By Book or by Crook (10 page)

“Look, Lucy, I’ve been wanting to . . . spend some time getting to know you better. But with this case and everything, Watson’s got me working day and night. Can I take a rain check?”

“Sure,” I squeaked. “I mean, yes, that would be nice.”

He headed for the door.

I remembered why he was here. “Theodore Kowalski has to be your number-one suspect. A book collector. Without suitable funds to sustain his passion. Found snooping around when the library was closed. Bertie warned me when I first arrived that we had to keep an eye on him.”

“Bertie again. I’ll mention it to Watson, although you’d be surprised at how many collectors who have plenty of money still get light-fingered.”

“Speaking of Theodore, I told you he’d snuck up the back stairs during the party on Thursday. Shortly before Mr. Uppiton was found dead. What did he have to say for himself? I assume you questioned him.”

“We did.”

“And . . .”

Butch gave me a long look. He did have lovely brown eyes. “I suppose it can’t hurt to tell you. He says he figured Bertie and Jonathan Uppiton had kept a piece of the collection behind to bring out in a
big flourish, and he wanted to have a peek before everyone else.”

“The notebook. He intended to steal it, the rat.”

“Maybe. Anyway, he’d only been in the room a minute when Uppiton came in and ordered him downstairs. And he left.”

“I don’t believe that. I saw him go up the stairs. I did not see him come down again.”

“Lucy, I have to point out that that’s not evidence. You didn’t see Uppiton go up, nor Bertie.”

“I was otherwise occupied.”

“Right.”

“Still, Theodore’s in the frame. Isn’t that what you policemen say? More than Bertie, I mean.”

“Lucy, we are, as Detective Watson says, considering all avenues of inquiry.”

“What about the rest of Jonathan’s Uppiton’s life? Apart from the library, I mean. Have you looked into his past? Maybe he has . . . had . . . enemies.”

“You’re relentless, you know that?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a good question. And, yes, we have considered that. He was involved in a nasty situation a number of years ago.”

“What happened?”

“Uppiton was cutting down some branches on his property. He foolishly left one half-chopped when he went inside for lunch. Unfortunately, a neighborhood kid happened to be underneath when the branch broke. He, the kid, suffered a severe brain injury.”

“How awful.”

“It got very nasty. The parents sued, saying
Uppiton shouldn’t have left the branch unattended. It was a big tree, and an awfully large, thick branch.”

“Fair enough.”

“Uppiton sued back, saying the child was illegally on his property and not being properly supervised by his parents.”

“How old was this child?”

“Ten.”

“Not really old enough to know better.”

“Old enough to read. Uppiton did have an old Beware of Dog sign on his mailbox. Although he didn’t have a dog. He claimed that was equivalent to a No Trespassing sign. Anyway, it was a nasty business all around. I remember my mom talking about it. She warned me and Jake not to go uninvited onto anyone else’s property.”

“What did the court decide?”

“That the kid and his parents were at fault. No settlement. Tension in town was running pretty high. Some people said the parents were railroaded because they were newcomers and couldn’t afford a good lawyer. My dad said that Uppiton got lucky and the judge sided with him. He’s never been a very popular guy around here.”

“What happened to the family? Do they still live next to Jonathan?”

“No. They moved soon after. Can’t blame them. They live in Nags Head now.”

“If you were still a child, this must have been a long time ago. Why do you suspect the parents would seek revenge after all these years?”

“The kid died last month. He never recovered, and had spent fifteen years in an institution.”

“How sad.”

“Yeah. If Uppiton had been offed in his own house, or even in a dark alley, we might look at the kid’s dad. But the guy was killed at a private function, in a building that’s about as secure as it can be. No back door, no easily accessible windows. A crowded party, one where everyone knows everyone, and anyone who didn’t belong would have stuck out like me at a garden party. We gave some thought to trying to figure out how an outsider would’ve been able to sneak in. And, don’t forget, get out again. No way could we see it happening.”

“What was the boy’s name?”

“Fred. Fred Wozencranz.”

“You said Mr. Uppiton wasn’t well liked. What’s that about?”

“He inherited a fair amount of money; whittled most of it away over the years, though. The Uppitons didn’t exactly make their fortune by being nice to their workers. Old man Uppiton—again, so my dad tells me—and his own father were a couple of sons of bitches. Never lost a chance to cheat fishermen out of a fair price for their catch or plant workers out of their wages.”

“What a couple of slimeballs.”

“All that might not have mattered once they were gone if Jonathan had attempted to be a nice guy. But I guess niceness just isn’t in the Uppiton blood. You met him, Lucy. The way he spoke to you that night was pretty typical.”

