Naked Once More (34 page)

“I did not accuse you, Paul. And I’m sorry if she went off the deep end, but I’m damned if I will treat her like a child who has to be shielded from unpleasant ideas. She’s an adult, intelligent woman.”

Paul stopped pacing. Leaning against the counter, hands in his pockets, he gave Jacqueline a twisted smile. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

Jacqueline’s eyes shifted. “I didn’t think she’d react so irrationally. Maybe I shouldn’t have… I stopped by the shop today to apologize, as a matter of fact. She’s gone away for a few days. I hope when she’s had a chance to think over what I said—”

“What?” Paul stiffened. “Gone away? Where?”

“The note didn’t say. I even yelled through the cat door, thinking she might have—”

She broke off with a yelp of surprise. In a single giant step Paul had reached her and taken her by the shoulders, fingers biting into her very bones. “That’s impossible,” he said. “She never goes anywhere. She certainly wouldn’t go without telling me. Once, when they put her in the hospital with a virus, she asked me to look after the cat. Where was the cat?”

“The cat,” Jacqueline repeated stupidly. “I didn’t see the cat. I didn’t see anything except the sign on the door. Do you think…”

“She would have told me,” Paul repeated. His painful grasp relaxed, but his face was a gray mask of strained muscle. “I was—I am her only friend.”

Jacqueline pushed her chair back. “Let’s go.”

She followed him in Mollie’s car, not wanting to leave her hostess without transportation, or be forced to return to get it. She lost him for a while on the side road, whose turns he knew better than she, but by dint of maniacal driving she caught up as he entered the city limits—he, and the police car that was in hot pursuit, lights flashing and siren blaring. Jacqueline could have cheered aloud when she saw it. Not that there was any urgency… not now. But her nerves tingled with the same apprehension that had sent Paul along the road at breakneck speed. He came to a crashing halt in front of the bookstore. The pursuing squad car almost ran into him. Jacqueline pulled up behind the squad car.

When she arrived on the scene Paul was rattling the doorknob in an impassioned but ineffectual manner and the police officer, probably under the impression that Paul was a demented burglar, was attempting to dissuade him. With one sweep of his arm Paul sent the other man staggering back. Jacqueline sidestepped nimbly.

“Boys, boys,” she said, fumbling in her purse. “Behave yourselves.”

She found her flashlight and switched it on. “Oh,” said one of Pine Grove’s finest. “Is that you, Miz Kirby? Was you the one behind me, driving like a bat outta hell? Have to give you a ticket too—”

“You can give me all the tickets you want in a minute,” Jacqueline said. “Paul, stop that. Don’t you have a key?”

Her calm voice had the desired effect. Paul turned from the door. He hadn’t stopped for a coat or a jacket and the wind was strong enough to stir his hair into tumbled waves, but great drops of sweat stood out on his forehead. “No. Wait a minute, though. She told me she always kept an extra key under the… the mat, was it? She was afraid she might fall and the rescue-squad people wouldn’t be able to get in.” He dropped to his knees and began overturning everything in sight—the welcome mat, flowerpots, the small stone image of a cat that adorned the step.

“Wait a damned minute,” said the bewildered minion of the law. “What the hell is going on?”

“We’re afraid the lady might have—might have injured herself,” Jacqueline said, steadying the light on Paul’s searching hands.

“Here it is!” Paul cried. “I knew it was… Oh, God! Oh, my God—look.”

Still on hands and knees, he scrambled back.

The flap at the bottom of the door moved. It was Lucifer’s private entrance, and Lucifer was opening it, but Jacqueline was in complete sympathy with Paul’s exaggerated panic. To see the animal emerge in all his bulk and blackness from the dark, silent house, eyes glowing green, every hair on his back bristling, was one of the most uncanny sights she had ever beheld.

Lucifer stepped through the opening, whisking his tail out of the way of the closing flap with the dexterity of long practice. Head lowered against the light, he plodded past them without stopping to look or speak.

“Jesus,” said the police officer.

“Open the door, for God’s sake,” Jacqueline gasped.

The key was rusted, and Paul’s hands were unsteady. It seemed to take forever before the key finally turned. The inside of the house was as black as Lucifer. Paul fumbled for the light switch.

