“No, he’s not around,” the staff sergeant told me when I arrived, out of breath, at his desk.
“I have to know where he is. It pertains to one of his cases, and is very, very urgent.”
The sergeant didn’t care how urgent anything was, he had to confer with superiors before telling me even the smallest factoid.
Finally he faced me. “They pulled the detail off Drew Wellington’s house a couple of hours ago. Officer Schulz has gone back up to Aspen Meadow with his team, to do some more investigating.”
“Where in Aspen Meadow is he?”
“You have a cell? Why don’t you call him?”
Which was exactly what I did. But either Tom wasn’t answering or he wasn’t getting reception. I won’t do anything, I told myself. I’ll just go where I know Patricia is. I know what she wants, and she’ll be waiting to go in and get it. She wants what she thinks she’s entitled to.
I couldn’t have figured any of this out, and I believed I was right, hoped I was right, without Elizabeth Wellington’s feeling she had to clear her conscience. As I gunned Louise Munsinger’s Caddy back up the interstate, I remembered how perplexed Elizabeth had said she’d been, that her filing for divorce had not been announced until after her then-husband had lost his reelection bid.
Drew Wellington knew how to manipulate people; that was how he’d gotten either Ginnie Quigley or some other minor bureaucrat to sit on Elizabeth’s divorce filing. But the Furman County Sheriff’s Department hadn’t been quite as tractable, and the news that Drew Wellington had been arrested for a DUI, which he’d then tried to have hushed up, had outraged voters enough to shoo him out of office.
Undaunted, he’d sold the house in Aspen, made a bundle, and rented a big place in Flicker Ridge. He’d also used the rest of the money he’d made to set himself up in map dealing. And he’d chosen a mentor, Larry Craddock, who was just difficult enough to deal with that he knew stealing Larry’s clients would be no problem. All he had to do was undercut Larry’s prices…which was easy enough if you stole some of the maps you sold.
Drew must have realized his world might collapse someday, but he probably figured that the worst that could happen would be that he’d have to pay back some of his clients. Or maybe he hadn’t figured that at all, I thought, as I made the turnoff for Aspen Meadow. But still, he’d wanted some insurance.
And then that insurance had fallen right into his lap, with Patricia Ingersoll asking, asking to be introduced to him. Drew knew he was handsome and able to charm…he just didn’t figure that Patricia thought she was equally good-looking and charming, and searching for some insurance herself, in the form of a wealthy person who might be her safety net.
Patricia had been in a drawn-out probate battle with her deceased husband’s daughter, Whitney, for over a year. But what if she lost, she probably wondered, and had to forfeit everything except the money Frank had left her in an insurance policy? She needed a fellow with financial depth, and that was why she’d searched out Drew Wellington, whom she’d thought had all kinds of money, because that was the way he lived.
Things had gone her way for a while…Aspen Meadow’s impossibly gorgeous, fabulously wealthy couple had seemed to be in love.
But then the ruling had come in on Ingersoll v. Ingersoll. Patricia had lost, as well she should have. Alerted to the decision by an obliging Ginnie Quigley, Drew had dropped Patricia faster than you can say “Bye!”
So there Patricia was: instead of having everything she wanted—the two houses, the big money, the gorgeous guy—she had nothing. But she did have a chance for one thing: revenge. And she’d wanted that revenge to be full and sweet. So she began to think—how can I get that kind of vengeance?
She had that final night with Drew. She’d acted cavalier, perhaps…Let’s just have one last fling, for old time’s sake. I didn’t know how she’d put her hands on cyanide and Rohypnol, but maybe she’d always kept them in reserve, just in case things didn’t work out. Anyway, law enforcement was better at figuring out that kind of thing than I was. Patricia knew about Drew cutting maps out of books…with his propensity for hubris, he’d probably shown her how he did it. But if she threatened to expose him, that wouldn’t be enough to get the vengeance she was imagining.
I interrupted my reverie long enough to call Tom, and again got his voice mail. Urgent, I said. Meet me at Drew Wellington’s house.
