B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (7 page)

Chapter 12

Back at Grand Central
Library that afternoon, the hands on Hester’s old Timex said 3:45. For 15
minutes she’d been contemplating a break to dash across the street to Callahan’s
Confections for a $2 bag of dark chocolate-covered licorice.

But for the past
five minutes she’d also been contemplating the ample nude figures in the
paintings on the wall opposite her in the McLoughlin Collection gallery.

Peering in
concentration at the oil just opposite her, Hester raised one elbow behind her
head, pointed her chin skyward and draped a leg over the corner of her old
walnut desk in emulation of the 18th-century model’s pose.

“My, you could
have put the ‘hip’ in hippo, my dear,” she scoffed under her breath, sitting
back into her chair. Gritting her teeth, she dug into her purse for the
wax-paper bag of celery sticks she’d brought from home.   

The healthful
snack was cold comfort after the earlier drama of calming Dabney Pensler’s
nervous fit over the idea that the library’s pistol may have been involved in
van Dyke’s murder. Hester wished she’d at least filled the celery sticks with
peanut butter.

Just as she was
turning back to the inventory list from which she’d been slowly ticking off
items for the past two hours, the phone on her desk jangled.

“Hester, it’s
Holly Fontana up in the Rotunda – I’m the designated minder for the Corps of
Discovery Exhibit this afternoon,” came a frantic voice when Hester picked up. “Someone
said Dabney went home with another of his stress attacks, but we need someone
from the McLoughlin Collection up here
right away
.”

Hester stopped
in the middle of reaching for another celery stick. “Well, I’m just the pinch-hitter
this week, Holly, can’t it wait?”

“No, I don’t
think it can – Hester, I’m sorry, but we have a patron who insists we have a
blatant counterfeit in our exhibit!”

*    
*     *

“It’s a fake! It’s
a laughable fake, and I can’t believe the library would fall for this!”

The hysterical
words echoed beneath the vintage leaded-glass domed skylight at the top of
Grand Central as the elevator door shuddered open and Hester stepped out.

Dodging a small
crowd of curious onlookers that included an overexcited class of backpack-dragging
third graders from Oregon City, she tried to quash a wince as she recognized
the speaker as one of her lesser-favorite bookmobile patrons. Eldon Purdy wore
a smug sense of entitlement almost as regularly as he wore the slightly crushed
and sweat-stained Panama hat that perched now atop his stringy, black hair.

  The little man’s
face was blotchy with emotion as he leaned over a glass case that contained
part of the library’s display of Lewis and Clark artifacts, keyed to this year’s
Rose Festival theme. Holly Fontana, whose curly brown tresses ordinarily framed
a smiling and welcoming face, huddled next to him in a posture of
embarrassment, waggling her fingers to try to quiet his protests.

“Mr. Purdy, what
seems to be the problem?” Hester cooed in her most patron-calming voice as she
strode across the marble floor.

“Did you people
even
look
at this display before you opened it to the public or did you
just have trained monkeys put it together?” he blustered.

Hester gave him
a frozen smile – a practiced expression that silently said, “Yes, I’m a public
servant, but I don’t have to respond to insults from annoying little men in
stupid hats.”

 She crossed her
arms and tapped her toe silently until he chose to elaborate.

Finally, popeyed,
he pointed into the case at a display of first-day covers, some of the
McLoughlin Collection’s trove donated by Pieter van Dyke’s father.

“I made a
special trip downtown just to see this – I’ve been a philatelist all my life,
and the Flying Canoe error printing of the Corps of Discovery 150
^th
anniversary issue of 1955 is second in rarity
only
to the famed Inverted
Jenny!”

Ceasing her
tapping, Hester looked puzzled.

“Oh, for
goodness sakes, surely any expert putting together an informative public
display of United States postage stamps knows about the Jenny!” Purdy fussed,
his liver-purple lips pursing. “It was an early 20
^th
-century stamp
showing a World War I biplane but it was accidentally printed with the plane
flying upside down. They sell to collectors for hundreds of thousands apiece!”

Hester,
remembering her mother’s coaching in the days when she wore pigtails, silently
counted to 10 before responding.

“Well, Mr.
Purdy, I have to excuse myself. You’ve seen me on the bookmobile so you know I’m
not the expert who staged this exhibition, but I assure you that my colleagues
pay the greatest attention to scholarly detail.”

