The Silence of the Library

by Miranda James

  “You rang, miss?” Fontaine was a man of few words. He did not believe, he had once told Veronica, in wasting time or breath on unnecessary conversation.

  “Yes, we did.” Veronica nodded at Lucy. “I am frightfully hungry, Fontaine. Perhaps you could find something for us, some victuals that Cook has not yet discarded?”

  “Of course, miss.” Fontaine coughed discreetly. “I will also inform Madam that you are awake. She has been anxiously awaiting the news.”

  Fontaine soon returned with a platter of bread, cheese, ham, and various fruits. Veronica greeted the sight with cries of delight and was soon happily sating her hunger. Her guardian joined them as Veronica finished the last of the bread and cheese.

  “Darling Veronica, how happy I am to see you looking so well.” Araminta Buff-Orpington seated herself on the bed beside her ward and clasped the girl’s hand affectionately. She turned to Lucy with a smile. “And dearest Lucy, what a treasured friend you are to nurse our girl so devotedly.”

  Lucy returned the smile. “I would do anything for Ronnie.”

  Mrs. Buff-Orpington turned back to Veronica. “Tell me, my dear, how you came to be in such a state.”

  Veronica related the events of the previous evening, and her guardian appeared suitably concerned, then relieved that the girl had come through such a harrowing adventure in good condition. “I do admire your concern for the welfare of those in need of aid, but I must condemn your tendency to put yourself in harm’s way.” She patted the girl’s hand again. “Whatever would Lucy and I do if something terrible happened to you? You really must be more careful, child.”

  Veronica squirmed with discomfort. She did not like being the cause of unease on the part of such a loving guardian, but yet she could not curb her appetite for adventure nor her concern for others. “I always try my best to avoid danger.”

  “I know you do,” Mrs. Buff-Orpington said smilingly, “and I won’t fuss any more. I am feeling rather tired and will now leave you two to chatter away the night as you like or rest.” She kissed each girl on the brow and made her stately way back to her own suite of rooms nearby.

  Though Veronica did not feel in the least sleepy, she knew Lucy was tired. Therefore, she did not demur when Lucy changed into her nightdress and crawled into the bed beside her. Veronica switched off the light. They chatted briefly, but soon Lucy was sound asleep.

  Veronica lay awake for some time, however, plotting her course. She must go back to that spooky house and investigate further. She could not forget Mrs. Eden’s fear or her plea for help. Finally, near dawn, she, too, fell asleep.

  I turned the page to the next chapter.

  Ten o’clock the next morning saw Veronica, accompanied by Artie Marsh, on her way back to the house she later learned was named Spellwood Mansion. Artie protested, trying to convince the girl that she should not tempt fate by going back. Veronica, however, remained undaunted. She must see that Mrs. Eden was safe.

  Veronica found the estate with little trouble, and she drove her roadster into the forecourt and parked before the front door. She gazed at the house for the first time in the light of day. Though it looked less sinister without a storm raging around it, Veronica thought nevertheless there was something forbidding about the mansion. She shivered, and Artie noticed.

  “Are you cold?” His words dripped with concern. He feared greatly that Veronica would again be injured. But if he could protect her in any way, he would. With his height and strong build, he felt sure he would prove a capable bodyguard for the young detective.

  “No, I’m fine.” Veronica smiled at her handsome friend. “Come, let’s go knock on the door and see what happens. I have the strangest feeling that more odd and puzzling things will occur.”

  As he extricated his long legs from the roadster, Artie hoped fervently that Veronica was wrong. Perhaps the inhabitants had fled in the night, and he and Ronnie could head home. Artie did not fear adventure, for he was a courageous young man, yet his concern for Veronica was paramount.

  He wielded the knocker vigorously, and he and Veronica waited. Moments later the door swung open, and Veronica glimpsed the creepy butler, Bradberry.

  “Good morning, miss,” the old man said. “Are you returned to visit the mistress?”

