The Cracked Spine (31 page)

Delaney Nichols, from Kansas in America, was holding and no doubt saving an item of supreme historical significance. If they could see me now, my friends and family back home. Boy, wouldn't that be something?

The door to the flat slammed shut, the noise sounding more like a rifle shot than a door slamming. I'd been so caught up in the glory of my moment that I'd wasted precious time.

“What is it with that stack o' paper?” Harry said.

I swallowed a scream just before it made it out of my mouth. “It's Edwin's.”

“No, it's mine. I dinnae even ken what it is, but it better be worth something.”

I nodded stupidly.

“Just put it down and you wilna get hurt,” Harry said.

I could do that. I set the Folio down on the top of the chest of drawers.

“All right,” I said.

But Harry wasn't going to let me go that easily. His right arm had been tight up against his side. When he pulled it outward I saw a long screwdriver in his hand, and I noticed that his knuckles were bruised. I hadn't noticed the bruises before. Jenny's murder, Monroe's black eye? Had Harry been responsible for both?

This time I screamed, good and loud. Elias wouldn't have been able to hear it from the curb, so unless the hair on the back of his ears was standing up, he wouldn't know I was in trouble but maybe someone else would help.

“No one will care about that scream,” Harry said. “No one cared the night I kil't Jenny and she was verra loud. Everyone here has their own problems. They dinnae care tae get involved with others. They keep tae their own business.”

“Wait a second, Harry, if you don't even know the value of the book, why did you kill Jenny?” I said. And then a distant part of me had a realization. I knew why it was so quiet in the building, why no one would come to my rescue. The quiet was on purpose, to hide the bad things, the scary things, the things that caused way too much noise sometimes. Quiet was the cover. Noise was better ignored.

“I kil't her because she owed me money.” I saw a glimmer of regret flash in his eyes. I'd tricked him into telling me why he'd killed Jenny. He'd admitted it without hesitation. Of course, he held the screwdriver and maybe that made him more forthcoming with the ugly truth. He wasn't going to let me get past him; what did it matter what he told me?

“The rent?” I said, not able to hide my disbelief.

“No, not the rent. The drugs. She owed me for drugs. She'd fallen off the wagon again and I'd been supplying her. I supply everyone here,” he said proudly. “I gave her plenty of time and then I went up tae collect. She'd promised me she'd sell that stupid book and give me the money, but she changed her mind. And she refused tae go tae her brother. I told her I'd just take the book and get whatever I could for it. She refused, said she hid it. It wasnae hard to find. She didn't want me tae take it. She fought, but I won. I've been waiting for all this tae pass so I can take it tae a bookshop. I thought I'd go tae London. Someone is bound to give me at least a wee something for it. And now ye had tae come looking for a flat. Why did ye open the drawer? How did ye ken it was there?”

“I don't know.”

I'd taken two small sideways steps to my left and toward the sliding glass door and porch.

Harry matched his steps to mine. “That”—he nodded at the Folio—“is mine now. And ye ken too much.” His eyes lit as if he suddenly understood something. “Is that why Edwin wanted tae go through her flat? You mean, that's what was important to him?” His eyes lit even more. “It's
that
valuable?”

“He loved Jenny.”

“Right,” Harry said as he huffed a stupid laugh. “Doesnae matter anymore anyway, does it?”

“It always matters,” I said before I made a quick lunging move to the left, but Harry was too quick. He got in between me and the sliding door and lifted the screwdriver above his head.

I stepped back to my right again. Harry was at an angle where he could stop me no matter which door I tried to run to. I quickly grabbed the one item I could reasonably reach—the Folio. I moved again, toward the front door, and lifted the Folio into the air just in time for it to meet the screwdriver as Harry plunged it downward and through the heart of it—through the heart of all of them inside it.

So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less, which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Hamlet's final words spoke from the stabbed pages. But it wasn't The Cracked Spine's Hamlet, so I was okay with it.

