Last Scene Alive at-7

by Charlaine Harris

  Lindsey Russell, a very young woman who'd just recently begun working as the children's librarian, passed through on her way out the back door. She gave me a cheerful wave, and told me the library had been really quiet all afternoon. Lindsey wasn't in the gossip loop yet, I gathered. I smiled back at her, and told her to have a good evening.

  I strolled into the main part of the library, and discovered I was working with Perry. A few years before, it would have made me quite nervous to be alone with him. The money Sally had spent on him, or Perry's own determination to get well, or time itself, had gone far toward curing Perry of his many problems.

  Perry was thin and nervous, but he was also a lot more sociable than he'd been, and he'd licked his drug problems. His relationships with women didn't seem to last too long, but wasn't that always the case until you found the One? I didn't always believe that there's a mate for every individual, but some days it was a real convenient and comforting concept.

  "Hey, girl," Perry said. "I heard about your unexpected visitor. Was that the red-headed woman who was in here the other day, reading the magazines?"

  "That was Tracy, all right. And she was the one who knocked me down in the parking lot, I'm sure."

  "It was a woman, after all. You were right. How's the arm?"

  "It's sore, but I'm going to be fine. No muscle damage to speak of."

  "That's good. I can't believe you came in to work."

  "I hated to stress Sam out any more than he's already stressed."

  "So, you know Patricia left?"

  I nodded cautiously. I didn't know what story Sam had told to give her a head start.

  "Sam thinks she'll come back. If he wasn't already married, and if doing a mixed-race relationship wouldn't be so out of Sam's league, I'd say he was in love with that woman."

  Immediately, I felt something click, and I knew Perry was right.

  Ultraconventional, ultraconservative lily white Sam Clerrick, married and the father of two, was in love with African-American left-wing former-bombmaker Anita Defarge. If she was his soulmate, God truly had a sense of humor.

  I shook my head to clear it. "Perry," I said, "do we actually have any work to do?"

  "I guess you could be entering the patron requests," he said, with a sigh. That was a nothing job, recording the patron requests for specific books so we could fit them into our budget. "There's only one patron in the building, Josh Finstermeyer. He's over in periodicals."

  I grinned at Josh's name, and Perry looked at me oddly. "Oh, by the way, Roe," he said, and he sounded so elaborately casual that I went on the alert immediately. "You know the man who brought those books in yesterday?"

  "Mark Chesney?"

  "One of the movie people."

  "Yes, the assistant director."

  "Do you know him very well?"

  "Hardly at all. He seems nice enough. I don't think working for Joel Park Brooks would be a job for the fainthearted."

  Perry was fiddling with some reserved books. I waited to see what he'd say, with some curiosity.

  "He came back in this morning," Perry said.

  I tried to think of a neutral response. "Oh?" was all I could come up with. I had a feeling I was about to be confided in. Perry fiddled with the books some more. "Had he found some books he'd overlooked?" I prompted him.

  "More things she'd checked out? No," Perry said. "He, ah, wanted to know if I'd go have a drink with him after work tonight."

  "Okay." I shrugged. "Are you going?"

  "I'd love to talk to him," Perry confessed. "Someone who lives and works in Hollywood. God, that would be so interesting. You know, I've always loved to be in the community theater plays, and I've done a couple of things in Atlanta."

  Actually, I had forgotten all about Perry's obsession with the theater.

  "I'd always hoped I'd get a chance to talk to your stepson," Perry went on, "but he was only in town so briefly when he came, and I could tell you two didn't have a good relationship."

  "That's putting it mildly."

  "So now this Mark, wanting to talk to me, it just seems so ... exciting."

  "So go."

  "But at the same time, it seems like a ... date." Perry flushed dark red. "I mean, why me? Would a regular guy just make a point of coming in and inviting another guy out for a drink?"