“So, lots of people had reasons to want him dead.”

“I didn’t say that. I said he wasn’t well liked. His father and grandfather were downright hated, and
they died in their beds. Although, to hear the rumors, his father wasn’t quite in his own bed, if you get my meaning.

“Watson’ll be wondering where I am. I’d better be off. Look after yourself, Lucy. You lock that door at night, I hope.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good night.”

“Good night, Butch.”

I shut the door behind him and leaned up against it. My heart was racing, but I didn’t know if it was from the proximity to Butch Greenblatt, the theft of
Sense and Sensibility
, or the ongoing question of who was responsible for the death of Jonathan Uppiton.

Butch had dismissed Fred Wozencranz’s parents as suspects. But I wasn’t so sure. Clearly Butch remembered the case very well. Did he have a soft spot for the parents, after what they went through? Did he not want to believe they might have sought revenge on Jonathan when their son died? The party was crowded. Plenty of people in a small space. It was supposed to be only for friends of the library, but I bet even Bertie didn’t know everyone who had showed up. Easy enough for someone to slip in, spot the object of their hatred basking in the adoration of his colleagues, steal up the stairs, kill him, and get out again.

I decided to see if I could track down the Wozencranz family.

W
hen I came down the following morning, the air was full of the scent of brewing coffee, and I knew Bertie had arrived before me. Her office door was open, so after pouring myself a cup, I popped my head in to say good morning. She was on the phone and the look on her face caused me to swallow my words.

“Very well,” she said into the receiver. “If you must. Nine o’clock.”

She slammed the instrument back into its cradle. “That,” she said, biting off the words, “was Mrs. Fitzgerald. I knew word of the theft of the book would travel quickly, but I dared hope it wouldn’t be quite so fast. She has called an emergency meeting of the board. This morning. They’ll be here in one hour.”

“I’ll put on the big pot of coffee, then. Do you want me to pop over to Josie’s and get some muffins and things?”

“Let them starve. The hungrier they are, the sooner they’ll leave. And no coffee, either. Don’t
even bring in extra chairs. I don’t want them making themselves comfortable. The board usually meets at a hotel at lunchtime, giving themselves nice seats, coffee, sandwiches, and pastries. They’ll be baying for blood, Lucy. Stay out of their way, and tell Ronald and Charlene to send them back here when they arrive and to go about business as usual.”

“Can I bring you a coffee?”

She gave me a tight smile. “I’d like that, thanks, but wait half an hour. I need to do some stretches and meditation to get my head into a place where I can confront the board without going berserk. I’ve been so busy with everything that’s going on, I’ve been neglecting my practice. I had to cancel some of my classes, and I don’t like doing that. People could find a new instructor and they might not come back.”

At nine o’clock, right on the dot, I unlocked the front door. Charles, who normally arrived at opening to accept the cries of adulation he took as his due, let out a piercing howl and fled for the break room, as Mrs. Fitzgerald, followed by the remaining members of the library board, marched in. I offered to show them to Bertie’s office, but Mrs. Fitzgerald, who’d always been as polite as her old-family Southern roots would suggest, snapped, “We know the way.”

The rest of the board, including Curtis Gardner, whom I recognized as Mrs. Uppiton’s companion of the other night, passed me shaking their heads and muttering darkly to one another. Diane Uppiton brought up the rear. Her usual mutton-dressed-as-lamb attire was missing today, and she wore a very
nice, and probably quite expensive, outfit of oatmeal slacks with a matching three-quarter-sleeved jacket over a baby-blue blouse. Diamond studs were in her ears.

“I think the meeting’s for board members only,” I said. “But I can pop in and ask if it’s open to the general public.”

Diane gave me a sly smirk. “Naturally, I will be taking my late husband’s place on the library board.”

“Note how Jonathan has been upgraded to late husband from late ex-husband,” Ronald muttered, after the parade had disappeared down the hallway.

“Upgraded from two-timing son of a bitch,” Charlene added. “Do you know if they were legally divorced, or just separated?”

“I wasn’t interested enough to find out,” Ronald said.

“It will certainly make a difference in the distribution of his estate. That outfit looks new to me. Did you catch the earrings?”

Members of the board were soon back, calling for chairs, ordering Charlene to put on coffee, asking where the cookies were kept.

I was in the break room, arranging my hat and getting a glass of water to sip during my lecture, when the door to Bertie’s office flew open. The library board sailed past, heads high, faces set into hard lines. Diane Uppiton brought up the rear. She glanced into the staff room and saw me watching. “There will be some changes around here. Very soon.” She marched away, heels tapping on the black-and-white marble floor of the hallway.

