Juanita rolled her eyes. “She’s here for story time, Rebecca. That’s why I suggested her. That and the fact that she’s done some historical research on the town already.”
Story time. That was something I could take Evan to. If Sheri was doing it, it must be good. I made a mental note to check dates and times and see how Haley would feel about it.
“Still trying to find out whose diary that is?” Sheri plopped a stack of storybooks onto the counter and dug in her purse for her library card.
“I think I have a pretty solid lead on that. Now I’m trying to figure out what happened to her.” I resisted the urge to clutch the diary to my chest.
“What do you mean?” Sheri lined the books up so they all faced the same way.
“Barbara thinks it sounds like a girl named Esther Brancato. According to her, Esther disappeared some time toward the end of high school.”
Juanita frowned. “Disappeared how?”
“In that one-day-here, next-day-gone kind of way.” I wasn’t sure there was another way unless it was in a puff of smoke. I was pretty sure Barbara would have mentioned a puff of smoke.
Juanita did a little head pop that I was pretty sure would have dislocated something on me. “Don’t take a tone with me, Rebecca.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to.” It was true. I had a lot of tone whether or not I meant to. “I just meant that Barbara didn’t really know. She couldn’t remember if Esther had run away or if something else had happened. I figured it would have definitely been in the Sentinel one way or the other.”
“Probably,” Sheri said. “That’s still a lot of microfiche to sort through if you don’t have a date, though.”
“I have a month and the year Esther Brancato disappeared. That should help.” Unless, of course, my diary writer wasn’t Esther, in which case I’d be back at the drawing board again.
“How do you know the month? Did Barbara remember it that specifically?” Sheri asked.
I flipped to the end of the diary. “That’s her last entry. She says she’s frightened and then nothing else.”
“What’s she frightened of?” Juanita paged through the diary.
“She thinks someone’s following her. Then there were some weird little accidents.” It sounded melodramatic as I said it. Coming from the mouth of a teenage girl, it would have been a million times more dramatic.
Sheri looked up. “Accidents?”
“Someone shoves her into the street in front of a bus.” I took the diary back from Juanita and paged through to that section of the diary.
Sheri read it over my shoulder. “Who? Who would do that?”
“She wasn’t sure. There was a crowd. Everyone there said she stumbled. She swears she felt hands on her back.”
“Anything else?” Juanita asked.
I paged through to another entry. “Food poisoning. Or maybe just plain old poisoning.” I tapped my finger against the entry where Esther, or whoever, described the painful cramping and illness.
“What kind of poisoning?” Sheri asked.
I shook my head. “She wasn’t sure. Remember this was the 1950s, too. It wasn’t exactly like an episode of CSI. Plus, her parents thought she was being dramatic, looking for attention.”
Juanita snorted. “They always discount what we say.”
Sheri shrugged. “Teenage girls can be a little dramatic.”
“Whether she was being dramatic or not, she disappeared. I’d like to know more.” Even broken clocks are right twice a day.
“What do you think you’ll find in the newspaper?” Sheri asked.
“I’m not sure. I guess I’ll know when I find it,” I answered. “I’m hoping to see if anybody had any theories about where she might have gone.”
Juanita asked, “How sure are you about the year?”
“Medium sure.” I was sure about what year Esther Brancato was supposed to graduate; whether or not that was the year she actually disappeared or if it was even her diary was up for grabs.
Juanita looked at her watch. “Look, I’ve got the older kids’ story time starting. Can you come back a little later and I’ll step you through it all?”
“Sure.”
I said good-bye to Sheri, who shepherded her girls into the stacks to look for books. I couldn’t help but smile. Their little chirping voices, excited about books they were going to read and videos they were going to watch, made me think of the little woodland creatures who danced around Disney princesses’ feet.
• • •
When I came back, Juanita had changed clothes.
“No more tutu?” I asked. “It looked cute.”
“The tulle totally crawled up my ass. I don’t know how ballerinas stand it,” she said as she led me to a back corner of the library.
“This is a little spooky.” I looked around at the cracked linoleum and dim lighting.
“We haven’t renovated back here yet. We might never. It’s not exactly the sexy technology of the day.” Juanita maneuvered her chair around a particularly big seam in the floor. “Here we go.”
The here she referred to was a big metal filing cabinet and a giant machine that looked like an old prop from a 1950s science-fiction B movie next to rows and rows of old telephone books. It seemed appropriate.
She patted the cabinet. “Every issue of the Sentinel from its inaugural one to 2004 is here in this cabinet and every phone book since 1910 is on those shelves.”
“What happened in 2004?” I asked, eyeing all five drawers of the monstrosity.
“They went digital, Rebecca. It’s Grand Lake, but even we figured that one out.” Juanita rolled her eyes.
“Right. So what do I do to read them?” I was pretty sure it was going to involve that machine. It looked intimidating.
Juanita pulled open a drawer. Inside were dozens and dozens of little cardboard boxes. “You said you thought you had a year to start with?”
“Yeah. 1954,” I said.
“Right. Now look at the dates on the boxes and find that year.” Juanita pointed at the drawer.
“Me?” I took a step back.