Books lay scattered across the room as if flung by a disdainful gaint’s hand. Filling half the space, monstrous in its size and significance, was the heavy bookcase that had stood against the back wall. The scattered books had fallen from its top shelf. Most of the others were still underneath. And so was something else. Only the feet were visible. One of them wore a heavy orthopedic boot. The other was surprisingly small and slender. Both were utterly still.

With a wordless animal sound, Paul sprang forward. He thrust the heavy bookcase aside as easily as if it had been constructed of cardboard, and began tossing away the books that lay in grotesque disorder upon the still body. Even from where she stood Jacqueline could see they were too late. Paul must have known it too, but he continued to remove book after book, as if their very touch contaminated her.

The unhappy policeman had gone a dirty khaki color, to match his shirt. Young as he was, this could not have been the first dead body he had seen, and certainly not the worst; the highways yielded their grisly toll of crushed flesh every week. It must be the incongruity of this death that distressed him, Jacqueline thought. She had always suspected God had a sick sense of humor. What more appropriate cairn for the body of a dead bookseller could there be than a heap of books? And what more fitting instrument of death than the bookshelves?

When she tried to speak, she had to clear her throat twice before the words would come out. “You’d better call in, hadn’t you, and report this?”

The officer nodded dumbly. Before she could stop him he had gone to the desk and picked up the telephone.

“Damn it!” Jacqueline shouted. “Don’t you know better than to touch anything at the scene of a crime? Doesn’t your damned car have—Oh, damn! Get those people away from here! Get out, you ghouls!”

The doorway was filled with gaping faces. Evenings in Pine Grove were on the dull side; the sight of a police car, the sounds of voices in the darkened passage had attracted every stroller and jogger on Main Street. As Jacqueline started for the door, she saw others coming. Crowds attract larger crowds.

She slammed the door. A yelp of frustration—and, she hoped, pain—echoed from without. The police officer stood staring at her, the telephone in his hand. It was making shrill, irritated noises.

Jacqueline took a long breath. “Go ahead, make the call,” she said, forcing her voice to a lower pitch. “Call the sheriff. Tell him to hurry.”

Paul crouched by Jan’s body, his big hands hanging limp and empty. The expression on his face made Jacqueline’s stomach turn. Even his berserker rage would have been preferable to this look—distant, inhumanly calm. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“She’s dead,” Paul said, without looking up. “I touched her cheek. It’s like ice.”

Jacqueline knelt beside him and forced herself to lift the quiet hand. It was not only ice-cold, it was flaccid. Rigor mortis had come and gone, at least in the upper extremities. Jan lay face down, her head twisted to one side. The one eye Jacqueline could see was wide open, and pressure on the opposite cheek had twisted the parted lips into an ugly grimace. Sinking her teeth into her lower lip, Jacqueline slid her hand under Jan’s blouse, which had been pulled out of the waistband of her skirt. Cold that burned like fire, flesh like stone; she had probably been dead for about a day. Almost certainly she had been lying there when Jacqueline knocked, and called to her through the cat door.

“I built that bookcase,” Paul said conversationally. “I fastened it to the floor so it couldn’t… Three-inch bolts.”

“Sheriff’s on his way.” The officer stood over them, thumbs hooked in his belt, in which he fondly hoped was a nonchalant, professional pose. “Get back away from her, you two. Shouldn’t have moved that bookcase. Not that it matters, I guess. Poor lady. Damned shame, that’s what it is. She must have been trying to reach something off the top shelf, and fell, crippled like she was, and grabbed at it, and—”

The opening of the door interrupted him just in time to save Jacqueline from assaulting a babbling idiot of a policeman. Her nerves were not at their best. She jumped to her feet, prepared to repel curiosity-seekers, and then relaxed when she saw a familiar face.

“Get the hell out of my way,” said Bill Hoggenboom, town gossip and ex-sheriff. He cleared the doorway by the simple process of filling it with his ample form, and took in the scene in a single shrewd glance. “Mighta known you’d be here, Miz Kirby. I was down at the Elite when some jackass barreled in yelling as how there’d been a murder. Sam. Where’s your boss?

“On his way. I just called him. It’s no murder, Bill. Bookcase fell on her, that’s what it looks like. See, I picked up Paul here hightailing it into town at about a hunnerd and ten, and followed him here, and Miz Kirby was following me. They got to worrying about Miz Wilson—”

“Must’ve been some big worry.” The man’s little eyes, sunken in rolls of loose flesh, turned to Jacqueline.

