Chapter Twenty-three
A s was true at the library, at the café I was the center of attention. The moment I entered, forks were dropped and voices stilled. Chairs scraped the lino leum as diners turned to look at me. From behind the cash register, Darla mouthed, “Tuna melt?” and I nodded.
“Has anyone seen Ian?” I asked. “I know he’s around.”
“He hasn’t been here,” a Tohler volunteered.
“Or at the This-N-That,” Patty said.
“He might be home.” That comment came from a girl’s voice. Buffy stepped forward. “Me and Thor could find him.”
“For a fee,” several people said.
I opened my purse and fished out a twenty-dollar bill. “Here you go. I need results before”—I glanced at the cat clock on the wall, the clock with the tail as a pendulum. Strange that Wanda hadn’t insisted yet on its removal—“before two o’clock. Think you can do that?”
A cape and a blur of pink glitter made for the door. Buffy and Thor were on the job.
Buffy and Thor found me at the library not long after lunch, Thor twirling his cape in one hand. I was in my office, finishing my tuna melt and ruminating on the disaster in which I now found myself. The puzzle was coming together, and I didn’t like where the pieces lay.
An unidentified dead man had been found in the witch’s circle. Tyrone Beaudrie was missing. Ian Penclosa had vanished and reappeared. Tyrone and Ian were from the same hometown. Could Ian have killed him?
“We got results,” Buffy said.
“An hour early,” Thor added. “How about a bonus?”
I set my bread crust on my plate, and Rodney roused himself from his nap on the windowsill long enough to sniff at the remains.
“I paid more than twice your usual rates,” I said.
“This was a rush job,” Buffy pointed out. “It deserved a premium.”
“No messing around. Where’s Ian?” I said.
“It’s a matter of life and death.” Possibly Tyrone’s , I thought, but the kids didn’t have to know that.
“Like in the Camelot classic comic books you’ve been reading, Thor.
” The library had a full collection. They’d been Sam’s when he was a boy.
“Sir Lancelot didn’t monkey around on his horse asking for money. He got things done.”
Thor let his cape drop from his hands. “All right.”
“All right, what? Where is he?”
Buffy and Thor looked at each other. Finally, Buffy spoke. “He’s at home.”
That was it? Ian was home? “Alone?”
“You mean, was he, like, all lovey-dovey with Lalena?” Buffy asked.
“Was he by himself?” I repeated. I corrected my tone of voice to be less short. It wasn’t Buffy and Thor’s fault I was suspected of homicide, and, on top of that, had had very little sleep.
“Yes,” Thor said. “We knocked on his door and asked if he wanted a car wash, and we didn’t see anyone else.”
“He said his car was fine,” Buffy added. “But he kept looking around, like he thought someone was going to get him.”
Someone like the sheriff, maybe , I wondered. “Thanks, you two.”
After they ran off, I went to find Roz at Circulation. She was perusing a home-decorating magazine.
“What do you think of these curtains? Too busy?” She pointed at a photo of floor-to-ceiling pink chintz drapes. “Lyndon would appreciate the botanical theme.”
“Perfect for a romance author,” I said. I took a fortifying breath. “I need to take the afternoon off.” I braced myself for Roz’s disapproving glare.
“Okay,” she said absently.
My jaw gaped. “You’re fine with it?” Although I was Roz’s boss on paper, she somehow usually ended up gaining the upper hand.
“Sure.” She absently flipped the page. “You won’t have much personal time in the pen. Might as well enjoy freedom while you’ve got it.”
I resisted the urge to swipe her hand fan and tap her on the skull, and I made my way over the river and down the hill to the Magnolia Rolling Estates.
Fingers crossed it was not to visit a murderer.
Ian’s van was still parked in its same spot in the drive way. Neither light nor movement showed in his trailer’s windows. Yet Buffy and Thor had said he was home.
I hesitated before coming closer. If my guess was right that Tyrone’s was the body found in the woods, Ian was the logical killer.