  “I am.” Veronica boldly stepped past the butler into the entranceway. “My friend Mr. Arthur Marsh is accompanying me today. Please announce us to Mrs. Eden. I trust she is well.” Until Veronica spoke to the mistress of the house, she decided she would not tax the servant with the mystery of her drugging and abandonment in her car by the side of the road.

  “She is indeed, miss.” Bradberry closed the front door behind them. “Please walk this way, and I will announce you.” He turned and headed toward the same sitting room in which Veronica had talked with Mrs. Eden the previous day.

  Bradberry opened the doors and advanced into the sunlit room. Veronica and Artie, following right behind him, could not at first see their hostess. The butler intoned their names and then stepped aside.

  Veronica moved forward. Then her step faltered.

  Mrs. Eden arose from her chair and walked toward them, her hands extended, a beaming smile on her face. “My dear, how lovely to see you again. And you have brought a companion. How delightful.”

  Veronica stared hard at the woman. She looked like the Mrs. Eden she had encountered the day before, but her manner was so completely different that Veronica was stunned by the change.

  While Artie accepted the woman’s hand and shook it, Veronica continued to scrutinize their hostess. Mrs. Eden’s face appeared harder, less fleshy, and more heavily made up than the day before. She also seemed stronger, certainly no longer an invalid.

  Veronica relied on her instincts in such situations, and her instincts were telling her that the woman was an impostor. This Mrs. Eden was not the Mrs. Eden she met in this house yesterday.

  I chuckled at the melodrama of it. A second Mrs. Eden—as I recalled it, a cousin impersonating the real Mrs. Eden, who was imprisoned somewhere in the house.

  Out of nowhere my tired brain connected disparate pieces of information, and I knew who the killer was.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mrs. Cartwright really wasn’t Mrs. Cartwright.

  My solution to the murder was nuts.

  Wasn’t it?

  If Mrs. Cartwright wasn’t Mrs. Cartwright, then who was she?

  Eugene Marter. Had to be.

  I realized I hadn’t seen him and his grandmother in the same place at the same time. Had only seen him once, as a matter of fact.

  If Eugene was really impersonating his grandmother, then where was the real woman? Was she even still living?

  There was an easy way to check that. The Social Security death index.

  I slipped on my shoes and hurried downstairs to where I had left my laptop on the kitchen table. As soon as it was ready, I opened the browser and entered a website address. I knew the fastest way to gain access to the information was via a genealogy service to which I subscribed. I input my search terms, Mrs. Cartwright’s name, figuring there couldn’t be that many other women with her name in the index.

  There was no listing at all for Electra Barnes Cartwright. I tried Electra Cartwright. No hits. Electra Barnes returned several, but I could tell by the dates that none of them was the correct person.

  I leaned back in my chair and considered the possibilities.

  The fact that I couldn’t find her in the death index didn’t mean that she was still alive. That thought chilled me. Had they killed her and buried her in the backyard?

  Nasty.

  Maybe she was alive but mentally incapacitated. No longer able to write or make competent decisions about her books.

  That would be tragic, but an alternative preferable to my first thought.

  Diesel startled me by meowing loudly beside me. I was
so absorbed in my speculations that I had forgotten all about him.

  “I’m okay, boy.” I rubbed his head. “Thinking hard, that’s all. Nothing to worry over.”

  He warbled a couple of times before he settled down on the floor beside my chair.

  How would Kanesha react if I shared this theory with her?

  She would demand proof; that’s how she would react.

  What proof did I have? I had a lot of odd facts that I thought suggestive, but Kanesha needed convincing evidence.

  Short of walking up to the fake Mrs. Cartwright and snatching the red wig off her head, what could I do?

  I had a sudden vision of grabbing hold of the hair, pulling, and Mrs. Cartwright screaming in protest. I shuddered.

  No, I had to be completely sure about my theory before I could test it like that.

  What incontestable proof could I muster? Surely there was something.

  My gaze fell on the scrapbook. Pictures of Mrs. Cartwright. A vague idea began to form.

