Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries)

by B. B. Cantwell

  Hester had to smile. The Instie-Circ had provoked Pim for years now. It regularly ate the day’s circulation statistics when it was “dumped” into the main computer after each run. The result: Overdue notices went out to every patron on the run.

  The regulars just shook their heads and handed the notices to Hester. New patrons were always upset and had to be reassured that their reputations were intact.

  “Pim,” Hester said as she pulled at the back cupboard. “This door is really jammed.” The tall cabinet with a small handle was always hard to open in winter when dampness swelled the wood.

  “Let me try prying the lousy thing,” Pim said, pushing back from the Instie-Circ. “I’ll grab my tool kit.” But before she could rise, the first of the morning’s patrons rapped on the door, and then pulled it open to peek in. Pim and Hester quickly began helping patrons aboard without the aid of the step stored in the jammed cupboard.

  The day was finally warming as the last stop before lunch brought the bookmobile to Toshmore Court, a retirement complex for the well-heeled. Toshmore’s fussy patrons expected a little more in the way of conveniences than the usual bookmobile user, so Hester went back to the cupboard to pull out the step.

  “Pim,” Hester called out. “Help me with this will you?” The door was still jammed tight. Yanking did little but threaten to pull the flimsy handle from its moorings. Pim peered closely at the door and pointed to a bit of navy blue wool wedged in the crack.

  “My kit's up front. If I can get that stuff out, the door should open,” she said, heading for the front of the bus.

  Hester reached for a nail file from the pocket of her greatcoat and began to saw at the material. “Got it,” she called out. Putting her shoulder to the door and bracing her weight against it, Hester wrenched open the tall cupboard.

  The shriek made Pim jump. She whirled and caught sight of the intrepid librarian trying to say something. All that came out was a squeak. Then Hester’s eyes rolled back in her head, she teetered on her heels, and then dropped to the cold linoleum floor.

  Scrambling to help, Pim skidded to a stop at the sight of bloody hand prints smearing the inside of the cupboard door. And slumping from the step in the bottom of the cupboard was the still figure of Portland's former head librarian, Sara Duffy.

  Chapter Three

  An hour later, yellow “police line” tape encircled the magenta bookmobile, giving it the incongruous appearance of a gaily wrapped Christmas package.

  Inside, a Portland Police Bureau detective conferred with an assistant medical examiner. Outside, a now-conscious Hester leaned against a brick wall separating the two wings of Toshmore Court. As curious neighbors milled among the usual bookmobile patrons, Pim was telling a uniformed police officer what had happened.

  “Excuse me,” a shrill voice intruded. “My books are due today. Are you going to talk all day? I have books to return!” Eldon Purdy, his badly dyed black hair falling in strings across his face, tried to shove a handful of books at Hester. Pim blocked the move like a skilled linebacker.

  “You'll have to take them to a branch,” Pim told him firmly. “The bookmobile can't do any more business today.”

  “But my books are due today,” the indignant reader whined. “And you're public servants,” he said, as if this was the first time anyone had thought of it. “I pay your wages!” The little man glared at Pim gloatingly.

  Hester turned to Mr. Purdy and said, “You can take them to the box over by that tree.”

  “But I want them checked in now; I don't want to get any of those notices.” Mr. Purdy was about to cite each and every overdue notice he had ever received when the uniformed cop chimed in.

  “No!” The police officer clearly cowed the man, who walked over to the box, complaining as he went.

  Hester cast a thank-you glance at the officer. She began to give her statement when the detective who had been in the bookmobile squeezed open the door, ducked under the yellow tape and strode across a patch of lawn to join them.

  “I’m Detective Darrow,” he said, extending his hand to Hester.

  She found herself looking up. Nate Darrow was several inches taller than Hester, who stood 5-feet-11 in her Birkenstocked feet. His slim build accentuated broad shoulders and a thatch of prematurely graying hair contrasted with luxuriant, chestnut-colored eyebrows. A Donegal tweed sport coat, heather gray with flecks of yellow and blue, hung unbuttoned over a white Oxford shirt, plum-colored knit tie and gray corduroy trousers. About her own age, she guessed, though there was a boyishness about his face.

