The Gray Woman was still in the main room, poking through the shelves. She looked, I thought, more as though she were checking for dust than seeking something to read. Waiting for her family to meet up with her, maybe. This was a tourist town, and it was tourist season, so we got a lot of seasonal people through our doors. Some of Ronald’s children’s programs were specifically designed for visitors, to introduce the kids to not only the history of the Outer Banks but also the flora, fauna, and spectacular natural features of this marvelous part of the world.
“Thanks, Charlene,” I said. “I’ll take over now.”
“Everything okay?”
“As okay as can be.”
I jerked my head in question toward the shelf behind which the Gray Woman had disappeared, ALCOTT–CAPOTE. Charlene leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “Been here for ages. Says nothing.”
“Can I help you?” I peeked around the shelf as Charlene went upstairs. The Gray Woman jumped and slid the book she was holding back into its place. “No, thank you. You have an impressive collection, for such a small space.” She spoke in a Midwestern accent as she stared at me down that long nose, through those black eyes.
“A small space means we have to know what’s important,” I said.
“True.”
“I’m Lucy Richardson.”
“Are you?”
“I mean . . . well, let me know if you need anything.”
She turned her attention back to the shelf.
Perhaps she was still feeling chilly from a long Midwestern winter. A bit of North Carolina sun might warm her up a fraction.
Then again, maybe not.
She soon left. She didn’t say good-bye or thank-you and she didn’t check out any books. I assumed she’d been killing time, probably while her family did something she didn’t approve of—like have fun—and I put her out of mind.
The board meeting finished at long last and the members streamed back into the main room. One of the men said to the others, “Anyone up for going for a drink?”
“How’d the meeting go?” I asked Bertie once they’d all left.
“As well as can be expected. If Diane knew anything at all about accounting or how to read a budget, she would have made plenty of objections, but even she knows when to keep her mouth shut. Sometimes. She does seem to have gotten a bee in her bonnet about security around here. Some idea of having the police give us tips on theft prevention.”
“She mistook Sam Watson for a community services officer. He wasn’t impressed.”
Bertie laughed. Watson and Butch had left right after getting that phone call. Watson hadn’t given me any dark looks, and Butch had smiled rather than looked on me with pity, so I assumed (I hoped?) the call had nothing to do with my mother.
Mom breezed in shortly before five, looking very “Grace Kelly on the Riviera” with yellow ballet flats, giant sunglasses, hair tied back in a Hermès scarf, tailored black capris, yellow summer-weight sweater, and restrained gold jewelry.
The sparkle had returned to her eye, and I decided I would not think about the last time I’d seen her: heading off to the lounge with George, manager. “Now,” she said, after greeting me with a peck on the cheek, “let me see this apartment. I can’t believe you actually live in a lighthouse. Above a library. If you’re short of funds, dear . . .”
“I love it,” I said, leading the way upstairs as Charles ran on ahead. The members of my family are not cat people; we’d had dogs when I was growing up. At first Mom ignored Charles; then she tried pushing him gently away, and then less gently. Charles wound around her ankles and rubbed up against her legs. I hid a smile. Nothing Charles liked better than to torment non–cat lovers. When we were admiring my tiny kitchen (me admiring, Mom horror-struck), Charles jumped onto the counter and threw himself at her. Mom shrieked and leapt back as the cat clung to her shirt and peered into her face. I plucked him off and held him tightly for the rest of the inspection, while Mom attempted to remove strands of long tan hair from her clothes.
Louise Jane had arrived while we were upstairs. She stood by the desk, chatting with Charlene. Inspired by the success of the Jane Austen exhibit, Louise Jane was determined to have a haunted Outer Banks display at the library in the fall. Organized by herself, of course. Her arms were piled high with books on the paranormal history of North Carolina. As soon as she heard our footsteps on the stairs, she dropped the books onto the circulation desk and hurried over to greet my mom. “Mrs. Richardson. Welcome to the Lighthouse Library. I’m Louise Jane McKaughnan, one of the library’s biggest boosters. I fill in here now and again when the workload gets too much for the regular staff to manage. Isn’t that right, Lucy?”
“Uh, right.” What else could I say?
“I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to chat at book club. Have you been having the grand tour? My family’s lived on the Outer Banks since the seventeen hundreds, so if there’s anything you want to know, anything an outsider like Lucy wouldn’t, then I’d be awful happy to help.”
“My mom’s family’s as old as yours, Louise Jane,” I pointed out.
“Yes, honey, but you aren’t. What do you think of our library, Mrs. Richardson?”
