B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (2 page)

Leading two
columns of unshaven men in buckskin breeches was a wiry, raven-bearded Gaul in
an eye-catching raccoon hat. And this wasn’t just the raccoon’s
tail
–
it was a whole taxidermied raccoon, wrapped around his head. As he waved the
tricolor flag of Napoleon, Pomp Charbonneau’s green eyes danced and the raccoon’s
shiny marble eyes bobbed above. Its little paws waved as if in a plea for help.

“My God!” Hester
recoiled.

*    
*     *

Oh, boy, is the
captain going to owe me for this, Nate Darrow kept telling himself as sweat
stains spread up the side of his T-shirt under the blazing sun. Across the back
was the slogan “Hopped Up on Full Sail IPA,” an homage to his favorite Columbia
Gorge craft brewer.

Portland might
get rain and ice in the winter, but it could also get beastly hot in the
summer, Darrow had been warned as he headed into his first June in the city,
after moving north from the university town of Eugene. Rivers bring some
breezes, but Portland is 100 miles up the Columbia River from the cooling ocean
air.

But this was too
early for this kind of heat, everyone agreed.

As the new guy
in the Portland Police Bureau detective squad – and one of few who’d come up
through the ranks and had memories of “those good ol’ days of traffic duty,” he’d
been reminded – Darrow had been “volunteered” to help supervise in staging the
parade, one of his captain’s favorite public-service projects.

Darrow expected
it also had something to do with his “rising star” having risen too fast in his
first months, when the press overplayed his part in “single-handedly” reviving
the bookmobile librarian after she’d fainted at finding a body in her
bookmobile.  

 For this one day,
it meant he was organizing 15 traffic cops, a half dozen bike patrolmen, eight
meter maids, and even the horse patrol.

Finally the
first part of the parade had reached the end point, where Taylor Street crossed
over the Stadium Freeway. The tall detective, with a runner’s build and a
prematurely graying thatch of hair over luxuriant chestnut eyebrows and a
strong aquiline nose, watched with satisfaction as a stocky, baldheaded uniformed
cop in aviator sunglasses furiously waved the Rose Queen float into a church
parking lot.

In the First Aid
tent at the lot’s edge, two red-faced and grimacing men in their 50s were
prying off wooden shoes as they showed a nurse their blisters.

The brassy notes
of a Sousa march wafted up the block. But another sound clashed in Darrow’s
ear, causing him to turn and look back down Taylor. There in the middle of the
parade, a buckskin-clad man with a wild animal on his head waved his arms like
a band conductor and split the ranks of mountain men marching behind him.

And through the
middle came the new Sara Duffy Memorial Bookmobile, its air horn blaring as if
it were a fogbound freighter crossing the Columbia River bar.

As Darrow stared
with dropped jaw the big bus ground to a halt 10 feet away. Clouds of steam
fogged its windows.

The front door
popped open and Hester McGarrigle, her face red as a beet, stumbled to the
pavement.

Seeing Darrow,
she started to speak, but all that came out was a squeak. Her eyes rolled back
in her head and she slumped in a faint just as Nate Darrow rushed forward to
catch her.

“Oh, Ms.
McGarrigle, we really need to stop meeting this way,” he said under his breath
as he carried Hester to the First Aid tent.

Chapter 2

Tuesday, June 11

Sunday and
Monday were the bookmobile crew’s customary days off, so there was plenty of
time to recover from the heat. This morning, Pim was hot under the collar for a
different reason.

“Why do they
have to change our route? It was perfectly fine just as it was, and anytime
they change it to make things more ‘efficient’ ” – she curled her stubby
fingers in air quotes – “it just confuses the patrons and we show up at stops
with nobody there!”

“And it complicates
my job because I don’t know who’s going to show up at a new stop and what they
might like to read,” Hester added. Unlike a regular library, the bookmobile
catered to specific patrons on its different runs. Sometimes that meant
stocking up on romances and westerns, or filling the shelves with movie-star
biographies. Today Hester had tried to shelve a broader selection, including
some young-adult novels in hopes of snagging a teen reader or two. “I can
always dream!” she told Pim.

The librarian
suspected her driver’s ire had to do with more than just the reading public,
however. The change of stops also meant Madame Pim wouldn’t get to have lunch
at the Onion-Aire burger stand by the Skyline bookmobile stop every Tuesday,
Hester mused, suppressing a smile.

 The Onion-Aire’s
regular burgers came with two hefty beef patties, and Pim’s normal order was for
an extra patty on top of that. The café had a standing challenge that if you
ordered a burger with four patties – a Walla Walla Whomper – and finished it in
one sitting, they’d give you another free. It was one of Pim’s long-standing
ambitions.

“But then she’d
explode,” Hester said to herself.

“What’s that you
say?” Pim asked.

“Oh!” Hester
looked up as Pim parked at the Skyline stop at 9 a.m., the new scheduled time
for the hilltop lookout, which today was wrapped in thick fog. “Uh, I was just thanking
our lucky stars this old bus didn’t explode coming up the hill. After it got so
overheated in the parade.”

