Books Can Be Deceiving (11 page)

Her voice dwindled and Lindsey reached over and patted her hand. “Don’t you worry. It’s fine. I’m just glad everything turned out okay.”

“Thank you,” Nancy said. Her blue eyes sparkled again. “Now, what were you going to say when I so rudely interrupted?”

“Beth went to meet that editor today,” she said.

“How did it go? Did she love her work? I knew she would.”

“Er, well, not exactly,” Lindsey said.

“What do you mean?” Nancy said. She looked huffy, and she shoved her knitting into the basket beside her chair. “Beth is brilliant. Surely she recognized that.”

“It turns out that Rick plagiarized Beth’s book, the hamster in the library story, and it’s coming out in a book next fall,” Lindsey said.

Nancy gasped. “No!”

“I’m afraid so,” Lindsey said.

“Why that good-for-nothing, no-account . . .” Nancy began, but Lindsey interrupted. “He’s dead.”

Nancy shook her head as if Charlie’s band was still playing and surely she had heard Lindsey wrong.

“It’s true,” Lindsey said. She folded up her own knitting and slid it back into her bag. Then she told Nancy the entire story from start to finish.

When she finished, Nancy said nothing. She rose from her seat and said, “Come on, I need to process this over some peanut-butter cookies and milk.”

“Good thinking,” Lindsey said. Nancy was the best cookie baker in Briar Creek, and Lindsey was always happy to be on the receiving end of her oven’s gifts. She shouldered her knitting bag and followed.

“What do you think is going to happen next?” Nancy asked after they had polished off a short stack of cookies each.

“Chief Daniels said he wanted to talk to each of us,” Lindsey said. “So I expect to be called in sometime soon.”

“What could he possibly want to ask you?” Nancy asked. “I mean, all you did was find the body.”

“I wish I knew,” Lindsey began but was interrupted by her phone chiming in her knitting bag. She fished it out and saw that a text from Beth had just come in.

She opened the message and her heart slammed into her throat. “Oh, no.”

“What is it?”

“Beth’s been arrested.”

I
t was hard to tell who jumped to their feet first, but Lindsey and Nancy raced for the door at the same time. Lindsey kept her bike on the side of the house and made to grab it, but then remembered that she had left it at the library the night before. Nancy took her arm and steered her toward the garage. Inside was a 1965 powder-blue Mustang with a white ragtop. It was her late husband’s car, and she rarely drove it, but she must have considered this an emergency.

Lindsey hustled into the passenger seat, and with a squeal of the whitewalls, Nancy backed out of the garage and out onto the road. She spun the wheel, and they headed into town. Lindsey felt her fingers dig into the armrest as they took a curve at high speed. Afraid she was going to gouge the restored leather, Lindsey forced her fingers to uncurl.

Nancy hit the curb as she pulled into the narrow lot behind the small police station. They slammed their doors as they raced into the squat brick building that sat on the edge of the park a few buildings down from the library.

Lindsey yanked open the door to the building, and Nancy strode in, approaching the front desk with an almost military bearing.

“Officer Plewicki, I want to see Beth Stanley right now,” Nancy demanded.

The pretty, dark-haired officer was staffing the desk, and she glanced up in surprise at their entrance.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” Lindsey said. “I’m sorry; we’re just concerned.”

“Understood,” she said. “You can call me Emma, by the way, especially you, Nancy. Who do you think you’re fooling calling me Officer Plewicki? You’ve known me since I was in pigtails.”

“I thought that would sound more official,” Nancy said.

“It’s not necessary,” Emma said. “Beth is in the chief’s office with him and a state investigator. They’re just talking. I’m sure she’ll be out shortly.”

“So, she’s not under arrest?” Lindsey asked.

“No,” Emma said. “She’s just being questioned. In fact, I’m glad you’re here. I was about to go and pick you up in the squad car, so we can talk to you, too.”

“Did you pick up Beth?” she asked.

“Yes, why?”

Lindsey looked at Nancy. “That explains it. She must have seen the car, thought the worst and texted me.”

Nancy visibly sagged into the nearest chair. “Well, thank goodness.”

