I quizzed all of them instead, first as a group and then talking to individuals in private. From the group I learned nothing much. Adah felt that somebody or other was trying to take her house away from her and Ricci was certain that the house was haunted. Of course I wanted to know why each of them felt the way they did. Adah just felt like the way she did and kept insisting that it was her house. I agreed with her, but she argued about it with me just the same. You probably know the type.
Ricci had seen a shadow that had her spooked. That shadow had not been anybody’s, she said. It was just there for a minute, then it disappeared.
There were a lot of rooms, as I’ve probably mentioned before, but not enough furniture for all of them. You could have a private room if you were willing to sleep on the floor like Audrey and me. Only we nixed the private room; I slept with Audrey next to Chandra’s bed. (You would probably have guessed that if I hadn’t told you.) Chandra had called her the lady captain, which made her sound like a woman who ordered other people around. That was maybe a little bit true, only with me it was only once in a while. Audrey and I had a lot in common, and it meant we were on the same team. Every team needs a captain for the coin toss and to talk to reporters; but “captain” doesn’t mean much when the team’s on the field. I wanted to get back to the Spice Grove Public Library where I belonged. Audrey belonged to the Polly’s Cove Public Library, but she didn’t want to go back there, or at least not very much. From time to time we tried to figure out a way to get her into Spice Grove with me.
About midnight Chandra started yelling that there was somebody under her bed. I turned over in a hurry and had a look, and there was nobody. So I said he was gone.
Next morning, I got out my notes and read over what each of the women had told me. Nobody had a decent alibi because I could not fix the time closer than a couple of hours. Nobody seemed to be lying, either; but I felt sure that somebody had to be and kept pounding away and getting nowhere. After thinking it all over, I shrugged and sighed, and decided they were telling the truth.
That meant Dr. Fevre had killed himself—or that the killer was somebody from outside who had gotten into the house. I hadn’t known him all that well, but he had never seemed like the suicidal type. All right, maybe if he’d been breaking his back on something really big and it had failed. Maybe then. But what was it? I couldn’t think of a damned thing, and there had not been a whisper of anything like that in what the girls had told me. From somewhere he’d gotten that big arrow. Ah, the very thing, he had said to himself and stabbed himself in the throat with it.
And snakes ride bicycles.
Plus there was other stuff. Suicides usually leave notes, and the better educated they are the more likely a note is. No note, and Dr. Fevre had taught classes at the university for Pete’s sake!
That was not all. Suicides mostly threaten and talk about it for weeks. I screened Peggy Pepper, who had gone back to her apartment, and asked her. She said no, nothing like that.
Then too, there was the big arrow. None of the girls had known he had anything like that, or so they said.
Fine. It had been somebody from outside. Probably he’d used a bow and arrow because they don’t make much noise. Also you didn’t have to get close; he could have shot through an open window. After that I was stuck, which is the problem with hiring a cheap detective.
We slept in the house that night. Sometime pretty close to sunrise, I woke up. There had been footsteps in the hall outside, I was dead certain. Now somebody had opened the door to our room.
I waited. Audrey was still asleep, snoring softly beside me. Our patron hadn’t stirred. Scare them and they’ll run, I told myself. I wanted to catch whoever it was (I thought probably Adah or Rose) and explain that as a general thing I murdered midnight visitors. Then he stepped into the moonlight for a minute, and I caught a glimpse—a big guy wearing some kind of helmet with feathers. I had seen feathers on women’s hats once or twice, but never on a man. He got close and I grabbed for him and got something that came loose, then he was gone. I must have let go after that; I didn’t hear anything hit the floor, but I probably should have.
I found it on the floor in the morning when I got up. It was a big knife, different from anything I’d ever seen. I’ll try to fill you in on it without beating it to death.
The big heavy blade was curved a little and sharp on both sides. The guard was a simple flat bar of something that looked to me like copper. The grip was pinkish-red and seemed to be some kind of stone, only not very heavy; it had finger grooves that were too far apart to fit my hand; I had to ignore them when I gripped it. The pommel was copper or something, like the guard. You could see where the tang went clear through and was pounded flat to keep the blade from pulling out.
It all adds up to a really nice knife, and I would have kept it and worn it if there had been a sheath. As it was, I put it away hoping to get somebody to make me one or make one myself. It never hit me that the guy who owned it might come back looking for it.
Like I’ve said, I was overdue. I told Chandra and her mother about that, and just as I figured Adah told Chandra to take me back and collect the deposit. Sometimes I felt sorry for that kid; it’s not fair to make kids responsible for grown-up stuff. Sometimes you have to, but with Chandra it seemed like it was all the time.
So back to the Polly’s Cove Public Library, and a shelf nowhere near as nice as the one in Spice Grove. I took the knife with me and hid it behind some books. Don’t bother to look, it’s not there anymore.
Audrey and I were not supposed to shelve side by side, but Audrey asked Charlotte to put us like that. It made our Dewey Decimal Numbers wrong, but the librarians didn’t seem to notice. We didn’t even hold hands until after six, when the library closed.
So swell. Only after a couple of days some fully human guy I had never seen before came in and checked out Audrey. I would have stuck my knife in him if it would have done any good. In a way, I was glad it wouldn’t; how would she feel about me if she knew I was a murderer? As far as I had known, the guy had done nothing wrong. Audrey had been a circulating library resource. In two weeks he would have to return her or check her out again. So whistle, whittle, and wait.
About a week later, a tall, hard-faced woman with a brown braid hanging down her back checked me out. She had a groundcar, big and plain ebony. I thought I knew something as soon as I was in the front seat next to her and got a look at the dashboard; so I said, “Polly’s Cove, Officer?”
That got me a sidelong glance, very brief. Then, “I’m Continental, Smithe.”
This time I actually whistled, without making much noise.
“You’re a reference, is that right? Sort of a dictionary with legs?”
I admitted I was, only not a dictionary.
“A historical reference to your own work.”
I nodded. “That’s right, although I don’t actually remember everything.”
“What about your life. Are you a reference to that?” Here it came, and I knew it. I nodded again. “My work was my life, more or less.”
“You wrote…?”
“Mysteries. Who Killed Cock Robin? Clues on pages twenty-six, a hundred and five, and two hundred and ninety-nine.”
“A lot of people you’ve known must have been murdered in that case.” She wasn’t serious.