“She didn’t fill out a leave request,” Susan said, closing the file. “Or at least it’s not in here. Now it’s possible I didn’t print it out, and I’ll have to check my email to make sure. I’ll check with my assistant too to make sure it didn’t get misplaced before it went in her file.”
“I wonder where she went…” I tapped my fingers on my boss’s desk, a nervous habit I’d picked up from Molly. “I hope it wasn’t to the Cayman Islands…”
Susan folded her hands together on top of her desk and leveled her gaze on me. “You and Evangeline are good friends, aren’t you?”
My eyes widened as I stared at her, hoping beyond hope she wasn’t going to accuse my friend of this heinous crime. I nodded.
“And she hasn’t been at work the last two days?”
I nodded again, swallowing hard. “I’ve heard she’s sick.”
“Yessss,” Susan drew out the word, “but I drove by her house this morning on my way to work, and she wasn’t there.”
“She wasn’t?” Oh no. What if she was in the Cayman Islands with Jada?
“Nope.” She popped the “p” on the end of the word. “I thought she liked working here,” she continued. “I thought she knew how much we valued her. It’s hard to believe she would betray us all like this, but I…”
“Wait,” I suddenly remembered Molly said Evangeline went upstairs to the activities room to get her jacket around the time the display case was smashed. Susan was up there supervising the clean-up from dinner.
“What?” My boss’s usually beady eyes rounded.
“Did Evangeline come upstairs to grab her coat while you were in the activities room on Saturday night? You know, during the announcement of our collection total, and then the Bible being stolen?”
Susan stared at me blankly for a moment like she was trying to access her memory reel from that night. And then… “No. No, I never saw her up there. After dinner, I didn’t see her for the rest of the night, in fact.”
Crudola.
“Okay.” I heaved a sigh that came from deep within my gut, which was starting to ache like I’d been stabbed. And I had, at least figuratively. How could one of my best friends betray me like this? Betray us all?
“So you haven’t talked to her about this?” Susan pressed, the slightest hint of empathy softening her sharp features. “She hasn’t said anything? She wasn’t behaving abnormally?”
“We’d been chatting at lunch about possible suspects,” I admitted, my head now aching with the pain I’d been trying to ward off all day. “I know she called in sick, but she never gets sick. And Mrs. Monroe said something strange about her yesterday morning when I passed her as she was out walking her dog.”
Susan’s brows arched. “Willa Bryce Monroe said something about Evangeline?”
I nodded, my guts twisting as I remembered the look on the widow’s face when she described my colleague as “pure evil.” At this point, I didn’t know what was more painful, my stomach or my head.
“What did she say?”
The thought of repeating it made me hurt even more. “Something about Evangeline being a witch…and needing the Founders’ Bible for some spell or…gosh, Susan, I don’t know. The whole thing was just so…strange.”
My boss’s lips thinned as she stared at me, absorbing my words. “When was the last time you talked to Evangeline?”
“Tuesday.” The knife in my guts twisted a little farther.
“Maybe you should pay her a visit tonight after work? And I’ll look into this Jada vacation thing more closely. Maybe we can figure out what’s going on.”
As much as I hated to confront Evangeline, I nodded somberly. Getting to the bottom of this and recovering the money and Founders’ Bible were of paramount importance. We couldn’t leave any stones unturned. And if Susan thought there was a chance Evangeline could be behind the heist, I had to act on her suspicion. There was too much evidence pointing in that direction, and Susan was rarely wrong about anything.
Ten
I relayed my entire conversation with Susan as Molly drove us over to Evangeline’s. We’d been friends with her for years now, but neither of us had ever been to her house. “Is that weird?” I asked Molly as she pulled into the driveway.
“I do think it’s a little unusual. It’s not like she said we couldn’t come over; it’s just that we always do stuff at my house or yours, or we go out.”
“She doesn’t like to go out,” I reminded her.
