I spent the next half hour with a sandwich in my office. I looked over the circulation records and library events and couldn’t help making notes for improvement. I felt a high that whooshed through my veins and flowered in ideas and energy. I wouldn’t be around to see any of the projects through, but the library needed a computerized system to check out books and track inventory. As far as I could tell, no one had been issued a library card in years, and books were lent with a simple notation of name and date in a ledger. Also, cookbooks should definitely be moved out of the bathroom.
Such a shame I’d be leaving so soon. There was so much I could do here.
“Yoo-hoo.” Roz stuck her head into the office. “Is this the book you were talking about?” She lifted the volume of Pride and Prejudice.
“That’s it.”
“Looks fine to me.” She set the book on the desk and ruffled its pages. “See?”
I pulled it closer and flipped to the passage I’d read last night. I turned the page. The text read without a hitch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was in the sitting room tidying the circulation desk when Sam crossed the yard from Big House. The sun picked up strands of premature gray in his hair. He glanced up and I hurriedly busied myself with the pencil holder. Some part of me had been waiting for his return.
“Ms. Way?” he said from the arched entrance to the hall.
I turned and faked surprise at seeing him. “Did you come back for your Hardy Boys novel?”
“No, I actually came to apologize.” Now just the desk was between us. “When I got home, I realized what a shock it must have been for you to find a stranger here after hours. Especially given what had happened that morning.”
“You’re right.” In the light of day, Sam should have looked like any other library patron. He should be less intriguing. I firmed up my voice. “I didn’t like it.”
“I could tell. I’m sorry.” That strange look of dissatisfaction settled over his mouth again, but you couldn’t see it in his eyes. “I have a bad habit of falling asleep too easily, especially when I’m content. I’ve always loved this library, and it had been a long day—”
“That’s okay,” I said, suddenly unwilling to see him uncomfortable.
“Thanks. I can’t afford to alienate anyone else in this town. Friends?”
“Friends.” I shook his hand.
I wasn’t sure what else to say. I didn’t see any reason he should stick around, but I wasn’t ready for him to leave yet, either.
“Hello, Roz,” he said. “Long time, no see.”
Roz was standing in the entrance to Thurston Wilfred’s old office watching us. “Not since I last babysat you, Sammy. Couldn’t have been more than a few days before your family skipped town.”
His frown deepened. “Still the same dour attitude?”
“Ha,” she said. “You know it. And I see you still look mad when you’re happy.” She nodded at me. “Watch out if he smiles. Then you’re in for it.” She leaned against the arch and crossed her arms over her chest. “What brings you back to town?”
“Just feeling homesick.”
“You moved to Los Angeles, right?”
“Right.”
“Mother still alive?”
“She sends her love.”
Roz snorted. “She was smart to stay away. I can’t imagine you’ve had an enthusiastic welcome in Wilfred, either.”
He twirled a pencil in one hand. “I guess I understand,” he said finally. “I was only eight when the mill shut down, you know. It’s been twenty-five years.”
“People don’t forget.”
There was a sadness in Sam. I felt it. Despite the easy waves of book recommendations I’d made over the day, I couldn’t think of anything to offer or say. I grabbed the Hardy Boys mystery he’d been reading last night and pressed it into his hands.
“Come back anytime,” I said.
“Thanks, Josie. I will.”
In the reflection off the open French doors to the hall, I watched him cross the now-sun-dappled grounds to his house. Thanks, Josie, he’d said. My breath caught. I’d never told him my nickname.
I followed Roz to the conservatory. “Did you tell Sam about me?”
She raised an eyebrow. “No. That’s the first I’ve seen of him in years. Why?”
Something about the night before felt too intimate to talk about. I changed the subject. “What happened with Sam’s family, anyway? Why is everyone so hostile to him?”
Roz sat at her desk. Besides an older couple browsing popular fiction, the library was quiet. Beyond the glass walls, Lyndon was raking leaves. She turned to me, reluctantly, I thought, and closed her laptop before I got a look at her mysterious project.
