Sweet Revenge

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3

The sheriff’s department had an outpost, an office actually, that was next to the library, and the skeleton staff that worked there—two men and one woman—were still on duty on Friday at five in the evening. They hustled over as soon as a librarian summoned them. Just the sight of their uniforms filled me with a sense of calm. The female officer immediately went to work trying to resuscitate Drew Wellington.

The two male officers secured the scene. I knew the drill: members of law enforcement needed to make sure there was no one with a weapon lurking in any corner of the library, nor in the parking lot. When the duo returned from outside, they took down the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the remaining patrons. Back when Roberta and I were working on Drew, I should have thought to insist that no one leave the library, but I hadn’t. There was only a handful of folks, who were quickly questioned and summarily hustled out to their cars. I took this to mean that no one had seen anything of import. Still, it was unlikely those two cops were going to tell me anything.

My friend Eileen Druckman arrived with her son, Todd, Arch’s buddy. They’d come to pick up Arch for the sleepover, and the two cops agreed to question my son next. Since he was a minor, I stood beside him, but was cautioned not to say anything. Arch looked shaken as he related that he hadn’t seen Mr. Wellington at any time, nor had he seen anything unusual. The exception, of course, was Arch’s altercation with the bald man, whom he described. I wanted to clutch Arch tightly when he was telling the police officer his story. But my son gently shook off my arm when I put it around his shoulders. He was almost sixteen, I kept reminding myself, and no matter what the circumstances, sixteen-year-old boys did not want Mom giving them hugs in public.

Once Arch had left with the Druckmans, the two officers ordered me, the library staff, and the three male volunteers to stay. There was no sign of the female officer working on Drew. Hank and the other two fellows who’d been helping me and shelving books looked dismayed but resigned. It was still snowing hard, so one of the policemen told us which outside path to our vehicles we could use. A cursory glance out the emergency exit must have convinced them that if the crime-scene unit was called in, they’d need to pick up whatever they could from an area that now had at least two new inches of white stuff.

In the meantime, we were told, we needed to stand apart and not talk until sheriff’s-department investigators assigned to the case had arrived. Investigators. The reason they needed us, the officers said more gently, was that we knew the layout of the library, the security system, and what belonged where. Unable to stand the tension, I hustled outside to the snowy sidewalk.

The night was already very dark and cold. Flakes fell in a ceaseless curtain.

After what seemed like an eternity but was probably only ten minutes, I heard the sirens. You always hear them before you see the lights. Julian, who loved physics, had explained the reason for this to me. Even though light travels faster—hence the delay between lightning and thunder—light doesn’t bend. Sound does.

Why was I thinking about this? I wondered as Roberta and her colleagues joined me outside. Because Tom still hadn’t called me back, and I didn’t want to face what was happening.

The oncoming phalanx of law enforcement personnel didn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that if Drew Wellington was indeed dead, the media would swoop down on our small mountain town with less mercy than local red-tailed hawks showed to meadow mice. Even on a frigid December night like this, they would come. I looked back at our little library. Wind whipped the snow into the pines and aspens around the brick building and up the hill that ran behind it. I could just imagine the shrieking announcements: It looks as if a former district attorney has met a mysterious end in the library … It would be a TV, radio, and newspaper feeding frenzy. I didn’t want to think about it.

Maybe Drew had just had a heart attack. It could be, I thought, that the cops from next door were only being careful in ordering us all apart. Perhaps Drew was going to make it. But I doubted it very much.

Roberta Krepinski stood not ten yards away from me. At least she’d had the forethought to don a puffy down jacket. In the light of the neon lamps that shone outside the entrance, her face appeared ghostly pale. Poor thing. Maybe because she looked so young and so thin, I felt motherly toward her. I made a mental note to ask the sheriff’s guys to have all the staff and volunteers wrapped in the quilts that loving, unpaid workers sewed for the victims, families, and witnesses to accidents and violent crime.

I pulled my cell out of my apron pocket and tried Tom … again. The last few times I’d punched in the numbers, I’d received that rapid busy signal that told me either everybody and their brother was on a cell phone, or Tom was driving through one of those folds in the mountains into which no signal penetrated.

“Schulz,” he answered on the first ring. That businesslike tone of his put the fear of God into criminals, and sometimes even me. I shuddered.

“Something bad has happened to Drew Wellington,” I began without preamble. “Roberta found him …” My teeth were chattering and my ears felt frozen.

“Goldy.” Now his voice was warm, comforting. “Tell me where you are.”

“I’m at the library. The department is on its way.”

“I know. My guys already called me. I should be there in fifteen minutes.” He paused for a fraction of a second. “Did you … see anything?”

“No, but—” The wind whistled into my cell as I tried to talk.

“Goldy?”

“Sorry, it’s just—” I wanted to tell him about seeing Sandee, or seeing a woman who looked a lot like Sandee, at the library.

“Why don’t you wait in your van? You can come out and meet our guys when they get there.”

“Some officers are already here. I mean, they were next door. We’re supposed to wait.”

“We?”

