1 Killer Librarian (16 page)

Dave’s toadlike head kept appearing in front of the books, rather like the pretend Wizard of Oz against the velvet curtains. The persistence of this vision told me I had much unfinished business with him.

I thought back to our travels together. Dave was the kind of guy who liked familiarity. In a flash it hit me where he might be and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it earlier. I dropped the book I had in my hand and stood up. Reaching into the drawer of the bedside table, I found the enormous London yellow pages.

Even browsing through a phone directory made me happy, especially the yellow pages. Everything organized in categories was reassuring and somehow satisfying.

I turned to the hotel section and found the middle of the alphabet. There were five Holiday Inns in London. I could call them tomorrow and find out if Dave was staying at one of them.

When we had traveled in the States, Dave loved staying at Holiday Inns. He had always been impressed by the plumbing, I guess. He had not been happy about the idea of a bed-and-breakfast when I had made the reservation. He said he didn’t want to have to eat breakfast with anyone he didn’t know.

I climbed back in bed and easily fell back to sleep, having a strong sense that I would be able to track him down and finally rid him from my life. The floating head of Dave wavered in my dream, then popped like a big balloon.

*   *   *

The next morning, before I ventured downstairs, I called all the Holiday Inns. I would find Dave, warn him, and then do what I planned to do today—go to the Chelsea Flower Show to see Annette Worth receive Howard’s award.

I had almost given up hope of finding Dave when the young woman who answered the phone at the second to last one said yes, a Mr. Dave Richter was staying with them. She asked if she should ring through to his room.

“No, I’d like to surprise him.”

“Lovely,” she said.

*   *   *

Two hours later I was standing outside the Holiday Inn, a gleaming white and silver building with a big green
H
cutting across the front of it like a brand on a horse’s flank. In no way did this structure resemble what one would think of as a quaint, quintessential London hotel. There was a Starbucks right next door. If I didn’t know I was in England, I would have guessed anyplace America. Sad that places had become so interchangeable. Why travel if it was all the same?

I walked into the lobby and was impressed by how spacious it felt: The ceiling went up at least three stories, the lounge chairs were large enough to fit two people, and the Persian rug was the size of a basketball court. This bigger-than-life sensation made me realize that most rooms in England—unless they were in palaces—were smaller than rooms in the States. I noticed that the British people walked with shorter steps. There was a slightly squished feeling to most restaurants and cafés, tables closer together than I was used to.

At the same time, it felt good to have a little more room around me, and yet I was disappointed to find this American hotel in the midst of London.
Odd how two conflicting feelings can coexist in our brains.

I forced myself to go to the lobby phone and call Dave’s room. The operator put me through. After the phone buzzed twice, a woman’s voice answered, sounding quite sleepy, “Hello?”

I said nothing. Honey sounded about fifteen years old and slightly cranky. I could imagine her rubbing her eyes.

Why did it have to hit me again and again that Dave had dumped me and taken up with a young woman, young enough that I could, in fact, be her mother? Each time the thought of it sank in, it went a little deeper into my psyche and the air rushed out of my gut as if I’d been punched.

“Who’s this?” Honey asked.

I had no intention of speaking. I simply wanted to know if they were there, in the hotel.

“We didn’t ask for a wake-up call.” The phone was slammed down at the other end.

I walked back out to the lobby to wait. I did not want to go up to their room. It would simply be too painful to get a glimpse of their shared bed. Plus, there was less likely to be a scene out in public. Or so I’d thought.

For over an hour I sat, facing the elevators, and watched the streams of people flowing in and out
of the hotel. Again, the variety of faces from all over the world was stunning to me. I became so caught up in guessing what countries different people were from that I almost forgot why I was sitting there.

The elevator doors opened and Dave stepped out with Honey right behind him. He looked rumpled and blurry-eyed in faded khakis and a Twins sweatshirt while she looked perky and ready for the day in skintight jeans and two layers of T-shirts, her hair pulled up in a ponytail as tight as her jeans.

I felt a rage inside myself pushing upward. He wasn’t good enough to have left me. How had that happened? I tried to calm myself down by wrapping my hands together and holding on.

Taking deep breaths, I let them get into the middle of the room before I approached them.

“Dave,” I said to stop them.

He turned. “Karen?” He took a step backward.

Honey stood next to Dave, looking puzzled.

“I have to talk to you.” Emotions were swamping me. A fierce and rare form of anger was bubbling up from deep inside me, something I had never felt before.

Seeing Honey up close again made me realize that she wasn’t that bad looking, thin and a little wispy, but lovely skin and big brown eyes, which made me angrier than ever.

“Who is this?” she asked Dave.

“Dave, you might be in danger. I can explain.”

Dave looked gobsmacked, a terrific Irish word that I had never had the opportunity to use. “How did you get here, Karen? My God, did you follow us all the way to England?”

“Listen, it’s a long story, but I have to warn you,” I started.

Honey grabbed Dave’s arm and asked again, “Who is this woman?”

“You want to know who I am?” I said, my voice rising in my throat. “I’m the woman whose place you took. I’m the woman who made the money for this trip possible. I’m the woman who should be standing next to Dave. This was my trip. Mine.”

“What are you talking about?” Honey said as she nervously looked over at Dave.

“I’m Dave’s girlfriend.” I refused to use the words
old
or
ex
. “Didn’t he tell you about me?”

“Since when?”

“For about four years until five days ago.”

Honey’s big brown eyes grew larger, then slitted down as she turned to Dave. In a loud-mouthy voice, she said, “You had a girlfriend? When we met you said you weren’t seeing anyone.”

Dave looked as if he had just eaten something rotten.