I tried to hold on and keep moving but Harry was too strong for me. He yanked on the screwdriver handle and pulled it, with the Folio attached, out of my hands. It flew through the air and landed on the couch, looking simply like a book that had been vandalized and nothing like a precious work of art.

Harry watched it fly, but instantly turned back to me and lifted his fist. He swung hard toward me. I ducked and he missed. Unfortunately, the next time he swung, his fist landed on my cheek and sent me down to the ground.

I fell hard, like someone had yanked my feet out from under me as he hit me. When I tried to get up, I couldn't focus or stop all the spinning enough to find purchase anywhere. I felt him grab my sleeve and lift me—probably so he could hit me again, just to put me back down on the floor. No, he wasn't just hitting me. He was going to kill me.

As I was moving upward toward more painful hits, the tide turned. I couldn't understand what was happening, what all the noisy, glorious shouting was about, but suddenly the grip on my arm released and I fell back to the ground on my own. Across the room, some sort of scuffle took place. The best I could figure out was that there were three people involved, but my vision was fuzzy, and I couldn't make out who they were. The hair on Elias's ears might have done its job.

A million moments later, a face appeared in my vision. I blinked until I could finally see the person who held me gently and pleaded with me to talk to him.

“Hamlet!” I said weakly but enthusiastically. “It's you.”

“It is,” he said with a relieved smile. His face was bloody, bruised, and swollen but I knew it was him. “You're going tae be okay, Delaney. We've called for an ambulance.”

“Are you okay?” I said, trying to understand what I was seeing.

He laughed. “I'll be fine, thanks tae you. You'll be fine too.”

“Oh good.”

I didn't lose consciousness, but I wasn't what I would consider to be with it as we waited for the police and an ambulance. I kept my eyes closed mostly, and amid all the ruckus, and the comforting gestures from Hamlet and Elias, I heard another voice. It was Macduff lamenting his sadness over the state of his country, perhaps about some wickedness that had seeped in. I thought it was perfectly appropriate and I would have cheered him with some good Scottish whisky if there was any around.

O Scotland, Scotland!

The quiet was no more.

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

Even though Tom and I didn't get to technically go out on a date that night, we spent most of the evening together. Of course, Edwin, Rosie, Elias, Aggie, Hector, and Hamlet were all there too, but I did appreciate Tom's concern, and he was the one who carried me from the cab to my bed in the cottage. The trip in his arms was unquestionably the best part of the entire evening. Inspectors Winters and Morgan even stopped by to check on me but they didn't stay long. I wanted to ask how they'd come to suspect a valuable book was involved, but I didn't. I might later.

In hospital (not “the” hospital, just “hospital,” as they say in Scotland) I was attended to by an excellent medical staff. I was also interviewed by an inspector I hadn't yet met and one to whose name I didn't pay the least bit of attention. I was so focused on continuing to keep the existence of the Folio a secret that I had to have an extra-sharp memory about my lies. It wasn't easy. For a long time my head hurt like crazy. I had a concussion but fortunately not a bad one.

Yes, he said he killed her because she owed him drug money. I don't know what you mean about a book. He didn't tell me anything about a book. Gregory Heath told you about a book. Who's he?

I think it was just a drug deal gone bad.

Hamlet didn't have a concussion, but he'd been pretty beaten up and had a small fracture in his cheekbone. He'd heal just fine, but his face would be a display of bruised colors for a while. When he and I were both released from hospital, Elias, who'd followed the ambulance there, drove us both back to my cottage where everyone had gathered after Aggie called them.

Elias had also put the Folio in his car after Hamlet asked him to do so. I thought that was pretty level-headed of my coworker, considering what he'd been through.

“I don't understand,” Edwin said after the police inspectors left and everyone was assured that both Hamlet and I were going to be fine. “What made the two of you go back there?”

“I just wanted to have another look around Jenny's flat,” I said, without sharing the contents of the purple note. “I was looking for the Folio. It was just something to do. I was surprised to see the paper sticking out of the drawer in Harry's flat. And then the surprises just grew from there.”

Rosie made a strangled noise, causing Hector to sit up and then lick her hand. “Sairy. I'm sairy.”

