Copycat Killing

17

“What makes you think Sam’s lying?” Maggie asked, gesturing to Claire for our checks. “You didn’t want dessert, did you?”

I shook my head. “I found the high school yearbook for the year Roma’s father graduated. There are a bunch of pictures that didn’t make it into the book, mostly candid shots. Sam’s in one of them, so is Pearl and some other girls. It’s pretty clear from the way Sam is looking at Pearl that he had a thing for her.”

“That’s probably the reason,” Maggie said, getting to her feet as Claire approached the table.

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I think I told you that I was a little late discovering boys.”

“You did.” I smiled at Claire as I pulled out my wallet.

“Did you want a cup of coffee to go?” she asked as she handed over my bill.

“I did,” I said. I looked at the cardboard take-out cup she was holding. “Is that for me?”

“It is,” she said with a smile.

I took the coffee and gave her the money for my meal plus a tip because Claire always gave great service.

“I heard about Jaeger,” she said to Maggie. “I’m sorry.” She looked past us, out the front window of the restaurant where the sky looked a little lighter than it had earlier. “Maybe it’s finally stopped raining and things can get back to normal.” She turned back to us again. “Have a good day,” she said and then she turned and headed back to the counter.

I pulled on my hoodie, careful not to catch the edge of the bandage wrapped around my thumb.

Maggie watched me. “I still think that thumb needs stitches.”

“I know,” I said with a small smile.

We started back to the shop. The sky really did seem less gray. Maybe Claire was right and we’d be able to get back to normal.

“Okay, so explain to me what you being slow to notice boys has to do with Sam lying about knowing Roma’s mom,” I said.

She brushed a stray blond curl off of her face. “My first year of college I had a huge crush on the guy who sat in front of me in my calculus tutorial.” She grinned. “The back of his head was gorgeous. The front was pretty cute too.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing,” she said. “He pretty much didn’t know I was alive. I mooned over the guy for the entire semester. Everybody who sat near us knew I had a thing for the guy because I had that goony, love-struck look on my face all the time and trust me it wasn’t because I loved calculus.”

We stopped at the corner while a couple of cars and an SUV turned up the hill, then we crossed the street.

“The thing is,” Maggie continued, “I literally sighed over the guy for months and never even talked to him. So even now, if someone were to ask me if I’d known him, my first reaction would be to say no, just because I still feel a bit embarrassed about the way I acted.”

It was hard to imagine Maggie being tongue-tied and awkward around anyone. Last winter when we’d been trying to figure out who had killed Agatha Shepherd, we’d ended up at a club up on the highway. She so totally charmed the bartender, for a moment he’d forgotten how to do anything other than grin at her like an idiot.

“So you think Sam is just embarrassed about a teenage crush?” I said. I knew I looked skeptical. That’s how I felt.

Maggie leaned sideways. “Dried-up raisin,” she said, slowly and clearly.

I stopped walking and glared at her. “Not the same thing,” I said.

She was referring to a cereal commercial my dad had done years ago. He’d played a dried-up raisin in the competitor’s not quite as good product. And developed a cult following. He’d actually had a fan club for a while called—you guessed it—The Raisinettes.

I’d been mortified and I admit I’d cringed a little when the company had decided to revive that ad campaign just a couple of months ago. And I hadn’t exactly told many people it was my father in the commercial.

Maggie was still looking at me with the same unblinking gaze I sometimes got from the cats.

“It’s not the same thing,” I said huffily.

She laughed then.

“Fine. You win,” I said, and started walking again.

Hercules was curled up on Maggie’s desk chair when we got back to the store. He opened one green eye and studied us for a moment. I got the carrier, set it on the floor by the chair and opened the top.

“Let’s go,” I said. The cat made a show of yawning, stretching, and taking his time getting in the bag. I closed the top and slung the bag over my shoulder.

“I need to get going,” I said to Maggie. “Susan and Mary are meeting me at the library.” I’d called both of them to come in for a couple of hours so we’d be ready to open on Friday. “Call me later and let me know how the pump’s working.”

“I will,” she promised. “And I’m going to call Roma too.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll try her when I get home.” I put a hand on the carrier. I could feel Hercules moving inside.

“Thank you Hercules,” Maggie said, leaning in to look at him through the side mesh panel.

He meowed loudly in acknowledgment.

Susan was standing by the front steps and Mary was coming from the mostly dry parking lot when I got to the library. I unlocked the door and turned off the alarm. “The first thing I need to do is put Hercules in my office,” I said, putting a hand on the top of the bag.

“Did I miss Take Your Cat to Work Day again?” Susan asked. Her hair was up in its usual topknot, a silver skewer poked through it.

