Verse and Vengeance

by Amanda Flower

  He studied my face. “Like I killed someone.”

  I took a step back. I needed to get back to Emerson and my bike and pedal out of there. Even knowing that, I asked, “Did you kill Redding?”

  “No, of course not.” Perspiration gathered on his forehead.

  “Can you prove it?” I stepped back a few feet, putting a large maple tree between us. It made me feel better to put something between Bobby and me. Hopefully, it would be all I needed to get away.

  “Y—you aren’t the police. I don’t have to prove anything to you.”

  “Can you prove it to the police?”

  He took a step toward me. “How dare you!”

  “What about Bryant Cloud?” I asked. “Did you kill him?”

  “Who?” he asked, honestly confused.

  It was clear to me that Bobby didn’t know who Bryant was. He might not have killed Danielle’s ex-husband, but it didn’t put him in the clear for Redding’s murder.

  “Do you know Redding?”

  “I never spoke to the man.”

  That answer seemed vague. “Had you ever seen him before the race?”

  Bobby took two steps back, and I let out a small sigh of relief. The more physical distance I had from him, the better.

  “When the police showed me his photograph, I recognized him. He had come into the bike shop once, a month or so ago. I had been with another customer and Jo had helped him, but I don’t think he bought anything. Spring is our busiest season, as so many people bring their bikes in for a tune-up or are ready to upgrade to a new bike. That’s something that you should really give serious thought too, Violet.”

  I wasn’t going to get distracted from my line of questioning by the fact that Bobby thought my mother’s bike was out-of-date. I knew it was, and that was one reason I liked it. Besides, it had held its own during the bike race. I couldn’t ask for much more than that. “Did you see him again?”

  He shook his head. “He just came into the shop the one time. That’s all I know. I have already told the police this.”

  Why hadn’t Rainwater told me this? I knew he couldn’t tell me everything about the investigation, but it might be a help to me to find Jo if I knew Redding had visited the bike shop where she worked.

  “When was this?” I asked. “Do you have it on security cameras?”

  “I don’t have any security cameras. They are too expensive.”

  That was a shame. The police could have looked at their body language to see if it appeared they knew each other.

  I thought security cameras were something Bobby should rethink with a killer on the loose in the village. As long as he wasn’t the killer.

  “Do you think Jo killed Redding?” I asked bluntly, because I wanted his honest reaction. As much as I didn’t want to believe that Jo could kill anyone, I knew she was the police’s number-one suspect for a reason.

  “N—no …” But it took him too long to answer to sound the least bit convincing.

  “What are you really doing in these woods, Bobby?”

  He scowled at me.

  “Are you looking for Jo?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Because I’m worried about her too. I want to find her and make sure she’s all right. I think she might be in trouble and someone might want to hurt her.”

  “No one is going to hurt Jo,” he said through clenched teeth.

  Not even you? I wanted to ask, but I held my tongue.

  “I have to go.” He turned around and headed into the underbrush. As much as I wanted to follow him and make him talk to me, I knew that was a bad idea. I didn’t want to believe Bobby could hurt anyone, but I didn’t know he was innocent. My only comfort was that I believed he really did care for Jo like a father, but it was a small comfort. Did that mean he would have been willing to kill Redding to protect her?

  He thrashed his way through the undergrowth to the path on the other side of the woods. I followed him just long enough to see him reach the path. There was a mountain bike parked on the path, and he climbed onto it. So he had been lying about the hike.

  He climbed onto the bike and sped off toward the Riverwalk.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  As much as I wanted to stay near the quiet spring and think about all I had learned, I knew I had to get to the library.

  Knowing Renee, she wasn’t going to keep the building open one minute past closing time, which was four o’clock in the summer. It was already three thirty. I increased my pace.

  The path out of the park opened onto the Springside Community College campus. It was a beautiful, small campus nestled in wine country. Across the main road from campus was a vineyard that stretched for acres with row after row of vines. In May, there weren’t any grapes on the vines, but the bright-green leaves pointed themselves toward the sun. A handful of students walked across the quad, but there were so few classes during the summer that the population on campus had dropped dramatically. I parked my bike in front of the library and locked it to a nearby tree. Emerson let me take him from the basket without any fuss, confirming my suspicions that he’d intended to come with me all along. I walked up the steps into the library building.

  “No cats allowed in the library,” Renee said in a loud voice, but she was grinning. “I just have to say that if administration happens to come by. If the VP stops in, I can say I told you the cat was against the rules.”

  “What’s the likelihood of the VP walking into the library during summer term?”

  She chuckled. “Nonexistent, but I like to cover my bases.”

  I set Emerson on the reference desk, and he walked up and down it like he owned the place. “I can respect that.”

  “Shouldn’t you be at the bookshop with Daisy running the village?”

  “Richard is at Charming Books right now. He’s been a great help. I’m not looking forward to the fall semester when he can’t work for me anymore.”