  In my opinion, no. But I felt totally unqualified to give Perry advice on this issue. I had long suspected Perry had so much trouble maintaining relationships with women because he was backing the wrong horse, orientation-wise— but I sure wasn't going to suggest that to him.

  "If you want to go, go. It doesn't commit you to anything," I said at last. "If you don't have a good time, if something happens that—doesn't interest you, that you don't feel comfortable with, get up and leave." I shrugged again.

  He brightened as if I'd given the date my blessing. "That's the right way to look at it," he said. "You're so wise, Roe."

  That was me—the wise librarian of Lawrenceton, Georgia.

  Our evening dragged. We were supposed to get off at nine, and at eight-thirty Perry excused himself to go through his getting-ready ritual, whatever that consisted of.

  I heard the drone of an electric razor from the men's rest-room.

  No one had shown a face in the library for the past hour, when Josh had left. I'd heard some books thud down into the book drop, but that was the most action we'd had. I began straightening the desk for the morning people. My arm was hurting, and I was looking forward to another pain pill and my own bed. The energy I'd recouped from the nap had long been used up, and I was very tired. I wondered where Robin was, what he was doing, whether he knew suspicion had crossed my mind. I wondered how Barrett was feeling, if he'd gotten over the shock of finding Celia dead. I wondered if he was a serious suspect in Celia's death.

  While I was pondering all these things, I found a book with a number of loose pages. One of the day workers had put it on the cart to return to the stacks. I snorted with indignation. That book had to go back to the repair area.

  "Mark's here!" Perry called. I turned to look at the front doors. Perry was wearing a black leather jacket and he looked really good. Mark was wearing a fresh shirt and creased khakis. "I'm going to go on and leave if that's okay with you, Roe."

  It lacked only ten minutes till closing time. "Sure. All I have to do is lock the back door on my way out." I'd closed the library many times.

  Perry and Mark waved as I locked the double glass doors behind them, and they strode off into the night. I began turning out lights in the main room. Of course, we kept some on all night, but that still left plenty to do. I looked around the big room, took one big inhalation of eau de book, and opened the heavy door that led to the new wing of the library. The employee lounge still smelled of Perry's cologne, and I decided that if Perry was putting on cologne and shaving for a drink with a guy, he wasn't as totally clueless of his own nature as he'd tried to appear. I got my purse out of my locker, extracted my keys, and spotted a light still burning in Sam's office. I went to switch it off. Now the employee lounge was the only lit room.

  The building suddenly felt very empty, uncomfortably empty.

  I heard someone fumbling at the lock outside and I stood in the middle of the floor, paralyzed with sudden fear. The door flew open, picked up by the wind outside. I realized as a leaf gusted in that it was beginning to rain again outside.

  Patricia Bledsoe—I could not think of her by her real name—stepped in from the dark. She was as astonished to see me as I was to see her.

  "He hasn't called the police," I said instantly.

  She gave a sigh. I thought it was of relief. "I saw your car in the parking lot, but I noticed two people came out the front. I thought you'd gone somewhere with Perry," she said. "Jerome's out in the car. We had to turn back halfway to ... well, halfway, and come back. I forgot something important."

  "Get whatever it is, don't mind me," I said. "I'm not even here." I'd dropped my purse on a table, and now I pick
ed it up again. Patricia sped into her office, pulling a drawer out all the way and fumbling under it. Her hand came up clutching an envelope, and I realized she'd had it taped to the bottom of her drawer. How the paranoid live. Though, in Patricia's case, the paranoia was justified.

  "Where will you go?" I asked. "Wait a minute, forget I asked that."

  And we both heard the back door begin to open. Patricia hadn't locked it behind her.

  With a desperate expression on her face, Patricia ducked down below her desk. I stepped out of her office, hoping the light in there didn't show anything suspicious over the half-wall.

  To my surprise, Will Weir stepped in. I'd half-forgotten out conversation. His timing was awful.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked, not caring if I sounded rude or not.