“Can you stick around for a while?” Emma asked.

“Sure,” Lindsey said. She had planned to wait for Beth anyway.

“We should have brought our knitting,” Nancy said.

“I have our book club books at the library,” Lindsey said. “I could run over and get them.”

“
The Last Time I Saw Paris
?” Nancy’s eyes lit up. “Go. I’ll hold them off.”

Lindsey had to smile. Nancy sounded as if she planned to fight off a sheriff’s posse to get their next reading-club book.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. She left the police station and turned toward the library. As always, just the sight of it made her happy.

With its thick stone walls and welcoming glass front doors, she always felt as if she were going home when she walked into the Briar Creek Library. Instead of the smell of her mother’s rosemary chicken, however, the library greeted her with the perfumed scent of old paper pressed between the hard covers of books on wooden shelves dusted faintly with lemon furniture polish.

As always, Lindsey felt all of her troubles ease once she was back among the familiar. Just seeing the names on the spines of the books was like calling hello to old friends. They had always given her solace in their steadfastness, and she valued each and every one more than she could ever say.

Ann Marie was at the front counter and glanced up with a smile. “Don’t you ever take a day off?”

“I am; I promise,” Lindsey said. “I’m just picking up my crafternoon club books. Is everything going okay here?”

“All is well,” Ann Marie said. “There was a woman in asking for you earlier. I put a note on your desk.”

“Thanks,” Lindsey said. She glanced at the clock on the wall. The library would be closing in fifteen minutes, at six P.M. “Do you need help locking up?”

“No, Ms. Cole managed to chase everyone out,” Ann Marie said. “She’s over in children’s picking up.”

“You never saw me,” Lindsey said.

Ann Marie smiled. “Roger that.”

Lindsey circled the circulation desk and hurried into the main workroom. Two of their part-time teen workers were organizing book trucks for shelving returned materials, and she gave them a wave as she went through the room to her office in the back.

Six copies of Lynn Sheene’s book were sitting on her desk. The courier for the state’s interlibrary loan service had dropped them off yesterday. Normally, the books never would have gotten here so fast, but Lindsey and Beth had a friend from grad school in the interlibrary loan office and he helped them out when he could. She stuffed them into her canvas Friends of the Library tote bag and hurried back out of the office, pausing only to grab the memo paper off of her desk from the woman who had stopped by to see her. She put it in the bag, planning to read it later. Right now, she felt the need to get back to the police station ASAP.

“Ms. Norris,” a stern voice called out. It didn’t sound like a greeting exactly, but still Lindsey was behooved to stop and respond. She noticed the teen workers were watching them, so she forced herself to smile.

“Hello, Ms. Cole,” she said.

“Isn’t it your day off?”

“It is,” Lindsey agreed.

“Then why are you here?” Ms. Cole asked. Her nostrils were flared, and her eyes were wide with indignation.

For a nanosecond, Lindsey was tempted to tell her that she was checking up on her, but she knew that would be like throwing a match at a gas can. Ms. Cole was obviously having turf issues with her, and for the good of the library, she needed to be kind even if pulling out her own tooth with a pair of rusty pliers would hurt less.

“I just stopped in to pick up the books for the crafternoon club,” she said.

Ms. Cole’s nostrils shrank as she eyed the tote bag on her arm. “Oh.”

“You seem to have everything running smoothly,” Lindsey said. “Nice work.”

Was it her imagination or did Ms. Cole puff up just the littlest bit?

“Well, I should hope so,” Ms. Cole snapped, turning away. “If you’ll excuse me, we need to start the closing procedures.”

Okaaaaay. Obviously, it had been her imagination.

“Absolutely. Don’t let me keep you,” Lindsey called after her. “Have a lovely evening.”

Ann Marie gave her a wave, and Lindsey scooted out the front door to retrieve her bike from the bike rack and head back to the police station.

She wondered how it was going for Beth. Surely they couldn’t think that a woman who spent her life doing felt-board stories, puppet shows and dressing up like Eric Carle’s very hungry caterpillar was a murderer. It was preposterous.

