Chapter 13 A False Leads Echo
The morning of the thirteenth day since Silas Blackwood’s death broke cold and grey, the kind of morning that pressed against the windows of The Yarn & Needle as though it wanted to come inside.
I had barely slept, and what sleep I had managed arrived in thin, fretful stretches that left me more tired than when I had lain down.
The ledger sat on my bedside table where I had placed it the night before, its dark green cover catching the first weak light, and I found myself reaching for it before I had even put the kettle on.
I did not open it. I simply held it, feeling the worn edges of the cloth beneath my fingers, and thought about the woman who had walked into my shop and taken what was mine.
Florence Albright knew about the buttons now.
She knew I had been inside the bookshop, knew I had found the loose floorboard beneath the stairs, knew I had been close enough to touch the truth.
And she had responded not with a confrontation but with a theft, a quiet, surgical removal of the evidence that might have undone her.
The message was clear enough: she could reach me whenever she chose.
I set the ledger down and went downstairs to make tea.
The shop was still closed, the sign turned to face inward, the window display of madder-dyed yarn a deep brick red against the grey light.
I filled the electric kettle and stood by the counter while it heated, my arms folded across my chest, my weight shifted onto my back foot.
I was not frightened, exactly. What I felt was sharper than fear, more focused.
Someone had been inside my home, had opened my cabinet, had closed her fingers around the proof I had gathered.
The thought made me stand a little straighter.
When the tea was ready I carried it to the telephone and dialed Eleanor’s number from memory. She answered on the third ring, her voice alert despite the early hour.
“Penny. You’re calling before eight. What’s happened?”
“The buttons are gone,” I said. “Someone took them from the shop. I checked the cabinet last night and they were missing.”
There was a pause, and I could hear Eleanor processing the information the way she processed everything, turning it over in her mind like a page in one of her books. “You’re certain they weren’t misplaced?”
“I locked them in the cabinet myself. The lock wasn’t forced, but the buttons are gone. I think Florence Albright has a key, or she found a way in.”
Another pause, longer this time. “Then she knows you’ve been looking.”
“She knows.”
I heard Eleanor exhale, a soft sound that might have been frustration or resolve. “We need to narrow the field before she narrows it for us. Julian Blackwood’s alibi. You told me he claimed to be in a neighboring town on the day Silas died. Have you confirmed it?”
“Not yet. I’ve been reluctant to push him directly.”
“Then it’s time to stop being reluctant,” Eleanor said, and her tone was not unkind but it was firm, the voice of a woman who had spent decades cataloguing facts and had little patience for facts left unverified.
“If Julian’s story holds, we can set him aside and focus on what remains. If it doesn’t, we’ll know where we stand. Either way, we stop guessing.”
I looked at the ledger on the counter, its pages full of coded entries and careful notations.
Eleanor had already cracked the cipher, had shown me the Latin phrases and the pictographic symbols that Silas Blackwood had used to hide his most valuable transactions.
But the ledger was only one piece of the puzzle, and the physical evidence I had gathered from the bookshop was gone.
Julian was the last loose thread I could pull without confronting Florence directly, and I was not ready for that confrontation. Not yet.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll speak to him this morning.”
“Good. I’ll make some calls of my own. I still have colleagues who owe me favors.”
I hung up and finished my tea standing by the window, watching the village wake up around me. The street was quiet, the shops still shuttered, but I could see lights on in the bakery further down and a figure moving behind the glass. Normal life, continuing as it always did. The thought steadied me.
I telephoned Julian Blackwood at the small hotel where he had been staying since his return to Meadowbrook.
He answered with a gruff, half-awake syllable that suggested I had pulled him from sleep, and I apologized briefly before explaining that I wanted to discuss his uncle’s estate.
There were some practical matters, I said, things that might benefit from a family member’s perspective.
It was a thin pretext, but Julian did not question it. He agreed to come to the shop at ten.
He arrived five minutes late, his hair uncombed and his shirt collar turned up at one corner.
He had the look of a man who had dressed in the dark and not bothered to check a mirror afterward, but his posture was careful, his shoulders squared as though he expected a challenge.
I invited him in and offered tea, which he declined with a small shake of his head.
“You said you wanted to talk about the estate,” he said, settling into the chair across from the counter. His voice was sharper than it needed to be, the words clipped at the edges. “I’m not sure what I can tell you. My uncle and I weren’t close.”
“I know,” I said, taking the chair opposite him. I kept my hands folded in my lap, my back straight but not rigid. “But you’re the only family he had, and there are questions about the bookshop that someone needs to answer. I thought you might be able to help.”
