Hemlock

by Susan Wittig Albert

  While I dressed, I found myself wondering—worrying, really—about Jed Conway. Had he survived the night? If he was able to talk, would he confirm what I heard him whisper? And what had I heard, anyway? Had the man said Blackwell or Maxwell? I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t know. That’s what I had to tell Chief Curtis. And hope he didn’t throw the book at me.

  I pulled a quick comb through my hair, decided I didn’t need lipstick but definitely did need coffee, and took the back stairs to the kitchen.

  Aside from the dream, I had slept well all night. Jenna hadn’t.

  We met in the kitchen, where she was huddled over a plate of the breakfast Rose had left for us—pancakes, spicy sausages from a local farm, and fried red (not green) tomatoes. Dorothea’s place was empty. She had apparently already eaten and disappeared into the library.

  Jenna looked up at me. Her face was pale. “Did you hear it?” she asked anxiously.

  “Hear what?” I glanced at the clock as I poured myself a glass of orange juice. Rose’s breakfast looked too good to miss. But if I wanted to have time for a full and contrite confession to the chief before I saw Margaret Anderson, I would have to eat fast.

  “The ghost.” We were alone, but she lowered her voice to a whisper. “The thunder woke me up about three. The ghost was in the room over mine, moving around. I heard a really loud thump, like something falling over. And then scraping, as if somebody were dragging something across the floor—a coffin, maybe. And rustling noises. Hideous rustling noises—not just upstairs, but out in the hall. Right outside my door.” Remembering, her eyes were huge, with dark smudges under them, and she put her fist to her mouth. I could see that she had been terrified. “I’ve heard the ghost before, China, but never like that. I wanted to get up and wake you. I wanted you to hear it, so you’d know what I’ve been talking about.”

  “My goodness,” I said mildly. Remembering what Claudia Roth had told me about the ghost showing up on stormy nights, I pulled out a chair, sat down, and helped myself to pancakes and sausages. “Did you get up and take a look? Did you go upstairs?”

  “Are you kidding?” she demanded. “I was so scared I couldn’t—” She reached for her coffee cup and took a sip, her hand visibly shaking. “I was afraid that if I got out of bed, I’d faint. And upstairs is where Sunny killed herself. You wouldn’t catch me dead up there.”

  “I certainly hope not.” I poured syrup over my pancakes.

  She stared at me for a moment before she got it. Her lips trembled and she sounded almost despairing. “You don’t believe me.” With a clatter, she set the cup into its saucer. “You and Dorothea. You think I’m imagining all this. Hallucinating. You don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe,” I said, wanting to explain. “In fact, I—”

  This is complicated. I am a practical person, a believer in what’s real and can be proven. Until the past few years, I had never believed in ghosts. However, my adventures with Ruby and more lately with Annie, the original and long-deceased occupant of my herb shop, have altered the way I think about these things.*

  But while it is fair to say that I believe in the ghosts with whom I have a personal acquaintance—Annie, for instance, who is altogether benign—I won’t lay claim to a generic belief in unspecified spirits. One woman’s ghost is another woman’s shadow on the blind or an owl in the chimney or a tree branch scraping against the roof.

  I didn’t want to share this with Jenna, though. She was quite obviously frightened—no, terrified—by the noises she had heard in the night. Hemlock House was over a century old, and not in the best repair. There could very well be a real-world explanation.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe,” I said again, reassuring now, “and I apologize for sounding snarky. If it’ll help, you can wake me up when you hear something that scares you. Or if you’d rather, I’d be glad to spend the night in your room.”

  Jenna brightened immediately. “Oh, would you, China? There’s a fold-out sofa bed, if you’re willing to do a sleepover. I would be so grateful.”

  A sleepover. I hadn’t done something like that in a while. “Fine. Let’s do it, then.” I attacked my sausage. “I finished the pages you sent.”

