I nodded. “Do you have any idea who turned off the security system?” From the corner of my eye I saw Claire approaching with our food. Gavin waited until she’d topped up our cups before he answered my question.
“It was an inside job,” he said.
I frowned at him. “Inside how? Are you trying to say it was someone who works at the library?”
His mouth was full of Eric’s latest breakfast sandwich creation, so he held up a hand. I waited.
“I mean inside as in someone shut down both systems from inside the building.”
I had to let the words sink in for a moment. “You mean Margo turned off the alarm? She let her killer get into the building?” I broke a piece off the fat cinnamon roll on the plate in front of me but didn’t eat it. “C’mon, Gavin. That doesn’t make any sense. Margo didn’t think the Weston drawing should have been out of a museum setting. Why on earth would she turn off the security system that was protecting it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. When I left, Margo said she was going to be about another twenty minutes. She locked the main library doors behind me and I can guarantee that the rest of the building was locked up tight because I checked everything personally.”
“So she let the thief in?”
“It looks that way.” He looked around for Claire, pointing at his mug and smiling when she looked his way. Gavin drank more coffee than I did.
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Margo wouldn’t let anyone into the building. Not with the exhibit set up.” I didn’t say that I’d half been expecting her to sleep in the building once the artwork arrived.
“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” Gavin agreed. “And it’s completely out of character for Margo from what I know of her, but I can’t find any other way that the thief could have gotten into the building. Nothing was tampered with at the keypads.”
He paused, looked around the restaurant and then leaned across the table toward me. “Kathleen, I don’t imagine your detective would want this getting out, but it’s not just that it looks like Margo let someone into the building.” He cleared his throat. “You know I set up a perimeter alarm just around the area where the exhibit was?”
“I know,” I said.
The day the alarm had been installed, Mary had managed to set it off twice, both times by backing up with a cart of books for reshelving. We’d ended up moving a low unit of bookshelves and borrowing a set of brass posts and a black velvet rope from the Stratton Theatre to keep patrons from straying across the invisible security barrier.
“It had been disabled, too.”
The only way to turn off that perimeter alarm was from the circulation desk, with a sixteen-character code that only Gavin, Margo and I knew.
He swiped a hand over his mouth. “I didn’t do it and I’m guessing you didn’t, either, so that just leaves Margo.”
He looked past me, out the front window toward the river. I could see a mix of emotions play across his face. There was sadness over Margo’s death. They hadn’t been friends, but they had worked extremely well together, and as the poet John Donne had written, “Each man’s death diminishes me.” But I could also see tight lines of frustration, or maybe it was anger, around his mouth.
I sighed. “If Margo let the thief into the building . . .” I let the end of the sentence trail away. I didn’t want to finish the thought.
Gavin grimaced. “Yeah. Was she in on the theft?”
“Do you seriously believe that?” I asked. “You knew her better than I did, but nothing I knew about Margo would make me think she’d do something like that.”
“I know, I know,” Gavin said, shaking his head. “Maybe there’s something we’re missing.”
“I hope so,” I said, reaching for the spiral-bound notebook to my left. “There are a couple of things I need to go over with you.”
“Sure,” he said, reaching for his tablet. He seemed to be happy to stop talking about Margo.
Gavin and I spent about half an hour coming up with a plan to deal with security at the library until the police at least released the artwork back to the museum. At this point the entire schedule for the exhibit had been put on hold and I suspected in the end the tour would be canceled.
I went home and had lunch with the boys, taking my bowl of rice, topped with some steamed vegetables and leftover chicken, out into the sunshine of the backyard. I sat in the blue Adirondack chair with Hercules beside me while Owen prowled around the lawn like a predatory jungle cat.
As I ate I told Herc what I’d learned from Gavin. Talking about it out loud seemed to help me make sense of everything, and talking to the cats didn’t feel as weird as just talking to myself did.
“Why would Margo let the thief into the building?” I asked Hercules.
He looked at me blankly. He clearly had no more idea than I did.
“She had to know she’d be setting herself up as a suspect once the theft was discovered. Why would she do something that careless?”
The cat didn’t have an answer to that question, either.
I spent the rest of the day working from home, dealing with paperwork and making numerous phone calls to Lita.
Late in the afternoon Lita called me. “Kathleen, Everett has asked if you’d be willing to go ahead with the two interviews that had been scheduled for tomorrow. He would have called and asked you himself, but he’s in a meeting.”
“Of course I will,” I said. “You know they’re going to ask about Margo’s death.”
“I know,” she said. “Everett thinks it would be better if we got out ahead of the speculation as much as we can. To this point the police haven’t released a cause of death and it’s not common knowledge that the Weston drawing is missing.”
I leaned back in my chair and stretched. Owen was sitting on my lap, seemingly engrossed in the revised staff schedule on the screen of my laptop. “I think Everett is right. We need to salvage what we can from this.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized how they sounded. “I’m sorry, Lita,” I said. “That was disrespectful. Margo is dead. Finding out what happened to her is what matters.”
“You weren’t being disrespectful,” Lita said. “It doesn’t serve anyone to have her death sensationalized along with the town. These interviews are a chance to make sure people know how hard she worked on this exhibit and how enthusiastic she was about supporting and promoting the local art community.”
Owen turned his head to look inquiringly at me and I smiled at him since I couldn’t smile at Lita.
“And that’s what I’m going to do,” I said. “As usual, you’re right. Are you ever wrong?”
“Oh yes,” she said gravely. “Last October. I was convinced that I was mistaken about something, but it turned out I was incorrect.”
I laughed and she promised she’d send me the details for both interviews once she’d confirmed them with the reporters.
Marcus wasn’t available to have supper, so I called Roma. “Are you free for supper?” I asked. “I have pea soup with ham.”
“Oh, that sounds good,” she said. “Are you free to help strip wallpaper from the little bedroom?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
I had some of Rebecca’s rolls in the freezer. I got them out to take along with the soup. “I’m going out to Roma’s for supper,” I said to Owen, who had watched me get the food ready with great interest.
“Mrrr,” he said, wrinkling his nose in annoyance. Roma was not one of Owen’s favorite people. She was the one who poked him with needles and tried to look in his mouth. I felt the same way about the dentist.
• • •
The library was closed on Saturday and stayed closed Monday. I did both of the interviews and tried to keep the conversation on the exhibit and the town and away from speculation about Margo’s death.