“You hadn’t known about that?”
“Heavens, no,” she said with genuine abhorrence.
“Did that change your mind about whether Jack might have done it?”
“Well, it certainly gave me pause for thought. But I’m still not sure. I don’t want to think that Jack did it, but it’s difficult to arrive at any other conclusion.”
“What about the mistress?”
Leonora Trane shook her head. “If I know George, she was only someone he toyed with for his own amusement. Someone he could dominate. He couldn’t dominate me, you see. So I suppose he needed someone he could impress. But I’m sure there was no emotional involvement of the sort that would lead to murder. Besides, George was killed here, on the estate. What would his mistress have been doing here?”
“What about business associates? Did anyone dislike him?”
Again she shook her head. “He was very popular. Honest as the day is long, in business anyway. A community figure — served on the school board, the road commission, the library board, the city council.”
No wonder Strawn was convicted so quickly, Dewey thought. He finished his coffee and rose. “Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Trane.”
“Not at all. I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I’m totally without conscience. I’m sorry that George is dead, and I’m sorry that Jack is in so much trouble. But there’s nothing I can do about either of them, is there? And life does go on.”
“It does that,” Dewey Taylor agreed.
This woman, he decided as he was leaving, would not kill for any man.
It was almost noon when Dewey got back to town. He went directly to the library. A young library assistant told him that Elizabeth Lane was downstairs in her workroom. Dewey went down and tapped on the open door. Elizabeth looked up from her desk.
“Oh, hello. Come in. What can I do for the famous reporter today?”
“I’ve come to take you to lunch in celebration of your fifteenth anniversary as the librarian for this splendid little community,” Dewey said glibly.
She smiled the slightest of smiles and continued working. “I take it you’ve been asking Fred Simply some questions. He must have told you that the anniversary to which you refer was three months ago.”
“Yes, he did. I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Too late, I’m afraid.”
Dewey thought for a moment. “Suppose I had been early? Would that have made a difference?”
“Perhaps.”
“All right, then, I’d like to take you to lunch to celebrate your sixteenth anniversary. I’m afraid I’m nine months early.”
She kept working, checking invoices and receipts, initialing them, spiking them on an old-fashioned spindle. But she did smile again. “How do you know I’ll be here in nine months?”
Dewey glanced around the little workroom she had fashioned for herself, the little sanctuary from the lonely nights, the refuge from whatever there was out there in the world that frightened her. “You’ll be here,” he said quietly.
Elizabeth Lane’s smile faded and she self-consciously put one hand on her throat. Their eyes caught in an instant of naked truth. Then the librarian put one more paper on the spindle and said, “All right, I’ll have lunch with you.”
They drove to a little café built on a pier out over the Chattahoochee River, and ordered fried catfish and hush puppies and a pitcher of iced tea. Their table was next to an open wall, and the river slapped gently at the pilings beneath them. In a nearby moss tree growing out of the water, a blue jay quarreled noisily and chased some sparrows from their limb.
“Reminds me of my city editor,” Dewey said, watching the bullying blue jay.
“How long have you been a reporter?” she asked.
“About a hundred years. Seems like, anyway.”
“You must love it.”
“Must I?” he asked dryly.
“Why keep doing it if you don’t?”
He shrugged. “Life’s rut. I have a feeling you know what that is. It’s that limbo state of mind that most humans fall into, where our lives aren’t good enough for us to be happy, but not bad enough for us to make a change. It’s a neutral existence where most days are like most other days, where there’s no excitement, no challenge, nothing to make your blood rush. It’s a life where you never sweat. That’s life’s rut. Sound familiar?”
“Should it?” She tilted her head. “I wonder what Fred Simply has told you about me.”
“Just the usual. You’re a New Rome girl who went to college thirty miles from here, then came back to run the library. Your parents are dead, you’ve never married, you live in the same house where you were bom, all alone except for three cats, and… His words trailed off.
“Go on,” she said evenly, “finish it.”
Dewey remained silent.
“And I’m the town old maid,” she finished it for him. “A dried-up, nearly forty-year-old virgin.” A low fire began to show in her eyes. “Do you believe that?”
Dewey looked at her bare arms, at a bed of freckles just below her throat, at the full lower lip that sometimes gave her an artificial pout. He did not answer her.
“Let’s see if you believe it,” she said. “Supper tonight. At my house.” Her words were clearly a challenge. And her voice was huskier than usual. Dewey felt his mouth go dry.
“All right,” he said. “Supper tonight. At your house.”
They finished lunch. Dewey walked close to her on the way out. He caught a trace of aroma from her.
“I like your perfume,” he said.
“It isn’t perfume, it’s bath oil, but it lingers. I’m glad you like it. It’s my favorite — jasmine.”
Dewey felt a sudden coldness along his spine.
“There s a mistress who may be involved in the Trane murder,” Dewey told Fred Simply later that day. “You and I are going to find out who it is.”
“Uh, sure, Mr. Taylor. How do we, uh, go about it?”
“The way good newsmen go about getting any story, Simply: legwork and investigation. This is your town, you probably know half the people in it; I want you to start talking to those people: quietly and discreetly, not like you’re asking questions, but like you’re just having a private, personal conversation. Trane had a mistress in this town; somebody had to know about it. They had to meet somewhere, so someone must have seen them. Think you can handle it, Simply?”
“Can do, Mr. Taylor. Uh, do you think I might get a byline if we find her?”
“You never can tell, Simply,” the reporter said, throwing him a confidential wink. “Now go to work.”
After Simply left, Dewey walked over to the library. He did not go in, merely sat on a bench under a tree, looking at the neat, white-columned little building, thinking about the woman inside. Elizabeth Lane, with her sensuous arms and dusty freckles and throaty voice, who had stirred old feelings in him; warm, liquid feelings, the kind he had known frequently as a younger man, but had experienced less and less often as he matured and found himself becoming jaded about the world and its creatures.
Resting his head back against the bench, Dewey mused about how unpredictable life was. He had come to New Rome on a routine assignment, to do nothing more than complete a routine story about a routine murder trial. Now here he was about to become involved with a lady librarian. And there was no doubt in his mind that there would be an involvement. No doubt in hers either. When their eyes met over lunch, they had communicated more in a split instant than some couples do in a lifetime. One fleeting moment, and they had registered an intimacy of each other that cried out for fulfillment. A fulfillment which would be consummated tonight in her home, her bed, her body.