Bait and Witch

by Angela M. Sanders

  “The furnace will be off for a few minutes while I change the filter. Oh. Hi, Roz.”

  Roz had come from behind the shelf and now stared at Lyndon with an expression sad enough to leave her usual Eeyore face in the dust.

  “Need help with those books? Sounds like the shelf gave out.” He talked as if nothing had happened between them.

  Eyes wide, Roz shook her head.

  I backed toward the door. Maybe if I just slipped out...

  “No, Josie,” Roz said. “Stay. I have something I have to tell you.”

  “Honestly, it won’t take a second to help you with that shelf. It’s the one with the tricky support, isn’t it?” Lyndon said.

  Patty appeared at the doorway. “The Wilfred boy is wandering around in the hall. I’m coming in here for some peace. Hello, Lyndon . . . hello, Roz.”

  Sam. I took this moment to exit. Maybe he had an update.

  He was in the atrium and motioned toward my office. He pulled the door closed. I dropped to my chair. With both of us standing, he’d been less than an arm’s length away. He leaned on the door frame.

  “Something new?” I asked.

  “Your interview has started things moving. For one, this morning Senator Markham fired Richard White.”

  My sympathy for him lasted only until I remembered Anton. “You said ‘things,’ plural. What else?”

  “Bondwell is sending someone to Wilfred.”

  “Already?”

  “They don’t want you on TV repeating what you told the Post’s reporter. The sooner they can convince you to disappear—”

  Or worse, I thought.

  “—the better. An agent is tracing him from the airport. I want to be there when he’s pulled aside.”

  “So, that’s it? I’m safe, then?” I should have felt relieved, but I was vaguely disappointed. It felt too soon, too easy.

  “No, you’re not safe. Not until I tell you we’ve made an arrest. Until then, continue on as we planned, and don’t take any chances.”

  “Oh.”

  He only had to lean forward a few inches to lay a hand on my arm. “You’re still worried?”

  “No.” I forced a smile. “It’s fine. Everything is working out exactly as it should.”

  * * *

  Afternoon had come, and Roz and Lyndon were still MIA. I pictured Roz in her trailer with the curtains pulled closed and Lyndon shut up in his cottage.

  I hadn’t heard a peep from Sam, and although I wanted to stick to our plan of always having someone within earshot, thanks to Lyndon and Roz’s encounter, it was only the occasional patron and me at the library. Rodney kept to the room’s edges. I locked the kitchen and side doors and held my breath every time the front door opened. At lunch, I ate Roz’s tuna sandwich while I sat at the front desk. Rodney was restless, and his cat door flapped every fifteen minutes or so as he stalked the garden then returned to pace the library’s atrium.

  Despite my nervousness, the day had been fairly quiet, except for a few Wilfredians who stopped by to ask me about the Washington Post article and opine about politics and corruption. One older gent who kept tipping back his baseball cap to scratch his bald scalp even found a way to link the Wilfred mill’s closure to national politics. When he dove into criticism of Sam, I changed the subject and steered him toward a biography of Teddy Roosevelt.

  Then Ilona showed up. Today she wore a fake fur–trimmed white suit with a matching tote, like something from a set of Doctor Zhivago–themed Barbies. Her earrings were tiny sleighs. It seemed early in the season for this particular getup, but I was no fashionista in the practical skirt and blouse I wore for the fifth time since I’d arrived.

  “I don’t get it,” Ilona said. She stood in front me, a hand on a hip.

  I remained seated. “Maybe I can help you. We have a good reference section. What don’t you get?”

  “You don’t even care about the library. You just came here to get away from someone you snitched on.” Her voice rose.

  “I do care about the library. I care about it a lot.” I missed hearing the companionable grumbling the books would have made on Ilona’s arrival.

  “You don’t care about Wilfred, either.” She stepped closer, and her tote hit the desk with a thud. “Why are you interfering? Why don’t you leave us alone? For the first time in decades, good things are happening here, then you come and mess it up.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “Why are you so worked up? All I did was give the judge evidence of how much the library matters to Wilfred.” Could her commission from the sale really mean that much to her, or was it simply ego? Then it started to come together. “Wait. Has he ruled?”