  "I'm glad I caught you," he said, smiling. "I'm sorry if I scared you. Is it illegal, coming in the back way? The front was locked, and it's not nine yet."

  No, it was all of 8:58. I felt abruptly uneasy. "You're not supposed to come in this door," I said. I didn't smile back. "You're going to have to wait to come to the library tomorrow. I've shut everything down."

  "I just needed to see the books Mark brought in," he said, still smiling. "I see they're over here in the box."

  "It's too late. You have to come back tomorrow."

  "I have to work tomorrow. Let me just take a minute, and I'll be all through." He'd made his voice soothing, as though I was being childish.

  I know when someone's trying to get away with something. I've sure been a librarian long enough for that.

  "Will, what's in those books that's so important? That can't wait?"

  He smiled again, made a "wait" gesture with his hand, and began riffling through the pile of books. The wind was whooshing through the cracked door, and it fluttered the pages of the book he held, the book about diagnosing your own illness. Will shook it. Nothing happened. He followed that procedure with every book in the box. As book after book proved a disappointment, he tossed them to one side. I almost protested, and then caught myself.

  He kept talking the whole time, meaningless phrases like, "I'll be out of your hair in just a second," and "I just need to check these books." He was just trying to keep me sedated, I realized, and then he lifted the bound movie script that Mark had brought by accident. I'd completely forgotten it. Will turned it upside down, and shook it, and from its pages flew a folded piece of paper. The wind picked up the paper and blew it in my direction, and it landed on the table to my right.

  Without a single thought in my head I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a yellowed letter, and it began, "Dearest Celia, the lawyer should give you this when you turn twenty-nine. I think you should know who your father is..." and then the paper was snatched out of my hand.

  "You don't need that. It's mine." Will was smiling again, that warm and homey smile that had made me feel relaxed and comfortable in his company.

  "Were you Celia's dad?" I asked, incredulous. "Did she know?"

  "She did after the lawyer delivered that letter," Will said. "She turned twenty-nine last week, and the package came Federal Express from the lawyer in Wilmington."

  "Why did Celia's mom leave her a letter?"

  "She knew she wasn't going to be around to talk to Celia in person."

  "She knew she had Huntington's."

  "Yeah, she knew. ‘Course, I didn't, until it was too late. I would never have risked a relationship with a woman who had a disease like that. I would have known my heart would get broken."

  "So you knew Linda Shaw after her divorce?"

  "Yeah, she came out to California to find me. She'd felt the first symptoms, and the Huntington's had been diagnosed in North Carolina. She wanted to see Celia placed before she got any worse, and she wanted to do a little living before she got too sick. So she left Celia with her sister, and she followed me out to California. She wanted to do that living with me. The only thing is, she didn't tell me. She didn't tell me she'd had my child, and she didn't tell me she was going to die." He was bitter all over: voice, stance, words.

  "That was really wrong of her," I said softly. I began to edge a little closer to the door. He was still to my left, by the book-mending area, but with one leap he could be between me and freedom.

  "Damn right." He looked as though he was going to cry. "Then, when she got really sick, she begged me to help her. She begged me to kill her. Finally, I helped her out."

  "She wasn't a suicide."

  "Not strictly speaking."

  "It was you."

  "Yes, it was me. She asked me. I couldn't stand to see her suffer any longer, lose her personality, her muscle control, everything that made Linda a person."

  "What about Celia?"

  He was scanning the letter. "I met up with her when she came out to California after she got a bit part in a TV series I was filming. She looked so much like her mother that I followed her the first time I saw her. Then I arranged to meet her. She was Linda's daughter, all right, and she was my daughter, too. At first she tried to make friends with me—she didn't know, of course. She just knew I was an important guy."

  Oh. That was the kind of "friends" she'd tried to make.

  "Luckily, I'd told her I was her dad before the letter came."

  "You know, I really don't need to know any more," I said cheerfully. "You can take your letter and go now."