Hamlet interjected, “Same for me. It was just a gut feeling I had and I wanted tae see for myself that the Folio wasn't still in Jenny's flat. It was out on the table in Harry's flat when I got there. I confronted him. He beat me up and put me in the flat across the hall, telling the man there tae keep me quiet.”

We'd both lied. We'd both gone there based upon the note on the purple paper. I had the whole version still on my kitchen table as far as I knew, but Hamlet had known what it had originally said, and he hadn't yet had the opportunity to check the mattress for himself. He'd said something to me about hoping that either Edwin or the police would find the Folio on their own. Since they hadn't he'd finally decided to take matters into his own hands.

I'd have to ask him again for the specifics when I was well, but when we were still in the building waiting for the police and medical attention and as Elias got Harry restrained, Hamlet had sat beside me and told me something along the lines of how Jenny had contacted both Monroe and Genevieve to try to sell the Folio to them. Jenny told Hamlet they'd declined, that they still must not have forgiven her for her weaknesses, and that they'd threatened to tell Edwin that she was trying to sell it. Ashamed of her actions, Jenny was going to leave, run away according to the note. Hamlet had tried to get her to give him the Folio, but she wouldn't. They had argued the night before she was killed. Jenny had yelled, so had Hamlet. He'd lied to me and wanted to talk to the police again just so they might actually go back and search Jenny's flat for the Folio again. He'd been the one to rip the note from her hand, taking only the part he'd put in the table at the bookshop. He didn't have any idea what she'd done with the rest of it.

Hamlet never did suspect Harry. He thought the killer must have been part of the unsavory crowd Jenny was around, but Harry hadn't entered his mind as part of the crowd. Hamlet kept the piece of the note and his subject of the argument with Jenny, her possible betrayal of her brother, a secret because he was trying to protect his family, most specifically Edwin.

“But it's more than that, Delaney,” he had said adamantly enough to get me to push away the dizziness and pain and listen to him hard. “Edwin can never know that his sister considered betraying him. I'm sure that's why Monroe and Genevieve never said anything tae him. It would break his heart even more than her death.”

“Edwin,” I said, bringing my thoughts back to the current moment in my bedroom, “where did you go today, after you dropped me at the bookshop?”

Edwin shook his head and frowned. “Unlike you and Hamlet, I had other ideas, other suspects in mind. I went looking for Birk. When I couldn't find him, I went tae the bagel shop and tried tae ask about the man who claimed tae have found the Folio. I thought I should try tae start from the beginning even if the beginning was a long time ago. No one there knew who I was talking about.”

“Did Monroe's black eye ever bother you?” I said.

“No. He admitted tae me it was from a pub fight. He didn't want others tae know, said it was unsophisticated so I didn't tell anyone. I believed him. Why? Do you think different?”

“Not anymore.”

Edwin frowned worriedly at me.

“I'm fine,” I said. I tried to sit up a little straighter. “Edwin, are you and Genevieve … are you … good friends?”

“Aye. Very good. She's been a source of comfort for me. She knew Jenny well. She's been kind enough to share old stories with me since Jenny was killed. I've needed those stories. Why?”

“No reason.” It didn't much matter, but I wanted to ask if they were romantically involved. I thought they weren't. They were what he said—good friends, there for each other when they needed to be. I looked at Elias. He blinked and nodded as if to confirm my thoughts.

I decided that Birk, Genevieve, and Monroe simply cared for Edwin. Their behavior at the auction could be attributed to their concern for their friend and his idea to welcome his drug-addicted sister into his life and their hopes that I, being the new person in his world, would watch out for him. I'd talk to them all later, but I was pretty sure I now understood.

I looked at Hamlet. “Gregory kept you locked up?”

“Aye, but he's also the one who heard you scream and gathered me so we could both help you.”

“I see,” I said.

I saw Aggie's eyes light as though she'd just figured something out. She backed out of the bedroom and disappeared. She came back a few moments later, caught my eyes with hers, and then patted her pocket.