The Broken Spine

by Dorothy St. James

  “I’ve never noticed.” I glanced down at the tabby and was startled by what I saw. My goodness, he was right. The black tiger-stripe markings on its head formed what looked remarkably like a skull. “I suppose it might resemble something like that.” Instead of waiting to be dismissed, I jogged toward the stairs that led down to the basement.

  “What’s his name?” he asked as he followed me. “Or is he a she?”

  I could think of several names I wanted to call this feral beast that seemed intent on clawing and chewing its way through my arm. But I really couldn’t say any of those aloud.

  “Dewey,” I blurted.

  “Dewy? Like water on the grass in the morning?”

  “No, as in Dewey Decimal.” I pointed with my elbow to a set of Dewey Decimal numbers listed at the end of the bookshelf we were passing. “His name is Dewey Decimal. But we all call him Dewey.”

  “Ah.” He kept following me. “Why is your cat growling?”

  “He doesn’t like to be picked up. He’s a former stray.” I hurried down the stairs.

  “I bet you have a house filled with strays.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” That I don’t have friends? That I’m a lonely woman?

  “That you have a good heart.” He held up his hands. “Honest.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Why, oh why, did he insist on following me? And why was he wearing that amused grin that was both devastating and irritating?

  I reached the back door, but I couldn’t simply turn the cat out, not with Jace watching.

  “I . . . I’ll put her in here,” I said, hurrying over to a storage closet where the maintenance staff kept their mops and floor cleaners.

  “I thought you said the cat was a boy,” Jace replied.

  “Um . . . I probably did.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Dewey is a new acquisition. That’s why I brought her, or him, to the library with me. It takes a while before a stray feels comfortable being inside. And I haven’t had the chance to get Dewey to the vet. So, I don’t know if I should be calling him a him or her a her.”

  Jace nodded as if he’d followed what I’d just said, which was a good thing. I wasn’t sure I had.

  When I tried to shift the kitty around so I could open the door to the maintenance room, Dewey dug its claws deeper into my arm. “Um, could you help me?”

  I thought Jace would help by opening the door for me. But he didn’t. He slipped his hands around the little cat and carefully pried its long nails and sharp teeth from my skin.

  “Don’t let it get away!” I warned.

  Needlessly.

  The cat snuggled against the detective’s chest as if it had landed in a safe, warm bed.

  My jaw dropped.

  “Cats like me,” Jace said with a shrug.

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  He chuckled.

  I quickly opened the door to the maintenance room. “Please, put Dewey in there.”

  He carefully lowered the cat and released it into the small but clean and well-lit room. I slammed the door closed before Dewey could dart back out and disappear into the library again.

  “Be sure to put some water in there,” Jace said as we climbed the stairs.

  “I will.”

  “And food. I’ve never held such a skinny cat. It needs to eat.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  “And a litter box, unless you want to have a big mess on your hands.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll get it all done.”

  He smiled at me. “I know you will. And I’m glad your big secret is that you’re taking your cat to work with you and not that you killed the town manager.”

  “Of course I didn’t kill anyone.” Thank goodness for a skinny stray cat. I suddenly decided to buy Dewey a can of the best tuna I could find.

  I rubbed the bloody scratches on my arm. Did I need to get some kind of shot to ward off cat-scratch fever? If the books were still on the shelves, I would have known exactly where to go to look up what I needed to do about the injuries.

  At least I knew one thing for certain. Without the cloud of suspicion hanging over me, I could keep silent about my secret bookroom project.

  The police chief’s voice boomed down the stairs. “Detective, is Ms. Becket with you?”

  “Shh!” Mrs. Farnsworth’s whispery voice followed.

  “With all due respect, ma’am, if what your assistant here is telling us is true, I need Ms. Becket to answer some very important questions.”

  Jace looked at me. “What is Fisher talking about?”

  “My cat?” While I’d sounded confident, my insides trembled. What did Anne tell the policemen? Had she seen my friends packing up the books and carrying them into the basement?

  Picturing Nancy Drew in my mind’s eye, I straightened my shoulders. Worrying solved nothing. I’d find out what was going on soon enough.

  I marched with a pragmatic gait up the stairs, more determined than ever to untangle myself from the web of this particular murder mystery. I could do it, even if it meant I’d have to prove I wasn’t Duggar’s murderer by catching the killer myself.

  Chapter Six

  As soon as Jace and I returned to the library’s main floor, Ellerbe directed me to sit in a comfortable armchair in the reading room. The older detective from the state law enforcement agency took a nearby seat, propped his elbows on his knees, and leaned toward me.

  “Are you okay, Ms. Becket?” he asked, sounding honestly concerned for my welfare.

  “I’m perplexed,” I said, and nudged my glasses up my nose. “Police Chief Fisher said I needed to answer some very important questions. This is regarding Duggar’s death, I assume?”

  He briefly glanced over his shoulder to where Police Chief Fisher and Jace were standing on either side of a pillar, watching. “Nothing too serious. Nothing to worry about.” He touched his arm. “You’re bleeding, though. That’s what I was asking about.”

