A Likely Story: A Library Lover's Mystery

by Jenn McKinlay

  “Okay, so I was compiling my data for my monthly report, and I noticed that my numbers dropped all month,” Beth said.

  “Isn’t the flu going around?” Lindsey asked. “Couldn’t it just be sickness keeping everyone away?”

  Beth grabbed Lindsey’s arm and turned her to face her. Her eyes were huge, and she said, “My numbers have never ever been this low. Never. Ever.”

  Lindsey raised her eyebrows. Beth always packed the house. She was the most popular children’s librarian in the state of Connecticut, if not all of New England.

  “The weather?” Lindsey asked.

  “We’ve had the mildest January and February in decades,” Beth said. “Lindsey . . . I . . . I think I’m losing my touch!”

  Now the tears spilled over, making Beth’s black eyelashes spiky while the tip of her nose turned bright red. Lindsey pulled her friend close and gave her a bracing hug.

  “Now you listen to me,” Lindsey said. “You are the best children’s librarian on the planet.”

  “No, I’m not.” Beth shook her head.

  “Who was asked to present a workshop on story times at the American Library Association and the Public Library Association conferences and was given an award for her contribution in the field of library services to children?”

  “Me,” Beth said. “Still—”

  “No,” Lindsey interrupted. “No one is more committed to children’s literacy than you. There is a logical reason why your numbers are down, like maybe the scheduled times and days need adjusting, and we’re going to figure it out. Okay?”

  Beth drew in a long, shuddering breath. Then she wiped the tears off her cheeks and nodded.

  “You’re right,” she said. Her breath puffed out in a white cloud. “I just have to figure it out. There has to be a logical explanation.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Lindsey said. “No more fretting.”

  They continued on their way to the library, and although Beth had stopped crying, Lindsey got the feeling the discussion was far from over. She knew her friend well enough to know that Beth wouldn’t rest until she knew why her program attendance was down.

  * * *

  Lindsey arrived bright and early at the library to catch up on the work she had missed the day before. So it was no small wonder that by midafternoon she was dragging and needed a serious java booster shot to make it to the end of her shift.

  Jessica Gallo, a part-time library assistant, had handed in her notice a month ago to take a full-time job in another town. Lindsey would have loved to have kept her in Briar Creek, but there just wasn’t money in the budget for another full-time librarian, and Jessica had worked too hard to get her degree not to use it. Since her departure, the library had been short staffed, and Lindsey was pulling extra hours on the reference desk to maintain coverage.

  Working the desk got Lindsey out of the weekly deadly dull department head meetings in town hall and gave her research skills a solid workout, so she really didn’t mind. In fact, she had debated stalling on hiring Jessica’s replacement but then figured if she didn’t hire someone soon the town might rescind the position, thinking she didn’t need it. As much as she liked working the desk, she couldn’t do it all the time. Her inbox was backing up into a teetering pile of have-to-do’s she had to address.

  She made a cup of coffee in the break room and took her steaming mug out front. Ms. Cole gave her a beady-eyed stare for taking a beverage onto the public floor, but Lindsey ignored her. She had been up half the night fretting over the Rosen situation. Who had shot Peter? Where was Stewart? How could they live in that cluttered filth?

  The last thought wasn’t nice, she knew, but still, it made her head hurt just to think about the boxes and bags and piles of refuse. She found herself cleaning off the top of the reference desk, picking up stray paper clips and sticky notes and making sure all of the pencils and pens were capped and standing up in their holder. Anything extra was relegated to the appropriate desk drawer.

  Lindsey sat and sipped her coffee, surveying the neat desk and feeling herself calm down. When the pages, the library’s teen workers, came in this afternoon, she was going to have them tackle the storage room after they did their shelving. She knew it was probably a weird sort of posttraumatic stress reaction, but the need to clean and sort the library was like a worm in her brain. She would not feel at ease until there was no indication of any hoarding in the library.

  “Lindsey, I’m sorry to be a bother, but . . .” Jean Garabowski paused in front of the reference desk and looked at Lindsey with big, sad eyes. “Help.”

  “Absolutely, Mrs. Garabowski,” Lindsey said. She sat up straighter. “What can I do for you?”

  Jean was an older patron with short gray hair that she wore in tight curls all over her head. Her reading glasses hung from a beaded rope around her neck, and she was partial to elastic waistband slacks and turtlenecks with a plaid flannel shirt over them.

  “My friend—well, she was my friend, I don’t know what she is now—she just unfriended me on Facebook,” she said. “And I don’t know what to do.”

  Mrs. Garabowski’s voice wobbled with genuine distress, and Lindsey felt her heart pinch with sympathy.

  “Unfriend is such a harsh word, isn’t it?” Lindsey asked.

  “Yes,” Jean said. “It’s not nice at all.”

  “Do you know why the person unfriended you?” Lindsey asked.

  “No idea,” she said. “Can you help me?”

  “I can certainly take a look,” Lindsey said. She followed Mrs. Garabowski to a table where she had left her laptop open. The social media site was up, and Lindsey glanced at it. “I don’t want to invade your privacy, but in order to assist you I need to look at your activity.”

