Final Catcall

7

Abigail came into the library just after we opened in the morning. There were dark circles, like smudges of charcoal, under her eyes, and her usually smiling face was serious. Ben was with her.

“Kathleen, do you have a couple of minutes?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. I gave Ben a small smile. “Hi.”

“You know about Hugh Davis, don’t you?” Abigail said, pushing the strap of her messenger bag up on her shoulder.

I nodded. “Yes, I do.”

Three women came in the front door and made a beeline for the cookbook section. They were followed by a teenage girl, her platinum and black hair sticking up all over her head, carrying a pile of books stacked so high she could rest her chin on top—and did—yawning as she carried them to the desk.

“Come up to my office. It’s a little quieter there,” I said, gesturing toward the stairs.

Ben and Abigail took the two chairs in front of my desk, while I leaned back against it. “I’m sorry about Hugh,” I said. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes,” Ben said. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, elbows propped on his knees. “Call Thea and ask her to come fill in for Hugh.”

“Please,” Abigail added.

I ran one hand along the edge of the dark wood of the desk. “Like I told you, Mom’s in Los Angeles, doing Wild and Wonderful.”

Ben leaned forward. “We got lucky. I talked to a friend out there. The show’s going to be dark for the next ten days—some kind of renovations to the studio. She’ll come if you ask her.”

He was right. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to ask.

I loved my family. When I’d gone home to visit during the summer I’d realized just how much I missed them. All four of them—Mom, Dad, Sara, and Ethan—were exuberant and melodramatic and sometimes it felt as though they sucked all the air out of the room. Mayville Heights was the first place I’d ever lived where I was Kathleen first, not Ethan’s big sister or Thea’s daughter.

My mother was a force of nature. No one ever forgot her. I had a mental picture of her holding court at Eric’s, teaching a stunt-fighting class on the Riverwalk or, heaven forbid, getting onstage with Mary for amateur night at the Brick, strutting her stuff in a feathered corset to Bon Jovi or Beyoncé. She was capable of doing all that and then some.

On the other hand, she was a good director and an even better actor, and if she came, the festival could continue.

And I missed her.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Abigail looked tired, the expression in her eyes almost pleading. Whatever relationship she’d had before the festival with Hugh Davis was none of my business. I’d learned how to size people up from my mother. And I knew Abigail. She hadn’t had anything to do with Hugh’s death. Mayville Heights was my home now. I wanted the New Horizons festival to be successful as much as anyone else in town did.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll ask her.”

Abigail closed her eyes for a second and I saw some of the tension ease in her shoulders.

Ben’s face relaxed into a smile. His eyes darted to the phone. “Why don’t you call her right now?” he said.

I laughed. “It’s quarter after seven in Los Angeles, Ben.”

My dad insisted Mom had been a raccoon in a past life. She liked shiny things and roaming around at night. She didn’t like mornings. When she had to be up early, she did it with more of her usual dramatic flare.

Ben leaned back in the chair. “She’s probably had a lot earlier wake-up call for the past couple of weeks.”

“And it’s Saturday. I promise I’ll call her after lunch, but unless you want to hear ‘menj el à máj’ growled at you, you won’t call her now.”

“Menj el what?” Ben said.

“Menj el à máj,” I said. “It loosely translates to ‘go away or I’ll eat your liver.’ It’s Hungarian. I think.”

“Your mother speaks Hungarian?” Abigail asked, reaching for her bag.

“Let’s just say my mom knows a lot of ‘colorful’ expressions in a lot of different languages.”

“I think I’m going to like her,” she said, pulling a dark green folder out of the canvas satchel.

I nodded. “Yes, you are.”

I really wanted her to come, I realized. My mother wasn’t the conventional bake-cookies/remind-you-to-wear-clean-underwear kind of mom. The only things she could make with any degree of success were baking powder biscuits, lemonade and toast. And the toast was iffy. And the only advice she’d ever given me pertaining to underwear was to tell me not to get my knickers in a knot over something. But she loved Ethan and Sara and me with the fierceness of a mama grizzly bear, and I could use a little of that right now.

Abigail handed me the green folder and stood up. “That’s the tentative schedule for the next week. As soon as she says yes, I’ll arrange the plane tickets and everything else.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I talk to her,” I said.

She threw her arms around me, whispering, “I owe you” in my ear.

Ben got to his feet, patted his pockets and pulled out a pen. He took the green folder from me and scrawled a phone number across its front. “That’s my cell. Tell Thea she can call me when it’s good for her.” He squeezed my arm. “And thank you.”

I smiled at him. “You’re welcome.”

I walked them to the top of the stairs, then got myself a cup of coffee from the staff room and went back to my office to tackle the pile of paperwork next to my computer. About quarter after ten I went downstairs again to relieve Susan and Mary so they could take their breaks.