  I slapped my hand over the dark, wet stains on my blouse’s sleeve. “Just . . . just a few scratches. Nothing serious.”

  “Serious for the blouse. It’s likely ruined.” He spoke so kindly. He reminded me of my father.

  After a moment of quiet contemplation, Ellerbe sat back and tilted his head to one side. He talked about the town, the weather, and his favorite football team before asking why I had failed to sign in yesterday morning. We chatted a little more before he asked why no one had noticed my presence in the library until after the town manager’s murder.

  He then leaned forward again. “If you weren’t around all morning, how did you manage to find Duggar’s body before anyone else?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the truth. “Anne should have been the one to find Duggar. Why didn’t she come running when the shelf toppled over? And where was she when I’d called for help? She’s always working with her computer servers. And those servers are located in the room adjacent to where he died. Where was she?”

  Ellerbe looked thoughtful before crossing his arms over his chest. “Hmm. That is a puzzle. But we’re not talking about her right now. We’re talking about you. Why were you in the media room? You had no reason to be in there. The plans were to leave that room untouched. So you had no reason to be there unless . . . perhaps . . . you were the one to push over the shelf.”

  “I wasn’t in the room when the shelf fell,” I corrected.

  “Then why were you the first one to find the town manager? The crash of the shelf must have been loud.”

  “It was,” I said. “Startlingly so.”

  “And yet no one else heard it?”

  “They should have.” My brows crinkled. “They all should have heard it.”

  Ellerbe stroked his bristly mustache. “But no one else claims to have heard the shelf that killed the to
wn manager fall. You’re the only one. How can that be possible? Are you sure you weren’t in the room when it happened?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “Perhaps you forgot? Finding the town manager like that must have been quite a shock.”

  “I didn’t forget where I was when I heard the crash. I’ll never forget it.”

  He smiled. “Where were you, then?”

  “In the basement. Where was Anne?”

  He sat back in his chair again. “Ms. Lowery only recently moved to Cypress from California,” he said. “And the town manager had personally hired her and had been one of the biggest proponents for the work she was doing here. What motive could she possibly have to kill him?”

  “What, indeed?” Anne’s lack of motive didn’t explain why she claimed she didn’t hear the shelf’s loud crash. She must have been in the next room, for heaven’s sake. She practically lived in there.

  After a long span of silence between us, Ellerbe dismissed me . . . for now.

  I walked out of the reading room feeling as if I were leaving the principal’s office. The three lawmen watched my exit with varying degrees of concern written on their faces. Fisher seemed to be seeing me for the first time. Jace looked fretful. And Ellerbe’s expression remained disturbingly neutral.

  For some reason, that neutral look worried me most of all.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I can’t believe this place doesn’t serve Coke,” Flossie complained when I met her during my lunch break less than an hour later. She was dressed in a cotton dress in varying hues of peacock blue.

  “It’s a coffee shop,” I pointed out after kissing her cheek. I joined Flossie at a table in Tori’s popular coffee shop, Perks. The table was near the front door and in quite a busy location.

  In the past, the three of us would usually meet at the library. Flossie spent most of her time at the library, especially when pushing herself to meet a publisher’s deadline. The library’s temporary closure had forced her (and us) to change our meeting place.

  I liked Tori’s Main Street coffee shop. The two-story brick building had served as the town’s only feed and seed store for as long as anyone could remember. When old Brantley retired and handed his family’s legacy over to Junior, his oldest son, Brantley’s “golden boy” promptly sold off all the shop’s stock and put the building up for sale. Tori had used the divorce settlement from Number Three to buy the building and renovate it into a cozy coffee shop. She’d scavenged old feed ads and put them in rustic frames as a nod to the building’s history. A plump brown hen pecked away at a pile of corn as the sun rose over a red barn in the illustration hanging near our table.

  Flossie glanced at the happy hen. She shook her head slowly. “I tell you what, when I was your age, every place sold Coke. Even the feed store.”

  “You could order coffee,” I said.

  “I already had a coffee this morning.”

  “We can go somewhere else,” I said. “I’m sure Tori would understand.”

  “No, no, we’re already sitting down.” She pulled a reusable water bottle from her leather purse. “I’ll just sip on this.”

  I looked at my triple mocha with whipped cream and caramel sauce dripping down its side and felt bad that Flossie didn’t have anything to drink other than a bottle of warm water. “Are you sure you don’t want to try something else? They also sell teas and milkshakes.”

  “I had my heart set on a Coke. They have everything else. I cannot believe a coffee shop like this doesn’t offer Coke.”

  “Perhaps because it’s unhealthy.”

  She narrowed her gaze as I took a sip from my tall, frothy drink. “And that’s health food?”

  “Yeah . . . um . . .” I bit my lower lip.

  “I have a grandchild. I visited her in Athens last year.”

  “She lives in Greece?” I’d never stepped foot out of the South.

