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Saturday, April 20, 1996
You are right, Widelap. I am not fat. My tummy is a little rounder than it has been in the past. Even running up and down those library stairs could not counteract the effect of all those mouse dinners, and you have been feeding me very well since I moved in with you. I have to admit I like living here, knowing that I do not have to catch my own dinner, and having your soft, roomy lap to jump onto whenever I need it.
The purr stopped for a moment, then continued.
I hate to admit it, but I am as stumped as my humans are. I must have been in the attic stalking that really sneaky mouse with the white whiskers when the murder happened. I probably should have heard something. Ordinarily I would have, but I was so intent on my hunting, I suppose I might have missed a quiet murder. Maybe I was finishing off the mouse while Antlerbagman was getting killed. What I did was not a murder; it was an execution. A fine point, perhaps, but I am meticulous about such things.
I remember stopping at my litter box on the third floor right after I left the attic. Then I strolled halfway down the stairs before I smelled the blood–and the car oil.
It was then, I think, that I heard the sound of that unfamiliar door opening and closing. Later, when I met Softfoot and led him to the front door, I ran in and out to show him how the Sneakman and the other one had left that way. I am happy to say he seemed to understand because he carefully checked the ground where their smells were.
I looked down again at the silky bundle purring in my lap. About a month after the murder, when I hadn’t seen a mouse, dead or alive, for a week or so, Marmalade followed me out the library door late one afternoon. Always before she had walked me to the door, purred a good-bye, and stayed inside to hunt as I left for home. But that day she must have known the rodent problem was under control ...
Of course I knew it. Once I caught Whitewhiskers, it was just a short cleanup campaign.
... and she wouldn’t be needed on the night patrol anymore. She strolled out onto the porch with me, sat down as if to wait for me to lock the door, and then followed me down the block to Azalea House, where I was staying with Melissa Tarkington.
Melissa ran the closest thing to a bed-and-breakfast that Martinsville has ever known. She didn’t rent to just anyone. No, she had a few regular customers who came the same time every year. She used to joke that it was almost like one of those time-share condos in the junk mail ads.
When I was hired last year, Melissa was without her regular March/ April/May clients, who had left on a yearlong jaunt around the world. That meant they wouldn’t be there for their usual three months in 1996 either, but they wanted to reserve their space, so they asked Melissa if they could pay half their usual rent for 1996. Melissa agreed, with the understanding that she could rent the rooms to someone else for that time period. She’d heard that the library trustees were looking for a cheap place to rent for the new librarian. They figured the salary was so small, they had to sweeten the pot a bit. Melissa told them she’d rent them the rooms for half the usual monthly amount. Nobody ever stayed there through the summer anyway, so Melissa came out on the sweet end of the deal. Her half-price clients were happy, the town council saved money, Melissa made extra money, and I didn’t have to worry about housing for a year. It was a case of win/win/win/win.
The best thing was that Melissa and I gradually became very good friends. I cooked soup for her. She cooked breakfast for me. In the evenings, we spent a lot of time just talking, sharing pots of tea, solving the problems of the world. We laughed together and sometimes cried together. I’d been there only five months when her favorite nephew was killed in a car accident. A drunk driver from Enders, a town down the river from here, rammed the boy’s bike off the road and over that steep embankment between here and Braetonburg. The guardrails didn’t help Jake at all, but they saved the drunk driver from going over the edge.
Anyway, that first evening that Marmalade followed me home, I asked Melissa if it was okay for me to keep a cat. She knew Marmalade from the library and agreed right away, especially since the regulars had a cat that came with them every year.
Long white hair. Lazy as the dickens. Smells like canned tuna. Likes to sleep on the long bench in the sun.
Later that evening Marmalade and I sat together on a curved garden bench beside the Acer palmatum dissectum. The Japanese laceleaf maple tree was surrounded by the banks of flame azaleas that the bed and breakfast was named for. And the late afternoon sun threw the maple-leaf shadows over Marmalade’s fur. She watched my face as I talked to her about the way I was feeling about that sweet policeman who was investigating the murder. She acted like she knew what I was talking about, and she purred her encouragement.