  “Oh, I just put up pictures of my flowers,” Mrs. Garabowski said. “There’s nothing private. I don’t put up any personal information. I heard people will take your information and clear out your bank account.”

  “Very wise.” Lindsey began to scroll through Mrs. Garabowski’s page. “You’ve won a lot of awards for your flowers.”

  Mrs. Garabowski preened. “I have a greenhouse, so I can garden all year round, and I just won first place for my roses at the American Rose Society show in Boston.”

  “By any chance is the person who unfriended you also a gardener?” Lindsey asked.

  “Why, yes, how did you know?” Jean asked.

  “This is just a guess,” Lindsey said, “but I’m seeing by your activity that you post a lot of pictures and write quite a bit about your roses, but I don’t see you liking or commenting on other people’s posts so much.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Garabowski said. Lindsey showed her how to read the activity log.

  “A good rule of thumb for social media is one out of five,” Lindsey said.

  Jean looked at her in confusion, and Lindsey clarified. “At most, one in five posts should be about yourself, your flowers, your whatever. And you really need to make sure you like and comment on other people’s posts so that it’s more of a conversation and less of a monologue.”

  “You’re saying I’m a rudesby,” Mrs. Garabowski said.

  “No, well, yes.” Lindsey cringed. Sometimes the truth was ugly, but better Mrs. Garabowski hear it from her than lose all of her friends.

  “How mortifying.” Mrs. Garabowski put her hands on her cheeks as if to cool a heated blush. Lindsey patted her arm.

  “It’s all right. You’re new at this,” Lindsey said. “I think most people make the same mistake when they’re new. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to share what’s important to you. You just have to acknowledge others as well. Here, let’s like some other people’s posts for practice.”

  She spent the next fifteen minutes giving Mrs. Garabowski a quick tutorial on social media etiquette.

  “This is great,” Jean beamed at her. “You s
hould teach a class.”

  Lindsey nodded. The idea had some merit, since they were already teaching other computer classes, and it didn’t look like social media was going away anytime soon. Maybe if everyone had to take a class in online etiquette, the amount of cyberbullying would go down, but probably not. She hoped her solution worked for Mrs. Garabowski, but there was also the possibility that the person who unfriended her was a meanie who would strike again. Lindsey figured they’d deal with that if and when the time came.

  She had just settled back into her chair when two men approached the reference desk. One was tall and thin with a thick thatch of straw-colored hair that made him look almost like a scarecrow. The other was short and stout with a neatly trimmed beard that was rapidly turning from black to gray. They both wore heavy coats, jeans and work boots and looked like the sort of men who knew how to fix things.

  Lindsey tried to remember if she had called anyone to fix anything lately, but she was sure the last request she had put in was for the toilet in the children’s bathroom, which Beth had told her had been fixed yesterday. Usually, the town maintenance men took care of all repairs, but occasionally they had to call in specialists. As far as Lindsey could recall, there had been no calls like that made for the library.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” the tall one said. “I’m Kevin Perkins, and this is my partner, Calvin Hodges. We’re looking for some information, and my mother, who is a librarian, taught me that whenever I find myself in a strange place, I should go straight to the library and ask the librarians.”

  “Smart woman,” Lindsey said with a smile. “I will do my best. How can I help you?”

  “We’re collectors, and we’ve come to see the Rosen brothers out on Star Island. The only problem is, we don’t know how to get there.”

  Lindsey went completely still. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “We’re from the Chicago area,” Kevin explained. He reached into his coat and took out a business card, which he handed to Lindsey. It was plain white with embossed lettering and a picture of an antique shop.

  “We travel all over the country buying antiques and collectibles for our shop. Currently, we’re touring New England, and my partner got a line on the Rosen brothers’ as a place to check out.”

  Lindsey blew out a breath. “Welcome to Briar Creek. I’m Lindsey Norris, the library director. Have you been in touch with the Rosens lately?”

  “Not since we left Chicago,” Calvin said. He looked up at his partner. “When was that, two weeks ago?”

  “About that,” Kevin agreed.

  “You won’t have heard, then,” Lindsey said. She made an apologetic face as she studied the two men. “I’m sorry to report that there’s been a tragedy at the Rosen home. Peter Rosen is dead.”

  Both men gave her startled looks.

  “That’s terrible!” Kevin said.

  “When did this happen?” Calvin asked.

  “He was discovered yesterday,” she said.

  “Peter was the brother I was in touch with,” Calvin said. He looked stunned. “What happened?”

  Lindsey sighed. How much could she say to complete strangers? The news of Peter’s death had rocketed through the town, but Stewart being missing wasn’t common knowledge just yet. Of course, in a town this size, it was only a matter of time before everyone knew, which would probably be when Stewart resurfaced to do his nightly foraging.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything else. You may want to stop by the police station and talk to Chief Plewicki, as she can give you more information on the situation.”

  Kevin looked at her with a concerned expression. “Is there a reason we’d want to talk to the police?”

  Lindsey hesitated.

  “How did he die?” Calvin asked.

