The Ghost and the Dead Man's Library

"IT IS HEREBY proposed that the Quinidicott Business Owners Association shall make a request to the Zoning Board to extend parking hours (pahkin’ ah-wahs) an additional hour within the city limits Monday through Thursday, and an additional two hours on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.”

Bud Napp, the widower who owned Cranberry Street Hardware, paused to stifle a yawn. “We do this in anticipation of the crowds that will supposedly be drawn to the artsy-fartsy films Brainert is going to exhibit when his theater opens next month—”

“I object to that negative remark!” Brainert exclaimed with indignation. “My theater will be a valuable addition to this community.”

“If the zoning witch lets you have a permit, maybe,” Seymour said. “Otherwise your grand movie palace is going to be one big box of empty.”

Brainert scowled. “Thanks for the bulletin, Tarnish. Shouldn’t you be peddling ice cream to the teeners up at the haunted house?”

“No way, Parker,” Seymour replied with a grin. “Wouldn’t miss this meeting for the world.”

It was obvious to me that Seymour had already heard about the masked man breaking into my store and was here to learn all the juicy details.

Mailmen don’t have much to live for, do they, doll?

On that, I had no comment.

“Anyone ready to second the final motion on the table?” Bud Napp bellowed impatiently.

Linda Cooper-Logan and her husband, Milner, of Cooper Family Bakery, both raised their hands. “We second it.”

“Motion passed.” Bud slammed the hammer down, rattling the table. He was wielding a real hammer, too—a brand-new ball peen fresh from his hardware store. Someone had absconded with the gavel after a meeting several months ago. It was one mystery the Quindicott Business Owners Association (a.k.a., the Quibble Over Anything Gang) hadn’t got around to solving.

On the other hand, some of the members had helped me solve far more vexing mysteries. To wit: Bud Napp, Seymour Tarnish, J. Brainert Parker, Fiona Finch, Linda and Milner Logan, and Mr. Koh and his daughter had helped solve the murder of a visiting true crime author this past summer. Tonight, after the regular meeting adjourned, I was holding out hope they’d stay and help Sadie, Brainert, and I solve another.

Bud Napp searched me out in the crowd. “This meet’s adjourned,” he declared with a slam.

The room began to empty at once. Casual attendees filed out immediately—folks like Chick Pattelli, owner of the garden store; Glenn Hastings of Hastings Pharmacy; and Gerry Kovacks, owner and manager of the newly opened phone store, Cellular Planet. All were escorted through the bookstore, to the front door by Sadie. Within a few minutes, the only folks left in the meeting room were the people I’d ask to stay. Sadie locked the door and joined us.

Rather self-consciously, I stepped behind the podium set up at the front of the room. Behind me, Bud Napp sat at a table, our judge and referee in these informal gatherings as well.

For the next hour, I brought everyone up to speed—about the death of Peter Chesley in Newport, Rene Montour’s fatal accident on Crowley Road, ending with the details on the attempted robbery of my store and the assault on yours truly.

Milner cleared his throat. “There’s something you should know, Pen. Officer McCoy was in the bakery this afternoon. He told me what happened. And he claimed you’d made the whole thing up.”

“What?!” I cried.

Linda nudged her husband with her elbow. “Tell her the rest of it,” she demanded.

Milner winced. “McCoy said…sorry, Pen, but he made a crack about you. About how everyone around town knows all about how you became a widow, that your husband killed himself. I think he meant to suggest that maybe you were…you know…mentally unstable.”

Seymour Tarnish balled a fist and banged his thigh. “That’s just the kind of crap I expect to hear from Bull McCoy. What did that jerk’s partner have to say?”

“Eddie wasn’t there,” Linda replied. “It was just McCoy, shooting off his mouth. I don’t know how that moron even got on the police force.”

“It’s easy when you’re Chief Ciders’s nephew,” Bud pointed out.

I threw up my hands. As small a town as this was, I couldn’t believe no one had shared that little fact with me before tonight. “No wonder McCoy is spreading stories about me. He gets his attitude from his uncle.” And everyone knew there was no love lost between Ciders and me.

“Forget it, Pen,” Brainert said. “We believe you. That’s what counts.”

Fiona Finch rose. “Getting back on the subject at hand, Penelope, I think you should know I received a strange phone call this afternoon….”

As Fiona deliberately allowed her voice to trail off, Seymour folded his arms and tapped his foot. Fiona loved drawing out the suspense when she dispensed gossip. We were all used to it by now, but it continually drove Seymour up the wall.

“Out with it!” he cried. “Who from?”

“From Rene Montour’s uncle in Canada,” Fiona declared.

