Last Scene Alive

I woke up about four. My arm was very sore, but it was bearable as long as I didn't move it too vigorously. I got some pants on by myself, and actually zipped and buttoned them. Getting the nightgown off over my head was much worse, and pulling on a knit shirt was just as bad. But finally I managed, and crept downstairs very slowly.



Robin was asleep on my couch, his laptop plugged in on my desk. He'd carried my phone to the couch with him, and it was moving up and down with the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He snored, like a big cat. It was a large noise, but oddly delicate.



I padded into the kitchen barefoot, and made some coffee. I looked outside to see a day that had gone gray and windy. Rain was coming up. I watched a swirl of gum leaves sweep past the window, yellow and red and brown. Indian summer was definitely over. I looked at the thermometer mounted outside the window. It had dropped twenty degrees since this morning.



While the coffee perked, I found a notepad with messages in Robin's slanted, narrow handwriting. My mother had called, which was no surprise. I should have called her. My sister-in-law - well, my stepsister-in-law - had called, too. So had Sally. And Arthur.



The last name Robin had written was "Will Weir." I wondered what the cameraman could have to say to me. Though everyone else deserved to be called back before Will, his was the number I dialed first, out of sheer curiosity.



"Weir," he answered. I knew he must be on a cell phone, but it was the best connection I'd ever had. No crackling, no distant buzz.



"You called me?" I asked, after I identified myself.



"Right. The newspaper reporter who was here today, doing a story for your local paper... she said that a woman who claims to have killed Celia had attacked you. Is that true?"



"Yes," I said, promising myself I'd grab Sally Allison and stuff her head in a food processor. Violent images were coming easily to me today. "It was Tracy, the young woman who served the food at the caterer's truck?"



"The reddish-haired girl," he said, after waiting a second for his memory to kick in, I assumed.



"That's her."



"Why did she say that?"



I looked at the phone. I was glad Will couldn't see that look. "Well, because she had a bee in her bonnet about Robin Crusoe, and she was resentful of Celia's former relationship with him."



"But why would she attack you?"



This had me stumped. "She thinks that Robin and I have a relationship now," I said, feeling very awkward.



"That is a little quick," he said, his voice as dry as toast.



"Robin and I are old friends," I said, as neutrally as possible.



"I remember, from the book. Well, Mark and Joel wanted to know if it was because of something that happened on the set..."



"No," I said, not following his line of reasoning, but willing to dismiss it as my own woolly-headedness.



"Mark brought some books by the library yesterday," Will was saying.



"Yes."



"Some books Celia had borrowed?"



"Yes."



"They were in her trailer when she was killed?"



Were we playing twenty questions here? Robin slouched into the kitchen, his hair rumpled and his face creased from the throw pillow on the couch. He came up behind me and wrapped his long arms around me. I snuggled back against him.



"Yes," I said again, hoping he'd get to the point soon. I tapped his name on the list with my finger, so Robin would know to whom I was speaking. I could feel him nod.



"The thing is, she'd borrowed some books from me," Will was saying.



"Oh, gosh. No wonder you want to know about the books." I never loaned books, myself. You never got them back, or if you did they had peanut-butter fingerprints on them, or smelled of other people's cigarettes or pets. "Aside from a batch of paperbacks, there were two hardbacks about the sixties, and one home health book. Those were Lawrenceton library books, though. I'm really sure."



"A home health book?" His voice sounded weaker.



"Yeah, the kind that you use when you want to diagnose your own illness. Poor thing."



"You think she figured out what she had?" Weir sounded horrified.



"I know she had. There was a bookmark on the page for Huntington's chorea."



A long silence fell. Robin poured himself a mug of coffee, asked me in mime if I wanted one, too. I nodded emphatically.



"She knew," Will repeated, his voice just as shocked as it had been the first time. "Oh, my God."



"I'm sorry if I've upset you," I said, actually feeling a little on the impatient side. "What books were you trying to find?" I took a sip of coffee. The groggy nap hangover began to fade. My eyes strayed to my other phone messages. I had a lot of things to do, and my arm was burning.



"Books," he said blankly. "Oh, right, I'd loaned her some paperbacks. You said Mark also brought a few paperbacks to the library."



"Yes, that's what I said." He could have asked Mark before he called me.



"I'll drop by the library and have a look through those books," he said. "They're not important, but I stuck a letter in one of them, and I need it. When will you be working?"



"Tonight, six to nine," I said. I'd told Sam I'd try to at least make the evening part of my shift, if I could. I didn't feel too bad.



"If we finish filming, I'll drop by," he said.