She thought back to the few moments that she’d stood on the dock with Sully. How long had they been there waiting for Beth? It had only been minutes, definitely not long enough for Beth to have stabbed Rick. She was sure of it. But if Chief Daniels wanted to push it, could she and Sully swear to an absolute knowledge of time passing? Neither of them had worn a watch.

She felt a creepy, cold-fingered tickle of unease ripple over her skin like a chilly breeze ruffling the surface of the water in the bay.

It would be too easy to blame Beth as the dumped girlfriend, she thought. Given that Beth had no witnesses other than her cats to say she was at home all night, Chief Daniels could make a case against her without even straining himself. As Sully had said, it was going to be a no-brainer for the chief to go after Beth.

The books in the tote bag banged against her side as she pushed her bike, bringing her back to the present. The weight of the books grounded her, giving her careening emotions purchase with their heft and substance. She left her bike outside the station and mounted the steps to the front door.

Nancy pushed open the door as soon as she stepped close to the entrance, as if she’d been watching for her.

“Any news?”

Nancy shook her head.

They were alone in the front room and sat on the hard wooden bench in front of the window.

“Where’s Emma?” Lindsey asked.

“She went to go get Sully,” Nancy said. “They want to talk to him, too.”

Lindsey opened her tote bag and pulled out two copies of the book. She noticed that her palms were damp, and she wondered at her sudden case of nerves.

“Thank you,” Nancy said. She looked at Lindsey and asked, “Who was it who said,
‘I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage’
?”

“The French lawyer and political philosopher Charles de Secondat,” Lindsey said.

“Brilliant,” Nancy said and cracked open her book and began to read.

Lindsey opened her own copy, looking for the balm of a good story to take her mind off of the fact that she was sitting in a police station, waiting to be questioned.

She was never given the chance.

“Ms. Norris.” She glanced up to find Chief Daniels at the front desk.

“Yes?” she asked.

“If you’ll follow me,” he said. Without waiting for her to rise, he turned and strode toward the back of the station.

Lindsey put her book back in her bag and followed. As she passed the main desk, she couldn’t shake the feeling of doom that enveloped her like a shroud.

T
he room was small and cramped with a scarred wooden table and two folding chairs. Chief Daniels gestured for her to take a seat. Lindsey sat in the chair that gave her a view of the door.

“Detective Trimble will be joining us shortly,” Chief Daniels said. He hitched up his pants. “You want anything, a glass of water or a can of soda?”

“No, thanks, I’m fine,” Lindsey said.

She saw two people cross in front of the door. She recognized Beth’s black spiky hairdo, but the other person she didn’t recognize. They were gone before she could call out to them.

“I’ll be right back,” the chief said and he exited the room.

Lindsey folded her hands on the table. There were initials carved into the distressed surface, but they were jagged and hard to make out. There was also a skull done with more finesse than the initials, but maybe that person just had better tools or more time.

There was another drawing, in black marker. It took her a moment to figure out what it was, but then she realized she was looking at the rear end of a donkey with the name Daniels spelled out in the long hair of the tail.

She couldn’t help it. The assessment was so spot-on, she laughed.

“Something funny, Ms. Norris?” Chief Daniels asked as he walked back into the room with a man in a suit right behind him.

“No, sir,” she said. “There’s nothing funny here, not at all, not a bit.”

The man in the suit watched her as she glanced away from the drawing on the table. With a frown, he came around to her side and studied the drawing in black marker, while Chief Daniels ducked out of the room to get another chair.

“I’d say that’s quite an accurate rendering,” he said. His voice was very matter-of-fact, and Lindsey felt her mouth pop open just the littlest bit.

He smiled at her and took the seat across the table from her. Chief Daniels returned with another chair and plunked it next to the man in the suit.

“Ms. Norris, this is Detective Trimble,” he said. “He’s with the state police.”

The detective extended his hand across the table, and Lindsey shook hands with him. His grip was firm and warm, solid without being brutish. The cut of his suit was perfect, accentuating his broad shoulders and trim waist. His black hair was cut with military precision, and the glasses he wore gave him the look of a scholar.