The Chocolate Book Bandit (21 page)

Just as I began to feel hopeful, all hell broke loose.

I heard a noise behind me and I turned to find myself face-to-face with Carol.

She came around the end of the bookshelf behind me and stopped as if I’d hit her with a paralysis ray of some sort. She seemed to be frozen, standing at the end of the bookshelf I was kneeling behind.

Then we both moved. I reached for the hammer I had stuffed down my shirt, and Carol grabbed a large, flat book from the top shelf. She got her weapon first. Holding the book in both hands, she swung it at me the way a street fighter would swing a two-by-four.

I ducked. A bra does not make a very good holster, and I was having trouble with my quick draw. The hammer was tangled with my undies.

Carol swung twice, and I kept ducking. I managed to avoid being hit in the head. I was still on my knees, and I launched myself at her, hitting her with a tackle that justified that Dallas Cowboys sticker my van flaunted.

She went down like a dead tree in a high wind, right over on her backside, landing on her fanny with a shock that shook the floor of the ancient building.

Then she got one foot free and kicked at me. The two of us grappled on the floor, twisting and wrestling. Carol began shrieking, and I was grunting. We must have been a real spectacle. I remember seeing Miss Vanderklomp in the distance and thinking that she was missing a show.

Then something hard hit my jaw. Later I decided it must have been Carol’s foot; she had kicked me. I lost my hold on her. For a moment I couldn’t seem to move. A hard rod was pressing against my breastbone, for one thing.

It was that hammer. My secret weapon.

The thought energized me, and I climbed to my feet, ignoring the aches and pains left from the van’s trip down the bluff. I finally got the hammer out.

And I realized that Carol was getting away. She was running down the aisle toward the front desk, and, beyond it, the front door.

“No!” I screamed.

And I threw the hammer at her.

Luckily, it missed. If it had hit her, it might have killed her, and I’d just as soon not live with that. But, no, the hammer went over her head and hit the glass in the front door. The glass must have been safety glass, because it shattered into a million tiny pieces, but stayed inside its frame. Carol gave another shriek, and I roared like an angry mother bear.

Beside me was a book cart, the type that rolls, with shelves on either side. I yanked it out into the aisle, aimed it more carefully than I had the hammer, and sent it flying.

It hadn’t even begun to slow down when it hit Carol full in the back. She fell headlong into the front door. The front door flew open, and Carol landed in the arms of Butch Cassidy. And Joe.

I ran to the door. Joe and Butch Cassidy stood there, each holding one of Carol’s arms.

There was a lot more yelling and screaming as three state policemen ran up. Then Hogan finally got there. And Jerry Cherry, his main patrolman.

I was still yelling. “Call the EMTs!”

“Why?” Joe had the presence of mind to be sardonic. “Are they the only people missing?”

I pointed to the couch.

“Oh, my God!” Joe said.

Miss Vanderklomp had slept through the excitement. She gave a loud grunt and followed it with a wheeze.

I collapsed into a chair near her.

“What a day,” I said.

The mayhem stopped then, but the excitement was far from over.

Carol made a brief try at convincing everyone I had been the aggressor, but that didn’t go very far. It seems that the owner of the Elite Beauty Salon actually had been in her building, catching up on chores. She’d seen Carol help Miss Vanderklomp across the alley and into the library. She’d seen me go back and forth down the alley, talking on my cell phone as I frantically tried to get law enforcement there. Of course, my phone records proved whom I’d been calling.

But Carol’s nerve broke after a hospital representative called to say Miss Vanderklomp had been drugged, but the doctors felt sure she would survive. And Hogan took Miss Vanderklomp’s cup to test the Pepsi inside for drugs. We all knew that a surviving Miss Vanderklomp would confirm that she had not attempted suicide, and possibly would even reveal that Carol had poured Pepsi into her cup.

When Carol heard that, she began to cry. “I had to save Brian’s camp,” she said.

Then Carol began to confess. It was only after somebody whispered the word “lawyer” in her ear that she shut up. But Hogan said it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened.

Brian and Carol were broke.

Five years earlier, Brian was a middle-school phys ed teacher with an idea for a camp. More than a camp; a chain of camps. He met Carol when he came to look at the camp she’d inherited, with an eye toward renting it.

My cynical nature suspects he found it easier to marry the camp than to rent it. At any rate he and Carol opened Camp Upright.

But both of them should have kept their day jobs. The camp never made money. Gradually Carol grew desperate. And as far as I can tell, Carol never shared the financial problems with Brian. Maybe she was afraid that if he gave up on the camp, he’d leave her, too.

His camp and his scheme to build a chain of such camps seemed to be all Brian cared about. Joe and I had witnessed his offhand treatment of Carol.

But Brian was everything to Carol. She worshipped him. If his camp failed, Carol would not only lose her inheritance, but she would also lose her husband.