  “Is she really dead?” Hester asked, knowing it was a foolish hope to think otherwise.

  “I’m sorry,” Darrow replied with a nod, holding her gaze for a moment before reaching for the uniformed officer’s notes and quickly assessing the information. Handing back the officer’s notebook, he took out his own and continued the line of questioning with Hester.

  “ ‘Hester Freelove McGarrigle.’ That’s quite a name,” Darrow said with a small smile.

  Hester found that his quiet warmth helped her focus. “Freelove is a family name,” she volunteered. “It’s a virtue name, you know, like Faith, Hope and Charity. I kept it a secret for years,” she said with a chuckle, then stopped, embarrassed by her own chatter.

  Darrow paused. “And ‘Hester’? That’s none too common.”

  “No, that’s an English-teacher mother with an overdeveloped penchant for Hawthorne.”

  “Then we have something in common,” Darrow said. “My first name is Nathaniel, also after the scribe of Salem. My parents came from New England.”

  “Goodness! Maybe we should form a club.”

  Glancing sideways into her eyes, Darrow suppressed another smile, then returned to business. “This obviously is quite a shock for you, Ms. McGarrigle, but it is important that we get as much information as we can as soon as we can. I take it you knew the victim. Were you close?”

  Hester closed her eyes to put her thoughts in order. Turning to Darrow she said haltingly, “Yes, and no. Miss Duffy was the former head librarian of the Portland City Library. She has, uh, had been a bookmobile patron from the day she retired three years ago.”

  Hester paused. “I knew Miss Duffy for at least 10 years but I was never part of her circle. I did notice certain things about her, though. Like, when she had a special errand to run or a friend to meet she would wear that blue dress with the little frill at the neckline. When she had a doctor’s appointment, she would wear an identical one in beige. The rest of the time she wore a plain wool skirt with a matching twin-set.”

  “Twin-set?”

  “You know, a pullover sweater with a matching cardigan, usually come in pinks or gray or white?” She caught herself. “Sorry, I’m babbling. You don’t really look like you’re an expert in over-50 ladies’ fashions.”

  Shaking his head vacantly, Darrow made a note on his pad. It sounded like the sort of thing his grandmother had worn, always smelling of liniment.

  “Now, can you think of anything that was unusual about the bookmobile today?” he continued.

  Pim looked at him in disbelief. “There was a body in the back cupboard,” she said with a deadpan gruffness.

  Annoyance played on the detective’s face as Pim interrupted his rapport with Hester.

  Hester caught the look but her mind had gone blank. She stammered that she really couldn't think of anything. Darrow scribbled more in his notebook.

  “We’ll have your statements printed up in a few minutes,” Darrow said curtly, indicating the Police Bureau clerk who had set up shop with a laptop and printer near the bookmobile. “As soon as you have signed, the patrolman over there will give you a ride to wherever you need to go. We’re impounding your vehicle. But you’re free to go about your business for now.”

  “For now,” Hester whispered to Pim as they walked toward the waiting patrol car. Pim, who had become quiet and grim, nodded, “I don't like that man.”

  Hester, turning to look b
ack at the bookmobile, had a different thought.

  Chapter Four

  Tuesday morning dawned strangely quiet. Sunlight filtered with an unusual clarity through the kitchen window of Hester’s apartment as she emerged from her tiny bathroom and looked out. A half inch of ice coated the outside of the pane.

  “A silver thaw!” Hester experienced a moment of delight. She turned up the radio to hear the beginning of a long list of school closures.

  Portland's famous silver thaw was a local phenomenon Hester had grown up loving. It must have snowed some in the night and then warmed just enough to change to freezing rain. The city turned into one gigantic ice palace – just like the one in “Dr. Zhivago.” The streets became ribbons of ice, making travel unthinkable. The schools usually closed and that was always cause for celebration!

