  Lindsey picked it up and stared into the froth on the top as if the creamy chocolate could give her answers. She only wished. She took a sip, letting the cocoa warm up her insides.

  “You left before we discovered Olive’s body,” Lindsey said. “You didn’t by any chance notice her with anyone, say, one of my staff, maybe, having an argument on your way out, did you?”

  Nancy frowned. She stared at the pile of cookies before her as if willing them to give her an answer.

  “I’m sorry. I left with Violet, and we were busy cooing over the trip for two to Paris that she won in the auction. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.” At Nancy’s dubious stare, she added, “Really. I made a promise I would leave these things to the police, and I intend to keep it.”

  “Of course, dear,” Nancy said. She tipped her head to the side and studied Lindsey. “You look tired.”

  “I am,” she said.

  Exhaustion hit her like a heavy feather pillow to the face. The desire to be unconscious suddenly overrode any other need, even the one to stuff her face with Nancy’s amazing cookies, and that was saying something.

  “Here.” Nancy handed Lindsey her mug and then bagged a dozen cookies for her. “Take these and go hit the sack. Things will be better in the morning.”

  “Will they?” Lindsey asked.

  “No, but you’ll have gotten some rest, and everything is always more manageable when you’ve had some sleep.”

  Lindsey gave her landlady a one-armed hug. “Thanks for watching the boy.”

  “My pleasure,” Nancy said, and she walked them to the door.

  The two flights of stairs in her dress and heels were too daunting to contemplate, so Lindsey kicked off her shoes in the foyer and left them on the bottom step. She would collect them in the morning. Then she grabbed her handbag and her keys and made the slow climb upstairs, sipping her cocoa as she went.

  When she reached the second-floor landing, she paused to nibble a cookie and finish her rapidly cooling cocoa while Heathcliff waited patiently by her side. Her neighbor Charlie popped his head out and smiled when he saw her.

  “I was waiting for you,” he said. He gestured to the cocoa and cookies. “Aunt Nancy was waiting for you, too.”

  Lindsey held out the bag for him to take a cookie.

  “Thanks,” he said. He chomped it down in two bites. “So, we heard about Olive Boyle.”

  “Grisly news travels fast.”

  “She was a pretty hateful old bat,” Charlie said. “I don’t wish ill on anyone, but I can’t pretend that I’m heartbroken either.”

  “Charlie, while you were there breaking down your equipment at the end, did you notice anything weird?”

  Charlie tossed his stringy black hair and tipped his head to the side. It almost looked like he was trying to identify a song he heard playing, but there was no sound other than Heathcliff’s nails on the hardwood floor while he paced back and forth waiting for Lindsey.

  “Nothing that I would call weird, exactly,” he said. “More like annoying.”

  “Oh?” Lindsey raised her eyebrows.

  “Yeah, what’s going on with Kelsey Kincaid and Devon Strickland?” he asked.

  “You mean Kelsey the florist and Devon the landscaper?”

  “Yeah, are they a thing?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” Lindsey said.

  “Well, that’s not very helpful,” Charlie said.

  Lindsey held up the bag of cookies, and he took another.

  “I take it you were preoccupied with Kelsey and Devon and didn’t notice much else?” she asked.
>
  “She danced with him like four times. The guy can’t even play an instrument,” Charlie stated, clearly dumbfounded that Kelsey could find a non-musician attractive.

  “Okay, then, good talk. Night, Charlie,” Lindsey said. She patted him on the shoulder and headed up the stairs.

  “If you hear anything about Kelsey and Devon, let me know,” he called after her.

  “Roger that,” Lindsey said.

  “Roger? Who the heck is Roger?” he asked. “She’s not dating some guy named Roger, too, is she?”

  Lindsey paused in the middle of the stairs and glanced down at Heathcliff. He sat at her feet as if understanding that she needed to finish her conversation with Charlie.

  “No, that was roger as in okay. You know, roger that, like a fighter pilot, military speak.”

  “Oh.” His face turned a bit pink, and he nodded. “Sorry, she’s just got me all . . .”

  Lindsey thought about Sully and how he got her in a tizzy at times. “No worries. I totally get it.”

  Charlie grinned at her, and it transformed his face. How had Lindsey never noticed how handsome he was? Maybe he stood a shot with Kelsey after all.

  “Smile at her like that when you ask her out,” Lindsey said. “She won’t say no.”

  His smile snapped into a frown. “I never said I was going to ask her out. There’s criteria involved, you know. Non-negotiable stuff.”

  Lindsey began walking again and called out, “Yeah, yeah, I know, like does she prefer the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Big criteria there.”

  “Are you mocking me?” he called after.

  Lindsey leaned over the rail so she could see him. “Yes.”

  “Well, at least you admit it,” he grumbled.

  “Good night,” she called out. She unlocked her door, and Heathcliff dashed in, eager to sniff around their one-bedroom apartment to make sure everything was exactly as they’d left it.

  Lindsey followed him and locked up. She bagged her dress in an old dry cleaning bag, thinking she never wanted to wear it again. Even if she had it professionally cleaned, she couldn’t in good conscience donate it to charity. She left it on the floor by the front door, resolved to figure it out tomorrow. Then she took a scalding shower as if the hot water could burn the horror of the night out of her mind, but of course, it couldn’t. Nothing could.