Interlibrary Loan

by Gene Wolfe

  I said, “His body’s probably in the morgue.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “It’s where they store bodies involved in criminal cases, for a few days at least. After that, the body’s turned over to the medical examiner for an autopsy.” I was recalling the deaths of Colette Coldbrook’s father and brother. “That’s if the death looks suspicious. If it doesn’t, there is no autopsy.”

  Chandra gulped. “I guess this looks suspicious, right?”

  “I assumed it did from what you said about the police. What was the cause of death? The apparent cause, anyway.”

  “I don’t know what you call it.” Chandra stopped and pretended to draw a bow.

  “Are you saying he was shot with an arrow?”

  She stared. “Can you say that? Shot? When it’s an arrow?”

  I nodded. “That’s the oldest meaning, as far as I know.”

  “Then that’s what it was. A big arrow. Right here.” She touched her neck.

  “A big arrow? How long?”

  She held her hands as far apart as she could. It had been as long as she was tall, maybe more.

  I said, “That’s a spear.”

  “Well, it has feathers at the end.”

  “You’ve still got it?”

  Chandra nodded.

  “Who was there at the time? Who was in the house?”

  “My mother and father, and your friend the lady captain. Mrs. Heuse—”

  “Your parents didn’t return Audrey to the library?”

  “My father said she could probably stay here if she’d go back there with him. I went along too.” Chandra sat down on a stiff-looking davenport. “She did, so my father returned her and paid the fine, only he didn’t take his deposit back. We left that in and checked her out again.”

  I said, “I understand.”

  “The librarian said we wouldn’t be able to if another patron were waiting for her. Only there wasn’t anybody, so we could.”

  “And you did. What about the two girls your father brought back?”

  “Ricci and Idona? The dead girls? They’re still here.” Chandra paused. “I guess I have to invite you or you won’t sit down, so you’re invited. Sit anyplace.”

  I sat down in a wingback chair covered with old and badly tarnished tinbroc. “Millie and Rose weren’t returned to the library. Are they still there, too?”

  Chandra nodded.

  “That seems to leave us with no fewer than eight suspects—Audrey, your mother, Millie, Rose, Ricci, Idona, Mrs. Heuse, and you.” I sighed. Eight suspects, and all female; the big arrow implied that most women could not have drawn that bow. “You didn’t do it?”

  “Kill my own father? Heck no!”

  I sighed again. I had been listening for guilt, but there had not been any. I said, “It happens. All right, that leaves seven. Have you a favorite?”

  Chandra turned her head to look at me. “Do I get to think first?”

  I nodded. “Certainly, go ahead.”

  She did, sitting quietly for half a minute or so. Then, “I’ve got two. Idona and Rose.”

  “You must know what’s coming next. Why them?”

  Chandra shrugged.

  “When a married woman is murdered, the murderer is usually her husband. Husbands aren’t killed by their wives quite as often, but it occurs pretty frequently. So why not Adah?”

  “Two reasons. Because I know her and she’d use her big knife. Besides, I’d know about it if she had an arrow.”

  I said, “Unless she just got it.”

  “From where?”

  I laughed. “Now you’ve got me. You picked Rose and Idona. Please explain.”

  Chandra challenged me. “You don’t like me saying Rose. Want to tell me why?”

  “I will in a minute. Why did you name her?”

  “You were the one who said there were only women left.”

  I had to think about that one. When I had, I said, “You’re right. Rose wants an audience, and not a female audience. If she felt your father didn’t appreciate her and was standing in the way…”

  “Bing! Women know how good-looking she is, but mostly we’re jealous. Men are hot for her, or anyway she thinks they are. My father’d had her, but he looked her over a lot just the same. You know?”

  “Undressing her with his eyes.”

  “Yeah.” Chandra sounded thoughtful. “Sometimes they held hands. I think Rose might, maybe, kill some man who told her to peddle it somewhere else. Or a man who kept all the others away…”

  Chandra fell silent. It seemed as if she might talk more without being pushed, so I kept my mouth shut. Someone was walking around upstairs in high heels; I listened to her footsteps and tried to guess who it was.

