The Silence Of The Library

THIRTY-SEVEN

Mrs. Cartwright really wasn’t Mrs. Cartwright.

My solution to the murder was nuts.

Wasn’t it?

If Mrs. Cartwright wasn’t Mrs. Cartwright, then who was she?

Eugene Marter. Had to be.

I realized I hadn’t seen him and his grandmother in the same place at the same time. Had only seen him once, as a matter of fact.

If Eugene was really impersonating his grandmother, then where was the real woman? Was she even still living?

There was an easy way to check that. The Social Security death index.

I slipped on my shoes and hurried downstairs to where I had left my laptop on the kitchen table. As soon as it was ready, I opened the browser and entered a website address. I knew the fastest way to gain access to the information was via a genealogy service to which I subscribed. I input my search terms, Mrs. Cartwright’s name, figuring there couldn’t be that many other women with her name in the index.

There was no listing at all for Electra Barnes Cartwright. I tried Electra Cartwright. No hits. Electra Barnes returned several, but I could tell by the dates that none of them was the correct person.

I leaned back in my chair and considered the possibilities.

The fact that I couldn’t find her in the death index didn’t mean that she was still alive. That thought chilled me. Had they killed her and buried her in the backyard?

Nasty.

Maybe she was alive but mentally incapacitated. No longer able to write or make competent decisions about her books.

That would be tragic, but an alternative preferable to my first thought.

Diesel startled me by meowing loudly beside me. I was so absorbed in my speculations that I had forgotten all about him.

“I’m okay, boy.” I rubbed his head. “Thinking hard, that’s all. Nothing to worry over.”

He warbled a couple of times before he settled down on the floor beside my chair.

How would Kanesha react if I shared this theory with her?

She would demand proof; that’s how she would react.

What proof did I have? I had a lot of odd facts that I thought suggestive, but Kanesha needed convincing evidence.

Short of walking up to the fake Mrs. Cartwright and snatching the red wig off her head, what could I do?

I had a sudden vision of grabbing hold of the hair, pulling, and Mrs. Cartwright screaming in protest. I shuddered.

No, I had to be completely sure about my theory before I could test it like that.

What incontestable proof could I muster? Surely there was something.

My gaze fell on the scrapbook. Pictures of Mrs. Cartwright. A vague idea began to form.

Hard on those thoughts came another point. Photographs could be the reason the killer took away Carrie Taylor’s files. Why Carrie Taylor had to die. She had the proof right there in her file cabinet.

Surely the killer had to realize, however, there were almost certainly copies of Mrs. Taylor’s photos elsewhere. Maybe a photograph wasn’t the proof after all.

A memory surfaced. At the meeting with Mrs. Cartwright and Marcella, Carrie Taylor mentioned a photo of the author in the garden shed where she wrote her books. I didn’t recall seeing such a picture in Aunt Dottie’s scrapbook.

I went back to my laptop and typed Electra Cartwright garden shed in the search engine. The result was a couple of pages of hits. I clicked on the first one, and that led me to an article in a fan publication devoted to children’s books—not Carrie Taylor’s newsletter.

An examination of the other links revealed nothing useful. I clicked the link for an image search, and the result was a screen full of pictures. Some were of the author as a much younger woman; others were of garden sheds. Not a single one showed Mrs. Cartwright and a garden shed.

Back to square one on that idea. I glanced at the scrapbook again. This time I pulled it close and found the section Aunt Dottie devoted to Mrs. Cartwright and Veronica. There were a couple of portrait-type photos from magazines pasted in, but those didn’t tell me anything.

I stared at the image of Mrs. Cartwright with Marietta Dubois. Both women wore shoes with low heels, from what I could tell. The actress looked tall next to the writer, but if Miss Dubois had been six feet tall, that would make Mrs. Cartwright about five-eight. How could I find out how tall Marietta Dubois was?

The encyclopedia entry I found earlier didn’t have that information. I searched for Marietta Dubois height but that didn’t get me anywhere, except increasingly frustrated. As a test I entered Judi Dench height and retrieved the information right away. Too bad Marietta Dubois hadn’t been more famous.

I glanced at the screen again and examined the results of my search on Judi Dench. One link jumped right out at me—an Internet database devoted to movies. Maybe it had what I needed?

I found the entry for Miss Dubois, and there it was. Height 5' 6". I laughed with relief. Whether a court would accept it as evidence was one thing, but it might be enough to convince Kanesha.

At our first meeting I noticed that Mrs. Cartwright—or rather Eugene Marter—was the same height as Teresa Farmer. My friend and colleague was around five foot six as well. There was no way the real Electra Barnes Cartwright had grown a good four inches in the past sixty-odd years.

Now that I had identified the murderer, I considered how that fact fit into the odd incidents that had occurred, starting with the murder itself.

Kanesha’s witness, Mr. Andrews, claimed to have seen a man arrive around the time of Carrie Taylor’s phone message to Melba. Carrie Taylor had said something like, “What does he want?” About twenty minutes later Mr. Andrews saw a woman carrying a large box leaving the house.

Two possibilities occurred to me. The first—Carrie Taylor had two guests in close succession. I really didn’t think so. The second—Eugene Marter arrived as a man, somehow secreting his wig about his person. After he committed murder, he donned the wig to confuse things. That worked for me. I figured Eugene was doing his best to muddy the waters.

Next odd incident—the alleged theft of the five manuscripts and their discovery under the mattress in Winston Eagleton’s suite. When Marcella and Eugene first arrived at Eagleton’s party, they went immediately to the bathroom. The bedroom was only a few feet away, and one of them could easily have placed the manuscripts where they would quickly be found after Eugene reported the theft. I recalled the large handbag Eugene carried. He had not carried one in his role as his grandmother before, as far as I could remember.

What about the phone call reporting the theft? Didn’t it occur around the time of the party when Eugene would have been at the hotel?

Easily resolved—a cell phone call from the car or even from the lobby of the hotel before Eugene and Marcella came upstairs.

My excitement built as I put the pieces of the crime together.

What about the theft, however? Why had Eugene set it up? Had he seriously thought he could implicate Winston Eagleton in the murder? Or had he simply wanted to make everything more complicated in hopes that the authorities would be too confused to see the truth?

That was the likeliest answer—intentional confusion. It had certainly worked, up to a point. Eugene had even set it up by coming to me with his story of Eagleton’s threats against Mrs. Cartwright over the right to publish the manuscripts.

What about Yancy Thigpen? I felt chagrined that I had forgotten about the agent until this moment. Had Eugene killed her because she somehow stumbled into the middle of all this?

I could only hope she was alive and unharmed, perhaps being hidden as a prisoner of Eugene and Marcella. Like the real Mrs. Cartwright. The Marters had a large house, with more than enough space to lock two women away upstairs and out of sight.

What was at the root of the deception in the first place? That was a significant question, and one I should have considered earlier.

The quick answer to that was money. The Marters were desperate for cash, and thought they could make some quick bucks by hawking the manuscripts and collecting fees from fans like Gordon Betts willing to pay outrageous sums to get a signature. A spurious signature, that is.

I thought about those manuscripts. I would love to get my hands on them. It would be wonderful to see them in print, along with the original Veronica Thane books.

An appalling idea brought me up short, however.

What if they were spurious as well?