Chapter Ten

My right hand cramped from gripping the dash. Being in a car with Jackie while she was driving down the interstate was akin to riding an amusement park ride. I almost screamed when she swerved from the third lane to the middle lane, landing between two semis before whipping into the first lane and onto an off ramp.

I broke out into a sweat.

“Why do you drive like that? You’re going to kill someone someday.”

She laughed. “I am not. I know exactly where every car around me is at all times, and I know exactly what maneuvers I can make.”

I felt drained. I would never get used to her driving in a million years.

We stopped chatting while she followed the directions from her GPS to take us to the address we had for Tabitha Abbott.

I had already filled her in on Keith’s observations and demonstration. I rattled off my list of suspects.

“Didn’t you put the mayor on your list?” she asked.

“Why would I?”

“Wishful thinking,” she said.

“He came into the bookstore while I was standing over Meredith’s body. I had to rush out and shoo him away before the police came.”

Jackie’s jaw dropped. “Jo, if he was there, he’s a suspect.”

“He was just making his morning rounds.”

That was true, but a nagging thought in the back of my mind finally surfaced. When Parker and I had gone over the footage of the morning of the murder, I didn’t recall seeing the mayor go into either the laundromat or the bakery. He walked down the sidewalk directly to the bookstore. That was a departure from his usual routine. Could he have gone in and out through the back door and then doubled back around to come in again? I had to consider every option.

Jackie pulled into the driveway of a modern saltbox house. I don’t know why I was surprised, but the offbeat style of the woman didn’t match the Colonial style of the home. A Christmas wreath on the front door was the only holiday decoration on the property.

I rang the bell. A few moments later, a little girl opened the door. I wasn’t a good judge of age, but she couldn’t have been more than five years old. She was in her bare feet, had chocolate frosting smeared on her face, and her long, curly hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed yet today.

“Is your mommy home?” I asked.

She pointed to Jackie. “You have pretty hair.”

“Thank you. So do you,” Jackie said and smiled. “Is your mommy home?”

“She’s at work.”

“Where does she work?” I asked.

She pointed at me and scowled. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” She wiggled her finger for Jackie to come closer. When Jackie stepped forward and leaned down, she whispered loudly in her ear, “My mommy works at the museum.”

She took a step back and slammed the door with as much strength as her little arm could muster. Jackie jumped back to avoid being hit in the head with the door.

“Where’s Pepper when you need her?” Jackie asked. “She’s good with kids.”

“She seemed to like you,” I said. “I was afraid she was going to telepathically set my hair on fire.”

“Do you want to ring again, or should we check the GPS to see if there are any museums nearby?”

“Let’s try again,” I said. “For all we know, Tabitha could be working at a museum in Pittsburgh.”

Jackie rang the bell again.

This time, a man who had apparently been sleeping answered the door. His eyes were barely open, his hair would frighten most children, and he still had one hand in his sweatpants. He managed to grunt one loud, angry word, “What?”

Never one to back away from a challenge, Jackie said sweetly, “We’re friends of Tabitha’s. She invited us for tea.”

The man opened his eyes a little wider. He focused on me first. His expression didn’t change, but the hand in his pants appeared to do some scratching.

When he saw Jackie, it was as if someone shot him. He staggered back, yanked his hand out of his pants, and threw it against his heart. “Ay, caramba! There’s an angel on my doorstep.”

The little girl stepped into the foyer, kicked the man in the leg, and yelled, “I’m telling mommy you’re saying bad words again.”

I stepped forward and said in a tone to let him know I meant business, “She’s not an angel, she’s a reporter, and I’m a private investigator. Where’s Tabitha?”

The man used the hand from his pants to run through his hair in an effort to tame it. “She’s at work. What’d she do now?”

“Nothing. We just want to talk with her. What museum?”

“The new museum next to Patterson Plaza. There’s about fifty flags out front. You can’t miss it.”

The man watched us walk to the car. Or rather, he watched Jackie walk to the car. As usual, she looked stunning with her long red hair pulled into a high ponytail. She wore a snug heather green sweater and a black pencil skirt that accentuated her gorgeous legs. I was on the opposite end of the spectrum with hair rivaling the little girl’s, a loose-fitting sweater, and comfortable slacks. You had to guess the shape of my body.

The museum was easy to find, but a parking space wasn’t. A parking deck sat adjacent, but it was still under construction. Jackie dropped me off in front of the building and sped off. I assumed she would have to park at the plaza and walk to the museum.

After paying an entrance fee of fourteen dollars, I stopped at the information booth and asked for Tabitha Abbott.

“Is she expecting you?” the clerk asked.

Since this wasn’t official business, I handed the man my Two Sisters and a Journalist card. “No, but it’s important I talk with her.”

