“She looks friendly,” I said.
I had that queer feeling again of hearing—or, really, feeling—the books talk. They murmured like girls at a tea party. The trauma of finding the body thinned.
“She was beloved. The rest of the Wilfreds, not so much. But Auntie Lyn—that’s what we called her—was a favorite. Everyone in town turned up for her funeral.”
“You were there?”
Roz, still gazing at the portrait, nodded. “She lived a good long time. Died not long after the mill closed in the early nineties.”
Marilyn Wilfred almost seemed to smile at me. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the black cat lying at her feet. Except for Rodney’s torn ear, it might have been him.
“The black cat hanging around here. Rodney. Who does he belong to?”
“He showed up just last week. Dylan named him and made him a bowl in art class. We already had cat doors from Auntie Lyn’s time. Is he bothering you?”
“No. Not at all.”
Roz’s hands dropped to her sides. “Now for the rest of the tour.”
“Okay.” I was reluctant to turn away from Marilyn Wilfred’s comforting smile.
“You know the kitchen, of course. Let’s take the ground floor clockwise. Here”—she pointed to the open arch beyond the service staircase—“is the old dining room. Now it’s social sciences. We have a great local history section.”
Bookshelves lined the room’s damask-papered walls, but a chandelier with glass globes and a marble fireplace made it easy to imagine a polished mahogany table surrounded with chairs.
“Next stop, the sitting room.”
We passed through a connecting door to a room mirroring the dining room, but with French doors opening to a balcony. I moved toward the wooden block of drawers in its center with brass pulls and numbered labels.
“I can’t believe it. A card catalogue. I’ve never seen one in real life.”
“Yep. No computers here. Auntie Lyn’s will said no changes.”
“Except for the ‘betterment of Wilfredians,’” I quoted. “Bringing the library into the age of the Internet would be a huge benefit to everyone, especially students. The library would have access to all sorts of other collections.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure you’re right. The last librarian wanted to put some in, but he left before it could happen.”
“Why didn’t he stay?”
“Didn’t work out.” She pointed to a desk with a trolley cart behind it. “Circulation. Magazines and new releases are over there.”
Right inside the front door, the sitting room was well situated for keeping an eye on patrons coming and going. What a wonderful place to work on a spring day with the French doors ajar and the scent of the lawn wafting in.
The thought of outdoors reminded me of this morning’s scene by the river and my upcoming interview with the sheriff. “How well do you know the sheriff?”
“Known him for years. It’s a small town, remember. Why?”
“He’s reasonable?”
“Reasonable and good at his job. A third-generation sheriff and proud of it.” Her voice was still calm, but I detected a slight tremor. “He’ll get to the bottom of this. I’m sure.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t what he’d find out about the body that caused my concern, but what he’d dig up on me.
“You’re okay, right?” When I nodded, she said, “Then follow me. Now we’re going to what used to be the house’s real library. It’s just beyond the foyer, so the foreman from the mill could stop by to talk business without bothering the rest of the family.”
We crossed the atrium to enter a wood-paneled room with a leather-topped desk as large as a twin bed.
“The first owner’s study,” I said.
“Right. Thurston Wilfred ruled his empire from here. Now it’s children’s fiction.” She reshelved a Nancy Drew novel. “Not a lot of kids in Wilfred. Young families usually move on to Forest Grove or Portland. Ever since the mill closed, the town’s been shrinking.”
I made a mental note to lock up the fireplace tools. Pokers and toddlers didn’t mix well. My thoughts slipped again to the body outside, and it must have shown on my face.
“Don’t think about it. I’m not.” Roz’s sudden frown betrayed her statement. “Duke and Ilona will have a heyday when they find out.”
“What do you mean?”
“A dead body on library grounds? They already complain about graffiti and loiterers. One of their chief arguments for the retreat center—apart from the money—is that it would be safer up here. This clinches it.”
