Great Day for the Deadly (6 page)

At the moment, she didn’t want to joke about anything. The weather out there had gone from bad to impossible to positively dangerous. She wanted to lock up, get out and make her way up to Iggy Loy. She could have done it, too, except for the fact that the library wasn’t empty. She had sent Shelley and Carl, her full-time paid assistants, home at once—almost as soon as she’d walked through the door. They had gone, too. Like most people with jobs they weren’t particularly interested in, they were happier than not to be sent home from work. She had sent old Tommy Douver up to Iggy Loy, assuming that he’d been evicted from another rented room. Since he was drunk and that was the only reason he came into the library anyway, it was a safe assumption. She hadn’t had any patrons to send anywhere. The general population of Maryville had been up, awake and nervous long before she had. A lot of them had been in town during the flood of 1953, and the rest had heard the stories. No, it wasn’t any of these usual categories of people who were giving Glinda trouble. It was that puzzle of puzzles, that confusion of confusions, The Library Lady.

Glinda had packed away everything on the checkout desk except for the rubber stamp. She had even put her extensive notes on what the library was doing to celebrate St. Pat’s and honor the Blessed Margaret Finney in her tote bag, so she could carry them up the hill and be sure they weren’t ruined. Now she put the stamp in the desk’s center drawer and slammed the drawer shut. The Library Lady was Mrs. Barbara Keel, and technically she should be called a Community Volunteer. Like the other Community Volunteers, she was supposed to walk around the library putting abandoned books into a cart, make posters, decorate for holidays, and generally do the million and one pieces of small work the paid staff didn’t have time for in these days of not enough paid staff. Like the other Community Volunteers, she was old, well over sixty, possibly over seventy. Unlike the other Community Volunteers, she was something of a character. That was why the children had nicknamed her The Library Lady.

“I know it’s none of my business,” The Library Lady was saying, “and I know it’s a new day and age and all of that, but I still think it wasn’t right. I mean, right there in the woman’s own bank. Do you think that makes sense, a woman owning a bank?”

“I don’t know,” Glinda said. The truth of it was, she didn’t have the faintest idea what Barbara was talking about. She never did. She picked up her keys and started for the stacks. There were a set of closets back there that had to be checked and locked, and a storeroom with doors to both the inside and the out. She cast a quick glance at the great sheets of plate glass that made up the doors and windows of the library’s front entrance. They were covered with shamrocks cut from white construction paper and dusted with green glitter and paste, the work of the half dozen four-year-olds who came every week to Story Hour. Glinda wondered if she should take them down and put them in her tote bag to preserve them, and decided against it. There were too many of them and there wasn’t enough time.

“The thing is,” The Library Lady said, “I don’t know what to do about it. In the old days I would have told Father and that would have taken care of it. I suppose I could tell Father now. It’s just that Father Fitzsimmons is so—young.”

Father Fitzsimmons was forty-six, but Glinda knew what the woman meant. There was a touch of naïveté about him that was disconcerting at times. Glinda got to the back of the stacks and the first of the closets and opened up to check. It was full of Story Hour supplies and green metal folding chairs, folded up. Glinda shut the door again and went for her keys.

“What were you doing in the bank on a Thursday?” she asked The Library Lady. “What were you doing in a bank at all? I thought Father Doherty got it all straightened out for you, having your check direct deposited.”

“Oh, he did, Miss Daniels, he did. I suppose I could tell Father Doherty about this. He wouldn’t be shocked. But it’s not his parish, then, is it?”

“I suppose not.”

“I was putting in a little check from my daughter in Albany. She sent me twenty-five dollars. Did I tell you about my daughter in Albany?”

“Yes,” Glinda said, “you did.” Actually, Glinda knew The Library Lady’s daughter in Albany. They had graduated in the same class from St. Margaret’s Academy. It was Glinda’s personal opinion, and the opinion of practically everyone else in town, that Jennifer Keel was a world-class shit. That was the only explanation anyone had for why Jennifer would let her mother live alone in Maryville on Social Security and unpredictably scattered twenty-five-dollar checks, while Jennifer played Up and Coming Legislative Aide in Albany with a Maserati and a closet full of Ralph Lauren Polo. Glinda got to the second closet, checked it out—it was full of clear plastic dust jacket covers, enough to last a million years or more—and went on down the line.