This was Patricia’s plan, I thought as I turned into Flicker Ridge. Put a very small amount of Rohypnol into Drew’s flask, just so he would feel so drunk that he’d need the coffee she knew he always took into the library. Pour the cyanide into Drew’s coffee when she filled his thermos at the beginning of the day. Make sure she was seen in the morning by the nosy neighbor. Agree to meet with one of the Losers members for an alibi, and bring a few books for the book sale. Get to the library early enough with an X-Acto knife, maybe one just like the ones she used at home, but not one from home. Watch and wait, and when the Rohypnol took effect and Drew couldn’t fight back, when he’d slugged the poison-laced coffee, stab him with the X-Acto knife. That way, it could look as if a disgruntled dealer, or maybe an angry collector, had used the same weapon on him that he’d used to steal maps.
Then she slipped out the emergency exit so she wouldn’t be taped by the surveillance camera out front.
Patricia wanted desperately to have everyone but her look like a murderer. She’d told me about Neil, about Elizabeth, about Smithfield…and she knew I could easily find out about Larry and some more of Drew’s disgruntled clients. And if none of those worked out, she even had the perfect suspect to offer up to the police for the murder. For nearly a month, Drew Wellington had been receiving threatening e-mails, e-mails he’d asked the sheriff’s department to investigate, e-mails that had come from public libraries. Patricia had spotted Sandee lurking around Drew and had recognized her. She knew Drew had taken a public stance on Sandee’s case, criticizing the police for letting her get away. Even if Sandee herself was never caught by the cops, a mysterious stalker who had it in for Drew made for a much better killer than a grief-stricken fiancée.
But then she’d started miscalculating. She’d miscalculated Whitney, for one, who was not satisfied with merely winning the expensive legal battle with her father’s widow. When one of Whitney’s Aspen Meadow spies had let her know that Patricia’s boyfriend, Drew Wellington, had been found dead in the library, Whitney had called in a false tip to the cops about Patricia, hoping her nemesis would somehow dig herself a hole.
And it had almost worked, because Patricia had killed Drew. She had driven away from the library in her X-5, as Whitney had anonymously reported to police, and there was an X-Acto knife with blood on it in Patricia’s house. Only the weapon the police had found hadn’t had Drew’s blood on it; it had only a little bit of Patricia’s. And with nothing but a report of a vehicle half the rich folks in Aspen Meadow drove…that wasn’t enough to keep someone behind bars.
As extra insurance, Patricia had called Brewster Motley and told him to meet her at my house so she’d have an excuse to come over. Then she’d begged me to help her solve the case, and she’d begged again when I’d visited her in jail. She must have assumed I’d be so terrified at the prospect of the Jerk’s killer running around loose, threatening my son, that I’d do everything in my power to chase Sandee down.
Which left Patricia free and clear, once the police finished their investigation. I was more than willing to bet she still had the Rodin drawing that she’d hidden in a place Drew had told her about. She could sell the drawing quietly on the black market and make a bundle from it. Now that Whitney had won her lawsuit, she knew she had no hope of retrieving the Rodin from Patricia by the usual legal means. So she had sent in Grace to search for a way to get into Drew’s house to look for it. But Grace wouldn’t have had any luck, because the police had had their detail on the place until the past hour.
Why had Patricia killed Larry Craddock? I mused as I gunned Louise’s C
adillac up the interstate. Greed and fear. Drew had had three maps on him when he’d gone into the library on Friday, December 16. He’d offered two of them, the less valuable maps of Nebraska and Texas, to Larry as a peace offering, but Larry had smelled a rat…and had gone to check if the maps had been reported stolen. Drew, maybe already drunk or feeling the effects of the Rohypnol, must have hidden the Nebraska map in his coat pocket so that Patricia, in her hurry to get out the library’s emergency exit, had overlooked it. But the Texas map and the very valuable one of the New World that Drew had planned to show to Smithfield—those two she took. Probably she’d tried to sell the Texas map to Larry. No doubt he’d immediately recognized it as one of the maps Drew had tried to sell him right before he was killed. So Larry had been one of Patricia’s victims, too. The map floating down Cottonwood Creek was a casualty of that particular encounter.