  “It seems to me he’s spending most of what he’s earning on books at the store.” She pulled out the three books Richard had bought for her. “He delivered these the other day. I don’t know how he knew these were the books I wanted for my collection.”

  “Speaking of Richard …”

  “Violet, don’t you start. I get it from everyone else on campus. I’m not going to take it from you too.’

  “What?” I asked innocently.

  She glowered at me as only a librarian can glower. “Don’t play dumb. You’re too smart for that.”

  I laughed. “He did bring you those books.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What he needs to do is grow up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not an idiot. I know that Richard has had a crush on me and has for a while now, but has he done anything other than buy me books and visit the library every single day because he ‘keeps remembering there is more research’ that he needs to do? Yeah sure, no one researches that much, and I’m saying that from the perspective of a college librarian.”

  “You want him to ask you out,” I said, understanding for the first time.

  “Yes. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  I arched my brow.

  “If Richard can’t get up the nerve to ask me on a date, how is he going to work up the nerve to do anything else? We have to be equal partners, and I can’t be equal with someone who is too scared to ask me to coffee, let alone dinner. I’m not scared to ask him, but he has to prove to me that the same is true for him.”

  “I can respect that,” I said.

  She gave me a thumbs-up. “And that’s why you’re my friend, Violet. I doubt that Rainwater has ever been vague about his intentions with you.”

  That was true. Rainwater had been very clear from the start how he felt about me. I’d been the one who’d treaded lightly, but not nearly as lightly as Richard. He was going on years of pining for the outspoken librarian.

  “I’m not going to wait forever, Violet,” she said. “I have a life of my own t
o lead. I don’t need Richard to complete it.”

  “Spoken like a true feminist.”

  “You’d better believe it.” She straightened a stack of papers on her desk. “Now, I know you didn’t come to campus to talk to me about my love life.”

  I smiled. “It’s a great topic.”

  There came the glower again.

  “I was wondering what you might have on Leaves of Grass. I feel like I have exhausted all the research databases from home. I’ve looked at the Whitman archive online too.”

  She arched her brow. “What’s the sudden interest in Whitman? I thought you were taking a break from serious reading for the summer to recover from your dissertation. Whitman doesn’t seem like light reading.” She snapped her fingers. “I know—you’re reading it because a copy of the book was found with Redding’s body.”

  “You heard about that?” I asked.

  “I think everyone in the village heard that. It was a very odd thing to be carrying through a bike race.”

  I thought about this a minute. “Everything about Redding’s participation in the bike race was odd.”

  “I do have a theory why he was reading Whitman. It was because of the village connection.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you knew.” She paused. “Walt Whitman visited Cascade Springs.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “What?” I stared at her.

  She nodded. “Oh, you didn’t know that, I take it.”

  I shook my head. “I knew he visited Niagara Falls, but never Cascade Springs. How would you know that?”

  “Because there was a small mention of it in one of the journals from the mayor at the time, the one who had the village hall built. He hadn’t been too impressed with Whitman, but Mayor Hodge, who was in office from 1850 until 1881, was a fussy man. I think he had heard about Whitman.”

  I blinked at her. “Why hasn’t anyone written more about this? Whitman was credited to be the founder of American-style poetry. It would be a big deal in literary circles that he came to the village.” Then I added, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She shrugged. “You have never been interested in Whitman before, so it’s never come up.”

  I opened and closed my mouth. I might not have been researching Whitman in particular, but he had been a contemporary of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts. All of these transcendentalists had been a main focus of my research. It would have been nice to know that someone who actually knew them had visited my village.

  “I can show you the entry in the journal, if you’d like to see it.”

  “Yes!” I almost shouted.

  “Jeez, girl,” she said. “You’re going to have to calm down at least a little bit. I know no one is in here right now, but this is a library.” Then she laughed to take the edge off her words. “It’s almost four, so let me lock up the building, and then we can go down to the archives and look at it.” She shook a finger at me. “If you tell the stodgy archivist that I showed you this without him present, I will deny it to my death.”

  I nodded and crisscrossed my finger over my chest. “I promise.”

  Her eyes narrowed as if she didn’t quite believe me.

  After Renee locked the front door and turned off the main lights, I followed her down the back staff stairs. The college archives were in the basement of the large library. Although the space was underground, it was clean and finished and smelled faintly of disinfectant and whiteboard markers.

  My hands tingled as we walked. I could barely contain the excitement inside me. I knew I was about to learn something important. The only problem was, I didn’t know how it was important. It was how I’d felt when I’d gone down any little tangent in my research for my dissertation. I’d always felt like my skin was crawling, that all the nerves in my body were on high alert as I was about to learn something that would change everything I’d known before.

  I had visited the college archives on one occasion before, and at the time the archivist had been there. He was a bear of a man who didn’t like anyone to come into his lair. Well into his seventies, he wasn’t showing any signs of retiring, and I thought that the college was too scared to send him packing. He would get along famously with Bertie, now that I thought about it.

  Renee removed a large ring of keys from her pocket and unlocked the door. The moment we stepped inside, the comforting smell of old books and papers welcomed me into the space.