We paused in the atrium. From the look on Roz’s face, her thoughts were as glum as mine.
“Come on,” Roz said finally. “Let’s skip the drawing room. You can look at it later. It’s literature and arts.” She pushed open a glass-paned door. “Here’s the best part of the library. The conservatory.”
I followed her into a glass-ceilinged room bright with sun and saw what she meant about “the best part of the library.” Even with the stark view of leaves drifting off the trees, the conservatory was warm enough that a banana plant flourished in a gargantuan ceramic pot. In case the sun failed, a small tile woodstove sat in the corner with a few split logs in a basket.
Outside, a group of khaki-uniformed people, two carrying metal suitcases, marched down the trail. Lyndon watched from his pile of raked leaves.
Roz pointed to a table and chair in the corner, against a window. “I work here most days. I mean, my other work, not as assistant librarian.” She shot me a glance. “Darla says it’s okay if I keep things here. It’s easier to focus than at home.”
“What sorts of projects?”
“Oh, this and that.”
She shuffled papers. People here were experts at avoiding questions.
She pointed to the ornate railings ringing the second floor. “Upstairs mirrors the ground floor, except it’s all former bedrooms, plus another one over the front vestibule. Five rooms of books. Oh, and a bathroom.”
“With a tub?” My apartment’s bathroom rated only a shower stall.
Roz nodded. “Folks from the trailer court drop by for baths every once in a while. Mobile homes aren’t known for big tubs, and some of Wilfred’s residents partake a bit too regularly of Darla’s pecan pie.”
A thought occurred to me. “You don’t keep books in there, do you?” Seeing the casual way the rest of the library was run, I wouldn’t have doubted it.
“Only cookbooks.”
“But the moisture—”
“No big deal. It’s not like they’re in pristine condition, anyway. You should see the grease stains in Cookies Near and Far.”
I’d never want to change the house’s lush-if-worn oriental carpets or nooks with old armchairs, and having a library cat had always been a dream of mine. But, no Internet? Rotary telephones? And books in the bathroom? Too bad I wouldn’t be around to take the library to its full potential. That is, if the library even existed beyond next month.
“Speaking of damaged books, I’m afraid I lost Folk Witch.” Roz didn’t need to know about my fit of pique this morning. “I’ll pay for a new copy, of course.”
“Folk Witch? The book at the diner I said I’d reshelve? You must be talking about another book.” She lifted a paperback with its all-too-familiar cover from her desk. “It’s right here.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I spent the next few hours in my apartment unpacking and getting settled.
Little touches throughout the apartment welcomed me. Lavender sachets freshened the linen closet. Baskets of firewood next to the bedroom and living room fireplaces almost made me wish for snow so I could strike up a blaze. Best of all, each room had at least one cozy place to read, with a good lamp and a table to hold a cup of coffee.
I imagined what it would have been like had I known I were staying. Despite the horror of finding a body, Wilfred charmed me. Everyone I’d met had been welcoming and friendly, and even Lyndon, the caretaker, wa
s growing on me. The countryside was gorgeous—so green and full of life—and the air was perfumed with fir, moist soil, and river water. Colors here might have been drawn from a crisper palette than back home.
My little sister, Jean, once told me that people tend to be oriented toward their mind, emotions, or body. She pronounced me a “mind” person and said I didn’t care about my surroundings as long as I had a book handy. Somehow in the past day, I’d drifted toward my senses. My sheets had the silken hand of years of washing. I luxuriated in the feel of them on my skin. I couldn’t even tell you what my sheets in D.C. were made of. I smelled the warm wood of the house’s ancient fir joists. The afternoon was thick with birdsong.
And the house—I loved the house and the fact that it was now a library. Back home, I’d toured a lot of fancy house museums and grand public buildings, but none of them spoke to me the way the Wilfred library did. Was it Wilfred that held the magic, or had I changed somehow?