Swallowing hard,
she continued. “Still, even the best scholars are eager to learn more. What is
it you’ve discovered?”

 Eagerly seizing
his moment of tribute, Purdy brushed strings of hair from his eyes and dug into
a pocket of a leather briefcase he carried. He pulled out a magnifying glass
large enough to convince Sherlock Holmes that size mattered.

“I brought this
because I wanted to savor the details of the Flying Canoe first-day cover on
display,” he simpered. “But imagine my surprise when I saw this.”

He placed the
magnifying glass, as large as Hester’s palm, on the glass display case above the
first-day cover in question. In the envelope’s upper right corner was a postage
stamp with a cancellation reading “First Day of Issue.” On the left half of the
envelope, a meticulous engraving showed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark wading
through a cattail-edged marsh. Purdy stepped back and waved his hand for Hester
to take a look.

From her
inventory duty, Hester knew a little about the famous Flying Canoe first-day
cover. The postage stamp it bore showed the two famous explorers paddling a
canoe at the mouth of the Columbia River. But through a printing error, a few
batches of the stamps showed the canoe up in the sky instead of on the river’s
surface, thus the stamp’s nickname.

She brushed her
auburn hair behind her shoulder and bent to peer through the magnifying glass.

“I’m sorry, I
guess I don’t know what to look for, it looks about as I expected – there’s the
canoe up in the sky!” she said with an appreciative chuckle.

“But don’t you
see!” Purdy fumed. “Count them!”

“Pardon?”

“How many men
are in the canoe?”

“Oh!” Hester
looked again. “There are, um, three.”

“YES!” The
little man raised his arms in the air as if signaling a football touchdown.

Hester looked
confused. Purdy saw that she didn’t understand.

“Don’t you see?
The Lewis and Clark stamp of 1955 showed only Lewis and Clark in their canoe. Lewis
– and – Clark – and – nobody – else!”

*    
*     *

Fifteen minutes
later, in a quiet backroom of the McLoughlin Collection, Hester pored over the
provenance file for the first-day cover, which she had removed from the display
and brought along with her.

The file noted
that Vincent van Dyke Jr., Pieter’s father and a son of a former governor, had
acquired the philatelic treasure in 1955 on the day the stamp was issued in
Astoria, Ore., a fishing and one-time fur-trading center at the mouth of the
Columbia River. Not far from Astoria, on the edge of a marshy slough seen
before only by local Indians, deer, beavers and myriad waterfowl, the Corps of
Discovery had spent the long, wet winter of 1805-06 in a tiny fort they had
built from scratch.

Vincent Jr. was
one of only a few dozen collectors to get out of the post office that day with a
first-day cover before an observant 12-year-old complained about the printing
mistake and asked for his money back. Sales were then suspended.

Hester was
amused: The file even noted that the release of the flawed stamps was blamed in
part on lax oversight by the local postmaster, absent from the ceremonies
because it was opening day of the local salmon-fishing season at the Columbia
River’s famed Buoy 10. Her father, an avid angler, talked about Buoy 10 as if
it was a religious shrine.

Hester’s head
swam. Taking a deep breath, she again picked up the magnifying glass she had
appropriated from Mr. Purdy with the promise of returning it next time the
bookmobile came by his stop at Toshmore Court. Actually, even with that
promise, he wouldn’t give it up until she made a “citizen’s arrest,” as if that
was something a librarian could do, Hester recalled with a tiny grin.

She held the
glass up with one hand. With the other she grasped a glossy black-and-white
photograph she’d pulled from the file. It was a photo of Vincent van Dyke’s
Lewis and Clark Flying Canoe first-day cover. The photo was taken the day it
was accepted into the collection of the Portland City Library.

 In the photo,
the stamp showed two explorers in a canoe.

Shifting the
magnifying glass to the envelope she had brought downstairs from the rotunda,
she again counted three men in the canoe.

Leaning closer
so that her nose almost smudged the magnifier’s glass lens, she scrutinized the
new figure in the center of the canoe. He seemed to be attired in the buckskin
clothing of a fur trapper, regalia familiar to anyone who has studied the
period.

But what was
that on his head? Some kind of animal skin? Cocking the magnifier at a new
angle, she realized it was a raccoon. You could see the stripes. But not just a
skin. A whole raccoon.