"Okay," I said doubtfully. "They're in a box in the back. By the employee entrance, but it'll be locked, so come to the main doors. I can show you." I was sure no one had had a chance to get to them in the past twenty-four hours.



"Good, maybe I'll get there tonight." He sounded much more relaxed than he had at the beginning of the conversation.



"You're going in to work tonight?" Robin asked after I'd hung up.



"I ought to," I said. "I really don't hurt too bad, and with Patricia missing, I feel like I should keep things as even as possible. I'll call Sam to tell him as soon as I finish my coffee."



"I was hoping you'd stay with me," Robin said, doing his best to look pitiful.



"We've had our time today," I reminded him. "I think after work I'll need to come home and sleep some more. My arm is sore." Plus other things.



He kissed my shoulder. "Did that make it feel better?"



I tried not to smile, failed. "A little."



"Can we plan on tomorrow night?"



"Oh, yes. And I don't have to work the next day."



He smiled at me. Robin had a radiant smile.



We talked about the move for a while, and the book Robin was working on, while I returned the rest of my phone calls.



Sam was glad to hear I was coming in, since he hadn't found anyone to replace me yet. After an incident a few years ago, librarians weren't allowed to work by themselves, no matter how few patrons showed up in the evening. My mother was glad to hear I was all right, and she had some rental units to show Robin. My stepsister-in-law Poppy was glad, too, and she wanted me to know that Brandon had his very first tooth. Arthur wanted me to know that law-enforcement gossip had it that Tracy was talking at great length about everything: her long-standing obsession with Robin, beginning with reading his books and escalating to focus on his personal life, her careful maneuvering to get the job with Molly's Moveable Feasts, her visit to Celia's trailer with a tray of croissants as camouflage, her subsequent movements...



"That's good," I said, puzzled.



"She's telling us everything," he repeated, significantly. "In detail."



I could feel my face turn red as I realized Arthur was telling me that everyone in the SPACOLEC (Spalding County Law Enforcement Complex) was aware that Robin and I had had sex on the carpet in the office of the house I was buying.



"Oh," I said. My voice sounded small and embarrassed to my own ears.



"Oh," he said. Angry.



"Um. Well, I'll talk to you later, thanks for letting me know - I think."



"Roe, you realize this woman did not really kill Celia Shaw?"



"Yes, I know that." Point?



"You want to know what I think."



"No."



"I think your new boyfriend did it. I think he knew what disease she had and killed her out of mercy."



"I think you're nuts," I said furiously, and slammed the phone down.



But when Robin asked me what I'd gotten upset about, I didn't look him in the face. And I didn't explain. No one could have persuaded me to believe Robin murdered someone - anyone - out of malice. But out of pity... it was almost conceivable. A lovely young woman, once beloved, facing a horrible fate - it was just barely possible. Didn't the fact that she'd been drugged argue that whoever had killed her didn't want her to feel the pain? Didn't the pillow pressed over her face give her a comparatively gentle end? Celia Shaw had had a merciful murder, if you believed such a thing was possible.



I didn't know Robin well enough, really, to completely rule out such a possibility. I needed to be by myself: to think, to recover my equilibrium. I reminded myself vigorously that Robin had a practically ironclad alibi.



He left a few minutes later, and we planned on seeing each other the next day, and I smiled at him, but when I locked the door behind him, I have to confess I felt some relief. When I thought of him not only coming to the hospital, but taking such good care of me afterward, I knew I was being one horrible woman to even doubt him for a second. But the tiny thread of doubt made me miserable, and I didn't need to be around him for a while.



I could not have a relationship with someone who could do such a thing. On the other hand, when I thought of the dreadful disease that would have killed Celia slowly, maybe her death had been a favor to her. That didn't mean I could cohabit with the one who'd granted it.



I pottered around, cleaning our mugs and the coffeepot, taking some extra-strength pain reliever the hospital had sent home with me, cleaning myself up a little for work. By five-thirty, I was at least presentable and functioning, though at a low level. Jeans and a long-sleeved tee were not my usual working gear, but I was not about to try to change again. I put on my red-framed glasses, to give me pep, and brushed my hair awkwardly. With the damp and cold in the air, my hair was on its worst behavior. It made a cloud around me, crackling with electricity.



It was already dark when I used my key to enter the employee door of the library, always kept locked after dark. The lights were on in the employee lounge, and I glanced over to see the books Mark Chesney had brought in, still in their box on the repair table. Patricia's office was still dark. I wondered how far away she'd gotten by now, and I felt sorry for Jerome. As I slung my purse into my locker, I thought of how long Patricia had kept such a big secret, and how careful she must have had to be for many years.



A slip of the tongue, and her new life and her son would be gone.