“You should have told one of us you had the check,” Glinda said. “We’d have gone to the bank for you.”

“Oh, I know you would have, dear, you’re all very nice, but I didn’t have anything to do this morning and I like to walk. And I don’t think those boys would bother me in broad daylight, do you?”

Yes, as a matter of fact, Glinda did. It wasn’t the time or place to say so. “It’s been terrible weather out there all morning,” she said instead. “It wasn’t such a good idea to go out when you could catch a cold.”

“But I was going to go out anyway. I was going to come here.”

“Well, in a few moments you’re going to go up to Iggy Loy with me and you’re going to stay there. I think there’s going to be another flood.”

“Flood,” The Library Lady said.

Glinda made it to the third closet, stared in despair at a jumbled mess of rags and old pieces of wood, wondered what in God’s name they had ever been of any use to anyone for, and then wondered at how long it had been since she had locked up herself. Of course, the truth was, it hadn’t been long at all. It was just that she didn’t usually open the closets before she locked them, to see if water had gotten in and done any damage.

“The thing is,” The Library Lady said again, “it was a terrible day to be at the bank. There were so many people there. Maybe they were trying to get in out of the rain. And there was so much confusion. People throwing boxes back and forth and up and down.”

“Boxes?”

“Yes, dear, you know. For St. Patrick’s Day. The bank always puts up that little exhibit, you know, the history of the Immigrants National Bank, the pictures and the little balsa-wood houses that show what the town was like in 1875 or whenever it was. They were doing that today. They were bringing the boxes up from the basement and bringing them down again. It was very distracting.”

“I’m sure it would be.”

“That was how I saw them,” The Library Lady said, “Miss Severan and Mr. Malley. Wriggling.”

“Wriggling,” Glinda said. She was peering into closet number four. It was full of books that had been donated for the library’s annual used-book sale. She locked it up and began moving toward the storeroom. “What do you mean, wriggling?”

“Well, they did have all their clothes on, dear. There was that. But they were wriggling.”

“Wriggling how?”

“It was in the back hall near the officers’ desks. Behind that, I mean. Do you know that hall? There’s a ladies’ room there.”

“Is there?”

“Yes, there is. It’s very convenient. The lines were very long, you see, so I went down to powder my nose. And I was thinking about things, you know, and not paying attention. So when I came out I turned right instead of left.”

“And?”

“And they were wriggling,” The Library Lady said positively. “I saw them as soon as I got to the corner. The hall turns there in the back, you see. I was so preoccupied, I nearly bumped into the wall. But there they were. Wedged front to back in a wooden crate in the utility room they have back there, and him with his hand on her, um, well. Yes. Now, I know, Miss Daniels, I know that everybody in town knows that those two have been going at it for six months, and I know that means Miss Bailey must know too, I mean Mrs. Malley, it’s funny how you never think of her as Mrs. Malley, but that’s not the point, is it? I mean the point is—”

“Wait,” Glinda said.

“Is something wrong, dear?”

Something was very definitely wrong. Glinda was standing right in front of the storeroom door. She had the key to it in her hand, because unlike the closets the storeroom was usually kept locked. It had a thick metal door that had been padded with acoustic insulation, too, which made what she had been hearing, right through The Library Lady’s babblings, even worse.

“Listen,” she said. “Listen hard. Water.”

The Library Lady had come up right behind her and was now standing at the storeroom door. “That doesn’t sound like water,” she said. “That sounds like someone hissing.”

“Don’t be silly,” Glinda said. “There’s nobody in there hissing.”

“I’m just telling you what it sounds like,” The Library Lady said.

Glinda rubbed the side of her face in agitation. All she could think of was the outside door, breached somehow, pushed open by the storm or left open by someone’s carelessness, letting in a thick puddle of filthy wet to ruin the carpet. The vision was so awful, she was having a hard time making herself act.

“Be careful what you pray for,” she told The Library Lady. “Last night I was praying for an adventure in my life.”

“Well, dear,” The Library Lady said, “I think God is smart enough to understand you really meant a man.”