“I’m sorry, Susan,” Mary said, all mock-seriousness. “I forgot to forward the memo.”

“You two are so funny,” I said.

Susan waggled her eyebrows at me. “We think so.” She gestured at my bag. “Why did you bring Hercules with you? Are you planning on making him shelve books?”

I shook my head. “I was thinking that I’d get him to add new books to the system. He’s a pretty good two-pawed typist.”

Herc picked that moment to meow with great enthusiasm and volume. Mary and Susan both laughed.

“He was over at the co-op on rodent patrol for Maggie,” I said.

“Eric told me what happened when you had the job,” Susan said.

I felt my face getting red.

“What am I missing?” Mary asked, hands on her hips.

“Nothing,” I said, quickly.

“Kathleen was the previous rodent wrangler,” Susan said. “Turns out it’s not one of her strengths.”

Hercules chose that moment to meow loudly yet again. It was like having a feline Greek chorus on my hip.

“Details,” Mary said.

Susan made a go-ahead gesture with one hand.

“There was a dead rat floating in the basement over at the co-op store,” I said. “I fished it out and took it outside. That’s all.”

Susan smirked at me. “You left out the part about throwing it at Ruby.”

“You threw a dead animal at poor little Ruby?” Mary said, frowning at me.

“No,” I said. “I was just putting it outside and Ruby kind of got in the way.”

“Now you see, the way I heard it, you used a shovel like it was a tennis racquet and the rodent in question wasn’t exactly dead,” Susan said, still smirking.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Mary interrupted, holding up a hand. “You threw a live rat at Ruby?”

“No,” I said. “Not exactly.” I should have stopped talking. “At least not on purpose.” I slid the cat carrier down off my shoulder. “It’s complicated.”

The one-cat Greek chorus took the opportunity to add his two cents. “Don’t start,” I said darkly to the bag.

Mary and Susan were shaking with laughter.

“Seriously,” I said. “And Maggie doesn’t know the rat—”

“—had more than one life to live?” Susan finished.

“Please don’t tell her,” I said.

They both held up their little fingers, linked them, and chanted, “I will not bend, I will not break, this pinky swear I now do make.” Then they gave me big, goony smiles.

I shook my head slowly. “I swear sometimes the two of you are worse than a couple of six-year-olds.”

They grinned and high-fived each other.

“Moving along, I think the first thing we need to do is open some windows and get some fresh air in here,” I said, heading for the stairs.

“I’ll open a couple down here,” Susan said, heading for the computer area.

Mary gestured at my take-out cup. “Should I start the coffeemaker?”

I looked at her without saying a word and she mock-slapped her forehead. “Oh what am I saying? I forgot who I was talking to.”

We started up the steps together. “Your forehead looks sore. I heard what happened. Do you feel all right?”

“I do, thanks,” I said. “I have some pretty spectacular bruises, though.”

Mary hitched her oversized, quilted tote bag a little higher on her shoulder. “As long as you weren’t badly hurt, that’s all that matters.” She stopped on the step below me, one hand on the dark wood railing. “I didn’t believe it at first when I heard Tom Karlsson’s body was out there.”

The image of that dirt-encrusted skull flashed into my mind. “It’s difficult for Roma,” I said.

“And Pearl too, I imagine,” Mary said. “You know, I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“You were friends?”

“Heavens yes. We were in the same class for years.” She gave me a sly grin. “Don’t let my girlish good looks fool you.”

“So you knew Tom?” I said.

Mary nodded. “That I did. A real ladies’ man. All charm and very little substance.” She laughed. “My mother called him a ‘slick willie.’ Pretty much tells you all you need to know.”

“What about Sam?” I asked. Hercules was moving in the bag against my hip again.

“Sammy Ingstrom? He was a grade behind us. Plus his father had money. Sam used to drive this aquamarine T-Bird to school. We didn’t run in the same circles.”

I thought about that photo again. Was I seeing something that wasn’t there?

We went up the last few steps. “You know, I always thought Sam had a bit of a crush on Pearl, though,” Mary said as if she’d somehow read my mind.

“Really?” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling. “It would probably surprise you, given how much he likes to go on and on now, but back then Sammy didn’t say much. And if he was around Pearl, well”—she gave me a knowing smile—“the boy was practically catatonic.”

She headed down the hall to the staff room and I went into my office. Maybe Maggie was right. Maybe Sam had lied about knowing Pearl purely out of embarrassment.

As soon as I let Hercules out of the bag he went for my office chair, sending it looping around in a circle when he jumped on the seat.

I reached for the back and stopped it spinning and the cat looked up at me slightly cross-eyed it seemed to me.