Sadie nodded. “That’s not unusual. Jacques Montour is the family patriarch and the true book collector in the family. Rene does—er, did bidding and buying for Jacques.”

“Well,” Fiona said, “Jacques Montour requested we hold Rene’s luggage and personal effects until a representative of the family arrives.”

“When is this representative expected?” I asked.

Fiona glanced at her watch. “He should be at the inn right now. I left my Barney at home to meet them. Whoever he is, he’s going to be disappointed.”

Sadie blinked. “Why?”

“Mr. Montour didn’t leave much in his room,” Fiona replied. “But I knew he was travelling with something of value because the first thing he did was ask me if the inn had a vault. I told Mr. Montour he was free to avail himself of the inn’s wall safe, but after checking it out, he told Barney that the safe would not be large enough for his purposes.”

“Montour obviously wanted to stash the books in a secure place,” Sadie said. “He knew they were too valuable to leave in the room, so he kept them with him at all times. That’s why the books were in the car when he went for a drive.”

“But the question is, why did he go for a drive?” I asked. “Mr. Montour had dinner at Fiona’s restaurant, he didn’t know anyone in the town except perhaps Sadie. Where was the man going at nine o’clock on a Sunday night in Quindicott?”

“Mr. Montour received a phone call at around eightthirty, if that’s any help,” Fiona offered. “About fifteen minutes later, he went out.”

“Another mysterious caller,” Seymour said in his woowoo spooky voice. “Could it be the same as-yet unknown person who called 911 while you were at Chesley’s mansion? Only the shadow knows…”

Anybody going to tell this rube he’s being about as helpful as a rock in your shoe?

“Two murders and an assault over a set of books,” Milner said. “What I’d like to know is why they’re so special.”

“Yeah, so they’re old. So what?” Linda shrugged. “You can get the Poe stuff anywhere. It’s not like it’s out of print.”

“Allow me.” Brainert moved to the podium, a file folder full of papers in his hand. I returned to my seat next to Sadie.

“Eugene Phelps knew there was not much market for his Poes when he published them,” Brainert explained in his professorial tone. “Phelps also knew there would be limited interest in his dubious scholarship, his rambling introductions. That’s why he buried a secret code inside these books—three of them, in fact.”

“Codes?” Fiona sounded almost breathless. “Like in The Da Vinci Code?”

Brainert appeared to have sucked on a lemon. “Kind of like that, Fiona. Only without the secret societies and that nonsense about Mary Magdalene.”

“No loose women!?” Seymour cracked. “Sheesh, that’s the best part.”

Bud slammed his hammer. “I want to hear about those codes.”

“I’m sure you do,” Brainert said. “According to solicitation letters Eugene Phelps sent out to subscribers in the 1920s, there are three codes buried inside these editions. The solution to all three riddles was to reveal the existence and location of a literary and artistic treasure, or so Eugene Arthur Phelps claimed.”

Bud Napp snorted. “Don’t you think that the premium for that particular prize might have expired after all these years?”

“Or maybe someone already claimed this marvelous treasure,” Mr. Koh said.

“Anyway it just sounds nuts,” grumbled the skeptical Bud.

Brainert nodded. “Maybe. But there is at least one code, which was solved by a scholar named Dr. Robert Conte. Penelope, you may recall that my colleague Nelson Spinner mentioned him? Well, I looked up his research, and I have the Conte paper right here.”

Seymour crossed his arms above his thick waist and stared at Brainert. “This had better be good.”

“Dr. Conte did a thorough textual analysis of the Phelps books as compared to the now-standard Poe text accepted as correct by the Ford Foundation and the Library of America—”

Bud brought the hammer down. “In English, if you please, Professor. And cut to the chase.”

Brainert sighed. “Dr. Conte determined that there are errant letters in the first story of each volume of the Phelps Poe books. They look like typographical errors, but if you put them all together and reverse their order, it spells out an actual sentence—” He glanced at the papers on the podium in front of him. “Mystic Library east wall sunset reveals all.”

I heard Jack Shepard groan in my head. This is starting to sound like decoder ring hooey.

“Is this riddle meant to reveal a hidden secret about the library in Mystic, Connecticut?” Sadie asked.

“That’s what Dr. Conte believed, but he was dead wrong. According to my own research”—Brainert grinned and straightened his bow tie—“when Eugene Arthur Phelps was editing his Poes, he lived in a large mansion at the cross streets of Plum and Armstrong in Newport. In the 1940s, the house was converted into apartments and renamed The Arms, but the mansion’s name when Phelps lived there was Mystic House.

“Ahhh!” said the Quibblers.

“Inside this Mystic House there was a large, well stocked library, much of it dedicated to the study of Edgar Allan Poe.”

