“Quel dommage. But every mouthful a little heaven on the tongue.” Helen Louise expertly boxed my selection and rang it up at the register.
“Oui, certainement.” I knew some French too, and Helen Louise laughed.
“Come again soon,” she said. “You too, Charlie.”
I grinned as I led Diesel to the door. Helen Louise was charming, and her personality was one ingredient in her success.
I put the gateau carefully on the backseat of the car, while Diesel sprang into the front. My two most important errands of the morning accomplished, I thought Diesel and I might drop by the public library for a few minutes. It was only a few blocks away, on the route home.
I was about to back out of the parking space when my cell phone rang. I shifted back to park and pulled the phone out of my shirt pocket. Glancing at the number on the display, I frowned. Someone from the college was calling, but I didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello, this is Charlie Harris.”
“Hey, Charlie, it’s Rick. How you doing?” Rick Tackett was operations manager for the college library.
“Doing fine, and you?”
“Pretty busy,” Rick said. “Got a big delivery for you, and I wondered if you wanted it up in your office maybe? Or somewhere else?”
“How big?” I asked, puzzled. I wasn’t expecting anything.
“Fifty-four boxes,” Rick said. “Pretty heavy. Maybe somebody’s papers or something.”
Papers?
For a moment I couldn’t remember any recent agreement to take someone’s papers for the archive.
Then it hit me.
Could these be Godfrey Priest’s papers?
SIXTEEN
Who else could the papers have belonged to? Godfrey had estimated he had fifty or sixty boxes of papers and books to give to the college archive.
But when had he shipped them?
“Charlie, you still there?”
Rick’s voice brought me back to the conversation. “Yeah, I’m still here. Just a bit stunned, that’s all.”
Rick chuckled into my ear. “Yeah, it’s a huge shipment. And pretty heavy, too. Probably cost a coupla thousand bucks, I bet.”
“If they belonged to whom I think they did, he had plenty of money.” Yeah, the papers were Godfrey’s. He must have called someone and had them shipped right after our conversation yesterday.
“Must be nice.” Rick laughed again. “Anyway, they’re here on the loading dock. Oh, and there’s a letter, too.” There was silence for a moment. When Rick spoke again his tone was somber. “Return address says it’s from Godfrey Priest. I heard he died last night.”
“Yes, he did.” What should I do with Godfrey’s boxes? The sheriff’s department would probably impound them if they knew about them, though I couldn’t imagine what use they would be to Kanesha Berry. Technically they were now the property of Athena College, although I didn’t think Godfrey had signed anything to that effect yet.
Maybe there was something in his letter that stated his intentions.
“I’d better come over there. I’ll meet you on the loading dock in a few minutes.”
“Sure,” Rick said. “I’ll be here.”
I ended the call and stuck the phone back in my pocket. Diesel butted my elbow with his head.
“No, I didn’t forget about you,” I told him. “But we’ve got to take a detour. Sit.”
Diesel sat in the passenger seat. I’d been meaning to get him one of those pet car seats, but since I mostly just drive around town, and pretty slowly at that, I kept putting it off.
About six minutes later I pulled into the loading dock of Hawksworth Library. Built in the 1920s and added to several times over the past eight decades, it was named for an illustrious president of the college who had served right after the Civil War. Altogether it occupied half a block of the street on the north side of the antebellum mansion that housed the archive and some administrative offices.
Rick Tackett, a friendly, stocky fireplug of a man about ten years my senior, stood on the loading dock beside a pallet of boxes.
I rolled the front windows down a little before shutting off the car. “You stay in the car, boy. I won’t be long.”
Diesel yawned at me and curled up on the seat. Sometimes, like now, he was remarkably obedient. Other times he was as headstrong as a Brahma bull. I never knew how he’d react to a command.
Or a suggestion, from a feline point of view.
I climbed up onto the loading dock and shook Rick’s extended hand.
“Morning, Charlie,” he said. He nodded at the neatly stacked and shrink-wrapped boxes. “Here’s the letter.” He pulled it from his back pocket.
The envelope, made of heavyweight paper, screamed expensive, as did the gold-embossed return address bearing Godfrey Priest’s name—or rather, “Godfrey Priest Enterprises Inc.” I guess being a big bestseller was something like running a business.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll just open this and have a quick look, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure thing,” Rick said. “Here.” He handed me a penknife.
I took it and slit open the envelope with the blade and returned the knife to Rick. I extracted the contents, two pages of heavy bond paper.
The top sheet, bearing last Wednesday’s date, was a letter from one Gail Enderby, apparently Godfrey’s administrative assistant. Ms. Enderby explained that she had prepared the boxes for shipping per her boss’s instructions. Each box, she said, contained an inventory of its contents, and box number one—I glanced over at the pallet, and the boxes I could see did bear numbers—contained a master inventory.
With the amount of time all this would have taken to organize, Godfrey had evidently been planning this donation for several months.
The second sheet was a letter from Godfrey himself, dated the day before his assistant’s note. He proclaimed his intent to donate his papers to the Athena College archive. He didn’t mention giving any money along with the papers to cover the costs of processing and housing the collection, but at least this letter ought to give the college clear ownership.
“Good news?” Rick asked when I looked up from the letters.
“Yes. Now I feel like I can answer your question about what to do with these boxes.”
“Great. Where do you want them? Over in your building?”
I eyed the pallet, trying to estimate how much space I had in one of the storage rooms allotted to the archive. “Could you have the boxes numbered one through ten put in the office? I think the rest of them will fit in the archive storage room.”
“No problem.” Rick glanced at his watch. “My guys’ll be having lunch soon. How about they get ’em up there by two? That do?”
“That’s fine.” I was itching to get into box number one and take a gander at Ms. Enderby’s master inventory, but that could wait. “Thanks. I really appreciate it.”
Rick smiled, and I climbed down from the loading dock and rejoined Diesel in the car.
We sat there for a moment as I stared at the boxes above us. How bizarre this was. And yet, how typical of the man.
Godfrey, with his irrepressible ego, was so sure the college would want his papers, he had them boxed and ready to go. What would he have done yesterday, I wondered, if someone had told him the college wasn’t interested?
He would have found a home for them somewhere, but in reality, Athena College, like most private schools these days, couldn’t afford to turn down a gift from a prominent alumnus like Godfrey. Athena would accept anything in the hope that more money would follow.
Diesel rubbed against my arm and chirped loudly, interrupting my train of thought.
“Let’s go home for lunch,” I said, scratching his head. “Then we’re going to come back this afternoon and take a look at those boxes.”
I drove us home and, once we were in the kitchen and I’d taken off his harness, Diesel headed straight for his litter box in the utility room. I went to the refrigerator, feeling a bit peckish. After the big breakfast I’d had, I didn’t want much for lunch.