“What does it matter? You two seem to get along fine. Why wreck it?” she said.
If there was something to wreck, I wanted to know about it. “You’ve made lots of disparaging comments about the Wilfreds. Everyone has. I figure as long as I’m here, I ought to know some of the history. Is there more than what you’ve already told me?”
Roz pointed to a chair. I sat. “It’s like this,” she said. “As I told you yesterday, the Wilfred mill is the whole reason the town exists. A couple hundred people worked there, and the town was set up to support them—us. Dad worked marking lumber.”
“Okay.” So far, pretty straightforward.
“The last year the mill was open, a union organizer came to town, and a lot of the guys thought he had good ideas about raising their wages and fixing up company housing.”
“There was company housing?”
“Where the trailer court is. The houses weren’t bad, but they’re in the bend of the river and tended to flood in rainy years. We’ve put the trailers up on cinder blocks just in case.”
“So, the mill didn’t go union, and people resent that?”
“It wasn’t that.”
Roz kept glancing over my shoulder. I was against the wall, so she couldn’t be watching for patrons. I turned and realized she was watching Lyndon’s reflection in the conservatory’s glass panes.
Roz noticed that I caught her and quickly added, “The mill shut down with no warning, in the middle of the night, and the Wilfreds skipped town.”
“No warning at all?”
“None. Like most of the mills around here, it was getting harder to find good timber to harvest. But it wasn’t like the Wilfreds were going bankrupt. One day, the mill was running as usual, and the next day the place was gone. As in, burned to the ground. Christmas was right around the corner, too.”
“Whoa.” No wonder people were still angry.
“All that’s left is the mill pond and the concrete shell of the stacking house. The Wilfreds pay Lyndon to keep an eye on Big House, but they never said anything about coming back.” She leaned back and folded her arms. “Now Sam shows up. There are a lot of old scores to settle.”
“Is there a theory about why the mill shut down so suddenly? Maybe some kind of double books or insurance fraud or something?” Since my experience in the Library of Congress stacks, I wouldn’t put it by anyone to steal.
Roz shook her head. “Most folks figure the Wilfreds saw the writing on the wall with the union and didn’t want to deal with it.”
“A harsh way to go out of business.”
Roz turned back to her computer. “No kidding.”
* * *
Six o’clock. Time to close the library.
It had been a good day—maybe not exactly what I’d pictured as a kid when I dreamed of running a library—but in many ways better. Among the Wilfredians who simply wanted to check out a murder scene, I’d met some real book lovers, and I’d made some reading recommendations that had surprised even me. Who knew I’d suggest a book on raising Pomeranians to a woman browsing the self-help section? I never would have guessed I’d press Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye into the hands of a man looking for a how-to book on repairing lawn mowers. I had a gift for this. An uncanny gift. Heck,
a kind of magic. I didn’t want it to end.
All around me, books seemed to sigh in contentment. They felt happy for a day’s work well done. Or maybe that was me.
As I unlocked the book return box on the front porch, a white Mercedes pulled in front of the library and killed its engine. A blonde who might have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years old stepped from the car in heels I recognized from the Neiman Marcus catalogue Anton used to peruse during coffee breaks. Manolo Blahnik, last spring’s collection. I hoped she’d bought the boots on the facing page. Nights were getting chilly.
“I’m just closing up,” I told her.
She joined me on the porch and placed a hand on the brass doorknob. “I’m Ilona Buckwalter,” she said, as if that exempted her from the rules.
Ilona. The name was familiar, but I couldn’t quite make the connection. “I’m new here,” I said. “I haven’t met everyone yet.”
Ilona pushed her way inside, and I followed. She took in the hall, her gaze resting briefly on the staircase’s newel posts, then the light fixtures. “You’re the new librarian, huh? I’m sorry you won’t have a job much longer. I’m sure the job market is solid for librarians. In the meantime, Darla was smart to bring you on. We’ll need someone to clear this place out.” From her tone, it was clear she didn’t know and didn’t care about the library employment situation.
