B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery

by B. B. Cantwell

“Quote some more of ‘Churchyard,” Hester implored her neighbor. “Please.”

  Darrow gave her a puckish look. “Ah. You’re going to challenge me.”

  He sat up straight and rolled his eyes upward in thought for a moment, then inserted his hand inside an imaginary vest in a Napoleonic pose and spoke again in the same lilting manner:

  “Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight,

  And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

  Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

  And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.”

  Hester started to applaud, but Nate glared at her and she froze. He continued:

  “Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r

  The moping owl does to the moon complain

  Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,

  Molest her ancient solitary reign.”

  This time Darrow stopped and bowed.

  “And that old chestnut goes on for 32 stanzas – believe me, as one who once earned something like 15 cents a stanza, I’ve counted.”

  Hester’s face shone with delight.

  “I’d love to hear it all sometime. I love to read good poetry, but the only thing I’ve ever had a head for memorizing was ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’ I recited it in Fourth Grade.”

  Darrow’s face lit up.

  “Robert Service! Now there’s an artist!” He rolled his eyes back again, resumed his pose and searched his memory.

  “There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold…”

  “And then I’m gonna need your help,” he begged Hester.

  She drew up her shoulders, assumed her own pose and continued the poem in a soft singsong, as if back in the Fourth Grade:

  “The Arctic trails have their secret tales

  That would make your blood run cold;

  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

  But the queerest they ever did see…”

  Here Darrow joined in to finish the stanza.

  “Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee.”

  This time he applauded as Hester curtsied.

  When Nate stopped grinning, he assumed a serious countenance. “Only I have to ask, because I’ve always wondered: How exactly does one ‘moil,’ and what the heck is the ‘marge’ of a lake?”

  Hester spread her hands apart in an “everyone knows this” expression.

  “You know, moil. It’s like panning for gold. You ‘moil’ the sand and rocks in your pan. And the marge is the lakeshore, as in ‘margin.’ It’s quite obvious,” she sniffed.

  “And I’m sure you were a bewitching Fourth Grader,” Darrow smiled, taking her hand in his and stretching his other arm comfortably around her shoulders. As his eye wandered across the room it came to a stop at an old clock on Hester’s mantel and he came back to earth.

  “Oh, criminy, is that the time? I better get on my way, what with your canoe paddling adventure tomorrow,” Darrow said, harking back to one of the topics over dinner.

  A little sigh escaped Hester’s lips.

  “So. Detective. I don’t know if you’ve gotten the clue, but you don’t really have to make that long trip home,” she said, a sapphire sparkle in her eye. “I mean, I have pumped you full of good Oregon wine, and I’d hate for you, as an officer of the law, to get an SUI.”

  Nate squinted his eyes and cocked his head, struggling to suss it out. “OK, I’ll bite. What’s an SUI?”

  “Stairclimbing Under the Influence,” Hester deadpanned.

  “Aha,” Darrow said, nodding in comprehension, with a small twist of a grin flashing briefly across his face.

  He gazed up at Hester’s crowded bookcase and momentarily scanned the authors: Jane Austen to Charlotte Brontë to Dorothy L. Sayers to P.G. Wodehouse, their names in gold on wrinkled leather book spines. Puffing out his cheeks, he took a quick sip of the port and turned his eyes to hers in an air of blurting confession.

  “Hester, that night we had in February was one of the sweetest I’ve known, for the spontaneity and the playfulness, and simply the lovely nature of it all – cat vomit aside,” he said in a pensive recollection of how Bingle T.’s unfortunately aimed retching had led to his need to get out of his clothes during a previous dinner visit.

  “And I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about it these past few months, and how many times I almost showed up at your door unannounced with a good bottle of bubbly in hopes that you’d say, ‘Oh, Nate, how sweet, let’s hop in the sack again!’ ” he said in a rush.

  Hester, having just taken a sip of the aromatic ruby liquid, half-choked and almost sprayed her port across the room at this last statement, but Darrow continued before she had a chance to say anything.