“Yeah. You. You’re the one with the curiosity that needs to be satisfied.” Juanita shot me a look.
“I’m pretty sure you’re curious, too.” I’d seen the way she’d sniffed my diary.
She shrugged. “I’m curious about a lot of things. You get to be the cat on this one.” Then she froze for a second. “Although, given your track record, you might want to rethink all that.”
I sighed. “It’s a diary from the 1950s. So far Barbara’s the only person I’ve stumbled across who seems to know anything about this girl at all.”
She nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Who would be upset about something that happened that long ago?”
I looked through the boxes and found one that spanned 1953 to 1957. I pulled it out.
Juanita pointed over to the machine. “I’ll show you how to thread it and then you’re on your own, okay? I’ve got a preteen book club starting in fifteen minutes.”
Operating the microfiche machine wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d expected. It was all a matter of following instructions. Years of following recipes had primed me for jobs like this one. Start at Step One. Progress to Step Two. Don’t question. Don’t think too hard. Someone else has already done that hard thinking for you.
Which is why I was surprised when I couldn’t seem to find the month and year I was looking for. I was pretty sure I’d progressed through all the steps just as I should. I hadn’t skipped any steps. I hadn’t added any, either. Yet for some reason May of 1954 wasn’t there.
I started over and retraced my steps. Nope. It still wasn’t there. Okay. It was a long time ago. Maybe something had gotten misfiled somehow. Who would ever have noticed? Who would be going back through these old papers? Maybe it was in anothe
r year.
I pulled out 1955 to see if it had gotten lumped into the wrong year. That month was missing. May of 1956 wasn’t there, either. I looked down at Sprocket. “That’s weird,” I said.
He whined.
I pulled every year of the 1950s. The month of May was missing in every year from 1950 to 1959. It looked as if someone had burned that section out of every year.
• • •
I heard a familiar voice outside the cell block. “Stand back, you big oaf. Don’t think you can intimidate me by looming over me like that.” Ah, the dulcet tones of Faith. Faith was Barbara’s niece. She’d started to help run Barbara’s shop and had become a good friend.
“I’m not looming, Faith,” Huerta said. “I’m holding the door open for you. It’s heavy.”
“Sure you are.” Faith marched up to my cell.
I walked up to the bars. “Boy, are you a sight for sore eyes.” I felt my own eyes start to well a bit. I hadn’t realized how alone I’d felt until I saw a friendly face.
“This is totally unacceptable,” Faith said, arms crossed over her chest, looking over my cell. “Absolutely unacceptable.”
I glanced back at the concrete-block walls and metal bars. “I haven’t really had time to decorate.”
She snorted. “That blanket looks too thin to keep a furnace warm.”
She was right. It was pretty chilly here in the cell and the blanket didn’t do much. “The floor doesn’t help.”
We both looked down at the gray concrete under our feet.
“And do they really expect you to use that?” She pointed at the metal toilet in the corner of my cell.
I nodded.
She sniffed. “We’ll see about that.”
“How?”
“Just wait.” She snapped her fingers at Huerta. “Open up that door. I have work to do.”
“Who was that?” Cathy asked after Faith had left.
“A friend.” I smiled. “A good friend.”
“That’s lucky. That is not the kind of woman I’d want as an enemy,” she said.
She didn’t know the half of it.
“Must be nice to have visitors,” she said.
“No one visits you? No one at all?” Cathy had been here for weeks. How was she holding it together? No wonder she was interested in my story.
Cathy shrugged. “My attorney, every now and then. Otherwise, no.”
“Weren’t you . . . married?” It seemed indelicate to ask, but we’d been pretty indelicate with each other for a while now.
“Yep.” The pace of her sit-ups increased.
“Your husband doesn’t visit you?”
“Nope.” She lay back on the floor, arms stretched to the side. “That’s not entirely true. He came once.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“It was to serve me with divorce papers.” She started doing crunches again.
Ouch. “Sorry.”
“Whatever. Now can we get back to how you ended up in here?” she asked. “I feel like your nephew got a better explanation than you’re giving me.”
• • •
The newspaper hadn’t helped with my investigation into Esther Brancato, but it had listed a date and time for Lloyd McLaughlin’s wake. I decided to attend. It didn’t count as meddling. It was paying respects and perhaps gathering some information at the same time. If I happened to overhear word of someone who had had bad feelings toward Lloyd, it would be a bonus. I hadn’t wanted to arrive at Lloyd’s house empty-handed, but thought it would be tacky to show up with popcorn. Even if I wasn’t the one who had poisoned him, it seemed callous. I made cookies instead. Chocolate chip with a little caramel surprise inside.
I didn’t want to wear black. I hadn’t known Lloyd and it seemed presumptuous to say I mourned him. Plus, I still only had the black chiffon party number I’d worn to Coco’s funeral, and that had not gone down particularly well. I also didn’t want to show up in my usual jeans, though. After a few minutes of staring into my closet, I chose a skirt and boots that said grown-up, but not stuffy. I put Sprocket in the yard with a peanut butter Kong, promised to be back before too long, and got into the Jeep.
