by Joanne Fluke
It wasn’t long before they reached the library and Lucy decided to pay a visit to Miss Tilley. She wanted to update her on the progress of her investigation, but she wanted to do it as delicately as possible. After all, a father’s infidelity would be a sensitive subject for anyone.
Miss Tilley was sitting in her usual spot at the circulation desk when Lucy and Toby entered and greeted them warmly. As far as Lucy could see there wasn’t anybody else in the library, so she could talk frankly. She pulled off Toby’s hat and mittens and unzipped his jacket and let him loose in the children’s corner, where he made a beeline for the box of toys and began pulling them out and tossing them over his shoulder.
“Toby! That’s no way to play,” she reminded him.
“Never mind,” said Miss Tilley. “We’ll help him tidy up afterward.” She leaned forward. “How’s the investigation going? I’m eager to hear what you’ve learned.”
Lucy looked at Miss Tilley, taking in her frail, birdlike shape and her wispy white hair, caught in a bun that barely held together despite an enormous quantity of hairpins. She seemed the very model of a typical old maid, right down to the cameo pin that caught both wings of her starched white lace collar. Suddenly Lucy wasn’t sure she wanted to bring up such a sexually charged topic as Judge Tilley’s infidelity.
“I understand you’ve been talking to Hannah Sprout,” coaxed Miss Tilley.
“That’s right,” admitted Lucy, wondering if she was doing the investigating or being investigated. “How did you know that?”
“I ran into Emily Miller at the IGA. This is a small town, you know, and all we really have to talk about is each other.”
It was true. Lucy thought of the “Social Events” column in the weekly Pennysaver newspaper that included items such as “Mrs. William Mason and her daughter, Mrs. Henry Tubbs, entertained Mrs. Hildegarde Wilson and Miss Susan Wilson for tea on Wednesday afternoon,” and “Mr. and Mrs. James Nesmith recently took a motor trip to Prince Edward Island in Canada where they visited with Mrs. Nesmith’s cousin, Winifred MacDonald.” She always read it, finding it oddly fascinating since she rarely recognized any of the names.
“Well, she’s right. I did talk to Hannah Sprout at the coffee hour after church on Sunday….”
“So you’re a churchgoer?” inquired Miss Tilley.
“Occasionally,” said Lucy. “It was the Christmas pageant. I think the whole town was there.”
“Not me,” said Miss Tilley. “I’m boycotting.”
Lucy was surprised. “Why?”
“Oh, something that happened a long time ago. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
“Okay.” Now Lucy was truly flummoxed. She’d been encouraged by the fact that Miss Tilley probably knew all about her conversation with Hannah Sprout, but now it seemed the librarian was setting limits and she was afraid once again of offending her. “Well,” she began, blurting it out all at once, “Hannah Sprout said her mother thought your father was having an affair with his secretary, and she left town for six months because she was pregnant with his child.”
Lucy held her breath, waiting for Miss Tilley’s reaction.
“Papa always was one for the ladies,” said Miss Tilley, smacking her thigh with her hand. “He was an old devil.”
Lucy exhaled. “So you’re not upset.”
“Not a bit. It just confirms what I always thought.”
“You thought he had an affair with Katherine Kaiser?”
“I thought he was a mean, selfish hypocrite.”
Lucy couldn’t help it. She was shocked. Not knowing quite what to say, she looked across the library to the children’s corner, where Toby was pushing a wooden truck across the floor.
“I suppose the affair could be a motive for killing your mother,” she finally said. “But why didn’t he marry Katherine Kaiser?”
“I expect he thought it would be an admission that he wasn’t as pure as the driven snow.”
The baby kicked and Lucy rubbed her stomach. “I can’t quite imagine a man turning his back on his own flesh and blood like that and letting somebody adopt his child.”
“I don’t think men make the connection between the sex act and the arrival of a child nine months later. Not unless they’re married, that is.”
“Not even then,” said Lucy, laughing.
“Well, you would know better than I. I can only draw on what I’ve observed. And my experience as a child, but it seems to me that men throughout history have had remarkably little interest in assuming responsibility for their offspring, especially female and illegitimate offspring. My father always behaved as if Harriet and I were my mother’s hobby, like stamp collecting or knitting, and had nothing to do with him.”
Just then there was a crash and Toby began to cry, so Lucy jumped up and hurried over to the children’s corner, where she found Toby had knocked over a tower of blocks which came tumbling down on his head. She picked him up and kissed the boo-boo, a little bruise on his forehead, assuring him that he was all better. When she returned to the circulation desk, carrying him on her hip, Miss Tilley had a cookie waiting for him. She sat down with him in her lap.
Miss Tilley beamed at him, tickled his tummy and gave him another cookie. “So where do we go from here?” she asked.
“Well, I guess I better get Toby home for lunch before you spoil his appetite with any more cookies,” said Lucy.
“I was referring to the investigation.”