However, I couldn’t imagine him wheeling his chair through the fern-choked trail with a body over his shoulder.
He might have lured Tyrone to the woods and killed him there, but even that was a stretch.
If there was any bad blood between the men, there’s little chance Tyrone would have taken Ian’s bait.
Then there was the fact that Ian had presented himself at the sheriff’s office to prove he was alive. If he had killed Tyrone, why would he come out of hiding to get me off the hook?
My Aunt Beata was behind this. I was sure of it. However, my guess was that her style was more to drive people to their deaths, not to murder them outright. She may have latched onto another man’s crime to have me put away. If so, it was possible that man was Ian.
I gingerly walked up the ramp to the front door and raised my fist to knock. Before my hand made contact, the door opened. I faced Ian through the screen.
“Josie! I’m so glad you’re all right,” Ian said.
“You are?”
“Come in.” He rolled his chair back and motioned for me to enter. He certainly wasn’t acting like a murderer. “Sit down.”
I pushed open the screen door and took a seat on the couch. “Where have you been?”
“I had to let them know I was alive,” Ian said, his words coming in a rush. “When I found out you were arrested, that is.” He rolled back an inch. “For my murder.”
“How did you know? You still haven’t said where you were.”
“I was hiding.”
I waited for more. The detective novels I loved so much recommended silence as a way to elicit further response, but it didn’t seem to be working right now. “Where? Lalena looked everywhere for you.”
The mention of Lalena’s name worked. “I felt so bad disappearing like that. It was for her own good. If she’d known….”
Again, giving him space to fill the void was a fail. “If she’d known what? Ian, stop horsing around. Where have you been, and why?” I leaned forward and lobbed my biggest bomb. “Did you kill Tyrone Beaudrie?”
The shock on Ian’s face was real. He had no idea Tyrone was dead. Of course, I wasn’t completely sure, either.
“Who’s Tyrone Beaudrie?” he said.
Now I was the flummoxed one. In the distance, a lawn mower started up.
Outside, the world rolled on with its routines of grass cutting, dinner prep, and children playing.
Inside, tangled threads of fear and murder waited to be put straight.
Ian’s scar whitened in the light, then faded back to pale pink as he turned his head.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “A week and a half ago, you dropped out of sight. When construction started at the Empress.” Or was that a coincidence?
His nod confirmed that I was on target so far. To me, Ian had always appeared reserved, although I caught hints of a boyish vulnerability. Clearly, Lalena did, too, or she wouldn’t be so smitten with him. He opened up now. Whether it was design or simply exhaustion, I didn’t know.
“You want the beginning? Here’s the beginning.” He examined the hand resting on the wheel of his chair, then raised his eyes to mine. “I grew up in a rough neighborhood in Baltimore, and I fell in with the wrong crowd.”
“As happens,” I said, hoping this would encourage him further.
“My home life was rough. My mother was gone, and Dad wasn’t around much, either. I guess I was looking for family.”
Despite myself, my heart softened. “I see.”
He looked away. “Me and a few other kids worked for a gang who ran a protection racket.”
“A protection racket?”
“Some older men had set it up. They told businesses in the neighborhood they had to pay a monthly fee, or they’d find their stores vandalized.
You know, windows broken, goods stolen—things like that.
My role was to collect payments and, when needed, break a few windows.
” He drummed his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair.
“I’m not proud of it. This was before my injury, of course. ”
I didn’t want to interrupt his narrative, so I simply nodded.
“One of the shop owners had a used bookstore. He was different from the rest. Other business owners either paid us quickly without making eye contact, or they were openly hostile.” Ian snorted.
“Not that I blamed them. But Mr. Ehrenberg was different. When he saw me looking at a stack of books on his counter, he showed one to me. It had engravings of old ships.” Ian’s voice sounded faraway now, lost in a long-ago memory.
I understood that love of books. I knew the wonder of discovering that a flat bundle of bound paper could reveal whole worlds teeming with sights, sounds, and emotion. It still thrilled me.