“That’s true. She normally doesn’t come when we go out.” Molly shrugged. “She’s an introvert. It’s not her fault.”
The garage door was shut, and there was a newspaper on the porch. It was still light outside, so no telling if the lights were on inside or not. “I guess I didn’t tell you what Mrs. Monroe said about our friend…?”
Molly flashed me a curious look, then launched into her own opinion on the matter, “Not sure I’d believe anything that comes out of that woman’s mouth. She’s not one hundred percent lucid, as far as I can tell. I talked to her for about five minutes at the gala on Saturday, and all she would do is give me advice for snatching up a man. I think it had something to do with wearing heels and cooking him his favorite dish.”
I burst into laughter. “Yeah, she told me not to even bother looking for love until I lost weight, so at least your advice was a little kinder. She offered to let me borrow her diet cookbook.”
“She said that?! Oh my gosh!”
I nodded, the giggles still spilling out of my mouth. It was funny, of course, but I might have been stalling. The prospect of confronting Evangeline had my stomach tangled in knots. Molly and I had both skipped dinner, thinking we’d reevaluate after we were done with this potentially unpleasant task.
I sucked in a breath as my laughter died out. “Well, she also accused Evangeline of being a witch, so…”
Molly stopped laughing and whipped around to face me. “Where are we? Salem, Massachusetts, circa the seventeenth century?”
“She said she’s ‘pure evil.’”
“Just because she wears black all the time and hates people?”
I shrugged. “No idea. I’m just repeating what she told me. She said Evangeline needed the Founders’ Bible for some ritualistic spell or something.”
“Wow, that’s…” Molly shook her head and blinked rapidly, “…creative, to say the least.”
“No doubt,” I agreed.
Okay, we’d stalled long enough. I’d told Molly that Susan claimed she’d driven by in the morning, but no one was home. With the garage locked up, how could she tell? Did she actually go to the door? At the time, I assumed she meant there was no car in the driveway and no garage, but now…
“C’mon, we better get going.” Molly reached over to touch my hand.
I nodded, filling my lungs with an extra dose of oxygen for additional strength. Father, please, I prayed. Give me the right words to say. I have no idea what I’m doing here.
We climbed out of Molly’s car and walked up the stone path to Evangeline’s house. It was similar to mine, a cottage style, but hers featured gray siding and black shutters. Her living in a gray house with black shutters perfectly matched my expectations.
Molly rang the doorbell, and then we both stood there, waiting. My hand was on my hip, and Molly rocked back and forth from one foot to the other. I was surprised I couldn’t hear both of our hearts pounding away. After a minute, I was almost ready to bail, but then the door handle slowly began to turn.
The sound of my blood rushing through my veins pulsed in my ears. I didn’t know what I was so scared of. Was I expecting Evangeline to answer the door wielding an axe like she was about to go on a murderous rampage?
Finally, the door swung open, and Evangeline stood there looking rather like a zombie. She had a blanket wrapped around her frail shoulders, and her face was a greenish-gray color. Purple half-circles underscored her dark eyes, and her hair was unwashed and propped into a ball on top of her head in what wa
s possibly the messiest bun in the history of messy buns. And there was that distinct odor of sickness radiating off her.
“Oh, honey!” I gasped when I saw her. She staggered back and held up her fingers in the shape of a cross. “Are you trying to tell us not to come in?”
She nodded slowly, like it was exceedingly painful to move her head even that tiny bit.
Molly spoke through the screen door, “Can we get you something? Chicken noodle soup?”
Evangeline shrugged, then shivered, wrapping the blanket tighter around her thin body. I didn’t know what kind of illness she had, but I certainly didn’t want to get exposed to it.
“We’ll be right back.” Molly lifted her index finger to indicate one minute.
Evangeline didn’t even bother closing the door. She stepped back a few feet, and we saw her collapse on the sofa.