They hadn’t bothered to shut the door to Bertie’s office after them. I knocked lightly and peeked in. “Would you like a glass of water? Tea?”

“Thanks, Lucy, but I’m fine.”

“How’d the meeting go?”

“Better than I expected.”

“Diane Uppiton seemed pleased with herself.”

“She shouldn’t be. Not yet. She and Curtis Gardner have it in for me, but Eunice Fitzgerald, Elaine Rivers, and Graham Luffe aren’t so hasty.”

“Is Diane really allowed to be on the board in her late husband’s place?”

“So it seems. Although she, fortunately, is not the chair. Mrs. Fitzgerald will take that on until a new chair can be voted in.”

“Do you think Diane cares about the library?”

“If anything, the opposite. This library was Jonathan’s passion. He was difficult to work with—interfering, demanding, stubborn as a mule.”

“I noticed.”

“Yes, but he was also dedicated to the Lighthouse Library, although perhaps he wanted to see too much of his own glory reflected in it. But Diane . . . Jonathan loved the library, and Diane believes it came between them. Now, rather than maintaining his legacy, she intends to destroy it.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I wish I were. Diane seems to have gotten close to Curtis Gardner all of a sudden. Until the reception the other night, she wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Another library board member. She was
flirting with him at the party, probably in an attempt to make Jonathan jealous.”

“I saw them having dinner together at Jake’s on Saturday night.”

“Plotting my downfall.”

“Maybe they were just eating good seafood?”

Bertie smiled. “I’m sure they can do two things at once. I’ve never liked Curtis. I doubted he joined our board because he had the interest of the library at heart. He never took a position, never made a decision; just followed Jonathan’s lead. Now he’s doing the same with Diane.”

“But the others are behind you? Behind us?”

“For now they are being cautious. Obviously the theft of
Sense and Sensibility
is a huge blow to this library’s reputation. Fortunately, we took out a generous insurance policy on the collection, so we won’t be out of pocket. But I’m afraid we’ll have trouble ever getting anything like it again.”

“So, we have to find the book?”

“Yes. We do.”

“Lucy, your fans are waiting,” Charlene called from the end of the hall. I adjusted my hat and went to talk about Jane Austen.

*

Bertie had allowed us to close the doors for a half-hour lunch break. Normally we took lunch in shifts, but with being so busy, anyone left on the desk was overwhelmed. Charlene had been shutting the door, but she wasn’t fast enough, and Louise Jane and Poor Andrew squeezed themselves through. “Library business,” Louise Jane said airily.

I’d just put up my aching feet and my hand was
hovering over the sandwich tray delivered from Josie’s Cozy Bakery, when Louise Jane and Andrew breezed in. A shamefaced Charlene threw a
sorry
glance at Bertie. Charles retreated to a corner, where he watched us with narrowed blue eyes.

“I have a wonderful idea for a special exhibit.” Louise Jane McKaughnan dropped into a chair in the break room.

“Wait until you hear.” Andrew hovered at her shoulder. “It’s a wonderful idea.”

“Didn’t I just say that, Andrew?”

“Sorry.”

“We’ve got enough on our plate at the moment,” Bertie said.

“I happened to run into Curtis Gardner and Diane Uppiton at the market,” Louise Jane said, selecting a ham and cheese sandwich on rye. I bit into my crab salad on a fresh baguette. Josie’s baguettes were the best I’d ever had, and this one was still warm from the oven. Andrew bypassed the sandwich tray and went straight for a pecan tart. He looked like a tourist in his blue-and-red-striped Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirt patterned with orange and purple flowers.

“They’re giving you another chance, Bertie, to keep this library from falling into disaster,” Louise Jane said.

“How kind of them.”

“I thought so, too. Anyway, I told them my idea. . . .”

“It’s a wonderful idea,” Andrew said, pastry crumbs dripping down his chin.

“I can’t wait to hear,” Ronald mumbled. He
glugged half his bottle of Arizona Iced Tea in one long gulp.

“And they loved it. Hauntings of the lighthouse! It will run from the end of the summer until Halloween.”

No one exclaimed in delight, and Louise Jane deflated. But only for a moment. She turned to me. “There are so many fascinating stories about this lighthouse. Do you know that two men died during the construction? Crushed beneath the weight of the stones. It was late at night, a terrible storm building, and no one knows why they would have been working in those conditions. It’s said you can hear the stones falling and the men crying out in terror on nights when a storm comes up from the south. And then there’s the lighthouse keeper’s little son—such a tragic story. The boy was playing on the top of the stairs, by the light, where he wasn’t allowed. He fell. All the way to the bottom. He would have gone right past your door, Lucy, screaming in terror all the way. My grandmother says the thud when he hit the bottom could be heard all the way in Nags Head. You know that story, Ronald. Island children who visit the library sometimes see a little boy, wearing short pants and a cap, who asks them if they want to play with him. Remember when Roseanne Peterson went missing from story time, and how frightened we all were? She said she saw him, the little boy, beckoning to her to join him on the stairs.”