  “No. No. Athens in Georgia. She’d go to a coffee shop like this one and drink coffee after coffee as she worked on her computer. She pictures herself as a budding screenwriter. But she’s really a salesclerk at the downtown department store. I told her that she needed to get herself a husband and family. And she told me that I was old-fashioned.”

  “She sounds like she wants to be a writer like you,” I said.

  “I had a husband. He was my everything. I don’t know why your generation is so set against marriage.”

  “I’m not against it.” Flossie was starting to sound terrifyingly like my mother. So I made an abrupt conversation change. “I can’t believe the town council is moving forward with converting the library to a bookless monster. Duggar is gone. Dead. Why didn’t his plan die with him?”

  Her eyes widened just a bit. “You’d better hush. Saying things like that makes you sound guilty as sin.”

  “You know I’d never . . . that I could never.”

  “Honey, of course I know better. But I’m smarter than most around here. You need to watch your words. They have power, you know. You have to use them with care, or else you might find yourself in a situation you can’t handle.” She leaned toward me and whispered, “You’ve already bent the law by stealing all of those books.”

  “I was saving them.”

  “By stealing them.”

  “Not technically. They haven’t left the building.”

  “Let’s not dwell on that.” She took a sip of her bottled water.

  “I agree. What we need to do instead is find out who killed Duggar.”

  “So we can give him a medal?” Tori asked. She plopped down in the chair next to mine. Today she wore her hair in a high ponytail. She was dressed in a pair of cutoff jean shorts and a black crop top with “Perks” blazed in red across her chest.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “We need to catch the killer.”

  “We’re not the police,” Tori pointed out.

  “I know that,” I answered.

  “We’d look horrible in those uniforms,” Flossie added.

  “Speak for yourself.” Tori gave her gorgeous blonde ponytail a toss. “I happen to know from firsthand experience that I look quite fetching in—”

  “We don’t want to hear about what you do when you go out on dates,” Flossie said.

  “I do,” I said eagerly. “But perhaps later?”

  “Later it is.” Tori gave me a wink.

  Flossie cleared her throat. “Right now we need to make plans for the secret bookroom. I’ve typed up some more cards for the card catalog from the list you provided.” She looked furtively around the room before sliding a manila envelope across the table.

  I wondered again if Flossie wrote thrillers. She seemed well versed in how to be sneaky.

  “Thank you,” I said. “But—”

  “And we need to figure out how to invite the public to come browse the books without exposing the secret,” Tori said.

  “That’s true,” Flossie agreed. “Opening the library will be tricky. We’ll have to—”

  “Before we do any of that, we’ll have to convince the police I didn’t kill Duggar,” I blurted out.

  “Honey, why in the world would they think that?” Flossie narrowed her eyes at me. “Have you been saying things around them like what you said to me?”

  “No, I’ve not said anything,” I said.

  “Then I don’t see the problem.” Flossie pulled out a pad of paper filled with notes concerning our basement library.

  Tori nodded in agreement. “You’re as tame as a kitten, Tru.”

  “Kittens can be feral.” I rubbed the scratches on my arm. “Anyhow, Chief Fisher brought in a detective from the state to head up the investigation.”

  “Oh, I bet that is sitting like a burr in Jace’s pants,” Tori said. “Please, tell me he was twisting around in pain.”

/>   “I don’t think Jace intends to step aside.” Ellerbe’s arrival hadn’t stopped Jace from following me around the library, questioning me.

  “The young man does bring a local perspective that the state investigator could never have,” Flossie pointed out. “He grew up here.”

  “He also moved away right out of high school. He’s as much of an outsider as anyone,” Tori countered. My two friends rarely agreed on anything. “He knows much more about crime on the streets of New York than life in Cypress.”

  “That may be true. But he knows Tru, doesn’t he? Y’all were all in high school together.”

  “We were,” Tori agreed. “And everyone knows Tru is as straitlaced as they come.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said dryly. “I wish you were right about him knowing me, but you’re not. He barely remembers that I’d tutored him. He didn’t remember the humiliation he caused me in high school. And he sees my passion for the library as motive.”

  Tori snorted. “He’s a man. They need more time than women to figure basic things out.”

  “It’s not just Jace. Detective Ellerbe questioned me just now. He seemed to be very interested in why I’m the only one who heard the shelf fall over. It felt as if he didn’t believe me when I told him that I was in the basement at the time. I got the impression that he wanted me to confess that I was in the room with Duggar when he died. The way he looked at me afterward made me worried that he thinks I killed him.”

  “That is a troubling development,” Flossie said.

  “I’m not worried,” Tori said. “Jace will eventually come around and see the truth, and so will that outsider from the state.”

  “Will they?” Flossie swallowed some more water. “The police don’t have the full picture. And unless you want Tru to go to jail for her heroic act of rebellion, they will never have the full picture of what was going on that morning.”

  Tori’s face fell. “I hate to admit it, Flossie, but you’re right.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” Flossie grumbled. “I’m right about nearly everything.”