Miranda James - The Silence of the Library

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’ll see myself out.” She nodded good-bye and headed for the front door.

Melba waited until Kanesha was out of earshot. “So who is this Yancy Thigpen? What does he have to do with all this?”

“She is Mrs. Cartwright’s agent,” I explained. “She was supposed to arrive at Mrs. Cartwright’s house sometime yesterday for a meeting between her client and Winston Eagleton, a publisher who wants to reprint the Veronica Thane books. According to Mrs. Cartwright and her daughter, Ms. Thigpen never turned up.”

“You obviously think there’s something sinister about that.” Melba frowned. “Sounds that way to me, too, the more I think about it.”

“I’m afraid it is connected to Carrie Taylor’s murder, and I am praying that Ms. Thigpen is found alive and unharmed.”

Diesel as usual picked up on the sudden tension and started meowing for attention. He came to me for reassurance, and I rubbed and scratched his head and back while Melba watched.

“It’s amazing to me how he picks up on things.” She spoke softly.

“He’s very intuitive, that’s for sure.” I gave my boy an indulgent smile, and he chirped at me. Finally, having had enough attention—for the moment, that is—he wandered toward the utility room. No doubt by now he was starving again.

“Help yourself to more coffee. Of if you’d prefer something cold, there are canned drinks in the fridge. I’m going to get my laptop and sit here with you while I search.”

“I’m fine for now.” Melba smiled and picked up her pen.

Out of nowhere I suddenly remembered Carrie Taylor’s dog. “What did you do with the dog?”

“Zippy, you mean?” Melba laughed. “I thought Thelma, Carrie’s neighbor, hated dogs, but now that Carrie’s gone, Thelma decided she wants to take him. Says he gets into her yard all the time anyway, so he might as well stay with her because it’s familiar. Don’t that beat all?”

“As long as she’ll provide a good home for him,” I said, “it’s probably the best thing. Dogs are a lot of responsibility. Cats, too, for that matter.”

“I was relieved, actually.” Melba waved a hand at me. “Go get your laptop and let me concentrate.”

A few minutes later I was seated at the table again, laptop up and running. Diesel had come back and stretched out by Melba’s chair. She was engrossed in her task.

As soon as the computer was ready, I opened a browser and prepared to search. I realized I really should think about my strategy rather than start searching with no plan.

What should I search first?

Yancy Thigpen seemed stuck in my head at the moment, so I decided to search her. I might find out something pertinent to her apparent disappearance.

There was actually more than one Yancy Thigpen out there, I discovered. I honed in on the one I wanted quickly because one of the results included a thumbnail of a young woman. I clicked on that and examined the photo.

I frowned. She looked oddly familiar. I was sure I hadn’t met her, but she resembled someone I knew. Who was it?

Suddenly I had it.

Teresa Farmer. She could be Teresa’s cousin, if not her sister.

THIRTY-TWO

I stared at the photo of Yancy Thigpen. Did she really look like Teresa Farmer, or was I imagining it? The longer I examined the photo, the less sure I was.

I shifted the laptop on the table so Melba could see.

“Take a gander at this image and tell me what you think. Does this person remind you of anyone?”

Melba glanced at the screen and frowned. “Charlie, you’re always thinking somebody strange looks like somebody you know.” She leaned forward and peered more closely at the screen. I pushed the laptop a little nearer.

“Well?” I said after a long moment of silence.

Melba shrugged. “I guess she reminds me a little bit of Teresa Farmer from the public library.”

“You think in dim light you could mistake Teresa for this woman?” I recalled the incident when Teresa and I visited Mrs. Cartwright and her daughter and how Marcella Marter reacted so oddly when she opened the door and saw Teresa standing there. I figured she might have mistaken Teresa for Yancy Thigpen.

“I reckon I might,” Melba said. She didn’t sound convinced. “What does this have to do with anything, though? You think they could be related?”

“I hadn’t really thought about that,” I said. I told her what happened when we first met Marcella Marter.

“That’s weird enough,” Melba said. “But does it really mean anything?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. Melba shrugged and went back to work on her list.

I examined a few more pictures of Yancy Thigpen, and I soon realized that they all had one thing in common. In every single photograph, each apparently taken on different occasions, Ms. Thigpen was wearing a red dress with a scarf. The scarf in each photo was different, but they were all vivid geometric prints. What this had to do with anything, I wasn’t sure, but the information could be useful to the authorities looking for her. I fired off a brief e-mail to Kanesha, just in case.

That was enough about Yancy Thigpen for the moment, I decided. I needed to get on to the main subject of my research, Electra Barnes Cartwright. The solution to the murder, the disappearance, the strange theft—she was the common denominator. I was convinced of that.

I typed in her name, hit Enter, and got back over twenty-five thousand results. I knew many of them would be repetitive, but I still had to comb through them to make sure I didn’t miss anything significant. As I stared at the screen, I realized I still hadn’t formulated a coherent strategy for my research. I needed to have some focus to what I was doing; otherwise I would easily get sidetracked and end up following trails that would yield nothing helpful. That was what made surfing the Internet both frustrating and fun.

“Melba, let me have a couple of pieces of paper. I need to make a few notes.”

She glanced up from her work, her expression one of fierce concentration. “What? Oh, okay.” She tore several pages out of the notebook and handed them to me.

I found a pen in the jumble drawer and resumed my seat. I stared at the blank page. What should I focus on to start with? Basic biographical information was the logical answer. I made a heading for that on the paper before I turned back to the laptop.

The first result on the screen—after the commercial links to used book sites—led me to a bio of Mrs. Cartwright on a popular Internet encyclopedia. There was only one image attached to the article, a rather grainy photo of her when she was about forty years old. That was during the height of her fame as the creator of Veronica Thane. The first book in the series was published when the author was only twenty-six.

I studied the photograph. Because of the mediocre quality, whether from the original itself or a bad scanning job, I couldn’t see the kind of detail I wanted. I could see the resemblance to Marcella Marter and her son, Eugene, however. They both had the same aquiline nose and rather prominent brows, but Mrs. Cartwright’s mouth looked smaller and softer. Marcella had rather heavy jowls—from her father’s side, I supposed—and Eugene was somewhere in between.

Mrs. Cartwright at the century mark favored the woman of sixty years ago, but of course age exacted a toll on everyone. The younger Electra Cartwright was fleshier, probably plumper in all respects, but I could see the resemblance to the older woman.

I skimmed the basic early biographical details and made a few notes as I went. She was born near Calhoun City, her father a farmer and her mother a schoolteacher. She was an only child who excelled at school—except for mathematics, which she apparently loathed, according to an interview early in her career. There was no money for her to go to college, but apparently she was so eager to get away from small-town life in Mississippi that she struck out for New York when she was barely eighteen. A distant relative offered her a place to live in Connecticut, and off she went. She had performed in plays in high school and was stagestruck, determined to make it on Broadway.