His doctor had forbidden Harry Johnson from going to the cemetery, barely having given reluctant permission to his attending this service. So, gently urging him back to the car, David saw that his grandfather was drooping with fatigue as he slumped down in the passenger seat at his side, silent as they drove the few blocks toward home.
When they entered, the smell of cooking food lay in the air and David frowned, heading for the kitchen. June Allie was there, blowsy hair pulled back in an unkempt pony tail as she bent over a frying pan from which she was abstracting golden brown pieces of chicken. Other pots bubbled on the electric coil burners.
“How did you get in?” he asked.
“There are ways,” she said smugly, continuing her efforts. “Anyhow it was time I got back in here and made that poor man a decent meal. No telling what you’ve been feeding him.”
He stared angrily at her, reluctant to usher her physically from the house, but determined his grandfather would not eat a bite of her food.
“Look, David,” she turned to face him, “the old man was good to me and mine when I was in a bad way. I owe him a lot and he’s a good old guy. The last thing I would want is to do him harm.”
He hoped this was true. But he couldn’t risk it. Grandpa was too dear to him.
“I appreciate your sentiments, Mrs. Allie, but still I’m asking you to leave and not come back. If you don’t I’ll call the police to get you out.”
She didn’t move. He entered a number into his phone and asked to speak to Chief Hartz. When Jon’s voice came on the phone, he said, “This is David, Jon. We’ve a little problem over at the house and could use your help.”
“Be right there.”
June Allie glared at him, but must have seen the determination in his face. With a shrug and a muttered curse, she turned off the burners and stalked toward the front door. “Goodbye, Harry,” she called in the direction of the living room, but there was no answer.
He checked on Grandpa and found him heavily asleep in his chair. He went back in the kitchen, calling the police station to tell them Jon needed not come after all. He’d just started shifting the apparently delicious food into a trash bag for disposal when a knock on the door alerted him to the fact that Jon hadn’t gotten the message.
When the police chief came in, David explained what had happened even as he put delicious looking pieces of fried chicken, fluffy whipped potatoes, and corn on the cob into a plastic garbage bag. After that they searched the house for any possible point of entry and found that the lock on the basement window had been broken and the window stood open.
“There you go,” Jon said. Between the two of them, they repaired the lock, though David couldn’t help thinking it could easily be done again.
“I’m going to have an alarm system installed,” he said grimly.
Jon nodded. “I’ve been trying to get Harry to do that for ages. A man in his eighties, living alone, and with some valuables on board, it only makes sense.”
“Valuables?” David looked around, startled. This was just home to him.
“Some of his furniture was handed down from his grandparents and are antiques that a dealer would love to get hold of. Also his mother’s jewelry, he keeps it in the same box she did in one of the upstairs bedroom. And he believes in always having cash on hand. He remembers the thirties from when he was a kid, you know, and still isn’t sure he entirely trusts the banks. And there’s several other paintings that the same grandmother and mother collected back before the artists became famous. In the old days, your family had pretensions toward grandeur.”
“News to me,” David said.
“Well, old Harry is as plain and down-to-earth as they come. He wouldn’t have brought you up thinking that way. But, just the same, I’ve always been afraid somebody would decide to enrich themselves by breaking in here, and worse, maybe hurting Harry in the process.”
“Recommend a company,” David said grimly. “I’ll call immediately.”
Jon nodded. “And there’s the gun collection. Locked in a cabinet upstairs. That belonged to his dad.”
The woman looking back at her from the ladies’ room mirror displayed long, black hair, high cheekbones and large dark eyes. Undoubtedly she was of native American decent, Susan thought enviously. When she imagined a history for herself she often hoped she could claim the same. After all this was Oklahoma where so many Indians had been forcibly settled, notably in the immediate area, the Cheyenne, and so it was not an unreasonable wish.
She read all she could about the culture, finding it fascinating, and loving to think what it must have been like in those days before white settlement when the prairies were full of natural grasses and the natives with their portable lives could wander at will. For a person tied forever to a single building, it was an intriguing possibility.
The girl finished putting on her lipstick and departed and Susan was left staring into a mirror where only the walls and furnishings of the bathroom were reflected. She had no idea what she looked like, whether her eyes were blue or brown, if she was twenty or fifty. As far as the mirror was concerned, she didn’t exist.
She’d not suffered from claustrophobia before and certainly had spent little time wondering who she was, but lately things had changed. It had something to do with David Johnson arriving on the scene. She wanted to be seen by him, her presence acknowledged. Even more she wanted to be able to walk out of the library and down the front steps at his side.
Might as well wish for the moon, she thought now, trying to jar herself from a gloomy mood as she followed the Cheyenne woman from the bathroom. That woman, she saw now, was over talking to Mrs. Kaye, a thick book held in one hand, obviously the subject of discussion. The library was relatively crowded this afternoon. School had recently started and high school students were pushing to finish summer independent studies which often included the reading of a classic novel. So most of the ‘customers’ today were young people.
