Chapter 10 The Buttons Silent Witness
I had not intended to return to the Lavender Lane Bookshop so soon.
The morning's revelations about the missing first edition still sat fresh in my mind, and Eleanor's parting words about Julian Blackwood had given me a clear direction for the day ahead.
But as I stood behind the counter of The Yarn & Needle, turning the ledger's pages without really seeing them, a different thought began to press at the edges of my attention.
The button I had found in Florence Albright's hidden compartment matched the one discovered near Silas Blackwood's body.
That much was certain. What troubled me was the question of whether there might be more.
Florence had been inside the bookshop more than once, I was now convinced of it, and a woman who left one button behind might easily have left another.
I reached into the pocket of my cardigan and felt the small brass key that Florence had pressed into my palm nearly a week earlier, her smooth voice explaining that Silas had given it to her for emergencies.
At the time I had accepted the explanation without question.
Now the key seemed to burn against my fingers, a small cold weight that spoke of deceptions I was only beginning to understand.
Eleanor had returned to her cottage after our morning's work, promising to continue deciphering the remaining coded entries in the ledger.
The shop was quiet, the sign still turned to CLOSED, and the afternoon light fell through the front window in long amber panels across the floorboards.
I told myself I was being foolish. I told myself that the bookshop was still an active investigation, that Constable Finch would not welcome my interference.
But the key was in my hand, and the question was in my mind, and I had learned enough about myself in the past ten days to know that I would find no peace until I had answered it.
I locked the door of The Yarn & Needle behind me and set off down the lane toward the bookshop, my footsteps sounding louder than they should have on the empty pavement.
The afternoon had turned overcast, the sky thickening to a soft grey that seemed to press down on the rooftops, and the village had drawn into itself in the way it often did before rain.
A few damp leaves skittered across the road ahead of me, and somewhere beyond the churchyard a dog barked twice and fell silent.
The Lavender Lane Bookshop stood at the end of its narrow street with the stillness of a building that had been closed for more than a week.
The windows were dark, the doorstep unswept, and a single yellow leaf had caught in the frame of the door.
I stood for a moment with the key in my hand, listening to the quiet.
No one was watching. No curtain stirred in the cottage opposite, and the lane behind me remained empty.
I slid the key into the lock, felt the mechanism turn with a soft click, and stepped inside.
The air in the shop was cooler than I remembered, and it carried the faint sweetness of dried lavender, a scent that had once seemed merely pleasant to me and now felt like a signature I could not ignore.
Dust motes hung suspended in the grey light that filtered through the front windows, and the silence was the deep, settled silence of a place that had been empty long enough for the dust to gather.
I closed the door behind me and stood very still, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness.
The bookshop was arranged exactly as it had been on the morning I had found Silas's body.
The front room with its neat shelves of contemporary fiction and local histories, the narrow passage leading to the second room where the older and more valuable stock was kept, the small office at the rear with its cluttered desk and filing cabinets.
The police had been through the premises, of course.
Constable Finch had assured me of that. But the police had not been looking for a button, and they had not known to look for the things I now understood might be hidden here.
I walked slowly through the front room, my shoes making soft sounds on the wooden floor.
The shelves stood in orderly rows, each book aligned precisely with its neighbours, and I found myself thinking of Silas Blackwood's thirty years of meticulous record-keeping, the careful hand that had entered every acquisition into the ledger,
the morning ritual of sweeping the floors before opening.
A man who lived by such habits did not leave a stepladder unused and climb a tall bookcase without it.
A man who kept a lost-property tin beside the till did not misplace a rare first edition on the day a buyer was meant to collect it.
The shop itself seemed to insist on the wrongness of the official story, every straight spine and dusted shelf a quiet contradiction of the idea that Silas had simply fallen.
I passed into the second room, where the older books were kept.
The tall bookcase against the far wall was the one Silas had been found beneath, and I paused before it, letting my gaze travel from the top shelf down to the floor.