“It’s lovely,” Mom said. “Lucy’s apartment is simply darling. It’s small, but adequate for temporary accommodation.”
At the word temporary, Louise Jane’s eyes lit up as if the first-order Fresnel lens had been switched on inside her head. “You’re staying at the Ocean Side, are you?”
“Yes.”
“That hotel has a fascinating history. Are you interested in history, Mrs. Richardson?”
As if anyone could say no.
“Yes,” Mom said.
“Will you look at the time?” I said. “Let’s go, Mom.”
“I just happen to have tomorrow afternoon free,” Louise Jane said. “If you don’t have previous plans, how about I drop by the the hotel, say at three? We can have a nice chat and I can give you a private tour of some of the interesting historical aspects of the hotel, Mrs. Richardson. May I call you Suzanne?”
“Please do,” Mom said.
“Great. Three o’clock in the lobby.” Louise Jane bolted for the door. Mom blinked. It’s not often my mom was outmaneuvered. About the last thing in life she’s interested in is the history of the Outer Banks, and the haunted history at that. If it had been anyone but Louise Jane, I’d have chortled. Instead I wondered what she was plotting now.
Theodore Kowalski was next to arrive, his hair blowing in the wind stirred up by the exit of Hurricane Louise Jane. “Where’s Louise Jane off to in such a hurry?”
“I have no idea,” I said, imagining potions, cauldrons, and black cats.
“Nice to see you again, Suzanne,” he said. “We didn’t get much of a chance to chat the other night. Lucy runs a tight ship in her book club.” He waved his finger at me. “No frivolity allowed.”
“Speaking of that night,” I said. “You didn’t hang around outside by any chance, did you?”
“How I wish I had. Perhaps I could have been of assistance to poor Karen. Awful business. Gang of drunken college punks, people are saying.”
“Are they?” That was news to me. “Did you see these . . . uh, punks?”
“I’ve spoken to Detective Watson. He’s been questioning everyone who was at the book club that night. They were also asking about some beach bag. I don’t know what that has to do with—”
“From England, are you?” Mom said.
Theodore beamed. He was, in fact, from Nags Head, North Carolina. He liked to pretend he was an English scholar.
“Lucy,” Bertie called. “Can I have a minute?”
I left my mom telling Theodore how much she loved London.
Bertie had a form for me to sign, and I did so. When I got back to Mom, Theodore was asking her where she was staying. She managed to gasp out, “The Ocean Side” as I dragged her away.
“Why did Theodore want to know what hotel you’re at?” I asked, once we were in the SLK and speeding down the highway.
“No reason.”
Oh dear.
My mom and I weren’t all that close; we never had been. We’d certainly never been friends. I was surprised at the amount of time she wanted to spend with me on this trip. Was she lonely at the hotel without my dad or any of her girlfriends, or was it that she didn’t want to appear to be alone? She still hadn’t said anything about going home, which had become a moot point since Watson ordered her not to leave Dare County. I didn’t exactly have a packed social life myself, but I did enjoy getting together with Josie and her friends, or just having time on my own to read and daydream and explore the Outer Banks.
“About that necklace,” I said now.
“There is nothing to discuss. I’ve never seen the thing before, and I have no idea how it got into my bag. As if I’d be interested in anything so tasteless in any event. I doubt very much it was stolen. Rather than admit she’d lost it, some old broad with early-onset Alzheimer’s played the prima donna. Either that or a malicious housemaid took it and hid it in my bag to get revenge for some supposed slight.”
“I thought you and Karen made up,” I said.
“Did I mention Karen? I did not.”
“Oh, come on, Mom. I know that’s who you meant.”
“We made up, as in I decided to apologize for my rudeness, yes. And I will admit I was rude to her. Does that make you feel better?”
“It’s not up to me to feel one way or another.”
She turned her head to give me one of her patented glares. The car veered into the passing lane and I shrieked.
“Control yourself, Lucille,” Mom said, deftly returning to her own lane, as an SUV gave us a blast from its horn. “I see North Carolina drivers are no politer than when I was a girl out for a day’s outing with my parents.”
I ground my teeth. My feet pressed harder into the foot well.
“You needn’t help me with the brakes; I can drive all by myself. To return to the subject at hand. I told your police friends that the sequence of events is perfectly obvious. Karen stole the necklace. She was a maid in that hotel, wasn’t she? She then snuck into my room and put it in my bag as a way of getting it out of the hotel. I assume the staff are checked closely to ensure nothing, shall we say, accidentally finds its way into their pockets. She would have naturally assumed I’d be coming to your charming little book club, and schemed to retrieve the item then. Why she didn’t is up to the police to determine. Not me. Overcome by guilt, I suspect. I assume her accomplice—don’t they call such a person a post?”