  Hard on those thoughts came another point. Photographs could be the reason the killer took away Carrie Taylor’s files. Why Carrie Taylor had to die. She had the proof right there in her file cabinet.

  Surely the killer had to realize, however, there were almost certainly copies of Mrs. Taylor’s photos elsewhere. Maybe a photograph wasn’t the proof after all.

  A memory surfaced. At the meeting with Mrs. Cartwright and Marcella, Carrie Taylor mentioned a photo of the author in the garden shed where she wrote her books. I didn’t recall seeing such a picture in Aunt Dottie’s scrapbook.

  I went back to my laptop and typed Electra Cartwright garden shed in the search engine. The result was a couple of pages of hits. I clicked on the first one, and that led me to an article in a fan publication devoted to children’s books—not Carrie Taylor’s newsletter.

  An examination of the other links revealed nothing useful. I clicked the link for an image search, and the result was a screen full of pictures. Some were of the author as a much younger woman; others were of garden sheds. Not a single one showed Mrs. Cartwright and a garden shed.

  Back to square one on that idea. I glanced at the scrapbook again. This time I pulled it close and found the section Aunt Dottie devoted to Mrs. Cartwright and Veronica. There were a couple of portrait-type photos from magazines pasted in, but those didn’t tell me anything.

  I stared at the image of Mrs. Cartwright with Marietta Dubois. Both women wore shoes with low heels, from what I could tell. The actress looked tall next to the writer, but if Miss Dubois had been six feet tall, that would make Mrs. Cartwright about five-eight. How could I find out how tall Marietta Dubois was?

  The encyclopedia entry I found earlier didn’t have that information. I searched for Marietta Dubois height but that didn’t get me anywhere, except increasingly frustrated. As a test I entered Judi Dench height and retrieved the information right away. Too bad Marietta Dubois hadn’t been more famous.

  I glanced at the screen again and examined the results of my search on Judi Dench. One link jumped right out at me—an Internet database devoted to movies. Maybe it had what I needed?

  I found the entry for Miss Dubois, and there it was. Height 5' 6". I laughed with relief. Whether a court would accept it as evidence was one thing, but it might be enough to convince Kanesha.

  At our first meeting I noticed that Mrs. Cartwright—or rather Eugene Marter—was the same height as Teresa Farmer. My friend and colleague was around five foot six as well. There was no way the real Electra Barnes Cartwright had grown a good four inches in the past sixty-odd years.

  Now that I had identified the murderer, I considered how that fact fit into the odd incidents that had occurred, starting with the murder itself.

  Kanesha’s witness, Mr. Andrews, claimed to have seen a man arrive around the time of Carrie Taylor’s phone message to Melba. Carrie Taylor had said something like, “What does he want?” About twenty minutes later Mr. Andrews saw a woman carrying a large box leaving the house.

  Two possibilities occurred to me. The first—Carrie Taylor had two guests in close succession. I really didn’t think so. The second—Eugene Marter arrived as a man, somehow secreting his wig about his person. After he committed murder, he donned the wig to confuse things. That worked for me. I figured Eugene was doing his best to muddy the waters.

  Next odd incident—the alleged theft of the five manuscripts and their discovery under the mattress in Winston Eagleton’s suite. When Marcella and Eugene first arrived at Eagleton’s party, they went immediately to the bathroom. The bedroom was only a few feet away, and one of them could easily have placed the manuscripts where they would quickly be found after Eugene reported the theft. I recalled the large handbag Eugene carried. He had not carried one in his role as his grandmother before, as far as I could remember.

  What about the phone call reporting the theft? Didn’t it occur around the time of the party when Eugene would have been at the hotel?

  Easily resolved—a cell phone call from the car or even from the lobby of the hotel before Eugene and Marcella came upstairs.

  My excitement built as I put the pieces of the crime together.

