Death Overdue (Librarian Mysteries) (15 page)

“Not really. All I know is she goes to see the lawyer. And I’m deciding that I must tell her about my changing of mind. But it seems not the right thing to do just yet. I can never find the moment.”

I wondered what he thought she was going to the lawyer about, if Alfredo was telling the truth about not knowing about the change in the will. “Well, you’re a lucky guy.”

“I hope so,” he said.
“Un altro?”
He lifted up the bottle of grappa.

“No, thank you.”

He poured himself another glass. “But I must have one more. One is for me, one for B and B, and one is for my Sally, who was good to me as much as she could be.”

I
nspector Blunderstone once again appeared at the door of the B and B the next day, but this time he asked to see Mr. Remulado. When I didn’t move for a moment, he explained that he needed to speak to him about the will.

“I’ll get him,” I said as I could hear that Caldwell was cleaning up the breakfast dishes.

Even though it was nearly nine o’clock, it was still quite early for our Italian guest. I knocked on his door and heard him say,
“Entra.”
Walking in, I found Alfredo stretched across the bed, looking as if he were trying to swim to a far shore. I roused him and told him to dress, that he had company.
When he rolled out of bed, I was glad, for my own sense of decency, to see that he was wearing a complete pair of pajamas. I wanted to reach out and feel the fabric, as they had the drape of silk.

“Who is here for me?” he asked.

“The cop.”

“What is this . . . cop?”

“Sorry, it’s the police, the inspector, he wants to talk to you.”

“Still about my Sally,” he said.

“Yes, but are you sure she was your Sally?”

“You are right. She belonged to no one.”

I left him to throw on some other clothes and led the inspector into the garden room, where Penelope was reading the newspaper, then went to help Caldwell clear up the dishes. He told me that Bruce had already gone out for the day.

“He’s really been bugging me to see my collection of books. He’s dying to get in the library,” Caldwell said.

“Well, why not show it to him?” I picked up a towel and started wiping the dishes he had left to dry.

“I’m just not sure I’m ready. I don’t have most of them priced, and I feel like I want to make a grand splash when we open the shop.”

I decided to not correct him about the “we” opening the shop. “You’ve got to sell them sometime,” I said. “Wouldn’t that help with the cash flow?”

“Yes, but I have to decide what ones I will sell and for how much. It’s complicated.” His face scrunched up in thought.

I reached out and smoothed his brow. “I see that.”

“This is one of the many reasons I need you. I’m so counting on you to help me sort through the books and figure out what’s a fair price. I know you have that kind of mind.”

I smiled. “You are such a sweet talker. How many men know to compliment a woman on her mind?”

Suddenly we heard a skirmish going on in the hallway. When we looked out the kitchen door, the inspector was leading Alfredo away, but Penelope was trying to hold him back.

“He needs someone else to be there. I’m going with him,” she said.

“No, that won’t be necessary,” the inspector said.

“He doesn’t understand the language well enough,” she said.

Alfredo stepped in here. “But I can do it on my own. Penelope, you have not to worry. All will be well.”

I had never heard him address her so sweetly before. She looked rather more frantic than I thought she should. Once again I wondered what was going on between the two of them.

When the door closed behind them, Penelope slumped to the wall. I put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Let’s
go sit down. Did you sleep well last night? You look a little peaky.”

She let me lead her down the hall, and then she burst into a rant. “Just because he’s a foreigner, they think he did it. That’s so like the police. Alfredo is a good man, and he didn’t even want Sally’s money or anything. He told me.”

“I believe you,” I said, steering her to a seat. “So you’re sure he wouldn’t have killed Sally?”

“Not in a million years. He didn’t want to hurt her. You might not know this, but he was trying to break it off with her.”

“And how do you know this?” I asked.

“Well, he had to tell someone.”

“Why was he breaking it off?” I wanted to hear how Alfredo had explained himself to Penelope.

She dropped her head and fussed with a button on her blouse. “He said he didn’t feel the same way anymore.”

“Was there someone else?” I asked, prying a little more.

“I think there was,” she said with a half smile on her lips.

T
he police had taken down the crime scene tape and said we could go back into the library. Caldwell went off to run some errands, and I decided I would try to put the books back in some semblance of order. I wanted to do it when he wasn’t around, as I was worried there would be damage to some of the books. I wanted to repair what I could before he saw them.

But when I walked up the stairs, I noticed the door to the library was open, and when I looked in I saw a man standing in the middle of the floor, slowly turning around, completely absorbed in perusing all the books. It was
Bruce, and I knew Caldwell didn’t want him in there by himself.

“Hello there,” I said in a friendly voice. “Can I be of help?”

He startled, as he should, and said, “The door was open, or rather, not locked, and Caldwell had been promising me a look.”

“I know, and you will have a look, but not until he’s here to help you. I’m merely a librarian, not a full-fledged collector like you two.”

