Chapter Twenty-Two

At that moment Sam Watson’s phone beeped with an incoming text. He glanced at it and then gave us a grin.

“Curtis’s lawyer has arrived. It seems Mr. Gardner wants to talk to me. Diane Uppiton has also lawyered up. I suspect I have an interesting day ahead of me. I’ll take this box with me and put it someplace safe.”

“I’ll call Janelle Washington,” I said, “and let her know it might be of some interest to them.”

“I’ll talk to Rick Monaghan,” Connor said. “You’ll probably be able to hear him yelling from here.”

“You can tell people we found some interesting personal letters from the immediate postwar era,” Bertie said, “but please provide no details. It’s up to the families concerned if they want to take this further.”

“Understood,” I said. “The Washingtons don’t have much money. I can’t see that they’ll be able to mount a court challenge against Monaghan and his company.”

“Bankers are a proud people and respectful of our history,” Louise Jane said. “All of our history, including the bad parts. I think the community will come down awful strong on the side of Thaddeus’s heirs.”

“That remains to be seen,” Bertie said. “Let’s get back to work everyone.”

I walked Connor to the door, conscious of the library patrons watching us.

He gave me his private grin. “Life with you, Lucy Richardson, is never boring.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “I wish it could be just a little bit less exciting.”

His blue eyes twinkled. “Never.”

*   *   *

Sam Watson returned to the library at closing time. He’d called Connor and invited him to come too.

We gathered in the main room. Bertie pulled up the wingback chair; Charlene sat behind the circulation desk. Ronald leaned against the wall, and I stood next to Connor. Watson faced us. Charles sat on a shelf next to Watson’s shoulder, as eager as the rest of us to hear what he had to say.

“I feel like I’m between the pages of a Lord Peter Wimsey novel,” I said. “All the characters have gathered in the library, eagerly waiting for the detective to make the big reveal.”

“All the characters except for the accused,” Watson said, “which is why I’m here. I figured you’d want to know the most recent developments. Curtis is claiming self-defense. He admits that he was here, at the library, with Jeremy that night. They’d met at a bar in town, as we knew, and had a couple of drinks. Far more than the one he’d told me about in his initial statement.”

“Imagine that,” Ronald said.

“As they drank, Jeremy got increasingly angry at being, in his words, ‘kicked out of the library to wait for’—again in his words—‘some flit of a girl’ to let him examine the documents. He decided he wasn’t going to stand for that, and he’d go back to the library and demand to be let in.”

“Curtis agreed and they drove to the library together in Jeremy’s car. Now, according to Curtis, when he realized the library was closed and no one was around, he wanted to leave.”

“Totally believable,” Connor said sarcastically.

“That will be up to a judge and jury to decide,” Watson said. “Fortunately, not me. It just so happened that Jeremy had a sledgehammer in the trunk of his car.”

“Why?” Bertie asked. “He didn’t seem the handyman type to me.”

“Apparently he was. His wife tells us he liked to fix things around the house. She added that she usually had to call a contractor to unfix them. We found a well-stocked tool box in his car and similar items in the garage.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” I said. “I was wondering where the sledgehammer came from.”

“I don’t tell you a lot of things, Lucy,” Watson said.

I pondered that for a few moments.

“Jeremy got the hammer and broke down the door. Curtis, according to Curtis, was appalled, but he followed Jeremy into the library in order to prevent him from doing more damage.”

“That worked well,” Ronald said.

“Jeremy then forced open Bertie’s desk. When Curtis realized that rather than just looking at the papers, Jeremy intended to steal them, he tried to stop him. They fought”—Watson glanced at Louise Jane—“meaning pushing and shoving at each other and knocking things over. No injuries were found on Jeremy’s face, nor on his hands, which is why we discontinued that line of investigation.”

Louise Jane smirked.

“Jeremy fell and hit his head,” Watson continued. “Panicked at what he’d done, Curtis fled the library, calling Diane to come and pick him up.”

“What, the documents just happened to fall into his pocket?” Bertie said.

“He claims he grabbed them from Jeremy and in his panic took them with him.”

“Hogwash,” Bertie said.

“I’m inclined to agree,” Watson said. “He might well have panicked, and he probably did, but he took the documents with him.”

“But he didn’t show much interest in the pages,” I said, “Not when everyone was here. It was his obvious disinterest that first clued me into suspecting his guilt. What do you suppose changed?”

“After a few drinks,” Watson said, “Jeremy, who should have known better, told Curtis the map might lead to a cache of previously undiscovered Civil War documents. It was Jeremy’s idea to steal the map and follow to where it led, but it was easy enough, I suspect, to get Curtis to agree to the plan. All of which is largely irrelevant. I don’t know what caused the men to argue and get into a fight, but not only did Curtis not report to the police when he’d sobered up and calmed down, he tried to use the documents to his own end. He came to your book club, pretending to know nothing about their whereabouts, and joined the discussion about cracking the code. I think we have a pretty solid case.”

“What did he hope to do with the pages if he did manage to crack the code?” Bertie asked.

“Curtis’s family has long maintained that their ancestor wasn’t a deserter, as everyone believes, but instead an army spy pretending to be a traitor to the cause. They claimed letters that could prove such had been lost.”

“When we first saw the pages,” I said, “Louise Jane suggested they might lead to a report a spy had had to bury. Curtis didn’t seem all that interested at the time, but I bet he said something to Jeremy about his ancestor when they talked later, and Jeremy played it up.”

“What a fool,” Connor said.

“Knowing Curtis,” Charlene said, “I’ll guess he didn’t bother with the diary because he thought it nothing but the ramblings of a fisherman’s wife. A foolish assumption on his part. Therein lay the beginning of the trail.”

“What about Diane?” I asked. “What’s she saying?”

“She says she didn’t tell me she’d picked him up on the library road because I didn’t ask. She told me, in her words, ‘a little white lie’ because Curtis had asked her to. She didn’t ask when word got around about the documents missing.”

“That I believe,” I said. “She didn’t show much interest when they came to book club. She is, if I may be honest, not very smart and not very observant, and not at all interested in anything to do with anyone else. She did what he asked her to do because she didn’t bother to think it through.”

“Diane has been released on bail,” Watson said. “Curtis has been denied.”

“I’ll give Eunice Fitzgerald a call,” Bertie said. “She might want to suggest Diane step down from the library board.”

“Now,” Watson said, “who’d like to go into town for a drink? My treat to thank you all, Lucy in particular, for a job well done.”

Charles was the first to reach the door.