Chapter 6
The voice on the phone said, “This is Steve Goolsby from Goodwinkle Security Systems. The alarm on Color Me Read is going off. We have notified the police.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much.” I hung up and dialed Professor Maxwell’s number as I ran upstairs, limping just a tad from the bruise on my leg. I was holding the phone with one hand and pulling on a pair of pedal pushers when his elderly butler Mr. DuBois answered in a very grouchy tone.
“Do you know what time it is? Of course you do. You have a hundred clocks.”
I slid a blue short-sleeved top over my head. “The alarm is going off at the store. I thought Professor Maxwell should know.” I rushed downstairs, holding the phone to my ear. Peaches recognized my panic and ran along with me as I dashed through the carriage house.
While I popped the top on a can of cat salmon and dumped the contents into Peaches’s plate, I realized there had been a long silence from Mr. DuBois. “Hello? Are you there?”
“I am, but Maxwell is not.”
To Peaches I whispered, “I’ll be back later, but I don’t know when.”
Still on the phone, I grabbed my purse, and locked the door behind me.
“Okay. No problem. I’ll have to handle it. Where is he?”
“Miss Florrie! How many times do I have to tell you that I do not gossip?”
I was too worried about the store to laugh. Mr. DuBois loved to gossip. Maxwell had recently rekindled his relationship with his ex-wife. She often stayed over at the mansion. “I’m sure Jacquie knows where he is.”
“I doubt that. Jacquie is off at some romance writer convention in Las Vegas. I’m quite concerned about Maxwell. I don’t like him staying out all night. It’s not like him.”
While I would have been happy to learn more, it just wasn’t the right time. “When he comes in, tell him what’s going on.” I said goodbye and hung up. And for the second time in twelve hours, I did my best to run. The streets of Georgetown were still sleepy. Few houses had lights on yet. I hadn’t run an entire block when I slowed to a rapid walk, which probably was about the same speed as my inept running had been.
I tried to calm myself by thinking Professor Maxwell had probably arrived at the office in the middle of the night and simply forgotten to shut off the burglar alarm. He hadn’t done it before, but it was certainly possible.
I heard the alarm blaring as I power-walked closer. When I rounded the corner and saw two police cars parked in front of the store and no sign of the professor, those hopes faded fast. A uniformed officer casually walked toward me. “Are you the manager?”
“Yes. What happened?”
“We got a call from your alarm company. The front door is locked.” The name on his uniform said Petrocelli.
“That’s odd. Unless”—I hated to even imagine this possible scenario—“the owner arrived and something happened to him so that he couldn’t turn off the alarm.”
The officer looked at me askance. “I doubt that. Not many people would arrive at their place of work this early.”
“He does. Professor Maxwell doesn’t seem to have an internal clock.”
Another officer joined us as we walked up the few stairs to the entrance.
When we reached the top and I pulled out my key, Petrocelli said, “I want you to unlock the door, but you stay out here on the sidewalk while we go inside. Understand?”
“No problem.” I had no desire whatsoever to encounter a burglar. I unlocked the door for the officers and scampered down to the sidewalk.
Petrocelli opened the door. The two officers entered Color Me Read.
I waited outside with adrenaline pumping through me. I reasoned that the burglar had probably left as soon as the alarm blared. There was nothing to be nervous about. He was probably long gone.
To see above the awning that ran across the front of the building, I backed up as far as I could go without stepping into the street.
The beams of flashlights flicked by the display windows on the first floor as the officers swept the building. Seconds later, someone ran out the front door. I moved closer, thinking it was a cop, but he or she wore a ski mask that covered his face.
I shrieked in surprise and shock. Those ski masks were some kind of scary! The person looked straight at me for what must have been seconds but felt like minutes. He turned right and hightailed it along the sidewalk. I yelled, “He’s running down the street!”
The cops must not have heard me over the alarm that was still ringing.
I backed up to the street again and waved my arms in case one of them looked outside.
The second-floor windows were tall French doors that opened to a tiny balcony that ran the width of the building. They were dark, as were the windows on the third floor.
Suddenly, one of the French doors on the second floor opened and someone stepped out. Thinking it must be a police officer, I yelled, “He went that way!” And I pointed to the right.
The person jumped onto the awning, slid off it, and landed feet first in a squat. He was dressed all in black, definitely not one of the officers. I couldn’t see his face. He touched the sidewalk briefly to stabilize himself and took off running.
It happened in a matter of seconds. I ran up the stairs to the front door. Remaining outside, I yelled again. “They’re out here!”
Over the blaring alarm, I could barely hear footsteps on the bookstore stairs as Petrocelli ran down. I stepped aside and pointed in the direction the people had gone. Even with the showroom lights of the stores that lined the street and the prominent streetlights I couldn’t make anyone out. They had disappeared into the night.
Petrocelli jogged along the sidewalk but he was too late. He trudged back to me, calling in on his radio. I hoped another squad car in the area might intercept the burglars.
When he put his radio away, he said, “Come inside and turn off that blasted alarm.”
I entered the bookstore and gazed around in horror. The burglars had done a number behind the checkout counter. All the special orders that were waiting to be picked up now lay haphazardly on the floor. They had torn a framed poster off the wall that said Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.—Mark Twain.
“I would assume that your visitors don’t have a sleepy conscience,” quipped Petrocelli.
He watched while I punched in the code. The sudden silence was almost deafening after the blare of the siren.
“Stay out there where you were while we finish,” said Petrocelli. “We need to make sure there wasn’t anyone else.”
