Sweet Revenge

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “You ought to mix Grand Marnier into the syrup, too,” Marla mused as she finished up her piece. “And then serve some more of the liqueur neat, on the side? Once the librarians have a few bites and sips, you’ll be able to find out if there’s anything they aren’t telling you about the demise of Drew Wellington. Maybe something they saw on the surveillance camera?”

  “Whatever was recorded on the surveillance camera was turned right over to law enforcement, I can assure you.” I rinsed my dish and thought of something I hadn’t asked Marla. “Why was Louise Munsinger, of all people, calling you early this morning? She wasn’t at the library.”

  “Noooo, but she does have a cell phone, and somebody who was driving by the library last night saw your van there, and then found out what had happened. So Louise was calling me, as your titular best friend, to find out if you’d still be catering the garden-club luncheon today.”

  “Why didn’t she just call me?” I asked, irritated. “Of course I’m doing my planned events.” I glanced around at the morning’s offerings. French toast and cheese pies, coffee cake, ham, and chocolate bars. Fat brings them back was an adage quietly passed between caterers. No kidding. I didn’t have a single client who would love my potatoes au gratin if I used skim milk and low-fat cheese. Just the thought made me ill.

  Insomuch as my thoughts could be called a chain, Marla broke it. “I don’t know Louise Munsinger well, but once I got her talking, she was a font of useful information. She’d already talked to Hermie MacArthur, who is extremely upset that Neil Tharp invited himself to her party tonight. To fill in for the missing Drew Wellington, apparently.”

  I sighed. So much for honoring your dead boss by doing a bit of grieving.

  I looked in on the ham, which was sputtering, spitting, and filling Marla’s kitchen with an inviting scent. I placed the liqueur-soaked brioche underneath it. Onward and upward, as they say.

  “This is not the first time this has happened to me,” I said. “Somebody dies, and all of a sudden someone jumps in to take their place at a party? That feels weird. Why not just say it’s okay to be one person short?”

  “Don’t ask me.” She was neatly folding forks, knives, and spoons into snowy-white cotton napkins. “And to talk about map collecting, ugh. The only time I need a map is when I’m driving a rental car without a navigation system.” She began to arrange the wrapped silverware in a napkin-lined basket. “Still, there’s going to be a lot of big money around that table. A lot of big, unattached money.”

  “Unattached to another worthy investment, you mean?”

  “Yup.” She did a little dance around her kitchen. “Hermie should have invited me to fill in for Drew. Then we could have had some fun at that party tonight, instead of being forced to listen to boring old Smithfield give a geography lesson and talk about his acquisitions. Double ugh.” She two-stepped over to her stereo closet. “I’m going to turn on some music.” Marla may not have used her kitchen, but she knew how to make Frank Sinatra sound as if he was in the next room.

  I checked the ovens. The toast was golden, and the cheese pies were rising. Since none of the library folks were here yet, I turned down the temperature, as I wanted to make a dramatic entrance with the puffed pies, which had a tendency to deflate pretty quickly. Once the French toast and ham were out, I could turn that oven to broil, so I could quickly do the grapefruit topped with brown sugar. When the doorbell rang, I prayed that everyone was arriving en masse so that I could bring the hot food out all at once. This was a caterer’s favorite wish, which rarely came true.

  Meanwhile, Marla’s phone beeped, and she trilled that she needed to go answer it.

  “Do you want me to get the door?” I asked.

  “No!” Marla cried over her shoulder. Then she hollered in the direction of the front door, “It’s open!”

  Oh, marvelous, I thought.

  I retrieved the ham and placed it on Marla’s elegant buffet. This particular piece of furniture was a polished antique cherrywood piece that would have made Tom chartreuse with envy. Marla had set it beautifully with white linens and Versace china, and placed an enormous basket arrangement of holly, ivy, and red-and-gold bows in the center. In fact, her entire house looked gorgeously festive, with spruce ropes laid across every available surface, and bubbling lights strung in front of each window. She had Aspen Meadow Floral come in every year to do the decorating, which she oversaw to the last detail. When the florist had finally left, she’d called to say, “The Christmas season is so exhausting!”