“Roseanne Peterson wet her pants and was afraid she’d get a spanking when her mother found out. She hid behind the toy box and repeated a story her
mother had told her. Mrs. Peterson has an overactive imagination. Like some people I could mention.”

“Oh, you can mock me, Mr. New York, but I can tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end. This whole area is full of ghosts. You do know why it’s called Bodie Island, don’t you, Lucy?”

“No. I don’t,” I said, once again stepping into her trap. Despite myself, I found the hair on my arms standing up at the thought of the ghostly little boy, never growing up, always searching for someone to play with him, through all eternity. My sandwich, delicious as it was, lay abandoned on the plate.

“Bodie, pronounced ‘body.’ Because of the number of bodies that washed up here over the years. Shipwrecks, pirates, ships lost at sea and never seen again. The Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

“Louise Jane, you know as well as I do,” Bertie said, “the island was named for the Body—B-O-D-Y—family.”

A plaque by the front door announced that this was Body’s Island Light House, erected 1872, and gave the latitude and longitude. I’d thought that nothing but a quaint spelling mistake.

“Was it, really?” Louise Jane said. “Or is that a pretty story made up so as not to frighten tourists?”

“This is a library, not a haunted house. As a library we deal in facts, not wild flights of imagination.”

“There’s no shortage of books, scholarly books as well as popular, dealing with the paranormal history of the Outer Banks.”

“For once I have to admit that Louise Jane is right,” Charlene said. “And they’re very popular.”

“See,” Louise Jane gloated. “Anyway, Diane and Curtis just loved the idea.”

“So there,” Andrew added.

Bertie stood up. Her roasted vegetable and hummus sandwich remained uneaten. “Thank you for your suggestion, Louise Jane. Diane and Curtis do not run this library. I do. It’s time to get back to work. Ronald, I need to talk to you about the schedule of children’s activities. I got a phone call from . . .”

Charlene grabbed a chocolate-chip cookie and followed Bertie and Ronald out. I returned my attention to my baguette.

“I have plenty of books and other material,” Louise Jane said. “My great-grandmother collected word-of-mouth stories and passed them to my grandmother, who wrote them down. They’ll be a great addition to the exhibit. I’d be awful happy to lend them to you, Lucy.”

“Thanks. Although I don’t have much time to read for pleasure as long as the Austen exhibit’s here.”

“Oh, Lucy, honey, I didn’t mean for you to read for
pleasure
. No, if you’re going to live here, in the lighthouse itself, you need to understand what forces move in the dark. Not that anything’s likely to happen, of course.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Andrew added.

Charles dug his claws into Poor Andrew’s ankle.

*

That evening Theodore Kowalski dropped into the library as the last of the bus tours drove away, directed by Charlene to the craft co-op. Which not only had adjusted its hours so as to remain open after the
library’s Friday closing, but was suddenly selling barely dry paintings of long-dressed women in bonnets staring out to sea, Victorian tea sets, knitted book covers, and anything and everything that could be passed off as “olde” English.

“What’s this I hear?” he boomed from the doorway.

“Go away, Teddy,” Bertie said.

“I’ll remind you, Albertina, that my name is Theodore.” He walked into the library in a wave of cigar smoke and damp wool. “I spent the day in Raleigh, deep in research at the Duke library, and as soon as I turned on my phone, to my horror, I had a screen full of messages telling me you managed to lose
Sense and Sensibilit
y!”

“I didn’t lose anything,” Bertie said. “It was stolen.”

“How could you be so careless?” Somehow, in Theodore’s fake British accent, the sentence sounded even more accusing.

“Lucy, Charlene, did you see Teddy here yesterday?”

“Yup,” Charlene said. “You spent a lot of time in the alcove . . . Theodore.”

“A lot of time,” I repeated.

“I resent your insinuations,” he said, nose pointing to the ceiling.

“Okay,” Bertie said, “No more insinuations. You stole it, Teddy. Give it back.”

“I won’t dignify that accusation with a reply.”

“You must know the book is comparatively worthless without the rest of the collection.”

“Great books are beyond monetary value.”

“Great books are to be enjoyed by the public. Not by some foolish man gloating over them in the dark.”

“Careful, Bertie,” Charlene warned. A few patrons still lingered in the library. They’d stopped what they were doing and their ears were flapping.