A Rare Murder In Princeton (12 page)

“I think I could manage,” said George. “I’ll call about it tomorrow.”

“Do you think Dante could replace that pane?” asked McLeod.

“That’s a good idea,” said George. “I wonder where you get red glass. I guess he’ll know. I’ll call him and then maybe I can cut a piece of cardboard and tape it over the hole—keep out some of that cold air that’s pouring in here.” He went to the telephone in the kitchen and fumbled around among the pieces of paper in a small basket on the countertop, and finally found what he was looking for.

“Dante said he’d come over first thing in the morning,” he said when he hung up the phone. “Do you have any cardboard?”

“Not that I can think of. You send your shirts to the laundry, don’t you? Don’t they still stuff cardboard in them?”

“Sure they do. Good thinking.” He hurried up the stairs, two steps at a time, and returned with two pieces of cardboard. McLeod watched him measure the hole in the door, then measure the cardboard, and then try to cut it with scissors.

“Don’t you have a box cutter?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. Finally, they got the cardboard cut to size. Then they needed masking tape and had none. McLeod finally took adhesive tape from the first aid shelf in the bathroom medicine cabinet and used that to hold the glass in place.

“I’m exhausted,” said McLeod.

“I should think so. I think we’d better go out to eat.”

“Oh, no,” said McLeod. “I don’t want to have to come back to the dark and empty house.”

“I see what you mean,” said George. “And I have to call the police and tell them nothing is missing. We’ll just eat here. We have lots in the freezer.”

For what was almost the first time that day, McLeod thought about the murder, and asked George if he had heard anything.

“Nothing new,” he said, “but the administration is concerned.” He grinned. “We issued a statement to that effect.”

MCLEOD SPENT MOST of Friday trying to bring order out of the chaos of her room. She went downstairs when Dante arrived to repair the glass in the front door. George had gone off to work—of course, she thought. I’m like a wife, somebody to do the stay-at-home chores, but I’m not a wife. Then she had to admit that the arrangement was fine with her right now. She didn’t want to be married again and she liked being able to live in Tallahassee for long periods of time and Princeton (or some other place) for short periods. She honestly wouldn’t want to be married to George and have to be the wife of a university administrator.

When he came, Dante clucked over the broken glass. “It’s a puzzle,” he said. “Who would do such a thing?” He shook his head for a long time, but finally he said he knew where to go in Trenton to get red glass. He measured the hole for the pane and prepared to leave. But he was concerned about the burglary. “Mrs. Murray never had any problem with burglars,” he said.

McLeod wondered if she was supposed to be ashamed that Jill Murray had managed to avoid burglars while she had not.

“You need a dead bolt on this door,” said Dante.

“What good would that do?” asked McLeod. “They could still break a pane and reach in and undo the dead bolt, couldn’t they?”

“It’s the principle,” said Dante. “A dead bolt is better.”

That was logic for you, McLeod thought. It was unanswerable.

“Mrs. McLeod, you still have that box of old clothes?”

Evidently Dante thought her last name was McLeod. That was all right, lots of people got confused. “No, Dante, I took it to my office.”

“You better get that dead bolt,” Dante said again as he was leaving.

“George is going to get a burglar alarm system,” McLeod said. As she went back upstairs to work on organizing her room, she wondered what a dead bolt had to do with that box of old clothes? Had Dante known about the things wrapped in the dresses? Did anyone else know? She must tell George about that box.

Cleaning up after a burglary is worse than moving, she thought as she hung skirts and dresses on hangers in the closet. It was worse than moving because of the personal threat involved in the ransacking of her possessions. Some of her clothes were too rumpled to put back in the closet, so she set them aside to take to the cleaners.

Who had done such a thing? It was vile, she thought. She gathered up the sweaters and underwear that were lying around on the floor and took them down to the basement to wash them—she could not bear the thought of wearing them after some hideous unknown person had manhandled them.

What on earth had they been looking for among her paltry possessions? Why hadn’t the rest of the house been ransacked ? The burglar must have been interrupted. George was just lucky he didn’t have a mess to clean up like she did.

She made her way up the stairs to her room to get on with trying to restore order. She went back downstairs when Dante came back from Trenton. He quickly inserted the new glass and puttied it in.

“All finished,” he said.

McLeod inquired about payment, and Dante said Mr. Bridges had made an arrangement.

“Fine,” said McLeod. “Thank you so much.”

“
Non c’e problema,
” said Dante. “Be careful. Be careful.”

McLeod promised she would. It was lunchtime, and she decided to walk over to the campus and get some lunch and perhaps find out if there was anything new about the murder. It had been two days since it happened. Surely there was something to be learned. Just as she was leaving, George drove up.

“You left the office?” she asked, incredulous.

“Yes, I came home to meet the man from the burglar alarm company,” he said.

“I’m off,” she said and started on her way. George was indeed very upset about the burglary, she reflected as she walked.

The little café in the basement of Chancellor Green offered a limited menu, but she bought a roasted vegetable wrap and a bottle of apple juice, turned to survey the room, and saw Fanny Mobley at a table by herself.

“May I join you?” she asked.

Fanny silently moved her purse so McLeod could put her food down on the table but did not speak or smile. She wore a heavy rust-colored wool cardigan over a mauve dress with a long skirt, and to McLeod looked dowdy beyond belief. I wish she would cut her hair and comb it, she thought. Regretting the impulse that had made her approach Fanny, McLeod sat down, smiled in what she felt was an idiotic way, and began babbling.

“I’m glad to see you. How is everything in Rare Books? Have you recovered from the murder? Are you able to get any work done? Such a terrible thing to happen. How are you surviving?”