  She slid a glance at me. “I hope you’re going to tell me that you thought they were okay.”

  “More than okay, Jenna. In fact, your novel is really good. You’ve answered most of my questions—such as how Elizabeth managed to earn the hundreds of pounds it took to get that ne’er-do-well husband of hers out of jail. I hadn’t thought about the possibility of her selling the book as a serial—and selling it in the apothecary shops. Makes perfect sense.”

  “Of course it makes sense. It’s what happened. I’m sure she had street vendors selling those weekly serials. The women who peddled herbs could have hawked them, too.” She smiled. “I’ll have some more pages for you this evening. And maybe, after that, we can talk about where the book needs to go. I’d really like some feedback.”

  “Perfect.” I finished my pancakes, glanced up at the clock, and pushed my chair back. “I need to be on my way down the mountain. I have a couple of interviews in Bethany this morning and a meeting this afternoon.” I looked out the window to see that the drizzle had almost stopped but the wind was still blowing a gale. “All I have is this corduroy blazer, and that wind is pretty impressive. Do you suppose I could borrow a coat?”

  “Of course. I’m not going out, so you can take my parka.” Jenna stood and began picking up her dishes. “You might want a pair of boots, too.”

  I thought of Ruby’s recommendation of boots and smiled. There’s no denying that my best friend is psychic, and it looked like she had scored once again. But I shook my head. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll mostly be in town. I don’t think I’ll need them.”

  In a moment, Jenna was back with a chocolate-brown fleece-lined North Face parka. “This ought to keep you warm,” she said, handing it to me. “Tonight, if the ghost comes back, we can play ghostbusters.” She looked hopeful. “Dorothea thinks it’s all silly stuff, and I’m too seriously chicken to do it on my own.”

  “Sure.” I grinned. “Just us chickens. Sounds like fun.”

  Had I but known . . .

  • • •

  It felt cooler than it had when I got up that morning. The clouds had thickened into a dense gray porridge, and the wind was definitely blowing harder. I didn’t need the parka and probably wouldn’t, I thought, but it was good insurance.

  When I got into the car and started down the mountain, I tried again to get a local weather radio report. No luck this time, either. But that was okay, because I needed to pay attention to the road—the switchbacks were, if anything, more terrifying going down—and I had plenty to think about. I wasn’t looking forward to confessing my wrongdoing to Chief Jeremy Curtis, believe me. But I had done a bad thing and I wanted to get it off my conscience before it ate a hole in my grimy soul.

  Cell phone service on the road was intermittent, but just as I completed the last zigzag, McQuaid called. He had dug up the information we had discussed the night before. By the time we said goodbye, my conversation with the chief was looking even more complicated.

  There was much less coming and going in the police station this morning, but the same young female officer who had been so busy the day before was at the front desk.

  “Any word on Mr. Conway’s condition?” I asked. An appropriate question, I thought, coming from the person who had probably saved his life.

  She actually smiled. “They’re saying he’s off the critical list.”

  I let out my breath. “Has the chief been able to talk to him yet?” I needed to know, but this was an impertinent question. I doubted that I’d get an answer.

  She fooled me. “The hospital said they thought he could be questioned this morning,” she said, which I took to mean “not yet.” The re
d light on her phone blinked. “You can go in now.” She pointed in the direction of a door marked chief.

  Chief Curtis sat behind his desk and listened gravely to my confession of hearing Jed Conway’s whispered word. Blackwell? Maxwell? Not a dying declaration, now that Conway was on the survivor’s list. But in the scheme of things, perhaps just as important.

  Then he read me the riot act, scathingly and at length. He left nothing out, but I took the scolding meekly. I deserved every word of it.

  He finished with “You might get away with that in Texas, but not in North Carolina. I could arrest you for obstructing justice.”

