Of Books and Bagpipes

by Paige Shelton

  “What does?”

  “Why he wanted Edwin tae know that I was alive.”

  “Please explain, Gordon. Help me understand. I know my boss didn’t kill your son. He couldn’t, and you probably know that too, but what’s all this about?”

  “I cannae tell ye, Delaney. It would be breaking a promise I swore I wouldnae break. I’m not much anymore, a liar certainly, but I cannae betray…”

  “Who?”

  “I cannae.”

  “What if you telling me the answer finds the killer?”

  “It willnae unless it was Edwin,” he said a long, thoughtful moment later. He sat forward and touched the phone with a fingertip. “I didnae ken that Billy knew about the dirk.”

  “You didn’t ask him to give the dirk to Edwin?”

  “I never would have.”

  “So, you really wrote down the story of your faked demise on a piece of paper you put in an Oor Wullie book?”

  “Aye.”

  “And the Oor Wullie comic was important to you all?”

  “Aye. At one time, many years ago, it was important tae us all.”

  “Could you explain that, please?”

  If I hadn’t already shown him something that seemed to have drained him of all of his energy, he might have told me.

  “Not today,” he said.

  “Would you write down the story for me?”

  “Why? I told ye the story in person. There’s nothing left tae tell. I was a drunken fool and I made a mistake in thinking I was tae blame for Leith. I wasnae. I wasnae tae blame for Billy either.” Heavy tears welled in his eyes.

  I reached for the phone. Gordon made a brief motion toward it but then sat back again. “Why did seeing this dirk bother Edwin so much?”

  “He saw it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then maybe he’s not guilty. He’ll get over it,” Gordon said with a small smile.

  I put the phone back into my bag and said, “Gordon, does S-P-E-C mean anything to you?”

  His smile widened for an instant but his now dry eyes remained sad as they locked onto mine. “Ye are interesting, Delaney from America, but that’s another secret I’ll not tell.” He stood, making him seem gigantic in the small space. “I have tae get back tae work now.”

  “Did you know it was tattooed on the inside of Billy’s wrist?”

  “Of course I did.” He lifted his sleeve and showed me his identical tattoo.

  “A secret society from the university?” I said.

  “I have tae get back tae work.” He pulled down the sleeve.

  A noise sounded outside the door. It was as if someone slipped on the floor and caught themselves with a stomp of their foot. Gordon and I looked at each other before he turned the knob and pushed it open. No one was in sight.

  I followed him out to the market, where many more customers filled the space along with the strong sea smells. There was no obvious eavesdropper in the area, but a tall, older man next to the closest set of doors looked over at us and pulled his eyebrows together.

  “My boss,” Gordon muttered quietly. “We were in his office. I’ll come up with an explanation.”

  “Thank you for your time,” I said loud enough and friendly enough for the boss to hear.

  But Gordon lowered his voice. “Dinnae come back here again, Delaney. We have no business together. I wouldnae want tae do anything tae put Fiona in jeopardy. Please stay away.”

  He turned and walked past the office and through some plastic dividers that I assumed led to an even colder part of the building where the fish went before they were displayed out front.

  I smiled as I passed Liam. He smiled too and then quickly turned his attention back to the mussels he was placing on ice.

  The nice day had disappeared by the time I stepped back outside. Light rain fell with clouds that promised heavier rain before they dissipated. From the landing I peered toward the street in between the market and the river. I had an umbrella in my bag but there was a bench on the landing around from the front doors that was protected by an awning. I took a seat and pulled out my phone again, finding the bus route and time app.

  A fifteen-minute wait. Not bad. I tried to call Edwin and wasn’t surprised that he didn’t answer. Just as the ten-minute mark ticked by, Liam came out through the door, stopping short when he saw me on the bench.

  “Hi again,” he said. He’d taken off the hair net, apron, and white coat, and his dimples stood out even more when you could see his short brown hair.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m sairy if I was weird in there. Ye really do leuk familiar but that’s no excuse for my stalkerish behavior.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Ye waiting for Barclay?”

  “No, a bus.”

  “Aye? Weel, I’d offer ye a ride, but after all that I’m not sure it would sound awright.”

  I smiled. “Thank you, but I’m okay. I like the buses.”

  Liam smiled and cocked his head as he looked at me. The moment went on a bit too long.

  “Nice tae meet ye, Delaney,” he said a beat later.

  “Nice to meet you too, Liam.”

  “Ye ken where I work. Stop by sometime if yer personal circumstances change.”

  I nodded.

  He started to walk away but turned again to face me. “How do ye ken Barclay?”

  “A friend of a friend.” I shrugged.

  When I didn’t offer anything else, he tipped an invisible hat and said, “Weel, then, I’ll be off.” He glanced up at the door to the market so I did too. The tall, older man I’d seen, Gordon’s boss, stood there. He sent Liam a distinct look of displeasure. He sent one my direction too before he went back inside. Maybe he always looked like that.

  Liam turned and was gone in a flash, moving down a street I couldn’t quite see from my vantage point.

