A Great Day for the Deadly(67)

The disturbance was being caused by a very small woman with bright red hair. When the main doors had opened for Gregor, she had been momentarily silent. By the time he stepped inside, she was being silent no longer. She was standing at the check-out desk in a bright green toggle-fronted cashmere car coat, pounding her list against the desk’s blond wood. Since every one of her fingers had rings on them, every pound she made gave off metallic echoes.

“I don’t care where she is or what she’s doing,” she was shouting, “I want to talk to that little bitch right now!”

It should have ended right there, because the girl behind the check-out desk was being stubborn. Gregor could see the lines of mulishness in her young, plain face and a secret satisfaction. In some way Gregor couldn’t understand yet, these roles were being reversed. In most encounters between these two, it was the red-haired woman who would be winning. The girl at the desk crossed her arms over her chest and said,

“Miss Daniels is out. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know how to get in touch with her.”

“This is Maryville,” the red-haired woman screeched, “not New York. There aren’t all that many places she could be.”

“Maybe she isn’t even in Maryville.”

“Maybe’s she’s gone off to have hormone injections,” the red-haired woman said. “That’s the only thing I can think of that would turn that desiccated old bitch into a woman.”

“No she’s not,” the girl behind the counter said in a kind of hysterical triumphancy. “No, she’s not, she’s—”

There was an office behind the check-out desk with a window wall in it. Gregor had noticed it when he first walked in. Now he saw a door at the back of it open and a woman come through. She was only five feet four and solidly built, but there was a magnificence about her that caught at Gregor immediately. It caught at the red-haired woman, too. Finally, even the girl at the checkout desk felt it. She turned her back to the red-haired woman and stared.

“Well,” the red-haired woman said finally. “There she is. Maryville’s answer to Liz Smith.”

“Oh, Miss Daniels,” the girl at the check-out desk said. “I didn’t mean you to overhear. I was just going to send her right out of here.”

Glinda Daniels passed through the office door into the library proper, walked up to the check-out desk, patted the girl there on the shoulder (“That’s all right, Shelley, I’ll take it from here”) and surveyed the room over the red-haired woman’s head. She paused when she came to Gregor and when she came to the older woman standing a few feet from him. She didn’t pause long enough in either case to make Gregor feel he should speak. Then she turned her attention to her assailant and sighed.

“For God’s sake, Ann-Harriet,” she said, “what do you think you’re doing? You know it’s just Miriam getting you all worked up again.”





[2]


“Her name is Ann-Harriet Severan,” Glinda Daniels told Gregor twenty minutes later, when she had the library calmed down, Ann-Harriet off the premises and the patrons back to looking through the books. She’d even managed to get Shelley at the desk to calm down and go back to work. That was a good thing, because there was no place in the library for a private talk but that office with the window wall in it and they needed Shelley to run interference. Otherwise, half the people in town were going to want to have their own personal private conversation with Glinda Daniels, just as they had all week. Along with Gregor, Glinda had brought in the old woman Gregor had noticed outside, introducing her as “Mrs. Barbara Keel.” Mrs. Barbara Keel had told Gregor to call her “The Library Lady.”

“Mrs. Keel was with me when I found Brigit’s body,” Glinda explained. “She was supposed to be in the rest home getting over it for at least another week, but here she is.”

“I get bored,” Mrs. Keel said.

“I would too,” Gregor told her.

Glinda had been making coffee in one of those Dripmaster automatic coffee makers. Now she picked up the glass pitcher, poured coffee into a plastic foam cup and two stout mugs, and handed them out. Gregor got the plastic foam cup. Mrs. Keel got the mug with the teddy bear on it. Glinda got the red mug with a picture of a lizard etched in gold on one side and “The Fearless Gourmet” etched in gold on the other. When she put it down on her desk she said, “Sam brought it in for me when I broke my old one last week,” and shook her head in wonder. Mrs. Keel ignored her and put a quarter cup of milk and ten packets of sugar in her coffee.