Miranda James - The Silence of the Library

“Good morning, miss,” the old man said. “Are you returned to visit the mistress?”

“I am.” Veronica boldly stepped past the butler into the entranceway. “My friend Mr. Arthur Marsh is accompanying me today. Please announce us to Mrs. Eden. I trust she is well.” Until Veronica spoke to the mistress of the house, she decided she would not tax the servant with the mystery of her drugging and abandonment in her car by the side of the road.

“She is indeed, miss.” Bradberry closed the front door behind them. “Please walk this way, and I will announce you.” He turned and headed toward the same sitting room in which Veronica had talked with Mrs. Eden the previous day.

Bradberry opened the doors and advanced into the sunlit room. Veronica and Artie, following right behind him, could not at first see their hostess. The butler intoned their names and then stepped aside.

Veronica moved forward. Then her step faltered.

Mrs. Eden arose from her chair and walked toward them, her hands extended, a beaming smile on her face. “My dear, how lovely to see you again. And you have brought a companion. How delightful.”

Veronica stared hard at the woman. She looked like the Mrs. Eden she had encountered the day before, but her manner was so completely different that Veronica was stunned by the change.

While Artie accepted the woman’s hand and shook it, Veronica continued to scrutinize their hostess. Mrs. Eden’s face appeared harder, less fleshy, and more heavily made up than the day before. She also seemed stronger, certainly no longer an invalid.

Veronica relied on her instincts in such situations, and her instincts were telling her that the woman was an impostor. This Mrs. Eden was not the Mrs. Eden she met in this house yesterday.

I chuckled at the melodrama of it. A second Mrs. Eden—as I recalled it, a cousin impersonating the real Mrs. Eden, who was imprisoned somewhere in the house.

Out of nowhere my tired brain connected disparate pieces of information, and I knew who the killer was.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Mrs. Cartwright really wasn’t Mrs. Cartwright.

My solution to the murder was nuts.

Wasn’t it?

If Mrs. Cartwright wasn’t Mrs. Cartwright, then who was she?

Eugene Marter. Had to be.

I realized I hadn’t seen him and his grandmother in the same place at the same time. Had only seen him once, as a matter of fact.

If Eugene was really impersonating his grandmother, then where was the real woman? Was she even still living?

There was an easy way to check that. The Social Security death index.

I slipped on my shoes and hurried downstairs to where I had left my laptop on the kitchen table. As soon as it was ready, I opened the browser and entered a website address. I knew the fastest way to gain access to the information was via a genealogy service to which I subscribed. I input my search terms, Mrs. Cartwright’s name, figuring there couldn’t be that many other women with her name in the index.

There was no listing at all for Electra Barnes Cartwright . I tried Electra Cartwright . No hits. Electra Barnes returned several, but I could tell by the dates that none of them was the correct person.

I leaned back in my chair and considered the possibilities.

The fact that I couldn’t find her in the death index didn’t mean that she was still alive. That thought chilled me. Had they killed her and buried her in the backyard?

Nasty.

Maybe she was alive but mentally incapacitated. No longer able to write or make competent decisions about her books.

That would be tragic, but an alternative preferable to my first thought.

Diesel startled me by meowing loudly beside me. I was so absorbed in my speculations that I had forgotten all about him.

“I’m okay, boy.” I rubbed his head. “Thinking hard, that’s all. Nothing to worry over.”

He warbled a couple of times before he settled down on the floor beside my chair.

How would Kanesha react if I shared this theory with her?

She would demand proof; that’s how she would react.

What proof did I have? I had a lot of odd facts that I thought suggestive, but Kanesha needed convincing evidence.

Short of walking up to the fake Mrs. Cartwright and snatching the red wig off her head, what could I do?

I had a sudden vision of grabbing hold of the hair, pulling, and Mrs. Cartwright screaming in protest. I shuddered.

No, I had to be completely sure about my theory before I could test it like that.

What incontestable proof could I muster? Surely there was something.

My gaze fell on the scrapbook. Pictures of Mrs. Cartwright. A vague idea began to form.

Hard on those thoughts came another point. Photographs could be the reason the killer took away Carrie Taylor’s files. Why Carrie Taylor had to die. She had the proof right there in her file cabinet.

Surely the killer had to realize, however, there were almost certainly copies of Mrs. Taylor’s photos elsewhere. Maybe a photograph wasn’t the proof after all.

A memory surfaced. At the meeting with Mrs. Cartwright and Marcella, Carrie Taylor mentioned a photo of the author in the garden shed where she wrote her books. I didn’t recall seeing such a picture in Aunt Dottie’s scrapbook.

I went back to my laptop and typed Electra Cartwright garden shed in the search engine. The result was a couple of pages of hits. I clicked on the first one, and that led me to an article in a fan publication devoted to children’s books—not Carrie Taylor’s newsletter.

An examination of the other links revealed nothing useful. I clicked the link for an image search, and the result was a screen full of pictures. Some were of the author as a much younger woman; others were of garden sheds. Not a single one showed Mrs. Cartwright and a garden shed.

Back to square one on that idea. I glanced at the scrapbook again. This time I pulled it close and found the section Aunt Dottie devoted to Mrs. Cartwright and Veronica. There were a couple of portrait-type photos from magazines pasted in, but those didn’t tell me anything.

I stared at the image of Mrs. Cartwright with Marietta Dubois. Both women wore shoes with low heels, from what I could tell. The actress looked tall next to the writer, but if Miss Dubois had been six feet tall, that would make Mrs. Cartwright about five-eight. How could I find out how tall Marietta Dubois was?

The encyclopedia entry I found earlier didn’t have that information. I searched for Marietta Dubois height but that didn’t get me anywhere, except increasingly frustrated. As a test I entered Judi Dench height and retrieved the information right away. Too bad Marietta Dubois hadn’t been more famous.

I glanced at the screen again and examined the results of my search on Judi Dench. One link jumped right out at me—an Internet database devoted to movies. Maybe it had what I needed?

I found the entry for Miss Dubois, and there it was. Height 5 ' 6 " . I laughed with relief. Whether a court would accept it as evidence was one thing, but it might be enough to convince Kanesha.

At our first meeting I noticed that Mrs. Cartwright—or rather Eugene Marter—was the same height as Teresa Farmer. My friend and colleague was around five foot six as well. There was no way the real Electra Barnes Cartwright had grown a good four inches in the past sixty-odd years.

Now that I had identified the murderer, I considered how that fact fit into the odd incidents that had occurred, starting with the murder itself.

Kanesha’s witness, Mr. Andrews, claimed to have seen a man arrive around the time of Carrie Taylor’s phone message to Melba. Carrie Taylor had said something like, “What does he want?” About twenty minutes later Mr. Andrews saw a woman carrying a large box leaving the house.