“You like that,” I said. He may not have cared for catnip the way Owen did, but it was clear Hercules liked the rush of spinning around in my chair.

I turned the seat to face the window so he could both bird and people watch. Then I hung up my jacket and changed my rubber boots for shoes.

The pen cap that Hercules had found at the co-op was still in my pocket. I took it out to look at it again. It was clearly old. It looked a lot like the pen I’d seen Everett use, which he’d mentioned once had been his mother’s, but I didn’t see how the cap from a pen belonging to Everett could have ended up at the co-op building. It wasn’t Maggie’s as far as I knew. I turned the piece of the pen over in my fingers, wondering where Hercules had found it and why he’d thought it was important enough to bring to me.

“Care to tell me why you think this is important?” I asked. The cat looked over his shoulder at me with the same unreadable gaze Maggie had given me earlier. I sighed and put the small piece of metal and plastic back in my pocket. I wasn’t going to get any answers from a cat. I needed to get the library ready to reopen, not play Nancy Drew with Hercules.

“Stay in here,” I warned the little black-and-white cat. “If Mary or Susan find you roaming around the library there will be way too much explaining to do.”

As usual, he ignored me.

I stopped for a moment at the head of the stairs and surveyed the library space below me. The renovations had been complicated and more than once I’d thought the job would never be finished. But the building looked wonderful. The mosaic tile floors in the checkout area had been repaired. There were new windows and new flooring elsewhere in the building, as well as additional shelving and a new checkout desk that was more efficient—thanks to Mary’s organization skills—and that took up less space.

Oren Kenyon’s beautifully hand-carved wooden sun shone down from over the front doors, above the words LET THERE BE LIGHT, the same phrase that was over the entrance to the first Carnegie library in Dunfermline, Scotland. And now we were getting ready to celebrate the centennial of this building.

That reminded me that I needed to talk to Rebecca about the missing pages in her mother’s journals as well as ask Maggie for her ideas on how best to display Ellen’s sketches.

I went down to the main floor and stood looking around the computer area. My plan was to rearrange the space for the main centennial display. Maggie had already started the photo collage panels I wanted to put in the room.

Susan came to stand beside me. “Do you remember how we were talking about displaying the photo panels on some kind of oversized easel?” she said.

“I do,” I said.

“I had an idea. I don’t know if you’ll like it and I don’t know if Oren will say it’s doable.” She pushed her dark-framed glasses up her nose.

“What is it?”

She tipped her head back and pointed at the high ceiling. “I don’t know if you can see them or not,” she said. “But there are hooks up there, in the beams, in more than one place.” She pointed. “Look.”

I squinted up over my head. Susan was right. I hadn’t noticed them before, but there were what looked to be metal hooks fastened to the ceiling beams in several places.

“If there are enough hooks and they’re in the right places, maybe the panels could be hung from the ceiling.”

“I like that idea,” I said. “I’ll call Oren and see what he says. Thank you.”

She pressed both palms together and gave me a deep bow. “I live to serve,” she said.

I walked over to the desk for a piece of paper so I could write myself a reminder to call Oren…and Maggie…and Rebecca. The phone rang while I was standing there and I answered instead of letting the call go to voice mail. It was someone wanting to know if we’d be reopening soon. I was happy to tell the caller tomorrow.

It didn’t take long to get the library ready for people again. Mary and I had kept up with the book drop and the reshelving. Now she dusted and put out the new magazines while I vacuumed and Susan checked the computers. Then I checked the e-mail again, while Mary took care of the voice mail messages and Susan dealt with the mail Mary had stopped to pick up from the post office on her way over. After about an hour we stopped for Mary’s coffee and—no surprise—the conversation turned to Jaeger Merrill’s death. The news was spreading fast.

“So how long is the co-op store going to be closed?” Mary asked.

“The police are already finished there.” I added a bit more cream to my cup. “And Larry Taylor found a pump for the basement so if the rain holds off”—Mary was quick to rap her knuckles on the edge of the wooden table—“Maggie may be able to reopen in a few days.”

“Are the photo panels she’s doing for the centennial finished?” Susan asked, poking the silver skewer a little more securely into her hair.

“Almost,” I said. “And I got some things from Rebecca—from her mother, actually—that I’d like to use.”

“That reminds me,” Susan said, shaking a finger at me. “Abigail found a list of library rules from back in the late fifties.”

“Library rules?” I said.

Mary was already nodding and smiling. “They used to give them out when you got a library card. Every kid got a copy. The rules of proper library behavior. That was back in the days of ‘children should be seen and not heard.’”

“Whoever came up with that saying clearly didn’t have any kids,” Susan said, dryly.

