Susan froze, hand on the coffeepot. Today she had a chopstick in her updo. “Blood?”
“I’m not sure,” I said again.
“Can’t be. Easton wasn’t bleeding when he left and he wasn’t even over there. Do they think he came back?” She refilled her cup, then came around the table and topped up mine.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I don’t see how he could have come in again without me seeing him.” Susan sat across from me again. “I didn’t leave the desk, Kathleen.”
“I know that.” I poured a packet of sugar in my cup before it all ended up in Susan’s.
“And I don’t see how he could have snuck in. Or even why he would.” She shook her head. “Easton wasn’t subtle. He struck me as the kind of person who always made an entrance, who sucked all the air out of the room.”
I tried to get a mental picture of Gregor Easton slinking back into the library, creeping past the circulation desk while Susan was busy. And to do what? Go bleed on the floor of a half-finished meeting room? What would that accomplish? From my one encounter with Easton while he was alive, I felt sure a showy, melodramatic scene was more his style. “You’re right,” I said to Susan. “Gregor Easton didn’t seem like the kind of person to do anything unobtrusively. We don’t know what the police found on the floor downstairs. We certainly don’t know it was blood. And if,
if
it was, it’s probably from one of the workmen.”
“Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. One of those guys was carrying a piece of wood and almost took my head off last week. Then he turned around so fast he took out an entire shelf of paperbacks with the other end of the board.”
“Not everyone is Oren,” I said.
Susan grinned. “You’ve got that right.”
I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to nine. “That reminds me,” I said, as I stood up and took my cup to the sink to rinse it. “The rest of the reference books are coming from Everett’s warehouse this morning. Could you get them shelved, please?”
“Sure.” Susan chugged the last of her coffee and set her mug in the sink.
“Mary will be here at ten,” I said. “She can cover the desk and the phones. I’m going to see if I can figure out what we have for the computer room and what we still need. Oren will be here late this afternoon to at least get the furniture together.”
The truck from Everett’s warehouse pulled up to the back door of the library at exactly nine thirty. The driver used a small, wheeled dolly to move the crates of books into the building. He took off the tops with just a hammer and his hands, as if they were pull tops on cans of tuna, had me check each crate, sign for everything,
ma’am
ed me half a dozen times and was gone in less than fifteen minutes.
Susan started unpacking the books as soon as Mary arrived to handle the desk.
I got my trusty five-in-one, multipurpose Ginsu tool from my office. (It’s a knife! It’s a screwdriver! It’s a corkscrew! It’s scissors! It’s a blade for opening anything encased in plastic! Wow!) And, yes, I’d bought it from a late-night infomercial—in between ads for spray hair in a can and the amazing panini press—but it really worked. It was great for cutting open boxes, hermetically sealed plastic packages and the occasional coffee cake from Susan’s husband, Eric. And I liked knowing that if I ever needed to saw through a soda can, I could do that, too.
The soon-to-be computer room was piled with boxes and unassembled furniture. I set the three printer cartons under the window. The monitors were already stacked in the corner. I left them there. The chairs were shrouded in yards of plastic film, one upside down on another, as though someone had gone a little crazy with a giant-sized roll of sandwich wrap. I pushed those against the end wall. Leaning up against the last pair of chairs was a long, flat box—the other table for the children’s department. I’d been looking for that for almost a week. I knew if I left it Oren would put that together, too, but all it needed was to have the legs attached to the top. How hard could that be for a woman with a multipurpose, five-in-one Ginsu tool?
Harder than I thought. It took the better part of an hour to attach legs A1 through A4 to top B with screws DD, nuts FF and washers EEE. There were bits of plastic and bubble wrap all over the floor and clinging to my shirt when I was finished. I went upstairs and got the small vacuum we kept in the staff room, and prowled the walls looking for an outlet to plug it into. The rewiring of that section of the library obviously hadn’t been done. Another thing to talk to Will about when he showed up. Assuming he showed at all today.