Why had Patricia followed us from her house yesterday, then mashed me into the snow? Because she’d sensed, by my bringing Tom to interview her, and by my taking a not-surreptitious-enough look around for the Rodin, I no longer fully trusted her story. And then she’d seen me talking to Elizabeth. Patricia feared I might confront Elizabeth about that Heart Association fund-raiser. Which I had. And Elizabeth Wellington had been right to act confused, to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because Elizabeth hadn’t had a luncheon fund-raiser for the Heart Association; it was just something Patricia had made up on the spur of the moment, when we’d asked her what she needed from the house, and she’d said she needed her green dress. When Patricia, who’d undoubtedly hustled fast down to the RRSSA so she could sit in the parking lot and wait for me, had known she could get caught in a lie…she’d probably figured it was time to try to scare me off.
I knew why she had to have her green dress. Or at least I suspected. And when I drove up to Drew Wellington’s house, and saw Tom leading Patricia Wellington out in handcuffs, she was indeed wearing a long, floating dress of lovely dark green.
I rolled down the Caddy window. “Don’t let her out of your sight with that dress on!” I shrieked at Tom. “I’ll bet there’s a Rodin drawing in the hem!”
“Shut up, you!” Patricia shrieked at me. “I wish you could have some of what’s in this dress!”
Tom handed Patricia off to an assistant and walked over to me. Instead of congratulating me on cracking the case, he said, “Miss G.? Whose Cadillac is this?”
Tom drove Louise Munsinger’s car back to the MacArthurs’ house—with a police car escort—parked it in the driveway, and gave Julian Louise’s cell. The luncheon, thank God, was still going on, with Grace Mannheim helping. When Tom had told Julian what I’d been up to, Julian had just shaken his head.
Tom also told me that Sandee, as I suspected, was long gone. At least she’d had the decency to leave Father Pete his Volvo, with the keys inside.
Later, Tom told me the whole thing had actually been my idea: to make it look as if the detail had been pulled off Wellington’s house when Tom was inside with his team, waiting for a killer. He said if I’d shown up ten minutes earlier, he’d have had to shoot me, just to shut me up.
The Rodin drawing was indeed in Patricia’s hem. She wouldn’t have wanted to risk having Whitney or anyone else find it in her house. I did get to see a photograph of the drawing, one of the studies for the Gates of Hell. Father Pete, I thought, would love the irony.
There was also, in Patricia’s hem, a small bottle of someone else’s prescription for Ritalin, and—surprise!—a plastic baggie of Rohypnol. She’d been able to slip that small dose into Drew’s flask while he was showering, then push the tiny bag back into the loosely stitched hem of her dress, where, she had correctly surmised, no investigator would look…until she lost her cool and told me she wished she could give some to me.
Later, a witness came forward with a description of Patricia’s car, with the correct license plate number, that the witness said had been parked near the place in the creek where Larry Craddock had been killed on Sunday morning. Finally, sheriff’s-department investigators used a bloodhound to find the missing X-Acto knife handle, which had traces of Drew Wellington’s blood on it, as well as a small bottle of cyanide, buried at the far end of Patricia’s yard, under a foot of pine needles and another foot of snow.
But nowhere in Patricia’s house, and nowhere in her yard, and certainly in none of her hems, was there any map of the New World.
Eight days later, Roberta Krepinski called and said there was going to be another staff and volunteer breakfast at the Aspen Meadow Library, only this time, Tom and Arch and I were to be guests. Roberta, Hank, and all the other worker bees were very happy to provide a potluck, and to treat us like royalty. Neil Tharp and Elizabeth Wellington came together. Neil had called me and shyly announced that the library function would be their second date, and could I make something special? I had obliged by concocting a toffee, date, raisin, pecan, and chocolate-chip bar that I’d dubbed Got-a-Hot-Date Bars.