  Renee turned to me. “The journal is in the vault. You can’t go in there. The archivist would kill me if I let anyone in there. He is organized like you wouldn’t believe, so it should only take me a second to find the journal.” She took another key from her ring, unlocked another door, and disappeared inside.

  While she was gone, I looked at the display cases. There was a display about the village on its bicentennial last year. There were drawings and hand-written descriptions of what the village looked like at the time. I peered closer to one of the hand-drawn maps, which was dated 1817. I could clearly see the house that would become Charming Books on River Road. Rosalee had still been living then. She didn’t die until right before the Civil War. She would have been living alone in that house with her daughter, LillyAnn. I realized I didn’t know much about LillyAnn, and I promised myself I would look in the ledger my grandmother had given me as soon as I could. What had her gift from the essence been? There might be something here in the archives about my family too—if I could work up the nerve to ask the archivist. Probably not. I would just come back another time when Renee was here alone and ask her to look for me.

  The thick fire door to the vault opened again, and Renee stepped out wearing white gloves and carrying a small, light-blue cardboard box. I recognized it immediately as a phase box, used to house fragile artifacts.

  There was a long, antique table in the middle of the main room, surrounded by heavy wooden chairs. The whole set looked like it dated back to the time of Rosalee, but it was much more likely just from the turn of the twentieth century. Renee placed the box on the table and sat in one chair. I sat next to her. The wood was cold, as everything in the archives was kept at a constant cool temperature to keep the artifacts safe.

  She opened the box and peered inside. Then she removed an old, cracked, leather-bound book that looked just like the ledger my grandmother had given me but was a third its size.

  She removed the gloves. “Here. If you want to touch it, you have to put these on.”

  I nodded, knowing the oil from my hands could harm the delicate pages.

  I held the journal and read aloud.

  June 13th, 1880. Today, the village received a visitor. The poet Walt Whitman is here. He carries with him his abhorrent body of work, which he calls Leaves of Grass. He tried to give me a copy, but I have no use for scandalous drivel. He said that he was visiting our village because of his aliments and he had heard that the springs could heal those pains. My, he is an old man and waxed on about the days of the war when he would see Mr. Lincoln in Washington. I do believe that he was trying to impress me when he told me this. It was to no avail. There were many who knew Mr. Lincoln. After leaving me at the village hall, he, of course, went to the Waverly home. It is no surprise to me that a man who would write such questionable text would be drawn to the women living in that house.

  My breath caught as I stared at the words THE WAVERLY HOME. My home. It must have been LillyAnn Waverly with whom he had visited. I stared up at Renee. “Did you know about this?”

  She leaned over the book and read over my shoulder. “I had no idea he had visited your family. I never read directly from the journal. I had just known what the archivist had told me verbally. Admittedly, I don’t listen to half of what he says. The man is a bit of a bore.”

  I wasn’t listening to her myself as I read on.

  He will go to the springs with the Waverly women. I hate to think of the scandal it will bring down on our quiet village.

  I set the book back on the tab
le. “I need to ask Grandma Daisy about this. I’m sure she didn’t know. She would have told me. She knows about my interest in Leaves of Grass.” I almost added, She knows the shop wants me to read it to solve the murder. Instead I asked, “Can I take a photo of this journal entry?”

  She nodded. “No flash.”

  I removed my phone from my pocket and turned off the flash before snapping five photographs of the page. I could hardly wait to get back to Charming Books and show my grandmother. Maybe she would be able to help me sort out what this revelation meant.

  Renee carefully replaced the journal in the phase box and closed it up. She then stood and went back into the vault.

  As I followed Renee back upstairs, I was deep in thought. What was the shop telling me by having me read Whitman’s work? Was it trying to tell me the shop’s connection to the poet? Was all this reading completely unrelated to the murder? No, I knew that couldn’t true, because the shop had given Redding a copy of Leaves of Grass, and it would not have done that unless he wanted or needed that. That’s how the shop’s essence worked—or at least that’s how it worked as Grandma Daisy and I understood it—when it was sharing books with anyone who was not the Caretaker.

  While I often pondered on the magic, its significance and how it worked, there was one thing I’d never doubted: the kinship it shared with literature. Both the shop’s essence and all great books had the power to change lives. What was Redding’s kinship with Whitman? Maybe if I could answer the question, I would be able to solve the murder.

  In the time that we had been in the basement, the skies had darkened. Renee opened the door that led onto the library steps. She looked up at the clouds. “Looks like it’s going to be a nasty one.”

  It seemed that Vaughn had been right in his forecast of bad weather. There was a crack of thunder far off, but no lightning.

  Renee grimaced. “Do you want me to give you a lift home, Violet? I don’t like the idea of you riding your bike if a storm breaks.”

  I didn’t like the idea of that either, but my brain was swirling with everything I had learned about the village, Whitman, and my own family. I had no idea how this all related to Redding’s murder, but I knew it must somehow be connected to it.