Somehow Susan felt sure she wasn’t that young, mostly because she didn’t identify that closely with the teenagers. She felt more protective and even amused by them and their passionate likes and dislikes than as though she were one of them. She had already been through that stage of life, she thought.
On the other hand she felt a kind of reverence toward older people as though they should be looked up to—by the way she felt, she belonged somewhere in the middle. She hoped she was about David’s age, which she guessed to be in his early thirties. Certainly she wouldn’t want to be old enough to be his mother or his daughter. She felt neither motherly or daughterly toward the injured soldier.
As though on cue, as she came out from the stairway to enter the main section of the library, she as instantly aware that he had entered from the front door that led outside.
Chapter Eleven
He walked past the new books display, merely nodded to Mrs. Kaye behind the big desk, and ignoring the others present, seemed to head directly for where she stood in front of the door that led down to the lower floor.
He couldn’t know she was there, couldn’t even be aware of her existence, but still he came to a stop right in front of her. His lean, thoughtful face brooded.
He stood for a minute like that before going to the nearest reading chair to sit down. He didn’t bother, this time, to pick up a magazine in pretense that he was paying attention to the words written within. She looked around, wondering if anyone noticed his odd behavior. Several patrons glanced his way, but her attention was quickly caught elsewhere.
June Allie and her granddaughter Mari, half hidden by the stacks of books, intently looked together through a non-fiction section, stopping to whisper to each other as they looked through individual volumes. She was sure David hadn’t noticed their presence.
Susan left David to his thoughts and moved with that swift, noiseless motion that was one of her talents and then stood, ghostlike between the woman and the girl. “This looks good,” Mari whispered, opening a thick book and showing it
s pages to her grandmother.
Susan slipped into position so she could read the title on the cover of the rather faded old book. Poisons and Their Uses. Shocked, she quickly went back to look at the text. Unlike the earlier booklet, this seemed some kind of dense scholarly tome, complicated and perhaps dull in its informative existence.
Mrs. Allie seemed to think the same. She grimaced. “I’m not sure I can understand that one. The other one was more my speed.”
“Well, it’s gone. We’ve searched everywhere and there’s lots of books in this library. We’ve got to try something else. We’re running out of time.”
“But we’ll never get through it in the little snatches we have to look without drawing attention.”
“I’ll pick out several science books and I’ll tell Mrs. Kaye it’s for a paper I’m doing for school. She won’t think anything of it and we can take it home and really dig in.”
Mrs. Allie sighed. “I’m not sure it’ll be any help. Better we just read the labels on bottles and such.”
Susan stared at the conspiring faces with horror. This was confirmation of all her worst fears.
“It’s not so much the old man I’m worried about,” Mari whispered to her grandmother, “but the young one. He’s in to everything and acting so suspicious.”
“Yeah. Makes me mad. He acts like he has to guard Harry from everybody including me.”
And a good thing that is, Susan thought. No telling what would have happened to Harry Johnson if his grandson wasn’t looking out for him. Then the realization dawned that if they saw David as a threat, he might have stepped in line in front of his grandfather as a murder risk.
David didn’t know why he’d come here, but something felt right as he came to a stop near the far end of the library. He’d left the house in something of a panic after spending the afternoon seeing to it that the latest state of the art alarm system was installed. Grandpa hadn’t complained much and had seemed interested in the details of the installation. “Real sci fi stuff,” he said. “Though I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to figure how to get back into my own home.” He’d added after a thoughtful glance at his grandson, “but if it makes you feel safer, son.”
He could guess what Grandpa was thinking. He thought this wasn’t about the poisoning but instead had to do with David’s own fears from his experiences in Iraq. No doubt, he’d heard his grandson cry out in the night during those terrible nightmares that still came at regular intervals.
Being here, being so concerned about Grandpa, definitely wasn’t helping his recovery. On the other hand, he couldn’t leave town even if he he wanted.
So he’d come running to this safe place once again, knowing Grandpa could not be harmed as long as he stayed within a house closed in with the new alarm system.
He’d come here to feel as though he were in the company of a benevolent spirit. He grinned, thinking back to the days when he’d first lost his parents and would imagine them hovering nearby, standing guard over him. When he asked Grandpa about that, he’d shrugged and said, “Who knew?” But, the least superstitious of men, he’d said something about there being more things in heaven and earth than he knew about and that no matter what, he was certain that his folks, wherever they were, still loved and cared about him.
He wished he still thought that. With the raw wounds of the past, physical and mental so close, he could have used a friendly spirit in his life.
Hell! He need to get back to the house and act like a grownup instead of a traumatized kid. Getting up slowly because of his damaged joints, he walked over to the checkout desk and, surprised to see June and her granddaughter there, managed to greet them politely enough, even though they were the last people he wanted to see.
The girl had a surprising stack of serious looking books. Something to do with school, he supposed, but June was the one who began to babble to Mrs. Kaye, as though making a joke, that David must think she was some sort of criminal ‘cause he wouldn’t even let her in the house to see to Harry. “Poor old man,” she said, “He must feel like he’s locked in prison himself when his grandson won’t even let his friends in to see him.”