  The bus stopped on the corner a few seconds later. Even with the umbrella, my legs got drenched as I hurried across to catch it. Once seated I looked toward the spot where Liam had last been, but didn’t see any sign of him still there. As I looked one more time at the doorway to the fish market, I noticed what I first thought was a misplaced steady snake upward of steam, but I realized I was seeing a discarded but still burning cigarette on the landing right outside the door.

  The bus took a route that reminded me about someone else who might be able to answer some of my questions. Or at least help me come up with better questions.

  I disembarked earlier than I originally planned.

  FIFTEEN

  Though all libraries, even the smallest, least stocked branches, are treasures, the library at the University of Edinburgh is a masterpiece of treasures.

  The building’s outside is made with modern, squared-off lines and concrete balconies, but the inside is an arched cove of nothing but architectural smarts and historical beauty. Tables, chairs, reference desks, and computers populate the main floor and shelves upon shelves of books ride up the sides, filling in the spaces between the windows and the arches and pillars. The stairways throughout are dark carved wood, and I often wondered if they were magical and moved of their own accord when the lights were out at night and no one was around.

  I knew that Tom’s father, Artair, had been recently spending most of his time in the art book room, cataloguing the lifespan of a specific design of ceramic bowl. It was such a micro-research project that even I, someone who was made to research, felt anxious thinking about the tediousness that must be involved.

  I made my way toward Artair, keeping my footfalls as quiet as possible. As I passed by them, I enjoyed glancing at the busts of past notable university professors that lined the main room. I always wondered what they’d taught so well that they got to be honored in such a cool way.

  I usually pushed my bookish voices away when I was inside the library. If I was overwhelmed and in awe, they’d probably be that way too. Today, though, I opened my mind and let them in. Maybe they could tell me what “SPE
C” meant. It didn’t work that way, but it was worth a shot.

  We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

  If I wasn’t mistaken, that wasn’t a quote from a book, but a quote from an author. I’d gone through a Kurt Vonnegut phase one semester in high school, but I didn’t remember where I’d read the quote or why I was so certain the voice in my head was his.

  Mr. Vonnegut was talking about Gordon, I was sure. The idea of him playing dead and hiding in plain sight couldn’t continue forever, but he’d managed it so far. I was disappointed in my bookish voices for giving me something so obvious, and I was at the doorway to the art book room before I could see if they had anything more to say.

  The room wasn’t large and though all of the shelves on each wall were full, there was a distinct sense of organization inside it; a neatness that seemed to follow Artair wherever he went.

  He sat behind a tall worktable, studying something intently. I had a misshapen view of him because the large lit magnifying glass clipped onto the side of the table was elbowed at just the right angle to make him look bug-eyed. A moment later he sensed I was at the doorway, and looked up over the glass.

  “Delaney, lass, welcome! Come in, come in.”

  He clicked off the light, stood, and came around the table.

  “How are ye, lass? Any news aboot the murder? I wanted tae call Tom, but I didnae want tae bother the lad when I heard about the broken pipe.”

  “A little news,” I said. “And when I last left Tom, I think he was getting the pipe under control.”

  “Guid tae hear. What can I do for ye?”

  “You have a few minutes? I have some questions, but I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “I need a wee break anyway. Come along. We’ll have some coffee and ye can tell me the news.”

  He led us down a hallway, and slid his ID through a slot next to a security door that opened to a dark and echo-y stairway. The break room beneath the depths of the magnificent library was disappointingly like almost any other break room, stark and boring, but today this one wasn’t busy. I knew that Tom had told Artair about Gordon’s visit to the bookshop, his faked death, and what we knew of his history with Edwin. Only a few people traveled in and out of the break room as I told him about Edwin’s reaction to finding the dirk, but I got to the point of why I’d come to talk to him with as little preamble as possible.

  “Do you know anything about something called S-P-E-C?” I spelled.

  “An acronym?”

  “I think it’s an acronym. S-P-E-C,” I repeated. “But I’m not sure. Either way, does it ring a bell? I believe it might have something to do with a university secret society.”

  Artair’s eyebrows lifted. “Aye?”

  I nodded. “It was a sticker on the glass part of the frame over Edwin’s diploma from the University of Edinburgh. It didn’t seem official, but like something that someone had stuck there later. Billy, the dead man, also had a tattoo of those letters on the inside of his wrist.”

  Artair had fallen into thought, his coffee cup halted halfway to his mouth. He didn’t speak for a long moment. I waited silently.

  “Delaney…” he began as he put the cup back on the table.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Come with me,” he said, his jaw suddenly set firm as he hurried out of the room.

  “Okay.”

  I grabbed my cup and the one Artair seemed to have forgotten and threw them away before I followed his fast steps the other direction from the stairs and down a sloping hallway.

  We took three right turns, walked down another short flight of stairs, turned left, and then entered a low-ceilinged room with shelves packed with boxes.

  “A sub-basement?” I said.

  “One of a few,” Artair said. “I need to know what year Edwin graduated from university. Do ye remember what the diploma said?”

  “No, sorry, but we can figure this out.”

