Murder Between the Covers

  Murder Between the Covers

  Two Sisters and a Journalist #5

  by Maddie Cochere

  Copyright 2015 by Maddie Cochere

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions therof in any form whatsoever except as provided by US copyright Law.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  Breezy Books

  http://www.breezybooks.com/

  Cover design by Gillian Soltis of Columbus, Ohio

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter One

  This place was a madhouse, and these people were crazy.

  “Faster, Jo. Pull faster,” Pepper ordered as she raced past with a grocery sack full of books. She held the bag below a table in the corner of the room and watched it disappear.

  Keith was stationed under the table. He had taken the bag from his mother and shoved it under a Superman bed sheet, where he had already hidden more bags of books. His job was to guard them all with his life.

  A few minutes ago, I watched a woman lift the Superman sheet and crack her head on the edge of the table when Keith startled her with a growl. She was now at the front of the room, rubbing her head and complaining to the workers that hoarding shouldn’t be allowed.

  I looked down at the half-empty bag between my feet. I was still working on filling my first bag.

  Pepper scurried up to me and pointed toward the wall behind us. “Cookbooks. Go over there and pull cookbooks.” She muscled me out of the way and began grabbing books directly in front of where I had just stood.

  Kelly passed us by as she made her way through the crowd to give another bag to Keith. “Isn’t this fun, Aunt Jo?” she asked with a big smile.

  I answered with as much sarcasm as I could muster, “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”

  An elderly man stepped on my foot with the bulk of his weight landing on my little toe. I let out a loud, “Ouch.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see you standing there.”

  I believed him. Most people were so focused on grabbing books, they were oblivious to the people around them.

  I found a spot in front of the cookbooks and tried to remember Pepper’s instructions. “Grab anything that looks new, isn’t an ex-library book, and make sure it has a dustjacket,” she had said.

  I spotted a Julia Child cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I pulled it off the shelf and had it ripped from my hands by the woman next to me.

  “I saw it first,” she said.

  “But I had it first,” I shot back and tried to grab it from her.

  “You saw me reaching for it, so you jumped in front of me,” she said, raising her voice a couple of octaves.

  Kelly ran behind me with another full bag. “Let her have it and move on. Mom says we’re not allowed to fight.”

  I didn’t want to make a scene and upset Pepper, so I backed off, but I wasn’t happy about it. I’d never been in a room with so many rude people. It further irritated me when I heard the woman tell her companion the cookbook was a first edition and would fetch almost two hundred dollars.

  Pepper was on the move again and pushed me aside. “I’ll do cookbooks. Go help Kelly with children’s books, and stay away from the CDs. Stinky Morgan is over there.”

  Keith had filled me in on some of the more colorful locals who might be attending the sale. According to him, “Stinky Morgan doesn’t take a bath for a week before a sale, and he doesn’t use deodorant. That way, he’s good and ripe, and no one can go near him. He gets to shop without anyone in his way.”

  I wasn’t cut out for this. I thought it would be fun to give Pepper and the kids a hand with their new home business of selling used books online, but I was mistaken. I’d try to fill my bag, but then I was going to find a quiet place to relax until they were done shopping.

  Three children stood from the floor, where they had been rummaging through boxes of books under a table. This section of the room was overflowing with boxes stacked on top of each other, not only on the tables, but under them as well. I slipped into the space vacated by the kids and vowed to do my best to pick out books meeting Pepper’s criteria.

  I lifted a box of paperbacks and set it aside. Beneath the box I had moved were two boxes marked Schneider donations. Both boxes were full of vintage children’s books in relatively good condition. Most were for older children, but there were some picture books for younger children as well. Pepper hadn’t given me any instructions on old books. She had only said she wanted newer books with dustjackets.

  The first book I pulled from the box was a Hardy Boys book. It didn’t look like the books our brother Hank read when we were younger. This book was older, thicker, and had a dustjacket. I looked around to ask Kelly or Pepper about it, but they were on the other side of the room. A ruckus had broken out at the table where Keith had set up camp.

  I stacked the boxes one on top of the other and gave them a good heft to be sure I had a solid grip on them. If I didn’t collapse with a hernia by the time I made it to the other end of the room, I’d give them to Keith.

  As I got closer, I could see the woman who had cracked her head on the table was now leaning down and yelling at him.

  “Come out from under there, you juvenile delinquent. Where’s your mother? I’m pressing charges.”

  I couldn’t hear what Pepper said, but the woman turned on her next.

  “You need to control that little brat. I’m going to need a tetanus shot, and you’re going to pay for it.”

  I was finally in range to hear Pepper. She was nose to nose with the woman.

  “You’ve been harassing him ever since he caught you trying to steal our books. I don’t care if he grabbed your leg and gnawed on it like a rabid dog. You deserved it.”