A little bell
rang in the back of Hester’s mind.

“Hoo boy, it’s
been a long day,” she groaned, leaving the magnifying glass to rest atop the
first-day cover for a moment while she rubbed her weary eyes.

Shaking her head
to clear it, she looked back down and something at the edge of the magnifier
caught her attention.

She quickly
picked up the glass and moved it over the engraved picture on the side of the
envelope.

“I’ll be dilly
damned,” Hester breathed, unconsciously repeating an oath she’d heard her mother
use from the time Hester was still in rompers.

It wasn’t plain
to the naked eye, but under the magnifier it was almost hard to miss.
Interwoven with the reeds and cattails among which the explorers waded were
thin, angled letters. In places an “h” looked like a stalk. A “C” formed the
edge of a leaf.

Together the
tiny letters, like an artist’s signature, spelled “POMP CHARBONNEAU.”

Chapter 13

Hester was more
than ready to decompress at day’s end.

Happily, she had
plans after work to meet her old friend, Karen White, for a beer at one of
Portland’s coziest new southside watering holes.

The Blue Heron brewpub
was named for the city’s beautiful official bird. From the quiet Sellwood
neighborhood bluff where the craft brewery nestled among the district’s
renowned antique shops, herons could often be spied soaring over the nearby
Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, at the edge of the Willamette River. The birds’ distinctive,
gargled “gronk, gronk” call always sounded like someone being garroted, Hester
thought. Perfect for Portland, she believed: elegance with an odd twist.

Hester hadn’t
seen Karen for more than a couple quick coffee breaks in the four months since her
old school friend had revealed that she had been leading a secret life under
the pen name of Teri June, author of a best-selling series of “tell it like it
is” novels for preteen girls. The books had been at the core of a book-banning
controversy that involved Sara Duffy, the murdered librarian. The attendant
publicity had given a huge boost to Teri June’s flagging sales.

“Well, look at
you! Things must be going better!” Hester exclaimed as she spotted Karen at a
corner table beneath raw oak beams, slowly whirling ceiling fans, and
low-hanging light fixtures fashioned from … were those pony kegs?

Karen was
wearing a flamboyant linen sheath dress festooned with giant sunflowers that
shouted “Provence.” The tight, shapeless garments were the kind of thing often
seen on wealthy, overly tanned and whippet-thin older women. On short,
well-padded Karen, it reminded Hester of one of her nana’s stuffed rigatonis. 

 Karen jumped up
and the two friends hugged, after which Karen carefully primped to stop her
ample bosom from escaping her dress. Sitting back down in a thronelike wicker
chair, she quickly fanned herself with the beer menu and ran a finger around
her neck to loosen the slightly sweaty, persimmon-orange bandanna knotted at
her throat.

 “Well, Teri
June Inc. is back in business, I tell you!” exulted Karen, swinging the
pounded-silver hoops dangling from her ears. “Hest, the whole Sara Duffy
episode has been a gold mine for me. All that time I was afraid to come clean
about my writing, and it turns out that my secret life has just been raw meat
for the publicity agents. My confessional on ‘Oprah’ really put Teri June back on
the best-seller list, I tell you! I have been book touring until my eyes bleed.”

Hester smiled
for her friend’s good fortune, and eyed the golden beer in a half-full glass on
the table in front of Karen. “Well, it’s a warm day, what’s good here?”

“I got the
Portland Pilsener, and I think it’s just about as good as those German lagers
they charge $4 for on the deck at the Harborside,” Karen said.

“Well, that’s
probably because it’s most like the light and watery Blitz of your college
days, dear heart,” Hester said with a grin as she scanned the list.

Hester often
surprised dining companions with her taste for dark beer, nurtured by growing
up as the daughter of a confirmed Guinness man.

“I’m going to
try the Sellwood Stout – it says it has ‘rich aromas of burnt caramel and sarsaparilla,’
” Hester enthused, adding as an afterthought, “I wonder if they could serve it
over ice cream?”

When a hunky
young barkeep with an Australian accent who called her “Luv” had taken Hester’s
order, the two friends compared their weeks.

“I have to say,
Karen, I really didn’t need to be involved in another murder case!” Hester
moaned. “I don’t
want
to be the ‘Miss Marple librarian,’ I just want my
cozy old Portland back, with the dopey mayor on his clunky red Huffy, and the
corny Rose Festival, and people getting all excited about Packy the elephant’s
birthday party at the zoo.”

