“Defending it against whom?” I said.
“Her work has sadly fallen out of fashion,” he said, indignantly. “It’s become quite trendy to belittle her work. Not just its quality, but its originality.”
“They find her work derivative?” I asked.
“Derivative would be a kinder way of putting it,” he said. “There have been a number of articles written over the years that claim she was a plagiarist—that she took the works of more commercially successful poets and … well, changed enough of the words to make it look like a different poem, and passed it off for original work.”
“And did she?”
“I’ve always contended that she was merely strongly influenced by her favorite poets,” he said. “And that her profound reverence for them manifested itself in an unconscious imitation of their forms and meters.”
I took that for a reluctant yes.
“But Gordon had something that proved otherwise, right?” I asked.
“He’d gotten hold of a box of books from her library,” Schmidt said. “Books of poetry by Longfellow, Tennyson—people like that. A lot of the poems were all marked up in her handwriting, showing how she’d taken their poems and produced her versions. Changing a couple of words in each line, until it looked different enough to pass off as her own.”
“Hard to defend that as unconscious imitation,” I said.
He nodded slightly.
“Not exactly good for your career,” I suggested.
He shook his head.
A wild suspicion hit me, and I decided to run with it.
“Especially if it came out where Gordon got them,” I said. “However did you let them fall into his hands?”
He winced.
“It was my wife, and her damned decluttering,” he said. “The damned box had been gathering dust in our attic for twenty years. And then, while I was off in England at a conference, she went to this damned class on getting rid of clutter.”
“Really? Where?” I asked. Sounded useful, that class. Maybe I could go, and take my whole family.
“I don’t know,” Schmidt said, frowning. “One of those places that gives stupid classes for housewives with too much time on their hands.”
“I see,” I said, and hoped it didn’t come out sounding too much like a snarl. I found myself hoping, for Mrs. Schmidt’s sake, that he turned out to be the murderer and got a good, long prison sentence.
“Anyway, one of the stupid decluttering rules they gave her was if you hadn’t opened a box for more than a year, you should get rid of it without opening it. The stupid cow called Gordon and had him clean out the whole attic.”
“So Gordon not only had the goods on Mrs. Pruitt, he knew you’d found out about her plagiarism and covered it up,” I said.
He nodded.
“Sounds like motive for murder to me,” I said.
“Not really,” he said. “I may have my shortcomings as a scholar, but I have a very well-honed sense of self-preservation. Why would I kill Gordon without getting back the evidence? Who knows who’ll get hold of those books now that he’s dead? But whoever it is, I very much doubt it will be anyone as greedy, grasping, and dishonest as Gordon.”
“So I take it you don’t have them?”
“Would I still be trying to find them if I did?”
Maybe, I thought, if you wanted to look less like a murder suspect.
“So someone else has them,” I said aloud. “Or will get them, whenever they turn up. And you’re afraid that someone will make them public, and you’re trying to get them first.”
He nodded.
“So if you didn’t kill him and you didn’t get your books back, just what did happen between you and Gordon yesterday?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Try again.”
He pursed his lips as if afraid something incriminating would slip out. I just waited.
“Nothing happened because he was already dead when I went into the barn.”
Chapter 31
Yes! I thought. I hadn’t entirely trusted the Hummel lady’s story, that she’d never seen Gordon, but now I had independent confirmation that Gordon was already dead before Giles entered the barn. I wasn’t sure whether to cheer, knowing that this was probably enough to clear Giles, or shake Schmidt for lying and helping to implicate Giles in the first place.
“He was already dead?” I repeated.
“Definitely dead,” Schmidt said. “When I first walked in, I saw his stuff lying all around, and I figured he was there—maybe snooping in the hayloft, that was about his style. So I called out for him to come down, that we needed to talk about the books. And he didn’t say anything. And I went over to the ladder to the hayloft and he was just lying there, dead, with this bloody bookend by his head.”