Seymour arched his eyebrow. “Was?” he said.

Brainert nodded. “The place was destroyed by a fire in 1956.”

Bud threw up his hands. “Then I was right. The treasure is lost.”

“Frankly, I don’t think this treasure ever existed.” Linda Cooper-Logan waved her hand, her silver and jade bracelets janging. “Except as a figment of Eugene Phelps’s imagination. But I guess anyone who becomes obsessed with Edgar Poe is a little crazy, right?”

Brainert sighed. “Eugene Phelps was a tragic figure. An eccentric, and something of a romantic, too. But I doubt he was crazy, Linda. In fact, it was easy to find parallels between Edgar Allan Poe’s and Eugene Arthur Phelps’s life that may have fueled the latter’s obsession with the former.”

“Beside the fact that both men have the same initials, what else have you got,” Seymour asked. “And by the way, I have the same initials as Sharon Tate. Using your logic, I should be murdered by a crazy, Manson family–type cult.”

“We should be so lucky,” Fiona muttered.

“Watch it, bird lady! Mail can get lost, you know.”

Brainert ignored the bickering and pressed on. “As you know, Poe was the son of a beautiful stage actress who died when he was just a child. Phelps’s mother was a trained opera singer who died of tuberculosis when he was four. After his mother’s demise, Poe was adopted by a wealthy family named the Allans. Frances Allan loved Poe like a son; Mr. John Allan was cold and indifferent. Mrs. Allan died when Poe was nineteen and in military service. Her death left him once again bereft and motherless, with a stepfather who neither appreciated nor wanted him. Eugene Phelps had an indifferent father as well. After the death of his wife, Eugene’s father remarried, and the couple spent the next fifteen years traveling the world. Eugene remained in New England, raised by a string of nannies and servants—”

“Life in a Newport mansion,” Seymour cut in. “Poor him. I could think of worse things—like the life of a mailman.”

“Loneliness haunts rich and poor alike. Nobody is immune.” Sadie’s voice was barely above a whisper.

“No, Seymour is right,” said Brainert. “At least Eugene Phelps inherited his family’s money. But like Poe, he married late in life to a very young bride. Unfortunately for Phelps, she died of tuberculosis five years later and he never remarried.”

“And Poe?” Linda asked.

“The pattern for Poe’s life began early and never changed. He became defined by loneliness and alienation, and a hopeless quest for love and acceptance. But Poe was doomed to forever be an outcast. His poetry and prose were sometimes controversial, and in his literary criticism, Poe attacked the leading lights of his day, which didn’t make him popular. In a way, Poe was his own worst enemy.” Brainert shook his head. “But saddest of all, the women in Poe’s life always died, leaving him alone and loveless. After losing his stepmother, Poe married a teenaged cousin when he was twenty-seven. But Virginia Clemm was weak and sickly and hovered near death for many years. Eventually she died of consumption, just like Poe’s mother.”

“How tragic.” Linda sighed.

“Yes,” Brainert said. “Though loss and mourning ultimately fueled Poe’s art and led to the composition of his greatest works, eventually tragedy—and alcohol—took their toll.”

During Brainert’s recounting of Poe’s difficult life, I saw Sadie become more and more emotional.

“How did it end?” Linda asked.

“In his final few years, Poe became a pathetic figure,” Brainert continued. “Though his writings made him famous, there was little joy and less financial gain in this recognition. Poe wandered the country from Baltimore to Philadelphia and through the Antebellum South, desperately courting a number of women, simply because he could not cope with life alone.”

Sadie jumped to her feet. Tears she’d been trying to hold back spilled onto her cheeks. She fled the room without a word.

For a moment, everyone sat in an uncomfortable silence. “My aunt is still getting over the loss of her friend Peter,” I explained. “I’d better go see if she’s okay—”

“Let me, Pen.”

Before I could even rise, Bud Napp was on his feet and heading for the doorway. I wasn’t surprised. Ever since he’d lost his wife to cancer, Bud had been a good customer of Buy the Book. “Turns out, good reading’s good company in the lonely hours,” he’d once told us.

He got started by working through his wife’s old pile of Agatha Christies. Soon, Sadie was suggesting some newer authors (although Miss Marple still remains his all-time favorite), and the two seniors had struck up a friendship. Lately, they’d been seeing each other outside the bookstore, for the occasional dinner or drive to Providence.

“So where do we go from here?” Seymour asked after Bud left. “If there was a treasure, it’s gone up in smoke. And we hit a dead end, anyway.”

“Not necessarily,” said Brainert with the hint of a smile.

“What have you got, Brainiac?” Seymour demanded.