You will figure it out some day.
A week or so later I took her up to the vet in Russell Gap to have her spayed.
~~~~~
FROM THE STATEMENT of Melissa Tarkington to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
Of course I’ve talked about it. Everybody’s talking about it ... Yes, she’s living at Azalea House, my bed & breakfast ... Yes, I do remember. She went up to bed a little after ten o’clock ... I think she’s a lovely lady, and we’re getting to be good friends ... Yes, I’ve started going to the library at least once a week.
... No, I don’t think I ever saw him there ... I wear a seven, more or less. It depends on the style ... No, I don’t know why he was in the library.
~~~~~
SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 1996
It’s hard now to believe how much has happened in just a year ...
I had an operation, for one thing.
... and, looking back, I realize that Bob didn’t really ask me out or anything, not at first. Yet we ended up spending a lot of time together. We had several discussions at his office or at the library and often at the deli. He kept saying that he had to get the full picture for the murder investigation. But we’d find we were talking about the way we’d grown up in nearby towns without knowing each other existed. He’s only five years older than I. He’d tell me about wanting to play baseball, but not being able to see the ball. Getting glasses in seventh grade. Entering the science fair his freshman year with a project on diabetes, and having his poster board, with its little packets of sugar, eaten by mice ...
You just cannot trust those critters. They can get into anything.
... the night before the judging. He said he really understood what Marmalade was up against.
I told Bob about my mother the potter, and my dad the music teacher, both of whom had loved me enough to let me shoulder the responsibility for my own decisions. “Write your own music, and then play it with passion,” is what my dad had told me on my fourteenth birthday. He gave me a packet of composers’ paper, with the pre-printed five-lined staffs. I don’t think he meant for me to write music literally, but just that he trusted me to listen to the music in my heart. When I told him, close to my twenty-third birthday, that I was going to marry Sol Brandy, his only question was, “Does this guy make your heart sing?” And I’d said yes.
Marmalade listened to most of those discussions that Bob and I had. Sometimes I’d be the one with the cat on my lap. Sometimes Bob would hold her. Sometimes Marmalade would just crouch off to one side, with her tail curled around her feet. That tail outlined where the carrots would have been if she’d been a meatloaf.
It took Bob six months to get around to proposing. We got along so well, although he usually drank coffee. I usually drank tea.
I always drink water.
He was a cop. I was a librarian. He knew people. I knew plants and books. He’d been divorced after six years of an early unfortunate marriage. I’d been widowed. He liked Mahler. I preferred Mozart. Neither of us had or wanted a TV set. We both liked to walk. We both treasured silence. He kept a journal that he wrote in each morning, and sometimes at night. I kept a journal that I wrote in each night, and sometimes in the morning.
His first gift to me was a dozen Allium giganteum bulbs. He said if I planted those giant onions, they’d grow taller than my granddaughter, and she’d like that. I guess he had me pegged right from the start. Last month I dug up some of the bulbs of the huge onion-like plants, which had grown taller than four-year-old Verity, to bring here. They’re planted between the front steps ...
Where the cricket sings all the time.
... and the sweet-smelling Winter Daphne bush.
We both wanted a cozy house right from the start. His house on Upper Sweetgum Street was way too small, and my rented rooms at Azalea House had been a temporary landing place from the moment I’d moved to town. I adored the lovely yard with the bench under the Japanese maple. I appreciated its proximity to the library, but it was still only a temporary shelter.
Before we started house hunting, we put together a treasure map. I’d read about that process (self-help section, third shelf in the red room), but Bob said he had done it before. I found out months later that he’d made a treasure map, a dream board, of his ideal life partner several months before I showed up in town. He had wanted a self-sufficient, companionable woman in her mid-forties. He wanted someone with gray hair, and what he delicately called “an ample armful, easy to hug and hold.” He also wanted someone who would hug back!
