“You think about the things I said to you. You’ll see I’m making sense. Something ought to be done about Henry Holborn.”
In Naomi’s opinion, something ought to be done about Rose MacNeill—what in God’s name had gotten into her? The most conservatively Christian woman on the North Carolina coast, and now she was turning into—what? A liberal?
Naomi propelled herself back out onto Main Street and looked around. The town still looked deserted. It made her almost misty-eyed for the days before Tiffany Marsh had been murdered, the days when the town was almost always deserted during the seasons when tourists were not in residence in force.
Naomi started walking down Main Street, limping badly in her high, uncertain heels. She was thinking so hard about Rose, the obvious didn’t occur to her until she was almost at the library door. But the obvious was obvious, and it was going to occur to everybody sooner or later, if she wanted to let them know.
Rose was more right than she realized. Henry Holborn could have killed both Tiffany Marsh and Carol Littleton. And Naomi was the only person in town who knew how it could have been done, because she had seen him.
2
WHEN STEPHEN HARROW WALKED through the front door of the bookstore, Maggie Kelleher was sitting in the loft, looking through a hardbound leather copy of the complete works of Aristotle. Maggie had no idea why she had this particular edition of this particular book in the store. Its retail price was something over fifty dollars. God only knew, nobody was going to buy it. The tourists who came in here only wanted trash—or, at best, very very very good genre work, like P. D. James. The few people in town who did like to read classics bought their books at the Barnes & Noble superstore up in Cary, and didn’t buy leather-bound editions, either. Maggie thought of the Aristotle, and the few similar volumes she kept up there—Les Miserables in French in hand-tooled red Moroccan leather; The Brothers Karamazov in deep brown calf—as talismanic. Other people had Henry Holborn or the Episcopal Church or old Father Kennedy at St. Mary’s. Maggie had these tokens of another life in another place, a life that had once been all she thought she would ever want. A life with a man in it, she put it to herself now—and almost giggled, out loud, in spite of how awful she felt about Carol Littleton and everything that was going on up at the camp. It was something worse than a shame, what was happening to Zhondra Meyer’s dream project. Zhondra claimed that she was being persecuted, and there were times when Maggie could almost believe it. Something seemed to be directing itself against the establishment up there. Maggie didn’t believe in the devil, but in this case he would suit, and in this case she would use him. He might be the devil in the disguise of Henry Holborn or some other fundamentalist nut from one of the neon churches on the roads outside town, but until she could put a face to him, she would go on thinking of him as the devil. She just wished it would all come to a stop, right now, before it got any worse. The whole town was winding itself up tight.
When the bell on the door tinkled, Maggie thought it must be David Sandler. He had been her only steady customer since the tourist season ended. Reporters came in, off and on, now that so many of them were stuck here covering the murder. They made a lot of noise and bought magazines. Maggie looked over the loft rail and saw Stephen Harrow standing in the middle of the big main room, looking at Linda Lael Miller’s latest. He looked both strained and confused, a man lost in an alien landscape. Maggie wondered where he had bought all those theology books that lined the shelves next to the fireplace in his living room.
Stephen put Linda Lael Miller’s book back on its shelf. Maggie got to her feet and went to the loft rail to lean over.
“Stephen?” she called down. “Just a minute. I’ll be right with you.”
Stephen stepped back and squinted. “Oh, Maggie,” he said, “it’s you. I thought I was going to find what’s-his-name.”
“Joshua has the day off,” Maggie said. “Did you need him for something? I’ve got his home number on my desk someplace.”
“No, no,” Stephen said. “It’s all right, really. I just didn’t expect to find you here. I saw you up at the camp.”
“Everybody was up at the camp. Was that pitiful, or what? We’re all turning into a bunch of small-town ambulance chasers.”
“I am a small-town ambulance chaser, Maggie. I’ve been small-town one way or another all my life.”
“Well, I haven’t been. It embarrasses me sometimes, the way I behave lately. Give me a minute and I’ll be right down.”