Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [120]
Number twenty-seven changed my mind.
15
IT WAS NORA’S last column. The one that should have run this week instead of the one about me and Gabe. And would have if she hadn’t been killed.
I scanned down the page looking for a clue as to who might have killed her. As with all the other Tattler columns, she didn’t name names, but there were a few people I didn’t have trouble picking out. She hinted at a deadly secret in the past of a storyteller known for her animal tales with a touch of Tabasco: “Believe me, this storyteller’s secret will give y’all more bang than a sawed-off shotgun,” Nora had written. I flinched inwardly at her cruel remark. Nobody who knew Evangeline would miss that one.
Nora also wrote about the financial background of another storyteller who was “mired so deep in Mississippi mud it’d take a semi to pull them out.” I knew that was Ash, and so would anyone else with half a brain. Then she wrote about a library employee involved with the storytelling festival who had quite an exciting story involving lust, revenge, and murder. That maybe it was time the tale was told. She was deliberately obtuse with this one. A library employee? The three employees affiliated with the storytelling festival were Dolores, Jillian, and Nick. What secrets could each of them be hiding? Lust, revenge, murder? Certainly secrets many people had killed for. But I couldn’t imagine her deliberately revealing something that could hurt her brother. They’d always been so close, but Nora, even according to Nick, had changed after her son’s accident. And then there was the disagreement they had over the land she inherited, that last argument in the library—
I rubbed my temples. Three library employees. A body that would have been literally deadweight. I couldn’t see how either Jillian or Dolores could physically manage to move the body out to a car and down to the lake. That left Nick. No, I protested mentally. No way. Not Nick.
The only thing to do was give Gabe the disk and let him and his investigators decide what to do. Maybe information on it would correspond with something said in one of their suspect interviews.
I started closing the program when a voice behind me said, “All through now?”
I jumped at the sound of Jillian’s voice and fumbled for the off switch on the computer. “Uh, sure—” I stammered. “Just doing some research for Dove. Historical Society stuff.” I looked down, cursing my expressive face.
“Well, the library’s been closed for half an hour. I was making the last rounds and saw you in here.”
I looked through the small window of the computer room. The library was completely dark. Apparently the children’s librarians had forgotten I was in here. I looked back at her, realizing something else. Something I hadn’t noticed when I sat down. The screen of the computer I’d been using was visible to anyone standing at the window. Anything on it was completely readable to someone with halfway decent eyes.
Anything.
The palm-sized handgun Jillian pulled from the pocket of her Armani suit was as elegant as she was. At least I’d die with class.
“You really never know when to stop, do you, Benni?” she asked.
“You?” I said. “But why?”
“You know why,” she snapped.
I started to protest, then stopped. Though I can be very stupid sometimes, I wasn’t stupid enough to argue with a crazy woman pointing a gun at me. Especially when she’d obviously killed once already. She must think that I’d found something that incriminated her on the disks. That means she couldn’t have read them from the window.
“Walk ahead of me,” she said, gesturing with the gun. I contemplated one of those quick, clever