Arsenic and Old Books

SEVENTEEN

I decided I was a little too prone to flights of fancy not grounded in fact. There was no telling who originally placed this one volume in the false bottom or what the motivation was. Because of everything that had occurred in the past couple of days, I was overthinking this.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “This volume will be stored safely in the more secure room next door when I leave tonight.”

“Excellent,” Mrs. Long said. “Now I really have to be on my way. I’m already late for a meeting.”

Kanesha added her farewells to mine. Once the mayor was gone we sat again.

“Are they going to do anything about the lock on this door?” Kanesha asked.

“I’m sure they will now,” I said. “I think they ought to put cameras up here, too. Probably nothing like this will ever happen again, but it sure would be nice to have the added security.”

“I’d be willing to bet Chief Ford has already mentioned that to your boss,” Kanesha replied. “This building is way overdue for a security makeover.”

I tried to keep the bitterness out of my tone when I spoke, but I doubt I was successful. “Yes, it is overdue, but the college administration has different priorities. If it were something involving the football team, you can bet it would have been addressed long ago. A piddly little thing like an archive with rare or irreplaceable documents doesn’t rate beside a sports team.”

Kanesha frowned. “You’d think they’d get a better return on their money on the field, if they’re spending so much of it on sports.”

Our college football team hadn’t had a winning season in three years now, and the alumni were not happy. The administration kept shifting money to scholarships for athletes in an attempt to lure gifted ones to Athena. So far it didn’t seem to have worked all that well.

“You’re right about that,” I said. Time to get this conversation back on track. “I’ll pack the diaries in a box. I’m sure you don’t want to wait until I make new boxes for them.”

“No, we don’t have time for that.” Kanesha nodded. “Use those cotton gloves, and touch as little of the surfaces of the books and those boxes as possible. I doubt we’re going to find any fingerprints, but you never know.”

“I’ll be careful.” Her instructions irritated me a bit because by now, I thought, she surely ought to realize I knew enough to be careful. I found an empty box in the supply closet and brought it back, along with the four large manila envelopes the mayor had used to contain the diaries before.

I slipped each book into an envelope with great care, then sealed the metal clasp on the envelope and placed it in the box. When I finished, I said, “I’m going to pray that the techs at the crime lab will be that careful as well.”

“The mayor will see to it,” Kanesha said. “She knows the right people to make sure of it, even though she didn’t sound all that confident talking to us.”

“Okay,” I replied. I really hated to see the diaries leave my office again, but I knew it had to be done. “You know, we got sidetracked right away with the sudden reappearance, and then the mayor coming in with her surprise. You never did ask me what you wanted to know about Marie.”

“I hadn’t forgotten.” Kanesha settled back in her chair. “Take me through any encounter you had with Dr. Steverton during the past couple of days.”

I took a moment to marshal my thoughts. Then I launched into my recital of events. There was an interlude of about three minutes when Kanesha’s deputy arrived to pick up the four diaries. Once he left with the box, I resumed my narrative.

Kanesha did not ask questions until I finished. I appreciated that about her. She was patient and listened, rather than interrupting and perhaps making me forget something.

“I’ll be interviewing Ms. Grimes sooner rather than later,” she said. “Obviously she and Dr. Steverton were at cross purposes with each other.”

“Yes, they were,” I said. I recounted my experiences with Kelly Grimes, the ones that didn’t directly involve poor Marie. “She impressed me as being as eager as Marie to get hold of the diaries. Did you search her house?”

“Apartment,” Kanesha said. “We did and turned up nothing. Based on our searches, I had to conclude that if either woman took those diaries, they managed to hide them real well. Maybe in another location.”

“What about Jasper Singletary?”

“According to his campaign manager, he was at a meeting in Jackson at three o’clock. He made it back to Athena around ten last night.” Kanesha shrugged. “I have an appointment with him at ten thirty this morning.” She checked her watch. “Twenty-five minutes from now.”

“In order to be in Jackson for a meeting at three, he would have to have left Athena no later than one,” I said. “If he left Jackson around eight he could make it back here by ten, I suppose.”

“Yeah, I’d worked all that out myself.” Kanesha stood.

“Sorry,” I said. “Bad habit of thinking aloud.”

“Sure,” Kanesha said. “I’ll probably come back to you with more questions after I’ve dug a little deeper into all this. In the meantime, if you find anything pertinent in that diary, let me know.”

Diesel meowed and a moment later I felt a paw on my shoulder. I could hear Kanesha’s boots on the marble stairs as she descended.

“What’s up, boy?” I turned my chair to face the cat on the windowsill. “You want to visit Melba, don’t you?”

Diesel meowed again.

“I bet she’ll be here in the next two minutes. You just wait and see.” I knew Melba’s curiosity would be at fever pitch by now. She probably would have seen Kanesha come or go—the mayor as well. I was sure she had already heard about Marie’s death.

I turned back to face the doorway. One . . . two . . . three . . . I made it to seventeen before she popped up.

“What the heck is going on around here?” she asked as she took the chair in front of my desk. “Hey, Diesel, come give Melba some sugar.”

Diesel reached her before she got out the last few words. While she cuddled with the cat, I responded to her question.

“I found the missing diaries in my office this morning. No idea who had them or why they reappeared.”

Melba continued loving on Diesel while I told her the rest. As I suspected, she had already heard about Marie’s death. A friend of hers owned a house two doors down from the neighbor who found Marie in the street, and the whole neighborhood was abuzz with the story. Melba’s friend called her first thing this morning to share the terrible news.

We chatted for a few more minutes about the unfortunate Marie; then I told Melba gently that I was anxious to start work on the one volume of the diary I had available to me.

Melba grinned at me. “I guess I’d better scoot back downstairs before I wear out my welcome here completely.” She gave the cat a couple more scratches on the head before she headed out the door.

“Thanks,” I called after her.

Diesel muttered at me because Melba left. He lost his source of undivided attention, and he was not happy about it.

“Melba has to get back to work like I do,” I told him. “You be good now and get back up in your spot on the window.”

He stared at me for a moment before he padded around my desk and climbed back into the window. He continued to make grumbling noises, fainter and fainter, as I focused on my task.

I extracted the fifth diary volume from the mayor’s tote bag. I would have to remember to return that to her at some point. After a quick examination I determined that this book was in roughly the same condition as the others. Flaky but intact leather binding, with the same issues from the iron gall ink as the previous volumes. Only about half the pages, I estimated, contained writing. The remainder of the book was blank.

Curious, I checked the first and last entries. Rachel Long had neatly dated each entry, and that was helpful. The first entry had the date of March 9, 1861. The last entry, about two-thirds of the way through the volume, was written on May 17, 1865.

If I recalled correctly, Rachel started her diary in July of 1854. To judge by the dates of this volume, it must be either the second or third of the five in terms of chronology. I wondered why a middle volume had been secreted in the trunk. I was also curious why she stopped writing in this one before she had filled it.

I had to resist the temptation to sit there and read it. The answers to many questions could lie within these pages. It would take me a little while to get used to Rachel’s handwriting, but I was confident I could decipher it. I really needed to scan the pages first, however. At least if something happened to this volume, I would have the scans.

That thought caught me a bit off guard. If word got out about this fifth volume, would the person who stole the others try to take this one, too?