  The people working the book sale were on the geriatric side. I assumed they were volunteers for the Friends of the Library. One of the less-frightened men approached the two women and suggested they might want to quiet down and allow the patrons to shop.

  “I will not,” the woman shouted. “That child bit me.”

  I performed a sumo squat to set the boxes in front of Keith. “Shove these under your sheet,” I told him. To the woman, I said, “Come with me. I’m a private investigator. If he bit you, I can help.”

  My being a private investigator didn’t mean diddly-squat in the matter, but I wanted to diffuse the situation and get her away from Pepper and Keith. The woman was so agitated, she followed me into the hallway without question.

  “Show me the evidence,” I said. “Where did he bite you?”

  She lifted her pant leg, and my eyes opened wide while I stifled a laugh behind a cough. The exposed red mark was very light and only slightly resembled a bite, but it was hard to see through the thick hair on her legs. It was then I noticed she had dark and rather thick hair on her arms and a definite moustache on her upper lip. Her black eyebrows were b
ushy and almost created a unibrow. She must have given up trying to tame the wild hair years ago.

  I took my camera out of my bag and snapped a picture of her leg. Pepper would accuse me of exaggerating the amount of hair, so I wanted to be sure I had proof to show her.

  I dug through my work satchel, which doubled as my everyday purse, and found a notebook, a pen, and one of my business cards. I handed the card to the woman and asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Meredith Duncan.”

  I made an earnest show of writing her name down.

  “Where do you live?”

  “I’m at 203 Maple Street.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I’m retired, but I work part-time at Wagner’s Used Books.”

  I smiled. “You do? Then you know Walt and Peggy. How are they doing?”

  She appeared caught off guard by my chattiness and the question.

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “Walt used to have the best coffee in town when he ran the snack bar in the flea market, but it turned into the worst coffee in town when he opened his bakery. Don’t you agree?”

  She nodded her head, and I made a show of jotting down her agreement.

  After the flea market burned down last February, the owner, Walt Crump, didn’t rebuild. He bought a new building two blocks down the street and remodeled it for two businesses. He opened Crump and Crumpets Bakery for himself on one side, and he rented the second space to Peggy Wagner, where she opened a used bookstore.

  “I assume you’re here shopping for Peggy?”

  She nodded her head.

  Stinky Morgan chose that moment to walk into the hall. He carried a grocery sack full of CDs with one hand and fumbled in his pocket for car keys with the other.

  I nearly gagged from the odor wafting from the man. I couldn’t understand how he could live with himself. Meredith attempted to cover her nose discreetly. I did my best not to breathe, but I finally clapped one hand over my mouth and nose.

  The man gave us a big smile and said, “They don’t call me stinky for nothin’.” He took off down the open staircase to the main floor.

  The elevator doors beside us opened to reveal two police officers inside. Officers Glenn Wheeler and Clay Carpenter stepped out. Both made faces of disgust.

  “Don’t you guys have a shower at your place?” Clay asked Glenn.

  “I don’t think it’s Jo,” he said. “I hosed her down myself this morning.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at both of them. “Oh, stop it.”

  “It’s about time you got here,” Meredith said. “I called over twenty minutes ago. And that smell is from Terry Morgan. I insist you arrest him for defiling the library. Isn’t it illegal to emit odors that offend the public? He’s a public nuisance.”

  “Is that why we’re here?” Clay asked.

  Glenn looked at me and said, “We got a call there was a disturbance at the book sale. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Meredith said. “Some little cretin in there bit me, and I want to press charges.”

  “It’s Keith,” I said. “He’s under a table watching over Pepper’s books, so no one steals them, and-”

  Meredith interrupted. “They’re hoarding books! I don’t have hardly any to take back to the bookstore, because that woman brought her two kids, and they’re grabbing books faster than anyone can see what’s on the tables.”

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “None of this would have happened if you would have just shopped for your own books instead of being so concerned with what someone else was buying. And you did try to look under their sheet. Why would you do that if you weren’t going to steal some of their books?”

  The woman stepped closer to me and raised her voice. “They’re not their books until they buy them.”

  Glenn stepped between us. “All right. That’s enough. Let’s go see what Keith has to say.”

  When we stepped into the room, the atmosphere didn’t feel quite so frenetic. Many people had already found their treasures and were in line to check out. Pepper had slowed her pace and was now looking through some of the books instead of grabbing and running. Kelly and Keith were at the back of the room with all their bags and my two boxes loaded onto a large library cart. They were in the process of paying for their new inventory.

  Keith looked our way, and Glenn motioned for him to join us.

  “Did you bite this lady?” he asked.

  “Of course he did,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, and she saw my wound.” She pointed an oddly crooked finger my way. “I need a tetanus shot.”

  “Let the boy tell his story,” Clay said.