  “Do you want to know about Idona, too?”

  I nodded.

  Chandra drew a deep breath. “She wants to be queen of the world. Get in her way, and she might kill you. That’s just what I think.”

  “And you’d like to be wrong.”

  Reluctantly, Chandra nodded.

  “Why is that?”

  “All right, I’m sure that’s wrong, Mr. Smithe. So why would I want you to believe it?”

  “I don’t. Why are you sure it’s wrong?”

  “Because none of it makes sense. In the first place, she’d try to get him on her side. It doesn’t matter whether she did or not, because she’d keep trying for a couple of weeks anyway. Probably longer.”

  I nodded. “You said you had a lot of reasons. Give me another.”

  “All right, why an arrow? If she stabbed him with it, where did she get it? And why not use a kitchen knife? Mrs. Heuse has lots of them, and she could take her pick. If she shot the arrow, she’d have to get rid of the rest of her arrows and the bow.”

  I was still digesting what Chandra had told me when the door opened for us and we went inside.

  With Dr. Fevre dead, I had expected to find a madhouse, or something close to it. It wasn’t really that bad. It seemed like all the women helped with the housework, even though some worked quite a bit harder than others. I offered to help and did, mostly by moving furniture Adah wanted to rearrange or that Audrey wanted to sweep under.

  The light in the windows dimmed, the house began to turn its own lights on, and there was a dinner, with me sitting next to Audrey—or her next to me, if you want to put it like that. We held hands sometimes, keeping our hands below the table so no one could see them. That night she and I slept next to Chandra’s bed. Women always bitch about men falling asleep as soon as the sex is over, and that night I did. We were still holding hands when I dozed off; I don’t believe I will ever forget that.

  When I woke it was still pitch-dark in our bedroom and something was in the room with us. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred no one will notice a small animal as long as it keeps quiet. My visitor did, only he was not even close to small. He was as quiet as a shadow, moving very, very slowly. That helped a lot, but the floor was not quiet; it creaked and groaned beneath his weight.

  Maybe I should have elbowed Audrey until she woke up, but I didn’t. She might have screamed and for all I knew screaming might get you killed. Sure, I would have tried to protect her; good luck to that, because whoever he was he was so big he seemed to fill the whole room.

  The door opened, and for a second or so I could see the rectangle of faint light. Then the doorway was blacked out by somebody one hell of a lot bigger than I am.

  Oh so quietly, the door closed behind him.

  I had not realized how frightened I was until I tried to sit up. Then I found out—my whole body was trembling.

  It seemed like forever before I could make myself sit up. Maybe I was brave, but my body was scared half to death just the same. Getting out of bed was even harder.

  I opened the door as quietly as I could and looked out. Our bedroom had been dark, but there were a couple of little lamps in the hall. Whoever it was that had been in our bedroom was gone.

  So was the big
arrow somebody had pulled out of the doctor’s neck.

  Could whoever our visitor had been have climbed out a window? Probably not—he’d been too big. So front door or side door or back door.

  I went around to all three. Mrs. Snow bolted them all at night, or so I had been told. I checked them all, and they were all unbolted, the big iron bolts pulled out of their sockets by somebody inside. Maybe he was still inside with us. Maybe he was gone, which I liked one hell of a lot better. I found a lamp in the kitchen and checked out the empty rooms on the second and third floors. Nobody.

  Basement? Nobody there, either.

  14

  OF THE CONTINENTAL POLICE

  I’ve been getting ahead of myself. Let me back up a little and fill you in. The natural thing would have been for Adah to take charge, since it was her house. All right, but she wasn’t a good candidate for taking charge of anything. When she was up she was in the same league as Napoleon, sure; but when she was down she couldn’t have run a kid’s playhouse. So it was Audrey, which gave me another reason Chandra had called her the lady captain. Or maybe I ought to say it was Mrs. Heuse in the kitchen and Audrey in the other rooms, which explains it exactly. Could I have taken charge? Maybe, but I didn’t want to be in charge and didn’t try.