  “But I also know that there was talk around the department and eyebrows raised about how chummy I’d gotten with a prime witness in a high-profile homicide. And if it had gone up the chain any farther I would so have gotten my butt fired,” he said, his eyes riveted now on the cold ashes of the fireplace. “And frankly I’m sorry for being such a coward.”

  Hester, having regained her composure, took another sip of wine, cleared her throat and mentally chewed on his tone of pragmatic guilt.

  “And it’s such a cute butt,” she said.

  Hester was a pragmatist in many ways herself, recognizing that there was no profit in taking insult that Darrow put career over romance.

  She silently contemplated his profile and the dark stubble on his sharp jaw line as she poured him another sip of port, nibbled at a crumb of the delightfully spunky cheese, then asked in deliberate provocation, “And speaking of that derrière, you never told me the whole story of how you got the tattoo,” she said, humming a quick few bars of “Anchors Aweigh.”

  It was Darrow’s rare turn to lightly blush in Hester’s presence.

  “Oh. You’re talking about my well-anchored personality,” he quipped, referring to the anchor tattooed on his right buttock.

  Never one to sit still for too long, Darrow sprang from his chair, facing away from Hester, stretching his arms over his head, and then lowering his hands to massage his lower back with an appreciative groan. Slowly his palms wandered lower to cup his own rear end in playful provocation.

  Hester didn’t pass up the opportunity to give him a swat on the back pocket. “Now stop that!”

  He sat back down and hastened to explain.

  “I was kind of a basket case the summer after my folks were killed in the car crash. I think I told you about that before.” Hester nodded mutely.

  “So to get away from the world I’d sailed up the inside of Vancouver Island with my Uncle Babe, from Port Townsend. And one night in Nanaimo I made some friends whose names I will never remember and after a very misguided few hours in a dive bar playing foosball and drinking way too many red beers – the worst thing I can think of now, tomato juice mixed with Pabst Blue Ribbon! – we ended up at a tattoo parlor. I guess I’m just lucky it wasn’t somebody’s name that I would have to get surgically removed. I can tell you that it was sore as the blazes and Uncle Babe made me sit at the helm for several days in a previously unknown streak of sadism.”

  Hester bit back a giggle, then leaned over and pecked him on the stubbly cheek. Then it was her turn to turn owlish, peering at the light through her glass of port for a moment before speaking.

  “Since it’s True Confession night, I will say I had some guilt to work out after our February tryst as well. While I’ve ridden the Roller Coaster of Love more than once in my day, I am not one to roll in the hay with just any hayseed who comes along, and I admit I hadn’t known you for long. So I needed a little time to think about it.”

  She took another contemplative sip of port and ruefully remembered how alcohol tended to inspire her to mix metaphors.

  “And while I did give you some space these past few months, all those times we ran into each other at yo
ur favorite pizza joint weren’t entirely coincidental. I’ve eaten more pizza than I’ve ever had in my life, thank you very much. I’ve had to walk around the Park Blocks twice a day just to keep from becoming a blimp!”

  It was Nate’s turn to let his eyes wander. The curve of her slim neck, with a few fetching freckles at the base, showed the pizza had done no harm. He leaned over slowly and let his lips nuzzle her left ear.

  Hester shrieked in ticklish surprise. “No, not the ear!”

  He moved his mouth to her neck and heard an intake of breath. Hester turned her chin and her lips met his. The kiss went on, and on.

  Out in the kitchen, Bingle T. was on the windowsill again, his teeth chattering and eyes darting with the movement of a tiny Anna’s hummingbird at the feeder a few feet beyond his reach.

  This time the cat had nothing to do with the urgent removal of Nate Darrow’s clothing.

  Chapter 26

  “Why are we having Sunday brunch at a hot-dog restaurant?” Harriet Harrington hissed at her husband.

  “It’s a little thing I have to do for work, Harriet. You know how you always say you don’t want to know the details about my work? Well, let’s just say it’s one of those times, dear,” Harry whispered across the table where they’d just been seated by Gerhard Gerbils, once again clad in his brown jodhpurs. “And they have more than just hot dogs, honeybunch – I hear the sauerbraten and spätzle are good. I have no idea what they are, but I understand they’re really quite nice.”