“You won’t need any Rohypnol with this,” I said as I passed Neil a wrapped packet of the bars.
“That’s not funny, Goldy,” he replied, but he smiled.
The MacArthurs were in attendance, and Smithfield beamed with pride while loudly relating that his very own caterer had been instrumental in finding the killer. Julian and I exchanged a glance. Tom managed to leave the room before he burst out laughing.
There was only one fly in the ointment of happiness, however. The Special Collections of Stanford’s Green Library was still missing its map of the New World, from 1682. Patricia had been offered all kinds of incentives to tell the police where it was, but she swore she’d never seen it. Private investigators hired by Stanford had cooperated with the police in searching both residences, and the map was in neither. If the map was in neither Patricia’s nor Drew’s house, Neil Tharp insisted, then Drew must have had it with him when he’d come into the library that Friday.
The librarians had followed what Smithfield MacArthur and Neil Tharp had told them, that map smugglers had not only hidden maps in clothes, but inside the jackets of other books. The librarians, investigators, and volunteers had started with the atlases and gone through every single library book, checking behind the jackets and within the pages, to no avail. When books that had been checked out over the weekend were called back in, those were checked, too—but there was nothing in them, either. The librarians had somberly reported that the map was not to be found.
Our library holiday party went on for hours. Exhausted, and finished with serving, I finally decided to rest in front of the reading-room gas fire. I smiled at Arch, who was there with a group of pals from the Christian Brothers High School. He grinned back. He’d accepted my apology and told me please not to tell him all the time that he should be careful. I should be more careful, he said. I told him I would if he would be less messy. He’d said, “Deal.”
“Arch,” I said suddenly as I stood up from the hearth. “Can you come help me with something?”
He said, “Oh, Mom,” but followed me anyway.
“Just indulge me,” I said.
When we were up at the front desk, I asked Arch to walk in front of the security camera, but not to stop at the circulation desk.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“Just act as if you’re half drunk,” I said, thinking of how Drew Wellington had acted on the surveillance video, when he’d probably already begun to feel the Rohypnol. “You’re stumbling around, but you want to hide something.”
“Mom, I feel stupid.”
“There are no girls here, so you’re fine. Where are you going to go? Keep walking,” I told him as he passed me, reeling.
“I’m going to go out this door,” he said, pointing to the entryway to a hall that led to the back exit/entrance, the same one I had used to bring supplies into the library that fateful Friday evening.
“Yes,” I said, “exactly. Let’s go.” We pushed through the door and walked down the hall. The l
ibrarians had brought their goodies in this way today, and the air was still cold.
“What are we looking for?” Arch asked.
The first room was used for storage, and it was completely empty except for some fans used in summertime. The door at the end of the hall, I knew, led to the staff kitchen and lunchroom. In the middle was the room where the books for the used-book sale were stored. There were about a hundred volumes on the shelves, all accumulated in December.
“Arch, help me go through these volumes, would you?”
“Every one of them?” he replied, incredulous. “But I already know what’s in these books. Some of them are mine, or they were.”
“You don’t have to look in those, because we didn’t bring them to the library until Sunday, but everything else we have to search. We’re looking for a map, a valuable one,” I replied as I pulled the first stack carefully off the shelves and began checking for something tucked behind the jacket, or in the pages, or someplace else where Drew Wellington might have hidden something. He might have thought he was getting drunk, or someone was trying to drug him, to steal his maps. He may have thought, I’ll hide this and find it later.
After we had worked for about ten minutes, Tom became concerned and corralled Julian, and the two of them came looking for us. Soon the four of us were working in earnest.
“Mare occidentalis,” Arch announced triumphantly as he unfolded a large piece of vellum. “That’s Latin for Atlantic Ocean. Wow, look at this thing.”
Our Christmas was quiet, which was just the way we wanted it. Marla was with us, and Julian had insisted on bringing Grace. So maybe it wasn’t that quiet. I can’t even remember what each person received, except that Stanford University sent every one of us shirts with their logo, and said we could all come out to visit, at their expense, whenever we wanted.
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