“Yes, I can see by his books that he knows quality when he finds it. This is quite a wonderful collection.”

“I’m glad you approve,” I said, ever so snarkily.

I could see his hands shake slightly as he gestured toward the stacks of books, so impatient was he to handle them.

“What books are you most interested in?” I asked, knowing full well that I could be in for a torrent of a list, having experienced it with other collectors.

“I try to keep myself open to all possibilities. When one starts collecting books, one never knows what one might find. A well-made first edition is always worth looking at.”

I was surprised at his admission. “But surely you must have some areas you specialize in?”

“Oh, yes. I love books printed by small presses in the early twentieth century, like the Hogarth Press, for example.
Such wonderful, thoughtful books. And so few were produced.”

“So you like Virginia Woolf?” I asked.

“I love her books, not that I’ve read them. I just admire what beautiful objects they are. And worth quite a lot of money, especially in FN.”

I knew FN stood for fine condition, the penultimate designation for a collectible book.

“And then I adore children’s books,” he went on.

“I’m not sure about any Hogarth Press books, but I know Caldwell has a decent collection of children’s books.”

“Yes.” Bruce turned his head longingly to the bookcase that housed most of them. “I’d love to have a look.”

I had to be firm. “I can’t allow that without Caldwell. They are, after all, his books, and I don’t have any idea which ones he’s even willing to sell.”

Bruce’s shoulders sagged. “When will he be here?”

“Soon, I hope. But I’m not sure when he’ll be ready to show the books. He seems to want to wait until we have a proper store.”

“I understand,” Bruce said, and walked out of the room.

But I wasn’t convinced he did.

*

The books had all been put back on the shelves by the police but completely helter-skelter. No sense of any order—not by
size, not by color, not by author’s name or title or by topic. I suppose book organization is just not in their job descriptions.

As I stood before these scrambled shelves I realized it was making me a little nauseous to look at them. Almost as if I didn’t know where to start. A sense of hopelessness came over me like a dark fog.

Things need to be in their proper place. Just as each book has one spot to be in the Dewey decimal system, so it is with a crime. There is a victim and there is a murderer. There is the truth of what happened. That’s the way it is. I should be able to line up everyone—Alfredo, Brenda, Bruce, Caldwell, Karen, Penelope, Sally—and put them where they belong.

There was a second reason I was tackling the books. I had a sense that if I could know why Sally was in the library it might help me figure out who had killed her and why.

I remembered the toppled bookcase well. It was the one I had just finished organizing when Sally had rung the front doorbell at the very beginning of this whole disastrous affair.

The top three shelves contained history books, specifically English history. I slowly moved through the ages, putting books about early England on the top shelf. I had to stop and browse through a book on Ethelred, the not-ready king of Britain from around
A.D.
1000. He tried to save the country from the Danes by paying them off. He gave them so
much money that they say it is easier to find an old English coin in Scandinavia than in the British Isles.

After an hour’s work, I had made my way down to present-day England and had to resist peeking into many of the books. I promised myself that I would read the books on the abdication of Edward VIII very soon. People had so many different opinions on his wife, the previously married Wallis Simpson. Why are nasty people so much more interesting than good ones?

Finally I found the book I had been looking for, the one I thought just might be Sally’s because I was sure that it wasn’t Caldwell’s. I pulled it off the shelf where it had been tucked in between some history book and a book on gardening: a biography of Princess Diana called
The Diana Chronicles.
It was written by Tina Brown, the former editor of the extremely gossipy magazine
Tatler.
I was sure it was juicy as all get-out and equally sure that Caldwell would never have read it.

Opening it up to the copyright page, I saw the book wasn’t even a first edition. This made me more sure that it was one of Sally’s few books. In fact, it could have been the book Sally was looking for the night she died.

I paged through it, stopping to look at the pictures. Diana on horseback, Diana with long hair, Diana at her wedding, her sons. Diana always impressed me, with her short, thick haircut, as a very handsome young woman. But I felt like there was almost a prince-like quality about her.

What could there be about this book that would make Sally get up in the middle of the night to look for it?

Just as I was about to put the book where it belonged on the shelf, I noticed it didn’t close as it should. When I turned to the very back of the book, I saw that there was a hole cut out in the middle of the pages, and in the hole was a tiny envelope taped shut.

I carefully unsealed it and dumped the contents into my hand.

A ring.

A Victorian, quite an exuberant ring with jewels galore, mostly diamonds, I thought, and one rather large green stone in the middle.

The size made me think it could have been some kind of cocktail ring, not an everyday ring.

I was quite sure I had found the ring that Sally and Penelope had fought over and that Sally was said to have stolen from her sister.

This had to be what Sally was looking for.

And I was probably the reason she couldn’t find it.

That very day I had rearranged the books and put that particular book way up at the top of a different bookcase than where it had been, in the very bookcase that had fallen over on her.

I hated to think it but, if the book had been where she had left it, Sally might still be alive.