Yet, I couldn’t stay. Even if the library wasn’t going to be demolished—and that was a big “if”—the body I’d found would end up in the news, possibly with my name attached, and that would be that. I’d have to leave. I just didn’t know when.
I sighed and pushed open the bedroom window’s curtains. All morning and most of the afternoon, people came and went up the library’s gravel drive. They traipsed through the garden separating the library from Lyndon’s cottage to the trail by the river. From what I could make out, most were from the county sheriff’s office. A van arrived, and two people hauled off the body, bundled in black plastic, on a gurney.
The sheriff hadn’t stuck around for most of these proceedings, but from the reports Darla delivered via Roz’s cell phone, he was busy. According to Wilfred’s robust grapevine, which seemed to terminate at Darla’s diner, the sheriff had been seen in Forest Grove and Gaston knocking on doors. I even learned he’d taken lunch—a microwaved burrito from a convenience store, extra hot sauce—in his cruiser. No one had reported any arrests.
All I could do was watch and wait.
* * *
“Ms. Way?” the sheriff said from the kitchen door.
“Josie, please.” I set aside a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Normally, I’d have searched the library’s shelves for a Ngaio Marsh or Rex Stout mystery I hadn’t read recently, but crime novels cut too close to the bone this afternoon.
“It’s time for that statement I told you about this morning. Mind if I join you in your office?”
I stayed in the armchair, and Sheriff Dolby overwhelmed the wooden chair at my desk. The office felt half its earlier size.
I fidgeted with the fabric of my skirt. Rodney watched from under the desk. “What do you want to know?”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning? Tell me about finding her.” His voice was surprisingly gentle for such a big man. I appreciated how he avoided saying “body.”
“Like I told you this morning, I just arrived last night.”
“To take the librarian position,” the sheriff said. “You can skip to this morning.”
“Was that when they think it happened?”
“We don’t have the medical examiner’s final determination, you understand, but she was likely killed sometime last night.”
“Before I arrived.”
“Yes. Looks that way. Lyndon filled me in on your arrival time.”
So, all the time I’d been wandering around upstairs alone last night, she’d been there, a stone’s throw from my bedroom. Dead. I pulled in my arms as if being smaller would make the shock smaller, too.
“Well, as I said this morning, Roz was planning to give me a tour of the library, but she had something else to attend to. So I took a walk. I found . . . I found her off the trail. Only a few minutes later, Roz came out, too. We called you right away. Ten-thirty-ish.”
“Ten-thirty-seven,” he said. “Did you touch anything?”
I bit my lip. “I did touch the body.”
His thick eyebrows rose.
“To look for ID. I felt her pants pockets and inside her jacket.”
“And?”
I felt certain she’d been sent to silence me, but that’s all it was—a feeling. To my surprise, before my eyes flashed the cover of The Executioner’s Song.
“Nothing. I didn’t find anything. No purse, no phone, nothing.”
“Do you have any idea who she might be?”
This was the moment. Telling the sheriff my suspicions would expose why I was in Wilfred. My cover would be blown. If the story came out in the newspaper—well, it would be like sending up a flare to my pursuer. I shifted my gaze toward the office window. Should I tell?
The day it had happened, only a week ago, had been drizzly. I’d decided to spend my lunch hour in the library’s stacks. I could close my eyes now and see it all.
I’d taken the elevator to the deep subbasement. Most people don’t know that below the Library of Congress are layered floor after floor of books. The elevator opened to dark acres of metal shelving. I clicked the light switch on the end of the shelf to my right, knowing its timer would give me just enough time to reach my favorite spot deep among decades-old industry trade publications. No one went there. The year before, when the office upgraded our chairs, I’d moved my old chair down and placed an upturned box next to it. I stashed a book light and a cloth napkin in its recesses.
I unwrapped my egg salad sandwich and took in the comfort of being surrounded by books. Thousands and thousands of books, around me, above me, and below me. They seemed to hum their comfort, like a peculiar Gregorian chant. This was the only place I felt this, and only when I was alone. Until I’d come to Wilfred, that is.