  "I think you know a little more than you need to," he said. "I've taken care of the women I loved. I've done the right thing by them. I don't love you, and I don't care any more if I do the right thing or not. I like my job, and I like to work, and I don't want you to stop me doing that. Celia never told anyone we were kin."

  "Who your family is, is your business."

  "I don't think for one second that you're that naive, Aurora. I think you know I killed Celia."

  "Why?" I asked desperately. "Why would you do that?"

  "You could tell she was getting it," he said. "You could tell. It was just like Linda. She was beginning to stumble around. She was beginning to make these sudden movements without knowing she was doing it. She was having trouble remembering her lines. In a year, she'd be just another starlet who'd caught a bad disease, and she'd be forgotten in two years. This way, she'll always be remembered. She'll always be brought up in the magazines. Like Brandon Lee. Freak accident; they still print his name, his picture, what might have been. Celia, they'll do the same."

  The thing I hated most—media attention—he'd sought out as being preeminently desirable. More valuable than life. And yet, hadn't I had the same thought hours before? Better a provocative whodunit than a disease of the week?

  "What would Celia have thought about that?"

  "You can't tell me she didn't know," he said defensively. "I brought her the coffee with the Valium in it, a whopping dose; she must have tasted something funny about it. She just looked at me while she was drinking it. Then she closed her eyes and waited."

  Then she fell unconscious.

  "She'd had a good night before with that stepson of yours," Will Weir said. "He was good-looking enough, and self-serving enough, to show her a good time."

  I wanted to throw up. The Celia Shaw pre-death lay.

  "And she was on the set of her very own movie, her very first starring role. Her Emmy was beside her. She had her own trailer."

  "So you put a pillow over her face."

  "She didn't struggle. She was at peace. No disease, at the top of her form. And then I carried off the coffee cup."

  I put a hand over my mouth. He explained what he'd done so plausibly, but it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

  "Did you ask Celia what she wanted? Did you tell her about her mom's Huntington's?"

  "Not before she read it in the letter." He shrugged. "I didn't know about the letter."

  "Would you have told her?"

  "No." He looked surprised. "No, I would never have told her. We'd have had to go through the whole emotional scene, then, the crying and shit."
>
  The crying and shit. What an inconvenience.

  "Did you get this job with the idea of watching over her?"

  He said, "More or less."

  Meaning, no. He'd been hired by chance, observed the beginnings of Celia's disease by chance, revealed his identity to her only when she'd made a play for him. And then, he thought he'd kill her. After all, he was her dad. He had the right to choose for her.

  I don't think I've ever loathed anyone so much in my life.

  "What are you going to do now?" I asked, cutting to the chase. I might as well know.

  "I guess I'm going to take this letter with me. I guess, if you say anything about it, I'll just say you lied."

  Hope flickered in me for a minute, to be extinguished when I considered the overwhelming selfishness of this man's life. He had no intention of leaving me alive with his secret. After all, there were blood tests that could prove whether or not he'd been Celia's father. And there was the lawyer who could testify he'd had a letter sent to Celia on her birthday, even if he couldn't say what the contents of that letter had been.

  I had no idea what I could do to stop him. I don't go around armed. You'd be surprised how many Southern belles have a gun in their purse, but I wasn't one of them. I didn't have a stun gun, or a blackjack... hey. I had a panic button! It was on the keyless entry pad for my car.

  I'd gotten my keys out and now they were clutched in my hand. Was my car close enough to the back door to pick up the signal? I hadn't the slightest idea how the damn thing worked. I probably had to be closer. So, before I could have second thoughts, I made a dash for the back door, managed to get my hand out of it, and pressed the panic button.

  Beep! Beep! Beep ! My car responded in a wonderful way, lights flashing and horn blaring. But I feared it was too little, too late, because now Will had hold of me around the waist and was pulling me back into the library. I held on to the doorknob of the open door as long as I could, but he was a strong man and my grip was weak.