Chapter 10

"Cordelia Botkin, 1898," Jane hissed triumphantly. She'd come up behind me as I was reshelving books that had been checked in. I was at the end of a stack close to the wall, about to wheel my cart around the end and onto the next row. I drew in a breath down low in my chest, shut my eyes, and prayed to forgive her. Tuesday morning had been going so well. "Roe, I'm so sorry! I thought you must have heard me coming."

I shook my head. I tried not to lean on the cart so obviously.

"Cordelia who?" I finally managed to say.

"Botkin. It's close enough. It doesn't actually fit, but it's close enough. This was so sloppy that I think it was an afterthought, or maybe this was even supposed to come off before Mamie Wright was killed." "You're probably right, Jane. The box of candy took six days to get here, and it was mailed from the city, so whoever sent it probably thought I'd get it in two or three days."

I glanced around to see if anyone was in earshot. Lillian Schmidt, another librarian, was shelving books a few stacks away, but she wasn't actually within hearing distance.

"How does it fit, Jane?"

Jane flipped open the notebook she always seemed to have with her. "Cordelia Botkin lived in San Francisco. She became the mistress of the Associated Press bureau chief, John Dunning. He'd left a wife back in..." Jane scanned her notes, "... Dover, Delaware. Botkin mailed the wife several anonymous letters first, did your mother get any?"

I nodded. With a very stiff upper lip, Mother had told Lynn Liggett something she'd never thought significant enough to tell me: she'd gotten an incomprehensible and largely nasty anonymous letter in the mail a few days before the candy came. She'd thought the incident so ugly and meaningless that she hadn't wanted to "upset" me with it. She had thrown it away, of course, but it had been typed.

I was willing to bet it had been typed on the same machine that had typed the mailing label on the package.

"Anyway," Jane continued after checking her notes, "Cordelia finally decided Dunning was going back to his wife, so she poisoned some bonbons and mailed them to Dunning's wife. The wife and a friend of hers died." "Died," I said slowly.

Jane nodded, tactfully keeping her eyes on her notes. "Your father is still in newspapers, isn't he, Roe?"

"Yes, he's not a reporter, but he's head of the advertising department." "And he's living with his new wife, which could be said to represent ‘another woman'."

"Well, yes."

"So obviously the murderer saw the outline was roughly the same and seized the opportunity."

"Did you tell Arthur Smith about this?"

"I thought I had better," Jane said, with a wise nod of her head.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"He wanted to know which book I'd gotten my information from, wrote that down, thanked me, looked harassed, and told me goodbye. I got the impression he's having trouble convincing his superiors about the significance of these murders. What was in the candy, do you know yet?"

"No, they took the box to the state lab for analysis. Arthur warned us that some of the tests take quite a while."

Lillian was moving closer and looking curious, a chronic state with Lillian. But all my co-workers were regarding me with more than normal interest. A quiet librarian finds a body at the meeting of a pretty odd club on Friday night, gets a box of doctored chocolates in the mail on Saturday, turns up dressed in all-new and uncharacteristic clothes on Monday, has a whispered conference with an excited woman on Tuesday.

"I'd better go. I'm disturbing you at work," Jane whispered. She knew Lillian quite well. "But I was so excited when I tracked down the pattern, I just had to run down here and tell you. Of course, the Communist man's murder was patterned after the Marat assassination. Poor Benjamin Greer! He found the body, the newscast said."

"Jane, I appreciate your researching this for me," I hissed back. "I'll take you out to lunch next week to thank you." The last thing I wanted to talk about was Morrison Pettigrue's murder.

"Oh, my goodness, that's not necessary. You gave me something to do for a while. Substituting at the school and filling in here are interesting, but nothing has been as much fun in a long time as tracking down the right murder. However, I suspect I will have to get a new hobby. All these deaths, all this fear. This is getting too close to the bone for me." And Jane sighed, though whether over the deaths of Mamie Wright and Morrison Pettigrue, or because she had to find a new hobby, I could not tell.

I was on the second floor of the library, which is a large gallery running around three walls and overlooking the ground floor, where the children's books, periodicals, and circulation desk are located. I was watching Jane stride out the front door and thinking about Cordelia Botkin when I recognized someone else who was exiting. It was Detective Lynn Liggett. The library director, Sam derrick, seemed to be walking her to the door. This struck me unpleasantly. I could only suppose that Lynn Liggett had been at the library asking questions about me. Maybe she had wanted to know my work hours? More about my character? How long I had been at work that day?

Filled with uneasy speculation, I rounded the corner of the next stack. I began shelving books automatically, still brooding over Detective Liggett's visit to the library. There was nothing bad Sam Clerrick could tell her about me, I reasoned. I was a conscientious employee. I was always on time, and I almost never got sick. I had never yelled at a member of the public, no matter how I'd been tempted—especially by parents who dumped their children at the library in the summer with instructions to amuse themselves for a couple of hours while mommy and daddy went shopping.

So why was I worried? I lectured myself. I was just seeing the down side of being involved in a criminal investigation. It was practically my civic duty not to mind being the object of police scrutiny.

I wondered if I could reasonably be considered a suspect in Mamie's murder. I could have done it, of course. I'd been home unobserved for at least an hour or more before I left for the meeting. Maybe one of the other tenants could vouch for my car being in its accustomed place, though that wouldn't be conclusive proof. And I supposed if I could have found a place that sold Mrs. See's, I could have mailed myself the candy. I could have typed the label on one of the library typewriters. Maybe Detective Liggett had been getting typing samples from all the machines! Though if the samples did match the label, it wouldn't be proof that I typed it myself. And if the sample didn't match, I could have used another machine—maybe one in my mother's office? Now the murder of Morrison Pettigrue was another kettle of fish entirely. I had never met Mr. Pettigrue, and now never would. I hadn't known where he lived until one of the other librarians had told me, but I couldn't prove either of those things, now that I came to think about it. Ignorance is hard to prove. Besides, if he'd been killed late Sunday night after the abortive last meeting of Real Murders, I had no alibi at all. I'd been home alone feeling sorry for myself.

However, if by some miracle the killing could be proved to have occurred during the hour we were all together, we'd all be cleared! That would be too good to be true.

I was so busy trying to imagine all the pros and cons of arresting me that I bumped into Sally Allison, literally. She was looking at the books on needlework, of which the library had scores, Lawrenceton being a hell of a town for needlework.