“Our wedding cake is going to be angel food cake. I liked how light it tasted, so it’s perfect for a late spring wedding. Sherry told me the kind of icing that will work with the flowers I want, but at the moment I can’t remember the name. There won’t be any filling. And I quit my job at the newspaper because Howard hired my ex to write the society page, which meant that my pay would be cut in half and I’d lose my health insurance. So I quit.”
Alex’s eyes opened wide as my words sunk in, and then they returned to normal. The expression on his face changed from worry to surprise to what I thought looked like confusion. I didn’t stand around waiting for him to say anything, though, and walked upstairs to the bedroom to lie down.
This day had been too much. I needed a nap.
I curled up under the covers and pulled them over my head, hoping to shut out everything so I could quiet my brain and find some peace. For hours, that tiny voice that had terrorized me so many times since that day I found out Jared had run off with another woman had been screaming in my head that the past was about to repeat itself.
That Alex would get cold feet and run away just like Jared did.
It didn’t matter how many times I told myself that would never happen. That Alex wasn’t Jared and I had no valid reason to believe he didn’t want to marry me as much as I wanted to marry him. Nope, it didn’t matter. The voice kept repeating its ominous warning over and over until that’s all I could focus on.
Alex is going to leave you just like Jared did. Alex is going to leave you just like Jared did. Alex is going to leave you just like Jared did.
And there’s nothing you can do to stop it because it’s you he doesn’t want.
My head pounded from the sound of those words echoing in my brain. My stomach had tied itself into a tightly wound knot just as Jared sat down at the table at The Grounds all those hours ago, so by the time I curled myself up into the fetal position and pulled the covers up over my head, the pain in my gut hurt so bad I wanted to cry.
I hated that I was so weak that a few well-chosen nasty words from my ex could send me spiraling into this kind of paranoia and self-doubt that practically crippled me. I felt foolish even admitting to myself that he still had that effect on my psyche.
As all these thoughts swirled around in my head in a toxic soup that threatened to poison every inch of me, I heard Alex come into the bedroom. A sense of embarrassment washed over me as I listened to him untie his shoes and toss them across the room and then felt the bed dip when he sat down.
He must think I’m crazy. I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to marry me because I’m nuts.
Without saying a word, he crawled under the covers with me and gently put his arm around my body, pulling me to him so we were pressed together. He rested his chin against my shoulder, and his warm breath drifted over my cheek.
But he said nothing.
For Alex, words were necessary evils like other things in life that one was forced to have. He preferred to show people what he believed and how he felt about them rather than tell them. While I loved words and had an overabundance of them inside me just waiting to get out most days, he could easily not speak a single syllable on any given day and he would have been happy.
Sometimes that frustrated me. Now I loved that he didn’t fill the air with words he hoped would help or wasn’t sure were even what he should say but felt the need to because he didn’t like seeing me like this.
His silence soothed me, and the strength I felt from having him there next to me made that voice that had been screaming for hours slowly fade into the recesses of my mind. I sighed, letting the stress of the day out.
“I’m sorry.”
He likely had no idea what I was apologizing for. That’s okay. It was more of a blanket apology anyway.
“I didn’t mean to scare you today, Poppy. I wasn’t in any danger, though. It was just some basic investigating,” he said quietly in my ear.
“That’s not why I was upset,” I said as I pulled his arm tighter around me so I could feel him even more.
“You were too good for that job anyway. Don’t worry about that. They’ll be calling you begging you to come back before Founders’ Day. You watch,” he said, trying to be sweet.
I brought his hand to my lips and kissed his knuckles before tucking it under my chin and snuggling around it. “I wasn’t really upset about that either.”
Alex said nothing in response, but I wanted him to know why I’d been so upset all day. I rolled over to face him and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand to see the look in his dark brown eyes when I admitted the truth of what happened to me since kissing him goodbye that morning.
“After Howard gave Jared the society page and I quit my job, I was sitting in The Grounds trying to get my head around what I’d just done. Jared came in and wanted to talk, but I told him to go away. He…he said you were probably getting cold feet like he did about marrying me.”
I buried my head in the pillow. “I know it was stupid to let him get to me like that but then—”
Alex pulled me into his arms and held me to him before finishing my sentence. “But then I didn’t show for the cake tasting and you thought maybe he was right. I’m sorry, Poppy. I never meant to make you think that. It was just a cruel coincidence that I got stuck in traffic and didn’t make it. You know that, right?”
I turned to face him and saw the worry in his eyes. I’d never seen that in any other man’s eyes when they looked at me.
“I know, Alex. This actually has very little to do with you. It’s all in my head. I let him get to me, and I don’t know why. I have a wonderful man who never makes me doubt for a second that he loves me, but all that tiny voice in my head needs is one shove from my ex and I end up spending the day going out of my mind thinking that you’re going to do what he did. It’s crazy. You’re marrying a crazy woman.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You’re not crazy, but even if you are, I don’t care. I still love you, Poppy McGuire. And I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me.”