Meanwhile, Carol was treasurer for five different community organizations. Any small-town citizen will recognize this situation; I call it the Work a Willing Horse to Death syndrome. The people who are willing to do the jobs get elected.

Several of these organizations didn’t have proper safeguards on handling their funds. The temptation was too much for Carol. She began to rifle their accounts.

The library board, with its setup under state law and its limited say in how city funds were spent, had not fallen victim.

Carol had snuck down to the basement to figure out why Miss Vanderklomp kept going down there. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that Miss Vanderklomp was hiding books in her special closet. Then Carol figured out a way to use that knowledge.

Miss Vanderklomp isn’t going to explain to the world at large, but Carol must have convinced her she supported the effort to keep the library shelves untainted by reading material that lacked intellectual content. Then Carol asked for a grant to Brian’s camp.

Abigail Montgomery must also have been curious about Miss Vanderklomp’s trips to the basement. Plus, she looked at the Vanderklomp Foundation financial report, which was a public document. I’m guessing that she followed Carol to the basement to confront her about the donation to TAC.

Abigail wound up dead. Carol dragged her body to the foot of the stairs, hoping to make it look as if she had fallen.

Betty Blake had told me she had found something odd in the library’s financial records. Hogan believes that it was the grant to TAC in the Vanderklomp trust. When Betty called me, probably to ask me, as an accountant, about the legality of this, Carol somehow discovered Betty was suspicious. She knocked her out with a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, then finished the job with repeated blows from the book. Then she shoved the bookshelf over, dumping hundreds of books on Betty, trying to make her death look accidental.

When the state police technicians searched Carol’s home—Brian gave them permission—they found a pair of slacks and some shoes with blood on them. Yes, it matched Betty’s.

But after she killed Betty, before Carol could flee down the back stairs, I had happened upon the scene. Carol didn’t realize I had taken photographs; she was simply afraid I had seen the red folder. So she later enticed me to the dangerous stretch of road and pushed me and my van down the bluff. Another supposed accident, but I was lucky.

Carol was smart enough not to use either her car or the camp’s van for this, of course. She used a large SUV that had been donated to the camp as part of its fund-raising efforts. Some people gave boats; some cars. One of them had paint on it that matched my poor wrecked van.

Brian seemed stunned by the whole thing. I finally concluded that he was about as intelligent as a rutabaga and never caught on to what Carol was doing. He’d been leaving the finances entirely up to her.

The saddest part may have been that by the end of the afternoon, Brian was telling everyone in sight that he knew nothing about what Carol had been up to.

“I’m just a dupe,” he said.

“Dope” might have been a better word. A few remarks supporting his wife might have sounded good.

Butch made sure the books were out of the basement closet before Miss Vanderklomp was out of the hospital. He says she never mentioned their existence to him, and he didn’t ask her about them. The books were simply moved to the new library. Some were added to the collection, and some were not. But now Warner Pier girls can check out any book from a complete set of 1960s vintage Nancy Drew mysteries.

Later Hogan told Joe and me that the state police lab techs, in searching the basement, had found the hidden closet the night that Abigail Montgomery was killed.

“Did they get into it?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “They have lots ways to open old locks. The problem was, it was just an old closet in the basement of an old library. So finding it full of old books didn’t make anybody too excited. They looked in there, then locked it up again.”

I laughed. “If Miss Vanderklomp had just ignored that closet, the whole thing would have gone away. But once Carol realized that Miss Vanderklomp didn’t want anyone to know what she had been doing, she had a hold on her.”

“Right,” Hogan said. “Carol must have convinced her that she could be an ally in the book-censoring project—if she got a little money for her trouble.”

“But Abigail Montgomery must have figured out what was going on,” I said. “I wonder where she got her key.”

“Her key was a copy made by that old locksmith in Holland. We surmise that Mrs. Montgomery suspected something funny was going on and that it centered on that closet. When she got temporary possession of the key—maybe Miss Vanderklomp dropped it or something—she had a copy made.”

Hogan chuckled. “Have you guessed why the closet was built in the first place?”

“I suppose the Vanderklomp grocers used it.”

“But what for?”

I frowned, and Joe began to laugh. “Prohibition!”

“Right!” Hogan said. “The Vanderklomps ran their store all during Prohibition, and if we had any way to check, I bet old Mr. Vanderklomp had a private stock of booze imported from Canada for a few regular customers. That’s one of those things the respectable Miss Vanderklomp would probably not want brought up today.”

I’m certainly not going to ask her about it.