  The doorbell rang again, with no Marla to answer it. I cursed under my breath and hustled back toward the front door. As I was racing into the foyer, Roberta Krepinski stepped into my path.

  “Roberta!” I cried.

  “Yes?” The reference librarian’s eyes were rimmed with pink and her cheeks were puffy. Her red hair was caught up in a cotton-candy froth of ponytail, as if she hadn’t had time to fix it this morning. I doubted she’d gotten much sleep. I hadn’t known she wore contacts, but clearly she did, and hadn’t been able to find them or get them into her eyes this morning. Instead, she wore glasses with rectangular lenses the size of dominoes. They made her look older and more authoritarian.

  “I’m not doing well,” she said.

  “Okay. Why don’t you sit down, have a cup of coffee? You look really—”

  “The police have closed the library until Sunday. In spite of the snow, journalists are swarming all over the place and slipping down the hill behind the reading room.” She stopped to catch her breath. “This morning I had chest pains, and I don’t feel good—”

  At which point she collapsed forward and passed out in my arms.

  7

  I cursed anorexia as I struggled to keep rail-thin, ultra-light Roberta from cracking her head on Marla’s stone foyer. She was oddly unwieldy. I screamed for Marla to bring some smelling salts or a bottle of ammonia to the door. When Marla rushed into her foyer a moment later, she was holding a bottle of peroxide.

  “It’s all I had,” she said apologetically. “What’s the matter with Roberta?”

  “She fainted.” I clasped Roberta while staring at the peroxide bottle. Did it have a strong scent? I couldn’t remember. “Look, Marla, would you please open the bottle?”

  “You’re going to do her hair? It’ll come out looking like crap.”

  “Marla, for heaven’s sake!” I gently turned Roberta onto her back, so that she was resting on a slender Oriental rug. Then I lifted her head. “Okay, now run the top of the bottle under her nose, all right?”

  “It doesn’t smell like anything,” Marla protested, giving the open bottle an experimental sniff.

  “Then go look for some ammonia, would you, please?”

  “I’m not going rummaging around in my cleaning lady’s supply closet!” she protested. “I wouldn’t even know what to look for.” She eyed me passing the bottle slowly under Roberta’s nose. “You spill that stuff on my Khirman runner, I’ll sue you for all you’re worth.” And off she dashed to hunt for ammonia.

  When she returned with the ammonia and a shot glass, she did the pouring honors herself, then traded the shot glass for the peroxide bottle. This time when I ran the head-clearing liquid under the librarian’s nose, she sputtered.

  “Oh, golly, what happened?” Roberta asked, her voice weak. She blinked at me, then looked quizzically up at Marla. “I just had this terrible nightmare—” When we shook our heads, she said, “Oh, okay, it wasn’t a dream.” She groaned. “Let me get up.”

  I handed the ammonia to Marla, who disappeared with it. Then I stood up and helped Roberta to her feet. She wobbled slightly, lifted her chin, and pressed her lips together. She looked so young, so innocent, and so wounded, my heart went out to her. She said, “I’m sorry to be so Victorian. Fainting, for crying out loud. Well, I haven’t had anything to eat. And I was just so upset…”

  “Let’s get some food in you first.” I moved toward the kitchen, where I still had work to do.
“Want some coffee?”

  Roberta followed me and sat reluctantly at Marla’s black granite breakfast island. “Two investigators came to my house. They said Drew Wellington was dead, and that he’d been, uh, murdered.”

  I nodded.

  “Then Neil Tharp called me.” Her voice went from brittle to shaky. “He said Patricia Ingersoll was arrested for killing Drew.” When I again signaled the truth of this, she went on: “He wanted to know if I’d seen Patricia at the library.”

  “Well, I’m not sure that—”

  “Do the police have evidence that Patricia did this?” Roberta asked, her voice insistent.

  “I suppose they do, or she wouldn’t have been arrested,” I replied. “But I have a feeling she’ll be cleared soon.”