David refused to defend himself, though he could easily have said that several of Grandpa’s closest friends had called and been welcomed. He just didn’t want anyone bringing food into the house.
Mrs. Kaye smiled a little uneasily. “I’m sure David only wants to keep Harry quiet while he recovers. He was so sick.”
And that was when the stack of books which she was starting to process fell with a great clatter to the floor, as though swept off by an invisible hand. David bent to help collect them and while he reached for a couple of books, one large volume inched toward him. He bent to pick it up and stood, reading the title on the cover. Poisons and Their Uses.
He frowned, but before he could speak June’s pretty granddaughter explained hastily, “Research,” she said, “for a project at school.”
“She’s a real good student,” June Allie added defensively.
David handed the book to Mrs. Kaye. Also frowning, she read the title aloud. “I haven’t seen any other students doing research of this sort.”
“Are you saying my girl is lying?” June demanded belligerently.
“Hush, Gran,” Mari warned, then addressed herself to Mrs. Kaye. “It’s an individual project. Nobody else is doing it.” Cool as a cucumber, she waited for the librarian to finish the checkout.
Bewildered more by the odd way that the book had been virtually pushed into his hands than by the idea that June and Mari Allie were obtaining a book on poisoning just after the death of Marian Ellers, David found himself asking, “For which teacher?”
June frowned at him. “What business is that of yours?”
Mari stepped in by saying, “Mrs. Stewart, the English teacher. She asked us to do something original. I’m writing an essay called ‘Science Gone Wrong.’”
It seemed almost possible. Sometimes circumstances conspired to present the unlikely. Certainly this young girl would have no reason to choose to harm either his grandfather or Marian. She seemed to be bright and even likable and not at all like her grandmother.
“Mrs. Stewart said we could write about whatever we liked. She said only that it must be original.”
“Well, it’s certainly that,” Mrs. Kaye said in a dry tone and continued to check out the books, including the poison tome. It seemed to David that June looked back at him triumphantly as they walked away as though to say they had bested him.
Mrs. Kaye shrugged, answering the unspoken question. “I doubt very much that Mari would harm anyone. She seems to be trying to rise above difficult circumstances.”
He noticed she didn’t vouch for the girl’s grandmother.
Susan watched the changing expressions that flickered across David Johnson’s normally stoic features. Well, at least she had done what she could to show him what was going on and she knew she had stirred some suspicions.
Still she couldn’t feel at all good about this. She had also brought him into direct confrontation with the suspects and, if indeed guilty, they would have more reason than ever to want him removed.
Feeling uneasy, she walked at his side as he moved toward the door and was aware that every eye in the library was fixed on him. He must be terribly conscious now of the weight on his shoulders to keep his grandfather safe, but once again his face was stoic, almost without expression. She so wished she could tell him he was not alone in this, that she would do everything she could to help him.
Instead, once she’d seen the door close behind him, she went back to a section of the library particularly familiar to her. She’d first observed June Allie’s activities in the local history area because it was her pet area of interest. With no family or friends, no human connections other than the tenuous one-sided relationship she had with the library’s staff and its regular patrons, she liked to immerse herself in the accounts of earlier settlers and their personal lives.
Most especially she liked to read the stories of those settlers during their earliest days in western Oklahoma, stories collected from interviews conducted during the 1930s by Works Progress Administration writers at a time when those pioneers were still relatively young and keenly remembered settlement days.
Over the years Mrs. Kaye had collected some of those memories for easy access into notebooks and it was to those Susan now turned. Maybe she could learn more about David’s family if she read those and, perhaps as well, more of June Allie’s family. Maybe then she would come to some understanding of why there would be so much animosity between them that June would want to kill the old man.
Even as she picked up the first volume and began to read, she heard a woman’s voice nearby. “Don’t care what you say. I think that David Johnson acts real weird. June’s got a point. Why is he keeping old Harry locked away in his house like a prisoner?”
She didn’t look up to see who was speaking. It didn’t matter. Probably others shared her opinion. She went on with her research.
The house rang with voices when David approached the front door and he stepped up his pace, anxious that some harm might threaten his grandfather. Quickly he entered the code that would allow him to enter and went inside to hear the sound of Grandpa’s laughter ringing down the hall.
When he stepped into the living room, he found a small crowd and quickly took note of the visitors. Jill was there with her husband and children, but another person, an unfamiliar white-haired man with a deeply wrinkled face who looked even older than his grandfather was seated across from him and had obviously just told a humorous story that had sent Grandpa into amused laughter.
“Grandpa? You all right?” They all turned to look at him.
“Fine, son, just fine. Though I suppose I did humiliate myself when the police had to come out to see who was breaking in only to find it was just me. You see, I couldn’t quite remember that code you taught me, but got it bum-fuzzled by mixing up the numbers so that the alarm starting screaming. People were coming out all over the neighborhood to see what was happening and so Jill and her bunch came down to help me out.”
Those Who Mourn: A Wolf Creek Mystery (Wolf Creek Mysteries Book 1) Page 8