“Wow, she looks terrible!” I whispered. “Why did Susan say she wasn’t home? Surely she didn’t leave the house in that condition. Maybe she just didn’t answer the door.”
“I’m starting to understand why she didn’t answer our texts,” Molly said. “She looked like death warmed over!”
“Let’s go get her some soup, and we’ll come back. I wonder if she needs anything else.” I turned back to the door and shouted through the screen, “You need anything else?”
Zombie-woman shook her head.
“Just soup?” I verified.
She gave me a weak thumbs-up. “Can you get my mail?” she added in a hoarse voice.
“Sure thing.” I walked back to the car with Molly, feeling just horrible that I’d doubted my cataloguer friend. Yes, she was a bit of an odd duck, and the grumpiest person I knew—next to me, though she made me look like Miss Mary Sunshine in comparison, almost like my parents got my name right after all. But it was wrong to think, even for one second, that she could be responsible for the horrible, evil crimes that happened at the library on Saturday night. I hated the idea of her being sick, but I loved the idea of her not being a traitor!
We returned to Evangeline’s home about thirty minutes later with a bag of groceries and goodies for our friend. Hot chicken noodle soup from the café on the boardwalk and crackers, tissues, cough drops and a few other items to speed along her recovery.
“Hey, I’ll get the mail and take these trash cans back to the house,” I offered, gesturing toward the green garbage bin and the matching recycling bin with a yellow lid that were perched by the mailbox. “Can you ask our patient where they go?”
“Sure, just a sec.” Molly stepped up to the porch and opened the door just wide enough to set the convalescent items inside the house. Then she turned back to me. “She says to drag them around to the back door.”
That seemed like a long way to drag the trash bins every week on garbage collection day, but whatever. There was a sidewalk that wrapped around the house, so I dragged one bin to the side of the house, dropped the mail off to Molly, who was talking to Evangeline through the door to stay as germ-free as possible, then I returned for the recycling bin.
Once I had both bins, I wheeled them around the house to where I found an enclosed deck. I froze in my tracks as a heart-stopping scene came into view.
There was an old book that looked suspiciously like the crumbling leather-bound Founders’ Bible in the center of a circle of candles with an assortment of rocks, pine cones, and other nature items forming a design around it.
When my limbs finally unfroze from my initial shock, I rushed up the steps and found the screen door unlocked. I darted in, grabbed the Bible, and darted back out before evil spirits or whatever was hanging around in there could nab me. All I could hear was my blood rushing through my ears as I raced around to the front of the house, freezing again in my tracks when I saw Molly standing in the driveway, her hands on her hips.
“What’s taking you so long?” she snapped. “I want to sanitize my hands!”
I realized I was clutching the Bible to my body so tightly, she couldn’t even tell I was holding it. Carefully—and painstakingly slowly—I peeled the book away from my heaving chest and turned it around to show her, trying hard not to damage the fragile relic.
“Oh my gosh, is that what I think it is?” she breathed out, hardly any actual voice to her whisper.
I nodded, my whole body quivering with the realization of what this meant.
“Well, let’s start by not panicking,” Molly suggested as her fingers white-knuckled the steering wheel.
“Panicking? Who’s panicking?” I stammered, my voice shaking with nerves.
“There has to be a reasonable explanation for this!” Molly insisted as she made the turn onto Bryce Beach’s main thoroughfare.
“Besides our friend is a witch and stole our town’s most prized possession for some evil sorcery?” I ran my fingers through my red curls and gave them a good tug, replacing one sting with another. “Maybe Willa was onto something!”
“Maybe she’s a good witch!” Molly shrugged but kept her eyes glued to the road. “Maybe she’s casting a spell to rid the town of evil spirits.”
I winced. “No…no…this is all messed up. What should we do? We can’t let her get away with it! Our jobs are at stake here. She cashed the checks?”
“Well, she is actually sick. I don’t think she could fake looking that bad.” Molly turned down the street where my house was. All the streets in Bryce Beach were named after flowers or trees, and I lived on Magnolia Lane.