The elevator opened and lights clicked on again and steps came down the central aisle. “Mind if I join you?” It was Anton, my office mate. We’d been hired the same day and had been buddies ever since.
“Take a seat.” Anton would have to sit on the floor, but he never minded. He was the sort of guy who made himself comfortable wherever he was.
The lights clicked off. We sat in the dim glow of my book light, me with my sandwich and Anton with a take out bowl of curry.
Then I heard the voices. Lights flickered on across the main aisle a few shelves closer to the elevator.
“You’re sure no one can hear us here?” a man’s voice asked.
Another man laughed. “You can’t even get cell service this far down. Look. The Beer Digest from 1965. Who’s going to find us here?”
I knew the voice but couldn’t place it. It had a slight Southern accent. I set my sandwich on the crate next to my chair and clicked off the book light. I looked toward Anton but couldn’t make out his expression in the dark.
“Here’s the info. Four million in an offshore account, as we agreed. The access code is in the envelope,” the first man said.
A crinkle of paper. “Great. I guess that’s it.”
“No. I need assurance you’ll follow through on our agreement.”
“You don’t trust me.” The man, the one with the vaguely familiar voice, laughed again. “Not that you could prove anything. But you don’t need to worry. We have solid cooperation in the Pentagon’s procurement office, I’ve seen to that. The senator will sign whatever I recommend. The contract belongs to Bondwell.”
The senator. Senator Markham. Now it came to me. The voice I heard was Senator Markham’s chief of staff, Richard White. Markham was chair of the defense authorizations. Bondwell was a major aeronautics company. The elevator dinged, and after muttered good-byes, the stacks were quiet once again.
It took Anton and me only a few minutes to decide we had to report what we’d heard. By the close of the day, FBI agents were taking our statements. Anton had vanished the very next morning. He hadn’t shown up for work, and no one could find him. My supervisor granted my request for leave, thinking I simply needed a few weeks of vacation to recuperate. Instead, I’d fled.
“Earth to Josie,” the sheriff said. I wasn’t in D.C. anymore
. Now I was all the way across the country, in rural Oregon. Rodney watched me, his pupils mere slits. When the sheriff spoke, the cat’s gaze shifted to him. “Did you find anything that might indicate who the victim is?”
My hands were shaking. I tucked them under my thighs. “No. Nothing. I have no idea who she is. Why would I?”
CHAPTER SIX
By nightfall, the library’s grounds were quiet. The sheriff and his colleagues were gone, except for the deputy Sheriff Dolby had thoughtfully posted at the top of the road.
I still didn’t feel completely safe. Thanks to the house’s floor plan with the floor-to-ceiling atrium, my apartment was open to the library below. However, the solid oak door at the top of the service staircase ensured my privacy, and the apartment was high enough that I couldn’t be seen unless I leaned over the railings. I tested the door. The dead bolt was solid. Another plus, a cat door let Rodney come and go.
Only one mystery remained in the apartment, and that was the padlocked door at the end of the hall, to the left of the service staircase. The door must lead to the tower extending over the vestibule. In that case, it made sense to lock people out. A fall that far could kill.
In every room I went, Rodney was somewhere nearby—in an armchair, at the foot of the bed, under the kitchen table. I was getting attached to the little guy.
I changed into a cotton nightgown, wrapped a warm chenille robe around me, and left a pile of bobby pins next to the bathroom sink. If I could, I’d sleep. I turned down the blankets on my bed, then realized one vital element was missing: a novel. I’d finished the Margaret Millar mystery I’d brought on the plane, and I’d had my fill of P.G. Wodehouse for the day. Heck, I lived in a library now. Finding something to read would not be a problem. I was halfway to the door when Rodney meowed from the bed.
Bait and Witch Page 4