  “Why do you have that feeling?” Roberta asked, her chin trembling. “Does that mean the police will be looking for even more evidence, and the library will be closed even longer while they pull up the carpeting?” She retrieved a crumpled tissue from a pocket of her sweater, a belted baggy gray knit that had seen not just better days, but better years. Roberta blew her nose, then raised those pained red eyes at me. “Patricia was in the library that afternoon, but it was much earlier. Neil Tharp, Drew Wellington’s business partner, was there, too. I’m not sure about Elizabeth Wellington, although the police did ask me about her.” She blushed with sudden guilt. She patted the frizz around her ponytail and avoided my eyes. “Oh dear, I’m not supposed to divulge when patrons come in, or even who’s in the library at any time.”

  I carefully picked up the second pan of soaked brioche and put it into the oven. “Just tell the police what you know. And only the police,” I added.

  “I did, I did.” She glanced around the kitchen, as if she’d just noticed we were alone. “Where is the rest of the library staff? The volunteers?”

  “That I can’t tell you, because I haven’t a clue.”

  Roberta, sitting on one of Marla’s elegant leather stools, slumped in defeat. She kneaded the corners of her ragged sweater, lifted her head to gaze around Marla’s kitchen—made immaculate by the absent cleaning lady—and knitted her brow into deep lines, as if she expected the rest of the guests to jump out from the cabinets.

  “Remember I told you Neil Tharp called me early this morning?” Roberta asked, her voice still sour. “Well. In addition to telling me that Patricia had been arrested and asking me if she’d been in the library, he also said Elizabeth Wellington wanted to know if I’d found any papers beside Drew’s body. He was asking on her behalf, he said, and he demanded to know what the surveillance camera had recorded. Did he think I picked up stray documents and was even allowed to see what the police had downloaded from our video system? No, I stayed up all night worrying about the library.”

  Roberta began to weep quietly. What was with Neil Tharp, anyway? Why was he teaming up with Elizabeth Wellington? Had Neil’s association with Elizabeth, whatever it was, been the reason Drew didn’t trust him anymore, as Patricia had told me? Or was Neil just trying to protect the map business’s assets in the wake of Drew’s death? With Elizabeth Wellington’s influential fund-raising contacts, though, surely they could have bothered someone official to find out the status of the investigation. Why hound me, or a defenseless librarian who didn’t eat enough and was prone to fainting spells?

  I tried to make my voice as soothing as possible. “Roberta, could I please fix you an espresso, cup of coffee, something like that?”

  She sniffed and stowed her tissue. “I’d rather have tea, if you don’t mind. Herbal, if it’s available.”

  I delved into my beverage supply box for tea bags, started water heating, then sat down next to Roberta. “I hope you didn’t tell Neil Tharp what you knew. In fact, you shouldn’t be telling anyone a single thing about what you saw in the library yesterday. Did the sheriff’s-department investigators not remind you of that?” I asked gently.

  She groaned. “Yes, yes, of course they did. And no, I didn’t tell Neil Tharp a thing. But he’s not my real problem.” Her red-rimmed eyes sought mine. “The library is my problem. Here’s what will happen,” Roberta went on. “People will start calling me, demanding to know what’s what. They’ll hit the button for the reference desk. When I answer, they’ll say, ‘Didja see my fourth-grade teacher at the library on Friday? Maybe she did it, and now she’ll go to jail.’ I wish I could make a sign that said, ‘Please don’t ask us about the investigation.’ But I can’t, because then folks who haven’t heard about Drew Wellington will say, ‘What investigation?’ Another problem we’re going to have is voyeurs, people asking us, ‘Where was he killed? Where was he sitting? Is this his blood on the carpet?’” Roberta exhaled and nodded her thanks as I placed the tea in front of her.

  “You saw blood?”

  “Yes.”

  I paused. “I wasn’t sure what I saw.”

  “You weren’t right up next to his chest.” She sipped her tea. “Well, I don’t suppose I need to worry about all the phone calls and nosy visitors if they keep the library closed for more than a few days.” When she looked at me questioningly, the red veins in her eyes were hugely magnified behind the rectangular lenses. “Goldy, people rely on us. If I’m going to have a life again, I need to go back to work. I want to help people order books from other libraries. I want to work on the book sale. We have CDs, DVDs, and all kinds of stuff to organize and price! I can’t just stay home!”