  “Oh please, please, please, let the library be closed,” a grown-up Hester cooed to the radio just as she had as a child from her upstairs bedroom in her family’s old Italianate three-story in Portland’s historic Irvington neighborhood. Maintaining the decaying barn of a house stretched her parents’ teaching salaries but her band-conductor father said the 12-foot ceilings were necessary for good acoustics. Her mother, an English teacher who taught tap-dancing in their basement on weekends, liked to call the house a combination of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” and P.G. Wodehouse’s Totleigh Towers.

  But despite the thin-paned windows that frosted on the inside on winter’s coldest days and a cranky oil furnace whose blower wasn’t quite up to the task, that house was a cozy fortress in Hester’s memory. Snow days, when school was canceled, meant her whole family got to sleep late. An only child, Hester fondly remembered Third Grade when a big winter storm closed schools for a week and every morning she had climbed in between her parents in their big four-poster bed so her father would read aloud from “Chronicles of Narnia” while she imagined the White Witch riding her sleigh down their street.

  The reading bug claimed her early. A saintly neighborhood librarian who helped Hester choose books from the time she was old enough to have her own library card, then hired her for her first after-school job, inspired her future. From that time, she never stopped working in libraries. “Or wanted to,” she mused aloud.

  The crackling radio brought Hester out of her reverie.

  “Mollala, Mollala High and Dickey Prairie districts are closed,” the announcer droned. “Tualatin, Estacada and the Portland Public Schools are closed.”

  Hester didn't have any faith that the library would close. The current board felt that the library was an essential service and not to be closed unless truly necessary. Usually Hester agreed.

  “All county offices are closed.”

  Her breath caught. The county offices hardly ever closed. Hester looked outside again. The ice distorted the view. It was really closer to an inch thick and there wasn't a soul passing the neatly restored Victorians and brick-fronted apartments of her Northwest Portland neighborhood.

  “The Portland City Library is...”

  BRRRINNG! BRRRINNG!

  Hester ran to the shrilly ringing phone. “What?” she shouted into the ancient black receiver of the old telephone that fit her fondness for things that were classical and well-built. Missing that last bit meant waiting another 20 minutes for the next reading of the list.

  “Well, I thought you'd be happy to have a day off.” Pim’s voice squawked from the heavy handset.

  “Pim! I didn't mean to shout! The radio was just saying something about the library, but I didn't catch it.”

  “Closed.”

  “Really! I can't believe it! We never close.”

  “Have you looked outside?”

  Hester dragged the phone over to the window and looked again. “I'd say we have an inch here.”

  “More like two inches here.” Pim lived in a trailer-house out on the banks of the Sandy River, east of the city. She enjoyed a great view of drift-boating steelheaders on autumn afternoons but always seemed to get the worst of winter storms. “We'd be grounded for sure if the library opened for foot traffic.”

  Grounded days were the worst. Hester and Pim had to stay at the barn and do the paperwork, filing and report writing that were the bane of a librarian's life. That kind of thing made Hester want to break pencils. She had a desk drawer full of pencil halves.

  “You feeling okay now, Hest? You weren't looking so good yesterday.”

  Pim's casual remark brought Hester to a sudden stop. “Oh, Pim. I had – kind of forgotten. I never even thought... Oh, damn! There's someone at the door, I've got to go. I’ll call you right back.”

  The rapping at her apartment door continued. Hester undid the chain and deadbolt and opened the door wide to face Detective Darrow.

  “May I come in?” he said as he walked into the room.

  Hester waved him into the living room. With a quick glance in the hall mirror, she noted that the blue denim shirt-dress she had chosen this morning brought out the color in her eyes.

  Hester mentally shook herself. Detective Darrow was here for a reason that had nothing to do with her eyes.

