Surprised, I recognized her at once. I had just never known her name. Like most people in town, I simply called her the Bird Lady.
Orange hair stood in tufts on her scalp, as though a child had commandeered her head as an art table and left a mess of paint and cotton balls. She wore a pair of rhinestone cat-eye glasses, and a blue denim jumper over a cotton blouse, upon which was printed dozens of tiny red and green hearts. The jumper stopped at her calves, exposing thin pale legs that ended in red high top sneakers. On her shoulder a stuffed bird sat, a silent sentinel whose eye, at least the one that I could see, was cloudy as a cataract. The parrot’s feet were glued to a thin branch, which in turn was fastened to Tilly’s jumper with an intricate silver clasp and chain set.
The woman wore no socks and smelled of lilacs and talcum powder and glue. She looked up at me, took in my badge, and asked how she could help.
“Ms. Krinkle, my name is Gemma Monroe. I’m with the police department.”
“Well, of course you are,” she answered. Her voice was husky, a smoker’s voice. “Petey told me you were coming. Call me Tilly.”
“Petey?”
“My parrot,” she said, and pointed at the stuffed bird that stood on her right shoulder. “She is very wise.”
“I see. Um, hello, Petey,” I said, and half waved at the bird.
The woman gave me a black look. “Don’t expect a hello back, missy. Petey can be very shy. You’re here about Nicky Bellington, aren’t you?”
I hadn’t told anyone I was coming, not even Finn or Sam.
“How did you know that?”
Tilly said, “I watch the news, girly. I saw the press conference. It was only a matter of time.”
She stood, tsked-tsked, and motioned for me to follow her across the main reading room. The red sneakers squeaked against the linoleum and she walked on her tiptoes as though that would quiet the sound, but it just made her look as though she were about to sneak up on someone. I giggled and an elderly man in a suit at a study table frowned at me over the top of his half-moon glasses.
I shrugged back and mouthed an apology.
“I knew sooner or later someone would come about Nicky. I thought it would be sooner, but here you are,” Tilly whispered. “I’ve been waiting three god dang years.”
“Did the police talk to you after the accident?” I whispered back. “After Nicky fell at Bride’s Veil?”
She shook her head. “Nope, not a one of them. I waited but no one ever came.”
Damn Finn.
But then, would I have done any different? No matter what you think from watching CSI or Law & Order, we don’t tend to go looking for mysteries when there are simpler answers there for the taking. And the simple answer back then was, Nicky died in a tragic accident.
Tilly led me to a locked door at the back of the library. She inserted a stubby silver key into the handle and jiggled it back and forth, cursing up a storm when it wouldn’t catch. She took a deep breath, whispered something to Petey the bird, and then tried the key again. This time, the tumbler flipped back with a gentle click. The door popped open, and I followed the older woman down a wide flight of stairs that ended in a shadowy, cavernous room.
“The town archives,” she whispered to me.
Tilly instructed me to wait at the base of the stairs and then she walked into the dimness, keeping one hand on the wall, disappearing from my sight. She muttered more choice words and then one by one, rows of ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights buzzed on high above me.
The rest of the space remained dark and it was impossible to get a good sense of the room’s layout.
A tall bookshelf at my left held row after row of thick volumes. I pulled one out at random, sneezing as a layer of dust drifted off the scarlet leather cover. The title on the front read “Congressional Reports, Denver County, 1899-1901.”
“Hokay,” said a low voice behind me. I jumped and sneezed again, my heart pounding.
Tilly grinned at me, exposing all twelve of her remaining teeth.
“Jumpy, are we? Well, come on. I don’t have all day. Wouldn’t you know, I wait three dang years and you come on the day I have got a doctor appointment; it’s the cancer in the breasts. Hereditary. My mother had it. Her mother had it. Our whole dang family has it.”
I murmured some sympathies and followed her down one labyrinthine aisle after another, pausing as she switched on another row of lights. When she did, the lights behind us flickered off. Once, I stopped and turned and saw an emergency exit sign mounted high up, back in the direction of the stairs. The green glow seemed far away.
Then Tilly was telling me to come on, and I hurried to catch up with her.
She stopped abruptly in front of a study carrel. It was a cubicle-size space; the desk piled high with books, binders, folders, boxes of loose-leaf papers, and a magnifying glass, a tablet of paper, and a pencil.
“What is all this?”
Tilly shook her head at me and said to Petey in a low stage whisper “amateur.”
She pointed at the cubicle and said, “That, my dear, is the town’s complete archival materials on the McKenzie boys slash Woodsman murders.”
I swallowed. Research had not been my forte in school. “And this is what Nicky was doing when he came here? Reading all this stuff?”
“Yessiree,” she said. The sequins on her eyeglasses caught the reflection of the ceiling lights and a thousand tiny bulbs sparkled back at me. “That boy spent about four months down here.”
“And when was this? Exactly, I mean?”
“Oh, springtime, early summer of 2012. The last time he came by was two days before he went on that camping trip, in July. You know I’m up there a few times myself every summer? There’s a beautiful camping spot, just near that lookout point. Only place I can ever find some dang peace and quiet. Anyway, he told me I could pack all this up, that he had what he needed and thank you very much but he was all done,” Tilly said.
She stroked the stuffed parrot as she spoke, and I could have sworn I saw its emerald-green wings shudder at her touch.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked. “Pack it up, I mean?”
“Because he died, dummy. And I thought someone would come asking and I sure wasn’t about to put it all away and then go find it again, was I? Do you know how long it took me the first time, to gather all of this for Nicky? A week,” she said.
I looked at the overflowing cubicle and then at her. “Are you telling me this has been here for three years? Untouched? Doesn’t anyone else use this room? Or this material?”
She shook her head sadly. “You’re the first. Oh, I dust it all every week. But no one is interested in the past. If they were smart, they would be, for the past tells us all we need to know, if we listen. But no one takes the god dang time to listen.”
“Why didn’t you call the police and tell them to come check this stuff out?”
Tilly scoffed. “I did. I left a message at the station and no one ever got back to me. Time passed, and then it seemed silly to keep pestering you all. I figured if someone was interested, they would have come.”
I considered that, and Tilly’s age. If she was a native of the area, her answer to my next question might help frame things a bit.
“Did you know them? The McKenzie boys?”
Tilly nodded slowly, her eyes growing wider. She continued caressing the dead bird on her shoulder but her touch slowed, her finger making one long rhythmic stroke from crown to tail, and then beginning again.
“I was forty when they disappeared. Oh, but it was hot that summer. Hotter than a clap infection, so hot you could walk outside and feel like you could lie down and just die. I knew Tommy’s father, peripherally of course. We used the same dentist and we must have been on the same schedule, because every six months like clockwork we’d find ourselves waiting together in the little reception area at the dentist. Dr. Whitman. He’s long dead, by the way. Brain tumor.”