Julian’s gaze flicked toward the window and back. “What kind of questions?”
“Routine ones, mostly. The constable has been looking into the circumstances of your uncle’s death, and he’s been asking about everyone’s movements on that day. I told him I’d speak to you.”
It was not quite a lie. Constable Finch had asked me nothing of the sort, but Julian did not know that, and the mention of the constable seemed to settle something in him. He leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair, a gesture that looked more tired than defensive.
“I was in Chipping Norton,” he said. “I took the bus over in the morning and spent most of the day there. I had some things to sort out, paperwork from my old job. I was at the library for a few hours in the afternoon, using their computer. You can check if you want.”
“The library,” I repeated, keeping my voice neutral.
“The public library on High Street. I was there from about one until they closed at five. The librarian helped me with the printer. She’d remember.”
I watched him as he spoke, not his face but his hands, which rested on his knees without fidgeting, and the angle of his shoulders, which had relaxed slightly now that he was talking.
He did not look like a man constructing a lie.
He looked like a man reciting a sequence of events that had actually happened, the details emerging in the order he remembered them rather than the order that might best serve a story.
“That’s helpful,” I said. “Thank you.”
Julian’s mouth tightened. “Is that all you wanted? To check up on me?”
“I wanted to understand,” I said, and I meant it. “Your uncle was a complicated man. I thought perhaps you might have some insight into what he was like, away from the shop.”
Something moved in Julian’s expression then, a flicker of the resentment I had seen before. “He was a recluse who cared more about his books than he ever cared about his family. Is that the insight you were looking for?”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “That must have been difficult.”
He stood up, and the movement was abrupt enough that the chair scraped against the floor.
“I don’t need your sympathy. I came back because I thought maybe there was something here for me, some piece of the family I could actually hold onto. But there isn’t. There’s just a bookshop full of dust and a dead man who never wanted me around in the first place.”
He left before I could respond, the bell above the door jangling in his wake. I sat in the quiet for a moment, listening to his footsteps recede down the pavement, and then I picked up the telephone again.
Eleanor answered on the first ring. “I was about to call you. I spoke to Margaret Hargrove at the Chipping Norton library. She retired three years ago, but she still knows everyone there. She checked the visitor log for me.”
“And?”
“Julian Blackwood signed in at twelve fifty-two on the day Silas died and signed out at four forty-seven. Margaret confirmed it with the desk clerk who was on duty that afternoon. He used one of their computers and asked for help with the printer.
She remembered him because he was short with her when the paper jammed.”
I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding. “So he was there.”
“He was there,” Eleanor said. “The bus schedule puts the journey at roughly forty minutes each way. Even if he had wanted to return to Meadowbrook and harm Silas, he wouldn’t have had the time. The alibi holds.”
I looked at the ledger on the counter, its dark green cover catching the grey morning light.
Julian was innocent. The nephew with the sharp tongue and the old resentments had been exactly what he appeared to be: a man trying to find his footing in the wreckage of a family that had never wanted him.
The relief I felt was tempered by something else, a narrowing of focus that was almost physical.
With Julian cleared, the field of suspects had shrunk to a single name.
“That leaves the ledger,” I said. “The buttons are gone, and the bookshop has given us everything it can. If there’s something we’ve missed, it’s in Silas’s own records.”
“I agree,” Eleanor said. “Bring it over this afternoon. We’ll go through it again, line by line if we have to. There may be something we overlooked the first time, something that reads differently now.”
I promised I would, and we said our goodbyes.
The shop was still closed, the sign still turned inward, and I stood for a long while with my hand resting on the ledger’s cover.
Julian’s alibi had closed one door, but the corridor beyond it was darker than I had expected, and at the end of it, I knew, Florence Albright was waiting.
I thought about the buttons she had taken, the key she still possessed, the careful, cultivated smile she had worn when she walked into my shop and asked about yarn.
She had been standing in my home, and I had offered her tea.
I opened the ledger to the page marked October first, where Silas Blackwood had written a single cross and the word missing.
The ink was black and precise, the letters formed with the same fastidious care he had brought to thirty years of record-keeping.
I read the entry again, and then I read the entries before it, tracing the chain of acquisitions and sales that had filled the final months of his life.
Somewhere in those pages, I was certain, there was something I had not yet seen, something that would tell me what Florence Albright had wanted badly enough to kill for.
I pulled a chair up to the counter and began to read.