  She didn’t reply, and her eyes narrowed.

  “Ilona, if you know something, tell me.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  Then why was she here? “Anyway,” I continued, “since I’ve been here, patronage numbers have doubled, and people are checking out books on everything from Russian ballet to quantum theory. For instance, take Lalena. Now that she’s going to Paris, I can help her with books and maps.”

  I knew how lame it all sounded, but all the same, I believed in the library’s good. Ilona stepped back.

  “Lalena’s going to Paris?”

  “I pointed out a few novels and a book on French history to her, and it fired up her interest. Then she found that money—”

  “She found money.”

  “You haven’t heard? Ten thousand dollars. Craig Burdock was—”

  “Wait, did you say Craig Burdock?”

  “Sure. He’s out of jail.” Was she going to repeat everything I said? “I guess the sheriff had been mistaken about him.”

  “I’d wondered . . .” Ilona said slowly.

  “I guess they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him.”

  She didn’t wait to hear the rest. She hurried to the front door, and I watched through the window as she slipped into her white Mercedes. She knew something, and it had to do with Craig Burdock. What?

  I ran to the kitchen and snatched the library’s key ring from its hook. As the Mercedes disappeared down the drive, I locked the library’s front door and ran to Lyndon’s pickup. It was open.

  Shoot. It had been a long time since I’d driven a stick shift. The truck stalled on my first attempt to shift into first gear, but it lurched ahead on my second try, and I bounced my way out of the driveway and after Ilona.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I lona’s Mercedes disappeared into the distance. What had I been thinking? The old truck groaned as I shifted into fourth. I’d never catch her.

  I had a few things working for me, though. First, the truck looked like any number of trucks around Wilfred. I wouldn’t stand out if Ilona should check her rearview mirror. Next, there was only one road through Wilfred until it hit the highway to Forest Grove. Finally, at this speed, she just might get caught in Sheriff Dolby’s speed trap.

  The speed trap was just on the other side of the copse of cottonwoods. The Mercedes beeped once but didn’t slow. Figures she’d work an in with the sheriff. Thanks to the truck’s laboring engine, I was barely at the speed limit. The sheriff waved as I passed.

  Ahead, the Mercedes took a left at the highway. Craig Burdock could be staying with friends near Gaston. It wasn’t out of the question. He might not be feeling welcome in Wilfred right now.

  By the time I rounded the corner, the Mercedes had vanished. I rattled up the highway a few miles as farmland spread around me and the high arc of a field sprinkler shot streaks through the autumn sun. Black and white cattle grazed in another field.

  No sign of Ilona. She was gone.

  I pulled off the road into the parking lot of a small church and swung around to return the ten miles or so to Wilfred. I clicked on the radio to the station Lyndon had presumably been listening to and heard Frank Sinatra singing “Only the Lonely” to lush orchestration. Lyndon was full of surprises.

  Would Sam be listening to the
radio now, too? He’d have found a classical station, maybe. Or, better, he was listening to the confession of whomever Bondwell sent after me.

  I slowed as I entered Gaston. I passed a bar and a block of cheaply built apartments called, strangely enough, the Armada. They probably weren’t even nice when they were new forty years ago. Then I yanked the steering wheel to the right. Was that a white Mercedes I’d seen?

  I backed up on the gravel shoulder and crossed the road to pull into the apartment building’s parking lot. I slowed to a spot behind the dumpster. Here I’d be less obvious, even if I wasn’t entirely hidden.

  The two-story building had apartments upstairs and down with exterior exits. Downstairs, the windows must have glared every time a car’s headlights passed. Upstairs, the doors let out onto a concrete landing with metal rails shedding chipped paint. A sign warned that nonresidents would be towed. I wasn’t sure who else would park here, unless it was for shady deals—probably right where I was stopped now.

  In short, it looked exactly like the sort of place Craig Burdock would be holed up. What business did Ilona have with him?