  “I’m not sure what I should or shouldn’t say about the situation,” Lindsey said. “I apologize for sounding mysterious. The best I can do is tell you that his death is under investigation.”

  Both men were silent, studying her.

  “Well, given the circumstances,” Kevin said, “maybe we should move on to our next location.”

  “No!” Calvin argued. Both Kevin and Lindsey looked at him in surprise. He looked sheepish and put a hand on the back of his neck. “Peter and I share a love of old mechanical banks. We became friends online when we both posted to the same auction house on a vintage bank from nineteen ten. It was so cool, it . . .”

  He glanced up and noticed both Kevin and Lindsey looking at him.

  “Sorry. Nature of the business,” he said. He looked at Kevin. “You know, I wouldn’t feel right leaving until I know what happened to him, and I’d like to talk to his brother, Stewart. From some of the things Peter said, I gather there were some issues there. Given the situation, I’d feel horrible if I just left without finding out what happened.”

  Kevin nodded. “I get it, but we can’t linger. We’re on a tight schedule.”

  Lindsey studied Calvin. Issues between the brothers? Stewart had been taking care of Peter for over fifty years. Had he suddenly snapped? She couldn’t imagine it, but what did she really know about the Rosens?

  She certainly never would have guessed that they had online access to auctions, because they sure never used a computer to send her a message at the library, or search for books at the library, or anything as forward thinking as that. Their requests always showed up in the book drop in an envelope, containing a very polite handwritten note, requesting the specific item. If they had a computer, why not use it?

  She thought back to the house on Star Island. She hadn’t seen a computer, but then again, she hadn’t seen the whole house either. Maybe they had one off in a spare bedroom, or perhaps they both had the latest in cell phone technology.

  “If you’re looking for collectibles, you might want to pop in at the senior center and ask around,” Lindsey suggested. “We have a large retired population.”

  “In a town like this we may get lucky. Who knows what else we’ll be able to find. Can you recommend a place for us to stay?” Calvin asked Lindsey.

  “There’s only one place in Briar Creek, and that’s the Beachfront Bed and Breakfast run by Jeanette Palmer,” Lindsey said. “We’re not a peak tourist spot in late February, so she should have availability. Follow Main Street to the end and then turn right. She has a sign out front, so you can’t miss it.”

  “Great. Thanks,” Kevin said.

  “Thanks,” Calvin added. “Just for my own curiosity, do you have any articles or any information on the Rosen brothers as well as the history of the surrounding area?”

  “I have several books about the town’s history, and I’m sure the Rosens are mentioned in them, as their family has been here for generations,” Lindsey said. “But for more in-depth information, you probably want to talk to Milton Duffy.”

  Lindsey came around the desk and walked them over to the far side of the library. Sure enough, Milton was in his usual spot in the corner, doing one of his favorite yoga postures where he stood on one bent leg while the other was wrapped around it and his arms were twisted around each other as well. Lindsey knew if she tried it, she would have landed on her behind, but Milton was holding it without even wobbling; not bad for a guy cruising into his mideighties.

  “He’s the head of the historical society and can tell you anything you want to know about Briar Creek and the Thumb Islands.”

  As they approached, Milton opened his eyes and studied them. Lindsey could see he was doing his breathing, and she hated to interrupt, so she stayed back until he began to unwind from the posture.

  “Garudasana, also known as the Eagle Pose,” he said as they approached. “Opens the shoulders and strengthens the back, hips, thighs, calves and ankles.”

  Calvin and Kevin looked at Milton, then at each other, and the
n at Lindsey.

  She smiled. Milton was tall and thin with a neatly trimmed goatee, a shiny dome and sparkling blue eyes. He radiated good health and positive energy, and he was not only on the library board but was one of Lindsey’s favorite patrons, even though he was keeping company with Ms. Cole, also known as the lemon, which no one seemed to understand except for the two of them. Lindsey supposed that was exactly as it should be.

  “Milton, we have two visitors from Chicago looking to learn more about our town,” she said. She gestured to the two men beside her. “Kevin Perkins and Calvin Hodges. They’re collectors.”

  The two men exchanged handshakes with Milton. He was wearing his usual tracksuit and picked up a towel from the chair beside him and draped it around his neck.

  “Is there anything in particular that you wanted to know?” Milton asked.

  Lindsey smiled at them and gestured that she had to get back to the desk. They all nodded, and she hurried back to her coffee, hoping it was still hot.

  What were the odds that there were two men here to see the Rosens just when tragedy struck? On the one hand, she’d seen life work like that before, but on the other hand, she didn’t really believe in coincidence.

  She glanced at the card Kevin had given her and then turned to her computer and typed the name of their company, Perkins and Hodges Antiques and Collectibles, into Google. Their website popped up as the first option, and Lindsey went right into the About Us option.

  The photo that came up was definitely them, so that was good. She read their history and discovered that the two of them had been in the collectibles business for years. They had three part-time employees and worked out of a large warehouse in the Chicago suburbs. They frequently traveled around the country, looking for antiques with which to stock their shop. Kevin had a love of classic car engines and old gas station memorabilia, while Calvin was partial more to odds and ends like antique lamps, vintage movie posters and mechanical banks.