“Yeah, well, Bob
Newall said he spent all day yesterday flushing out the radiator; he
practically flooded the bookmobile barn,” Pim said, referring to the
long-suffering mechanic who kept Portland’s Mobile Library Unit chugging along.
“And I didn’t waste my days off. It gave me time to catch up on the Rose
Medallion clues. Me and Millie Eubanks from the motor pool – you know that gal
who almost got on ‘Jeopardy’? – we’re putting our heads together and I think we
have a chance at it. And it comes with big bucks this time, did you hear?”

The Rose
Medallion search was a longstanding, highly popular part of Rose Festival.
Every June, a small bronze medallion about the size of an Olympic medal and
engraved with a rosebud was hidden “in plain sight,” as contest organizers put
it, somewhere around Portland. Clues to its whereabouts were published each
morning in
The Oregonian
newspaper, starting out very vaguely and
getting more obvious as the week wore on. Whoever was first to find the
medallion won all sorts of donated prizes.

This year, in
celebration of its 50
^th
year in business, a local manufacturer of
sport runners, Zeus Shoes, had put up $50,000 cash, stoking interest to a
fevered pitch.

“That would sure
put a nice bump in the double-wide fund,” Pim said with a wink over the top of
her cateye glasses. Pim lived along the pretty Sandy River in an aging, mossy
single-wide trailer house on 10 acres, part of a long-ago divorce settlement.
She often complained of being “land rich.”

As Pim finished
setting up the Instie-Circ, the portable circulation computer, Hester put out
the step by the bookmobile’s rear door and waved through the murky mist to the day’s
first patron, Mrs. Loman, who was just coming into focus down the walk with her
customary two shopping bags of library books, one in each arm. Hester liked to
think the bags acted as ballast to keep the wispy octogenarian from blowing
away on the hilltop’s gusty winds.

Mrs. Loman’s sweet
nature belied an insatiable appetite for murder mysteries. Hester reached into
a cupboard for the new J.A. Jance she had saved for her favorite patron, who
rewarded Hester with a smile made even wider by a pair of ill-fitting dentures.

“Did you see us
in the parade, Mrs. L?” Pim asked, almost shouting to compensate for Mrs. Loman’s
hearing loss.

“What’s that? I’m
fine if you don’t mumble, dear,” she warbled.

“Parade! Parade!”
Pim bellowed.

“Oh, I love charades!”
she said, looking slightly befuddled. “Is the library having another Seniors Parlor
Game Night?”

Hester smiled,
nodded and handed Mrs. Loman a library events calendar.

Next to climb
aboard were the Donaldson sisters, identical twins, both widowed in their late
60s, who dressed alike and lately had taken to checking out books with one
another’s library cards in a giggly effort to trick Hester.

Behind them, a recent
new patron at this stop was Mr. O’Leary, a recently retired accountant and
self-proclaimed “available specimen” with too much time on his hands who was
making a study of mathematician biographies.

“Hullo, Hester,”
he said through his walrus mustache, its tips waxed to a point. “I saw the
trouble you had in the parade. The TV said the bookmobile almost took out an
entire high-school class!”

“Well, it really
wasn’t like that, you know how they exaggerate,” she said, giving him her “Hester
Sunshine” voice.

“And they’re
saying now that it has to do with that van Dyke, that there’s some sort of
investigation of how he’s mishandled library funds. I guess he was supposed to
use a bunch of donated money to buy you gals a brand-spanking new bus, not this
tarted up old thing, eh?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t
know about that,” Hester said, handing him a biography of Alexandre
Grothendieck, father of the Theory of Schemes, which Mr. O’Leary had ordered on
interlibrary loan from Boston Public Library. It was the only known copy in
North America.

 Hester had been
doing her best in recent weeks to divert this overly attentive patron’s
attentions to the Donaldson sisters, who were known, as Pim put it, “to take a
shine to anything in long trousers.” But every time Hester delivered a special
book he ordered, O’Leary acted as if she had done him a personal favor. The
red-faced little man ordered special books all the time.

“Oh, my favorite
librarian in the world has another prize for me!” O’Leary brayed, with both
chins wagging. “Thank you, Saint Hester!”

Hester sighed
deeply, readjusted the nametag pinned to her sweater and suddenly busied
herself helping a young mother with a 2-year-old in a tie-dyed onesie over by
the children’s shelves.

“Let’s get moving,
Pim, before Mr. Mustachio comes back,” Hester hissed a half-hour later as she
pulled in the step. “I swear, I’m going to have to ask Bob to fumigate this
thing with Pine-Sol to get rid of the curse of Aramis. He must bathe in the
stuff.”

The fog that
wrapped the city was a welcome cooling agent after the weekend’s heat. And it
was persistent. Pim leaned over the big steering wheel to peer through the
windshield. She flicked the wipers to squeal across the moist glass a few times
as they made their way slowly downhill to a new stop edging Forest Park in
Northwest Portland.

“I’m glad I
studied my Thomas Guide to get us to this new spot, ’cuz this pea soup sure as
heck-fire isn’t helping,” said Pim, never losing a chance to sing the praises
of the map book that she called her Bookmobile Bible. “But I sure wish the
siting committee would drive out to these spots before sending us to the back
of beyond. Look at this!”

