“I’ve got to get through,” I said, “I have an appointment at police headquarters. With Detective Scotty Grant. About a murder.”
He folded his arms, so his elbows were level with my ears. “This is City Hall, ma’am.”
“And police headquarters is on the other side,” I said.
“Then you’ll have to go around.”
My civility was waning. “There are barricades on that side, too. And a goon worse than you, more than likely.”
“Please move back, ma’am.”
Now my common sense was waning. “For Pete’s sake! Do I look like the kind of woman the president needs to worry about?”
Two of the agent’s clones appeared out of nowhere. They let me through the barricade, all right. But not before confiscating my purse and clamping a pair of handcuffs on my dangerous wrists. A minute later I was in a trailer behind City Hall, justifying my very existence to this pair of extremely unfriendly young men. Their names were Canfield and Morris. They took turns bouncing questions off me, like I was a Ping-Pong table.
“My name is Dolly Madison Sprowls,” I said. “Although I go by Maddy-for obvious reasons-and I’m the head librarian at The Hannawa Herald-Union -that’s the newspaper here.”
“You have some proof of that?” Agent Canfield asked.
I pointed to my purse, which he was cradling on his lap. “No, but you do.”
He blushed and dug out my wallet. He studied my business card and my driver’s license and all the rest. He asked me if I knew my address and my phone number and my Social Security number. I rattled off all three.
“Why did you threaten the president?” asked Agent Morris.
“I did not threaten the president,” I said. “I merely asked the other agent if I looked like the kind of woman the president needs to be concerned about.”
Agent Canfield corrected me. “You said ‘worry about,’ ma’am.”
“I suppose in your business worry sets off more alarms than concern, ” I conceded. “In mine they’re pretty much tweedledum and tweedledee.”
“So you had no intentions of confronting the president?” Agent Morris asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“The agent at the line felt you were exhibiting anger,” said Agent Canfield.
“Poop! I was just worried- concerned -about getting to my appointment with Detective Grant.”
Asked Agent Morris, “And who is Detective Grant?”
“Chief homicide detective with the Hannawa Police,” I said.
“And why was it,” Agent Canfield wondered, “that you wanted to see a homicide detective at the very location where the president was about to speak?”
“I’m helping him solve a murder.”
“This Detective Grant needs help solving murders, does he?” asked Agent Morris.
“All the help he can get,” I said.
I was convincing enough that Agent Canfield called Detective Grant to confirm our meeting. Which was, as they say, problematic. I didn’t actually have an appointment with Grant. I’d just planned to pop in and ruin his lunch, as usual.
Canfield put the phone down. He pulled his sunglasses down so I could see his cold eyes. “He said he’s never heard of you.” Then he smiled somewhat humanly. “Actually, Mrs. Sprowls, he’s on his way to take custody of you.”
“Take custody! What do you mean take custody?”
Ten minutes later Grant and I were fighting our way across the front of City Hall. The president’s motorcade had just pulled up and the crowd was going nuts. “Had you bothered to call for an appointment, you would have found out that I was on security detail today,” Grant yelled into my ear.
“Does this mean we can’t talk?” I yelled back.
“We can talk,” he assured me. “If you don’t mind sharing the stage with the president of the United States.”
“If the president doesn’t mind, I don’t mind.”
And so my meeting with Detective Grant was held on the top step of City Hall, surrounded by the Hemphill College Marching Bear Cat Band. On a makeshift stage fifty steps below us stood the president, the governor, the mayor, two U.S. senators, a gaggle of congressmen, a herd of local politicians. Below them was a great horseshoe of Hannawans, some with signs, some with children on their shoulders, all thrilled to pieces to be participating in this unimportant historic event. I waited until the president got to the podium then got to the business at hand. “So, Scotty-have you questioned Eddie again?”
Grant’s eyes were on the backsides of the politicians in front of us, but at least his mind was on me. Some of it, anyway. “Again and again,” he said.
“But nothing new to report?”
“Nothing new to report.”
The president was getting a resounding cheer about something. I raised my voice. “What about the sex change thing? Getting anywhere with that?”
“We’re still working it.”
“In other words, nothing new there either.”
“Nothing new there either.”
The president was now saying something about the American can-do spirit. The crowd was wildly agreeing. “You know what your problem is, Scotty?” I said. “You’re getting too much sleep. It makes the mind sluggish.”
He knew I was playing with him. And he knew he had no choice but to play along. “Been lying awake nights, have you?”
“Thinking and thinking.”
“I’ve been meaning to try that myself.”
“You should. It can help you unravel the most interesting mysteries.”
“For instance?”
Now the president was saying something about the future. The crowd was all for it, apparently. “Well, for instance, who Violeta Bell was before she was Violeta Bell.”
Grant was done playing. “You know for sure?”
“Not 100 percent sure,” I admitted. “But I think there’s a very strong possibility that the late Violeta Bell was, once upon a time, the late brother of Prince Anton Clopotar, pretender to the throne of Romania.”
It was as if I’d just told him he’d won the state lottery and then explained that it was a $5 scratch-off ticket. “Good God, Maddy, you’re not still climbing that family tree, are you?”
First I told him what I knew for sure. That Prince Anton lived on an island in the St. Lawrence River. That clopot in Romanian means bell. That the prince’s great-grandmother, Violeta, had married a man named Clopotar. That fifty years ago the prince’s older brother, Petru, took the family boat out on the river and was never seen again. That the Canadian police ruled it an accidental drowning even though they hadn’t recovered a body. That the prince, after half a century, still continued to insist that his brother’s death was a suicide. That while there was little chance Romania would ever restore the monarchy, the Clopotar family was in the running if they did.
Then I got to the fun part-my theory. “Until a couple of days ago I thought maybe the prince had killed his brother to get him out of the picture. And then learning that another pretender to the throne was alive and well and living in Hannawa, Ohio, made sure that she, too, was out of the picture. The prince’s father died a bit suspiciously, too, by the way.”
The president was now warning some country or the other to stop doing whatever it was doing, lest we be forced to do something about it. I waited for the applause to die down. “But obviously, the prince couldn’t have killed his brother back then if his brother was also Violeta Bell,” I said.
“It wouldn’t be the easiest thing,” Grant agreed.
He was being a smart ass. I ignored him and went on. “I now think the prince really believed his brother drowned. And I think he really believed it was suicide. Petru must not have been very happy in his own skin. But instead of wrapping himself in an anchor and jumping overboard, Petru only made it look that way. He swam to shore. He went somewhere and had a sex change. Took the name Violeta Bell. Moved to Hannawa and opened an