I was talking about the house, though. We’d wanted it to be within easy walking distance of the town center, with a generous sized front yard, a big back yard with room for a garden, a deep porch with enough room for a swing and a couple of rocking chairs. One good-sized bedroom, one office-sized room, one sewing/craft room. No guest bedrooms, because we didn’t plan on having my kids ever come to live with us, but we did want a comfortable sofa that would make out into a bed for temporary guests, so we needed a big enough living room to accommodate it. No formal dining room, but a kitchen large enough for a table. We needed a big laundry area so we could put a litter box in there. All our wants said “big,” but we wanted all of it arranged in a smallish-sized house.
Except for the “small” part, we got what we wanted. Mrs. Hoskins, of the multi-colored mailbox, moved to the new retirement center in Hastings, and her house was up for sale. There were, besides the mailbox—green the day we looked at the house—a wide porch, which she insisted on calling the verandah, on three sides, two big bedrooms and a bunch of small ones upstairs—I kept those closed since we didn’t use them, as well as an area for a sewing center, an office downstairs, anenormous living room, a small and very dark powder room under the stairs, the eat-in kitchen with a nook tucked into a bay window, and a huge attic that holds lots of furniture and doo-dads and old trunks that were left by the previous owners. Mrs. Hoskins didn’t want to deal with all that stuff, so she just left them. I’ll probably get around to tackling the attic next spring during the cool weather.
The back yard was completely fenced in. Mrs. Hoskins had a much-loved dog named Barley that had lived with her for years. As a pup he played all over the yard, fetching sticks and balls as long as Mr. or Mrs. Hoskins would toss them. After Mr. Hoskins died suddenly of a ruptured appendix, Barley was a comfort to the widowed wife. He always sat with her while she gardened. As he got older, he began to plod around the perimeter of the yard, marking his realm on all the fence posts every day, maintaining his rights as the ruler of his backyard kingdom. Sometimes he’d snooze under the line of Leyland Cypress trees, shaded from the afternoon sun.
Mrs. Hoskins had wanted to move to Hastings for years, but the retirement center wouldn’t accept dogs. So she stayed here until Barley took his last walk around the fence line, came back to where she was sitting on the porch steps, and died quietly in her arms. He’s buried under the dogwood tree in the back yard. The next week, Mrs. Hoskins asked Paul Welsh, who lives directly across the street behind that huge hedge of Ligustrum lucidum, to replace a couple of broken fence posts so she could put the house on the market.
Marmalade liked her laundry-room, and she’s liked the rest of the house, too. So have I. The one-year lease was up at the bed & breakfast last month, so I went ahead and moved in here. I’m renting it, and we’ll close on it after the wedding.
When I moved to Martinsville, I kept the old house in Braetonburg. My Sally and her Jason were tired of renting, so they moved in to house-sit until I decided what I wanted to do. Now it looks like I’ll be selling them the house. A good deal for them, and I’ll enjoy having them there. Of course, Sally painted the living room orange. She wanted to change some of the ‘mama decorating’ to make the place more her own. I understand. As long as she doesn’t sell the big bed. It has too many good memories, but it belongs in that house, not in this one.
Speaking of which, Bob comes to visit a lot, but he doesn’t spend the night here. I’m old-fashioned, as I’ve said before, and so is he. Also, I’m the librarian and he’s the town cop. We have a lot of eyes on us.
After our wedding next week, Bob has promised to build a whole series of Bob’s Original Cat Trees and Scratching Posts to grace some of the corners. Meanwhile, Marmalade’s pretty good at levitating to the top of six-foot bookcases, so she has her own baskets up there. Last week one of the baskets crashed onto the office desk. Luckily Marmy bailed out on the way down, but Bob came over that evening and anchored them with ingenious little dowel and wing nut devices of his own invention.
