He couldn’t do that. He felt a reluctance as though he would be sitting down in someone’s lap if he took that seat. He smiled, but shook his head, and turned to walk away, almost bumping into a tall woman as he tried to escape.
“Why David Johnson,” a pleased voice said. “So wonderful to see you back in town.”
He found himself facing Beatrix Kaye, who had taught him senior English all those years ago. She smiled. “I’m librarian now,” she said. “I retired from teaching.”
She took his arm, leading him away from the observing computer students. “Tell me, David, how is your grandfather?”
Chapter Five
She’d almost been caught. Susan had been so absorbed in her careful efforts to use a very light touch on the keyboard to avoid blowing out the system that she hadn’t been aware of the man who’d come up behind her. Now she got up to move quickly to the other side of the room.
She found herself standing again in the local history section and, unnoticed by her as she’d become so focused on the little computer class, the scowling woman named June huddled there reading her book on poisons.
Turning to look at the man who had caught her using the computer, she saw that he stood talking to the librarian. She took in his appearance. He was tall and slim, his shoulders fairly broad, but he looked shrunken somehow, as though he’d once been more substantial.
When he’d left the conversation with Mrs. Kaye behind, he stared around as though looking for something or someone and she saw intense light blue eyes that seemed to look right at her. Impossible. Nobody had looked at her ever that she could remember. Nobody could see her.
She liked the look of his face, pale and drawn though it was. She saw kindness and sensitivity mixed with lines of suffering. She wondered if he had a terrible illness.
Then she felt almost as though she were choking as he got up from his chair and walked, slowly but deliberately, straight toward her. With a mixture of hope and fear, she thought for those seconds when he crossed the room, he actually could see her standing there.
Then he went past her to address the woman reading at the table and she told herself that what she felt was certainly not disappointment.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Allie,” he addressed her and Susan watched as the woman covered the booklet with her purse. He’d surprised her and a faint flush outlined her cheeks.
“David,” she acknowledged his greeting in gruff tones, looking as though she were annoyed at the interruption. “I made lunch. Sandwiches wrapped in plastic in the frig and soup to be heated up.”
“You needn’t feel that you have to prepare food for me.”
“Of course I do. That’s what your granddad pays me for. As long as you’re visiting that is. But don’t suppose you’ll be staying long.”
She wanted to move between the man and the crusty older woman. But when he smiled politely instead of looking angry or even disconcerted, she decided he was able to take care of himself.
“I’ll stay until Grandpa is home again and feeling better.”
She snorted. “If he ever gets better. Looked mighty sick to me when they took him away in the ambulance and even if he’s improving, Doc will never let him come home. He’ll go to the old folks home where there’s somebody to take care of him.” She shuffled one foot under the table. “I’m no nurse. I just cook and clean. I won’t look after no sick old man.”
The young man she’d called David smiled again, but his eyes were cold. “Nobody would expect that of you, Mrs. Allie.”
She snorted again, clambered to her feet, swiftly shoving the poison booklet into the shelf between other books and then, without saying goodbye, grabbed her purse and started toward the door. When she was there, she turned to call back in a voice clearly to be heard throughout the library, “Supper at six and I am not keeping it warm.”
‘Look at the booklet! See what she was reading!’ Susan could say the words, but he couldn’t hear them. She reached over, tugged the little book from its tight fit between other books, and spilled it to the floor.
He looked down, frowned as though wondering how that had happened, then turned his attention elsewhere as he seemed to sniff the air, them murmured “lilacs.”
She watched him leave the library with increasing frustration. Something was going on here. Somebody needed to see that this man’s grandfather was safe.
Like a kid defying orders, David refused to show up for June Allie’s six o’clock supper. If he had his way, the minute Grandpa came home she would be fired. Just having that sourpuss out of his sight would no doubt improve his state of health.
Instead he went to Pedro’s for enchiladas, feeling this was confirmation that he was truly back in the southwest. Mexican food in Oklahoma might not taste the same as it did down in Matamoros, but it was also different from that in New York. He enjoyed the food and went he went back took Grandpa a sopapilla for dessert.
The nurses even allowed him to eat the treat, much to Grandpa’s delight. “Hector’s going to let me go home tomorrow,” he told his grandson happily.
So much for Mrs. Allie’s opinion. Still Grandpa looked pale and sick so that when Heck came in on his regular rounds, David questioned the wisdom of the decision. “You sure he’s up to going home?” he asked.
“It’s what he wants. We can arrange to have a nurse drop in each day to check on him,” the doctor said reassuringly. “And you’ll be there to keep an eye on him.”
David nodded. “Sure, I’ll stick around as long as he needs me.”
“I was hoping you’d decided to move back for good.”
“Just taking things day by day,” David evaded. “But what about this notion he was overdosed on heart medicine.”
Heck’s mouth set in a grim line. “Jon’s looking into it. But we’re counting on you seeing to it that he doesn’t accidentally take the wrong medicine—or have someone else treating him.”