The police had removed the stepladder from behind the counter and placed it against the wall nearby, and a faint chalk mark on the floorboards showed where the body had lain.
I knelt beside the mark and looked at the base of the bookcase.
The wood was old, dark with age and polish, and the floorboards beneath it ran perpendicular to the shelves.
It was then that I noticed the loose board.
It was a small thing, a detail so minor that I might have overlooked it even on a second examination if my eyes had not been trained by days of looking for what did not belong.
The board nearest the bottom of the staircase that led to Silas's upstairs apartment sat a fraction of an inch higher than its neighbours, its edge worn smooth in a way that the surrounding boards were not.
I reached out and pressed it with my fingertip.
The board gave slightly, lifting at one corner with a faint creak of old nails.
I worked my fingers into the gap and pried the board upward.
It came free more easily than I had expected, as though it had been lifted many times before, and beneath it lay a shallow hollow in the dust and debris that had accumulated between the floor joists.
The space was no more than a few inches deep, but it was enough to conceal something small.
And there, nestled in the grey dust like a pearl dropped in ash, was a button.
I picked it up and held it to the light.
It was carved from mother-of-pearl, cool and smooth against my skin, and its surface was engraved with a delicate floral pattern that seemed to shift as I turned it.
The engraving was unmistakable. I had seen its twin only two days before, hidden in the false bottom of a compartment in Florence Albright's antique shop.
And I had seen a third, sewn onto the blouse Florence had worn on the morning she came to retrieve her knitting from my shop.
The pattern was identical in every particular, the same curling petals and slender stems, the same fine craftsmanship that spoke of a garment far more expensive than anything one would find in a Meadowbrook dress shop.
I closed my fingers around the button and sat back on my heels, my mind working through the implications.
The loose floorboard was at the base of the staircase, no more than a few feet from where Silas's body had been found.
If Florence had been in the bookshop on the day of his death, if she had struggled with him near the staircase, the button might have been torn from her clothing and kicked into the gap beneath the board.
Or she might have hidden it there deliberately, in a moment of panic, not realizing that the floorboard was loose enough to swallow it.
Either possibility placed her at the scene of the crime, and either possibility made the official verdict of an accidental fall impossible to sustain.
I rose to my feet and slipped the button into the pocket of my cardigan, where it clicked softly against the brass key.
The bookshop seemed to press in around me, its silence grown heavier, and I felt the prickle of unease that came from standing in a place where violence had been done.
I had found what I came for. More than I had come for, if I was honest with myself.
But as I turned to leave, my gaze fell on the staircase itself, and I paused.
The stairs were narrow and steep, rising from the rear corner of the second room to the private apartment above.
Silas had lived alone in those rooms for decades, and the door at the top of the stairs was closed.
I had never been upstairs. No one in the village had, so far as I knew.
Silas had kept his private life as carefully ordered as his bookshelves, and the thought of climbing those stairs now felt like an intrusion of a different order.
But I had already let myself into the shop with a key I should not have had, and I had already pried up a floorboard and taken something that belonged to a crime scene.
The line I was crossing had been crossed long before I reached the staircase.
I climbed the stairs slowly, testing each tread before I put my weight on it.
The wood groaned beneath me, and the air grew warmer as I ascended, carrying a faint smell of dust and old paper and something else, something sharper that I could not immediately name.
At the top of the stairs, the door opened onto a small sitting room furnished with a worn armchair, a reading lamp, and a low table stacked with books.
A narrow bed stood against the far wall, neatly made, and a small kitchen occupied the corner nearest the window.
The room was spare but not uncomfortable, the possessions of a man who had needed little beyond his work and his books.
I stood in the centre of the room and turned slowly, letting my eyes take in the details.
Nothing seemed out of place. The books on the table were arranged in neat stacks, their spines aligned.
The reading lamp was unlit, its cord coiled tidily at the base.
The kitchen counter was bare except for a single teacup, washed and upturned on a folded cloth.
Silas Blackwood had lived as he had worked, with a precision that bordered on ritual.