Chapter Twenty-One. Unto the Breach
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Unto the Breach
I hired a car to bring me from the townhome to the Ashmolean.
Partly due to my aching head, and partly out of fear of being followed.
While I was beginning to believe that I was imagining the great black dog, I was fairly certain that the woman and the two separate men I had seen were flesh and bone.
“Merry Christmas,” I said to the driver, pressing several pounds into his gloved hand, enough to cover several weeks’ worth of wages.
He looked from the banknotes back up at me, surprised by the sum I’d handed him.
Despite the blow to my head, Ruan’s harsh words about the sorry state of post war Britain remained stubbornly in my thoughts.
Things were bad right now, truthfully they had been for quite some time.
The rioters. Lack of jobs. Deflation. And yet so many of us just went on—sleepwalking through the months while our neighbors suffered.
The increasing turmoil roiled beneath the surface here in Britain.
Similar ripples had begun to spread all across Europe, a quiet vibration of something yet to come.
I too was sleepwalking, insulated from much of the world—living with Mr. Owen, the two of us locked away in our bookshop, focused upon the past, ignoring the warning signs of what was coming—but isolation did not change the fact that the world around us was a tinderbox awaiting a spark.
Concern lined the driver’s face as he looked at me. “Do you need me to wait, miss? I can pull off ahead until you’ve finished your business, it’s no problem at all.”
“No, thank you. I’ll likely walk. It’s a surprisingly fine day.”
The driver looked at the clouds overhead and gave his head a shake before driving off.
He probably believed I was mad, perhaps I was—but if he sat idling away in his car, the odds of him being noticed by whoever was following me were far too great.
I would not risk this man’s safety for my own comforts.
I ran up the steps and into the museum, each pound of my feet against the stone echoing in my temple. The galleries were empty, aside from the lone attendant here or there marking the minutes until the end of their shift.
The door to Leona’s reading room was ajar, and a warm bright light glowed from within. I rapped twice with my knuckles on the cool wooden panels, before nudging it open with my toe.
“Come in,” Leona called.
Her sleeves were rolled up and she looked very much like someone who had spent the last eight hours buried in books. An unexpected wave of relief came over me at the sight of her.
“Ruby, what are you—” Her cheery greeting faded as she noticed the creeping edge of discoloration at my temple. “What’s happened to you?”
“A great deal. I want to talk about Julius Harker and his”—I wet my lips, weighing my words—“acquisitions.”
Leona’s eyes lit in recognition. “Did you go back to the museum?”
I nodded.
Leona’s gaze flitted to the door. “Close it, would you? It’s awfully drafty here.”
It wasn’t drafty at all. She simply wanted privacy. I shot a glance to Mary, the middle-aged researcher who shared the room with Leona. The woman was utterly lost in the pages of a large book on the far side of the room.
“You can trust her,” Leona said softly. “Mary and I have been through a great deal here, haven’t we?”
The other grunted in acknowledgment as she turned a page, not even deigning to look up.
I shut the door and turned back to face her, twisting my hands before me. I wasn’t ordinarily a nervous sort and yet much had occurred since I saw her this morning.
“Ruby, what’s happened? You’re worrying me.”
I drew in a shaky breath and it all tumbled out at once, for better or worse. “Mr. Mueller is dead and the cocaine is gone.”
Whatever Leona had been expecting me to say, it wasn’t that. She sank down onto the wooden library chair with a sigh. The grief on her face not at all feigned as she stared past me at the closed wooden door leading into the museum.
“I don’t know how long before the papers pick it up, or how the police will handle things … but I wanted you to know. To hear it from a friend.”
“How … how did you find out?”
I gently lifted my hair on my temple revealing the bloody scrape and frowned.
“It seems that whoever killed Harker doesn’t want his secrets revealed.
After you left the club, I started home.
I don’t know what possessed me to go back by the museum, but I did.
When I arrived, I found that the door had been forced.
” I omitted the fact that Ruan was the one to have discovered that minor detail.
Leona worried the inside of her cheek. “And you were attacked…”
I laid my palms on a low, flat exhibition case used as temporary housing for several dozen old books.
“Perhaps you should leave it alone. I’d not thought you’d get harmed. I hadn’t thought—hadn’t dreamed…”
“Leona, we’re talking about murder. Investigating that sort of thing often leads to this end result.” I gestured at my head. “At least this time I wasn’t shot.”
Her expression darkened. “That’s not amusing.”
“No, it’s not, but it’s what I’ve been dealing with the last several months. After today, I have to believe that Julius Harker was dealing in cocaine, and that Mr. Mueller either knew what was going on and hid it from us, or someone believed he did.”
“Yes, I’m afraid we must.” She squeezed her eyes shut as the radiator popped and groaned in the corner. “But who had he stolen the shipment from? If we knew that then we could take it to the police. Perhaps they could help us?”
I shook my head. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I suspected the police were somehow complicit in the whole sordid affair. That was a problem for another time—namely, once I knew the identity of our killer. “There is another possibility though…”
Leona quirked a brow.
“I am beginning to wonder if perhaps the answer to our problem lies in the past. I made a very curious discovery today. About a decade ago, Julius Harker stole a book from the Bodleian. It has since been returned, but I think the police believe the two crimes are connected.”