“So what were the rules for proper library behavior?” I asked Mary, leaning back to get a bit more comfortable.

“No voices above a whisper, for one,” she said. “And everyone was supposed to wash their hands before they handled any books.”

“That rule isn’t necessarily bad,” Susan said. “Remember the guy who was reading Sonnets from the Portuguese and eating the peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich? I’m sorry but peanut butter and fluff are just not romantic and they’re not good for books either.”

“What else?” I said to Mary.

“Children were expected to step lightly, preferably tiptoe so as not to disturb the other patrons.”

Susan rolled her eyes.

“And when I was in school, I can remember the teacher instructing us that we should choose books that would enrich our minds instead of ones that encouraged frivolous pursuits.” Mary smiled at the memory. “Treasure Island, for example, was considered to be a book that encouraged too much daydreaming.”

“Why do I get the feeling you read every single book that encouraged frivolous pursuits?” I said.

The smile spread into a grin. “My mother’s influence. She read us Gulliver’s Travels when I was about six.”

“I’m trying to imagine trying to enforce the no books that encourage frivolous pursuits edict today,” Susan said, frowning at the bottom of her cup as though she didn’t know what had happened to her coffee.

“Things were very different when I was in school,” Mary said, getting up and opening the cupboard over the sink. She reached up and felt around on the top shelf. “Are there any cookies?”

“No,” Susan said. “You and Abigail ate them last week.” She turned to me. “You have to display those library rules. People will get a kick out of them.”

“I’ll ask Abigail to bring them in. How about taking a look in the storage room to see if you can find anything else like that?”

“Sure,” Susan said.

Mary had come back to the table.

“Do you remember a group called The Ladies Knitting Circle?” I said. “I think they might have had at least some of their meetings here and I’m wondering if Abigail has them on her list.”

Mary gave a snort of laughter. “The Ladies Knitting Circle should have their own display, but they weren’t the kind of group you think they were. They weren’t getting together to exchange sweater patterns and try different kinds of yarn.”

Susan looked at me and shrugged. Clearly she didn’t know what Mary meant either.

“So what were they doing?” I asked.

“Hiding abused women from their husbands and then sneaking them out of town.”

I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open. “You’re not serious?” I said.

“Oh yes I am,” Mary said. “My mother was part of the group.” Something in her face changed. The gently teasing smile disappeared.

“Were you?” I asked quietly.

She nodded. “It was all Anna Henderson’s doing.”

“Everett’s mother,” Susan said.

“Yes,” Mary said. She was sitting very straight in her chair, one finger tracing a circle on the table. “And Ellen Montgomery—Rebecca’s mother—and my mother, and a few other women in town. Me, eventually. But Anna was the driving force. She knew people. She had access to her own money.”

She was looking at me, but her focus was clearly in the past. “Anna would arrange for new identities—new names, birth certificates, driver’s licenses. I don’t know how. And trust me, it all looked like the real thing. And she’d get the women away to start new lives. A fair number of them ended up across the border in Canada.”

The odd reference to yarn from Canada in Ellen’s journal suddenly made a lot more sense.

“I don’t know if Carson knew what she was doing or not,” Mary continued. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he had, but it wouldn’t have mattered, he adored Anna.”

“What did you do?” I asked, leaning forward, one arm propped on the table.

The twinkle came back into Mary’s gaze. “Showed a little cleavage, a fair amount of leg and played dumb.”

Susan laughed and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “The cleavage I believe, but I’m having a little trouble imagining you playing dumb.”

“Let’s just say I was kind of cute when I was younger,” Mary said. “So some people didn’t pay a lot of attention to this.” She tapped the side of her head with one hand.

“You were more than ‘kind of cute,’” I said. I’d seen photos of Mary in her twenties. She’d been a beautiful young woman, long dark hair, lots of curves and that wicked smile. She was still beautiful. Kickboxing gave her great legs and she still had that smile.

Maggie and I had accidently come across Mary doing a slightly naughty burlesque routine during amateur night this past winter at The Brick, a club out on the highway. I hoped I looked even half that terrific when I was her age, although I didn’t think I’d ever be swinging a feather boa and dancing in high heels.

“Yes I was,” Mary said with a sly sideways grin. “But modesty prevented me from saying that myself.”

“I want to know what you mean when you say you ‘played dumb.’” Susan said.

“Sometimes we needed a little diversion, to give the women time to get away. My specialty was a flat tire that I just couldn’t fix. I was pretty good with a dead battery and a dry radiator, too.”

Mary went on talking, but all I could think about was that Anna Henderson had been helping women disappear. Tom Karlsson’s remains had been buried out at Wisteria Hill. Could Anna have had anything to do with his “disappearance”?