Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

“It’s the worst thing I hope I ever see. They really don’t look much like people anymore,” Arthur said suddenly. He shoved his hands in his pockets. It was up to his fellow detectives to help him over this one, I realized. I was excluded from this bad moment, and truly, I was thankful.

I thought of a lot of things to say, but they were futile things. It was time for me to go. I got in my car and without considering what I was doing, I drove to work. I went to tell Mr. Clerrick that our volunteer wouldn’t be coming in that afternoon.

The rest of the afternoon just passed. Later, I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d done after I returned to work. I remembered I’d felt good when I’d gotten up that morning and I couldn’t believe it. I just wanted one day with nothing happening, nothing bad, nothing good. No excitement. Just a nice dull day like I’d had almost every day until recently.

Close to closing time, I saw one of the detectives whom I didn’t know personally coming into the library. He went to Sam Clerrick’s office on the ground floor, emerged in a matter of moments, and made a beeline to Lillian as she stood behind the circulation desk. The detective asked Lillian a couple of questions, and she answered eagerly. He wrote a few things down on his notepad, and left with a nod to her.

Lillian looked up to the second floor where I was again shelving books, and our eyes met. She looked excited, and more than that, turning quickly away. Soon when another librarian was in earshot, Lillian called her over. Their heads tilted close together, and after that the other librarian hurried to the periodicals room, where yet another librarian would be stationed. If the police kept coming here asking about me, I realized with a sick feeling, Mr. Clerrick might let me go. I could tell myself I’d done nothing, but I suddenly knew it wouldn’t make any difference. This wasn’t just happening to me, I reminded myself. Probably members of Real Murders all over Lawrenceton were being similarly inconvenienced, and many other people whose lives these murders had touched, no matter how tangentially.

It was the old stone-in-the-pond effect. Instead of stones, bodies were being thrown into the pool of the community, and the resulting waves of misery, fear, and suspicion would brush more and more people until the crimes came to an end.

Though I didn’t know it until I left work, that afternoon had been a busy one for the news media, as well as the police.

Mamie’s death had not aroused much interest in the city, though it had been front-page news in Lawrenceton. The box of candy had rated a couple of paragraphs on an inside page locally, and had failed to register at all in the city. But the murder of Morrison Pettigrue was news; the strange and off-beat murder of a strange and off-beat man, spiced with Benjamin’s charge of political assassination. Benjamin may have been a local butcher who very obviously desired attention of any kind in the worst way, but he did deserve the title “campaign manager” and he was quotable. The two local stringers for the city papers enjoyed a couple of days of unprecedented importance.

As Sally had told us so indignantly at the meeting at my place, she’d been asked by the police to keep the Julia Wallace speculations out of the paper. An account of the Julia Wallace murder would have little appeal for twentieth-century American newspaper readers, the police told Sally and her boss. And it would hinder their investigation. Sally was on an inside track with the Wright murder, no doubt about it, being a club member and actually present when the body was found, so she was furious to see her exclusive knowledge stay exclusive. But her boss, Macon Turner, agreed with the local police chief that it should be withheld for “a few days.” It was from Macon Turner I pieced all this together later; he’d been wooing my mother for some months before John Queensland gained ascendancy, and we’d become friends.

Sally became frantic after the Pettigrue murder; the minute she’d learned from her police sources that there had been paper scattered on the surface of the bathwater, and that Pettigrue had been placed in the tub after death, she mentally scrolled through the assassinations of radicals and easily came up with Charlotte Corday’s stabbing of Jean-Paul Marat in revolutionary France. Corday had gained entrance to Marat’s house by pretending she would give him a list of traitors in her province. Then she killed Marat while he sat in the bath to alleviate a skin disease.

After Sally had thought it through, she exploded into Macon Turner’s office and demanded to report the full story. She knew it would be the biggest story of her career. Turner, a friend of the police chief, hesitated a fatal couple of days. Then the Buckleys were slaughtered, and Sally, instantly drawing the obvious conclusion, prepared her story with full disclosure of the “parallel” theory, as it became called.

Turner could no longer resist the biggest, best story that had come along since he’d bought the Lawrenceton Sentinel . By chance, the two stringers were not acquainted with any Real Murders members, who at any rate had not been doing a lot of talking about Mamie Wright’s murder especially since the Sunday night meeting at my apartment. For example, LeMaster Cane told me later he’d decided even before the meeting that the murders in Lawrenceton were too much like old murders for it to be coincidental. But as a black man, he’d been too scared of being implicated to come forward. He’d already found by that time, too, that his hammer- with initials burned into the haft-was missing. He figured it had been used to kill Mamie.

The same afternoon the Buckleys were found slaughtered, the state lab phoned the local police to say that though the report was in the mail, they wanted Arthur and Lynn to know that what was in the candy my mother had received was a product called “Ratkill.” If my mother had swallowed the candy without noticing the taste in time to spit it out, she would have been very sick. If by some wild chance her taste-buds had been jaded enough for her to eat three chocolates, she might have died. But the Ratkill had a strong odor and flavor by design, to prevent just such a thing happening; so the poisoning attempt seemed half-hearted and amateurish.

Then Lynn Liggett found the open box of Ratkill in Arthur’s car.

The officer who had taken the telephone message from the state crime lab to relay to the detectives was a man named Paul Allison, and he was the brother of the man Sally’d been married to years before. He was a friend of Sally’s, and he didn’t care for Arthur. Paul Allison was standing in the police station parking lot when Lynn, reaching in Arthur’s car to retrieve her forgotten notebook, found an open box of Ratkill under it. Lynn assumed that Arthur had gotten a sample for some reason, and lifted it up where Paul Allison could see it, before she sensed something was wrong and instinctively tried to conceal it.

After Paul Allison had seen the Ratkill, there was no possible way to conceal its finding, and Arthur had a lot of explaining to do; so did Lynn, who had been riding with Arthur off and on.

Paul Allison decided to do his own explaining-to Sally. He called her an hour later, and her full story was in print the next morning.

Sally’s story created a sensation, which it fully deserved. Sally Allison, middle-aged newswoman, had finally gotten the story she’d hankered for all her life, and she went for it, no holds barred.

The stringers had not known about the “parallel theory,” but they did know something strange was happening in Lawrenceton, which normally had a very low murder rate.

When the Buckleys were killed, one of the stringers was listening to her police band scanner. While the police cars converged on the Buckley house, she was loading her camera. She stopped at the gas station to fill up her car, then drove slowly up Parson until she spotted the house. In front of the house was slumped a tall, lovely woman with blood on her legs, and sitting with her arm around that tall, lovely woman was a little librarian with big round glasses and a grim expression. I had been trying to ignore the heave of my stomach, because Lizanne smelled of vomit.