“I was just about to close,” I repeated. “We’ll be open tomorrow at ten.”
Ilona’s heels clicked across the floor as she touched a brass wall sconce and headed for the dining room’s marble fireplace. “It’s not my fault I’m late. It’s that stupid Sheriff Dolby and his damn speed trap.”
Good for him. My smile loosened to a neutral position when she turned to me. “Nonetheless, I have paperwork to do.”
“I’m a trustee. You work for me.” She smiled and shut it off instantly. “Surely a few more minutes won’t hurt.”
Now I remembered. Ilona was the trustee managing the library’s sale. I knew from an internship and working at the university that trustees were a big deal in the library world. They decided budgets and hired the head librarians. In turn, librarians compiled reports and generally tried to prove their worth.
Ilona’s heels clicked on the parquet floor as she passed to the parlor. “We’ll keep the books, of course. You’ll have to find a place to store them. I’ll salvage some of the fixtures. The new owners might want to use them in the retreat center. Bring a bit of Wilfred’s history to it.” She ran a hand over the mantel’s filigree. “I might keep this one for myself.”
Her presumptuousness was getting on my nerves. Not to mention her lack of respect for my time. I glanced up at Marilyn Wilfred’s portrait. Give me patience, I asked her. I swear she lifted an eyebrow.
“You’re sure the library will be demolished? You know it’s an active crime scene. Someone was murdered.”
I’d intended the words to shock her, but from her expression, I might have been offering her baked Brie and chardonnay.
“Oh, that’s not a problem. The body was found outside. The sheriff says it won’t slow the plans at all.”
“Sheriff Dolby?” I asked.
She snorted, an inelegant noise that didn’t jibe with her diamond studs and perfectly sculpted nose. “As if. No, I mean the sheriff of Washington County. The real one. He says they’re finished with the crime scene now. No problem at all.”
“What about the legal challenge Darla filed?” I said.
“The judge will throw that out. It’s simply a matter of days.”
“You can’t be sure of it—”
“Why not? Marilyn Wilfred’s will was clear. The sale of the library is for everyone’s best. We need the jobs the retreat center will bring. It will rejuvenate the entire town. We all know it. My study proves it. The trustees voted in its favor, didn’t we?”
“Not everyone,” I couldn’t help adding.
“I haven’t seen any testimony filed against the sale.”
“But there is the suit to stop it.”
“And a countersuit to drop the first suit,” she snapped. She moved on to Thurston Wilfred’s old office.
I clenched my fingers and released them. It didn’t seem fair that such a self-centered person as Ilona Buckwalter would profit from the library’s demolition. She didn’t care about Wilfred, that was plain. She wanted the real estate commission that funded her Botox shots. It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t fair. Those were the words that had gone through my mind when I’d overheard the senator’s aide mentioning the offshore account the bribe would be deposited in. Those were the words that got me into trouble every time.
Ilona turned to face me full-on. The woman I saw might have been the sister of the one who’d imperiously strode in earlier. Her expression had softened, and her eyes pleaded with me. “I sound awful, don’t I? Could we sit down? Just for a moment. I know you’re closing.”
With surprise, I took one of the armchairs near the fireplace. She took the other and relaxed, her head lolling against the chair’s back. Now she was no longer the wealthy socialite. She might have even been from Wilfred itself, but in fancier clothes. Viewed from the side, her nose wasn’t as ready to be pictured on a Roman coin. Small lines underlay her eyes and striped her forehead. She set her purse on the ground. Rodney appeared from nowhere to sniff at it.
“How long have you been in Wilfred?” she asked.
“This is my third day. I came in from”—I almost said “Washington, D.C.,” but corrected myself at the last second—“Maryland.”
“So you don’t know why the retreat center is so important.” She sat up. “I’m a local girl, from Gaston, up the highway. It’s awful, what happened when the mill shut down. It was a smack in the face, let me tell you.”