Then he kissed me softly, and the last faint sounds of that awful voice in my head faded into nothingness.
Slowly, as I lay there in Alex’s arms, my stomach began to untie itself from that wretched knot it had been in for hours and my headache subsided. We said nothing more for a long while as I relished the quiet strength of my soon-to-be husband who could never know how much this woman who loved to talk appreciated what he gave me.
I kissed him on the cheek once I felt better and asked, “So what did you find out today?”
Leaning back, Alex smiled. “Some very interesting things that make me even more interested in Bruno Carter for this murder.”
My curiosity piqued, I urged him to tell me more as I propped my head up on my hand. “Really? What did you find out?”
“He’s definitely not what we thought he was. He’s not sleeping with Eliza. That’s for sure.”
“Why? How do you know that? Did you find some secret wife or something today?” I asked, intrigued about what Bruno Carter’s story was.
Alex shook his head. “No secret wife, but I found out about a secret baby. Seems Eliza is Bruno’s mother. She gave birth to him when she was fifteen, and her mother passed him off as her own so Eliza wouldn’t have to drop out of school.”
“Ooooh. I doubt most people would think Eliza Morrow would be associated with something so sordid. Who’s the father?” I asked, intrigued about Samuel’s wife even more now.
“This is where it gets sordid. The father was some college kid at Georgetown who she was dating. She was fifteen, and he was twenty-one and about to graduate. He heard about the baby and wanted nothing to do with it. So her mother raised the child.”
The story about Eliza being at the Georgetown University library the day Samuel was murdered now seemed to make sense. “Is that why she was at the library on campus on Saturday?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure specifically why yet. And it
doesn’t explain what she was doing at the Caston library those other times. But I have a theory.”
“Tell me! This is getting good,” I squealed, happy to be back on the case and out of my own head after a long, trying day.
“I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we take a ride over to the Caston library now and see what we can find out? You up for it?”
I threw off the covers and jumped over him to the floor. “More than up for it. Let’s go!”
“I need to get my shoes on, Poppy. So do you,” he said as he rolled out of bed.
“Get your shoes on and give me a couple minutes to fix my hair since I have bed head. Then we can get going,” I called back to him as I hurried into the bathroom.
I brushed my hair and then headed back into the bedroom just as Alex finished putting his shoes on. “I had a feeling Bruno wasn’t just a driver, but I have to admit I didn’t peg him for a relative of hers. That’s a surprise.”
“Take a look at their eyes the next time you see them together. Something told me the similarities weren’t a coincidence, so I headed down to D.C. to see if it was possible that’s why they are so close,” Alex said with a grin.
As I straightened out his uniform shirt, brushing out the wrinkles with my hand, I couldn’t help be impressed with him. I’d been right there when we spoke to Eliza and Bruno, yet I hadn’t noticed their eyes looked alike.
“I didn’t see that at all,” I admitted sheepishly.
Alex kissed me sweetly on the lips and smiled. “You were too busy checking out Bruno’s muscles. Ready to go?”
We drove up to the Caston Public Library on Broad Street, and Alex parked the car right in front of the old Federalist style brick building. As the two of us walked up the stairs to the front door, I looked for the usual plaque that these kinds of places had right next to the entrance bragging about some famous historical person having done something important on that very spot.
Alex saw me searching for it and joked, “I think this is the first old building I’ve seen since I moved out to Sunset Ridge that doesn’t have a plaque saying George Washington slept here or something equally historically dubious.”
“Maybe he wasn’t in the mood for books when he was in town. He was a very busy man, you know. That war wasn’t going to win itself,” I said as Alex held open the glass front door so I could walk in first.
I stopped just inside the entrance as the scent of books hit my nose. I loved the smell of books. Old books, new books—it didn’t matter. They all smelled so warm and wonderful. They reminded me of when I was a little girl and my mother would take me to the library every Saturday to pick out that week’s books.
My partner ran into me from behind as I reveled in the scent of the library around me, sending the two of us careening forward toward a table of children’s books. Thankfully, we caught ourselves before the entire bunch of them landed on the floor along with the two of us.
“You have to tell me when you’re stopping, Poppy,” Alex said as he straightened himself.
“Sorry. I got lost in the smell of all these books for a second.”
He looked at me strangely for a moment but didn’t ask me what I meant before turning toward a desk where a woman sat in the back corner of the room. I took one more deep inhale of the wonderful smell of the library and followed him over to her.
A young woman I guessed to be in her late twenties or early thirties, she had dark blonde hair that hung just below her shoulders and sat writing in a notebook. As we got closer, I saw her ears were pierced no less than six times each all the way up to the top of the outside of her ear. Each earring was a hoop, and it made her ear look like the waist of a pair of pants that needed a belt.
She lifted her head from her work as we approached the desk, and I saw her nose was pierced and contained the same kind of small hoop earring her ears had. The woman smiled up at Alex and me, but all I could think about was how much all that piercing must have hurt and then immediately my brain traveled to how much all those hoop earring must cost to fill all those holes.
