Joan Hess: Poisoned Pins

The eighth book in the Claire Malloy series, 1993

I would like to thank Lieutenant Mike Terry of the University of Arkansas Police Department for sharing his time and expertise with me. I would also like to thank Barbara Rose for some of her amazing sorority stories, and several other sources who prefer to remain anonymous (for obvious reasons). Also, Sharyn McCrumb and Les Roberts were kind enough to offer specialized information and deserve my thanks.

Summer can be deadly. Oh, it’s got some positive points, I suppose, such as not having to shovel ashes out of the fireplace or drape innocent conifers with tinsel. No sleet, no arctic breezes, no bouts of the flu. On the down side, however, there are virtually no customers in the Book Depot, which leads to no income for its proprietor, who is then obliged to stare gloomily at the pedestrianless sidewalk and think longingly of the other nine months of the year, when Farber College students are burdened with reading lists and a thirst for the sort of analytical insights available from slim yellow study guides.

I was doing just that, rather than battling the piles of paperwork that awaited me in the cramped office at the back of the renovated train station. I’d bought the bookstore more than a decade ago, only a few months after my husband of the moment had a most unfortunate encounter with a chicken truck. Business was never what I’d describe as brisk, but I knew with bleak certainty that the next three months would feel like an eternity as my bank balance dwindled, my spotty old accountant hissed about my delinquent quarterly tax payments, and my spirits inversely reflected the temperature.

The bell above the door tinkled, and I looked up with what optimism I could muster. After a brief struggle with the door, a girl with a towering armload of textbooks staggered across the floor and crashed into the counter with a muted gurgle.

“Let me help you,” I said as I came around the counter and began to unload her. A face emerged, framed by wispy bangs and dull brown hair that needed to be washed. Her eyes were small and yellowish, her nose broad, her lips almost puffy. I continued taking books from her and piling them on the counter until we’d completed the task and the rest of her was visible. The rest of her turned out to be skinny to the point of angularity, with no discernible bust, waist, or hips. Beneath the hem of a wrinkled brown skirt, thick calves provided the only convexity.

She was watching me so nervously that I went back to my stool and sat. “What can I do for you?” I asked in the dulcet tones of a mild-mannered bookseller intent on a sale.

“Do you buy used textbooks?”

I inwardly winced at the nasality of her voice, but merely shook my head and said, “No, I don’t, but Rock Bottom Books does. It’s about four blocks past the tracks, on the opposite side of the street.”

“Four blocks? I barely made it this far. I was scared my arms were gonna fall off.” She tried to smile, but her enthusiasm must have fallen off along the way, too. “Are you sure you don’t…

“Very sure,” I told the witless wonder. “I do, however, sell books, and you’re welcome to look around.”

“Thank you.” She drifted behind a rack of science fiction paperbacks. “You sure have a lot of books, ma’am.”

“Bookstores are like that,” I said as I glanced at the spines of the textbooks. Titles ran the gamut from computer technology to medieval poetry to botany, an impressively varied array for someone amazed by the presence of books in bookstores. “What’s your major?” I asked the top of her head.

“Elementary ed. I’m going to be a teacher when I graduate. There’s something really special about kids, isn’t there? I mean, they’re so young and everything, like little sponges ready to soak up everything they can.”

Was a sale so important? It was well past the middle of the afternoon, and not a completely unreasonable hour to close the store, meet Luanne at the shady beer garden across the street, and drown my financial sorrows while gazing numbly at the desultory old hippies who came out only while the majority of Farber College students were gone for the summer. Pabst, pretzels, and piteous whining-not an unappealing combination for a summer’s eve.

Or I could call Peter Rosen, a man of considerable charm with dark, curly hair, eyes as deceptively guileless as puddles of molasses, a hawkish nose, and an uncanny talent in matters of passion. In other matters he could be somewhat irritating, alas, along with tedious, humorless, dictatorial, and blunt. Cops can be like that. As can men in general, I amended.

“I guess I’d better try to find that other store,” the girl said as she reappeared. I helped her pile the books in her arms, escorted her out the front door, and watched her for a few minutes as she reeled up the sidewalk, oblivious to the potential peril of the uneven pavement. Entertainment’s not easy to come by in Farberville, a mundane place made tolerable only by the slight infusion-or illusion-of culture from the college.

I was reduced to reading the local newspaper when the bell again jangled. This time the door banged open and the sunlight splashed on my face as my daughter Caron careened into the room with the finesse of a runaway locomotive.

“Mother!” she shrieked. “I have this absolutely incredible way to earn thousands and thousands of dollars! That way I can buy a car at the end of the summer! Aren’t you excited?”

Caron is fifteen, an age that precludes pleasantries. Although we are similarly equipped with red hair green eyes, and freckles, she has such an aura of intensity that I feel obliged to offer a disclaimer when I introduce her to the unwary. She’s capable of the brightest explosion or the darkest implosion, neither remotely predictable and both equally alarming. Before she was deluged by demon hormones, she’d not been an unreasonable person with whom to converse. I fully intend to resume such mother-daughter intimacy when it’s no longer a life-threatening proposition.

Following more sedately was her best friend, Inez Thornton, also fifteen but without Caron’s melodramatic flair. Inez is drab and soft-spoken, a perfect counterfoil to my burgeoning Broadway star. Her hair is brown in an oddly colorless way, her face rounded with the vestiges of childhood. The thick lenses of her glasses give her an expression of mild alarm, but if I were in Caron’s wake, I’d look that way, too.

“Thousands of dollars?” I said cautiously.

“Thousands and thousands of dollars!” Aglow with greed, Caron began to dance disjointedly in front of the counter, twirling on one foot and then the other, snatching invisible bills from an invisible money tree. “I think I’ll get one of those foxy little red convertibles. Rhonda’s getting some really stupid car that her brother used to drive. She’ll Absolutely Puke when I pull up in front of her house. Can’t you see her face when she realizes Louis Wilderberry is in my passenger seat?” She wafted away between the racks, lost in this consummate vision of revenge. “Oh, Rhonda,” she continued in a syrupy simper, “Louis and I are going to the drive-in movie. We’d invite you, but it’s too cozy for three. Bye-bye, Miss Cellulite Thighs!”

“Caron’s kind of mad at Rhonda,” Inez contributed with a sigh. “We called to see if she wanted to go to the mall, but she said she had to stay home and baby-sit for her nerdy little brother. We went by anyway, and Louis’s car is parked in her driveway.”