Pim was carefully
threading the big bus down a narrow street with just enough room between solid
rows of parked cars to squeak through if …

“Nope, can’t do
it, hang on a second!” Pim clucked as she yanked on the parking brake, leapt
from her seat, barreled out the rear door, ran to the front and folded in both
side mirrors, then scuffled back to her driver’s seat.

“OK, now I think
we can make it, but where we’re going to park down here, Jumping Jehosephat
knows!”

Hester studied
the “Location Information Missive” that had been sent along by Dora, the
library’s bookkeeper and “Head Bossy Boots,” as Pim called her. Dora’s “missives”
were supposed to tell where it was OK for the bookmobile to park and turn
around at each designated stop.

“It says
something in hieroglyphics here about ‘Horseshoe pt. OK 4 pkg. Posts hv. bn.
remved.’ But I haven’t a clue what that means,” Hester groaned as Pim came to
the road’s end. “Why does she have to write these instructions like she’s a
code specialist moving a MASH unit into enemy territory?”

Above them, a
high, arching bridge soared above the park entrance and carried Thurman Street
to the upper west side of town. A walkway from the road’s end threaded beneath
the bridge and followed a stream reputed for its resident trout population. On
weekend mornings, the path transported legions of joggers and dog-walkers into
the huge wooded preserve, known as the nation’s largest park inside city
boundaries.

Just ahead of
the bookmobile a narrow driveway led to a building with restrooms.

“Well, this is
just dandy, folks, how am I supposed to turn this thing around?” Pim blustered
as the big bus ground to a halt. But not one to be daunted by any challenge,
she immediately ground the gears, inched forward and started maneuvering up and
back in what turned into a 16-point turn to get the bookmobile facing the other
direction.

 Only once did
Hester wince when a corner of the front bumper pulled a branch off a little
ginkgo tree “planted by Mrs. Rasmussen’s Third Grade Class in honor of the
Challenger astronauts,” according to a plaque.

“OK, now where
do we park so we’re not in the way? I can’t really see a dang thing in this
fog, but it looks like there’s a sandy area there next to the restrooms that
could take us. I’m backing in!” Pim declared, jumping out of her seat to unfold
the mirrors again.

“Aha, Pim –
sandy area? Could it be a horseshoe pit? I think I just made sense of Dora’s
gibberish!” Hester laughed when her driver climbed back in her seat. “And it
says the iron posts have been removed so we’re good to go!”

As she steered
by the mirrors, there was a moment when the big bus seemed to stall, but Pim “just
gunned it,” as she liked to say, and the bookmobile bumped and swayed to a
resting point.

Only a few
patrons found them this first day in the new stop, but Hester was happy to
check out a copy of “Treasure Island” to a shy 10-year-old boy and the latest
Thomas Jefferson biography to his father.

Like a theater
curtain rising, the fog finally lifted. A cloud of blue smoke took its place as
Pim revved the diesel and readied for departure. Just as Hester opened the rear
door to pull up the portable step, she looked up into the smiling face of a
runner in an Oregon Ducks sweatshirt, his thighs sheathed in tight green nylon
running shorts.

“Hester, what
the heck are you doing here?” asked a panting and sweaty Nate Darrow, the
police detective who lived upstairs from her in an apartment building less than
a mile away.

“Oh, Nate! This
is where you go trail-running! Of course!”

As was often the
case when she unexpectedly ran into her neighbor, she found herself blushing,
which she never could quite explain. Frankly, it was getting a little
irritating.

“It’s a new
bookmobile stop, our first day here,” she finally blurted in answer to his
question, forcing her eyes away from the tan, muscled calves that Darrow was
now leaning over to massage.

Too late. His
eye caught hers.

“Sorry, I’ve
been cramping up for no good reason, for the last three miles,” he said through
gritted teeth.

“What, you’ve
been running half-naked in a cold and penetrating fog of which Dickens would be
proud and you can’t figure out why your muscles are knotting up?” Hester asked.

Darrow shot her
a look.

“Anyway, you’re
just in time to help guide us out of here, if you’d be so kind,” Hester
chirped, happy to regain her equilibrium. “Pim is a little worried about
getting stuck in this darn sand.”

Darrow waved
them ahead as Pim slowly eased the bus forward, but again it hung up halfway along
and the engine stalled. Pim cranked it back to life, then gradually eased out
the clutch. With another bounce and jounce, they cleared the sand.

Hester stuck her
head out the side window to thank Darrow, but suddenly she couldn’t see him. “Where
the heck did he go, Pim?”

She got up and
trotted to the rear door, swung it open and hopped out to see Darrow staring at
the sand pit behind the bookmobile.

He looked up at
her as if he’d seen a ghost.

“Oh my God, not
again, Hester,” he croaked.

He stepped
forward to stop her, but she turned and got a quick glimpse of Pieter van Dyke,
nude except for his tidy-whitie Fruit of the Looms, spread-eagled in the sand.
His hands and feet were duct-taped to horseshoe posts pounded deep into the
ground.