  I quizzed all of them instead, first as a group and then talking to individuals in private. From the group I learned nothing much. Adah felt that somebody or other was trying to take her house away from her and Ricci was certain that the house was haunted. Of course I wanted to know why each of them felt the way they did. Adah just felt like the way she did and kept insisting that it was her house. I agreed with her, but she argued about it with me just the same. You probably know the type.

  Ricci had seen a shadow that had her spooked. That shadow had not been anybody’s, she said. It was just there for a minute, then it disappeared.

  There were a lot of rooms, as I’ve probably mentioned before, but not enough furniture for all of them. You could have a private room if you were willing to sleep on the floor like Audrey and me. Only we nixed the private room; I slept with Audrey next to Chandra’s bed. (You would probably have guessed that if I hadn’t told you.) Chandra had called her the lady captain, which made her sound like a woman who ordered other people around. That was maybe a little bit true, only with me it was only once in a while. Audrey and I had a lot in common, and it meant we were on the same team. Every team needs a captain for the coin toss and to talk to reporters; but “captain” doesn’t mean much when the team’s on the field. I wanted to get back to the Spice Grove Public Library where I belonged. Audrey belonged to the Polly’s Cove Public Library, but she didn’t want to go back there, or at least not very much. From time to time we tried to figure out a way to get her into Spice Grove with me.

  About midnight Chandra started yelling that there was somebody under her bed. I turned over in a hurry and had a look, and there was nobody. So I said he was gone.

  Next morning, I got out my notes and read over what each of the women had told me. Nobody had a decent alibi because I could not fix the time closer than a couple of hours. Nobody seemed to be lying, either; but I felt sure that somebody had to be and kept pounding away and getting nowhere. After thinking it all over, I shrugged and sighed, and decided they were telling the truth.

  That meant Dr. Fevre had killed himself—or that the killer was somebody from outside who had gotten into the house. I hadn’t known him all that well, but he had never seemed like the suicidal type. All right, maybe if he’d been breaking his back on something really big and it had failed. Maybe then. But what was it? I couldn’t think of a damned thing, and there had not been a whisper of anything like that in what the girls had told me. From somewhere he’d gotten that big arrow. Ah, the very thing, he had said to himself and stabbed himself in the throat with it.

  And snakes ride bicycles.

  Plus there was other stuff. Suicides usually leave notes, and the better educated they are the more likely a note is. No note, and Dr. Fevre had taught classes at the university for Pete’s sake!

  That was not all. Suicides mostly threaten and talk about it for weeks. I screened Peggy Pepper, who had gone back to her apartment, and asked her. She said no, nothing like that.

  Then too, there was the big arrow. None of the girls had known he had anything like that, or so they said.

  Fine. It had been somebody from outside. Probably he’d used a bow and arrow because they don’t make much noise. Also you didn’t have to get close; he could have shot through an open window. After that I was stuck, which is the problem with hiring a cheap detective.

  We slept in the house that night. Sometime pretty close to sunrise, I woke up. There had been footsteps in the hall outside, I was dead certain. Now somebody had opened the door to our room.

  I waited. Audrey was still asleep, snoring softly beside me. Our patron hadn’t stirred. Scare them and they’ll run, I told myself. I wanted to catch whoever it was (I thought probably Adah or Rose) and explain that as a general thing I murdered midnight visitors. Then he stepped into the moonlight for a minute, and I caught a glimpse—a big guy wearing some kind of helmet with feathers. I had seen feathers on women’s hats once or twice, but never on a man. He got close and I grabbed for him and got something that came loose, then he was gone. I must have let go after that; I didn’t hear anything hit the floor, but I probably should have.

