Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

“I was too,” I assured him.

“Well, well, I’ll have to stop by Melanie’s and tell her,” he said after a moment of thought. “This will be such a relief to her. She’s had a hard time since Mrs. Wright’s purse was found in her car.”

Right. Being pronounced a martyr at church and getting a marriage proposal was really a hard time. But I felt too cheerful to envy Melanie; I’d gone out with Bankston twice and wouldn’t have him on a silver platter, as my mother always said.

Mother. That was someone who should hear the good news, too. I’d call her today. She was going to love being termed “what was worst about capitalism.” That was a hard line to take after all Mother’s hard work and struggle during the first few years with her business, though then she’d had my father’s presence to give her renewed strength. He hadn’t left until she was well on the road to success. I was trailing off into unpleasant thoughts, and snapped myself back quickly. Joy was the keynote of the day.

At work, all the librarians and volunteers seemed to have heard the good news, and I was back in the fold. Lillian went back to being her bitchy self, which was almost comforting.

Sam derrick ventured forth from his charts and graphs and budgets to pat me on the shoulder in passing. I poked book cards in the stamper vigorously, took overdue money with a smile instead of expressionless disapproval, shelved with precision. The morning didn’t just hurry by, it hopped, skipped, and jumped by.

The telephone rang twice while I was eating my micro-waved egg rolls and browsing through an encyclopedia of twentieth-century murderers. I’d had that familiar irritating feeling that someone, sometime, had said something interesting that I wanted to pursue, mentioned some names I wanted to mull over, and I’d thought flipping through the book would help. But the phone destroyed even this wisp of idea.

The first caller was my father, who always opened with, “How’s my doll?”

He hated calling me “Roe” and I hated him calling me “Doll.” We hadn’t come up with anything neutral. “I’m okay, Dad,” I said.

“Is it still okay with you if Phillip comes?” he asked anxiously. “You know, if you are upset about the situation in Lawrenceton, we can stay home.”

In the background I could hear Phillip piping anxiously, “Can I go, Daddy? Can I go?”

“The crisis seems to be over,” I said happily.

“They arrest someone?”

“They got a confession. I’m sure everything’s going to be okay now,” I said. Maybe I wasn’t all that sure. But I was pretty sure that I was going to be okay now. And I wanted to see my little brother.

“Well, I’ll be bringing him about five o’clock, then,” Dad said. “Betty Jo sends her love. We really appreciate this.”

I wasn’t so sure about Betty Jo’s love, but I was sure she did appreciate having a free, reliable babysitter for a whole weekend.

The next call was from my mother, of course. She still had some sort of psychic link to Dad, and if he called me she nearly always rang within the hour. If she was like Lauren Bacall, he was like Humphrey Bogart; an ugly guy with charisma coming out his ears. And bless his heart, he seemed quite unaware of it. But that charisma was still sending out alpha waves or something to my mother.

I knew that she must already have heard of Benjamin’s confession, and sure enough, she had. She’d also heard he’d said Morrison Pettigrue had mailed her the chocolates. She was skeptical.

“How would Morrison Pettigrue hear about Mrs. See’s?” she asked. “How would he know I always eat the creams?”

“He didn’t have to know you always eat the creams,” I pointed out. “There’s just no way to get rat poison in the nut-filled ones.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. “I still have a hard time believing that one. I barely knew the man. I’d met him at some Chamber of Commerce meeting once and if I remember correctly, we talked about the need for new sidewalks downtown. It was a cordial conversation and he certainly gave no sign then that he thought I was some kind of leech living off the masses, or whatever.”

But if Benjamin was lying about the chocolates, he could also be lying about other things. And I wanted him to be telling the truth and nothing but the truth.

“Let’s just shelve this until we find out more about it,” I suggested. “Maybe he’ll say something that’ll make sense out of the whole thing.”

“Is-your brother-still staying with you this weekend?” Mother asked, in one of her lightning turns of thought.

I sighed silently. “Yes, Mother. Dad’s bringing Phillip by around five, and he’ll be here until Sunday evening.” It would have been beneath Mother’s dignity to avoid the sight of Phillip, but having made a point of talking to him once or twice, she usually stayed away while he was at my place.

“Well, I’ll be talking to you again,” she was saying now. I could bet on that. I asked her about her business, and she chatted about that for a few minutes.

“Are you and John still thinking about getting married?” I asked.

“Well, we’re discussing it.” There was a smile in her voice. “I promise you’ll be the first to know when we definitely decide.”

“As long as I’m the first,” I said. “I really am happy for you.”

“I hear you have a new beau,” Mother said, which was a logical progression when you think about it.

“Which one have you heard about?” I asked, because I simply couldn’t resist.

In someone less grand than my mother, I would’ve called the sound she made a delighted cackle. We hung up with mutual warmth, and I returned to work with the distinct feeling life was on the up and up for me.

My mother’s “beau,” John Queensland, came into the library that afternoon while I was on the circulation desk. I realized he was practically the opposite of my father: handsome in an elder-statesman way, and overtly as dignified and reserved as Mother. He had been a widower for some time and still lived in the big two-story house he’d shared with his wife and their two children, both of whom had children of their own now. My contemporaries, I reminded myself gloomily.

As John was checking out two staid biographies of worthy people, he mentioned that his garage had been broken into some time within the last three weeks.

“I never use it anymore, I just park behind the house. The garage is so full of the boys’ old stuff-I can’t seem to get them to decide what to do with all their junk.” He sounded fond rather than complaining. “But anyway, I went to track down my golf clubs since I intended scheduling a game with Bankston in this warmer weather, and the darned thing had been broken into and my golf clubs were gone.”

Since John was a Real Murderer, I was sure that this theft meant something. I told John about Gifford Doakes and his hatchet- amazingly, he hadn’t heard-and left him to draw his own conclusions.

“I know Benjamin Greer has confessed,” I told John, “but that’s a bit of evidence the police might need. Just a confession isn’t enough, I gather.”

“I think I’ll go by the police station on my way back to the office,” John said thoughtfully. “Those clubs had better be reported. The whole bag was taken, and it was a pretty distinctive set. Every time my kids went somewhere, they got a bumper sticker and put it on my golf bag, just a family joke…”And trailing off with unheard-of abstraction, John left the library. I thought of Arthur and sighed. I wondered if he’d appreciate being handed another out-of-the-blue fact.

Golf clubs. Maybe they’d already been used. Maybe they’d been used on Mamie. The weapon in that case had never been found, that I knew of. Maybe Benjamin would tell the police where the clubs were.