I nodded. Then I got up and walked out.
My hand was shaking as I signed out at the back door. I said good night to Thorsten and walked over to the truck. Some small part of me wanted to believe that Elias wasn’t a murderer. But if he hadn’t killed Kassie then who had?
Wednesday morning just after we opened, Harry Taylor and his brother, Larry, arrived at the library.
“Do you have something already?” I asked.
“Ever see any of the James Bond movies?” Harry asked.
“I’ve seen all of them.”
He inclined his head in the direction of his brother. “He’s Q.”
“It wasn’t complicated,” Larry said with a smile. He handed me a small cardboard box.
I opened the flaps and peered inside. “This is the camera?” I said. The contents looked like a tiny robot spaceman in a white spacesuit with a black-visored helmet.
Larry nodded. “Wi-Fi, night vision, motion detector, 360-degree panoramic view, SD card and it will send an alert to my smartphone if anyone is around the gazebo.” He looked at me a little uncertainly. “I hope it’s okay that the alerts go to my phone. I couldn’t have them go to Harry’s. All he has is a flip phone.”
Harry gave him a look that said this wasn’t the first time they’d had a conversation about his phone.
“You could send the alerts to my phone,” I said.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think that it’s a good idea for you to come down here in the middle of the night to confront whoever has been pulling these stunts. I’m sorry if that seems sexist.”
I recognized the size and strength difference between the two of them and me. “No, it’s not. But I’d feel a lot better if you’d call the police when you get an alert.”
“We can do that,” Harry said.
I noticed he’d said “can” not “will.” I also knew arguing wouldn’t get me anywhere.
Harry and Larry installed the camera just under the back roof edge across from the gazebo. Unless you were looking for it you couldn’t see it from the ground or with a cursory glance at the building.
I was just walking back around the building when I caught sight of Caroline Peters coming up the sidewalk. She saw me and raised a hand in acknowledgment. I waited for her at the bottom of the steps.
“Hi,” she said as she reached me. “Ray called me after you two talked last night. I just came from the police department.”
I stuffed my hands in my sweater pockets. “I’m glad to hear that,” I said.
“I’m sorry I deceived you. I’m sorry I deceived everyone.” She played with the knotted bracelet around her left wrist. “No one knew about Ray and me. I wanted to keep it that way. When I left his apartment I was going to walk back to the café and just join everyone else. Then I met Kate.” There was a second’s pause. “She said, ‘So you got tired of working on your bread and decided to come out for a walk, too,’ and when I opened my mouth ‘Yes’ was what came out. I didn’t mean to lie. It just happened.”
“I believe you,” I said. That was the thing about lying. It was surprisingly easy.
“Thank you,” she said, and a little of the tension left her body.
I hesitated about whether to say anything else. The fact that I truly liked her won out. That and I didn’t trust Ray as far as I could throw him, as Rebecca would say. “Caroline, your life and your marriage are absolutely none of my business,” I said. “But Ray Nightingale is not someone worth blowing up your life over.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. I had no way to know if Ray had just been a reckless fling or if she had feelings for him. I hoped it was the former.
“I should go.” She looked in the direction of the sidewalk.
I nodded. “Thank you for coming. You didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did,” she said. “I tell my kids to tell the truth all the time. I tell them when they’ve made a mistake to admit it. I need to start practicing what I preach.” She gave me a small smile and headed toward the sidewalk.
I started up the steps. I realized that Kate didn’t have an alibi anymore unless she had some kind of secret romance going on as well. It didn’t exactly seem likely, given her soft-spoken, quiet demeanor. Neither did the idea of her being a murderer. So now what?
chapter 17
The phone rang Thursday morning before I had even had my first cup of coffee. I glanced at the screen. It was Harry. I knew what that meant.
“Good morning,” I said.
“I’m not sure you’ll think so when you know where I am,” he said.
“You’re at the library.”
“Larry got an alert about half an hour ago.”
I leaned against the counter. “You didn’t catch our gazebo guy, did you?”
“No.” I imagined Harry pulling off his ball cap and smoothing down what little hair he still had. “Whoever it was disconnected the camera and took the SD card. We’ve got nothing.” I heard him exhale. “Well, almost nothing.”
“What did he do this time?”
“There’s an inflatable pool in the gazebo—pretty good size, too. It’s full of Jell-O. And two squirrels, but I think they just might be a couple of innocent bystanders.”
“What kind of Jell-O?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “It’s dark red.”
I heard someone else say something.
“Larry says it’s black raspberry.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“You sure?” he asked.
I pushed away from the counter. “I’m sure. Do you want coffee?”
“As long as it’s not too much trouble,” he said. “Aw hell, even if it is too much trouble.”
“It’s not,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”
Owen and Hercules were fed. The litter boxes were clean. All I had to do was brush my teeth and my hair. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, put on some lip gloss and tossed a banana, a corn scone from the freezer, my travel mug and the rest of my makeup into my bag. It looked kind of lumpy.
I stopped at Eric’s and got three large coffees. I found Harry and Larry standing by Harry’s truck in the parking lot. I handed them each a cup. They both thanked me.
“Let’s go see the gazebo,” I said, wrapping my hands around my travel mug. Harry glanced at it but didn’t say anything.
The pool almost covered the floor of the gazebo.
“I figure fifteen feet in diameter,” Harry said. It was filled almost to the top with black raspberry Jell-O. Which had set. The squirrels were gone. I had a feeling that if we didn’t get it emptied soon we could become the downtown squirrel hangout.
Part of me admired the resourcefulness of our guilty party. He or she had to be good at chemistry and computers and math. On the other hand, these stunts were costing time and money and I was afraid they might escalate to something dangerous.
I turned to Larry. “So, our offender disconnected the camera?”
He turned to gesture at the building. “I think he spotted the camera and somehow managed to disable the Wi-Fi temporarily.” He shrugged. “It’s not hard. He probably used a jammer. He did his thing, then he swiped the SD card. The cool thing is—”
Harry glared at him.
Larry’s face reddened. “I, uh, mean the interesting thing is it looks like he hacked into the program and got it to send an alert when he was ready to leave.”
“To bring us down here on a wild goose chase,” Harry said.
“And maybe to show off a little, too,” I said.
“You want me to put the camera back up?” Larry asked.
I looked at the building. I looked at the pool. I shook my head. “I appreciate all the work you put in, but I think it’s time to bring Marcus in on this.”
“It could just be a kid,” Larry said.
“A kid that climbed up somehow and got that SD card out of the camera,” Harry said. “A kid that could have gotten hurt.”