  “How on earth did you make it through the ice?” Hester asked. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  Darrow, eyes rheumy and cheeks shaded by dark stubble, smiled a grateful yes. He peeled off a faded, mustard-colored anorak to reveal a rumpled blue sweater emblazoned with the knitted eight-inch high inscription, “POLICE.” How, uh, charming, Hester thought as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  Darrow stifled a yawn, shifting his weight from one weary foot to another as he glanced around the apartment. Hester's living room was as filled with books as a room could possibly be. It looked like a second-hand book shop he used to haunt, Darrow reflected as he shifted a stack of books so he could slump for a moment in an old dining chair shoved in a corner.

  One wall was a built-in rosewood bookcase, floor to ceiling, jammed with hundreds of volumes. Some appeared to be first editions, probably rare. Opposite the book wall was a fireplace of sooty river rock framing andirons that Darrow recognized as cast-iron silhouettes of Paul Bunyan on one side and Babe the Blue Ox on the other. The furniture, too, was just right for a bookshop. To one side of the fireplace, two overstuffed leather chairs in teal blue sat on each side of a solid mahogany table topped by a Tiffany-style lamp. A long sofa in faded chintz with huge red roses on a cream background straddled a multicolored rug, not Persian, but certainly hand-woven. A sideboard, loaded with more books, and a few scattered tables and lamps finished the decor.

  Darrow stood again, peering at the bookcase and scanning titles when Hester came back with a pewter tray. “The coffee’s freshly ground Kona Blend, but I’m afraid the cinnamon rolls are day-old,” she announced.

  “You've got some pretty valuable books here,” Darrow said, holding out a first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's “Letters.”

  “Uncle Hamish's,” Hester said as she set down the tray. “He was a bibliophile and something of a nut. He left me his library in his will. Most of these were his.”

  Darrow replaced the volume and took a seat as Hester motioned to the overstuffed leather chair that wasn’t occupied by her sleeping roommate, a huge Maine Coon cat.

  “The cinnamon rolls are edible only if you dunk them,” Hester said, demonstrating the technique.

  His loud laugh caused a startled Hester to plop a chunk of roll into her coffee.

  “I've never met a female dunker before! I always thought this was a male-only foible.” Darrow dunked his roll with a practiced dip and shake, guiding the coffee-dribbling roll deftly to his mouth without a drop on Hester’s rug.

  After a moment of thoughtful chewing he broke the silence. “You were on the phone when I knocked. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

  Hester paused only an instant between that perilous moment when her cinnamon roll might have become over-soaked and the right time to pop the morsel into her mouth. “Pim, uh, that is, Ethel Pimala, the bookmobile driver, jus
t called to tell me the library was closed.”

  Nate scribbled in a notebook Hester hadn't noticed before.

  Gulping down some hot coffee, Hester turned her full attention to Darrow. “Why?”

  “That was going to be my question,” Darrow said.

  “Because of the silver thaw.”

  “No, why did, uh, Ms. Pimala call you? Aren't you her boss?”

  “Pim called me because that's the way the 'telephone tree' works.” Hester explained the “tree.” “Pim lives farther out from the barn than I do, so she calls me and I call...Oh, dear!” Hester leapt to her feet and dived for the phone. She quickly dialed her clerk's number. “Leslie? This is Hester.” Leslie Milstone was a new hire in the last year and was very dedicated to library rules. Hester was relieved to find her still at home. A quick glance at the clock in the hall told Hester she’d had only a few more minutes before Leslie would have started out.

  “The library's closed, Leslie.” Hester apologized for the last-minute notification and rang off.

  Hester turned to see Nate busily writing in his notebook.

  “I completely forgot to call Leslie. She would have tried to get in.”

  “The radio has been repeating for quite some time that the library is closed,” Darrow said, indicating the ancient Motorola on the sideboard.

  “Unless you get a call from the tree the rules say you have to go in.”

  “Sounds a bit archaic.” Nate made a note.

  “When was the last time you were in the library? Everything is a bit archaic down there!” Hester resumed her seat. She sipped her coffee and found it cool.

  “How do you like working there? I understand it is run by a private group.” Darrow thumbed through his notes and read aloud, “The Portland Pioneer Literary Society.”