  After some quick calculations and a few guesses, Artair grabbed a cart that was against a wall and rolled it down an aisle. He pulled one of the office boxes from a shelf, dropped it with a muffled boom onto the concrete floor next to the cart, and then lifted the lid.

  “Yearbooks?” I said.

  “Aye, and some other items of note from those years. Some of our archivists and librarians save things in different ways. It’s … it’s difficult to explain, but let’s leuk.”

  Artair pulled out the two yearbooks that were on top of folders, small trophy-like trinkets, and a couple of smaller boxes. He handed me one of the books. It didn’t take me long to find a picture of my boss.

  “He was the editor of the university’s paper his senior year? I’d heard about the writing, but editor? That’s a pretty big deal,” I said.

  “Aye,” Artair said as he looked at the open book I held. “Awright. We have dates. Let’s load up some boxes and move over to the microfiche machines.”

  He repacked the box and lifted it and then three others to the cart. We rolled over to the other side where a row of three microfiche machines were lined up against the wall. My years of experience working in libraries had given me quite a knack with these machines.

  We’d found the yearbooks from the years Edwin had been at the university and then pulled out some of the smaller boxes from the bigger ones. Each small box held a roll of film that displayed the pages inside the yearbooks as well as pages from the university’s newspaper.

  I scrolled to a newspaper article that had a black-and-white picture of a young Edwin as the subject of the article. He’d been a well-respected editor, and had made “stylistic and content changes” to the paper that had been heralded as, among other things, “revolutionary” and “progressive.”

  “Handsome, huh?” I said with a smile. I enjoyed the flattering content of the article, but I couldn’t help but notice the dapper style he’d had even back then. He’d reminded me of Jimmy Stewart when I’d first met him. Even more so now.

  “Aye. A good lad too, from all indications. Here’s something.” Artair held an open folder with a short stack of papers on the table in front of me.

  I took the folder and read the caption under the picture on the top of the stack. “‘Edwin MacAlister, Leith Stanton, Gordon Armstrong, and Clarissa Bellows work to create their own Oor Wullie–type comic strip.’

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “This was in one of the boxes?”

  “Aye, I wondered if my memory was true. Until ye mentioned SPEC, I didnae remember these things. Even now though, Edwin’s involvement is a surprise. I didnae remember the names of those involved.”

  “What does this have to do with SPEC?”

  Artair’s eyebrows came together. “I’m not certain yet. I’m still putting the pieces together in my mind, but I think it was the students involved in the book like Oor Wullie who were part of a group called SPEC.” He shook his head. “I need tae keep looking, perhaps in a different place.”

  I read the full article and inspected the picture.

  The three men and the woman had been given a class project about mixing visual art with words, so they’d decided to create something similar to Oor Wullie. The editor of the Edinburgh paper that ran the Oor Wullie strip had heard about the project and was encouraging the students and giving them access to anything they might need at the city’s presses. The picture showed the four students posed outside a university building.

  Though the project and the community support were in themselves interesting, the picture was even more so.

  The three men, Leith and Gordon surprisingly as dapper as Edwin, gazed at the beautiful woman they surrounded.

  “From this picture, the three of these men look to be quite taken by Clarissa Bellows,” I mumbled.

  Artair leaned over my shoulder and readjusted the thick glasses he’d put on.

  “Ye might be right, or that might just be for the photo. She’s a lovely lass. Ye should ask Edwin aboot her. See what happened tae her.
I cannae remember if I read aboot her specifically.”

  “I will,” I said. “Did they ever create their book?”

  “I dinnae ken yet, but I’ll keep looking. These aren’t the boxes I was looking for, Delaney. I have memories of finding things much more scandalous.”

  I glanced at the date on the page with the picture of the four of them. “This one looks like it was taken before Edwin became editor, which according to the first yearbook was his senior year. The date on this article is two years earlier, their sophomore year. Did something scandalous happen sometime during those two years? Something with SPEC?”

  “I think something did, but I shouldnae have mentioned it tae ye until I knew for certain. I’ll need a little more time.”

  “It must not have hurt Edwin much. I doubt he would have been given the position of editor if he’d been in trouble.”

  “Probably not,” Artair said doubtfully.

  I looked at him and sensed we’d spent a lot of time in the sub-basement, keeping him away from the art room. “Artair, you don’t have time for all of this. If one of them would talk to me, that would give us a shortcut. I’ll try that first, but I might come back and look through these records again if that’s okay,” I said.

  “Anytime, but, Delaney, there’s one more thing.”

  I lifted my eyebrows at his ominous tone.

  “I think ye are correct about SPEC. I think it was a secret society, or at least something like that. I think there was a suicide, or someone died. It was many years ago, and I need tae find the connection again between the society and the book yer boss and his friends were making. I’ll find it, but it might take me a few days, and I’m curious. We’re a library and we like tae keep a record of everything, even if the manner of recording can be a wee bit hidden sometimes.”

  “Don’t do anything to put your job in jeopardy, Artair,” I said.

  “I willnae. Only some people like tae keep secrets buried. I know others who are keen tae share them with the world. I’ll find what ye’re looking for, if it’s tae be found.”