See Also Deception (6 page)

CHAPTER 9

The Dickinson Public Library sat on a tree-lined street at the very edge of the residential and business district of town. I'd always thought that the people who lived within walking distance of the library were the luckiest people in the world, especially in winter when all they had to do was bundle up and make an easy trek to the warm, old building. For me, a trip into town could take an hour or two in the middle of January, a half hour at most other times of the year. Time spent at the library was usually tagged onto some other reason for making the journey to town; a doctor's appointment, stocking up on meat, or running into the Rexall for a necessity of one kind or another. Except today. This trip was all about the library, all about Calla Eltmore.

The library, like so many, had been built with the help of a financial gift from Andrew Carnegie. It had opened to readers in 1910. The building was a simple design, yellow brick, a large window on each side of a grand set of steps that led up to the door, the interior was two thousand square feet at the most. The inside ceiling was high, intricately tapped tin that had weathered the years beautifully. Not quite a cathedral, but as close as there was to one as far as I was concerned. A west wing with a full basement had been added on in 1938 by Roosevelt's WPA program. Father called the WPA the We Poke Along Society, and for years that's exactly what I thought the acronym stood for. Some men were offended by the suggestion that they didn't work hard for their relief during the Depression, but others agreed with Father. Still, the craftsmanship of the building had endured, so the task had been undertaken with a high amount of skill and respect. I was glad of that.

Calla had become the librarian a year after the renovation and was just as much a fixture at the library, as were the bookshelves that held a multitude of volumes of pleasure and knowledge. The library was hallowed ground to me, even though the Lutheran church was a few blocks away. My soul had been nourished far more by the time I'd spent in the library than it had in the time I had spent in any pew.

I sat in the Studebaker, parked on the opposite side of the street, staring at the building, still unable to believe that Calla was dead, that she wouldn't be there to greet me with a surprised smile when I walked through the front doors unannounced.

I had to look away from the building for fear of tearing up all over again.
Get yourself together, Marjorie
.

I looked in the rearview mirror and flipped a stray strand of hair from my forehead. My hair was cut shoulder-length and had some natural waves to it. A few wiry sprigs of gray had started to sprout at my temples, but I'd never been tempted to pluck them.

A car passed, drawing my attention away from my reflection in the mirror. It went on down to 1st Street and turned right.
You're going to have to face this sooner or later, Marjorie
, I thought to myself as I pushed open the truck door.
Might as well get on with it
.

I wasn't sure if they were my words I was hearing or my mother's. She had little use for dilly-dallying. She was hard as nails on the outside and soft as pudding on the inside. Some of her rigidness was due to the conditions of life on the plains, what it demanded of you. I think she was just born with the rest, determined to pass on her steel spine to me. Most days I appreciated her insistence on character, but on this day I could have used some pudding.

The wind rushed straight down 3rd Street, careening out of the north, bringing with it a push of October cold; a harbinger of things to come. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees since I'd left home. I immediately glanced up at the sky before crossing the street. The perfect blue dome was being replaced by a sullen gray blanket. The sun glowed like a shimmering white plate hanging by an invisible thread, and I wondered if I would see it clearly again before the coming of spring.

The smell of burning leaves touched my nose, and I worried that someone would be careless with the flames. Grass fires could get out of control easily, especially since it had been dry recently. Fire was a fear the community held in unison, both out in the country and in town—making an exception for Twelfth Night, when we all gathered at the Lutheran church to burn our Christmas trees. Nature didn't just toss its wrath down from the sky—it was a threat at nearly every step, as I well knew.
Damn gopher hole.

I squared my shoulders, looked up and down the street, and found as much resolve as I could to take a step forward. I clutched my purse with both hands, worried that my lipstick wasn't as fresh as it could be, and hoping that my coat didn't smell of cigarette smoke. I moved on, hurrying toward the front doors of the library.