It irritated me not to have my watch on. How could I have skipped putting it on? I estimated that it only took them another ten minutes, though it felt like hours before they appeared on the stoop. Petrocelli asked, “Would you please come inside?”
I returned to the store and walked to the middle of the mess behind the checkout counter. “It doesn’t look like they tried to break into the cash register.”
“How can you tell?” asked Petrocelli.
“They were pretty brutal with everything else, but there aren’t any scratches or obvious attempts to break into the cash register.”
“Don’t touch anything. We’ll need to check for fingerprints.”
I nodded and stepped into the parlor. The furniture hadn’t been slashed or turned over, but the cushions were on the floor. They didn’t come to destroy the store. They hadn’t come looking for cash. They had been looking for something else, and I thought I might know what it was.
I turned to Petrocelli. “I think they may have been looking for The Florist. It’s a rare book. The woman who discovered it . . .” I paused, unsure how to phrase what had happened to Dolly. Should I say she was murdered? They hadn’t decided that for sure. I kept it simple. “The woman who found the book is now dead.”
After that, of course, it seemed prudent to tell them the whole story.
Petrocelli stepped away and made a phone call.
The other officer smiled at me. “It’s probably just a coincidence.”
Really? I didn’t think so. What kind of burglars ignored the cash register and ripped cushions off a sofa in a store? I didn’t think for one minute that they were hoping to find loose change that had fallen out of pockets. Nope. Those guys were looking for something. Something that someone would have hidden. I wondered if they had torn apart the rare book room on the third floor. With any luck, they hadn’t known that we had a rare book room or maybe they hadn’t made it up to the third floor before the cops arrived.
I peeked into the children’s book room. It was in surprisingly good shape, which I thought supported my theory.
Then it dawned on me that while I didn’t live that far away, it must have taken me at least ten minutes to get to the bookstore. I whipped around. “When did you arrive?”
The cop looked at me in surprise. “Just before you did.”
“So those guys heard the alarm going off and were willing to hang around anyway for ten minutes?”
“The pros figure they’ve got a couple of minutes.”
They figured right. I guessed they might have been walking up the stairs or checking the basement when the police cars pulled up. “You didn’t have your siren on?”
He shook his head. “Not for something like this. We thought it might be a silent alarm and didn’t want to scare away the perpetrator.”
I guessed that made sense. Still, it had to take some very serious guts to search while an alarm was going off and everyone was being notified. I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate. It did explain, however, why they were so sloppy. There wasn’t time to do anything but run through the store slinging things around.
“Did you check the basement?” I asked.
The cop looked annoyed.
Thankfully, at that very moment, Eric dashed into the store. He grabbed me by the upper arms and looked into my face. “Are you all right?”
I couldn’t help smiling. He looked so sincere. “I’m fine. I was at home asleep when the alarm went off. How did you hear about it?”
He took a deep breath. “I was at home asleep, too. But I got a call from the station. Something about a connection to Dolly’s death.”
“That’s my fault. I think the burglar was searching for The Florist.”
I explained my reasoning to Eric but the whole time I talked, I could see the cynical expression on the other cop’s face.
“So,” said the other cop. “Some old lady died, and you think that someone broke into your bookstore in search of her book? Sheesh.”
Eric squeezed my hand, and I knew he didn’t agree with the other guy.
“If I don’t touch anything, may I look upstairs?” I asked.
“Yeah. Be my guest.”
The second I started up the stairs, I could hear the other cop say, “What a crock. Does she really think we’re going to chase down a couple of two-bit burglars for breaking and entering a lousy bookstore?”
I wanted to cut him some slack. Maybe he was tired of his job. Maybe he was jaded from having seen too many truly terrible things. Maybe he didn’t care about crime anymore and was waiting for his time to run out so he could collect retirement pay. But my efforts to justify what he had said didn’t work. I was ticked off with him for not caring more about the people who counted on him. Maybe this was a two-bit bookstore to him, but it mattered to a lot of people. Not to mention that he might have been a little more sympathetic about Dolly’s death. She wasn’t just some old lady.
The second-floor rooms were a disaster area. If I was correct and the burglars had been looking for The Florist, then I could understand why they couldn’t delicately look at every single book. But did they have to knock them all on the floor?
It was six in the morning by the time the police collected fingerprints. Thankfully, Petrocelli and the other cop were gone. Eric and I sat outside of the store on a bench sharing a takeout breakfast of lattes and freshly baked ham croissants.
“Do you think we’ll be able to open the store today?” I asked.
“Sure. Florrie, I’m personally going to follow up on the fingerprints, but I don’t want you to be disappointed if they don’t lead anywhere.”
I swallowed a sip of the bracing latte. “I’ve been thinking about it. You’re not going to find anything. If they were smart enough to know how much time they had before anyone arrived, then they probably wore gloves.”
“Did you notice gloves on either of them?”
“It all happened so fast. I hate to admit it, but I was so astonished that I didn’t notice much of anything. But I think the burglars might have done this before.”
“Broken into Color Me Read?”
“I mean I think they were professionals. That sounds weird. Can you be a professional thief? Is that an oxymoron? I heard that cop minimizing the importance of the break-in, but here’s what I think. The burglars had the confidence and guts to look for something in the store with the alarm ringing. They knew people were being alerted. A common thief would have left immediately. It wouldn’t have been worth it to him to be caught. The alarm would have scared him away. But these guys knew they had about eight to ten minutes, maybe more, before anyone arrived to check things out. They didn’t stop at the cash register, try to get into it, and leave. They didn’t just vandalize the store, either. They were looking for something specific. They knew what they were after, and it was something worth enough to them to take the risk of searching even though an alarm was going off the whole time.”