I glanced at my watch and shot out of the chair.
Five minutes later, I met the kindergarten class at the door with a shaky smile, and hoped they wouldn’t notice my hands were trembling as I passed each of them a bright construction paper flower.
After they’d left, I had a little time to think between helping patrons. I wondered if someone had it in for Beverly’s family. Had her mother’s accident really been an accident? Or was the attack on Beverly totally unrelated, a kid on some kind of high taking the easiest money available?
A person would definitely have to be chemically altered to have the nerve to tackle Beverly, who was physically as well as mentally formidable. As I sat with my hands folded in my lap at my little desk, staring blankly at the shelves of books that walled me in, I wished Beverly and I hadn’t had our fracas the day before-and when I thought twice about it, I wished even more it hadn’t been witnessed by so many people.
Sure enough, when I was called to the phone, Arthur Smith was on the other end, at the police station. The Rillingtons’ house was in the city limits, so the city police were handling the investigation into the attack on Beverly.
“Roe, I wonder if I could talk to you after you get off work, about that incident in the library yesterday,” Arthur said. He had always been blunt. Once upon a time, I’d found that directness very exciting.
“Okay,” I said with a detectable lack of enthusiasm.
“Could you come by the station this afternoon, say around two o’clock?”
“I guess so. Why the station?”
“It’ll just be more convenient,” he said.
I liked this less and less. But it seemed paranoid to wonder if I needed a lawyer. Why was Arthur calling me, anyway? He was a robbery detective. Lynn Liggett Smith, his wife, was the only homicide detective on the Lawrenceton force, so other detectives were detailed to her sometimes, but why Arthur?
I began to wonder if I shouldn’t call Martin out of his seminar in Chicago and ask his advice. Nah. I’d talk to him tonight. Then I wondered if I should call my mother, and it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to tell her where I was going. Naturally, since Mother owns a prosperous realty business, the line was busy. So I figured I’d just stop by on my way to the police station.
Mother’s office, established in an old house and redecorated in calm, elegant colors, always made me feel inadequate. I’d hoped once to get interested in real estate, had even started studying for my license, but at last I’d had to admit that my only interest in real estate was in buying my own. When terms like “equity” and “Fannie Mae” and “assumable mortgage” began to be bandied about, my brain glazed over. But when I watched the controlled and purposeful bustle on good days at Select Realty, I felt a pang of regret.
Mother’s terrifyingly perfect receptionist, Patty Cloud, had graduated to office manager and then to realtor. Her understudy, Debbie Lincoln, now controlled the desk in the reception area. Debbie had done some evolving of her own, from a rather slow, silent girl with cornrowed hair and baby fat to a slim, streamlined, fashionable babe who’d become the office computer expert. In the process, Debbie had gained a lot of artifice, and shed some of her natural charm. She’d also acquired confidence and lost her diffidence around older people.
As I entered, she gave me an “I see you but I’m in the middle of this” smile and waggle of magenta fingernails, the phone clamped between ear and shoulder, her fingers busy separating computer sheets, collating and stapling them.
“Uh-huh. Yes, Mrs. Kaplan, she’ll be there at three. No, ma’am, you don’t need to do anything special. She’ll just look over the house and tell you what she’d recommend you ask for it… no, ma’am, that doesn’t obligate… no, ma’am, you can call in as many as you like, but we hope you’ll list your house with us… right, three o’clock.” Debbie blew a breath out after she’d hung up.
“Difficult?” I asked.
“Girl, you know it,” Debbie said, shaking her head. “I half hope that woman doesn’t decide to list with us. Dealing with her is almost more trouble than it’s worth. Your mom is showing a house now, so if you wanted to see her, you may have quite a wait.”
“Heck,” I said. I wondered whether I should leave a note. “Debbie, do you know Beverly Rillington?” I asked out of the blue.
“Oh, isn’t that terrible, what happened to her?” Debbie stapled the last batch of papers together and tossed the result into Eileen Norris’s basket, which was half full of phone message slips already. Debbie followed my glance. “Eileen can’t get used to coming out here every time she comes back in the building,” Debbie said. “So her stuff kind of piles up. I don’t really know Beverly that well, she goes to a different church,” she added. “But Beverly has always been a real tough individual, a real loner. She had a baby, you know, when she was just fourteen… and then, when that baby was about a year old, it choked on a marble or something and died. Beverly hasn’t had it easy.”
I tried to imagine being pregnant at fourteen. I tried to imagine my baby dying.
I found I didn’t want to imagine that.
“I guess I’ll just leave Mother a note,” I told her, and started down the hall to Mother’s office. It was the biggest one, of course, and Mother had decorated it in cool, elegant gray, with a slash of deep red here and there for eye relief. Her desk was absolutely orderly, though covered with the paperwork on various projects, and I knew the notepads would be in the top right drawer-and they were-and that all Mother’s pencils would be sharp… and that I would snap off the point of the first one since it was so sharp and I pressed so hard. Having gone through that little ritual, all I had to do was compose a message to let her know I was going to be at the police station at a detective’s request, without propelling her out the office door with her flags flying.
Maybe such a composition wasn’t possible, I decided after sitting for several blank seconds with the (now blunt) pencil actually resting on the paper.
After a false start or two, I settled on: “Mom, I’m going to the police station to tell them about working with Beverly Rillington at the library. She got hurt last night. Call me at home at four o’clock. Love, Roe.”
That should do it. I knew if I wasn’t at home at four she’d storm the bastions and get me released.
The car by which I parked at the police station/small claims court/county sheriff’s office/jail (known locally as “Spacolec” for Sperling County Law.Enforcement Complex) seemed very familiar, and after a second I recognized Angel’s car, the one Jack Burns had ticketed. Then I recalled Angel telling me she was going to the funeral because they’d worked out together; the two stories seemed mutually exclusive.
I mulled it over for a minute as I trudged through the hot parking lot to the glass double doors leading into Spacolec.
It was still making no sense when I saw Arthur Smith waiting for me right in front of the wall-to-wall admissions desk. Arthur had changed little in the three years he’d been married to Lynn. Marriage had not put a gut on him or lined his face; fatherhood hadn’t grayed his tightly curled hair, though it was such a pale blond that the gray, when it did appear, would be enviably hard to detect.
Perhaps he’d changed in the way he held himself, his basic attitude; he seemed tougher, angrier, more impatient, and that was so apparent that I wondered I hadn’t noticed it before.
Arthur, who’d been chatting with the duty officer, turned at the hissing sound of the pneumatic doors. He looked at me, and his face changed.
I felt acutely uncomfortable. I was unused to being the object of unrequited desire. Now, Angel (whom I now saw coming toward me out of the set of swinging wooden doors to the left of the reception desk) must have encountered panting men from adolescence onward. I would have to ask her how it made her feel. Right now she looked washed out, and her stride did not have its usual assurance.