“She’s actually sick, so she’s probably not going anywhere for a couple of days,” I ventured. “But why in the world did she think she could get away with this? Maybe she was going to skip town, but then came down with this bug and couldn’t travel?”
“She probably didn’t think anyone would come to her house and find the Bible.” Molly pulled into my driveway but left her engine running. “Do you want me to come in?”
I shook my head, still clutching the Bible firmly but not too firmly. Fear that I would damage or hurt it in some way spiked the edge of every nerve in my body. I was frazzled beyond belief, and I had no idea how I was supposed to sleep tonight.
I guessed I’d broken the case. But I was not at all happy with my accomplishment. I thought I’d feel amazing when I finally figured out what happened—especially if I beat Bryce Beach PD to the punch. But I felt like a pile of poo instead.
“How could she betray us like this?”
My question floated on the air as Molly stared out the windshield. The sun was sinking into the tree line now, giving the branches an orange halo. It would be beautiful if I wasn’t so upset.
My friend looked over at me with a tear glistening in her eye. Oh no. If she cried, I was going to cry too, and it was going to be hard to stay level-headed if I was sobbing uncontrollably.
I sucked in a deep breath. I was holding a Bible. God’s Word. If anything or anyone could help me now, it was God. “I’m going to go inside, put this Bible in a safe place, and pray about it. Then I’ll decide what to do.”
Molly nodded. “That sounds like a good plan. I’ll text you later, okay?”
“Thanks for going over there with me.” When I reached over and squeezed my friend’s hand, she nodded solemnly.
Then I got out of the car, cradling the Bible like a newborn as I walked up my steps and unlocked my door. I was going to figure this out. God was going to help me.
Eleven
Filled with a renewed strength and vigor, I got in my car on Friday morning, the Founders’ Bible wrapped carefully in a towel and placed in a canvas bookbag, and drove to the Bryce Beach police station. I didn’t know what the chances were that I’d be able to meet with Chief James, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle of calling first and trying to get an appointment when I had such a break in the case.
I’d prayed and thought long and hard about what it meant to go to the police with this evidence and to basically throw my friend under the bus. I just kept coming back to the fact that she betrayed the library, which
meant she threw all of us under the bus first.
I couldn’t believe she would do that. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what her motive was. How could she witness the time and effort I put into that gala just to destroy everything I’d worked for? She knew her job was safe because she was the only cataloguer at our small library, and she had more seniority than me. She didn’t have as much to worry about as I did.
I was forty-two years old, and I’d been a librarian for almost my entire life. How would I start over? Would I be forced to move away from the town my family had lived in for generations?
These were all of the fears digging their sharp claws into me when I was wrestling with how to proceed. Fortunately, my kitties had curled up next to me on the couch while I put on Netflix, and I just sat there and tried to breathe deep and relax. And then I went to the Lord and asked Him to guide me.
Reflecting back on the process I’d gone through to arrive at the conclusion I should turn Evangeline in, I parked at the station and headed inside. Though I’d lived in Bryce Beach my entire life, I’d never set foot inside the police department. I figured that was a very good thing, really, because if you have to go to the police, you’re usually involved in a less-than-ideal situation.
The interior of the police station was gray and cold and looked like it had last been updated in the late eighties or early nineties. Maybe Chief James would be in a better mood if he had a more aesthetically pleasing workplace? I knew my mood improved after the library underwent its last renovation, which was about five years ago. We went from a sea of beige to vibrant beach-inspired colors like turquoise and tangerine. It was much, much better.
“Hi, I’m Sunshine Baker, and I’ve been working with the police on the library theft case. I have some evidence I want to turn over to Chief James. Is he in?” I asked in my most pleasant, cheerful voice.
Dangerous Curves Boxed Set 1: 3 Cozy Christian Mysteries Page 10
