A Great Day for the Deadly(69)

“He wasn’t there the day of the flood,” Mrs. Keel butted in. “In the back hall where I was, I mean. There was just Mr. Malley and Miss Severan and Miss Bailey. The other two didn’t know Miss Bailey was there.”

“Barbara was at the bank before she came to the library on the day Brigit died,” Glinda said.

“I went to the ladies’ room,” Mrs. Keel said. “It’s in a back hall there that goes behind the tellers. It was all a big mess because of the decorations for St. Patrick’s Day and moving the money. And there they were.”

“Necking in a packing crate,” Glinda said.

“And there she was,” Mrs. Keel said, “standing in the door that goes to the steps that go to the basement and the vault, looking at them going at it and laughing up her sleeve.”

“She wasn’t laughing,” Glinda said. “She couldn’t have been.”

“She wanted to be,” Mrs. Keel said. “Oh, you young people think you know everything. You think they’re giving her a pain. Well, they make her laugh and that’s the truth.”

“She makes Ann-Harriet spit,” Glinda said. “Never mind. Mr. Demarkian wants to know about Brigit.”

Actually, although Gregor had every intention of going through the motions of asking Glinda Daniels all the proper questions about how and when and in what condition she had found the body, he didn’t really need the answers she could give him. That was routine police work, and it was something Pete Donovan did well. He had fifteen solid pages of Glinda Daniels talking to Pete and other police officers about the snakes, the storeroom, and the body. There were other, more esoteric things he needed to know.

“What I want you to tell me,” he said, “is how the storeroom works. How it’s situated. What it opens onto. From what I remember, in the report I got it said the storeroom opened both into the main room of the library and onto the outside.”

“That’s right.”

“Where on the outside?”

“To the back parking lot,” Glinda said. “Some of the other people on staff—Cory especially—used to go right through there to their cars. Just lock up behind themselves, if you see what I mean. I always went through the front, no matter what the weather was like. Going through the back never seemed right to me somehow.”

“A parking lot,” Gregor said. “A parking lot is almost too convenient. It wouldn’t happen to be shaded by evergreen trees, by any chance?”

“No. We have the lawn in the front and the hedge—a hemlock hedge, I’m told now—but in the back we have nothing. The parking lot takes up all the land the library has between the building and the street on that side, and on the other side the building comes right up to the sidewalk.”

“What’s out there? Stores? Houses?”

“There’s a triple-decker house split into three apartments and a line of single-family row houses right across from the parking lot.”

“Were they inhabited on the day Brigit Ann Reilly died? Had they been evacuated?”

“They were being evacuated just around the time Pete Donovan showed up to look at Brigit’s body,” Glinda told him. “I remember standing at the window in the ladies’ room off my office, trying to stop heaving and watching the cars come down. We’re in a deep hollow here, but we’re well inland. I don’t think anybody thought of the necessity of clearing us out until the last minute. Then the cars must have been freed up because everybody else was at Iggy Loy or the Motherhouse, and they came here.”

“What cars?”

“All sorts of cars,” Glinda said. “The Motherhouse sent vans. The bank sent half a dozen vehicles, including Miriam’s Mercedes. Josh and Ann-Harriet were nowhere to be seen, by the way. And Sam sent his four-wheel drive. There were cars all over the place that day.”

Gregor considered it. It was impossible to tell if this made his problem easier or harder. If the area was being evacuated after Pete Donovan arrived at the scene, then it had probably been full of people before Glinda discovered Brigit’s body—and with the weather the way it was, those people had probably been spending a decent amount of time staring anxiously out their windows. It was almost like a dress rehearsal for the Bollander situation, full of the danger of sudden discovery, defined by heavy risks.

Gregor finished the coffee Glinda had given him and put down his cup. “All right,” he said. “Let’s move on to what you were going to tell me. You said something a little while ago about Don Bollander claiming to have seen Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died.”