I was halfway up the stairs when I saw a woman push her way out the front doors of the library. She was shorter than I was, and older by at least twenty years. Her hair was salt and pepper gray, nicely coifed, not a hair out of place, and she was dressed in an outfit that had surely been bought off-the-rack at one of the fine women's stores in Bismarck. Her wool skirt was a lustrous tan, a result of well-fed sheep tended to under a tumultuous Scottish sky, and her jacket was a big brown plaid. Even from a distance the woman was strikingly beautiful—with the exception of her puffy red eyes and the smear of makeup on her right cheek.

The woman noticed me as she stepped off the first step. She put her unmarred heel in a place that wasn't there, and she instantly lurched forward, sending a pile of books straight up into the air. She tried to capture them. Tried to hang onto the ones that she could like they were made of fragile china and would shatter to pieces on impact. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The books rained down with predictable thuds. They sounded like soft rocks falling from the sky, hitting the cement as solidly as if they'd been thrown on purpose.

The wind screamed, but no sound came from the woman's mouth as she relented to the fall and realized that she wasn't capable of saving the books—or herself. She hit the ground with the same soft thud as the books, rolled a bit, then bounced down two steps and came to a stop on her shoulder without a whimper or a moan. It all happened in the blink of an eye, and I didn't know whether to stop or run to her.

Honestly, I thought she was dead.

CHAPTER 10

A pair of rimless glasses landed at my feet. The left lens had cracked from one corner to the other. The right one was missing altogether. There had been all kinds of noise as the woman tumbled my way; soft flesh hitting hard cement, and books flying without wings and landing harshly on the ground.

“Oh, my,” I gasped, then hurried to the women without another thought.

She lay on the ground, not moving a muscle, her arm tucked on her right side and her knees pulled up in a fetal position. To my relief, her eyes were fully open, with life still in them. A trickle of fresh blood trailed out of the corner of her mouth.

A car passed on the street behind me, but it went on, leaving only the woman and me. There was no one around as I kneeled beside her and looked for help at the same time.

She began to move her right arm in an awkward and painful attempt to prop herself up and try to stand. Her lips twisted into a grimace. There was only a hint of lipstick remaining on them—probably smeared off for a reason, long before the fall.

“Don't move,” I said. My words were soft, overridden by the push of the chilly north wind. I wasn't sure the woman had heard me, so I said it again, more emphatically. “Don't move.” It was definitely my mother's voice, commanding, sharp with authority.

The woman nodded and surrendered. I'd always wondered whether Hank would have ended up paralyzed if he had been handled a little more gently. I'd never blamed anyone for helping him, for rushing him out of the grouse field as quickly as they could. He was going to be blind—the angle of the shotgun when it had gone off had made sure of that—but the paralysis, that was another thing entirely.

“Does anything feel broken?” I said.

She didn't answer straight away; she just stared up at me, then at the sky. I didn't think she was reading the clouds for coming weather or wind, just making sure they were still there.

Her lips trembled, then she closed her eyes slowly, softly, like some hidden door for the final time.

“Can you wiggle your toes and fingers?” I said.

“Yes, I'm fine. Really,” she said as she opened her eyes again. They were hazel, the tint of an uncertain summer day. Her skin was pale, fragile white alabaster, but the color had started to return to her face. “I need to get home. Claude doesn't know that I left the house. I have a roast in the oven. It'll burn.” She stopped speaking, but I knew the fear of a man in another woman's voice when I heard it. And
there'd be hell to pay
, I assumed she would have said, finishing the sentence, if she'd known me better.

“That was a hard fall you took,” I said. “You should take a minute. Catch your breath.”

I set my purse on the ground, pulled my handkerchief out, and went to dab the blood from the corner of the woman's mouth. She recoiled like a skittish stray dog meeting an overly friendly stranger for the first time.

I pulled back, fearful of crossing an unseen boundary. “I won't hurt you,” I whispered.

She nodded with a soft, open stare. “I know you won't. Really, I'm fine. I must get home. You don't understand.”