Toby leaned back against his mother, chewing on the cookie. “Well,” said Lucy, “I think we can safely eliminate two suspects: Mrs. Sprout and Miss Kaiser. Your father sent Mrs. Sprout home on Christmas Eve, so she wasn’t there when your mother fell. According to her daughter she always blamed herself for leaving, wishing she could have prevented the fall.”
“And it appears that Miss Kaiser, vain and wicked vixen that she most certainly was, was also out of town and otherwise occupied at the time of my mother’s death.”
“But both those facts tend to point toward your father,” said Lucy, smoothing Toby’s hair with her hand. “But we also can’t eliminate the handyman, Emil Boott, and the nurse.”
Miss Tilley shook her head. “I knew Angela. I simply can’t believe she would have hurt a hair on my mother’s head. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.”
“Well, there is a link of sorts between Emil Boott and the glass cane. He worked in the office at the glassworks, but that’s all I’ve been able to find out about him.”
Miss Tilley leaned forward. “I never trusted him, you know. There was something about him, the way he looked at me, that made me afraid.”
Lucy tapped her chin thoughtfully. “The glassworks must have kept records about their employees. Do you have any idea what happened to them when it closed?”
“No, I don’t,” said Miss Tilley. “But I do know someone who may be able to give you some information about Emil Boott. His name is Sherman Cobb, he’s a lawyer here in town and his father was the sheriff who ran the prison when my father was on the bench.”
“I’ll talk to him,” promised Lucy, “but now I’ve got to get this little boy home for his nap.”
Toby’s eyes were drooping when Lucy buckled the car seat and she drove as fast as she could, hoping to get home before he fell asleep. She knew from experience that if he dropped off, even for a minute, she’d never get him to settle down for a nap.
But as she sped along the route that was already becoming so familiar to her, she found herself thinking about men and women. She and Sue had been joking when they made fun of their husband’s short attention spans but she sensed that Miss Tilley had a deeper antipathy toward men. Lucy remembered reading somewhere that a woman’s relationship with men depended on her relationship with her father. A woman like herself, who had a strong relationship with a caring father, generally had successful relationships with men. Daddy’s girls, who had flirtatious relationships with their fathers, rarely found men who measured up. And girls who were abused or negl
ected by their fathers had destructive relationships with men, or avoided them altogether.
It was all pseudo psychology, she admitted, turning into the driveway, but she thought there was some truth to it, especially in Miss Tilley’s case, but it did make her wonder if she could trust the librarian’s assessments of Judge Tilley and Emil Boott. She turned off the ignition and turned around to see if Toby was still awake and that’s when she heard the boom and felt the car shake.
The noise, she realized, had come from the house. Something had blown up inside the house. Toby was shrieking in the backseat, strapped into his car seat. She was still sitting in the car, hanging on to the steering wheel for dear life. But Bill was inside the house. She didn’t know what to do. She hopped out of the car and ran toward the house, then she ran back to the car, afraid the house might blow up with her inside, leaving Toby an orphan. She was standing, flapping her arms, torn between her husband and her son, when the door opened and a puff of smoke blew out, followed by Bill. She ran to him.
“Ohmigod, what happened?” she cried, taking in his soot-blackened face, singed eyebrows and hair. He was holding his hands out in front of him, the sleeves of his shirt and sweater were burned off and the skin was red and black and blistered.
“I tried to fix the stove,” he said.
“Get in the car,” she ordered.
“No, Lucy. Don’t start the car. Get Toby and we’ll go to the neighbors.”
“Right, right,” she said, yanking the door open and un-snapping the car seat straps with shaking hands. Bill was already halfway down the drive, walking like an automaton. He must be in shock, she thought, hurrying to catch up to him.
They could hear the sirens before they even reached the road; the neighbors they didn’t even know must have called the fire department. So they stood there and waited as an engine and a ladder truck and, finally, an ambulance, screamed to a halt in front of their house. Forty minutes later it was all over. Bill’s burns were treated and wrapped in gauze, the gas was turned off, the house was vented, and they were given permission to go inside.
“You got off lucky this time, believe me,” said the fire chief. “The whole house coulda gone, you coulda been cooked. So if I were you I wouldn’t attempt any more repairs. Leave the gas appliances to the professionals.”
“Right,” said Bill, thoroughly chagrined.
“Whew, that was a close one,” said Lucy, surveying the damage. The stove had opened and collapsed like a cardboard box, and everything else in the room was covered with a greasy gray film. That included the ceiling, the walls, the sink and refrigerator, the table and chairs, even the floor, which also had big, muddy footprints.
“Like the man said, it could have been worse,” said Bill.
Lucy remembered that awful moment after the boom, when she didn’t know if Bill was alive or dead. “I was so afraid,” she said, tears springing to her eyes.
“I know,” said Bill, enfolding her and Toby in his bandaged arms. “I didn’t see my whole life go before my eyes but I did see you, both of you,” he said. “And at that moment, I loved you so, so much. It was really, really intense.”
“How about now?” asked Lucy.
“Well, I still love you but I gotta admit I’d trade you both for a pain pill.”
