1 Killer Librarian (14 page)

“Oh, we have more company,” the gold Tweedle said, holding her hands in front of her chest as if she had captured a bird.

I determined to learn their names and find some physical characteristic I could link to each of them.

“But you’re not even dressed,” the green Tweedle said as she sucked in her breath. “Can you do that at a B and B?”

“She has a bathrobe on. Like in Georgette Heyer novels when the women put on a morning gown,” said gold Tweedle.

Francine was staring at them, her mouth held in a tight line. In comparison to the robust Tweedles, she looked even more pallid. I immediately liked the Tweedles more than ever. It was time to introduce them.

“This is Francine,” I said and then waved at the two women, saying, “This is Betty and Barb.”

“I’m Betty,” the one wearing the gold scarf said. I scanned her broad face and saw she had a mole by her left eye.

“And I’m Barb. We’re both from Omaha.”

Francine continued to look stunned.

“That’s in Nebraska,” Betty explained.

Francine turned to me. “Nebraska?”

“That’s probably someplace you haven’t visited. The middle of the country,” I told her gently. “Francine is from France.”

They both hovered over us, clapping their hands. “Oh, this is wonderful. A real Frenchwoman.”

Barb leaned close to Francine and said very loudly, “We’re very happy to meet you. Our first real French person.”

“Practice your French, Barb,” Betty said.

“On chant tea,” Barb said.

Francine looked at me. Somehow I had become the translator. “I think she’s saying, ‘enchanted.’”

“Does she know about Howard?” Betty asked.

“I’m sure Caldwell told her,” I answered.

“It’s made everything so different, him not being here,” Barb said, starting to pull out a handkerchief.

“My head, it is hurt,” Francine said, waving her hand as if to distract them. “Oh-la-la. I have a very badness here.”

“Oh, no. Did you fall down?” Betty asked. Then, as an aside to Barb, she said in a loud whisper, “Did you notice—she actually said oh-la-la, just like in the movies. Isn’t that something?”

Caldwell came bustling in with two big bowls of what appeared to be oatmeal. Betty and Barb sat down next to each other on the love seat and he set the bowls in front of them. They each poured a healthy dollop of milk over the cereal and then sprinkled the tops with brown sugar.

“We love the coarse-ground oatmeal. It’s from Scotland. Caldwell gets it in special for us. It keeps
us going all day long,” Barb said. “He calls it porridge. Isn’t that cute? Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

“And it keeps us regular,” Betty added.

“Regular?” Francine looked at me.

I really didn’t want to go there. “Satisfied,” I explained.

Francine nodded, then stared at the two women eating their oats. “I must go to my room. Nice to meet you.” She stood with her cup of coffee clutched in her hands and left the room.

“She looks a little peaky to me,” Barb said.

“Remember that book about French women? How they never get fat? How they drink wine with every meal? I think she’s taken it too far. She’s way too skinny and I’d say it looks like she had a little too much of the vino last night,” Betty said, nudging Barb with her elbow. They both tittered.

The women from Omaha again went up in my estimation.

“Karen is at least as elegant as that woman, even if Francine is French. And she’s a good healthy weight. Much more sensible.” Barb acted as if I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

As if to remind her that I was sitting right there, Betty turned her attention to me and asked, “Did
you have a good time with our Caldwell last night? We didn’t even hear you come in. But then we sleep like logs.”

“Yes, I had a nice time.”

“And how was the play, Karen?”

“Bloody unforgettable,” I said.

TWENTY-TWO

Raise a Ruckus

O
ne dead man on my trip was enough. I decided to take the bull by the horns and go tell Dave about the man I might have accidentally sicced on him. Much as I never wanted to see Dave again, I owed him that. The good news was that Honey knew the man I was talking about—she had been conversing with him at the National Gallery—so she could be on the lookout for him. I don’t know what I thought Guy would do, but I didn’t want to have to worry about it anymore.

Walking in London was like going to a most exclusive
museum—a slice of history on every street—and it was free. I put on my walking shoes and hoped that Madame Frou-Frou wouldn’t see me in them. I didn’t understand why sports shoes for women had to be so unattractive. Neon lime green really didn’t go with anything in my wardrobe, but back home they had looked fine.

When I came down the stairs I overheard Caldwell and Francine talking in the hallway and stopped midflight, not wanting to interrupt them.

“I have to finish up some work here,” Caldwell told her. “I’ll meet you for lunch later.”

“Very good,” she said. “Let’s try that new bistro by the Tate. It seems very sympa. Ciao.”

I heard what I hoped were air kisses, a set of two.

After the sound of the front door closing I descended the stairs. They were a couple.
Tant pis,
I thought. Really too bad. Only because I thought that Caldwell deserved better than that tightly strung woman. This thought led me to wonder, as I did often these days, whether I would ever have another man in my life.

When I walked down the hallway, Caldwell had gone into the kitchen. I popped my head in. “I’m off for the day.”

He was cleaning up the breakfast dishes. There was a moment when I thought of offering to help,
but that gesture felt wrong. After all, I was paying him to lodge me. Maybe I shouldn’t have invited him to
Macbeth
. Maybe he had gone because I was his guest and he didn’t feel like he could say no to me. Suddenly I realized I didn’t understand the rules in this country.

Caldwell looked up, with his hands in soapy water, and smiled a wan smile. “Have a good day,” he said.

*   *   *

Walking to the Queen’s Arms Hotel took longer than I had thought it would and I heard a clock tower strike twelve as I finally found the right street. I had taken a few wrong turns—as good as I was at finding my way, this city stymied me with its curving, narrow streets that weren’t on a grid.