“So you don’t think somebody tried to kill him?”
Heck looked mildly embarrassed. “Why would anybody do that? Whole town’s fond of the old man. Doesn’t have an enemy in the world and nobody to gain from his death but you.”
“Me?” David asked, totally startled.
Heck laughed. “Everybody’s knows you’re his heir and he’s a well off man. Good thing you were half the country away when he came down sick.”
David did not find this at all amusing.
Mrs. Allie had company. When David got back to the house on Cottonwood, he heard voices in the kitchen and went to check them out. Mrs. Allie sat at the table with three other people, none of whom he recognized.
She glared at him. “You missed supper.”
He nodded. “I managed to pick something up,” he said.
“Not as good as what Ma makes,” a man who looked to be about a decade older than his own age and equally rough from wear commented. “You must be the grandson.”
David didn’t know why he should be made to feel like an intruder in his own grandfather’s house, than decided he was over-reacting. “David Johnson,” he said. No question but he’d gotten a little prickly since his recovery. He didn’t deal well with people these days, which was why he tried to stay mostly to himself.
“This is my boy Simp,” the housekeeper said. “Simpson Allie. When I seed you wasn’t coming home, I told him and the kids they might as well come over for supper.”
David didn’t suppose that was a particular problem, though somehow he didn’t like the idea of people moving in and out of the house as though they belonged. Still, his grandfather had said he’d been lonely. Maybe he’d encouraged such visits.
The ‘kids’ looked to be in their late teens, male and female, and considerably more attractive than their slovenly father or unprepossessing grandmother. The boy stood, introducing himself as Tom Allie. Then pointing at the blonde in shorts and low-cut blouse as his sister Marilee.
While neither of the older Allies were particularly well spoken, the younger man was more
than articulate, he was smooth of both language and manner. Almost too smooth, David told himself. And then decided he was being prickly again.
The young woman gave a bare nod of acknowledgement before picking up her glass of iced tea as though to say she had no interest in Harry Johnson’s grandson.
“Grandpa will be coming home tomorrow,” he told Mrs. Allie and was not surprised to see a look of dismay on her face before he fled the room. No doubt she was thinking she’d have to get back to work with her employer returning from the hospital and might not be able to entertain her relatives in his kitchen.
David went to his room to take the meds he’d been forgetting in the last hours and laid down in the cool, quiet room with its big window looking out over the fountain in the back yard where songbirds cooled themselves. He wasn’t able to sleep, but still felt a certain restfulness he’d rarely achieved in the privacy of his little city apartment.
Chapter Six
Susan rarely slept and never dreamed and yet that night she jerked away from a nightmare where a helpless old man called out. She had curled up in one of the big chairs, her feet under her and her head resting against one of the arms of the chair.
She got to her feet and strolled the darkened room, lit only by the vintage street light on the sidewalk slightly east of the building. When she got to a window to look out she could see the line of such lights running on downtown, changing to a modern version in the business area, the buildings like lurking shadows and the streets empty of traffic. A picturesque old building that had been built back in the days after first settlement, poked higher than the others, a tribute to a time when even here architecture had been more elegant than the blunt lines of today.
Familiar with the history of each of the centrally located buildings from her readings from the local history section, Susan knew that construction had gone through several incarnations over the years, but that the tall building had been best known as the old German Bank, a name changed during the first world war. In the last year, she had watched as the sadly sagging building had been renovated into its old beauty and she had rejoiced to see it happen. She supposed it had a modern use, perhaps some business now operated from there, but that was something she didn’t know.
That young man with the intriguing face, he might be sick or injured, but she envied him none the less. He could walk out of the library and down the stairs and go anywhere he chose, visiting the newly restored German Bank building, buying a newspaper at the stand she could see outside the paper office, going on downtown to a café for a sandwich or coffee, and then he could go home to wherever his home lay.
He could, she thought wistfully, greet other people and be greeted by them. He could carry on a conversation. He could visit his sick grandfather and even look into what had made him ill.
But he didn’t know. He couldn’t guess that someone might be trying to kill the poor old man.
But maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was imagining things. Who was she to think she could understand what was going on better than the normal human beings around her.
She, who could not remember any past before this library, who haunted it like a ghost but somehow couldn’t help feeling she was alive, not dead. If this life was over for her, she would be moving on elsewhere. She would, she devoutly prayed, be joining God and his angels in Heaven.
For the first time, she felt caught, locked it, and a longing to be able to go out the big door, down the steps and into the world outside began to build inside her.
More than that, she felt a strong need to be able to help that old man who didn’t even know he was—might be—in danger.
In an effort to distract her own mind, she selected at random a book from the new releases and sat down to read the night away. By the time the dawning sun peeked in the eastern windows, casting a haze over the downtown buildings cars and people began to stir.
She felt a kind of despair lent her by the book she had persistently read through the night. It spoke of a world she didn’t know where people ran from affair to affair, their commitments only temporary, and which seemed riddled by hate and violence and a lack of loyalty that left a bitter taste in her mouth. Somewhere in the past she couldn’t remember, she had learned a different way of life.