  I settled in to wait. A young woman with a thick ponytail and a worn T-shirt that strained to fit dumped a plastic sack into the dumpster. She checked me out thoroughly but didn’t say anything. When she left, I got out of the truck and stretched. Just then, a ground-level door opened, and Ilona stepped out, talking to someone.

  “All right,” she said. “You really don’t think I should say anything?”

  The reply was too quiet for me to make out.

  “What else do we need?” Ilona said. “I saw we’re out of paper towels.”

  She lived there? Ilona lived in this run-down, smelly apartment building? Couldn’t be. But she sure talked as if she did. She couldn’t be living with Craig, could she?

  She turned, and I ducked behind the truck. Instead of the Mercedes, Ilona got into an older Ford sedan. I watched as she turned right on the highway.

  Deep in thought, I opened the truck’s door and noticed that the apartment Ilona had left was still open. A woman in a wheelchair watched me. The tubes of an oxygen tank snaked around it and into her nose. I saw no sign of Craig Burdock at all.

  * * *

  After staking out the Armada, I returned to the library to find the knitter’s club angrily milling at the front door and Lyndon standing near the truck’s usual parking spot looking perplexed. I apologized to the knitters and handed the keys to Lyndon.

  “I had to borrow the truck for a bit,” I said, not thinking of anything more original.

  “Okay. You could have let me know. The clutch is a bit touchy.”

  “It was a last-minute thing. I didn’t see you. In fact”—I met his eyes—“I haven’t seen much of you all day.”

  “Been working on something,” he mumbled and looked at his feet. No mention of Roz. Curiously, no mention of the Washington Post article, either.

  When he didn’t offer details, I said, “Well, I’ll probably be turning in early tonight. You haven’t seen Sam around, have you?”

  “Nope. Not since this morning.”

  When the library closed that evening and I still hadn’t heard from Sam, I continued with the plan. I punched up a few pillows and laid them out on the bed as if it were me, then set a timer on the bedside light. Then I stuffed a nightgown and toothbrush into a tote bag and crept out the kitchen door. I didn’t see anyone as I darted down to the river path in the twilight.

  I hesitated at the turnoff to the Magnolia Rolling Estates. My plan had been to go straight to Lalena’s, but my mother’s training was too strong. I couldn’t show up without a hostess gift. I darted across the street to the PO Grocery and pushed open the door to an instrumental version of “Viva Las Vegas.”

  When I entered, the girl at the register was busy swiping screens on her phone and barely lifted her head. Fine with me. As far as anyone was supposed to know, I was in my apartment in the library.

  The wine was in the back, next to the deli case. Above the shelves, WILFRED, OREGON and its zip code were still affixed to the wall in bronze letters. I grabbed a bottle of an Oregon pinot noir and was turning toward the cashier, when I heard Darla’s voice in the next aisle.

  “What does that say?” she asked. “I can’t stand cilantro. And no extra picante this time.”

  “No cilantro,” a male voice responded.

  I pushed aside a few cans of pork ’n’ beans and peered through the crack. Darla fingered her reading glasses and held a tub of salsa. Even though she regularly wore glasses on a cord around her neck, her vision appeared fine. She never wore the glasses. I’d seen her wipe up microscopic spills of gravy and grab the swatter to attack a fly across the dining room. She was faking a vision problem. Why?

  I dashed toward the front of the tiny store and pulled a copy of the Forest Grove News-Times from its rack, then sauntered to Darla’s aisle as if by accident. “Darla! Imagine seeing you here. I was just getting a few things before I head up the hill for the night.”

  “It’s been a long day for you, honey.” She turned to the man helping her. “Bye, Kevin. I’ll see you around.”

  I flipped the paper open and caught an ad for a cheap oil change at Providence and Sons Garage. “Look here.” I tapped the ad. “Think they’re any good?”

  She glanced at the paper, her expression mild. “I expect they’re fine. You don’t have a car. What do you care?”

  Thanks to the logo featuring an illustration of a Model T, anyone could tell the ad was for a garage. “I just wondered if you knew the Prudence Garage.”

  She tucked the salsa into her basket. “You should ask Duke, but I haven’t heard any complaints.”