  I was tempted to point out that I had gotten away with it in North Carolina—until I confessed, which I had done voluntarily and of my own free will. But I was at fault and I knew it, so I ate more crow, with a hefty garnish of mea culpa. I said I was sorry (which was true), and that my husband (the ex-cop, remember him?) had been very, very, very angry when I told him what I had done (which was a lie, because I didn’t tell him). But I thought it might make the chief a little more sympathetic. I even offered to amend my witness statement to include my best guess as to what I might or might not have heard. His staff was probably pretty busy this morning, so I would be glad to retype it myself. I would be willing to sign it in blood, if he liked.

  His mouth twitched but he managed to frown instead of smiling. “Well, okay,” he said, drawing it out grudgingly. “Amend your statement. Apologize to your better half. And don’t do it again.”

  “I won’t,” I said contritely. “I’ve learned my lesson.” I waited a beat. We weren’t done here. “I suppose you’ve already talked to Kevin Maxwell.” The impertinent question again.

  He pushed his lips in and out, deciding whether he wanted to answer. But we were on the same team once more, so he said, “Okay. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but Bethany is a small town. Everybody’s heard that Kevin was pissed off at Conway and his Hemlock friends over something that happened with his sister. Sure. Maxwell was the first one I thought of. Figured he had a damned good motive, although I was a little surprised that he didn’t finish the job.”

  “Okay.” I pushed my luck. “And?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “And it turns out that when Conway was shot, your boy Kevin was over at the Bull’s Head, way to hell and gone on the other side of town. Three of his coworkers were with him. They were sitting down to brisket and beer about the time you called 9-1-1. No way he was at the Open Book.”

  Not my boy, but whatever. I nodded. “So my first impression—that Conway had said ‘Blackwell’—is probably correct.”

  “Maybe,” he said, drawing it out. “I’ll have to check, but if there are any Blackwells in town, I can’t think of them right off.”

  I took a breath and dove in. “It happens that Blackwell is the name of the author who compiled the rare book that was stolen from the Hemlock House a couple of weeks ago. The one you mentioned yesterday,” I added helpfully.

  “Whoa.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re telling me that the shooting had something to do with that book?”

  “The possibility did occur to me,” I admitted.

  He thought about this for a moment.

  “That theft wasn’t my case,” he said finally. “Hemlock House is outside my bailiwick. However, I routinely see the county’s log of ongoing investigations. And Sheriff Rogers and I sit down together every couple of weeks, just to catch up. He told me about that book. He also said it looks like some other things are missing from that library. Rare books, maybe. Pictures of flowers, stuff like that.”

  “Yes. The Carswell collection has never been catalogued, so it’ll take some serious work to determine just how much might be gone. An initial guesstimate puts the loss at seventy or eighty thousand. But it could be a lot more than that, not including the Blackwell book. The auction estimate on that is a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Both eyebrows went up and Curtis whistled softly. “Mucho dinero.”

  “Plus, there’s this.” I told him about standing beside the counter at the Open Book and noticing Socrates.com on the shop’s computer. The website offered a couple of prints from an antique book about lilies, maybe from the book in the Carswell library. The two I had seen—the blackberry lily and the Barbados lily—were priced at nearly $6,000.

  “There are thousands of botanical prints for sale on the internet,” I went on, “so the site itself isn’t any great surprise. I struck out when I tried to trace the owner, though—the domain name is privately registered. My husband’s PI firm has the software to do forensic web searches, and he had better luck. He thinks I ought to tell you that it’s owned by Jed Conway. The prints for sale on that site may have been stolen from the Carswell library.”

  I made eye contact with the chief, wanting to be sure that he understood that the information I was giving him came via a legitimate, card-carrying detective—one of his tribe—and was hence credible and trustworthy. Yes, I admit it. I was shamelessly draping myself in McQuaid’s borrowed authority. But whatever works.