  Marla tiptoed into the kitchen behind Roberta’s stool. Her eyebrows rose as far as they would go as she pointed at me and mouthed, I need you.

  “Roberta,” I said, “calm down. Everything is going to be okay.” Marla stepped boldly into the kitchen as if she’d just arrived. Roberta was honking into her tissue again. I said, “You’ll reopen soon and be able to do all that work. And please. My husband would emphasize how important it is that you not talk to anyone about what patrons you saw or didn’t see at the library yesterday, afternoon or morning. If you think of anything you haven’t told the investigators, you need to write it down. They’ll be interested.”

  “I’m interested,” Marla said brightly.

  Roberta dug in her sweater pocket for more tissues. I patted her awkwardly on the back. She went on as if she hadn’t heard me: “I feel as if everything is bearing down on me. I’m not married, no kids, not even a pet. I have nobody to talk to.” She began to sob again.

  Marla and I exchanged a glance. Marla shrugged. I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, okay, maybe it would help you if we talk about it a little,” I said. “Do you know how long Drew was at the library?”

  Roberta swallowed. “He comes, came, in every Friday, to meet with clients.”

  “Why?” Marla asked before Roberta had even had time to answer my question.

  Roberta’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. “Drew told me his neighbors in Flicker Ridge didn’t appreciate him having a retail business in his home. They complained about the clients’ cars parked in front of their houses and informed him through their lawyers that he needed to rent an office or a store. He wasn’t ready to do that, he told me, so was it okay for him to meet with clients at the library? Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t have been conducting for-profit business in the library.” She sighed. “But he said he was tutoring his clients, too, at no cost to them! He was so nice and so charming, I said yes.”

  “So,” I interjected, “when did he come in yesterday?”

  “I’m not sure exactly what time he arrived, but he asked me for help with an atlas around three. I remember, because it was before school let out, and I’m always watching the clock because of the onslaught of kids we get wanting books before the weekend.”

  “And the video?” Marla asked eagerly.

  “Marla!” I protested.

  “There’s not much to tell.” Roberta’s tone was apologetic. “The sheriff’s department made a DVD from our one surveillance camera. They downloaded everything from when Drew arrived at the library to the time when
the police arrived.” She moaned. “People in the grocery store are going to stop me and say, ‘What was Drew reading, kiddie porn?’”

  People to see. An atlas. Hmm. Like Marla, I was overcome with curiosity. What people? An atlas of what territory? But that was just the sort of thing Tom did not want me to ask the librarian, dammit. I was also desperate to find out if Roberta knew Sandee, and if so, had she thought Sandee was at the library the previous afternoon? Was Sandee one of the people Drew was supposed to meet? Had she shown up on the surveillance recording?

  I was clear on one thing. If I was going to find out what Sandee was doing at the library, and if I was going to help Patricia, I’d need to know what exactly Drew had been doing at the library. Meeting with what clients? Also, I’d have to remind Tom to find out about the atlas.

  The doorbell rang again. Roberta looked into her teacup. Marla raised her eyebrows at me, more insistently this time. I still had the grapefruit to broil, and I had to watch it every second. Plus, I had to keep an eye on the second pan of French toast. What did she want me to do, answer the door, too? If not, then what in the world did she need to talk to me about?

  “People are going to descend on me,” Roberta moaned. “I’ll never have a moment’s peace.”

  Marla exhaled and scampered out while I preheated the broiler. At the sound of voices, I slid in the pan of Great Expectations Grapefruit. Roberta Krepinski still stared into her teacup.

  “Roberta,” I said finally. “Anybody asks you questions in the grocery store, at the gym, or anyplace else, you say, ‘The sheriff’s department has asked me not to talk about Friday afternoon.’ Period. I know it was a shock, but you’ll feel better soon, I promise. Why don’t you go to the bathroom and splash some water on your face? Then you can come out and greet your staff and volunteers, who have traveled through the snow to come to the breakfast.”