Glinda jammed her key into the lock and turned. On that note, she was no longer primarily worried about water damage in the storeroom. She was worried about having to spend just long enough with The Library Lady to turn homicidal. The key stuck and she rattled it. The key to the storeroom always stuck. It drove her nuts. She got the thing to turn and pulled the door open.

The Library Lady saw it first, because she was standing on the side where the gap widened. Standing a little behind the moving door, it took Glinda a little longer. The Library Lady cried out. Glinda just stared. Maybe it was all too bizarre to accept at first glance.

“Oh, dear,” The Library Lady said. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

“Go back toward the front doors,” Glinda told her. “Go back now. Run.”

The Library Lady didn’t run. She might not have been able to. For a second or two, Glinda thought she was going to have to push the old woman to get her to move at all. Then The Library Lady gave a shuffle and a cough and started to back slowly away.

“Don’t you touch those things,” she told Glinda. “Don’t you touch them.”

“I won’t,” Glinda promised her.

She meant to keep that promise, too. Out there in the storeroom, there was no water except for a few dark spots of damp that trailed along the carpet from the outer door. There were no green baize cardboard tables, either, which was what had been in there the last time Glinda looked. As far as Glinda could tell, the storeroom was empty, except for the body of Brigit Ann Reilly stretched out across the floor—

—and the snakes.

It was the snakes that changed everything.

Glinda would have rushed in to see if the girl was all right, or if there was anything she could do to help, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t for the same reason that The Library Lady had taken direction for once and retreated to the library’s front doors.

Brigit Ann Reilly was covered with hissing, snapping, spitting water moccasins, and water moccasins were very poisonous snakes.

W
HEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN FIRST
heard about the death of Brigit Ann Reilly, he was standing in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in New York City, wondering what he was going to do about his shoes. It was one o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, February 28, a cold, gray, bitter day with too much wind, and Gregor had just come from four solid hours of listening to a lecture on VICAP. VICAP was the Violent Criminals Apprehension Something, Gregor couldn’t remember what. It was also a computer program, devised and implemented to help the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Department help state and local police forces find wandering serial killers. Before his retirement, Gregor had been head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Department. In fact, he had been the man who set it up. He had also been the man who had argued, time and time again, for a computer system like VICAP. Standing by the long wall of plate glass windows that looked out on a curving drive that connected to a street whose name he couldn’t remember, Gregor tried counting all the bureaucratic reasons he had been given for why he couldn’t have one. It was amazing, really, what bureaucrats would tell you when they knew you wanted something from them. It went beyond lying and got tangled in a form of occupational pathology. It got worse when there was true and undeniable need for whatever you were asking for. Those were the last days of the career of Theodore Robert Bundy, with the papers full of stories about college girls killed in their sorority-house beds. Congress and the American people had been all primed to spend money—to do anything—to protect the country from repeat performances. Gregor had gone to the attorney generals office and got—what? He couldn’t really remember. Something silly. Something along the lines of “we-can’t-ask-Congress-for-that-this-year-because-we-asked-them-for-brass-spittoons-last-year.” Something like that, when Bundy had left a dozen dead that anyone knew about and the not-quite-formed Behavioral Sciences Department had files on half a dozen cases from Texas to Maine that looked like they were working themselves up into the same damn thing.

Of course, Gregor thought now, the political climate had changed since then. He wasn’t sure exactly how—he wasn’t very good at politics—but he thought it had something to do with who was spending money for what where. That was a safe guess, because it almost always had something to do with who was spending money for what where. Maybe Ronald Reagan had been a law-and-order president and he hadn’t noticed it. George Bush had gone to war in the Persian Gulf and he would never have noticed that, either, except that Donna Moradanyan had put a yellow ribbon on his apartment door. He looked down at his shoes again and sighed. Almost everyone who was attending the conference on VICAP—ex-Bureau agents, crime writers, newspaper reporters, local police officers—was staying at the Hilton, but the conference itself was being held across town at a small hotel the Bureau had favored since early in the reign of J. Edgar Hoover. Unfortunately, the hotel hadn’t done any maintenance since early in the reign of J. Edgar Hoover. The place was falling apart, and the pack of them had to troop over there every day anyway, getting their shoes full of grit and slush. The present director had probably gone to the attorney general’s office to ask for the Hilton and been told it couldn’t be done. The Department of Redundancy Department had got themselves into the Hilton just last year.