I nodded, thinking of Sam. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Rodney testing the strap of Ilona’s purse in his teeth. I opened my mouth to chastise him, and he raised his head and stared at me. I returned my attention to Ilona.
“The timber economy is gone now. Half the town’s residents—those who stayed, that is—are on food stamps. Wilfred’s in a sweet location, though. Between the coast and wine country, and the Kirby River is beautiful. There’s a chance for the town to grow and reestablish itself.”
“People do hate change,” I said. Now that Ilona was acting human, I found myself more sympathetic to her cause.
“They do. I understand that. We weren’t mill workers, but my father took off when I was a kid, leaving me and Mom to figure out how to get by with not much more than an ancient Pontiac and Mom’s shorthand skills. It wasn’t easy.”
I eyed her diamond rings. “You’ve come a long way.”
“Have you ever heard about shrimp?”
“Shrimp?”
Rodney seemed surprised at the change in conversation, too, and raised his head.
“Yes, shrimp. Their bodies grow, but the shells don’t. So, as they get bigger, they have to shed their old shells while they wait for the new ones to grow. Meanwhile, they’re completely vulnerable. It can’t be easy. Imagine. They’re tender. They’re simply pulpy bodies resting on the ocean floor, easy pickings for any bigger fish that comes along. But it’s necessary, or they’ll die. It’s a risk they have to take.”
I had the image of Darla, Lyndon, and Sheriff Dolby as pinkish blobs with shrimp tails. “I see what you mean.”
“I’m not going to lie. It’s not easy. People—some people, not everyone—have fought me every step of the way. But Wilfred needs to grow anew shell.” She stood and smoothed her skirt. “There’s one other thing that bothers me.”
“What’s that?”
“The body you found.” She shook her head. “It’s too quiet up here. For years, kids have been coming to hang out and do who knows what, then we find someone murdered in the bushes. With a retreat center, there will be people here all the time. It will be so much safer.”
I reluctantly agreed she had a point. Other than Ly
ndon, who seemed to stay holed up in his cabin when he wasn’t working, the library’s grounds would be deserted and tempting for anyone intent on secret meetings or other trouble.
“Thank you for letting me stay late,” Ilona said.
“I’ll see you out.”
She reached for her handbag. “Where’s my purse?”
“Rodney!” I said. Without our knowing, Rodney had pulled Ilona’s bag halfway across the room. A lipstick rolled from its depths. “Let me pick it up for you.”
“No, I’ll get it. Ow!” Ilona slipped her foot out of her sandal and rubbed a toe. “Where did that come from?”
It was The Eustace Diamonds again, this time lying corner-out on the floor. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what it’s doing there. It belongs across the hall in fiction.”
She returned her foot to her shoe and limped to the door. “I’ll leave you to clean up, then. And I’ll undoubtedly see you around. I’m staying nearby to keep an eye on things. After the other night’s murder . . .” She shook her head.
I watched the car disappear through the trees. Lyndon had pulled the curtains on his cottage windows, and yellow light escaped through a crack on one side. Beyond his house and a thin veil of trees, Big House loomed.
A light was on there, too, but the curtains were not drawn. Across the garden, Sam’s silhouette faced me, then turned away.
CHAPTER NINE
At last, the library was completely quiet for the first time all day. Ilona’s visit had left me wondering if perhaps I was wrong to want the library to survive. Now it was just me. Well, me and Rodney.
Rodney trotted purposefully toward the kitchen, pausing at the entrance to make sure I was following. In the kitchen, he pointed his chin at his empty bowl. I quickly remedied that and refreshed his water, too.
Moonlight illuminated my office. It was time to touch base with my sister. I was so far away from home—farther than I’d ever traveled—and talking with someone I knew loved me was irresistible. I wouldn’t tell her about the body I’d found or about the library’s imminent demise. I simply wanted her to know I was safe and to hear her voice. Plus, I wanted to get her opinion on my almost-magical skill with books.
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