  “I helped pick out books until I had three bags full,” Keith said.

  “Like a black sheep,” the woman mumbled under her breath.

  He pointed to the corner table. “I got under that table with my bags and stayed there, so when Mom and Kelly and Aunt Jo had bags full, they could give them to me, and I could put them under the sheet. When she looked under it to steal some of our books, all I did was growl at her. It’s not my fault she hit her head.”

  “That child has no manners,” Meredith said. “He could have politely said the books were spoken for.”

  Pepper glared at her. “Everyone knows the books under coats or sheets have already been picked by someone else.”

  Clay glanced around the room and seemed to notice it for the first time. “It looks like a tornado came through here.”

  “It’s preview night,” I said. “Most of the people here are book dealers who pay a premium to get in the night before the sale is open to the public. They get first crack at the books. It wasn’t pretty.”

  Keith continued with his story. “She kept coming back to the table, and I knew it was her, because of her shoes.”

  All eyes focused on Meredith’s shoes. She was wearing black Crocs and heavy black socks. Green and red flower widgets had been jammed into the holes, apparently to dress them up for Christmas.

  “When I decided to crawl out and apologize to her for scaring her, she tromped on my hand and wouldn’t let go. She kept grinding her foot on it.” He held his hand out. A deep purple bruise was beginning to show on top. “I bit her leg to make her stop.”

  “I didn’t grind my foot,” she said. “It was an accident.”

  “Let’s see the bite,” Glenn said.

  She hiked up her pant leg, and the two men recoiled at the sight of her hairy leg. Pepper’s eyes opened so wide, I thought her eyeballs might fall out. Keith was fearless and put his face down by the bite.

  “You can barely see it,” he said. “There’s no blood or anything.”

  Glenn turned to Pepper. “Go ahead and go on home. We’ll chalk this up to a series of unfortunate events. No one’s filing charges for minor injuries in a book sale melee.” To Meredith, he said, “Count yourself lucky you didn’t break any bones in his hand, or we’d be looking at an entirely different outcome.”

  We met Kelly and the cart full of books out in the hall. Meredith stormed past and onto the elevator without buying anything for the bookstore.

  “You guys can take the next elevator,” I said to Pepper. “I’ll walk down with Glenn and Clay.”

  I liked walking down the wide, sweeping staircase. Illustrations signed by famous children’s authors who had visited the library lined the walls. Once outside, we waited for Pepper and the kids to catch up.

  “Did you find the Caesar I left for you in the refrigerator?” Glenn asked.

  I shook my head. “I went right from work to Pepper’s, but a salad sounds great for later. Thanks.”

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you about the hot water,” Clay said. “It’s not as hot as when I first moved in. Do you think you could call a repairman?”

  I laughed. “I could, but I won’t. You agreed to take care of minor repairs and maintenance. Go downstairs and check the water heater. There should be a way to adj
ust the temperature. If that doesn’t take care of it, I’ll have Buck take a look. He’s messed with it a few times already.”

  After a temporary stint with the Buxley Police Department over the summer, Clay made the decision to transfer permanently from Patterson to Buxley. At the time, I had just moved in with Glenn and was debating selling my house, so it was a relief when Clay asked if he could rent my place.

  Pepper was upset when I first moved. We’d lived together or across the street from each other for most of our lives, and the new arrangement was an adjustment for both of us. I made sure I stopped by after work a few times each week, and we’d begun having family dinners with Mama on Sundays, so it wasn’t as bad as we originally thought it would be. It helped that Buck and Clay hit it off, and Pepper was thrilled to have a police officer living across the cul-de-sac from her family. So far, everything was working out well for everyone.

  Before Clay could say any more about the water heater, the mayor pulled into the parking lot. Clay grunted, and Glenn muttered, “Swell.”

  The mayor approached us with a huge smile on his face. “Hello, Jo. Officers. How are you all this fine evening?”

  Glenn repeated the word with a more friendly intonation. “Swell, and you?”

  “I’m doing great, and we’re making progress. We’ll have cycles for you boys in blue on Monday.”

  Pepper and the kids came out the front door with the library cart.

  “Bubba!” Keith yelled and ran to shake the mayor’s hand.

  Pepper quickly chastised him. “You address the mayor as Mayor Bones or Mr. Bones.”

  “Nonsense,” the mayor said. “I don’t expect formalities. Everyone calls me Bubba, and I want you to do the same, lad.” He patted the top of Keith’s head even though Keith was nearly as tall as he was.

  The mayor gave me the willies. He was cheerful and friendly, but there was something creepy about his friendliness. I always thought he was faking it, but Glenn said he only came across that way because he was a politician. Politician, schmolitician, I still thought he was creepy.

  “I see you found some treasures tonight,” he said to Pepper. “I thought I’d take a look through the books myself.”