Celia had had a massive secret, too. I wondered if she had known that her mother had died of the same disease she was developing. I wondered how she'd gone to work the first few days of filming, knowing what she was facing and how terrible her end would be: that surely her disease would become apparent to everyone in the course of time. I found myself thinking that Celia had surely had a theatrical flair, and she would have appreciated being a colorful True Crime episode rather than a disease of the week.



Lindsey Russell, a very young woman who'd just recently begun working as the children's librarian, passed through on her way out the back door. She gave me a cheerful wave, and told me the library had been really quiet all afternoon. Lindsey wasn't in the gossip loop yet, I gathered. I smiled back at her, and told her to have a good evening.



I strolled into the main part of the library, and discovered I was working with Perry. A few years before, it would have made me quite nervous to be alone with him. The money Sally had spent on him, or Perry's own determination to get well, or time itself, had gone far toward curing Perry of his many problems.



Perry was thin and nervous, but he was also a lot more sociable than he'd been, and he'd licked his drug problems. His relationships with women didn't seem to last too long, but wasn't that always the case until you found the One? I didn't always believe that there's a mate for every individual, but some days it was a real convenient and comforting concept.



"Hey, girl," Perry said. "I heard about your unexpected visitor. Was that the red-headed woman who was in here the other day, reading the magazines?"



"That was Tracy, all right. And she was the one who knocked me down in the parking lot, I'm sure."



"It was a woman, after all. You were right. How's the arm?"



"It's sore, but I'm going to be fine. No muscle damage to speak of."



"That's good. I can't believe you came in to work."



"I hated to stress Sam out any more than he's already stressed."



"So, you know Patricia left?"



I nodded cautiously. I didn't know what story Sam had told to give her a head start.



"Sam thinks she'll come back. If he wasn't already married, and if doing a mixed-race relationship wouldn't be so out of Sam's league, I'd say he was in love with that woman."



Immediately, I felt something click, and I knew Perry was right.



Ultraconventional, ultraconservative lily white Sam Clerrick, married and the father of two, was in love with African-American left-wing former-bombmaker Anita Defarge. If she was his soulmate, God truly had a sense of humor.



I shook my head to clear it. "Perry," I said, "do we actually have any work to do?"



"I guess you could be entering the patron requests," he said, with a sigh. That was a nothing job, recording the patron requests for specific books so we could fit them into our budget. "There's only one patron in the building, Josh Finstermeyer. He's over in periodicals."



I grinned at Josh's name, and Perry looked at me oddly. "Oh, by the way, Roe," he said, and he sounded so elaborately casual that I went on the alert immediately. "You know the man who brought those books in yesterday?"



"Mark Chesney?"



"One of the movie people."



"Yes, the assistant director."



"Do you know him very well?"



"Hardly at all. He seems nice enough. I don't think working for Joel Park Brooks would be a job for the fainthearted."



Perry was fiddling with some reserved books. I waited to see what he'd say, with some curiosity.



"He came back in this morning," Perry said.



I tried to think of a neutral response. "Oh?" was all I could come up with. I had a feeling I was about to be confided in. Perry fiddled with the books some more. "Had he found some books he'd overlooked?" I prompted him.



"More things she'd checked out? No," Perry said. "He, ah, wanted to know if I'd go have a drink with him after work tonight."



"Okay." I shrugged. "Are you going?"



"I'd love to talk to him," Perry confessed. "Someone who lives and works in Hollywood. God, that would be so interesting. You know, I've always loved to be in the community theater plays, and I've done a couple of things in Atlanta."



Actually, I had forgotten all about Perry's obsession with the theater.



"I'd always hoped I'd get a chance to talk to your stepson," Perry went on, "but he was only in town so briefly when he came, and I could tell you two didn't have a good relationship."



"That's putting it mildly."



"So now this Mark, wanting to talk to me, it just seems so ... exciting."



"So go."



"But at the same time, it seems like a ... date." Perry flushed dark red. "I mean, why me? Would a regular guy just make a point of coming in and inviting another guy out for a drink?"



In my opinion, no. But I felt totally unqualified to give Perry advice on this issue. I had long suspected Perry had so much trouble maintaining relationships with women because he was backing the wrong horse, orientation-wise -  but I sure wasn't going to suggest that to him.



"If you want to go, go. It doesn't commit you to anything," I said at last. "If you don't have a good time, if something happens that - doesn't interest you, that you don't feel comfortable with, get up and leave." I shrugged again.



He brightened as if I'd given the date my blessing. "That's the right way to look at it," he said. "You're so wise, Roe."



That was me - the wise librarian of Lawrenceton, Georgia.