  I found it on the floor in the morning when I got up. It was a big knife, different from anything I’d ever seen. I’ll try to fill you in on it without beating it to death.

  The big heavy blade was curved a little and sharp on both sides. The guard was a simple flat bar of something that looked to me like copper. The grip was pinkish-red and seemed to be some kind of stone, only not very heavy; it had finger grooves that were too far apart to fit my hand; I had to ignore them when I gripped it. The pommel was copper or something, like the guard. You could see where the tang went clear through and was pounded flat to keep the blade from pulling out.

  It all adds up to a really nice knife, and I would have kept it and worn it if there had been a sheath. As it was, I put it away hoping to get somebody to make me one or make one myself. It never hit me that the guy who owned it might come back looking for it.

  Like I’ve said, I was overdue. I told Chandra and her mother about that, and just as I figured Adah told Chandra to take me back and collect the deposit. Sometimes I felt sorry for that kid; it’s not fair to make kids responsible for grown-up stuff. Sometimes you have to, but with Chandra it seemed like it was all the time.

  So back to the Polly’s Cove Public Library, and a shelf nowhere near as nice as the one in Spice Grove. I took the knife with me and hid it behind some books. Don’t bother to look, it’s not there anymore.

  Audrey and I were not supposed to shelve side by side, but Audrey asked Charlotte to put us like that. It made our Dewey Decimal Numbers wrong, but the librarians didn’t seem to notice. We didn’t even hold hands until after six, when the library closed.

  So swell. Only after a couple of days some fully human guy I had never seen before came in and checked out Audrey. I would have stuck my knife in him if it would have done any good. In a way, I was glad it wouldn’t; how would she feel about me if she knew I was a murderer? As far as I had known, the guy had done nothing wrong. Audrey had been a circulating library resource. In two weeks he would have to return her or check her out again. So whistle, whittle, and wait.

  About a week later, a tall, hard-faced woman with a brown braid hanging down her back checked me out. She had a groundcar, big and plain ebony. I thought I knew something as soon as I was in the front seat next to her and got a look at the dashboard; so I said, “Polly’s Cove, Officer?”

  That got me a sidelong glance, very brief. Then, “I’m Continental, Smithe.”

  This time I actually whistled, without making much noise.

  “You’re a reference, is that right? Sort of a dictionary with legs?”
<
br />   I admitted I was, only not a dictionary.

  “A historical reference to your own work.”

  I nodded. “That’s right, although I don’t actually remember everything.”

  “What about your life. Are you a reference to that?” Here it came, and I knew it. I nodded again. “My work was my life, more or less.”

  “You wrote…?”

  “Mysteries. Who Killed Cock Robin? Clues on pages twenty-six, a hundred and five, and two hundred and ninety-nine.”

  “A lot of people you’ve known must have been murdered in that case.” She wasn’t serious.

  I grinned. “Not really. They just should have been.”

  No laugh, not even a smile. “You knew Dr. Fevre.”

  “Slightly. I’ve met him and spoken to him.”

  She watched her driving, not looking at me. “Did you like him?”

  I had to think that over. “I admired him. If I’d gotten to know him better, I might have liked him.”

  “But you don’t think so. Why not?”

  “You had to know him.”

  “Which you did, a little. Why didn’t you like him?”

  “He’s not alive to defend himself. Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “Not now, Smithe. Why didn’t you like him?”

  I said, “Suppose you were to show me a forest I’d never seen before.” I didn’t have to think about it.

  For a moment the lady cop turned to look at me. Then she said, “My name’s Katrine Turner, Mr. Smithe. Do you want my badge number?”

  I said it was a pleasure, and the number wasn’t necessary.

  “Now tell me about your forest.”

  “I’d look it over and think about hiking and fishing. Maybe hunting. Sitting under a tree, reading poetry and listening to a brook. Dr. Fevre would look it over and think about lumber.”

  Katrine was quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, “I never knew a library reference would be so much fun to talk to.”