  “Jeez.” The chief sat up straight and swiveled his desk chair to the computer on his right. “Socrates.com, you said?” He typed it in. As the site came up, he opened a desk drawer, pulled out a pair of black-framed glasses, and put them on, peering at the screen.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, scrolling down the page. “A ton of stuff here. Pricy, too. Three grand for a picture of a freakin’ peach!”

  I waited for a moment, then said, “There’s something else you should know.”

  He turned away from the computer, frowning. “Something else like what?”

  “I talked to Claudia Roth yesterday—she’s a neighbor and relative of Miss Carswell.”

  “The parrot lady.” He was dismissive. “About as loony as they come.”

  “Not so much,” I said. “She confirmed something I had already heard from the cook-housekeeper at Hemlock House. Conway had a serious dispute with Carswell several months before she died. He had come up with a scheme to sell items from her collection for her—including the Blackwell Herbal. According to Roth, Conway needed the commissions from those sales to offset the serious losses at his retail shop.”

  “Losses?” The chief gave me a sharp look. “The store was in trouble?”

  “Online bookstores are giving brick-and-mortar bookstores a hard time everywhere. You might check with his bank to see what kind of deposits and withdrawals he’s been making.” I paused. “Anyway, Carswell was planning to create a foundation to turn her collection into an accessible library, and she wasn’t keen on selling pieces of it. They argued, and she sent him packing.” I paused. “He had already introduced a couple of other people to her, and her edict didn’t apply to them, apparently. They got along with her. They continued to visit. Frequently.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Margaret Anderson, for one. She worked at the library for months, both before and after Carswell died.”

  “Margaret—” His jaw tightened. “You’re not saying she . . .” He shifted uncomfortably. “Who’s the other one?”

  His reaction made me curious, but I filed it away and went on. “Amelia Scott. Anderson was there to help organize the collection, which had never been catalogued. Scott was there—”

  “Scott was there on Hemlock Guild business,” the chief put in.

  This was getting interesting. “Hemlock Guild?” I played dumb.

  “Named for a poison plant, not the tree. It’s a right-to-die support group. It came up when I was investigating Wanda Sanger’s suicide.”

  I raised an inquiring eyebrow and he went on. “Seems that there were questions when Sunny Carswell shot herself. Was the suicide assisted? Who helped? Sheriff Rogers—it was a county investigation—was skeptical. So he took a look at the Hemlock Guild. For a while, he had his eye on Amelia Scott.” />
  Hmm. We were back to Sunny’s suicide now. I was interested to know what triggered the sheriff’s curiosity, and Curtis was willing to talk about it.

  His story went like this. Amelia Scott had been at Hemlock House on the day Sunny died. The housekeeper had called 911 after Amelia discovered the body. But Sheriff Rogers couldn’t find any evidence of assistance. At least, nothing that the DA was willing to take to a grand jury. Doc Peters, the county coroner, had ruled it a suicide. Carswell had used the same gun her daddy and granddaddy had both used for the same purpose—a 1911 .45 automatic, a one-off prototype made by the Carswells for a military contract before World War I. There were a couple of her clear prints, yes. But the gun had been wiped very clean, so there wasn’t the usual smudging you’d find on a weapon somebody had been handling—no smears or partials, just several very clear prints, Carswell’s prints. But as a prototype modification of the Browning patent, the gun was worth quite a bit of money on the collectors’ market. Maybe it had been cleaned with the idea of selling it.

  Curtis shook his head, speaking half to himself. “Think of that. Very same gun her daddy and granddaddy used. So yes, the coroner ruled it suicide, but there were still a few questions. And not much in the way of answers.”

  Answers. I thought bleakly of Sunny, the last of her family, alone with her books in that monstrosity of a house, with nothing to look forward to but a lingering and painful death. She couldn’t be blamed for wanting to make a ritualistic end to it. But I also understood why the sheriff had questions. And why the questions had no answers.

  There was a silence while Curtis chewed on his lip, going back to the thefts. Then he said, “Did Scott have access to the library, before or after Carswell died?”