Mary was at the circulation desk checking out books for a teacher from one of the neighborhood day-care centers. Susan was pushing a cart full of books toward the stacks. Mia was in the children’s department, her neon blue hair pulled back from her face with a wide zebra-print headband. She had a small bucket and a cloth and she was washing the tables.

I walked over to Susan. “I can’t wait to meet your mom,” she said.

“Abigail told you,” I said.

“Actually Abigail told Mary. Mary told me.”

I shook my head. “Of course. I forgot how information moves around here.”

“Faster than a speeding bullet,” Susan said with a grin. She tipped her head in Mia’s direction. “For the record, best student intern ever.”

“She picked up the computer system like that,” I said, snapping my fingers.

“The story-time kids love her hair. They were all clamoring to sit around her.” Susan pointed to the round table in the children’s department. Mia was scraping gum from under the bottom edge. “Nobody asked her to clean those tables. She volunteered.”

“You think I should offer her the part-time job when she’s done with her work-study?”

Susan nodded. “Yeah, I do. You said at the last staff meeting that we needed more help around here. Why not Mia?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.” I looked at my watch. “Do you want to take your break first?”

She shook her head. “I’d rather get these shelved before I do. It’s the last cart. Anyway, I think Mary should go first. She doesn’t exactly seem like herself today.”

The day-care teacher was heading out the door and Mary was on the phone.

“What do you mean, she doesn’t seem like herself?” I said.

Susan poked the crochet hook holding her topknot a little tighter into her hair. Either she was trying to keep it away from the twins so they didn’t put someone’s eye out or Abigail was still trying to teach her how to crochet.

“I don’t know. She seems kind of preoccupied about something. She went to put the coffee on and then came back down without doing it. And she forgot to lock the book drop after we emptied it.” She held up a hand. “That reminds me. Oren put a new strip of metal on the top edge where it was eating magazines. He said to let him know how it works.”

I nodded and made a mental note to make a written one so I wouldn’t forget.

Mary was just hanging up the phone when I walked over to the desk. “You can take your break now,” I said.

She looked blankly at me for a moment, then shook her head. “Sorry, Kathleen. I was somewhere else.”

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, tugging at the bottom of her cream-colored cardigan. The sweater had slipped down on her right shoulder, and the totem pole of scarecrows that decorated that side looked as though it was about to topple over. She sighed. “No, everything’s not all right.”

“Could I help?”

“Maybe you could. Obviously you know that Hugh Davis is dead.”

I nodded.

“Well, yesterday morning I walked over to the Stratton to see if I could help Abigail with anything. It was early and the only car in the lot was hers. I just assumed she was there by herself.” She gave me a wry smile. “At my age you’d think I’d know not to assume anything.”

I knew better than to try to rush Mary. She would get to the point in her own time.

“I thought that Abigail would be in the office at that time of day, so I went in the front.”

“She wasn’t there?”

Mary shook her head. “The auditorium doors were locked, so I decided to just go back outside and use the stage door.” She fingered a button on her sweater. “She was actually standing in the parking lot. I think she was getting boxes out of her car. I was about halfway around the building when I saw her.”

“Mary, did you and Abigail have some kind of an argument?” I asked.

“We didn’t,” she said. “But Abigail and Hugh Davis did.”

“People argue,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “You saw what Hugh was like when he was here yesterday. He couldn’t have been easy to work with. So they had a disagreement. It doesn’t mean anything.” I realized I was trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince Mary.

Abigail had lied about knowing Hugh. Mary had heard them arguing. And now he was dead. Big coincidence. On the other hand, I knew Abigail couldn’t kill anyone. Stuff someone in her rain barrel? Maybe. Shoot them? Never.

Mary shook her head slowly. “You don’t understand, Kathleen,” she said, lowering her voice. “This was a lot more than a disagreement. You know how Abigail is. She doesn’t lose her temper. She doesn’t raise her voice. In the last year and a half have you ever seen her get angry?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said.

She picked up a scrap piece of paper from the desk and dropped it into the recycling bin. “Well, I’ve known Abigail a lot longer than that and I’ve never seen her really lose her temper—that is, not before yesterday.”

“So what were they fighting about?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even realize it was the two of them at first. I could hear the tone of their voices, but I couldn’t really make out the words. Then when I saw who it was . . .” She looked away for a moment. “They didn’t see me, so I just backtracked to the sidewalk and left.”

“And then you found out Hugh was dead.”

There were tiny pinched lines around her mouth. “I don’t mean that I think Abigail had anything to do with that,” she said hastily. Then she sighed. “Kathleen, Abigail and Hugh Davis had some kind of past, but they were both pretending they’d never met.”

“Why do you say that?” I hoped that what I was feeling didn’t show on my face.

“Because of the one thing I did hear her say to him before I got out of there. She said, ‘If I’d killed you the first time you messed up my life, I’d be out of prison by now.’”