Finally, under the end window, behind a printer box, I found an outlet. I leaned over the box and stretched to push in the plug. There was a loud snapping sound and sparks flew up. So did I, backward onto the floor. I lost a few seconds, maybe half a minute. I opened my eyes and looked up into Detective Gordon’s blue ones. I struggled to sit up.
“Take it easy, Ms. Paulson,” he said.
“I’m all right,” I said. And I was, except for the tingling in my fingers, the buzzing ache in my arm and the high-pitched sound of crickets in my ear.
“I don’t think you are.”
At that moment Roma came around the end of the bookshelves. “Kathleen, what happened?” she asked. “I came in the door and Mary said you were hurt.”
“I got a little shock when I plugged in the vacuum cleaner,” I said.
“A little shock?” exclaimed Susan. I hadn’t seen her standing behind Detective Gordon. “There were sparks and a big bang, and she went flying.”
“Would you take a look at her, please?” Detective Gordon asked, getting to his feet.
“She’s a vet,” Susan said. She gave Roma an apologetic look. “No offense.”
Roma smiled. “None taken. You’re right. But I do have first-aid training.” She knelt beside me.
“Roma, I’m all right, really,” I said.
She laid a hand on my shoulder. “Kathleen,” she said, “stop talking just for a moment, please.” She began feeling my scalp, probing gently under my hair for bumps. “Did you hit your head?”
“No,” I said. I shifted position and winced. “I did bang my hip.”
She fished in her pocket, pulled out a set of keys and held them up to Susan. “My car is in the lot—it’s the dark blue four-by-four. There’s a black bag behind the driver’s seat. Would you get it for me, please?”
“Sure,” Susan said, taking the keys.
Roma turned back to me, reached for my arm and pressed two fingers to my wrist while she checked her watch. After that she sat back on her heels. “What happened?” she asked.
“I was plugging in the vacuum cleaner. There was a loud snap, sparks and I went over backward.”
She glanced up at Detective Gordon, who nodded his agreement. “Which hand?” Roma asked.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Which hand was holding the plug?”
“Oh. This one.” I held up my right hand.
Susan came back then with Roma’s bag and set it beside us. “Thank you,” Roma said. She opened the bag and pulled out a stethoscope. As she put the round metal end on my chest I hoped the last place it had been wasn’t a horse’s rear.
“Take a deep breath and bark,” Roma said.
Vet humor,
I figured.
She listened in several places, then pulled the ends of the stethoscope out of her ears. “Let’s try standing up,” she said.
Detective Gordon offered his hand. I took it and got to my feet. My arm still felt numb, but the high-pitched whine in my ear was almost gone. “See?” I said, holding out both hands. “I’m all right.” I turned to Roma. “Thank you.”
She bent to stuff the stethoscope in her bag. “You’re welcome. But you should see a doctor—one who specializes in people, not pets and farm animals.”
I thought about spending the rest of the morning sitting at the clinic, waiting to be seen by a doctor who wouldn’t do anything more than Roma had done. “I promise if I feel sick or off in any way, I’ll go,” I said. Susan, standing with her arms crossed, shook her head.
“Kathleen, do you know why I became a vet?” Roma asked.
“No.”
“Because my patients never second-guess me.” She smiled to soften the criticism. Then the smile faded. “If you feel funny at all, go to the hospital. Don’t wait around.”
“I will,” I said.
Roma swung the strap of her bag over her shoulder. She nodded at Susan and Detective Gordon. “I’ll see you tonight,” she said to me, and headed back to the checkout desk.
“You sure you’re okay?” Susan asked. “You hit the floor pretty hard.”
“I am, really,” I said, rubbing my hip. “Just a bit sore.”
“Okay. I’m going back to shelving. If you need anything, yell.” She grinned. “Maybe not as loudly as last time, though.” She disappeared around the corner.
I turned to Detective Gordon. “I won’t ask you if you’re really okay,” he said.
“Thank you.” I rubbed my arm. It still had a faint pins-and-needles feeling.
He walked over to the window to take a closer look at the outlet. There was soot on the wall plate and an ashy black scorch mark arced a good six inches above it on the wall.
