“Why do I get the feeling you read every single book that encouraged frivolous pursuits?” I said.
The smile spread into a grin. “My mother’s influence. She read us Gulliver’s Travels when I was about six.”
“I’m trying to imagine trying to enforce the no books that encourage frivolous pursuits edict today,” Susan said, frowning at the bottom of her cup as though she didn’t know what had happened to her coffee.
“Things were very different when I was in school,” Mary said, getting up and opening the cupboard over the sink. She reached up and felt around on the top shelf. “Are there any cookies?”
“No,” Susan said. “You and Abigail ate them last week.” She turned to me. “You have to display those library rules. People will get a kick out of them.”
“I’ll ask Abigail to bring them in. How about taking a look in the storage room to see if you can find anything else like that?”
“Sure,” Susan said.
Mary had come back to the table.
“Do you remember a group called The Ladies Knitting Circle?” I said. “I think they might have had at least some of their meetings here and I’m wondering if Abigail has them on her list.”
Mary gave a snort of laughter. “The Ladies Knitting Circle should have their own display, but they weren’t the kind of group you think they were. They weren’t getting together to exchange sweater patterns and try different kinds of yarn.”
Susan looked at me and shrugged. Clearly she didn’t know what Mary meant either.
“So what were they doing?” I asked.
“Hiding abused women from their husbands and then sneaking them out of town.”
I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open. “You’re not serious?” I said.
“Oh yes I am,” Mary said. “My mother was part of the group.” Something in her face changed. The gently teasing smile disappeared.
“Were you?” I asked quietly.
She nodded. “It was all Anna Henderson’s doing.”
“Everett’s mother,” Susan said.
“Yes,” Mary said. She was sitting very straight in her chair, one finger tracing a circle on the table. “And Ellen Montgomery—Rebecca’s mother—and my mother, and a few other women in town. Me, eventually. But Anna was the driving force. She knew people. She had access to her own money.”
She was looking at me, but her focus was clearly in the past. “Anna would arrange for new identities—new names, birth certificates, driver’s licenses. I don’t know how. And trust me, it all looked like the real thing. And she’d get the women away to start new lives. A fair number of them ended up across the border in Canada.”
The odd reference to yarn from Canada in Ellen’s journal suddenly made a lot more sense.
“I don’t know if Carson knew what she was doing or not,” Mary continued. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he had, but it wouldn’t have mattered, he adored Anna.”
“What did you do?” I asked, leaning forward, one arm propped on the table.
The twinkle came back into Mary’s gaze. “Showed a little cleavage, a fair amount of leg and played dumb.”
Susan laughed and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “The cleavage I believe, but I’m having a little trouble imagining you playing dumb.”
“Let’s just say I was kind of cute when I was younger,” Mary said. “So some people didn’t pay a lot of attention to this.” She tapped the side of her head with one hand.
“You were more than ‘kind of cute,’” I said. I’d seen photos of Mary in her twenties. She’d been a beautiful young woman, long dark hair, lots of curves and that wicked smile. She was still beautiful. Kickboxing gave her great legs and she still had that smile.
Maggie and I had accidently come across Mary doing a slightly naughty burlesque routine during amateur night this past winter at The Brick, a club out on the highway. I hoped I looked even half that terrific when I was her age, although I didn’t think I’d ever be swinging a feather boa and dancing in high heels.
“Yes I was,” Mary said with a sly sideways grin. “But modesty prevented me from saying that myself.”
“I want to know what you mean when you say you ‘played dumb.’” Susan said.
“Sometimes we needed a little diversion, to give the women time to get away. My specialty was a flat tire that I just couldn’t fix. I was pretty good with a dead battery and a dry radiator, too.”
Mary went on talking, but all I could think about was that Anna Henderson had been helping women disappear. Tom Karlsson’s remains had been buried out at Wisteria Hill. Could Anna have had anything to do with his “disappearance”?
18
We finished getting the library ready to reopen and I sent Mary and Susan home, telling them I’d see them tomorrow. I gathered up Hercules, locked the building and set the alarm.
I had just set the cat on the seat of the truck when I heard someone call my name. I turned, pushing my hair out of my eyes and for once remembering not to touch my scraped forehead. It was Abigail.
“Hi,” I called as she cut across the parking lot. “I was going to call you. We’re reopening tomorrow.”
“Good,” she said. “If the library had stayed closed any longer, I might have had to do some housework.”
Her gray hair, streaked with red, was in a braid over one shoulder and she was wearing bright yellow rubber boots covered with saucy happy faces all sticking out their tongues. Everyone had cuter boots than my plain black ones—even Hercules—which reminded me that I still hadn’t explained to Maggie that boots were just not the cat’s thing.
“What do you think of this?” she asked, opening the book she was carrying to a page marked with a scrap of paper.
I studied the color photograph. “I like it,” I said, looking up at her with a smile.
It was a puppet theatre, at least five feet high and almost as wide.
“It’s made out of a couple of appliance boxes and other recycled material. I’d like to make it for story time. Could I use the workroom to put it together?”
“Sure,” I said. I looked at the picture again. “I have a little money left in my contingency fund. What do you need?”
Abigail shook her head. “Nothing. If I can’t beg, borrow or scrounge what I need out of someone’s recycling bin I’m losing my touch.”
“Okay,” I said, holding out both hands. “I don’t want to take the fun out of it for you.”
Her expression grew serious. “I’d like to get Maggie’s opinion on reinforcing the top. I couldn’t believe it when I heard what happened to Jaeger,” she said. “We just saw him a couple of weeks ago at that estate sale and now he’s dead.”
“I don’t remember seeing Jaeger at the sale,” I said.
“Well he was there,” Abigail insisted. “I spoke to him.” She frowned. “It might have been when you went to look at those bookshelves. Anyway, he was definitely there with—I can’t think of his name—the guy who does those drawings with the duck in the hat and sunglasses.”
The hairs came up on the back of my neck. “Ray,” I said.
She nodded. “That’s him. I love his work.” She looked thoughtfully past me at the building. I could tell she was already putting the puppet theatre together in her mind. “Okay, I’ll call Maggie later,” she said. “Thanks Kathleen.”
“I can’t wait to see it,” I said.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. She headed back toward the sidewalk and I got into the truck.
I’d forgotten to ask Abigail if she’d come across The Ladies Knitting Circle in her research on the various groups that had used the library over the years. When she’d said Jaeger had been at that estate sale with Ray Nightingale, that had chased pretty much everything else out of my head.
Ray had told Ruby and me that he barely knew Jaeger. So what had Jaeger and Ray been doing at that estate sale together?