“Mr. Ehrenberg turned my life around. He made me see that so much more was possible than a life of being a stoolie in someone’s protection racket. I couldn’t thank him enough. I….”
Again, the fading out. Then I understood. “He’s not . . . he’s passed, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. He died.” Ian’s voice raised in pitch. “Apparently my bosses thought he should pay a bit more, and when he demurred, they trashed his shop. He had a heart attack. Died.”
“They killed him.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Indirectly,” Ian said. “His heart couldn’t stand the strain.”
There was more to this story. This time, my patience paid off.
“I couldn’t stick around,” Ian said. “I had to get out of there.”
“You couldn’t just quit?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I might have been able to quit, maybe, but Mr. Ehrenberg’s money had disappeared. I suspect my boss stole it. To hide it from the others, he accused me.”
“You didn’t take it,” I said with certainty.
“Steal from Mr. Ehrenberg? I couldn’t.” Ian’s voice was incredulous.
He held up a hand before I could protest that this was, in fact, what he’d been doing all along, although in someone else’s name.
“I know what you’re going to say. After I left, I sent money to his widow whenever I could. Now she’s gone, too.”
“You had to leave town.”
“Yes. I changed my name and moved across the country. This was years ago. The love of books Mr. Ehrenberg had instilled in me grew, and I ended up buying and selling them, just as he did, but without a storefront. Until I found the This-N-That.”
It started to come together now. “When the construction crew came to town, you saw one of your old gang.” Wilfred must be everyone’s bolt-hole, including Tyrone Beaudrie’s, an alias, not the name under which Ian had known him. I remembered his talk of a new life.
“I did. A huge shock. I didn’t expect to see him in construction, but it’s Byron, all right. I’d been safe for so many years. I never expected to see him again.”
“Where did you go?” Wilfred was tiny. If he’d have stayed here, Tyrone-slash-Byron would have seen him.
“Forest Grove. One of the professors at the university had died and left a huge book collection, and I’d agreed to help catalog it, get it ready to sell. When I saw Byron, I told them I’d start right away. I left a quick voicemail for Lalena and took a taxi within the hour.”
I looked around. Ian’s home was tranquil and pleasantly cluttered, as I imagined a rare books vendor’s home would be.
He had a strong arms and torso—he needed them to propel himself in his chair all day—but I didn’t sense violence.
He’d fled Baltimore instead of fighting his boss. He wasn’t a killer.
As I prepared my next words, I prayed I was right. “You didn’t murder him?”
Ian started. “Absolutely not. I don’t want him to know I still exist, let alone confront him. No way.” He squinted. “You say he’s dead? Are you sure?”
“I think so. A man’s body was found in the woods. There’s a strong chance it’s him, and, if you’re right, he was here under a pseudonym. Tyrone Beaudrie. He wasn’t at the guest house last night, and he hasn’t shown up for work.”
“The guest house, huh?” Ian shook his head in disbelief. “He’s dead?” His puzzlement morphed into a wide smile, then dimmed. “Someone killed him.”
“From what you say, I imagine he has his enemies.” I remembered Tyrone’s seductive grace, his sly doubletalk. If not a gang boss, his murderer might well have been a jealous ex-girlfriend.
“You were arrested for murder. His murder, not mine,” Ian said.
“And you heard about it somehow.”
He shrugged. “The windows were open. Someone outside was talking about how I was dead, and you’d been arrested for killing me.
I knew I’d better make it known I was alive—at least to the sheriff’s office.
I didn’t understand at the time, but now it’s starting to come together.
” He shook his head. “Wow.” Then, “I need to see Lalena. It’s safe now that Byron is dead. ”
Indeed, a sense of calm seemed to have settled over Ian. I rose.
“I hope she’ll understand why I had to vanish like that.” He looked at me with a question in his gaze.
“If you’re as honest with her as you’ve been with me, I predict she’ll forgive all.”
My words were upbeat, but my mood was not. I had a lot to figure out, and it was becoming increasingly clear that my life depended on it.