“Turns out there was a bundle of papers packed away with the Phelps editions—papers belonging to Miles Milton Chesley, the grandfather of Sadie’s friend Peter Chesley.”

I’d forgotten all about those papers, and the fact that Sadie gave them to Brainert to peruse.

“According to his letters, Miles Chesley bought each volume as they were published, mostly because he was obsessed with finding the treasure,” Brainert explained.

“Did he solve any of the riddles?” Fiona asked.

“Only the first one, pointing to the Mystic library,” Brainert replied. “The same one Dr. Conte solved.” His grin reappeared. “But I solved another.”

“Explain, oh great one,” Seymour urged.

Brainert nodded. “Ever see those tiny numbers and letters tucked near the fold of a hardcover? Those are signature marks and they exist to tell the bookbinder in what order the leaves should be bound. Well, in the Phelps books, there is a signature mark on the title page of each volume.”

“The title page?” I said. “That makes no sense.”

“Exactly! The title page is page five in the front matter of each volume, far too soon for a new leaf—since leaves are typically sixteen to twenty pages. That’s when I realized the marks were bogus.”

“That’s why you had Sadie copy the title pages for you!” I cried.

Brainert nodded. “I used a magnifying glass to examine the tiny letters and realized they were not the initials of the book titles, as is customary. These letters appeared to be random, and one of the volumes had a tiny mark that looked like a stray period. But when I examined it closely, I found it resembled a bug! So, of course, I applied the cryptogram that Edgar Allan Poe invented for his classic detective story, “The Gold Bug,” to those random letters in the title page signature marks, and I decoded the phrase ‘This is indeed Life itself.’”

Seymour scowled. “And this means?”

“It’s from a Poe story,” Brainert said. “A very important passage found in—”

We were interrupted by a pounding noise. Someone was knocking on the store’s front door. The CLOSED sign was posted and the store lights dimmed, so I wondered who it could be. The pounding began again, followed by the buzz of the night doorbell.

“I’d better get that. I don’t want Sadie to be bothered.” I rose and moved through the darkened bookstore to the front door. On the way, I saw flashing red lights rippling through the windows. Quindicott and Rhode Island State Police cars lined the curb. When I opened the door, a blast of frigid night air washed over me, and I shivered as three dark silhouettes stepped forward.

I saw the big, heavyset form of Chief Ciders, a scowl on his face. At his side, Eddie Franzetti shifted uncomfortably. I recognized the tallest of the three, a broad shouldered, bull-necked man in a gray Statie uniform and Smokey the Bear hat. This time it wasn’t the cold that made me shiver, but the stone cold eyes of Detective Lieutenant Roger Marsh of the Rhode Island State Police.

“You’re Mrs. McClure? Penelope Thornton-McClure?” Marsh asked, deadpan.

“You know I am,” I replied.

I heard a sound behind me. Brainert and Seymour had followed me out of the meeting. Marsh saw them, too.

“Step outside, please, Mrs. McClure.”

I figured he wanted to ask me questions, and wanted privacy to do it.

Suddenly Jack’s shout filled my head. Don’t do it, Penelope!

His warning came too late. I stepped across the threshold, pulling the door closed behind me. Suddenly Officer Bull McCoy stepped out of the shadows. His strong hands grabbed my arms, pulled them behind me. I heard a click, felt icy metal bracelets on my wrists. I tried to pull my arms free, but I’d been handcuffed before I realized it.

“Penelope Thornton-McClure, you are under arrest for grand larceny,” said Detective Marsh in a voice like doom. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

I hardly heard the rest of his spiel. When Marsh asked me if I understood the charges and my rights, I stared at the man in shock.

“You’re charging me with grand larceny?” I repeated.

“That’s right.”

“What in the name of heaven was I supposed to have stolen!”

“Do you understand your rights as I’ve read them to you?” Marsh repeated. “Ma’am, answer yes or no.”

“Yes, but—”

I heard the bookstore’s door fly open and Seymour Tarnish’s irate voice cry out. “Hey, you fascists, what the hell do you think you’re—”

Bull McCoy stepped around me with his nightstick clutched in his fist. “Back off, mailman, if you know what’s good for you or you can go to jail, too.”

Behind me, I heard “Go to hell, McCoy!” a scuffle and a grunt.

“That’s enough, Bull,” Chief Ciders said.

Officer Tibbet of the Quindicott Police escorted me to a squad car. Chief Ciders placed a beefy hand on my head to gently guide me into the back seat.

Still numb, I finally looked back and gasped. Seymour was crumpled on the sidewalk, clutching his stomach. Brainert, pale and in shock, stood over him. Together they helplessly watched the police cruiser carry me away.