  When they’d finished their meal and Gerbils brought Harry the check, along with two large plastic bags full of takeout cartons, his wife’s eyes opened wide in astonishment.

  “Harry, what on earth…?”

  “Oh, these are for the party tonight, dear. Remember the party we’re having, with all our friends from my office who love German sausage?” Harry emoted, winking at his wife five times.

  “Do you have something in your eye, dear?” she asked, scowling with confusion. Gerbils stared and Harry blushed.

  “Just pay the man so we can go,” Harriet demanded.

  Harry reached for his wallet in the breast pocket of his suit coat but the pocket was empty. He reached for a side pocket with no better luck. Finally after he frantically patted his midsection he found the wallet wedged into the other side pocket.

  It was a tight fit in a pocket not usually used for his wallet, and he had to pry it out of the folds. When it finally came, something else popped out, too: a small leather folder containing Harrington’s gold-colored detective’s shield, with an eagle at the top and “Portland Police” boldly emblazoned on a blue stripe across the bottom.

  The folder came to rest atop the restaurant check with the badge staring up at Gerhard Gerbils.

  Harry watched Gerbils’ eyes flick downward and then back to Harry’s face, which flushed crimson.

  “Oh, how did that get there, Harriet?” he stammered. “Was – was Junior playing policeman again? You know he really shouldn’t, ah, shouldn’t leave his toys in Daddy’s pockets.”

  Harriet didn’t try to hide her confusion as she picked up her husband’s wallet, pulled out a credit card and handed it to Gerbils.

  “Would you please just take this so we can be on our way?” she asked, with an air of glacial coolness.

  Chapter 27

  Monday, June 17

  “Damn and blazes!” Hester exclaimed as her wheeled “trail-along” suitcase tipped over yet again as she tried to drag it over a doorjamb into the bookmobile barn, a garage in a warehouse district near the Lloyd Center mall.

  In one hand she gripped a “Gigantor” dark-roast drip from a Jitters Coffee she had passed on Burnside, while she used the other hand to yank the suitcase back upright. Grabbing its leash like a dog walker with a reluctant beagle, she made a beeline for the bookmobile, its shining magenta finish the brightest thing in sight on this gray, overcast morning. On a wall above a stack of oil cans an old clock read “7:20.”

  “Wouldn’t you know our sunny weather would disappear just in time for this ridiculous voyage to the end of the earth?” came Pim’s gravelly voice from inside the driver’s window, where Hester saw her perched and sipping her own usual morning picker-upper, a mug of hot Postum.

  “Oh, Pim, there you are. I’m sorry I’m running a little late,” Hester called. “It was just one of those mornings.”

  “Not a problem, we’re still waiting for a couple others. Haven’t set eyes yet on Madge O’Hara from Arts and Music. And Sage, the page, had to run back home because he forgot his lucky paddling beret.”

  Pim paused to take in the full view of her bookmobile colleague, clad this morning in a spotless new pair of ripstop nylon trekking trousers – the L.L. Bean catalog had called the color “schist” – that would convert to shorts when the legs were undone by zippers. Above, a breathable merino-wool T-shirt in “cinnamon,” under a khaki safari vest with multiple cargo pockets.

  Hester saw Pim’s evaluative glance.

  “Do you think the T-shirt is OK? I like the merino because it can keep you both warm and cool, depending on the weather, but they only had this one with the figure of Kokopelli on front, and I’m not sure.”

  Pim, wearing a shirt of mango orange with an image of the fire goddess Pele looking over a field of erupting volcanoes, shrugged. She peered down at Hester’s suitcase, then caught the librarian’s eye.

  “Uh, Hester, you do know this is just a day trip, right?”

  “Oh, I know, it’s just that I haven’t been on a canoe trip before, and the weather forecast kept changing, and I wasn’t sure just what kind of gear we might need, so I did a little research and the consensus of several adventure authors was that it’s better to be overprepared for changing conditions in the wild.”