“I’ll call Doc Ryder right away,” said Lucy. “He can call a prescription in to the pharmacy.”
When she finished talking to the doctor, Lucy carried Toby upstairs and settled him down in his crib for a belated nap. The tired little boy was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. Returning to the kitchen she found Bill staring at the remains of the stove.
“Lucy, what do you say we give each other a new stove for Christmas?”
“My thoughts exactly, Santa,” said Lucy, slipping into her jacket and reaching for the car keys. “But next time, try coming down the chimney, okay?”
“Very funny,” he said. “And hurry back with those pills.”
An icy drizzle was falling when Lucy left the house and had turned to snow by the time she got to town. She drove slowly and carefully down Main Street, which was slick with icy patches and, observing the signs that prohibited parking in front of the pharmacy, slid into a spot a few doors down. The sidewalk was icy, too, and she was relieved when she made it to the door without falling.
Inside, at the prescription counter, the pharmacist greeted her and told her the prescription would be ready in a few minutes. Lucy was tired, so she decided to sit in the waiting area. Turning the corner to the secluded nook that held a few chairs and tattered magazines, she found Dora Boott crouching there with a baby in her arms.
“Hi,” she said. “Remember me? I bought the glass cane.”
Dora raised one hand to cover her face as she turned toward Lucy. “Hi,” she said, mumbling into her upturned collar.
Lucy wasn’t fooled. It was clear that Dora had recently suffered a severe beating, probably at the hands of her husband. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Baby’s sick,” she said, avoiding meeting Lucy’s eyes. “Doc said he’s got to have some medicine.”
Lucy’s eyes fell on the baby, who was lying listlessly in his mother’s arms. His face was quite flushed and his hair damp, he obviously had a high fever. “And what about you?” asked Lucy. “Did you have an accident?”
“Yeah,” growled Kyle, suddenly coming around the corner. “She walked into a door.”
“I don’t think so,” said Lucy, leveling her eyes at him. “It looks to me as if somebody hit her.”
“C’mon,” he said, grabbing Dora by the arm and yanking her to her feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
“But, Kyle,” protested Dora, in a whisper. “We haven’t gotten the medicine.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow and get it,” he growled, pulling her toward the door.
“But the doctor said he needs it tonight,” she whispered, even more softly.
“Shut up!” he growled, shoving her. “I’ve had just about enough of you. Now git!”
Bowing her head and curving her body protectively around the baby, Dora obeyed, shuffling down the aisle toward the door in her bedroom slippers. Kyle followed, turning to glare at Lucy before slamming the door open and leaving. The door had just closed behind them when the pharmacist called out “Boott” and plopped the little bag of medicine onto the counter.
Jumping to her feet, Lucy grabbed the bag and raced after them. Running toward the glass door, she could see them standing outside, face to face, on the sidewalk. Dora was apparently pleading with her husband, begging him not to leave without the prescription. Kyle was becoming increasingly frustrated and Lucy could see him raising his hand, ready to smack Dora on the head, as she pushed the door open and went flying across the icy sidewalk, right into Kyle.
Recovering her balance, she watched in horror as he slid in slow motion toward the curb just as a small, gray sedan driven by an elderly woman came skidding sideways across the street. The woman’s mouth was an O and her eyes were wide with shock as Kyle stumbled, then momentarily regained his feet and finally fell beneath the car which rolled right over him before coming to a stop. Only Kyle’s arm was visible; his hand twitched a few times and then was still.
Speechless, Lucy turned to Dora, who was still hugging the baby.
“Thank you,” she said, looking Lucy straight in the eyes and taking the prescription. She glanced at the tag stapled to the bag and pulled herself up to her full height. “Three ninety-nine,” she said, her voice clear as a bell. “I guess I’d better go inside and pay for this.”
Chapter Eight
Lucy just couldn’t get over it. She felt sick every time she thought of the accident, which she replayed over and over in nauseating slow motion in her mind. But as awful as Kyle’s death was, she had to admit it had its upside. Now Dora and the children could begin a new life without the constant fear of his violent outbursts. And Dora’s recovery had been amazingly quick, she didn’t seem to have the
least shred of grief for her late husband. In fact, the elderly driver of the car that hit him was far more shaken than Dora and had to be taken to the hospital for observation. Not Dora, though. She refused the sedatives offered by the doctor and when the EMTs expressed their condolences she only said, “Well, he had it coming. The wages of sin, I guess.”
Lucy soon discovered there was also a positive side to Bill’s accident with the stove, too. Since he couldn’t work on the house with his bandaged hands he was free to mind Toby while she went on a fact-finding mission at the appliance store. She felt almost giddy the next morning as she hopped down the porch stairs and slid behind Auntie Granada’s steering wheel, without having to break her back wrestling Toby into the car seat. Then she was off, flying down Red Top Road with the radio blaring Donna Summers and BeeGees tunes, mixed in with Christmas carols. She hummed along, tapping her foot to the beat, and before she knew it she was making the turn onto Main Street.