Fanny, pausing in her steady pursuit of spooning up soup, said briefly, “Yes, everyone is wildly inquisitive about it.”

Oh, dear, thought McLeod, it was one of Fanny’s bad days. “I didn’t mean to intrude, or pry,” she said. “It’s just that I have come to like everybody in the department and I liked Philip Sheridan. . . .”

“Oh, everybody is just crazy about Philip Sheridan now that he’s gone to what might be or might not be his reward,” said Fanny.

What did that mean? wondered McLeod. “Didn’t you like him?” she asked.

“He added to the manuscript collection in major ways,” said Fanny. Having finished her soup, she unwrapped a sandwich she had brought from home, put it down, unscrewed the cup-top off her thermos bottle, and poured a beverage into the plastic cup. She took two gulps, sighed with relief, and took a bite of her sandwich.

“Pâté,” she said. “I love it.”

“It looks divine,” said McLeod, encouraged by a not-illhumored remark. “Did you make it?”

“Oh, no. I bought it at Bon Appétit. It’s the only sandwich I like. I can stand the soup here but that’s about all.” She took another gulp from the thermos cup.

“I think the food is okay here—it’s university food services, isn’t it? And it’s so close to my office in Joseph Henry House.”

“It’s close to the library, too.”

Fanny seemed to be relaxing. Maybe she was basically shy and had to get used to each person all over again for every encounter. “Have you been at the library long?” McLeod asked her.

“Twenty years,” said Fanny.

“I seem to hear a faint English accent when you talk.” McLeod persisted, always eager for more information about people. “Do I?”

“Yes, I suppose you do,” said Fanny. “My mother was English and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in England.”

“Is that where you got interested in rare books and manuscripts ?”

“As a matter of fact it was. My grandfather worked at the British Museum. He was a curator in the manuscripts department.” She took another drink out of her thermos cup. “I was fascinated with what he did from the time I was a little girl. Once in a great while he would take me to work with him and show me something. One time it was a will in Old English from the later Anglo-Saxon Period, about 980 A.D., as I recall. The woman who died was very wealthy and she freed a slave priest in the will, and issued orders for three slave women to chant the Psalms in her memory. I’ll never forget that.”

McLeod was fascinated and listened intently as Fanny told about other wonders her grandfather had shown her. “I knew when I was eight years old that I wanted to work with manuscripts,” she said.

“That’s fabulous,” said McLeod. “I love stories about people who know what they want to do when they’re children. I always knew I wanted to be a newspaper reporter but lots of people don’t have a clue when they’re young.”

“Lots of people don’t have a clue about what they want to do even after they’re grown,” said Fanny. “Buster Keaton never has had a clue.”

“Really? You mean he just happened to become interested in rare books?”

“Staggered into the field,” said Fanny. “I don’t think he has a clear idea of what it’s all about to this day.”

“Heavens,” said McLeod. “But he’s pretty good at his job, isn’t he? He must be.”

“It depends on what you call ‘pretty good.’ I know Philip Sheridan thought he was terrible.”

“Really?” said McLeod. “Did Buster know Philip thought he was no good at his job?”

“He must have known. Philip made it plain to everybody that he thought Buster was hopelessly uninvolved,” said Fanny. “Buster, of course, put up a great show of respect for Philip, deferring to the greater knowledge of rare books that Philip plainly had. But I don’t think that cut any ice with Philip. Subservience did not mean a great deal to Philip Sheridan. And I did sense that Buster was beginning to tire of his role as lifelong learner from Philip. It has occurred to me that he revolted—revolted dramatically.”

“Have you mentioned this to the police?” asked McLeod.

“Of course not,” said Fanny. “I do my job and they do theirs, I hope. They seemed to be interested only in what time I left the library Tuesday and who was there after I left. All I could tell them was that I left right after we closed and everybody else was still there.”

“Let me ask you: Did Philip Sheridan get along well with everyone in the department? Everybody except Buster, I mean.”

“Everybody had to get along with him,” said Fanny. “He was the mighty money man.”

“What about Chester?”

“Chester?” said Fanny. “Of course Chester and Sheridan got along. Chester adored him, worshipped him.”

“That’s what I gathered,” said McLeod.

“Come to think about it, maybe there was some tension there,” said Fanny. She drained the last of the beverage from her thermos, and actually smiled warmly at McLeod. “It was so nice to see you,” she said. “I have to be moving along. I hope everything is going well with Henry van Dyke, and let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you.”

McLeod decided Fanny was one of the oddest women she had ever known. It was as if she were manic-depressive—cross as a bear one minute and sweet as sorghum sugar the next. She sat there reflecting on what Fanny had told her. So sweet Philip Sheridan wasn’t always sweet. According to Dodo, he had terrible quarrels with Chester, and according to Fanny, he made no secret of his low opinion of Buster Keaton.

She bused her tray and prepared to go to her office. Students never came for conferences on Fridays, but she would check e-mails and phone messages and leave everything shipshape for Monday. Once there, she found a phone message from Dodo Westcott, but when she tried to call Dodo, she was not at home. McLeod left a message.

As she trudged home, she thought that she really must remember to tell George about the box of dresses.

By Saturday morning McLeod had forgotten the box of dresses and was diverted to another course of action. She suggested to George that they ask Natty Ledbetter to dinner that night.

“Great idea. I have to go to the office so why don’t you call him? He’s probably tied up—he leads a busy social life. Call him.”

McLeod called and Natty, who was indeed free that night, professed to be delighted to come back to the murder house. “Murder’s all over the place, isn’t it?” he said, and then apologized for making a tasteless joke.