As for how my résumé and Butch’s letter—I figured out it was from his father, who was still in prison—got under Abigail’s body, well, apparently Carol carried them down to the basement. Joe believes she was looking at the things on Butch’s desk—just because she was nosy—when Abigail confronted her. Carol probably suggested they talk someplace private, and the basement would fit the bill. When Abigail made it clear she was going to tell about the books in the hidden closet, Carol was afraid the illegal donation to Brian’s camp was going to come out. She picked up the nearest blunt instrument and let Abigail have it.

Butch said there had been a chartreuse pencil on his desk, something left by the previous library director. Where Mrs. Smith got it, I have no idea, but Carol apparently carried that downstairs as well.

Most of those things took us weeks to figure out. Luckily, Joe and I were able to settle our personal problems that very day.

It was late afternoon when we left the police station and headed home. As we turned into our drive, Joe spoke. “Why don’t you get a jacket, and we’ll go down to watch the sunset? We need a little peace and quiet, and there shouldn’t be anybody at the beach now.”

Sure enough, when we got to the lake our little stretch of Lake Michigan access was deserted. We spread out a double-sized beach towel to sit on. Since the beach faces west, we were looking directly into the sunset.

It was gloriously purple, orange, pink, and gray, with just enough clouds to keep the sun from glaring in our eyes. The breeze was brisk, making it cool enough that I wasn’t surprised when Joe sat close to me and put his arm around my shoulders. I was surprised when he took two deep breaths and said, “Listen, Lee.”

He might as well have made an announcement. “I have something important to say.”

It took one more deep breath before he got down to business. “I wanted to tell you what’s going on with Meg.”

“Joe, I won’t demand . . .”

“No, I want to explain. When it first came up, I didn’t understand it, so I didn’t give a very good reason for seeing her. But that day you spent under the influence of pain pills, I pretty much figured out what’s going on. I think.”

He took another deep breath. “You and my mom have always acted as if Meg had this mysterious hold on me, as if she had cast a spell over me.”

“That’s silly, Joe.”

“Yes, it’s silly. But you may have been right. I never saw it, because there was a part of the story you and Mom didn’t know about.”

He took another deep breath. “When I was sixteen, Meg just about destroyed any confidence I had about dealing with women.” He needed two deep breaths before he could go on. “I don’t know how to be delicate about this.”

I wasn’t eager to hear that Joe had been intimate with Meg. “You don’t need to tell me all the details, Joe.”

“Thanks. Anyway, the next day—the very next day—she dropped me.”

I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry, so I didn’t do either. I just slid my arm around Joe’s waist and leaned my head into the curve of his neck. I could imagine how devastating an experience like that would be for a young guy, one having his first real sexual experience.

“I was crushed,” Joe said. “I felt as if I must have been the most inept— Well, it seems ridiculous now, but at the time, it pretty much knocked me in a heap.”

“Were you in love with her, Joe?”

“I was in love with her on a sixteen-year-old’s level, Lee. When you’re thirty-five, the way you felt then seems stupid.”

I remembered the real reason I’d been so upset about moving from Prairie Creek to Dallas when I was sixteen. “I was in love when I was that age,” I said, “and it’s sure serious at the time.”

“Sure is. Anyway, life went on, I recovered, and, I’m afraid, for a while I fully regained my confidence. Then I married Clemmie, and of all the problems we had, bed wasn’t one of them.”

I already knew that. Joe’s first wife had been crazy about him on a physical level, and I knew he had found her sexy, too. I’ve always had a feeling that their ill-advised marriage had lasted the few years it did last because of great sex. I’m okay with that. I’d been married before, too, and I was strongly attracted to my first husband. But like Joe, I discovered that physical attraction doesn’t last if mutual respect is gone.

When Joe and I found each other, it was a whole new start for both of us.

“Anyway,” Joe said, “I thought I had gotten over Meg completely. I hadn’t given her a thought in years. Oh, after she and Trey moved back to Warner Pier, I might run into her at the post office, but I could deal with it. Then she popped up in our lives four years ago when Trey decided I was blocking his ambitions, and we had all that trouble over Hershel Perkins.”

“I admit I was happy when Meg left town.”

“And I admit I was, too. I just didn’t want to fool with her. But I guess deep down, my sixteen-year-old’s pride was still hurt. That’s my only excuse for what happened when she turned up two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks ago?”

“Yes, she called me at the office. She said she was establishing residence in Holland so she could get a divorce, and she asked if I could help her with it. She’s working as a hostess at the yacht club. She asked me to come out for lunch and discuss the case.”

Yet another deep breath. This wasn’t an easy story for Joe to tell. “You don’t need to tell me that the smart thing to do would have been to refer her to another attorney,” he said.

“Joe, if she didn’t have any money—and hostessing in a restaurant doesn’t sound like a high-paying job—then that’s what your agency does.”

“Yeah, but there are three other attorneys in the agency. I could have told her one of them could help her. So the lunch at the yacht club was a bad idea. The other lunch and the dinners were worse ideas.”