“Fence.”
“Whatever. The fence arranged to meet her at the library, and when she didn’t have the necklace, he killed her.”
I wanted to believe her. Truly, I did. But I didn’t think it was so simple. If Karen had hidden the item in Mom’s bag, wouldn’t she have been anxious about it all evening? Karen had rarely had much to say at our meetings. I didn’t think she’d even read the assigned books. She would tell us she’d wanted to, but she had been so busy, time had gotten away from her. I suspected that she came to the club for the companionship and the bakery treats more than any great love of literature. I didn’t mind that. Everyone has their reasons, and at the Lighthouse Library our goal is to create a community as much as to lend out books or help with research.
I couldn’t remember what everyone was doing all the time at the last book club meeting, but I hadn’t noticed Karen being particularly agitated. She’d pointedly ignored my mother the entire time. So pointedly, it could have been a pretense. “You might be onto something, Mom.” I pressed my right foot into the empty space on my side of the car as we tore through a yellow light turning red. Mom drove like she lived life—with total abandon, in full expectation that everyone else would get out of her way.
Was that what my dad had first seen in her? Was that why he’d fallen in love with an Outer Banks high school girl, shocking his bluest-of-blue-blood Boston Brahmin parents to the core?
They’d met when my dad was vacationing on the Outer Banks. She’d been seventeen, about to begin her senior year of high school, spending the summer waitressing in a restaurant that’s no longer in business. He’d been in law school, the only son of a prominent Boston family, his future in the firm founded by his grandfather laid out before him.
She’d been a breathtaking beauty (she still was, in her late fifties). A picture taken that summer of my tanned, sun-kissed, bathing-suit-clad parents laughing on the beach might have been of two young movie stars relaxing in Malibu. His parents had been appalled when he announced he was going to marry the waitress, so young she hadn’t even finished high school yet, whose mother worked in a shop and whose father fished for a living. Oh, Mom never put it quite like that. She told her children that the Richardsons had been wary but eventually were won over when they realized how deeply in love the couple were.
In lust, more likely. My oldest brother was born five months after their wedding. Two more boys came at a more sedate pace, followed last of all by me.
We pulled into the parking lot of Jake’s Seafood Bar, careening across two lanes of traffic with milliseconds to spare.
“Josie’s young man seemed very sweet,” Mom said, bringing the car to a neck-straining stop. “I thought it would be nice to have our drink here, help support his business. Have they set a date for the wedding?”
“No. I don’t think they’re formally engaged, Mom.”
“I love weddings. I’ve been the mother of the groom three times, but not yet mother of the bride. It’s such an honored position. I’d hate to see Ellen get there before me.”
I got out of the SLK, grateful not to have to reply to that last comment. Mom had parked in her usual fashion—taking up two spots.
Once we were seated on the outside deck, Mom excused herself. I leaned back in my chair and enjoyed the view over the sound. At first glance, Mom’s theory sounded pretty far-fetched. But maybe there was something to it. Oh, not about Karen smuggling the necklace out of the hotel and murderous accomplices lying in wait, but the fact of the necklace being in Mom’s bag. What had Karen said when she and Mom had their altercation in the lobby? Something about Mom being a common thief? If that had been the rumor when they were back in school, so what? It was a long time ago. Mom wouldn’t care. She’d so totally put her Outer Banks life behind her, I wondered sometimes if she believed she’d lived her whole life in Boston.
Had Karen decided to get revenge for Mom’s slight by making it look as though Mom was still a thief? Karen, a hotel maid, was in a position to steal jewelry from a guest’s room and then to get into Mom’s room. Had she dropped the necklace into Mom’s bag, not to get it out of the hotel to recover later, but in hopes that Mom would be found with it?
Even I had to admit that my theory was a stretch. All Mom had had to do was look into her bag, see the necklace, wonder where it had come from, and tell the desk she had it if anyone was searching for it.
I knew that’s what my mother would do. No reason Karen would, though.
All of which had absolutely nothing to do with Karen being murdered outside the Lighthouse Library.
The two incidents appeared to have nothing at all in common. But they had to be related somehow.
I watched Mom make her way through the room toward our table. A man seated at the bar by himself said something to her. She gave him a radiant smile, and a shake of her head. Once he was behind her, and she saw me watching, she stuck out her tongue. My mother could be infuriating at times, but I loved her so very much.
The problem was, I could see only one thing that joined the theft of the necklace and the murder of Karen. My mother.
I would have to do everything I possibly could to ensure the police didn’t take that thread to that conclusion.