  “About Prudence and Sons?” I pressed.

  One eyebrow rose. She took the paper and brushed a finger over “Providence” then handed it back. “Sure.”

  I remembered the girlishly written note left for me my first night. Roz said Darla never texted. And she hadn’t wanted to read the report on the library’s benefits to Wilfred. Not to mention that, as far as I could tell, she’d never made use of her library card.

  “Darla, you can’t read, can you?”

  She dropped off her readers to dangle against her chest. “I can read. Honest. I know how.”

  She was telling the truth. I sensed it. “Then what’s wrong? You couldn’t read the ad I just showed you. You couldn’t read the salsa jar, either, could you?”

  She turned away a moment, tapping her toe on the wavy linoleum. “Okay. I’m dyslexic. Severely so.”

  “I see.”

  “I can read, but I don’t. Not much, and not without a lot of effort.”

  We faced each other, neither of us speaking. Her expression held a plea. I understood.

  “I won’t tell, I promise,” I said. “But it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people are dyslexic. You’d be surprised if you asked around.”

  “What would you know about it, anyway?” She looked up the aisle to make sure no one was listening. “For you, reading is like breathing, and from what I’ve seen, nearly as important. I’m not stupid.”

  “That’s why you’re such a big supporter of the library, isn’t it? You don’t want people to know about your disability.”

  “I’m going to reading therapy every week. That’s where I was the night of the murder. Bert knows, but it’s no one else’s business.”

  “I get it.”

  She shifted her basket to her other arm. “Auntie Lyn knew I had trouble reading. She used to sit next to me after school and read to me, running her fingers under the words as she went along. It didn’t help much, but I loved sitting with her, smelling her gardenia perfume, and hearing the stories. If it weren’t for her, I would have gone home to an empty house. Dad was at the mill, and Mom had left a long time ago.”

  No wonder Darla loved the library. So many good memories were there for her. She probably felt she owed it to Marilyn Wilfred to save it. Plus, it gave her a front. Maybe t
hat’s why she’d accomplished so much, too. She had something to prove.

  “You’re not really going back to the library, are you?” Darla said.

  I looked up in surprise. “How did you know?”

  She nodded at my overnight bag. “Given what’s happened with Roz, my guess is you’re staying at Lalena’s. You’re taking her a bottle of wine. I’ve had years in the restaurant business, and I don’t need to be a stellar reader to see you’re making a huge mistake.”

  “How?”

  She plucked the bottle from my hand and marched it back to the wine display. “Get a French one instead.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lalena was waiting for me with a glass of something lemon-tinted, probably from the box in her refrigerator.

  “Bonsoir, chère amie. Welcome to Chateau Dolby,” she said.

  “Sorry I’m late. I stopped to get this.” I handed her the bottle of Vouvray that Darla had helped me select. “How’s the vacation planning going?” I knelt to pet Sailor, who was jumping around my knees.

  “Paris in the spring. Two weeks.” Lalena drained her glass and set it on the coffee table in front of the pink couch. “Bert says he’ll take care of Sailor for me.”

  I took the rose-hued armchair at a right angle to the couch. The living room furniture was crowded into an “L” shape to better watch television.

  “Do you know anything about the Armada apartments?” I asked. Darla might be in the clear now, but Ilona’s sudden drive to Gaston still weighed on me, especially now that January Stephens’s murder was reopened.

  “The Armada? Why that place hasn’t collapsed on itself yet, I don’t know. Why?”

  “Ilona stopped by the library today. I think she wanted to blow off steam about my letter to the judge. When she heard Craig Burdock had been released, she sped to the Armada.”

  Lalena’s eyes widened, then settled. “Oh. You thought maybe she was going to see him.”

  “I’d wondered. Something isn’t right.”

  “Craig doesn’t live at the Armada, if that’s what you want to know. Ilona’s mom does.”

  “You’re kidding.” So, that was the woman I’d glanced in the doorway. Ilona’s mother. “How is it that Ilona drives a fancy car and her mom lives in a moldy hovel?”