My mind whirled. “Sorry to be so out of it. I’m talking about all the library staff and the volunteers. Plus myself. They told us to hang around so we can talk to, you know, the investigators. Your guys.” My teeth were chattering. “Plus then there’ll be an ambulance, more cops—”

“Please do me a favor and get in your van. If anyone hassles you, tell them to call me.”

“All right, all right,” I promised as I walked toward my vehicle, which was exactly where I’d left it. The vehicle that had been parked so ineptly next to me was gone. I felt my shoulders sag.

“Tom, there was an SUV next to me, and now it’s gone—”

“Miss G. Get in your van and lock the doors. Then you can tell me what’s bothering you. Besides the missing car there. Something else happened, right?”

What something had happened, really? As I wrenched open the van’s driver-side door, I tried to mentally rewind and replay those fifteen minutes before the library was supposed to close. I’d been setting up for an event. I’d seen that ghost again, this time near the shelves. Then everything had imploded.

“I thought I saw Sandee near where Drew was found. She may have been watching him.”

“Sandee Brisbane? Again?”

“Yup. Then a few minutes later, Roberta Krepinski discovered Drew in a chair by the corner,” I went on. “You know Roberta, the reference librarian?”

“I don’t know her. But she found Drew Wellington?”

“Yes, Tom. She said she thought he was asleep, and went to wake him.”

“You talked to her?” he asked, his tone tense. If this was a crime scene, was the implication, he wouldn’t want me talking to anyone.

“She called for help when she found him, and I went to see what was wrong. She kept repeating, ‘I thought he was sleeping.’ I guess she feels responsible.”

“But you didn’t see Sandee, or someone who looks like her, still hanging around?”

“No, Tom. And you’re right. I’m not even sure it was Sandee. You know her hair’s different, or at least not the same as Sandee Brisbane’s was six months ago. But I’m pretty sure it was the same woman I saw in the car last month, up on the road to Regal Ridge. You know? I thought that woman was Sandee, too.” There was silence for such a long time on the line that I thought I’d lost the signal. “Tom?”

He took a deep breath. “How’s Roberta doing now?”

“Not so hot.” I didn’t say what I suspected, that Roberta would be traumatized that her beloved library was now going to be invaded by law enforcement, and to receive more negative media attention than the Hindenburg.

“You’re sure she was the one who first came across him, Miss G.?”

“Yes. No. The emergency exit was making this horrible noise, and I just heard Roberta moaning and crying, and I went over to help. We lowered Drew onto the floor—”

“Aw, jeez.” Tom’s tone said, So much for the crime scene.

“Tom! We thought he’d had a heart attack or maybe a stroke, I don’t know. He looked awful. I felt his neck and there was no pulse.” Almost as an afterthought, I said, “There might have been blood on the carpet.”

“You didn’t see a weapon anywhere, I take it?”

“Nope. Just a thermos of spilled coffee, and a, well, a silver flask inside his briefcase. And it was … cold over there. That emergency exit I mentioned? It had been opened. Plus, there was … the smell of booze, and coffee.”

My phone beeped—call waiting. Could it be Arch, phoning to say he’d arrived at Todd’s? Like Tom, Arch was a worrier.

“Tom, I have to go. This could be Arch.”

“See you in ten.”

Instead of Arch, my caller turned out to be good old Marla, who in addition to being my dear pal was the self-appointed Aspen Meadow Town Gossip.

“Tell me,” she said breathlessly. “Drew Wellington? He’s, uh, been involved with half the women in Furman County. And not all of them women his age, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean. And how did you hear so quickly about what was going on here?”

She cleared her throat. “A library patron who was allowed to leave gave me a buzz, thought I’d want to know what was happening.”

I shook my head. “So what’s this about Drew being a ladies’ man?”

“Doesn’t Tom let you in on anything?”

“Not on that kind of thing. Plus it’s been a few years since Drew was D.A. The department is due here any minute, though—”

“Oh, please,” she said, indignant. “The department is going to want to talk to me, when they try to figure out what happened.”

“I’ll send them right over. So,” I said, thinking of twenty-two-year-old Sandee, “were these women all younger than Drew?”

“Some of them were,” she said, then hesitated. “Actually, I’m not familiar with all the details. I’ll check. Somebody could have been executing a vendetta, that kind of thing.”

“We don’t even know if what happened here was a crime.”

“Uh-huh. Has law enforcement arrived?”

As if on cue, red, blue, and white lights cut through the darkness and falling snow. That shrill call of sirens approaching meant that all the regular folks out on the road had finally moved out of the way. I shivered inside the van, which I hadn’t turned on while I was trying to talk on my cell.

“You’re not saying anything,” Marla prompted.

“They’re almost here. You want to tell me something, or not?”

“He was involved with at least three women that I know of,” she said quickly. “And he called them all problems. Topping the list was his ex-wife.”

“What? Who describes his ex-wife as a problem?”

“Who doesn’t?” Marla’s voice was impatient. “I heard Elizabeth still hates Drew. Doesn’t that make her a problem?”