A Death Long Overdue
A LIGHTHOUSE LIBRARY MYSTERY
Eva Gates
To: Mom
Acknowledgments
Since the publication of the first Lighthouse Library novel, By Book or By Crook, I’ve been overwhelmed by the support and enthusiasm of the cozy-reading community. Your encouragement has kept this series going and I am sincerely grateful.
Thanks to Kim Lionetti and Linda Wiken for tossing ideas around with me over a delicious breakfast somewhere in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Sometimes all a book needs is a spark.
Thanks also to the team at Crooked Lane Books and my marvelous agent Kim Lionetti from Bookends, without whom Lucy, Charles, and the gang wouldn’t be able to get into so much trouble.
Shelagh Mathers made the winning bid at auction as part of the Women Killing It Authors Festival to have a character in this book named after her mother. And thus we have Margaret Hurley, librarian. I hope you like my Margaret, Shelagh.
Chapter One
Reunions can be tricky things. Everyone involved approaches the gathering bursting with excitement and full of high expectations. Sometimes it turns out well: friends reconnect, photos of children and grandchildren are shared and exclaimed over, accomplishments praised, new friends made, and old enemies reconciled. Sometimes—not. Long-buried grievances are given fresh air, friendships doubted, old jealousies and resentments remembered, and new ones discovered.
Everyone goes home miserable and tells their loved ones they had a marvelous time.
Ten years later they do it all again.
I don’t actually know this from personal experience. I missed my high school class’s tenth reunion because it was the same weekend as my second brother’s wedding. I would have preferred to attend the reunion. My brothers and I are not close, but family is family, my mother says when it suits her to think so. Besides, my sister in-law has no sisters or female cousins, so I had to be a bridesmaid. I’ll never forgive her for that frilly shocking-pink dress I was forced to wear. I’m short enough that I looked like a cartoon character in it. The humidity had done its work on my curly dark hair, adding to the cartoon aspect, and the color didn’t go well with the bad case of sunburn I’d suffered the weekend before.
Last year, I missed my college’s tenth reunion because I’d just arrived here, in the Outer Banks, to take up the post of assistant director of the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library. Everyone wrote to tell me they’d had a marvelous time.
Right now, I was sincerely hoping Bertie James’s fortieth reunion to mark her class’s first day of undergrad studies would turn out to be the success she was expecting.
“Our exhibit might not exactly be worthy of the Bodleian,” Charlene Clayton said, referring to the great English library where she’d worked for a few years, “but it’s impressive enough.”
“Speaking as a North Carolinian,” Bertie replied, “I’m mighty impressed.”
“Your friends and colleagues will love it.” I added under my breath, “I hope.”
We stood back and admired the display—the history of libraries in North Carolina. Charlene and I had gathered artifacts from near and far and worked hard over the past few days to put it together. We were proudly showing it off to Bertie James, our boss and the library director.
The idea for the exhibit had been Charlene’s, something to show Bertie’s college class when they gathered tomorrow evening for the start of their reunion weekend at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library.
We’d put the display together in secret, working into the night after Bertie had left for the day, our activities concealed behind old sheets strung across the entrance to the library’s alcove, and “Keep Out” signs prominently displayed. When the library was open, we’d stationed Charles, one of our more formidable staff members, at the entrance to keep the curious—Bertie most of all—out.
Now it was time for the big reveal. At closing time on Thursday evening, library staff, board members, invited Friends of the Library, and lingering patrons had gathered to see it. Charlene ripped away the sheets; Charles returned to his favorite wingback chair next to the magazine rack to wash his whiskers and have a snooze; and everyone had suitably oohed and aahed.
“I doubt,” Ronald Burkowski, our children’s librarian, said, “the Bodleian could have done better with the materials available.”
Bertie clapped her hands. “You people are amazing.”
“I’ll second that,” Charlene said modestly.
“Meow,” added Charles from his chair.
The exhibit was a collection of old photographs of libraries in North Carolina, as well as items librarian friends had sent us or we’d been able to uncover in the depths of the town hall basement. Stuff was down there that probably hadn’t been seen by a human being since the building was first built.
We’d found a real card catalog and displayed it with the narrow drawers open to show the neat rows of little typewriter-printed cards; there was also a selection of photos showing enormous rooms full of row upon row of the neatly labeled wooden cabinets.
Charlene pointed to a sign I’d hung on the back wall next to the window, showing a woman’s plump red lips with her index finger pressed to them, and the word “Silence” in loud black print. “I cannot begin to imagine how they kept the kids quiet when story time let out.”
“I have a vison of them descending the stairs in a calm, neat little row,” Ronald said, “faces scrubbed, hair combed, socks pulled up, shirts tucked in, not saying a word under the stern eye of the children’s librarian. Not.”
One of the photographs was of two women, in floor-sweeping skirts, high-necked blouses with puffy sleeves, and hair pulled sharply back, organizing a bookshelf, and another showed a woman on horseback, with a jaunty hat and split skirt, cradling a stack of books in her free hand. We laughed over a staff picture from the 1960s of the librarians—all women of course—with their big hair and orange and brown dresses or twin sets with pearls. Photos of patrons showed more big hair, along with flowery