The wind rippled an open book behind me. “If you're sure nothing's broken and you can move everything without pain, then sit up slowly. I'll help you if that's all right?”

“Yes, of course, it's fine.”

I lifted the woman up with ease. She helped, was steadier than I'd expected her to be, and I also had the advantage of living my life on the farm. I'd helped to bale hay more times in my life than I could count, carried in countless cords of firewood from the stack to the house in the middle of winter, and tended and turned Hank more times in a day than I cared to count.

She exhaled and stared me in the face once she was fully on her feet again. “Thank you,” she said. “I'm lucky the wind isn't any fiercer today.”

I handed her my handkerchief, and she took it without a shiver and wiped away the blood from the corner of her lip. It looked swollen, like she might have bit it during the fall.

Certain that she was steady, I looked about and hurried to the closest book. I picked it up and hesitated. The book was an old, red leather-bound, with gilt letters. It was
Men and Women
by Robert Browning. My heart stopped. I'd never read the book and had little personal history with Browning as a poet. I'd never been enamored by the Victorian poets—but Calla Eltmore had been.

The woman tore the book out of my hand. “I really must go. Thank you for your help,” she said, then hurried away from me, leaving the other books and her broken glasses behind.

I picked up the fragile frames and called out, “Don't you need these?”

She ignored me, didn't bother to look back, and disappeared from sight in a matter of two shakes. I stared down at the glasses, then went to my purse and put them in the side pocket. I couldn't just leave them there.

The wind rose up again, making me wish I had worn a heavier coat. The pages of the scattered books flipped and tore open again, leaving me no choice but to gather them up like mindless chickens. Where was Shep when I needed him?

CHAPTER 11

Strangers were most often welcomed with open hearts and suspicious minds in North Dakota. It may sound like a contradiction, but the truth of the matter was that the sudden appearance of a new person in town, or anywhere else for that matter, was about as rare as seeing a shooting star blazing across a clear blue sky on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Under normal circumstances, Calla Eltmore would have served her time at the library, retired with some small comfort, and made sure that a new librarian was properly installed into her previous position, fully trained and completely aware of the nuances the job required. But the circumstances of the moment were hardly normal, and for some reason the possibility of retirement wasn't something that had given Calla hope, or the will to live. I had no idea what to expect of the person standing behind the librarian's desk.

I plopped the recovered books on the counter with a little louder thump than I had intended. The sound shot up to the two-story tin ceiling and echoed throughout the building with a doom-inspired volume that surprised me. It sounded like a gun had gone off, and I immediately regretted not being more careful; more aware of where I was and why I was there.

The unknown woman spun around and faced me with a hard scowl on her face. She was a head taller than I was, but that was mostly due to the deep brunette hair piled high on her graying scalp. Her hair looked like a boll of cotton that had been dyed, grown upward, then started to wither at the roots; there was no hiding her age, no matter how hard she tried. I had little trust in a woman who changed the color of her hair with a potent mixture of magical chemicals that came out of a dime-store box. Her vanity shocked me.

“May I help you?” the woman demanded. She stepped toward me and I saw, too, that her height was aided by three-inch high heels, not the expected comfortable, sensible shoes like Calla had always worn. She looked me up and down and a judgmental sneer flickered across her face. You would have thought I was wearing a flour sack dress.

“The woman who just left . . .” I flicked my head over my shoulder, then turned back quickly to meet the steel, unchanged gaze of the new librarian. “She dropped these on the way out and went off without them.”

“You mean she just left them there?” the woman demanded, twisting her lip up further in disdain.

“Um, yes, she did.”

“These books are library property, bought and paid for with tax dollars, or by donations from generous patrons. There's a fine for that.” There were wrinkles above the woman's lips that couldn't be filled in by any amount of foundation. They were flared wide open. I guessed she was about ten years older than I was and wound up tighter than barbed wire freshly strung.