Lloyd lived over off Highway 2. It was a nice neighborhood, newer than the one where I’d grown up. The kind of neighborhood where if you didn’t know the exact address of the house, you’d be out of luck. There were no distinguishing features on the houses. Each one looked just like the next. Two stories. Shingled roofs. Attached garages. Round window on what was most likely the landing of the stairway. Each lawn looked just like the next. Rectangular patches of grass. Two trees. Flower bed by the front door. What distinguished Lloyd McLaughlin’s house from his neighbors’ was the thumping music coming from the house.
Everyone processes grief differently. I reminded myself of that as I walked up to the house and rang the doorbell. And then knocked because no one answered and I wasn’t sure they’d heard me over the music. Then rang the doorbell again. That time, a woman answered the door.
I would have guessed her to be in her late forties or early fifties. There may have been a touch of gray roots showing in her otherwise dark hair, but only a touch. Her jawline was a little soft, but not jowly. What really distinguished her, however, was the open bottle of champagne in her hand, from which she was taking a healthy swig.
“And who might you be?” she asked. She enunciated each syllable like she was being careful to not slur her words.
“I, uh, just wanted to offer my condolences to Mr. McLaughlin’s family.” I held out my tray of chocolate chip cookies. It seemed prudent not to mention my name right out of the box. Even if I knew I hadn’t poisoned Lloyd, his family might not know that yet.
She eyed the cookies. “Homemade?”
I nodded, hoping that wouldn’t count against me.
She gestured with her head. “Come on in.”
I followed her into the kitchen and set the cookies down on the table with platters of all kinds of food. It was such a Midwestern thing. Tragedy strikes and we tie on our aprons. After our parents died, Haley and I nearly drowned in casseroles. Good thing we had Coco to teach us what we could freeze and what we couldn’t. We probably ate for six months off of what people brought us.
Nobody seemed to be deciding what to freeze here. In fact, the atmosphere was, well, like a party. Music was blasting. People were laughing. I’d heard of people having celebrations of life rather than memorial services, but this seemed to be taking it too far.
“Are you, uh, related to Mr. McLaughlin?” I asked my guide.
She smiled, her head bobbing to the beat of the music. “Not anymore. I got the papers to prove it, too.”
“Excuse me.”
“Ex-wife,” she said, gesturing to her chest with the champagne bottle. “Been divorced from that tight-assed SOB for going on three years now. Best decision of my life to lose one hundred and ninety pounds of ugly fat.” She threw her head back and laughed a big full-throated laugh.
“How, uh, nice.” I’d felt a lot of relief when I’d divorced Antoine. It had been a wrenchingly hard decision to make. I’d weighed the pros and cons in my head and on pieces of paper for months before I finally made up my mind sitting in a hotel hallway in Minneapolis in January without even a clean pair of panties to change into. Once the decision was made, I’d experienced a nearly exhilarating sensation of a weight being lifted from my shoulders and the breaking of some sort of stranglehold on my heart.
I would never wish him dead, though. Never. I’d loved him once.
“Uh-huh,” Mrs. No-Longer-McLaughlin said. “And get this. Lazy asshat never changed his will! This house he fought so hard to get during our divorce? It’s mine.” The noise she made next could only be described as a cackle.
“Congratulations?” I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to say, but it was all I could
come up with on short notice.
“Thanks.” She hugged me, bonking the champagne bottle into my back as she did so. Then she stepped back. “Hey, wait a second. Who exactly are you?”
I didn’t see any way to squirrel out of it this time. “My name is Rebecca Anderson.”
Her face went blank for a second and I thought she might be one of those drunks with unpredictable mood swings. I took a step back in case the mood swing prompted her to take a swing at me with that champagne bottle. It might be only half full, but it would definitely leave a mark.
“The one who owns the popcorn shop?” she asked in as close as a drunk can get to a whisper.
I took a deep breath, ready to take whatever was coming at me. “Yes. The one who owns the popcorn shop.”
“The popcorn shop where the poisoned popcorn came from?” she asked, eyes widening.
Her ability to get through that sentence was impressive. I wasn’t sure I could do it stone-cold sober. “Yes.”
She whooped and hurried into the living room. “Hey! Everybody! Guess who’s here? The lady that poisoned Lloyd!”
I don’t get a lot of applause. It’s not a chef thing. Someone might clasp their hands together and hold them to their chest when I set their favorite dish in front of them. People made appreciative noises. Every once in a while there was a marriage proposal, but they were usually spoken in jest. Applause? Actual applause? People clapping their hands together in appreciation of me?
Almost never.
Lloyd McLaughlin’s living room erupted in applause after Mrs. No-Longer-McLaughlin made her announcement.
I backed away some more. “No. You don’t understand. I didn’t poison him. I swear it.”
“Well, ding-dong the witch is dead anyway,” said a gray-haired man who looked like Fred Rogers’s younger brother, right down to the cardigan sweater. “We’re rid of that asshole regardless of how it happened.”
“Sometimes the best things in life happen by accident,” a young woman with a baby on her hip said.
I was getting the feeling that Lloyd McLaughlin was not universally loved.
By the time I left his wake, I had a list of potential suspects longer than the recipe for Gâteau Saint-Honoré.
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