To continue with the house tour, I love this “vestibule” as Mrs. Hoskins calls it. Inside the front door is an ample greeting area, as wide as it is deep. There’s room for the elegant old oak drop-leaf table that Mother Brandy gave me as a wedding present when I married her son. She had received it on her wedding day from her mother-in-law. A good tradition. I’ll pass it on to Scott’s wife, if he ever gets married.
You could keep it. I like the legs. They have those bumpy edges. Great for rubbing my sides on.
Right now Scott’s having so much fun living in Alaska, climbing glaciers and working at the University there, I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. For now, there’s room on the table for a huge vase of forsythia or dahlias, or whatever is blooming. I’m going to keep flowers there all the time, like the daisies Bob brought me yesterday.
Good idea.
Above the table, which Marmalade loves to rub against, by the way, is the staircase. It rises from the left to the right. We have to walk over to the left, toward the living room, to get to the bottom of the stairs. If we walk to the right instead, we enter the kitchen, which stretches along the east side of the house.
The stairway heads up to a landing, then turns and parallels itself to the second floor, where our bedroom will take up the whole north side of the house onc we knock out a wall or two. Mrs. Hoskins told us to be sure to investigate the attic, although I haven’t gotten around to that yet. There’ll be plenty of time for all of that, once the house is really ours.
~~~~~
FROM THE STATEMENT of Paul Welsh to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
Sure, I knew him pretty well ... Yes, that’s right. I live one house down the street, directly across from Elizabeth Hoskins ... No, I was out of town. I took my son to visit his great-grandmother in Americus ... She lives in a nursing home there ... We stayed with my brother ... Yes, I picked Cory up after school on Friday and we drove straight there ... Today. We pulled in about two hours ago ... Of course he wasn’t in any trouble! He was a great guy, and I liked him a lot ... Library? No, I don’t know why he was in the library.
~~~~~
JUNE 1988
Hastings was a small community, but it had many businesses, such as the retirement home, that served the entire county. Cherokee Motors, the car dealership owned by Tony Cecchini, who was the cousin of Harlan’s mother, needed a good mechanic. Of course, Harlan stepped into the job as if it had just been waiting for him to leave the army. He felt like he’d been training for it all his life. He was well liked right from the start by the other mechanics at the dealership. The women in the front office liked him too. Both of them wanted to marry him off to their daughters, but he quietly refused their frequent invitations to meals.
Tony Cecchini, whose Cherokee mother had married an Italian guy from Long Island, was a big, brash, loud-spoken man with a heavy head of straight black hair that he pulled back into a pony tail, thereby going against the grain of this conservative community. Not only that, he offended almost everyone in sight with his tasteless television ads. When he first came up with the idea, in the fall of 1988, he tried to talk his cousin’s son into playing the lead role in the ads, but Harlan had taken one look at the script and declined. Respectfully, but definitely. Every six months or so, Tony wrote a slightly different version of the ad, each one worse than the one before. By 1995, Tony was striding onto the screen each night, bare chested and carrying a huge hatchet, right before the 6:00 news. Harlan cringed every time he saw it.
“This is Tomahawk Tony, down at Cherokee Motors in Hastings. We’re slashing prices right and left to give you the best deal ever.” Tony waved the hatchet and let out an ersatz war whoop. “Remember, we’re the ones who kept our word, white man. You can count on us at Cherokee Motors for the best deals in the county. New or Used, you can trust a car from a Cherokee.”
It was horrible. It was worse than horrible. It was disgusting. Apparently, though, it was just zany enough to capture the notice of the masses, who flocked to Hastings to buy their vehicles from that weird guy on TV. Each buyer received a card, suitable for framing and personally signed by Tomahawk Tony, that said:
“You did us wrong, but we do you right.”
~~~~~
FROM THE STATEMENT of Anthony “Tony” Cecchini to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
What else can I tell you? Yes, he worked for me, but he was family ... He was the son of my cousin, my mother’s sister’s grandson. We were close. Our whole family is close ... I don’t know, but when I find out who done it, you may have another murder on your hands ... Library? What do I know about a library?