People turned to stare at us. The librarian in me came out. “Please lower your voice,” I said to Honey. I turned to Dave. All the words I had been storing up since he had dumped me came crowding forward, all the imaginary conversations I had had with him, all the questions I wanted to ask. “How could you treat me the way you did? After four years? After the Flush Budget? After all our plans for this trip? Why did you do that?”

Dave shrugged, lifted up his hands and said, “It just happened. She sat down next to me.”

“Hey, buddy, you came on to me. You bought me a drink. I was just sitting there minding my own business,” Honey reminded him. “Don’t make it sound like I went after you.”

I almost felt sorry for him. Honey seemed genuinely angry—but not as angry as I was. “Well, get used to it,
honey.
Coming here to England without him is the best thing he never did for me. I’m having the time of my life. I’m going to Hay-on-Wye, I’m seeing Shakespeare plays, I’m buying beautiful clothes, going into bookstores, doing everything I want to do. Dave would have been a drag.”

At my outburst, Honey grabbed Dave’s arm and shook it. “I would never have given you the time of day if I had known you were involved. But what I
hate the most is that you lied. How can I ever trust you?”

“You can’t,” I told her.

Dave’s eyes shifted back and forth. I could see that he was still having trouble taking in the sight of the two sides of his life colliding. Pathetic man. I had to get out of there before I strangled him. “Look, the only reason I’m here—and I don’t know why I bothered—is someone might be trying to kill you.”

Impossibly, Dave looked even more stunned. He sputtered, “Kill me?”

Honey started laughing at me. “Wow. You are kind of nuts. What are you talking about? Have you lost it?”

“I have lost nothing.” I had come to the hard part of what I had to do—confess to my role in this mess. “And it’s my fault because I talked to someone about what you did to me, dumping me and all. I told this guy that I wanted to kill you. I wasn’t serious, but I suppose he could have thought I was. Little did I know at the time that he was involved with criminal elements. I’m really not sure what he might do. But it was a mistake, a misunderstanding.”

Dave shook his head. “Karen, I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t want to know. Please leave Kirstin and me alone.”

“If you don’t believe me, ask her.” I pointed at Kirstin, not wanting to say her name. “She knows the man who might be after you.”

“What are you talking about? What man?” Kirstin asked.

“At the National Gallery. Remember when you were standing outside? I saw you talking with him—a tall blond guy.”

At this, she paused and I swore I saw comprehension cross her face. She shook her head, her blond ponytail switching back and forth. “What guy? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t talk to anyone anyplace. You’re making this all up. Stupid cow!”

After calling me a bovine creature, she lunged straight at me, both hands slamming into my shoulders with surprising force. I pitched backward and landed on my butt on the Persian rug.

Stunned and embarrassed, I sat there and watched the two of them stalk out of the lobby.

A bellboy with a dark complexion and doelike eyes came and stood over me, offering me a hand.

“May I help you, Madame?” he asked.

I let him pull me up and dust me off while I murmured, “Thank you, but I think I’m past help.”

TWENTY-FIVE

A Rose by Any Other Name

I
wandered down the paths at the Chelsea Flower Show until my feet were too tired to walk any farther. I sat on a bench to take in the oddly bucolic city scene. Clouds were languidly lolling through the light blue sky, their shapes reflecting in the water of the pond of the National Press Club garden. An opening in the trees on the horizon pulled the eye into the distance. Such a sense of space and vistas right in the middle of London.

There were no straight lines in this landscape; rather, the gravel walk curved around the pond, following
the contours of the land. I knew it was due to the influence of Lancelot “Capability” Brown and his theory of the “Line of Grace.” He had been the surveyor of the royal gardens. He believed in what he called “placemaking” and thought that there should be no rigid directions, no straight lines.

Capability Brown was right. I could see that now. There were no straight lines in the whole wide world. I desperately wanted there to be a straight line between a problem and its solution. But since Dave had dumped me I felt like I was meandering around in a world I no longer recognized.

I didn’t seem to know what love was; I didn’t understand why he hadn’t wanted to be with me anymore; I’d set something in motion that I couldn’t stop; an old man had died reading a book upside down. Everything seemed out of control. And yet here I was in this beautiful place, on a perfect day, paths curving away in all inviting directions. What more could one want?

I had that dizzying, horrible feeling that one gets after spinning around in circles until they were almost sick—elated and nauseous at the same time.

A mighty stand of foxglove pulled me toward it and I stepped off the path to lean in closer to the flowers and take a sniff.

I heard a voice behind me say, “Resist.”

I turned and found a tall youngish man in a striped shirt looking at me. He was smiling. I smiled back.

“Why?” I asked.

“It might kill you.”

“Sniffing a foxglove?”

“Yes. They are a very dangerous plant, especially the top leaves, and I read—mind you, I don’t know if you can believe all you read—but I read in an old herbalist that even a deep breath from a foxglove could be enough to send someone into cardiac arrest.”

“Digitalis,” I remembered. “Of course.”

“Yes, that one is digitalis . . . I think. Not my specialty.”

I stepped back onto the path and found he was a good head taller than me. “So you have saved my life.”

He leaned over me. “Oh, you’re American.”

“Yes.”

“On holiday?” he asked.

Holiday had such a nicer sound than vacation. “Yes,” I admitted. “My first time here.”

“How’re you liking our fair country?”

“Very much, thank you.”

“Good, because you see, I am responsible for your happiness,” he said, pointing to his chest.

For a splendid moment, I thought he really meant it, that he would take responsibility for me and my stay here in England, that he wanted to make sure I had a good time. “Oh, how does that happen?”