He studied my card and asked, “Is this a joke?”

“Of course not. I’m a private investigator.”

He eyed me as if he didn’t believe me. He looked around the room and behind him. “I’m being punked, right? This isn’t a legitimate business name is it?”

“Oh, for crying out loud. Will you just tell me where I should go to talk with her?”

He chuckled and continued to look around. Jackie came through the front door and walked up to the booth. “A spot opened up right outside the door. Is she here?”

The man laughed loudly. “Is this one of the sisters or the journalist?”

I snatched the card from his hand and pulled a Baranski and Ravens card from my bag. I handed it to him and said, “For the record, she’s the journalist, and if you don’t tell me where Tabitha is, I’m going to call your supervisor to help me get the information.”

“Ok, don’t get your shorts in a knot,” he said. He picked up the handset of the telephone in front of him and punched four numbers. A moment later, he said, “A couple of women here to see you. I’m sending them up.” He gave Jackie a flirtatious smile. “Take the elevator to the third floor and turn left. It’s the curator’s office, second door on the left.”

We stepped off the elevator and walked into the office. Tabitha looked up from spreadsheets strewn across a large desk. Just as Hank had said, she was a pretty woman, and her wild, frizzed hair suited her. I was struck by the deep emerald of her eyes and wondered if she wore tinted contacts.

I handed my official card to her. “I’m Jo Ravens from Barnaski and Ravens Investigations, and this is Jackie Ryder from the Buxley Beacon.”

Jackie closed the door behind us, handed Tabitha her card, and took a seat in a leather chair facing the desk. “We’d like to talk with you about the bookstore in Buxley,” she said.

Tabitha eyed us suspiciously. “What about the bookstore?”

I sat in the chair next to Jackie’s and said bluntly, “I don’t want to play games, so I’m going to be upfront with you, and I hope you’ll do the same with us.”

The woman’s look softened, but I could tell she was wary.

“Last Monday morning, Meredith Duncan was murdered in Wagner’s Used Books. You were there at the time of her death. I know, because I was across the street running surveillance. I have timestamped photos of you arriving and leaving. I also have earlier photos of you and a man going into and coming out of the bookstore before walking to Parker’s Tavern, where you had dinner and drinks. We want to know what happened in the bookstore Monday morning.”

Her eyes opened wide before she slumped in her chair, dropped her head, and covered her face with her hands. When she looked up again, her already pale face was white.

“I wondered if anyone would come. I thought I was in the clear when I read in the paper that her death was an accident.”

Jackie and I looked at each other. I think we were both surprised she had so quickly admitted to being there, and did she just confess to Meredith’s murder? Jackie opened her notebook. With pen poised she said, “Tell us what happened.”

Tabitha fidgeted in her seat and pushed a spreadsheet aside before folding her hands on the desk and letting out a sigh. “I went to the bookstore to see about a book. Peggy was looking for a particular title for me. Meredith called last Saturday and said she had four copies of the book come in.”

My spidey senses immediately went up, but I held my tongue.

“I told her I’d be in Monday morning to look at them. When I got there, no one was at the counter. I checked between the shelves, but I was alone in the store. The radio was on kind of loud, so I didn’t hear the voices right away, but even then, I couldn’t make out who was talking or what they were saying. I did have the impression that whoever was in the backroom was arguing. I thought it was Peggy and Meredith, since they were the only ones who worked there.”

“Are you sure the voices were female?” Jackie asked.

“No, I’m not. I waited for someone to come out, and I even called Peggy’s name a few times. I had to be here at the museum at noon, so I didn’t have much time. I pulled the curtain back, and I saw the back door closing, but I didn’t see who went out. I called for Peggy, but she didn’t answer. When I walked through and saw Meredith lying on the floor, I knew she’d been murdered, and I left.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?” Jackie asked.

“I know I should have, but I didn’t want to get involved. I just got this job, and I can’t afford to lose it.”

“Why would you lose your job if you notified the police of a murder?” I asked.

She hesitated. “I probably shouldn’t be talking to you at all, but I’m so sick of this. I have a daughter, and I need this job. Ed had no right to get me involved in this mess.”

“What mess?” Jackie asked.

I already knew what she was talking about. “Treasure Island, right?” I asked.

Her eyes lit up with fear and puzzlement. “How do you…”

“A map. You’ve been looking for a map in a Treasure Island book.”

Her eyes went wider. “Yes. How did you know? Ed said there were only a few people who knew about it.”

Jackie shot a sideways glance at me. I slightly shook my head to let her know I wasn’t saying anything more right now.

“Tell us what you know,” I said. “Maybe we can help.”

