A Great Day for the Deadly(12)

Her second victory had to do with the state of the library itself at six o’clock this Friday night. It had been a big week for library patronage. It might have been so even without the death, because in spite of what Cardinal O’Bannion had told Gregor Demarkian, the news of the beatification of Margaret Finney had not “got a big play” in Maryville before the flood. The Colchester media had made a fuss about it, but the local media hadn’t had a clue. The local paper had been bought out five years ago by a chain based in North Carolina, and their present hand-picked, specially shipped-in editor-in-chief didn’t know a beatification from a banana split. Then there had been the flood and the murder and the snakes. With one thing and another, it wasn’t until the day before yesterday that the paper had got around to mentioning it, and then the inevitable had happened. There were a lot of lost souls out there, the kind of people who watched the 700 Club but not the TV news, the kind of people who pored through the back pages of the papers for messages from God. They were the spiritual cousins of the people who drove thousands of miles to visit the Shrine of the Blessed Taco, and this week they were visiting her library.

Of course, most of the strange people who had wandered into the library this week weren’t in the least interested in the beatification of Margaret Finney. They were following a blood scent to its source—and Glinda thought it a victory within a victory that she had managed not to kill one of them. They slid along the edges of the main room’s walls, trying the doors to the closets. They came up to her and asked questions so blatant and gory, even the police hadn’t thought of them. They made her skin crawl. For a while there, Glinda thought she was going to be stuck with them, doing involuntary overtime on Friday night. It seemed grudging to call it only a victory, that she could look out the glass wall of her office now and see nobody in the place at all, except Sam Harrigan standing at the check-out desk with a book in his hand. Sam Harrigan often made Glinda Daniels nervous—had, in fact, been making her especially nervous over the past few weeks—but not because he was the kind of jerk who thought of murder as a spectator sport. He just made her nervous, that was all.

Glinda got her camel’s hair coat from the coat rack in the office’s far left corner, slung it over her arm, and headed out to the desk. Her purse was right there, under the counter next to the extra cards for the check-out pockets. Sam heard her coming and shifted on his feet, standing up a little straighter.

“There you are,” he said. “You were wandering around in there so long, I was afraid you’d taken ill.”

“I’m fine,” Glinda said, and didn’t say: You ought to know, because you could look through the glass at everything I did. Sam had been in and out a lot in the past week—he’d even formally introduced himself and asked her to call him “Sam”—and in that time Glinda had learned something about him she never would have guessed. Sam Harrigan was a socially awkward man. She would have thought he had too much experience for that, what with doing a television show and going on book tours and having movie stars wander in and out of his house, but there it was. Every time he tried to talk to her, he seemed to lose any sense of what he ought to do with his hands.

Glinda put her coat down across the check-out desk and took the book out of his hand. It was called Edible Fungi of North America, and she couldn’t believe he needed it. She couldn’t believe he didn’t own it. She opened its back cover, took out its card, and went searching through the center drawer for her date stamp.

“So,” she said, “you were saying. You were listening to the radio on your way into town—”

Sam shifted on his feet again. “I was listening to ‘Golden Oldies Rock and Roll,’ to tell you the truth. That’s how you know you’re living in a small town, when they interrupt ‘Peppermint Twist’ for a press conference by a Cardinal Archbishop. I was speechless.”

“It’s a Colchester station,” Glinda said drily, “and it’s owned by Catholics. For all you know, the Archdiocese has a piece of it.”

“I try to know as little as possible about the Archdiocese,” Sam said. “It’s like St. Patrick’s Day. Ever since those idiots got caught down in Queens, trying to supply arms to the Irish Republican Army, all I do for St. Pat’s is contribute to the mission fund when the Sisters come calling and go down and watch the parade. Anyway, they interrupted ‘Peppermint Twist.’ And there I was, listening to this man sound even more embarrassed than I would have been, saying nothing at all.”