“Oh, Hester, I
heard about Pieter van Dyke, and I’m so sorry,” Karen responded, reaching out
to hold her friend’s hand. “I know how nice it is to come home to plain old
Portland. I tell you, after doing book signings in New York, Atlanta and Philly
all in one weekend, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the old hometown.”

Karen sipped her
beer and took off on another tangent.

“Do you know how
much it costs to take a cab from the airport to midtown Manhattan? It was like 75
bucks – and I’m sure the Punjabi driver or whatever he was circled around the
same block five times on the way to my hotel, unless there really
is
a Starbucks
on every corner there now!”

Hester found
herself tuning out her friend’s monologue. She briefly considered taking Karen
into her confidence about the weird discovery she’d made with the first-day
cover. But Hester realized with some regret that her friend’s long deception
about her writing career had expended some of the basic currency of any
friendship: trust. She bit back her urge to say something.

“And I swear, if
the publisher wasn’t picking up the tab, I couldn’t afford chicken-fried steak
in some of those East Coast cities,” Karen went on.

As this
statement sank in, Hester suddenly realized she was famished. Glancing at her
wristwatch, she interrupted Karen.

“Say, Happy Hour
ends in 20 minutes, do you want to get some Buffalo wings or something?”

Karen didn’t
miss a beat, waving to the barkeep, who seemed like her new best friend.

“Oh, Simon,
could we get another round, and two orders of those Fusion Wings?” Turning back
to Hester, she enthused, “Girl, Buffalo wings are as outdated as the bison of
the Great Plains. These guys do ’em up with a combination of Thai peanut sauce,
Korean kimchi and Fijian chili lime.”

 When their order
had come and the barkeep started to rush back to the bar with a tray bearing
their empty glasses, Hester had a sudden thought. She grabbed at his elbow as
he started to skip away.

Unfortunately she
caused him to stumble as he whirled back her direction. Grasping from her chair
to steady him so he wouldn’t drop the tray, she pulled him this way and that as
the heavy pint glasses slid on his tray, until he came to a stop with his sinewy
calves, bristling with curly, sun-bleached hair, straddling Hester’s bare thighs
just beneath the indigo-blue batik skirt she’d changed into before leaving the
library.

Looking straight
ahead at the waist of his day-glo orange and chartreuse board shorts four
inches from her eyes she could read the label, “Quiksilver/Australia.”

“Whoa, luv, we’ve
only just met!” he chortled, peering down at her through the wraparound sunglasses
he wore even indoors. “But I get off at 7, darlin’.”

Hester, who knew
her face was as red as the cayenne peppering the chicken wings sending up
blissful aromas from her plate, quickly pushed her chair back three scoots.

“Ahem, I’m so
sorry – I didn’t mean to grab – Are you OK?” She dabbed at her temple with a
napkin.

“Never better,
luv, what can I do you for?” he leered.

Taking a quick
gulp at her new beer – Willamette wheat ale this time – Hester pointed at a
large television over the bar. “I just wanted to ask, before – before I – ”

She shook her
fiery locks. “Might it be possible to watch something other than wrestling?”
she asked meekly. “I was thinking, maybe local news?”

Turning to Karen
as the barkeep fiddled with a remote control from behind the counter, Hester
shook her head. “I don’t know about this new idea of having big TVs at bars. I
can’t believe it will catch on. Wouldn’t it be more peaceful to just have some
Pachelbel playing on the stereo?”

Karen rolled
her eyes and was about to speak, but a newscast on the TV suddenly caught
Hester’s attention.

“…and from Forest
Park, veteran reporter Misty Day has this latest update on the shocking Pieter
van Dyke murder.”

The spa-tanned face
of KSNZ’s former co-anchor filled the screen. With the unfortunate
oversaturated color setting on the Blue Heron’s cheap set, she resembled a
tangerine wearing mascara.

