Our forks poised in mid-air, Robin and I stared at each other like stricken loonies, and not in lust either.
"In the tub," Robin said.
"With a knife. And the paper clinches it."
"Marat," we said in unison.
"Poor Benjamin," I said on my own. He'd rejected us, launched on his own new direction, and gotten kicked in the nuts.
"Smith would recognize it, right?" Robin asked me after some fruitless speculation on our part.
"I think so," I said confidently. "Arthur's smart and well-read."
"Did you ever find out if the chocolates fit a pattern?" "It rang a bell with Jane Engle," I told him, and then had to explain who she was and why her memory was reliable. He'd only met the members of Real Murders once. "She's looking for the right case."
"Do you think she'll know by tomorrow night?" he asked.
"Well, I may see her today. Maybe she will have found something by then."
"Is there a nice restaurant in Lawrenceton?"
"Well, there's the Carriage House." It was a real carriage house, and required a reservation; the only place in Lawrenceton that had the pretensions to do so. I offered the names of a few more places, but the Carriage House had struck his fancy.
"This lunch is a washout, we haven't eaten half our salad," he pointed out. "Let me take you out tomorrow night, and we'll have time to talk and eat." "Why, thanks. Okay. The Carriage House is a dressy place," I added, and wondered if the hint offended him.
"Thanks for warning me," Robin said to my relief. "I'll walk you back to your car."
When I glanced at my watch, I saw he was right. All this walking, lusting, and speculation had used up as much time as I had, and I'd just make it to work on time.
"If you don't mind making our reservation, I'll pick you up tomorrow at 7:00," Robin said as we reached my car.
Well, we had another date, though I didn't think it was strictly a social date. Robin had a professional interest in these murders, I figured, and I was the local who could interpret the scene for him. But he gave me a peck on the cheek as I eased into my car, and I drove back to Lawrenceton singing James Taylor. That was much nicer than picturing dark, scowling, acne-scarred Morrison Pettigrue turning the bath water scarlet with his blood.
Chapter 10
"Cordelia Botkin, 1898," Jane hissed triumphantly. She'd come up behind me as I was reshelving books that had been checked in. I was at the end of a stack close to the wall, about to wheel my cart around the end and onto the next row. I drew in a breath down low in my chest, shut my eyes, and prayed to forgive her. Tuesday morning had been going so well. "Roe, I'm so sorry! I thought you must have heard me coming."
I shook my head. I tried not to lean on the cart so obviously.
"Cordelia who?" I finally managed to say.
"Botkin. It's close enough. It doesn't actually fit, but it's close enough. This was so sloppy that I think it was an afterthought, or maybe this was even supposed to come off before Mamie Wright was killed." "You're probably right, Jane. The box of candy took six days to get here, and it was mailed from the city, so whoever sent it probably thought I'd get it in two or three days."
I glanced around to see if anyone was in earshot. Lillian Schmidt, another librarian, was shelving books a few stacks away, but she wasn't actually within hearing distance.
"How does it fit, Jane?"
Jane flipped open the notebook she always seemed to have with her. "Cordelia Botkin lived in San Francisco. She became the mistress of the Associated Press bureau chief, John Dunning. He'd left a wife back in..." Jane scanned her notes, "... Dover, Delaware. Botkin mailed the wife several anonymous letters first, did your mother get any?"
I nodded. With a very stiff upper lip, Mother had told Lynn Liggett something she'd never thought significant enough to tell me: she'd gotten an incomprehensible and largely nasty anonymous letter in the mail a few days before the candy came. She'd thought the incident so ugly and meaningless that she hadn't wanted to "upset" me with it. She had thrown it away, of course, but it had been typed.
I was willing to bet it had been typed on the same machine that had typed the mailing label on the package.
"Anyway," Jane continued after checking her notes, "Cordelia finally decided Dunning was going back to his wife, so she poisoned some bonbons and mailed them to Dunning's wife. The wife and a friend of hers died." "Died," I said slowly.
Jane nodded, tactfully keeping her eyes on her notes. "Your father is still in newspapers, isn't he, Roe?"
"Yes, he's not a reporter, but he's head of the advertising department." "And he's living with his new wife, which could be said to represent ‘another woman'."
"Well, yes."
"So obviously the murderer saw the outline was roughly the same and seized the opportunity."
"Did you tell Arthur Smith about this?"
"I thought I had better," Jane said, with a wise nod of her head.
"What did he say?" I asked.
"He wanted to know which book I'd gotten my information from, wrote that down, thanked me, looked harassed, and told me goodbye. I got the impression he's having trouble convincing his superiors about the significance of these murders. What was in the candy, do you know yet?"
"No, they took the box to the state lab for analysis. Arthur warned us that some of the tests take quite a while."
Lillian was moving closer and looking curious, a chronic state with Lillian. But all my co-workers were regarding me with more than normal interest. A quiet librarian finds a body at the meeting of a pretty odd club on Friday night, gets a box of doctored chocolates in the mail on Saturday, turns up dressed in all-new and uncharacteristic clothes on Monday, has a whispered conference with an excited woman on Tuesday.
"I'd better go. I'm disturbing you at work," Jane whispered. She knew Lillian quite well. "But I was so excited when I tracked down the pattern, I just had to run down here and tell you. Of course, the Communist man's murder was patterned after the Marat assassination. Poor Benjamin Greer! He found the body, the newscast said."
"Jane, I appreciate your researching this for me," I hissed back. "I'll take you out to lunch next week to thank you." The last thing I wanted to talk about was Morrison Pettigrue's murder.
"Oh, my goodness, that's not necessary. You gave me something to do for a while. Substituting at the school and filling in here are interesting, but nothing has been as much fun in a long time as tracking down the right murder. However, I suspect I will have to get a new hobby. All these deaths, all this fear. This is getting too close to the bone for me." And Jane sighed, though whether over the deaths of Mamie Wright and Morrison Pettigrue, or because she had to find a new hobby, I could not tell.
I was on the second floor of the library, which is a large gallery running around three walls and overlooking the ground floor, where the children's books, periodicals, and circulation desk are located. I was watching Jane stride out the front door and thinking about Cordelia Botkin when I recognized someone else who was exiting. It was Detective Lynn Liggett. The library director, Sam derrick, seemed to be walking her to the door. This struck me unpleasantly. I could only suppose that Lynn Liggett had been at the library asking questions about me. Maybe she had wanted to know my work hours? More about my character? How long I had been at work that day?
Filled with uneasy speculation, I rounded the corner of the next stack. I began shelving books automatically, still brooding over Detective Liggett's visit to the library. There was nothing bad Sam Clerrick could tell her about me, I reasoned. I was a conscientious employee. I was always on time, and I almost never got sick. I had never yelled at a member of the public, no matter how I'd been tempted—especially by parents who dumped their children at the library in the summer with instructions to amuse themselves for a couple of hours while mommy and daddy went shopping.