I was checking in the last few books from the book drop when Susan tapped on the main door.
“Well, remind me not to piss you off,” she said when I let her in.
“Excuse me?”
“The maestro. One minute he’s in here being a jerk and the next he’s dead.” She looked at me over her tiny glasses with mock seriousness. “You didn’t sic your cat on him again, did you?”
I relocked the door and closed the security gate. “No, I didn’t sic my cat on him. And Owen jumping on Mr. Easton’s head the other day was an accident.”
“Whatever you say,” Susan said with a smile.
I followed her upstairs. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” I asked as she put her things in her locker and pulled out the vibrant pink sweater she wore when she was working.
“Oh, screw it. Why not? I had two devil’s-food cupcakes for breakfast.”
I poured a cup for her and one for myself and set Susan’s on the table. “Why?” I asked.
She poured three packets of sugar into the cup and stirred. So much for green juice.
“Eric’s on a chocolate kick,” she said. “Brownies, cupcakes, chocolate mousse, chocolate cheesecake. He’s making some changes to the menu at the café and he’s trying everything at home first.”
She drank a mouthful of coffee and pushed her blackframed glasses up onto the bridge of her nose. “So, is the rumor true? Did you really find Easton’s body at the Stratton?”
I nodded. “I was trying to catch up with Oren. He wasn’t there. But I did see him this morning.”
Susan stirred another packet of sugar into her coffee. “So if Easton died at the theater, what were the police doing here? Why did they close the building yesterday?”
I took a sip of my own coffee. “I’m not sure. A detective came to ask me a few more questions. I told him he could look around. He found something over where the meeting room is going to be.”
Susan leaned back in her chair and cupped her mug with both hands. “What were they looking for in here in the first place?” she asked. “The maestro had a heart attack, didn’t he?”
I shrugged. “He had a cut on his head. That’s all I know.”
“So they think what? You whacked him with a big old Encyclopædia Britannica, or something? That’s crazy.” She drained her cup and got up for more coffee. “What did they find, anyway?”
I ran a hand back through my hair. “I’m not sure. There were some . . . stains . . . on the floor.”
Susan froze, hand on the coffeepot. Today she had a chopstick in her updo. “Blood?”
“I’m not sure,” I said again.
“Can’t be. Easton wasn’t bleeding when he left and he wasn’t even over there. Do they think he came back?” She refilled her cup, then came around the table and topped up mine.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I don’t see how he could have come in again without me seeing him.” Susan sat across from me again. “I didn’t leave the desk, Kathleen.”
“I know that.” I poured a packet of sugar in my cup before it all ended up in Susan’s.
“And I don’t see how he could have snuck in. Or even why he would.” She shook her head. “Easton wasn’t subtle. He struck me as the kind of person who always made an entrance, who sucked all the air out of the room.”
I tried to get a mental picture of Gregor Easton slinking back into the library, creeping past the circulation desk while Susan was busy. And to do what? Go bleed on the floor of a half-finished meeting room? What would that accomplish? From my one encounter with Easton while he was alive, I felt sure a showy, melodramatic scene was more his style. “You’re right,” I said to Susan. “Gregor Easton didn’t seem like the kind of person to do anything unobtrusively. We don’t know what the police found on the floor downstairs. We certainly don’t know it was blood. And if, if it was, it’s probably from one of the workmen.”
“Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. One of those guys was carrying a piece of wood and almost took my head off last week. Then he turned around so fast he took out an entire shelf of paperbacks with the other end of the board.”
“Not everyone is Oren,” I said.
Susan grinned. “You’ve got that right.”
I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to nine. “That reminds me,” I said, as I stood up and took my cup to the sink to rinse it. “The rest of the reference books are coming from Everett’s warehouse this morning. Could you get them shelved, please?”
“Sure.” Susan chugged the last of her coffee and set her mug in the sink.
“Mary will be here at ten,” I said. “She can cover the desk and the phones. I’m going to see if I can figure out what we have for the computer room and what we still need. Oren will be here late this afternoon to at least get the furniture together.”
The truck from Everett’s warehouse pulled up to the back door of the library at exactly nine thirty. The driver used a small, wheeled dolly to move the crates of books into the building. He took off the tops with just a hammer and his hands, as if they were pull tops on cans of tuna, had me check each crate, sign for everything, ma’amed me half a dozen times and was gone in less than fifteen minutes.
Susan started unpacking the books as soon as Mary arrived to handle the desk.
I got my trusty five-in-one, multipurpose Ginsu tool from my office. (It’s a knife! It’s a screwdriver! It’s a corkscrew! It’s scissors! It’s a blade for opening anything encased in plastic! Wow!) And, yes, I’d bought it from a late-night infomercial—in between ads for spray hair in a can and the amazing panini press—but it really worked. It was great for cutting open boxes, hermetically sealed plastic packages and the occasional coffee cake from Susan’s husband, Eric. And I liked knowing that if I ever needed to saw through a soda can, I could do that, too.
The soon-to-be computer room was piled with boxes and unassembled furniture. I set the three printer cartons under the window. The monitors were already stacked in the corner. I left them there. The chairs were shrouded in yards of plastic film, one upside down on another, as though someone had gone a little crazy with a giant-sized roll of sandwich wrap. I pushed those against the end wall. Leaning up against the last pair of chairs was a long, flat box—the other table for the children’s department. I’d been looking for that for almost a week. I knew if I left it Oren would put that together, too, but all it needed was to have the legs attached to the top. How hard could that be for a woman with a multipurpose, five-in-one Ginsu tool?
Harder than I thought. It took the better part of an hour to attach legs A1 through A4 to top B with screws DD, nuts FF and washers EEE. There were bits of plastic and bubble wrap all over the floor and clinging to my shirt when I was finished. I went upstairs and got the small vacuum we kept in the staff room, and prowled the walls looking for an outlet to plug it into. The rewiring of that section of the library obviously hadn’t been done. Another thing to talk to Will about when he showed up. Assuming he showed at all today.
Finally, under the end window, behind a printer box, I found an outlet. I leaned over the box and stretched to push in the plug. There was a loud snapping sound and sparks flew up. So did I, backward onto the floor. I lost a few seconds, maybe half a minute. I opened my eyes and looked up into Detective Gordon’s blue ones. I struggled to sit up.
“Take it easy, Ms. Paulson,” he said.
“I’m all right,” I said. And I was, except for the tingling in my fingers, the buzzing ache in my arm and the high-pitched sound of crickets in my ear.
“I don’t think you are.”
At that moment Roma came around the end of the bookshelves. “Kathleen, what happened?” she asked. “I came in the door and Mary said you were hurt.”