“Hail to you! Proud student!” (presumably written on the occasion of someone’s graduation) would have made the normally blithe spirit of Percy Bysshe Shelley wince. Lord Byron would probably have consulted his solicitor upon reading what she did to “She Walks in Beauty,” but I suspect Edgar Allan Poe would only roll his eyes upon reading “Once upon a midnight bleak, while I studied, tired and weak.” Then again, maybe he’d have hit her up for beer money. And probably have gone thirsty, judging from her revision of Tennyson’s “The Lotus-Eaters” into a tract in favor of Prohibition. (“‘Temperance!’ he cried, and pointed at the bar, ‘My trusty axe will bring that downward soon.’”)
I snapped the book shut, realizing I’d already spent too much time on it. At least now I had that much more confirmation of Professor Schmidt’s story. And since the bin where Michael and I were storing our stuff was only one aisle over and a few bins down, I decided to make sure the box didn’t disappear, just in case we didn’t have the only set of keys.
After locking Mrs. Pruitt’s books in our bin, I hurried out to the parking lot. It suddenly occurred to me that if Carol tried to escape, Michael wasn’t the best person to have guarding her. I’d have no qualms about knocking her down and sitting on her if necessary, but Michael might have a sudden attack of chivalry.
Chapter 39
“All secure,” I reported, when I emerged into the parking lot.
Carol and Michael stood face to face, beaming their flashlights at each other. Carol’s feet were planted firmly and she frowned at Michael. His back was to me, and he appeared to be pointing something at her, in addition to the flashlight. Okay, I knew he hadn’t brought a weapon, but I didn’t know about Carol. What if after I’d left them alone, she’d pulled a gun and he’d had to disarm her? Then I relaxed. He wasn’t holding her at gunpoint. More like cell-phone-point.
“Carol was thinking of leaving,” he said, as I came closer. “But I convinced her to stay and talk to you first.”
“If you call the cops, I’ll tell them you were trespassing, too,” she said.
“But we were following you, Carol,” I said, aiming my flashlight at her face. “And we are bona fide customers. You, on the other hand, appear to have broken into the building and used a stolen key to access someone else’s bin.”
“It’s all mine now,” she said.
“Only if you didn’t kill Gordon,” I said.
“How could I possibly kill him?” she hissed.
“You were in the barn with him,” I said.
“I was not!”
“Then why did Ralph Endicott say he saw you leaving?”
“He didn’t!
“He did, and he’s not the only one who saw you there,” I said. “I saw you there myself. So give me one reason to believe you didn’t kill him.”
“I couldn’t have!” she wailed.
“Why not? He cheated on you, and now he was trying to cheat you out of your fair share of the property by hiding half his assets in there,” I said, jerking my head at the building. “Why couldn’t you have killed him?”
“Because he was already dead when I got there!”
“Not another one,” Michael muttered.
“But you told Chief Burke you talked to him,” I said. “You were fairly specific about your conversation. I heard you. Are you saying you lied to the cops?”
She sighed and slumped as if suddenly exhausted.
“I figured if I claimed to have found him dead, they’d think I did it,” she said. “Don’t they always suspect the person who finds the body?”
“It’s not as if you were the only one to find the body,” I said. “People spent the entire morning finding it and hiding it again.”
“They did? Well, how was I to know that?” she said. “I was standing there, looking at his dead body, and all I could think of was that everyone in town knew how much I hated him. Half of them had heard me threaten him, when I’d lost my temper. I figured if they found me with the body, they wouldn’t bother looking for the real killer. I was terrified. Hysterical. So I ran out.”
“Without even thinking about what you should do.”
“Exactly!” she exclaimed.
“But not before taking his keys.”
“Out of his pocket, no doubt,” Michael added. “Must have been pretty tough, hysterical as you were. Reaching down, touching the body of a dead man—a murdered man—and hunting around until you found his keys.”
“I didn’t have to hunt,” she said. “I knew he kept them in his right back pocket. He was lying on his face; I didn’t even have to move his body.”