See Also Deception
Read See Also Deception Online
Authors: Larry D. Sweazy
ALSO BY LARRY D. SWEAZY
See Also Murder
A Thousand Falling Crows
Published 2016 by Seventh Street Books®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
See Also Deception
. Copyright © 2016 by Larry D. Sweazy. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopyÂing, reÂcordÂing, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, exÂcept in the case of brief quotations emÂbodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke
Cover images © Corbis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sweazy, Larry D., author.
Title: See also deception : a Marjorie Trumaine mystery / Larry D. Sweazy.
Description: Amherst, NY : Seventh Street Books, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007618 (print) | LCCN 2016013607 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633881266 (softcover) | ISBN 9781633881273 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Librarians--Fiction. | Murder--Investigation--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.W438 S435 2016 (print) | LCC PS3619.W438 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007618
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
To Rose
“Absence and death are the sameâonly that in death there is no suffering.”
âTheodore Roosevelt
“Indexing work is not recommended to those who lack an orderly mind and a capacity for taking pains. A good index is a minor work of art but it is also the product of clear thought and meticulous care.”
âPeter Farrell
CHAPTER 1
October 1964
By the fourth ring, concern started to creep into my heart and mind. Calla Eltmore had always been one of the most consistently reliable people that I'd ever known. Her enduring presence at the other end of the telephone line was a matter of expectation on my part, and Calla's, too, as far as that went. She'd been the librarian at the public library in Dickinson for as long as I could remember, and she'd always held a strict policy of answering the phone promptly. More than once, Calla had said that she could get to the phone in three rings or less from anywhere in the library, then proven that statement to be true time and time again. My growing concern was not unfounded.
With each ring I gripped the receiver and tapped my red ink pen against the wall more emphatically. If I'd had another hand I would have chewed at the tip of my reading glasses, a bad habit I'd picked up recently. My nerves had yet to calm down from the unfortunate events that had occurred over the past summer.
I wasn't really pressed for time, though I was under a strict deadlineâtwo in factâwith another indexing project waiting in the wings, a commitment made to my editor, Richard Rothstein, in New York, without much choice. But I had a question concerning the index that I was working on. A simple question that Calla could answer for me quickly, so I could move on to something else. So, like a thousand times before, I'd made my way from my desk to the phone in search of a resource that I did not possess, a book that needed to be added to my collection but never would be. At last count, the library in Dickinson held over twenty-one thousand volumes of text. The library had always been my salvation. The building, and Calla, had always been there for me in one way or another.
Was musk thistle a perennial plant or a biennial plant?
It was a basic question and one that I really should have known, since the noxious plant grew on our land. I could walk out my door and touch it, smell it, and feel it if I wanted to. But I'd never paid attention to its lifecycle, nor was the year of its growth mentioned anywhere in the text of the book that I was writing the index for,
Common Plants of the Western Plains: North Dakota
. It was a short book, more of a field guide than an in-depth study, and I was perplexed by the omission of such foundational information.
Perennial or a biennial plant?
How could the author, Leonard Adler, a native of Fargo, have missed such an important point about such a hated, invasive weed?
According to Mr. Adler, musk thistle had been introduced in the nineteenth century, most likely on a ship with livestock, and had spread from the eastern United States to North Dakota aggressively, replacing other native and more beneficial thistles in pastures and grasslands as it went. Farmers fought it when they had time to notice, but they mostly won the battle and lost the war.
I pulled the receiver from my ear and looked at the phone to make sure that it wasn't broken. The buzz of the unanswered rings sounded like a bee was trapped inside the black plastic earpiece. I knew better than that. Then I began to question whether I'd dialed the right number.
Of course I had
. I could have dialed the library in my sleep. But I still had to wonder. I'd been burning the candle at both ends for weeks, bouncing between the demands of the farm, my daily life tending to Hank, and writing indexes for an array of books, one right after the other. The variety of subject matter required my undue attentionâcommon plants, travel by train in Europe, and a biography about George Armstrong Custer's wife, Elizabeth. Each new index I wrote became a journey into the unknown, an opportunity to learn, to better myself, to get paid for reading and writing, but I still had a life outside of booksâwhether I wanted to admit it or not.
It was obvious by the eleventh ring that Calla wasn't going to answer the phone, so I reluctantly hung up.
The tips of my fingers were cold to the bone. I had a deep urge to try and stop time, to walk out of my small house and grab at the wide blue sky that hung overhead and try to wrap it around my shoulders in a protective shawl against any bad thing that might be coming my way. I knew it was magical thinking, a childish wish, but I'd had enough tragedy to digest recently, and I could barely stand the prospect of dealing with anything else that came in the form of a dark cloud. Enough was enough.
Something is wrong. I know it.
I decided that I would just have to call back later, that the question about musk thistle would have to go unanswered for the moment. It wasn't the end of the world. I was on track to finish up the
Common Plants
index a few days early, leaving me a little extra time to dive full force into the second book that I had committed to indexing,
Zhanzheng: Five Hundred Years of Chinese War Strategy
.
Unlike the
Common Plants
book, the
Zhanzheng
title was a thick tome, four hundred pages, and I'd been given a month to complete the index. I was intimidated by the subject matter, since I didn't know a thing about China, much less its ways of war, but I was heartened by the structure of the book. At first glance at the first few page proofs I received in the mail, the book looked to have been edited well, which made all the difference in the world when it came to divining the most important terms and concepts out of such dense text and creating an index out of them.
But China would have to wait, too, just like my unanswered musk thistle question. I was almost sure that the thistle was a biennial plant once I thought about it, but
almost sure
wouldn't cut it. I had to know the
correct
answer. There was no guessing when it came to including an entry in an index. It had to be a solid fact. I needed verification of my assumption, otherwise I would risk the integrity of the index, of my livelihood, and that wasn't going to happen. I had to be just as reliable as Calla Eltmore had always been.
I pulled myself away from the phone and stopped at the bedroom door, just like I did every time I passed it. I had to make sure that Hank was all right, still breathing.
I would have preferred to be able to walk straight back to my desk and put a question mark by the biennial entry and move on to the next decision, the next question that needed to be answered for the reader, but that was not to be. The comfortably worn path of my life had been permanently altered a year ago and would never be the same again.
As I looked at Hank, I was silently relieved.
Today's not the day
. And silently sad for the same reason. Once again, death had not taken Hank gently in the night. The coming day would only bring more strugglingâif only to breatheâthan a good man like Hank Trumaine should ever have to endure.