The Silence Of The Library

Diesel sensed this, too. After sitting contentedly by Melba all this time, he reacted to the emotional temperature change and warbled a few times. Even Kanesha smiled. Melba scratched the cat’s head, and after a moment Diesel moved around to me. I had to give him attention and assure him that I was okay. He was still a bit shy of Kanesha, however.

“Carrie loved the books so much,” Melba went on, “that she was determined to meet the woman who wrote them. Carrie was adopted when she was about six months old, and she had no idea who her real parents were. If her adopted mama and daddy knew, they never told her, and she was never able to find any records.” She paused for a breath. “Carrie said she got it in her head that Mrs. Cartwright was her long-lost mother. She was too young to understand, of course, or even think about the fact that those books were being published twenty years before she was born. You know how kids can be when they want something to be true hard enough, they don’t always think logically about it.”

What Melba told us made Carrie Taylor’s story even more heart-wrenching. I could feel for that little girl who wanted so desperately to know her biological mother and to escape from a life of poverty.

“So Carrie wrote to Mrs. Cartwright.” Melba paused. “I think she wrote in care of the publisher maybe. Anyway, she mailed her letter and waited. And waited. And waited. She kept reading the books over and over till they were about to fall apart.”

“Did someone give her the books?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like her parents could afford to buy them for her.”

“They couldn’t,” Melba said. “One of the teachers at school felt sorry for her and gave them to her.”

“Did she ever get a letter back from Mrs. Cartwright?” Kanesha asked.

“About thirteen months after she mailed her letter.” Melba shook her head. “I read it once, the first time Carrie showed it to me, I guess it was. Mrs. Cartwright apologized real nice about answering so long after Carrie wrote to her, but she said that she had moved a couple of times during the year and the post office had trouble keeping up with her and forwarding the mail.” She shrugged. “That sounded kind of fake to me, but what do I know? Carrie was so thrilled to get the letter she didn’t care. She wrote back to Mrs. Cartwright, and this time got an answer right away. But in that second letter Mrs. Cartwright told her she was going to live overseas and didn’t know exactly where she’d be, so she didn’t have an address to give Carrie.” Melba shrugged again. “That really was a brush-off, I think, but Carrie was only twelve, I guess, and she believed every word of it. She wrote one more letter back to Mrs. Cartwright but it was never answered.”

“Was it the letters from Mrs. Cartwright she considered her prize possessions?” Kanesha asked.

Melba nodded. “They were real valuable to her, but do you think they were worth any money? Surely they weren’t worth somebody killing her for, were they?”

She was looking at me when she asked the question, and Kanesha also appeared to be waiting for me to answer.

I thought about it for a moment. “Frankly, I can’t see that they’d have significant monetary value. Maybe a hundred bucks or so, but unless letters in Mrs. Cartwright’s own hand are truly rare, I shouldn’t think they’d be worth much. It’s not like she was a hugely famous or successful person—although to her fans she was royalty.” A thought occurred to me. “Were those letters handwritten?”

“I’m pretty sure they were,” Melba said, though she didn’t sound completely certain.

“It doesn’t sound to me like those letters were valuable enough to kill over.” Kanesha rubbed her forehead. “If an item in those files motivated the murder, it surely had to be something else.”

But what? I wondered. I couldn’t come up with any ideas at the moment.

“Ms. Gilley, would you do me a favor and write down everything you remember about those files? Anything you can recall that you saw or even think you saw?” Kanesha drained the last of her coffee, and I refilled it. She nodded her thanks.

“I can sure do that,” Melba said. “If Charlie will find me some paper and a pen, I’ll get right on it.” She flashed a smile. “That is, if you and Diesel don’t mind me hanging around here a little while.”

Diesel meowed loudly, and I grinned at Melba. “I think he has spoken for both of us. I’ll be back in a minute.” I headed for the den at the back of the house and retrieved a notebook and a couple of pens from my desk there. Kanesha and Melba were silent when I returned to the kitchen.

“Before you start making your list,” Kanesha said, “can you think of anything else that could be important?”

Melba shook her head. “Not right this minute, but who knows what will come to me when I start writing? Okay with you if I do it here while you and Charlie talk? Or do you want me somewhere else?”

Kanesha eyed me for a moment.

“It’s fine with me if she stays here,” I said.

Melba flipped open the notebook, uncapped a pen, and started writing.