“Thank you,
Thaddeus. The roller-coaster ride continues in this breaking news story as word
came today from Phil Bishop, founder of Oregon’s Zeus sport-shoe empire, that although
The Oregonian has called off its part of the contest, he is continuing to offer
the $50,000 he had promised to the finder of the Rose Festival medallion. But
instead of it being a prize, it will be a reward for return of what is now
considered a potentially vital clue in the murder of one of Portland’s leading
citizens, philanthropist and civic leader Pieter van Dyke,” the reporter said,
biting off her words as the camera panned out to show her standing beneath the
arch of the Thurman Street Bridge. Around her, people roved every which
direction.

“And as you can
see all around me, that news has brought out hundreds of civic-minded citizen
sleuths who are combing this park in the belief that the medallion might not
have wandered far from the ill-fated horseshoe pit that remains cordoned off
behind me. Here’s one hopeful searcher, Mr. Vernon Kayzer, a retired sanitation
worker who drove 3 1/2 hours from Pendleton to search with his metal detector.
Mr. Kayzer, what are your hopes?”

A man with a
military crew cut, a nasal voice and a turquoise track suit loomed into the
picture.

“Well, Misty,
with my trusty machine here I’ve found everything from Indian Head nickels on
the beach at Yachats to a jarful of pennies buried in a schoolyard in
Hermiston, so I figure I might just be the one to help crack this murder case –
and if I get the $50,000 reward, I personally pledge 1 percent of it to the Future
Numismatists of America.”

The camera cut
back to a bored-looking Misty Day, caught rolling her eyes before she snapped
back to her on-air persona.

 “That’s a noble
idea, Mr. Kayzer. Now, Thaddeus, I have my own discovery to reveal about this corner
of Forest Park. It’s not the first time it has figured in an infamous Portland
murder.”

She paused to
arch a heavily penciled eyebrow before continuing.

“Today I came
across a small historical marker, hidden among the bushes here, documenting how
this was the 1850 land claim of one Danford Balch. He settled here with his
wife and nine children, not far from the claim of a family named Stump, with
whom the Balches did not get along. In true Shakespearean fashion, the Stumps’
eldest son, Mortimer, eloped with Balch’s 16-year-old daughter, after which Balch
shot and killed him. As a result, Danford Balch was the first person to be
legally hanged in Portland. True story.”

The camera
zoomed in on Day’s stern face.

“So, Thaddeus,”
she concluded, almost managing to furrow her overtucked brow, “this isn’t the
first time this quiet nook of Forest Park has figured in a macabre story of
murder. And if the Zeus Corporation’s reward leads to conviction of another
killer, it might once again lead to a public hanging for a murder linked to the
old Balch Place. For KSNZ, I’m Misty Day.”

Dumbfounded, Hester
stared at the TV. Then, as if in a trance, she stood, pointed to the continuing
newscast and spoke loudly to the two other tables of Happy Hour revelers.

“I want to say
for the record that, first, anybody who went to middle school in Portland was
taught all about Danford Balch and his son-in-law – though maybe Misty skipped
class that day – and, two, Oregon hasn’t had hanging as a method of execution
since 1931!”     

Karen White
sat with her hand splayed across her downcast eyes. The other bar patrons stared
silently at Hester.

Finally looking
up, Karen rose, scooped the chicken wings on to one platter, grabbed their
beers and toe-walked Hester quickly across the pub and through an open French
door to an outdoor balcony.

Pushing Hester
into a seat beneath a burnt-orange canvas umbrella at a table with a downhill
view toward the river, Karen handed Hester her beer.

“Some people
might say you’ve had too much, but I think you haven’t had enough,” Karen told
her old friend. “Chugalug, dear heart.”

Hester took a
gulp of beer as Karen gestured with a wing bone at the weary librarian.

“In fact, I
think all this murder business has you taking life so seriously you haven’t had
much fun on several fronts for too long,” Karen said, finally tugging at the
knot and tossing her bandanna on the table in a gesture of liberation. “For one
thing, your little fling – or I might say,
‘flingus interrupttus’
– with
Clarence Darrow has you all uptight.”

“Clarence was
his great, great uncle or something, and you know his name is Nate,” Hester
rejoined with a minor pout.

“Fine, but you
can’t tell me that little Marx Brothers physical comedy act in there with our
Australian buddy didn’t have some Freudian element,” Karen retorted. “You,
girlfriend, need someone in your bed other than that shedding cat of yours.”

Hester stared
silently at Portland’s West Hills, where the glare of the lowering sun through
shimmering waves of heat rising off downtown created the optical illusion of
flames racing along the ridgeline.