  What about the theft, however? Why had Eugene set it up? Had he seriously thought he could implicate Winston Eagleton in the murder? Or had he simply wanted to make everything more complicated in hopes that the authorities would be too confused to see the truth?

  That was the likeliest answer—intentional confusion. It had certainly worked, up to a point. Eugene had even set it up by coming to me with his story of Eagleton’s threats against Mrs. Cartwright over the right to publish the manuscripts.

  What about Yancy Thigpen? I felt chagrined that I had forgotten about the agent until this moment. Had Eugene killed her because she somehow stumbled into the middle of all this?

  I could only hope she was alive and unharmed, perhaps being hidden as a prisoner of Eugene and Marcella. Like the real Mrs. Cartwright. The Marters had a large house, with more than enough space to lock two women away upstairs and out of sight.

  What was at the root of the deception in the first place? That was a significant question, and one I should have considered earlier.

  The quick answer to that was money. The Marters were desperate for cash, and thought they could make some quick bucks by hawking the manuscripts and collecting fees from fans like Gordon Betts willing to pay outrageous sums to get a signature. A spurious signature, that is.

  I thought about those manuscripts. I would love to get my hands on them. It would be wonderful to see them in print, along with the original Veronica Thane books.

  An appalling idea brought me up short, however.

  What if they were spurious as well?

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I hated the idea that the five manuscripts might be fakes, but there were more important things to consider.

  First, though, I had to call Kanesha. I pulled out my cell phone and punched in the number.

  After two rings her voice growled in my ear. “This better be good.”

  “Did I wake you up?” I felt bad about that, considering how tired she had looked this morning. But this couldn’t wait.

  She ignored my question. “Why did you call?”

  “I know who the murderer is.” I paused for a reaction. None came right away. I plunged ahead. “Mrs. Cartwright is an impostor. It’s her grandson, Eugene, pretending to be her. He killed Carrie Taylor because I’m pretty sure she had evidence in her files that would have exposed him.” I paused again.

  Kanesha snorted in my ear. “If I didn’t know you better by now, I’d swear you were drunk out of your mind to come up with a far-out tale like this.”

  I decided the wiser course would be not to respond to that sally and wait for her to continue.

  “But I do know you better. You wouldn’t make such an outrageous clai
m if you weren’t sure you could prove it somehow.”

  “I believe I can,” I said, vastly relieved. “It would be easier to show you, though. I can’t really do it over the phone.”

  “Give me twenty minutes, and I’ll be there. That okay?” She sounded more alert, less aggravated.

  “That’ll be fine.” I ended the call and immediately started agitating over the best way to present my evidence. I grabbed the pad of paper I was using earlier to make notes from my research, found a blank page, and started outlining.

  Diesel must have sensed my mental turmoil. He sat up and prodded at my leg, then butted it with his head until I noticed him. “Everything is fine, boy.” I scratched his head with my left hand while I continued to jot things down with my right. He calmed after a minute or so of attention, and I could concentrate completely on my task at hand.

  By the time Kanesha arrived, I felt confident that I had put together a reasoned, coherent case against Eugene Marter. I offered to make coffee, and when she declined, I mentioned other beverages. She shook her head. She wanted to hear what I had to say, obviously. She did take a moment to say hello to Diesel, however, and I appreciated the gesture.

  I recounted my fruitless search through the newsletters, but I did suggest that they all needed to be examined carefully in case there was further evidence in them. She leafed through the scrapbook while I talked, and when she found the picture of Marietta Dubois with Mrs. Cartwright, I explained how I’d verified the actress’s height.

  “That sounds convincing.” She nodded at the picture. “Tell me the rest of it.”

  I took her through each of the strange incidents and offered my explanations for each. She seemed particularly interested in my theory about the planting of the manuscripts in Winston Eagleton’s hotel suite.

  “I couldn’t figure out why he would do something that was so obviously stupid,” she said. “But I had to charge him, given the evidence. Eugene Marter has a record—mostly petty crime, but he’s a shifty devil. Not as bright as he thinks he is, either.”