Leona stiffened at the mention of the book.
At long last, Mary snapped to attention. “Are you speaking of the Radix?”
“You know of it?” For if she did, she might be the only person besides Julius Harker and our killer to be aware of its existence.
Mary shot Leona a curious look before turning back to me. “I remember that affair quite well. It was years before you came to work at the museum, Leona.”
Leona did not respond, intently studying an imperceptible stain on the floor some three feet from where she stood.
Mary tugged her glasses from her face and continued. “It was all anyone could talk about for months. I mean honestly, to go as far as to steal the book, then hand it back to the library, sacrificing his entire career—only a madman would do that.”
“A madman indeed,” Leona murmured.
There was something odd in her body language.
The tension in her shoulders, the sudden withdrawn quality to her features—but I could not concern myself with her secrets, not when I had found someone who had knowledge of the blasted book.
I was as jubilant as Mr. Owen’s fictional Great-Aunt Penitence after confession.
“What was special about it? Have you ever seen the thing?”
“Never laid eyes upon it. But they say it has to do with witches. It’s very old, and from what I understand incredibly valuable. My best guess is Harker meant to sell it, but he’d have had a very hard time finding someone to fence it for him.”
I let out a startled sound at the rather detailed knowledge Mary had of the darker aspects of dealing in antiquities.
She let out an exasperated sigh and laid her palms on the desk before her. “Miss Vaughn. I work in a museum. Artifacts have been known to go missing, only to be found years later in private collections. It is sadly the way of things in our line of work.”
“Do you know anything else about the Radix Maleficarum?”
Leona frowned, her dark brown eyes wide. “Are you certain of the title, Ruby? That is the book the police are interested in?”
I nodded, careful to not tip my hand as to my source of said knowledge, lest I expose my own innumerable crimes committed in the name of lady-detectiving—as Mr. Owen would say.
While I did not believe Leona was involved in harming Julius Harker or Mr. Mueller, she still had secrets—and until I knew what they were, I could not trust her completely.
Not with this. “Does that book mean anything to you?”
She worried her lower lip. “Only that it’s the second time someone has mentioned that book to me in as many days.”
My skin pricked at the newfound information. “Was it Professor Reaver?”
“Goodness no. Frederick is not at all interested in any text before it’s reached a thousand years old.” She laughed. An odd expression on her face. “No. No. It was someone else.”
Else was a loaded word. Meaning all sorts of possible things, and in our current predicament it was a word I did not much care for. “Museum, else? Or elsewhere else?”
Leona darted a worried look to the door before shaking her head. “Not here. This is not the place for such conversations.”
We could discuss cocaine and murder here, but not missing books? Something was not right. Not right at all. I fiddled with the smooth, cream-colored button of my jacket as Leona rushed to her desk and jotted down a note on a torn scrap of paper before thrusting it in my hand.
“Take this to Jonathan Treadway. He should still be at the natural history museum.” She checked her watch. “At least for another hour.”
I furrowed my brow—the name achingly familiar. Jonathan Treadway. I’d seen it somewhere. “Is he the one who mentioned the book to you?”
She shook her head. “Tomorrow, Ruby. No more questions now. I’ll tell you everything else then, I promise. Meet me at the club at our usual time.”
I took the paper from her outstretched hand. She held my gaze for several seconds. Leona was trusting me with something important—only I had no idea what that thing was. I started for the door.
“Ruby?” Leona called after me, halting me in my tracks. “Tell Jonathan it’s important. He’ll…” She hesitated, the darkness shrouding her features. “He’ll know what it means.”
With a looming sense of dread, I hurried out the door toward the wide stair leading to the main floor of the museum.
I brushed into the fragrant holiday greenery along the balustrade on the way up the steps, taking them two at a time, when I came face-to-face with Frederick Reaver, who was on the way down.
His cool affect washed over me. The man glowered at me from where he stood three steps above.
Chin defiantly high, I looked at him.
“Miss Vaughn…” His eyes traced over my wounded temple. “It looks like you’ve had a bit of trouble this morning.”
My pulse thundered in my veins. “Just clumsy is all. I fell down the townhouse steps.”
“Did you?” He made a curious sound in his chest. “One must be careful on the ice this time of year.”
Leona’s letter grew hot in my palm as I kept my fingers wrapped tight around the paper. Reaver’s eyes traveled from my wound down my throat to settle unerringly on my hand. He somehow knew that I had a message from Leona.
I swallowed hard, trying to keep the panic from my voice. “I will keep that in mind.”
“I hear you are prone to close scrapes, Miss Vaughn. They say you took a bullet in Scotland, if the rumors are true.”
“I tend not to pay much mind to rumors.” I said coolly.
“Nasty things, Professor. I’m sure you understand.
Now, if you’d excuse me.” I ducked past him, not pausing until I reached the top.
He remained there—stock-still—waiting midway on the stairs, watching me with a considered stare.
I hurried out the door, forgetting all about my quest for the reader’s card and finding the book at the Bodleian.
I pushed open the heavy door to the museum and shivered—for once, it wasn’t the cold.