Arsenic And Old Books

“According to his campaign manager, he was at a meeting in Jackson at three o’clock. He made it back to Athena around ten last night.” Kanesha shrugged. “I have an appointment with him at ten thirty this morning.” She checked her watch. “Twenty-five minutes from now.”

“In order to be in Jackson for a meeting at three, he would have to have left Athena no later than one,” I said. “If he left Jackson around eight he could make it back here by ten, I suppose.”

“Yeah, I’d worked all that out myself.” Kanesha stood.

“Sorry,” I said. “Bad habit of thinking aloud.”

“Sure,” Kanesha said. “I’ll probably come back to you with more questions after I’ve dug a little deeper into all this. In the meantime, if you find anything pertinent in that diary, let me know.”

Diesel meowed and a moment later I felt a paw on my shoulder. I could hear Kanesha’s boots on the marble stairs as she descended.

“What’s up, boy?” I turned my chair to face the cat on the windowsill. “You want to visit Melba, don’t you?”

Diesel meowed again.

“I bet she’ll be here in the next two minutes. You just wait and see.” I knew Melba’s curiosity would be at fever pitch by now. She probably would have seen Kanesha come or go—the mayor as well. I was sure she had already heard about Marie’s death.

I turned back to face the doorway. One . . . two . . . three . . . I made it to seventeen before she popped up.

“What the heck is going on around here?” she asked as she took the chair in front of my desk. “Hey, Diesel, come give Melba some sugar.”

Diesel reached her before she got out the last few words. While she cuddled with the cat, I responded to her question.

“I found the missing diaries in my office this morning. No idea who had them or why they reappeared.”

Melba continued loving on Diesel while I told her the rest. As I suspected, she had already heard about Marie’s death. A friend of hers owned a house two doors down from the neighbor who found Marie in the street, and the whole neighborhood was abuzz with the story. Melba’s friend called her first thing this morning to share the terrible news.

We chatted for a few more minutes about the unfortunate Marie; then I told Melba gently that I was anxious to start work on the one volume of the diary I had available to me.

Melba grinned at me. “I guess I’d better scoot back downstairs before I wear out my welcome here completely.” She gave the cat a couple more scratches on the head before she headed out the door.

“Thanks,” I called after her.

Diesel muttered at me because Melba left. He lost his source of undivided attention, and he was not happy about it.

“Melba has to get back to work like I do,” I told him. “You be good now and get back up in your spot on the window.”

He stared at me for a moment before he padded around my desk and climbed back into the window. He continued to make grumbling noises, fainter and fainter, as I focused on my task.

I extracted the fifth diary volume from the mayor’s tote bag. I would have to remember to return that to her at some point. After a quick examination I determined that this book was in roughly the same condition as the others. Flaky but intact leather binding, with the same issues from the iron gall ink as the previous volumes. Only about half the pages, I estimated, contained writing. The remainder of the book was blank.

Curious, I checked the first and last entries. Rachel Long had neatly dated each entry, and that was helpful. The first entry had the date of March 9, 1861. The last entry, about two-thirds of the way through the volume, was written on May 17, 1865.

If I recalled correctly, Rachel started her diary in July of 1854. To judge by the dates of this volume, it must be either the second or third of the five in terms of chronology. I wondered why a middle volume had been secreted in the trunk. I was also curious why she stopped writing in this one before she had filled it.

I had to resist the temptation to sit there and read it. The answers to many questions could lie within these pages. It would take me a little while to get used to Rachel’s handwriting, but I was confident I could decipher it. I really needed to scan the pages first, however. At least if something happened to this volume, I would have the scans.

That thought caught me a bit off guard. If word got out about this fifth volume, would the person who stole the others try to take this one, too?

EIGHTEEN

Enough with the questions, I admonished myself. This fruitless speculation wouldn’t achieve anything. I needed to focus on the task at hand: scanning the diary.

Once I had created a good digital copy, I could take the time to read the contents to discern whether anything in the volume had relevance to the current situation.