“I don’t think that’s going to work anymore,” he said, pointing to the electrical cord on the vacuum. The plastic plug had melted into a misshapen blob.
“I think we have a broom somewhere,” I said. Then I remembered that the somewhere was the half-completed meeting room.
Detective Gordon was crouched down, studying the scorched outlet. He looked up at the ceiling. “I’m surprised you didn’t blow a fuse,” he said. “Still, I don’t think it’s a good idea to plug anything in here until it’s checked out by an electrician.”
I nodded. “You’re right.”
“Do you have any masking tape? We should mark this off so no one else uses it, either.”
“I think there’s a roll at the circulation desk. Let me check.”
I walked around to the desk. Mary was just hanging up the phone. “Kathleen, are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine, Mary,” I said, forcing a smile. “It was just a little shock.” I didn’t handle it well when people fussed over me. I was used to looking after other people, not the other way around. “Do we have any masking tape?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. Right here.” She pulled open the drawer below her computer monitor and handed the tape to me with a smile. She smelled like cinnamon and Ivory soap and looked just like someone’s sweet grandma—which she was. She was also state champion for her age and weight class in kickboxing.
“Mary, did Mr. Easton come back to the library Tuesday night after I walked him out?”
“No. Not while I was here.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I took the tape back to Detective Gordon. He crossed two pieces over the outlet in a large X. Then pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket and wrote DANGEROUS! DO NOT USE! on a third piece and stuck that above the X. “That should do it,” he said, standing up and brushing off his hands.
“Thank you.” He must have come to the library for a reason, I realized then. What was it?
“Was there something you wanted, Detective?” I asked. “You didn’t just stop by to pick me up off the floor and safety-proof the building.”
“No, I didn’t.” His smile disappeared. “Ms. Paulson, you said Mr. Easton was looking for an Internet connection when he came in Tuesday evening.”
“That’s right.” Suddenly I felt cold. I folded my arms over my chest.
“So you would have been standing . . . here?” He held out his hands, palms up.
“Yes.”
“Did Mr. Easton go anywhere else in the library?”
I shook my head. “Other than out the door, no.”
He looked me straight in the eye and I met his gaze head-on. I didn’t know where the conversation was going, but I didn’t have anything to hide.
“Did Mr. Easton come back to the library?”
“No. He didn’t come back while I was here. Susan and Mary covered the desk after that and they didn’t see him.”
He stared at me, hands jammed in his pockets, his face unreadable. If the guy who’d helped me off the floor was Nice Cop, then this had to be Mean Cop.
“Ms. Paulson,” he said, finally. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you what happens to people who lie?”
“Actually, my mother said, ‘Always tell the truth, because it’s much easier to remember,’” I said.
Detective Gordon said nothing.
“You think he came back?”
A tiny muscle twitched in his cheek.
“No,” I said slowly. “You’re certain he came back. That’s why you won’t let it go.” I looked across the library. One of the heavy sheets of plastic had been taken down. “You picked something up off the floor after we saw those spots of blood. What was it?”
He cleared his throat. “Part of a cuff link.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” I played with my watch. “Easton didn’t come back while I was here. Both Mary and Susan said they didn’t see him, either. And they don’t have any reason to lie.”
“Do you?” the detective asked.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a couple of deep breaths. “No,” I said.
I held up one finger. “I met Gregor Easton for the first and only time Tuesday night.” I added a second finger. “I did not know Mr. Easton.” Now three fingers. “Mr. Easton and I were not having an affair, a relationship or an encounter of any kind.” Finally, I stuck my arm out and held up four fingers. “And if Mr. Easton came back to the library Tuesday night, I don’t know when or how he did.”
Detective Gordon’s face was still unreadable, except for that tiny, pulsing muscle. He pulled out a piece of paper. “Then why did he have a note from you in his pocket?”
6
Single Whip
“W
hat do you mean, a note from me?”I asked, my heart suddenly thumping in my ears.
He handed me the paper. It was a photocopy of an original, which had been written on library stationery.
Meet me at the library at eleven thirty. Kathleen
, was all that was on the page. I looked up at him. “I didn’t write this,” I said.