Afternoon? “You saw Dayna before the reception?”
Olivia dropped her gaze again. “I know I should have said something.”
“Why didn’t you?” I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my jacket.
“I was scared.” She traced the snowflake design on one of the boxes with a finger. “She was here. We had a connection because of a crime that happened years ago and then she died after eating one of my chocolate truffles.”
“You didn’t tell the police.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t tell anyone. And I figured no one would make the connection because now I go by Ramsey, which is my stepfather’s name, but back then my last name was West. It was stupid, I know.”
“Olivia, what did Dayna want?”
“She wanted me to talk to the prosecutor’s office. She wanted me to be a witness if there was a new trial. She said she couldn’t do it.” She exhaled slowly. “I didn’t even recognize her at first. I told her I couldn’t testify because I’d gotten there too late. I hadn’t seen anything.” She looked up at the high ceiling overhead for a moment. “She wanted me to lie. I said no.”
Just then Georgia Tepper came in from the front of the old house.
“Ask her,” Olivia said. “She was here.”
“Ask me what?” Georgia said.
“Tell her about Dayna Chapman being here.”
Georgia hesitated.
“It’s okay,” Olivia said with a shrug. “I’m not keeping it a secret any longer. I shouldn’t have done that to begin with.”
“Liv was scrubbing down that table,” Georgia said, gesturing to the large workspace in front of us. “Mrs. Chapman—I didn’t know who she was then—was standing right about where you are. I heard her say, ‘All you have to do is lie.’”
Olivia looked at me. “I know it was stupid not to say I knew her from the start. I’ll call Detective Gordon and tell him everything.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” I said.
* * *
When I got back to the library, Hercules was still dozing in my chair in a patch of sunshine. I sat on the edge of my desk and leaned over to stroke his fur. He made an inquiring little “murp” sound that I decided to interpret as a question about how my visit with Olivia had gone.
“Would you believe Olivia told me she knew Dayna Chapman before I had a chance to ask her?”
The cat tipped his head from one side to the other as though he was pondering the coincidence.
“Interesting timing,” I said. Before I could say anything else, there was a knock on my door. I turned Hercules to face the window and hurried over to answer it.
Susan was standing there with a look of exasperation on her face and her updo skewered with two pencils. “Problem,” she said. Her glasses had slipped partway down her nose.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We plugged in the tree lights, there was a fairly loud popping sound and now none of the outlets are working in the computer room, so obviously none of the computers are working, either.”
“Is anything on fire?” I asked.
Susan shook her head. “No, but I did see sparks come out of the outlet.”
I rubbed the space between my eyebrows. “That’s not good,” I said as I closed the door behind me.
Susan pushed her glasses up her nose. “Yeah, I didn’t think so, either,” she said.
The limit of my electrical knowledge was switching the breaker on and off in the basement, and that didn’t fix the problem. I called Lita. She promised she’d have Larry Taylor over before the end of the day.
“I don’t think those boneheads who worked for Will Redfern wired things right in the first place during the library renovations,” she said in a voice edged with annoyance. “And I can say that because at least two of them are my cousins.”
I kind of agreed with her. This wasn’t the first time Larry had had to come to fix something Will Redfern’s boys hadn’t done quite right. I thanked Lita and hung up.
Even without the lights turned on, the tree looked beautiful. Since the building didn’t seem to be in danger of catching on fire, I decided there wasn’t really anything else to do but put a big COMPUTERS TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER sign on an easel at the entrance to the computer space, and hope Larry could stop by sooner rather than later.
And he did. Unfortunately it was just as I was going to take a late lunch and drive Hercules home.
“I guess you’re going to have to stay for the rest of the day,” I told him. It didn’t seem to bother Hercules at all.
I kept an “emergency” box of dry cat food, a water dish and a small covered kitty litter pan hidden in a box in the locked closet in my office. The boys had ended up at the library more than once, and even though we had a strict no-pets policy, they seemed to think the rules didn’t apply to them.
Larry discovered the electrical problem was a faulty set of lights and a breaker that had been recalled by the manufacturer. While he worked in the basement, Abigail began the tedious job of taking the lights off the tree without removing all the ornaments.
Marcus came into the library about midafternoon. There was a woman with him and as soon as I got a good look at her I realized I knew her. Or more specifically I knew who she was: Leah Webster, the investigating officer in the pawnshop robbery.
“Everything comes to he who waits,” I said softly.
“Tolstoy?” asked Susan, who was passing behind me with an empty book cart.
“Close,” I said. “It was actually Skeletor from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Tolstoy said, ‘Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.’”
“Good to have that cleared up,” she said dryly, her lips twitching with amusement.
Marcus had reached us by then. “Hi, Kathleen,” he said. He was wearing a dark woolen topcoat over his tweed sport coat, with a blue shirt and a blue-and-gray tie. I remembered that he’d had to go to court this morning.
“Hi,” I said, smiling because any other response would have been extremely inappropriate.
“This is Detective Webster,” he said.
I held out my hand. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Kathleen Paulson. Welcome to the library.”
She smiled back at me as she thanked me and I could see the family resemblance between her and Eddie. They had the same shape mouth and the same smile.
“Detective Webster came to consult on a case and her car won’t start,” Marcus said. “Thorsten said it looks like she just needs a new battery.”
“I’m a bit of a history buff,” Leah Webster said. “I’ve heard about your library’s collection of documents. I figured I’d take my chance to take a look at them.” Her dark eyes narrowed. “You have two diaries from when this area was first settled, don’t you?”
“As well as some correspondence and the personal papers of the town’s first mayor all scanned into our computer system.” I made a face. “Unfortunately our computers aren’t available at the moment.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow.
“Faulty breaker,” I said. “Larry Taylor is here.” I turned back to Leah Webster. “But we also have most of the information loaded on the hard drive of a new computer that we’re going to use just for genealogical research. If you don’t mind being upstairs in our very messy workroom, you could look through what we’ve downloaded so far.”
“I don’t want to put you out,” she said.
“You wouldn’t be. We usually don’t have patrons up on the second floor, but since you’re a police officer I think we can make an exception.”
“I appreciate this,” Marcus said, and the gleam in his blue eyes told me the words were more than just a social nicety.
“I do, too,” Detective Webster said, her enthusiasm obvious in the wide smile she gave me. “I had no idea you had such an extensive collection.”
I nodded. “From what I’ve been told, it was the pet project of the head librarian two librarians ago. We have a student intern who’s been photographing everything, bit by bit, and putting the images on a series of CDs and now on this new computer. The idea is that people will be able to see the documents without necessarily having to handle them. Eventually, we may be able to work out online access.”