  “Ah,” Pim said, trying not to smirk.

  “And you can take that smirk off your face right now, Ms. Pimala, because when we’re out in a squall in the middle of the Great River of the West, you’re going to be glad I packed two emergency ponchos so you have something other than that Aloha shirt to ward off hypothermia.”

  Hester paused to give Pim a playful look of motherly concern.

  “Besides, this isn’t just gear for the paddle trip. I brought some special Lewis and Clark history books and pamphlets from Grand Central for the bookmobile. I wanted to do a special display when we’re in Astoria.”

  From a knot of people in shorts, sandals and floppy hats at the other side of the garage Candy Carmichael spotted Hester and skipped over to welcome her.

  Candy, the library’s human resources director, had come to the library a few years earlier from the same Zeus sport-shoe company that was paying the Rose Medallion award. She had yet to “get” librarians. They sat quietly at their desks, didn’t make lots of phone calls, and sometimes they even read books during business hours. “What’s up with that?” she often moaned to the library director.

  This was the first time Hester had seen Candy in anything but high-fashion business togs, usually including spiked heels. Today Candy sported day-glo green running shorts on long legs that displayed a from-a-bottle tan. Her also-from-a-bottle blond curls cascaded down over a Zeus hooded sweatshirt in raspberry and mauve bearing the company’s hiply abstruse motto, “BE THERE.” Completing the outfit: blindingly white knee-high cotton socks and a pair of Zeus multisport high-tops that could have qualified her for the NBA.

  It occurred fleetingly to Hester that this outfit was sure to renew whisperings among the staff about Candy’s continuing “friendship” with the Zeus CEO, 20 years her senior.

  “Hester! Welcome!” Candy gushed, displaying white teeth like piano keys. “We’re so excited! I was just over there teaching everyone the Library Cheer! We’re going to use it when we need to recharge during our paddle trip today!”

  Three large dugout canoes, each carrying eight library employees, were to make the journey, launching around 10 a.m. from the Washington side of the Columbia at the quaint, forgotten-by-time litt
le burg of Skamokawa, its name meaning “smoke on the water” in the Chinookan language.

  They would paddle 20 miles downstream and across the wide river to the Oregon side. They aimed to arrive at the historic fur-trading and fishing town of Astoria in time for a midafternoon picnic in a riverfront park with a delegation from the Oregon Library Association’s annual convention, being held in nearby Seaside, an old-time beach town replete with penny arcades and carnival rides. Dora, the library’s notoriously tightfisted bookkeeper, had approved the whole junket only because it could be charged to the director’s rarely-touched budget for “education and conferences.”

  To Candy Carmichael, this was a trifecta: a team-building exercise that would double as a public relations coup in the final days of the Lewis and Clark-themed Rose Festival, while also showing off the flashy new bookmobile to colleagues from across the state.

  She saw the canoe voyage as demonstrating the library’s role not only as a repository of history but as a community of scholars who bring history to life, re-enacting some of the final westward miles of the Corps of Discovery.

  “And the library is closed Mondays anyway, thanks to the latest levy failure,” Pim sniped to Hester.

  Carmichael had alerted all of the local TV news directors. A community-college cable channel out of Clatskanie had promised to send an intern to film the launch.

  “OK, everybody, listen up!” Carmichael shouted, as the final stragglers arrived. “We have a big day ahead of us! We’ll be going in two vans, one of which is towing a trailer with one of our three artisanal dugout canoes on special loan from the Chinook tribe. Plus, as you can see, the other two canoes are coming atop the new Sara Duffy Memorial Bookmobile, which will give us tremendous visibility, so let’s all remember that every one of us is an ambassador for the Portland City Library today! We will have TV coverage, so show what a good time you’re having! Remember, a smile is just a frown turned upside down!”

  Behind her, Hester choked on a mouthful of her coffee, and from the door of the bookmobile Pim mimed sticking her finger down her throat.