Copycat Killing: A Magical Cats Mystery (19 page)

“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 L
ET
T
HERE
B
E
L
IGHT
, 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”?

W
e finished getting the library ready to reopen and I sent Mary and Susan home, telling them I’d see them tomorrow. I gathered up Hercules, locked the building and set the alarm.

I had just set the cat on the seat of the truck when I heard someone call my name. I turned, pushing my hair out of my eyes and for once remembering not to touch my scraped forehead. It was Abigail.

“Hi,” I called as she cut across the parking lot. “I was going to call you. We’re reopening tomorrow.”

“Good,” she said. “If the library had stayed closed any longer, I might have had to do some housework.”

Her gray hair, streaked with red, was in a braid over one shoulder and she was wearing bright yellow rubber boots covered with saucy happy faces all sticking out their tongues. Everyone had cuter boots than my plain black ones—even Hercules—which reminded me that I still hadn’t explained to Maggie that boots were just not the cat’s thing.

“What do you think of this?” she asked, opening the book she was carrying to a page marked with a scrap of paper.

I studied the color photograph. “I like it,” I said, looking up at her with a smile.

It was a puppet theatre, at least five feet high and almost as wide.

“It’s made out of a couple of appliance boxes and other recycled material. I’d like to make it for story time. Could I use the workroom to put it together?”

“Sure,” I said. I looked at the picture again. “I have a little money left in my contingency fund. What do you need?”

Abigail shook her head. “Nothing. If I can’t beg, borrow or scrounge what I need out of someone’s recycling bin I’m losing my touch.”

“Okay,” I said, holding out both hands. “I don’t want to take the fun out of it for you.”

Her expression grew serious. “I’d like to get Maggie’s opinion on reinforcing the top. I couldn’t believe it when I heard what happened to Jaeger,” she said. “We just saw him a couple of weeks ago at that estate sale and now he’s dead.”

“I don’t remember seeing Jaeger at the sale,” I said.

“Well he was there,” Abigail insisted. “I spoke to him.” She frowned. “It might have been when you went to look at those bookshelves. Anyway, he was definitely there with—I can’t think of his name—the guy who does those drawings with the duck in the hat and sunglasses.”

The hairs came up on the back of my neck. “Ray,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s him. I love his work.” She looked thoughtfully past me at the building. I could tell she was
already putting the puppet theatre together in her mind. “Okay, I’ll call Maggie later,” she said. “Thanks Kathleen.”

“I can’t wait to see it,” I said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. She headed back toward the sidewalk and I got into the truck.

I’d forgotten to ask Abigail if she’d come across The Ladies Knitting Circle in her research on the various groups that had used the library over the years. When she’d said Jaeger had been at that estate sale with Ray Nightingale, that had chased pretty much everything else out of my head.

Ray had told Ruby and me that he barely knew Jaeger. So what had Jaeger and Ray been doing at that estate sale together?

I hadn’t zippered the carrier bag all the way. Hercules poked out first a paw and then his entire head. He looked at me quizzically, which might have meant he was curious about what we’d just learned from Abigail, or that he was thinking when do we eat.

“This just gets more and more complicated,” I told him. “Looks like Jaeger wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.” I put the key in the ignition. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” I glanced over at the cat. “That’s not Shakespeare, by the way.” He wasn’t impressed.

When I got to the corner I really intended to turn up the hill and go home. Really. Instead I found myself driving over to the River Arts Center.

I shot a quick glance at Hercules. He’d climbed all the way out of the bag and was sitting, looking out the windshield, seemingly checking the scenery as it went by. “If Ray’s not there, we’ll go home,” I said.

The cat didn’t even bother looking at me. And it might have been my imagination that he shrugged.

I parked on a side street and reached for the cat bag. Hercules continued to look out the window. “C’mon, get in,” I said.