She could never, ever find a place in that world. Maybe it was best that she stayed right here in this safe place in her beloved library and let the flesh and blood people work out their own problems.
A sense of relief flooded her when the librarians arrived. They felt like friends, Mrs. Kaye, Molly the assistant, and the children’s librarian Ginger Hanahan, and she was glad of their company.
A box of new books was delivered just after the front doors were unlocked and Susan hovered at Mrs. Kaye’s side while she took them out to begin processing. It was one of the fun things of living here to see what was coming in and hoping one of her favorite authors had a recent offering.
Her attention was distracted, however, to the front desk where worked Molly, a young woman in her twenties who had recently replaced a longtime employee who had decided to retire so she could spend more time with her grandchildren. Susan missed that old friend, even though she did still get to enjoy her company when she brought in those same grandchildren for story hour in the children’s library, and had been a little slow to warm up to Molly.
Now she tuned in as Molly listened to the first customer of the day, the man called David whom she’d just met—seen—yesterday.
He was saying words of blasphemy, at least to Susan’s ears. “I really prefer an e-reader,” he was saying, “so I want to hook up so I can check out books electronically.”
It wasn’t that Susan wasn’t aware of e-books. She’d seen patrons with their ‘tablets’ in hand, though to her a tablet was something with lined paper inside and a dark red cover on the outside. You wrote within it with a lead pencil.
It wasn’t a small, lighted plastic package that not only displayed words, but also could use sound to read a book to you. If she wanted to be read to, then Mama’s voice would be the one she’d want to hear.
Mama? Almost, for a fraction of an instant, she could nearly hear a sweet female voice. And then it faded away, that almost memory. If she’d ever had a mother and, she supposed everyone did, she had no memory of her or any other family.
Pushing away the faint aching inside her, she fixed her gaze on David’s face. Didn’t he know that no modern electronic device could never replace an actual book printed on fine paper, with illustrations like in the old Wizard of Oz books or those by N.C. Wyeth in the Robin Hood tales. She loved the feel and smell of a book in her hands, her face bent forward to catch the words by the light that came from the streetlight outside or, sometimes on a bright night, the glow of the moon.
What kind of man was David to toss that experience aside for an e-reader?
She only wished she could debate the matter with him. She was sure she could make him see reason.
But then movement caught in the corner of her eye changed her focus. These days she was particularly conscious of attention to the local history section, but when she turned full-faced to look she was surprised to see that it wasn’t June Allie who was pulling a thin book from where it was wedged in that section.
Now she was getting paranoid, thinking everything had to do with the suspected poisoner. Suspected, she reminded herself. No real evidence. No reason to get involved.
The person choosing to read a local history volume might be a bit unusual. Normally older people showed up in this section. Maybe the pretty teenager pulling out a book was working on a school project. Of course it was late summer, but the school year had already begun and no doubt the teachers were already handing out assignments.
Leaving David to loading his reader with books, she drifted over to satisfy her curiosity as to what the girl was researching. She felt as though she’d touched a ‘hot’ electric fence when she read the title. It was a familiar one, A Woman’s Weapon: Poisons and Their Uses.
What was this? The girl hadn’t hesitated, but reached right for the booklet. Someone had to have told her it was there. June must have told her.
Were the two of them researching another murder attempt?
Heavily indignant at being wheeled out of the hospital, Grandpa made it obvious as he walked unsteadily the few steps from the chair to climb into the passenger seat of his Cadillac that he needed the help. He would have fallen without the assistance of a nurse and when seated, seemed to sink against the plush seat as though exhausted by the effort.
David guessed he and Grandpa shared the same stubborn gene that made them reluctant to expose physical weakness. Personally he always worked hard at concealing how hard it was for him to walk any distance.
He grinned. “Glad to be going home, Grandpa?”
“You bet. I was afraid they were going to ship me off to the old folks home. You’d think nobody had ever had a stroke before.” He proceeded to tell the story of a friend some ten years older than himself who had regained his health after such an occurrence.
Only half listening, David tried to decide how to break the news that what had first been assumed to be a stroke had been something else. Dr. Gilson and Chief Hartz had left imparting that information to Harry’s grandson.
He had to tell Grandpa. The man had a right to know with what he was dealing. David still found it impossible to believe that anyone would deliberately try to kill Harrison Johnson, but so far none of them had come up with a logical explanation. He suspected that Jon half way thought that maybe Grandpa had deliberately taken the medicine in his funk over his grandson’s condition and apparent abandonment.
Not many children were out playing on this hot summer afternoon. In a way the 100 degree plus heat was nearly as confining as a snowy blizzard as residents retired to air conditioned homes and businesses while the grass burned and the sidewalks sizzled. David remembered he and his friends had chased the birds out of the backyard fountain on days like this.
Those Who Mourn: A Wolf Creek Mystery (Wolf Creek Mysteries Book 1) Page 4