Alex seemed to read my mind because he turned and the expression on his face said, “Don’t mention the piercings.”
“Excuse me, miss. I’m Officer Alex Montero of the Sunset Ridge police and this is my partner, Poppy McGuire. We’re looking for some information about someone who’s come into the library a number of times in recent months.”
He pulled Eliza Morrow’s picture out of his shirt pocket and asked, “Have you seen this woman here at any time recently?”
The librarian took the photograph from Alex and studied it for a moment. A look of recognition came over her, and she nodded before handing it back to him.
“Yeah, I have seen her here once or twice.”
“Her name is Eliza Morrow. Would you be able to tell me what she was looking for here?” he asked, but I doubted even the best librarian would remember a detail like that.
She shook her head no, but immediately turned in her chair and began typing on the old desktop computer on the corner of the desk. “Eliza with a z, right?”
“Yes. Eliza Morrow,” Alex said as she tapped away on the keys.
A list came up on the screen in front of her, and she ran her fingertip from the top down, leaving a trail in the dust on the computer monitor. “She’s checked out a number of books. Moby Dick, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Hollywood Wives, and The Beginner’s Guide to Making Wreaths.”
Alex wrote the titles in his notebook and then glanced over at me. If I’d ever heard of a more eclectic reading list, I wasn’t sure where.
“That’s a strange grouping of topics,” I said with a chuckle to the librarian. “Classic literature, Nazi history, romance, and a do-it-yourself book on wreath making?”
She nodded and smiled. “I’d say so. But here’s something even stranger. Each time she took the book out for only a day and then returned it. Unless she’s done that speed reading course they used to advertise for, I’d guess she isn’t reading them. At least not Moby Dick and the Nazi book.”
Alex looked around the tiny library and asked, “Are those books checked in now?”
The librarian looked at the screen again and nodded. “Every one of them. The two fiction books are in the stacks on the left side of the room arranged by the author’s last name. In this case M for Melville and C for Collins. The other two nonfiction books are on the right side of the room, the wreath book in the seven hundreds and the Third Reich book in the nine hundreds in history.”
He thanked her for her help and pointed toward the nonfiction side of the library. “You take that side and I’ll find the fiction books. We’ll meet up at the tables in the middle of the room when we find them.”
“What am I looking for when I find them?” I asked, more than a little confused about what we were doing.
“I don’t know, but that selection of books is odd, to say the least, and keeping each book for just one day tells me she wasn’t checking them out to read them.”
He headed off to find the two fiction books, so I walked across the room to the nonfiction stacks and searched for my two. It took less than a minute to find my assigned books, and by the time I sat down at the tables, Alex was coming toward me with his two.
“Okay, we have them. What do we do now?”
“Open them up and thumb through them. See if there’s anything like a note or any pieces of paper left in them.”
I did as he said and began looking through the wreath-making book. Each page gave very detailed instructions on how to create handmade wreaths, but there were no papers whatsoever between the pages.
“Wreath book is clean. Just a whole lot about wreaths. Now onto the Third Reich.”
Sliding the book toward me, I marveled at its size, especially for a one night read. “There’s no way she read this book in one night.” Flipping to the end, I said, “It’s over a thousand pages!”
Alex looked up as he finished leafing through Moby Dick and nodded. “That�
�s why I wanted to see the books. Keep checking.”
I flipped through each page of the rise and then the fall of Nazi Germany without finding anything. Meanwhile, Alex finished his inspection of Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives and pushed the book away in disgust that his hunch had been wrong.
“So much for going old school,” he mumbled.
Just before I reached the end of the massive tome in front of me, I felt something behind the page I was turning. I looked down and there in the last few pages was a piece of paper.
Excited, I held it up for Alex to see. “Hey, look at this! You might have been right.”
His face lit up, and he leaned forward to check out the piece of paper. “Does it say anything?”
It was a piece of notebook paper folded in half and ragged on the sides. I opened it up and saw someone had written on the top two lines in large letters, “FRIDAY NIGHT 10PM BEHIND THE BUILDING.”
I handed Alex the paper, and he read it too before looking across the table at me with dejection in his eyes. “Not too helpful. This could have been any Friday at ten in all the years this library has been open and who knows what building this person was referring to.”
“Wait a second. Don’t get down on this just yet. We can figure out a few things at least. It’s definitely a man’s handwriting. It’s all flinty looking, so definitely a man’s.”
Never a huge fan of my handwriting ideas, Alex raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “Flinty? You want to explain what you mean by that?”
I held up the paper and pointed at the sharply written letters. “Females have a rounded nature to their writing nine times out of ten. It’s just how it is. I don’t know why. But men tend to have a straighter feel to their writing. Also, women usually don’t print. Not even younger women. Printing is a guy thing, and this printing is very angular. That’s why I said it’s flinty.”
My explanation didn’t impress him, and he took the sheet of paper back as he mumbled under his breath, “Flinty printing.”
The Finest Hour Page 16