Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

This reminder did not endear him to the detective.

“Whose idea was this stroll through the alley?” Lynn counterattacked.

We looked at each other.

“Well,” I began, “I started wondering how the Buckleys’ murderer had reached their house without being seen…”

“But it was definitely me that wanted to go through this alley as well as the one behind the Buckley house,” Robin said manfully.

“Listen, you two,” Lynn said with an assumed calm, “you don’t seem to understand the real world very well.”

Robin and I didn’t care for that accusation. I felt him stiffen beside me, and I drew myself up and narrowed my eyes.

“We are the police, and we are paid too damn little to investigate murders, but that’s what we do. We don’t sit and read about them, we solve them. We find clues, and we track down leads, and we knock on doors.” She paused and took a deep breath. I had found several flaws in her speech so far, but I wasn’t about to point out to her that Arthur read a lot about murders and that the police so far hadn’t solved a thing and that the clue of the hatchet would still be in the damn ditch if Robin and I hadn’t unearthed it.

I had enough sense of self-preservation not to say those things. When Robin cleared his throat, I stepped on his toes.

I was sorry I’d stopped- him a moment later when Lynn really began questioning him. I wouldn’t have stood to her questioning as well as he, and I had to admire his composure. I could see that it did look peculiar,- Robin arrives in town, the murders start. But I knew that Mamie Wright’s murder had been planned before Robin came to live in Lawrenceton, and the chocolates had been sent to Mother even earlier. The officer pointed out, though, that Robin had been present at the discovery of Mamie Wright’s body, having invited himself to a Real Murders meeting on his first night in town. And he’d been at my house when I’d received the chocolate box.

Lynn was certainly not the only detective who thought Robin’s presence at so many key scenes was fishy. And perhaps I was not as clear and free of suspicion as Arthur had assured me, because when Jack Burns took up the questioning he was looking from Robin to me with some significance. Here, he seemed to be thinking, is someone big who could have helped this woman get Pettigrue’s body in the bathtub.

“I have to go to work in an hour and a half,” I said quietly to him, when I’d had all I could take.

He stopped in mid-sentence.

“Sure,” he said, seeming abruptly exhausted. “Sure you do.” His fuel, it seemed, had been his exasperation with his own men missing the hatchet, and he’d run out of it. I liked him a lot better all of a sudden.

When Burns had taken over the role of castigator, Lynn had started knocking door to door at the apartments asking questions. Finally she reached the apartment where I’d used the phone, and the young woman, now in jeans and a sweater-she’d undoubtedly seen the police going door to door-answered in a flash. Lynn was obviously running through her list of questions, but I noticed after about the third one, she came to point like a bird dog. The young woman had said something Lynn was interested in hearing.

“Jack,” Lynn yelled, “come here.”

“Go home,” Burns told us simply. “We know where you are if we need you.” And he hurried over to Lynn.

Robin and I blew out a breath of relief simultaneously, and almost slunk out of the alley, trying as hard as we possibly could to attract no more official attention. Once we were out into the street, Robin went flying along home and dragged me with him by the hand.

When we reached our parking lot we finally stopped for breath. Robin hugged me and dropped a quick kiss on the top of my head, the most convenient spot for him. “That was really interesting,” he commented, and I began laughing until my sides hurt. Robin’s red eyebrows flew up, and his glasses slid down, and then he began laughing, too. I looked at my watch while I was thinking how long it had been since I’d really whooped like that, and when I saw what the time was, I told Robin I had to go change clothes. At least for a few hours, I had forgotten to be afraid about working at the library alone that night.

It had not been noticed until the last moment that no one had been scheduled to take Mr. Buckley’s place on the roster. None of the other librarians would now admit to having the evening free, and all the volunteers had been scheduled for other nights.

I told Robin this hurriedly, and he said, “I’m sure the police patrols have been stepped up. But maybe I’ll stop in on you tonight. If you need me, call me. I’ll be here.” He went in his gate and I went in mine.

As I pulled on the same blue skirt and red turtleneck I’d worn that morning, I was doing my best not to think of the hatchet. It had been unspeakable. On my drive to work I hoped that the library would be flooded with patrons so I wouldn’t have time to think.

I was taking over the checkout desk from Jane Engle, who had been substituting for one of the librarians whose child had the flu. Jane looked the same, with her perfectly neat gray hair, her perfectly clean wire-rimmed glasses, and her anonymous gray suit. But inside, I could see she was no longer a sophisticated and curious witness to the Lawrenceton murders, but a terrified woman. And she was glad to get out of the library. “All the others left at five, not a single patron’s come in since then,” she told me in a shaky voice. “And frankly, Aurora, I’ve been delighted. I’m scared to be alone with anyone anymore, no matter how well I think I know them.”

I patted Jane on the arm awkwardly. Though at times we’d eaten lunch together, mostly on days after club meetings when we wanted to discuss the program, Jane and I had had a friendly, but never intimate, relationship.

“Other people are interested in our little club for the first time,” Jane went on, “and I’ve had to answer a lot of questions no one ever bothered to ask me before. People think I’m a little strange for having belonged to Real Murders.” Jane was definitely a woman who would hate to be thought strange.

“Well,” I said hesitantly, “just because we had a different sort of hobby-.” Come to think of it, maybe we were a little strange, all of us Real Murderers, as we had sometimes called ourselves laughingly.

Ho-ho.

“One of us really is a murderer, you know,” Jane chimed in eerily. I felt my thoughts were becoming visible in a balloon over my head. “It’s gone beyond an academic interest in death and gore and psychology. I could feel it that night we met in your apartment.”

“Whom do you think it is, Jane?” I said impulsively, as she tied her scarf and extracted her keys from her purse.

“I am sure it’s someone in our club, of course, or possibly a near connection of some sort to a club member. I don’t know if this person has always been disturbed, or if he’s just now decided to play a ghastly series of tricks on his fellow members. Or maybe there is more than one murderer and they’re acting together.”

“It doesn’t have to be someone in Real Murders, Jane, just someone who doesn’t like one of us, someone who wants us to be in trouble.” She was standing by the front door by then, and I wanted her to stay as much as she wanted to go.

She shrugged, not willing to argue. “It’s frightening to me,” she said quietly, “to imagine what case I fit. I go over my books, checking out cases, to see what elderly woman living alone I resemble. What old murder victim.”

I stared at her with my mouth open. I was appalled to realize what Jane had been going through, because of her active and probably accurate mind.