“I’ll explain later, Bill,” she said. “The important thing—”

“Yeah,” said Bill. “Did you call the ambulance, Sam?”

“Geez, Bill, she don’t need no ambulance. She’s cold as a mackerel.”

The former sheriff gave him a look that shriveled him like a dead leaf. Then he turned, as a voice echoed hollowly down the narrow passage. “Clear the way! Get the hell out of there, you people!”

“There’s Bob,” Bill said, adding, to Jacqueline, “Sheriff. Paul, you better get your ass away from there.”

He stepped aside; but the man who entered was not the sheriff. Jacqueline had believed the situation was already as bad as it could get, but the sight of the newcomer proved to her that she was wrong. Bald head, tall and thin, ears…

She cried out, “Bill, that man is a reporter from the
Daily Sludge
! Don’t let him—”

Bill flung himself into the breach. He and the reporter grappled, gasping, but it was stalemate; they were in equally poor physical condition. Jacqueline danced around them, swinging her purse. She was trying to administer a crippling blow to the reporter when a sound from the back of the room made her turn.

Paul had gathered Jan’s body into his arms. The stiff torso and legs were as unyielding as those of a stone statue, but the head hung back over his arm at a sickening, impossible angle. The wide-open eyes stared at the ceiling.

She had been pretty once, Jacqueline thought numbly. Beautiful, even. Death had wiped away the lines of pain, smoothed and softened the bitter features.

It might have been the sight of the quiet face that shamed all of them, combatants and spectators, into sudden silence. The room was so still that Paul’s whisper was as penetrating as a shout. He was repeating a name, over and over, like a litany.

“Kathleen. Kathleen, Kathleen…”

Across the countenance of the reporter from the
Sludge
spread the dawning of a wild and wonderful surmise.

An equally murky and unattractive sunrise touched the eastern sky when Jacqueline finally lowered her weary body onto her bed. She was not alone. Her companion lay sprawled arrogantly across her pillow. Jacqueline shoved him aside; he muttered and twitched, but did not wake.

Tired as she was, it was impossible to sleep. The events of the night played and replayed themselves in her brain, like a recurring nightmare.

Bill and Sam had managed to evict the reporter, but not before he had gotten his story. “Excuse me, sir,” he shouted, as he was shoved toward the door. “Did you say Kathleen?”

Cradling the body, Paul looked up. “It’s Kathleen. She’s dead. Kathleen is dead.”

The improvement thereafter was only marginal. Before long the entire crime-fighting force of Pine Grove—all ten of them—had been rousted out of various locales, and were on the scene. Two of them hoisted Paul to his feet—he didn’t appear to have the ability, much less the inclination, to move on his own—and took him to the kitchen, where Jacqueline joined him. She was trying to persuade him to drink a cup of hot, heavily sugared tea, when she heard sounds of distress, altercation, and/or hysteria from the shop.

Propelled by an impulse even stronger than her normal curiosity, she went to the door and opened it. Now that the bookcase had been removed, she could see directly into the shop.

Jan’s body lay where Paul had left it—decently reposed, hands folded across her breast. At Jacqueline’s insistence, it had been covered with a sheet; she could not have said why this seemed important to her, but it did. The sheet had been pulled back, to allow a new witness to view the remains.

St. John Darcy had never looked more like a frog. His eyes bulged and his face was a pale greenish gray. He stood petrified for a moment and then began to sway gently, forward and back, forward and back.… Bill Hoggenboom caught him on one of his backward swings and thrust him into the unwilling arms of Craig Two, who had been standing behind him.

“Bring him in here,” Jacqueline said.

His knees buckling visibly under St. John’s weight, Craig turned his head. “I might have known you’d be here,” he said, echoing what appeared to be a universal sentiment.

Between them they got St. John into a chair. Jacqueline handed him the tea she had prepared for Paul. He drank it in great gulps, and gradually the greenish tint faded from his face.

“I can’t stand this sort of thing, you know,” he mumbled. “Never could. Bringing me here like this… Police brutality, that’s what it is.”

“So sue.” Bill Hoggenboom dropped heavily into another chair. “Sit down, everybody. Let’s talk.”

The Mad Tea party had nothing on this gathering, Jacqueline thought, as she filled the tea kettle and put it on the stove. Paul looked catatonic, St. John still looked as if he was going to be sick, Craig was trying to look like a lawyer and failing miserably… Bill looked as if he wanted a drink.