Real Murders

When we reached our parking lot we finally stopped for breath. Robin hugged me and dropped a quick kiss on the top of my head, the most convenient spot for him. “That was really interesting,” he commented, and I began laughing until my sides hurt. Robin’s red eyebrows flew up, and his glasses slid down, and then he began laughing, too. I looked at my watch while I was thinking how long it had been since I’d really whooped like that, and when I saw what the time was, I told Robin I had to go change clothes. At least for a few hours, I had forgotten to be afraid about working at the library alone that night.

It had not been noticed until the last moment that no one had been scheduled to take Mr. Buckley’s place on the roster. None of the other librarians would now admit to having the evening free, and all the volunteers had been scheduled for other nights.

I told Robin this hurriedly, and he said, “I’m sure the police patrols have been stepped up. But maybe I’ll stop in on you tonight. If you need me, call me. I’ll be here.” He went in his gate and I went in mine.

As I pulled on the same blue skirt and red turtleneck I’d worn that morning, I was doing my best not to think of the hatchet. It had been unspeakable. On my drive to work I hoped that the library would be flooded with patrons so I wouldn’t have time to think.

I was taking over the checkout desk from Jane Engle, who had been substituting for one of the librarians whose child had the flu. Jane looked the same, with her perfectly neat gray hair, her perfectly clean wire-rimmed glasses, and her anonymous gray suit. But inside, I could see she was no longer a sophisticated and curious witness to the Lawrenceton murders, but a terrified woman. And she was glad to get out of the library. “All the others left at five, not a single patron’s come in since then,” she told me in a shaky voice. “And frankly, Aurora, I’ve been delighted. I’m scared to be alone with anyone anymore, no matter how well I think I know them.”

I patted Jane on the arm awkwardly. Though at times we’d eaten lunch together, mostly on days after club meetings when we wanted to discuss the program, Jane and I had had a friendly, but never intimate, relationship.

“Other people are interested in our little club for the first time,” Jane went on, “and I’ve had to answer a lot of questions no one ever bothered to ask me before. People think I’m a little strange for having belonged to Real Murders.” Jane was definitely a woman who would hate to be thought strange.

“Well,” I said hesitantly, “just because we had a different sort of hobby-.” Come to think of it, maybe we were a little strange, all of us Real Murderers, as we had sometimes called ourselves laughingly.

Ho-ho.

“One of us really is a murderer, you know,” Jane chimed in eerily. I felt my thoughts were becoming visible in a balloon over my head. “It’s gone beyond an academic interest in death and gore and psychology. I could feel it that night we met in your apartment.”

“Whom do you think it is, Jane?” I said impulsively, as she tied her scarf and extracted her keys from her purse.

“I am sure it’s someone in our club, of course, or possibly a near connection of some sort to a club member. I don’t know if this person has always been disturbed, or if he’s just now decided to play a ghastly series of tricks on his fellow members. Or maybe there is more than one murderer and they’re acting together.”

“It doesn’t have to be someone in Real Murders, Jane, just someone who doesn’t like one of us, someone who wants us to be in trouble.” She was standing by the front door by then, and I wanted her to stay as much as she wanted to go.

She shrugged, not willing to argue. “It’s frightening to me,” she said quietly, “to imagine what case I fit. I go over my books, checking out cases, to see what elderly woman living alone I resemble. What old murder victim.”

I stared at her with my mouth open. I was appalled to realize what Jane had been going through, because of her active and probably accurate mind.

Then a mother trailing two reluctant toddlers came through the door, and Jane slipped out to go home to her waiting house, to leaf through her true crime books in search of the pattern she would fit.

Thank God other people were in the library when Gifford Doakes came in, or I might have shrieked and run. Gifford, massacre enthusiast, had always sounded the warning bell in my brain that cautions me to pick and choose my conversation topics. Though I really didn’t know too much about him, I’d always kept my distance from Gifford and limited my contact with him to the bare bones of courtesy.

You wanted to be polite to Gifford. You were a little scared not to be.

I had no idea what Gifford did for a living, but he dressed like a “Miami Vice” drug lord, in extremely stylish clothes and with his long brown hair carefully arranged. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a shoulder holster under his jacket.

Maybe Gifford was a drug lord.

And here he came now, gliding over to the checkout desk. I glanced around; that dynamic twosome, Melanie Clark and Bankston Waites, had come in a few minutes previously, their heads close together and laughing, and I could now see Bankston upstairs in the biography section, while Melanie was flipping through Good Housekeeping in the magazine area on the ground floor. Probably looking for a new meatloaf recipe. But bless her, she was there within call.

Gifford was right across the desk from me, and my hand closed over the nearest thing, which proved to be the stapler. A really effective deterrent, I told myself bitterly. I could see his shadow, Reynaldo, standing outside the double glass doors, pacing around in the near-dark of the parking lot. He would pass through a pool of light from the arc lamps that provided safety for the lot-theoretically-and then vanish into the gloom, reappearing seconds later.

“How ya doing, Roe?” Gifford asked perfunctorily.

“Um. Okay.”

“Listen, I hear you and that writer found the murder weapon in the Buckley case today.”

The Buckley case? I had a sudden vision of an anthology of accounts of the decade’s most notable murders, and of Lizanne’s parents’ slaughter being included. Other people would read about their deaths, and speculate, as I had speculated about other unsolved cases. Could it have been The Daughter? Or the Policeman who also belonged to the Real Murders Club? I realized that these murders would be made into a book… maybe by Joe McGuinniss or Joan Barthel or Robin, if his taste for it revived… and I would be in it, because of the chocolates. Maybe just “when the candy arrived at the home of Mrs. Teagarden’s daughter Aurora…”

For a minute I was very confused. Was I in a book about old murders that I was reading, or was this all happening to me now? It would be nice to have the distance a book would give me. But Gifford’s one earring was all too real, and the leopard-like pacing of Reynaldo-in the prosaic library parking lot!-was all too real, too.

“Tell me about the ax,” Gifford was demanding.

“It was a hatchet, Gifford. An ax wouldn’t fit in a briefcase.” I was immediately furious with myself for contradicting a scarey guy like Gifford; but then I consciously realized what my unconscious must have noted. Gifford Doakes was a man with a mission, and he was not interested in sidetracks.

“This long?” He held his hands apart.

“Yes, about.” Standard hatchet size.

“Wood handle with black tape wrapped around the grip?”

“Yes,” I agreed. I had forgotten the tape until he mentioned it.

“Damn,” he hissed, and then he said a few other things, and his dark eyes blinked rapidly. Gifford Doakes was a frightened man and a furious one. I was scared as hell, too, not only of the murderer but more immediately of Gifford.

Who was maybe also the murderer.

I gripped the stapler even harder, and felt like a fool planning to battle a crazy man with a stapler that even, I suddenly remembered, contained no staples. Well, strike that line of defense.

“Now I have to go to the police station,” Gifford said unexpectedly. “That’s my hatchet, I’m almost positive. Reynaldo found out it was missing yesterday.”

I laid down the stapler very gently on my desk, glanced upward and saw Bankston looking over the second-floor railing. He raised his eyebrows in a silent query. I shook my head. I didn’t think I needed help anymore. I thought Gifford was just as nervous as the rest of us, and for good reason. At this moment, sophisticated pageboy and