“A mess,” Pam said. “Hard to believe it looked like that a few hours ago,” she said in a wondering tone. “And hard to believe that all those people would drop their plans for the day and help me. I barely know most of them. And you,” she said, her voice cracking. “You’ve done so much for me, I can’t—”
“What you can do is look at those pictures,” I cut in. If she started bawling, I would, too, and soppy tears on top of too much leftover pizza wouldn’t sit well in my stomach. “Really study them. Tell me if you see what I see.” Which sounded a little too much like that Christmas carol, something completely inappropriate in June.
“All I see is a mess,” Pam muttered, but she kept looking. “A big, fat mess. I had no idea I had so much stuff in here. How could I have accumulated so much in such a short time? And what’s—” She stopped abruptly. “Hang on. The hatboxes are on the floor, but they’re close to where they should be. Same with the linens and the wooden puzzles and everything else. There’s only one category of item that’s scattered far from where it should be.”
“Exactly,” I said. “The books.”
* * *
The next morning was Monday, a library day, but I stopped at the sheriff’s office before going into work.
“Good morning, Ms. Hamilton.” Detective Inwood’s greeting was a salute with a powdered doughnut. “If you don’t make any jokes about cops and doughnuts, you’re welcome to a pastry.”
I blinked at the man. As far as I could remember, he’d never before invited me to partake of anything inside the office. Had he had a personality transfer since we’d last talked?
“Take advantage while you can,” Ash said, walking into the interview room, handing me an apple fritter with one hand and a cup of coffee with the other. We brushed hands during the transfer and smiled at each other. “Hal got another grandkid yesterday.”
“Congratulations!” I transferred my smile from Ash to the detective. “Girl or boy?”
“Girl,” he said, beaming. “Emily Grace.”
It was a nice name. I said so, and his smile went a little wider. For a second I was worried that the unaccustomed expression might send his face into spasms that could end up freezing there forever, but it went back to normal as he began to eat.
I breathed a sigh of relief. There was only so much dramatic change I could take in any given time span.
“Have a seat, Ms. Hamilton,” the detective said. “Unless this won’t take long?”
“Sorry to dash your hopes,” I said, sitting, “but I have a new theory.” I’d texted Ash yesterday about Pam’s store, but hadn’t said anything about what Pam and I had both noticed at the end of the day.
True public servant that he was, Detective Inwood didn’t even blink at my statement, even though I was sure he would have been content to never hear another idea from me the rest of his career. He and Ash sat across from me. “One of these days,” the detective said, “you’ll sit on this side.”
I glanced up at the stained ceiling tiles near the doorway. A few months back, when I’d mentioned that I’d thought the stain looked like a dragon, he’d said it wasn’t a dragon at all, that I needed to see it from that side of the room. One of these days, I’d break out of my rut and remember to actually do so.
“So, what’s your new theory?” Detective Inwood asked.
“This first part isn’t the theory,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you knew about Andrea Vennard’s old high school boyfriend, Steve Guilder. You know she had a personal protection order against him?”
Inwood brushed powdered sugar off his jacket. “Yes, Ms. Hamilton, we’re very aware of the documents issued out of this county.”
I colored the slightest bit. “Well, it was a long time ago. I just thought I’d mention it.”
“We’re exploring all avenues of investigation,” Detective Inwood said, and I almost mouthed the words along with him. “That includes looking into any possible suspects from her business downstate.”
“I heard she owned a business. What was it, anyway?”
The detective popped in the last bit of his doughnut. “The theory?” he asked around it.
I decided not to be miffed that he wouldn’t tell me. There were lots of other ways I could find out. “It’s about books,” I said.
Ash glanced at his supervisor. His supervisor, who was still in the act of taking a pen from his shirt pocket and flipping open a small notebook, didn’t glance back. He also didn’t write anything down.
“What’s about books?” Detective Inwood asked.
I almost said “Everything,” but knew that would earn me raised eyebrows from the detective and a shake of the head from Ash. “The murder. The break-in at the Friends’ book-sale room. The break-in at the bookmobile garage. The break-in at Pam Fazio’s store on Saturday night.”
The detective sat back. “The break-ins are the jurisdiction of the city police. If you have information, you should speak to them directly.”
Which he would prefer, I was sure. “It all ties in with the murder,” I said quickly. Though the city police were well trained and experienced, they weren’t the ones investigating Andrea’s death.
“How, exactly?” Inwood asked.
“It’s all about the books,” I repeated. He made a rolling motion with his hand, so I kept going. “As far as anyone can tell, nothing was taken from the sale room. And we know that nothing was stolen from the bookmobile or from Pam’s store. But it was the books in her store that were examined most closely.”
“What,” the detective said, hunching forward the tiniest bit, “makes you think it isn’t simple vandalism?”
“Two things,” I said. “One is that there’s been no real damage. Nothing has been taken, nothing maliciously destroyed. Sure, there were things broken at Pam’s store, but we did an inventory, and, considering the number of breakable items that could have been shattered into teensy-tiny bits, the number of things broken was surprisingly small.”
Thirteen, to be exact, and most of the broken bits had been from one large mirror. I’d swept up the pieces, hoping, for the first time ever, that the tale about the seven years’ bad luck for whomever had broken the mirror was true.
“And number two?” Detective Inwood asked.
“It was too much work,” I said.
His bushy eyebrows went up. “How’s that?”
The librarian was about to explain vandalism to the law-enforcement officers. It was a good day. “Straight vandalism,” I told them, “wouldn’t have been so thorough. Vandals go in, destroy everything in sight, and leave. Whoever broke into the bookmobile garage, Pam’s place, and the Friends’ room was very methodical. There are three thousand books on the bookmobile,” I said. “And each and every one was taken from its shelf and tossed onto the floor. Every one,” I repeated, tapping the scratched table with my forefinger. “Would any vandal be so thorough?”
Inwood and Ash looked at each other, and I knew I’d scored a point. “They were looking for something,” Ash said.
I nodded. “Had to be.”
Detective Inwood made a noise of dissent. “There are no ‘have to’s when you’re talking about crime,” he said. “You never know what people will do. But”—he put up a hand to stave off my knee-jerk protest—“you have a valid point.”
It took me a moment to realize that the detective had given me a compliment. Or, if not a compliment, at least it wasn’t a brush-off, and with Detective Inwood, that was pretty much the same thing.
“So, what I’m thinking,” I said, “is the person who killed Andrea is looking for a book. Andrea must have been, too, because why else would she have been in the library when it was closed? And since none of this happened until after Talia DeKeyser died, maybe the two things are linked. Maybe it was a book Talia owned, maybe it was valuable, and maybe both Andrea and her killer were trying to steal it.”