She looked back and forth between us for a few moments before nodding her head and saying, “Ed Hastings is my boss. He’s the curator here. At first, he told me he was looking for a special edition of Treasure Island for the museum. I kept finding copies, but they were never the right one. It was maddening. He finally confided in me that he was looking for a copy for his cousin who’s in jail somewhere in Indiana.”

“Gary,” I said.

Her puzzled look returned. “Yes. How do you know that?”

“It’s not important. Go on.”

“He said there was a map in the book, and it was supposed to show the location of stolen money. He was obsessed with finding it. He said it was going to set him and his cousin up for life, and if I helped find it, they’d give me some of the money to make things easier for me and my daughter. But I didn’t count on finding Meredith murdered.”

“If Ed’s cousin is in jail, how did he find out about the map?” I asked.

“Someone’s Aunt Matilda showed up at the jail during visiting hours to ask her nephew where the map was. Ed’s cousin was in the next bay when they were talking, and he overheard most of their conversation. The only place they mentioned as a location was Buxley. That’s why Ed’s cousin called him here in Patterson and offered to cut him in if he could find the map before the guy in jail gets out and finds it.”

“What about the aunt? Don’t you think she would have found it by now?” Jackie asked.

“That’s the thing. The guy didn’t remember anything other than the map was in a Treasure Island book when he was a boy.”

Jackie had been taking copious notes. She looked up from her notepad and asked, “Do you think Ed might have murdered Meredith?”

“No,” she said adamantly. “Ed may be greedy, but he’s not a killer.”

“What if Peggy or Meredith found the map?” Jackie asked. “Doesn’t it make sense they would have looked through the books before giving them to you? Maybe Meredith had the map and was trying to sell it to someone. Whoever was in the backroom with her Monday morning murdered her and took the map.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who was in the room with her.”

The three of us sat quiet for a few moments. Tabitha and Jackie didn’t know I had the map, and to me, it was looking more and more like Peggy killed Meredith, with her motive having nothing to do with the map. If what Nell said was true, and Meredith really was trying to take the bookstore away from Peggy, then that was a strong motive for murder. Peggy must have fled to Florida to keep a low profile for a few weeks or even months until she was sure she was in the clear.

“What happens now?” Tabitha asked. She motioned toward Jackie. “If you’re with a newspaper, I assume you’ll be writing about this, right? But if you do, Ed will fire me for sure, and he’ll probably lose his job, too. The museum isn’t going to want negative publicity with it being so new.”

“She can write her story without using your names,” I said. Jackie shot a look my way that included a frown. “But we can’t keep the police from coming to question you. Now that we’re certain Meredith was murdered, we have to take our findings to our police sergeant.”

She appeared frightened. “I have a child. I can’t go to jail.”

Jackie looked squarely at her and asked, “Tabitha, did you kill Meredith?”

Her eyes flew open as wide as they could go. Tears filled them. “No! I didn’t. She was already dead when I found her.”

I believed her, and I felt sorry for her. On some level, I had become desensitized to seeing a dead person, but I remember how it felt the first few times. It must have been a terrible shock for her to find Meredith. How she managed to look calm when she left the bookstore was still surprising to me.

I hoped I looked sympathetic when I said, “The best thing to do is tell the truth when you’re questioned. Our sergeant is fair, and if you cooperate and answer his questions honestly, you shouldn’t have any problems.”

She nodded and dabbed a tissue to her eyes before standing to walk with us to the elevator.

Jackie attempted to lighten the mood. “We stopped at your house before coming here. Your daughter is adorable.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Her name is Chloe.”

“We met your husband, too,” I said.

She shook her head. “I’m not married. That’s my brother, Jeremy. He’s unemployed, so he’s staying at my place.”

I wanted to tell her he was doing a terrible job of watching Chloe, but I kept my mouth shut.

After we made our way out of the museum and into Jackie’s car, we didn’t even have our seatbelts buckled before she was demanding to know what was going on. I knew I couldn’t tell her the town council had hired us to look into the mayor, but I realized I didn’t have to.

“I’ll tell you everything I know if you stay in the right-hand lane and drive the speed limit all the way back to Buxley.”

A potentially breaking story was of more importance to her than testing her racing skills. She agreed to sane driving.

“We also need to set some ground rules,” I said.

“No. No rules. You can’t keep restricting me in my job, Jo. I have a duty to report the news as I find out about it.”

“Can you honestly say you would use Tabitha and Ed’s names in a story if you knew it would get them fired? Especially when they didn’t do anything illegal?”

“You don’t know that. Either one of them could have murdered Meredith.”

“But you can’t speculate that in a news article.”

“Ok, so maybe that’s not the best example, but you’re going to ask me not to print what you’re about to say. You always do, and that’s not right.”