As I walked along, I took the time to go over what I knew about Howard’s death. While the police were treating it as accidental, several things were making me think it wasn’t. Annette seemed so sure that she wouldn’t have given him an overdose of his digitalis—although there was always the possibility, as the Tweedles seemed to think, that she might have done it on purpose, to get his money. And she seemed fed up with the life she’d been leading with him.

The Tweedles both seemed so fond of him and
I could think of no reason why they would want him dead—but they had been there that night and couldn’t be ruled out.

Then there was Caldwell. Little as I wanted to think it, he had both opportunity and motive. He could easily have gone into their room and taken a dose of digitalis. But how would he have given it to Howard? Also, he had reason to dislike Howard. But to kill him? After this much time? It just didn’t make sense.

And I didn’t want it to be true.

As I approached the entrance to the hotel, I told myself to leave Howard Worth’s death alone. Right now I needed to take care of Dave so I wouldn’t have his nonaccidental death on my mind.

A tall, thin-lipped concierge was standing behind the desk and looked me up and down as I approached him. I was sure he did not miss my shoes and pegged me as an American immediately.

“Hello, good morning,” I said.

“Good afternoon,” he corrected. “May I help you?”

“Yes, I believe a Mr. Dave Richter is staying here,” I started to say.

At the mention of Dave’s name, he interrupted me. “I’m sorry to say that Mr. Richter is no longer with us.”

“No longer with us,” I repeated. My stomach lurched. That sounded rather ominous. Could Guy have done something to Dave already before I had a chance to stop him? “What happened to him?”

The concierge shrugged. “One must be discreet about such things, but in point of fact it was all because of his traveling companion.”

“What did she have to do with it?”

The concierge tightened his eyes and screwed up his mouth, but I could see that the words were pushing against his teeth. He had been dying to tell someone. He leaned over and said in a very loud whisper, “She wanted to be served dinner in the middle of the night. Two o’clock in the morning, to be exact. She raised what I believe you would call a ruckus.”

I was confused. “A ruckus? What happened?”

“I wasn’t here, but the story I was told was that she tried to go into the kitchen herself and take some food.”

“Oh.”

“And wine.”

“Oh, I see.” Her behavior did sound inappropriate.

“I believe she had already consumed too much alcohol.”

“Yes, quite.”

“After some force, she was dissuaded from doing
that. I have reason to believe she was not happy.”

“And Dave?”

“I think Mr. Richter slept through most of this intemperate scene. But they left the next day. That was yesterday.”

“They left?”

“Yes, as I said, they are no longer with us.”

“Oh, that’s what you meant. I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe something bad had happened to Dave.”

The concierge stared at me for a moment before saying, “He is traveling with that woman. That seems punishment enough.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. “Do you know where they went?”

“As they did not pay for all their charges, I doubt we will be hearing from them again. They gave no indication as to where they might be found.”

“Oh,” I said, then thought maybe it was just as well. If I couldn’t find them, then hopefully Guy couldn’t either.

*   *   *

I walked into the first café I came across and ordered a bowl of soup. I pulled my what-to-do-in-England list out of my pocket and stared at it. Museums, gardens, castles, more museums. I put the list down and stared out the window.

I found it odd how I vacillated between feeling revved up and excited about really being in England, and feeling somewhat lethargic and completely out of place.

Being with Dave in London would have been a struggle. I knew that. He wouldn’t have wanted to do everything I wanted to do. He would have been crabby in the morning. He would have wanted to go to a pub every night, watch TV in our room, and complain when there was no football on.

But he would have provided a bit of insulation for me. He would have been more out of place than me in this cosmopolitan city, and so I would have felt more comfortable. Even though I would never have done what Honey did—demand food in the middle of the night—I rather liked her spirit for doing it.

I found myself working so hard to fit in that I often didn’t enjoy myself very much. Maybe it was time to relax and be an American, lime-green walking shoes and all. Not try to speak with a British accent, not try to do everything on my list, not try to figure out what was going on with Caldwell, and certainly not try to compete with Madame Frou-Frou.

A big bowl of mulligatawny soup was placed in front of me. It tasted of faraway spices in a delectable broth. My mother had made soup similar to
this and called it
slumgullion,
a combination of everything that was left in the fridge.

When I was done, the waitress came up and asked, “Would you care for something sweet?”

That was exactly what I wanted—a sweet. “Yes, please. What do you have?”

“Spotted dick and a trifle.”

As much as I wanted to order a dish named “spotted dick,” I took the safe route and ordered a sweet I was both more familiar with and knew from past experience that I would love. “I’ll have the trifle.”

When the trifle came—layers of cake and pudding and fruit covered with whipped cream—I contemplated it for a while. A small temple to all sweet things. All my life I had loved pudding. I remember my mother saying that she liked to chew her food herself, but I enjoyed the feeling of licking the creamy froth off my spoon. I ate the whole thing, scraping the side of the bowl with my spoon. My promise to not count calories on this trip was proving to be a most excellent decision.

Thus fortified, I decided to give myself the biggest challenge of all.

I would simply wander for the rest of the day, to truly be in London, expecting nothing, with no place to go, nothing I had to see. I would walk down one
street and decide which way to turn. For someone who always has a plan, who always follows a map, who always knows what time it is, this was a difficult task—to let go of all expectations and take the world as it came.

And so I did. For the rest of the afternoon, I stopped in shops when I felt like it, I smelled fruit, I sat in comfy chairs, I looked at artwork. In short, I strolled through the streets of London like I owned them.

Turning down one narrow street, I came upon a small bookstore called “Paul Haddington Antiquarian Bookseller.” The perfume of old books—leather, dust, leaves—hit me as I walked into the small space. The store was so narrow that it was actually taller than it was wide. Shelves covered the walls up to the ceiling and there was a ladder that you could push around and climb to reach the top. I was not exactly a collector, but I always had a list of books that I would like to add to my personal library, books that for whatever reason held a particular charm for me.