“I told you about that. It's the shower for Janet Mar-golies's new baby.”
“It's being held in an elevator? Small, select group, I guess.”
Cassie laughed. “Don't be silly, Tori. Foster's Elevator is a grain elevator and feed store in Mountain View. Everybody knows that.”
“Even though I've had plenty of opportunities to discover that Lickin Creek is very different from Manhattan, I think holding a baby shower in a feed store is just a little peculiar. Don't you?”
She shook her head. “Not if the feed store happens to be owned by your father, and it's got a large meeting room upstairs.”
“I give up.” I picked up a story sent in by one of our freelancers and pretended to read it, but I was seriously thinking about going home for a nap.
Cassie answered the phone a couple of times and handled whatever crises loomed on the horizon. The fourth time, though, she covered the receiver and spoke to me. “I think you ought to take this one, Tori. It's Maggie at the library, and she sounds awfully upset.”
“Maggie, what's the matter?” I asked. She was crying so hard I couldn't understand what she was trying to say. “Has something happened to Bill?”
“No,” she wailed. “It's the”-sob… sniffle… sob-“the gutta-percha. It's gone. Stolen.”
Cassie, still listening on her extension, looked at me quizzically. “Gutted perch?” she mouthed.
“Tell you later. No, not you, Maggie. I was talking to Cassie. Do you want me to come over?”
“Please.” Sniff… sob… sniff.
As I hunted for the camera and some film, Cassie said, “Sounded like she was talking about a fish. What's the big deal about a gutted perch?”
“Gutta-percha, Cassie. It's a rubberlike material. Maggie has a display at the library of objects made of it. I think it was on loan from the town historian.”
“And it was stolen? Poor Maggie! I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of Gerald Manley's temper.”
“Ah, here it is.” The camera was on top of the file cabinet behind a potted snake plant, the only plant that hadn't died since I'd taken over the office.
I ran down Main Street toward the library. From a block away, I could see the Lickin Creek police cruiser parked in the tow-away zone out front.
Maggie fell into my arms the instant I entered the building. She was sobbing harder than before. “What am I going to do?” she moaned.
“Tell me what happened?”
She pointed at the empty display case. Shattered glass lay on the floor and on the table where the neat display of Civil War books still stood.
“Hi, Tori,” Luscious said, coming to stand beside me. I smelled brandy, not necessarily on his breath, but surrounding him as if it were oozing through his pores. Evidently, last night, while I'd cried myself to sleep in bed, Luscious had quieted his loneliness in a different way.
The door burst open and Gerald Manley rushed in. His silver hair looked worse than mine, and he obviously had pajamas on under his coat. “You'd better have a good explanation for this, young lady,” he barked at Maggie.
I could see her shaking, but she regained her composure for long enough to say, “I'm so sorry, Mr. Manley. In all the years I've had displays in the library, nothing like this has ever happened.”
“How did the thief get in?” I asked Luscious.
“Through a window in the rear of the building,” Maggie moaned. “Nobody would see him. There's nothing back there but the parking lot and the playground of the Third Street Elementary School. Both are empty at night.”
Manley turned a furious face to Maggie. “Don't you check the windows and doors before you lock up at night?”
“I usually… I think I did… I don't remember…”
“Does the library have insurance to cover losses like this?” I asked her.
She nodded, but Manley jumped in before she could answer. “Those daguerreotype cases are priceless. One of a kind. Collected over a period of forty years. There's no way I can replace them.”
Maggie collapsed into a maple chair, put her head down on the table, and cried so hard I feared she'd shake something loose. I patted her shoulder in an awkward attempt to comfort her.
“Do you have any photos of the display?” Luscious asked.
“Yes,” Maggie gurgled. “Top desk drawer.”
In Maggie's office, where three distressed-looking staff members were huddled, I found the pictures and brought them back. While Gerald Manley explained to Luscious exactly why his gutta-percha daguerreotypes were so valuable, I took a few pictures of the empty, shattered display case.
“May I take one of the pictures of the collection with me for the paper?” I asked Luscious. He handed me the stack, and I selected one that showed a close-up view of a southern soldier in his gray uniform.
“Daguerreotypes of uniformed soldiers are the rarest,” Manley said. “Especially one that shows a Reb.”
“I'll run these pictures around to some pawnshops,” Luscious said.
“They'll never turn up in a pawnshop,” Manley told him. “Whoever took them already had a buyer lined up.”
Luscious accompanied me out the front door. “I didn't want to say anything in there,” he said, “but I had a call this morning about another robbery.”
“My God,” I exclaimed. “What's happening to this town? We might as well be in New York. What else was stolen?”
“Some things from the Lickin Creek Archeological Society's collection.”
“I didn't even know Lickin Creek had an archeological society. Does it have a museum?”
“Not yet, but they're working on it. Right now, they got all their discoveries on the second floor of a barn out at Snider's farm. A team of amateur archeologists went there yesterday afternoon to put away some things they'd just dug out of a privy at the Coffman farm, and that's when they discovered some of the boxes were gone.”
“What was missing?”
“They don't exactly know. Seems they got an inventory, but nobody kept a list of what was in what box.”
“Let me guess. They also don't know when the boxes were taken. Am I right?”
Luscious nodded. “Sometime in the last two weeks is the best they can say.”
Gerald Manley stuck his head out the door and yelled something unpleasant at Luscious. “Gotta go,” Luscious said, and reentered the building.
I paused for a moment on the library steps and looked down at the quaint, peaceful square, where the little mermaid poured water into the fountain. The old cannon, aimed at the cars coming down Main Street, had recently been polished and looked better than new. And the Garden Society had decorated the small lawn area around the base of the fountain with pumpkins and alternating pots of rust-colored and gold chrysanthemums. Only a few vehicles passed by as I stood there. Once rush hour was over and all the Lickin Creekers had driven through the borough to get to their destinations, there was not much reason for people to come downtown anymore. Where once there had been thriving department stores, dime stores, drugstores, and dress shops, there were now only dark, empty windows. Lickin Creek was peaceful, that was true, but it was a peace gained from the flight of local businesses to the mall or their closures last year after a huge discount store had arisen overnight on the edge of town.
Under Lickin Creek's placid public face, something sinister was happening. First, Mack Macmillan's bizarre shooting death, followed by Dr. Washabaugh's murder. And now this series of strange thefts: the fire department's antique trumpet collection, Manley's gutta-percha collection, and the robbery of the barn where the Archeological Society kept its collection. Putting these calamities together with the robbery from the Gettysburg park service's collection, it looked like someone who was very knowledgeable about the value of certain types of Civil War relics was methodically targeting local antique collectors.