“You’ve held off before, and it paid off in the end. I don’t want to argue with you about this. If you want to know what I know, you’re not printing what I tell you. At least not yet.”

She clenched her lips, and I saw her hands grip the steering wheel a little tighter. On one hand, I didn’t blame her for fussing. She wasn’t Buxley’s star reporter, and she hadn’t won her numerous awards, by sitting on stories.

“Ok. Spill. We can talk about what I can and can’t print when you’re done.”

“I have the map to the Confederate gold.”

The entrance ramp to the interstate was only a few hundred feet ahead of us. She swerved into the lane to our left to avoid accessing the ramp. For a second, I felt like a rag dog and couldn’t grab the dash in time to keep my shoulder from hitting the car door. The man in the car behind us blared his horn.

“What the hell, Jackie!” I screeched.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not driving while you drop bombs on me. Let’s get lunch at the plaza. We can talk, and I can take notes while we eat.”

I rubbed the side of my head. A slight pain made me realize I must have bumped it on the window when she swerved. “All right, but you’re still driving the speed limit on the way home.”

We agreed our best option for privacy would be The Broken Nine Iron, an upscale bar with loft seating.

After waiting twenty minutes for a corner booth upstairs to open, our waiter took our order and had our drinks in front of us in less than two minutes. I suspected patrons were cycled in and out of the restaurant as quickly as possible during the lunch rush.

Jackie slapped her notebook on the table. “How do you know you have the map to the Confederate gold?”

“Let me give you a little background first. Besides Tabitha and Ed, the mayor is also looking for the map. All three of them were relying on Peggy and Meredith to help find copies of Treasure Island, but what they didn’t know was Meredith used to work at that very same jail in Gary, Indiana where the story originated. I think she heard the story of the book and the map and moved here to look for it. Peggy didn’t ask her to work for her in the bookstore, Meredith pushed her way in.”

“Do you think Peggy killed Meredith for the map?”

“I think Peggy killed Meredith but not for the map. I told you, I have the map. According to the mayor, Meredith was threatening to take the store away from Peggy if she didn’t pay her for all the improvements she made. Of course, Peggy couldn’t afford to pay her, so she had motive to kill her, stage it as an accident, and run off to Florida for a while.”

“How did you get the map, and how do you know it’s the right one?”

“I don’t know if it’s the right one. It could have been made by a child, and Keith was coloring it with colored pencils. He found it in a copy of Treasure Island that Pepper bought at the book sale last week. The map is definitely old though. It shows the boundary of a farm, an X, and Sneider’s Creek – spelled with an e-i instead of a y.”

Jackie was quick to give me a history lesson. “It could be referencing Schneider’s Creek. The creek dried up over seventy years ago. The Muskingum Watershed choked it off to stop the flooding of Buxley. Homes had been built on the water’s edge, and as the town grew, the creek ended up running through town, parallel to Main Street.”

I had to think for a minute. Something about the creek was important. After I gathered maps of the town from the courthouse, I would be able to compare them to the book’s map and determine the correct spot for the X. It was the name Schneider that was needling me in the back of my mind. It felt important.

“What’s with the Schneider family?” I asked. “I know it’s a prominent name around town. Have they been in the news lately?”

“Do you ever read the paper?” Jackie asked sarcastically.

“I read your articles,” I said with a smile.

“They haven’t been in the news lately, but Horace Schneider died just after the first of the year. He was over a hundred years old.”

“I don’t always read the obits.”

“There was a huge article in the paper on the family. Even though there was a civil war between the Buxley and Schneider families when Buxley was founded, the Schneider family contributed considerably to the growth of the town.”

She grabbed her phone and accessed the newspaper’s archives to search for the article.

While she searched, I said, “I didn’t tell you, but I was the one who found the book at the book sale. There were two boxes of old children’s books marked Schneider donations. I took both boxes and put them with Pepper’s other books. She was going to donate the boxes to Peggy until Kelly checked the value of them. Keith took some of the books without value for himself. His friend Jimmy Faust has the Treasure Island book now.”

Jackie looked alarmed. “If someone killed Meredith over the book and the map, those kids could be in danger.”

“No one knows about them other than me and Keith. And now you. I didn’t tell Pepper or Glenn, and I told Keith we needed to keep it between the two of us for safety’s sake.”

She shook her head. “You have to let me print this. We’ll get it out in the open and that’ll be the end of it. No one will be in danger.”

My cell phone rang. It was Pepper.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“You know where I am. Jackie and I are in Patterson. We found Tabitha and talked to her.”

“Well, get your butts back here. We just got home from West Virginia, and someone broke into our house.”

I knew all bets were off when it came to having Jackie drive home like a normal person.