Murder at Teatime (18 page)

She was about to dismiss the question from her mind—MacMillan had probably just handed the notes over with the books—when something puzzling caught her eye. The notes were dated December, 1959, which wasn’t a surprise—Felix had said that MacMillan died on Christmas Eve—but the bill of sale was dated June, 1959. If MacMillan had sold the books to Thornhill in June, why had he included them in the notes he was making for a catalogue six months later? Slowly, bits and pieces of conversation from the herb luncheon began to bubble up to the surface of her consciousness: how MacMillan had outwitted Thornhill at auction to purchase
Der Gart
, how Thornhill had vowed to never let a book he wanted slip through his fingers again. And from the conversation the next day with Daria: how the botanical society had asked Thornhill, as the board member most knowledgeable about botanical collecting, to oversee the transfer of the MacMillan collection to their library. Suddenly she realized that the bits and pieces all fit together: Thornhill had stolen the books from the MacMillan estate!

The conversation from the luncheon came back to her now in more detail: Thornhill saying how MacMillan had decided to sell his prizes to his rival because he would appreciate them, and how the dying man had entrusted them to him with the words, “Take care of them, Frank. They are my children.” The words had struck her as phony at the time, but she had written their phoniness off to imaginative storytelling. She imagined Thornhill going through shelf upon shelf of MacMillan’s books, and then coming upon
Der Gart
: the book he had wanted above all others. She pictured him lovingly picking it up, and then hastily putting it down as his conscience flirted with temptation. “Who would know if I took it?”
No one
. “What if someone found out?”
I could say that he sold it to me
. “How would I prove it?”
I could forge a bill of sale on his stationery
. Then, upping the ante: “If I’m going to take
Der Gart
, why not take the others too?” And finally, making the grand rationalization: “The botanical society will never be able to appreciate these books the way I do.”

She doubted he had felt remorse. He had probably thought
Der Gart
was his due because he’d been tricked out of it by an obscure auction-house rule. He had also probably thought he was doing society a service by rescuing the books from the unworthy patrons of the botanical society’s library. She remembered what Felix had said about Thornhill possessing all the attributes of the winning player in the collecting game. He might have listed deceit and arrogance along with skill, patience, and boldness. But she did suspect that deep down inside Thornhill had been afraid: afraid that he would be found out, afraid that he might slip out of the groove again. In retrospect, his life of scholarly rectitude and selfless public service seemed to have been erected as a bulwark against the sinful strain in his honorable Puritan heritage, and the achievements recorded in his obituary—Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the New York Botanical Society, past President of the Society of Economic Botany, founder of the J. Franklin Thornhill Plant Science Center, author of dozens of highly respected books and articles—stockpiled like weapons against the possibility that he might one day be exposed for the thief he was.

Realizing that she was still holding the papers, she looked down again at the signature on the bill of sale. The line was not firm and bold as it was on MacMillan’s notes, but wavering, as if it had been traced. The risk had really been very slight: it was, after all, not a string of bad checks he had forged, but one signature on a quasi-legal document. The chances were that it would pass all but the closest scrutiny. For further protection, he must have simply taken the catalogue notes, knowing that it would be incriminating to leave them among MacMillan’s effects. He should have destroyed them, but he probably couldn’t bring himself to throw them away: they contained valuable information about the books that were now in his possession. Maybe he had even planned to issue a private catalogue of his own someday, using MacMillan’s notes as a foundation. She wondered if he’d taken the catalogue manuscript as well. Felix had said that the completed manuscript was about to go to the printer’s at the time of MacMillan’s death. If it could be found, it would be further proof that Thornhill had taken the books. She riffled through the rest of the stack of papers in front of her, but it wasn’t there.

Was the fact that Thornhill stole the books related to his murder? she wondered. As Daria and Tom sifted through the other papers she slipped the notes and the bill of sale into her bag. She wanted to talk to Tracey before revealing to Daria that her former employer was a book thief.

“I’ve got an inventory here that was taken last year,” said Daria. “Does anyone else have anything?”

“I’ve got some old auction house catalogues with listings of other copies of the missing books,” said Charlotte, passing them across the table.

“Actually,” said Daria, leafing through the catalogues, “between what we’ve got here and the card catalogue, we probably have enough.”

“How about you, Tom?” asked Charlotte, hoping he might have turned up the catalogue manuscript. “Find anything?”

“Nada,”
said Tom, tossing the rest of his stack of papers on the reject pile at the center of the table. “Is that it? I’m ready for some lunch.”

“I guess so,” said Daria.

She escorted Charlotte and Tom to the door, where they ran into John, who was entering. He was carrying a wicker picnic hamper. It was obvious that he and Daria were about to go off on a picnic.

“John, I’d like you to meet Tom Plummer. Tom is Charlotte’s friend. He’s helping her out on the case,” said Daria. “Tom, this is John Lewis, Dr. Thornhill’s scholar-in-residence.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Tom politely, removing his hand from its resting place at the small of Daria’s back and extending it to John.

Charlotte noticed John’s gaze follow Tom’s hand. They exchanged pleasantries, but their mutual distrust was obvious.

“See you tonight,” said Tom to Daria as they left.

Stan and Kitty had invited Daria for a barbecue. Kitty was playing matchmaker. Not that she needed to—the forces of nature were already at work.

Charlotte and Tom were about to sit down to lunch when Tom was summoned to the telephone by Stan. He returned to the table a few minutes later.

“That was my book contact in New York,” he said. “He called to tell me something he’d forgotten to mention the other day.”

“Well?” said Charlotte as she bit into a tuna fish sandwich.

“Good stuff. The scuttlebutt in the book world is that Thornhill didn’t buy those books from MacMillan—he stole them from the MacMillan estate. MacMillan was putting together a private catalogue at the time of his death that included the books he’d supposedly sold to Thornhill months before. I haven’t the faintest idea where we would get our hands on it, but if we could … And get this. Guess who his source was.”

“Who?” asked Charlotte.

“Felix Mayer.”

“Felix!” exclaimed Charlotte, her hand pausing midway between plate and mouth, “Now that
is
interesting.”

Of course! Felix had known all about it. She remembered the feeling she’d had at the herb luncheon, that Felix was goading Thornhill: the description of Thornhill as a collector of “uncommon daring,” the anecdote about the Spanish monk who had murdered for a book, the odd observation that Thornhill’s collection as it stood today surpassed MacMillan’s as it stood at the time of his death. Even the conversation in the library about the missing books was mined with references to the theft: Felix’s observation that the most difficult thief to catch is the thief who steals out of the drive to possess because he thinks he has a right to a book, and how such a thief usually keeps the books in a place under his direct control—“such as a vault.” And in his conversation about the importance of a book dealer’s good name, he had talked about the many temptations facing the book dealer, among them the temptation to purloin a valuable book from a collection he had been entrusted to appraise. Why had he kept on dropping these references after Thornhill was dead? Charlotte wondered. Had he wanted to tip them off that Thornhill stole the books, or was he simply so accustomed to needling Thornhill that he did it almost without thinking?

“What about the rest? Not easy to impress, are you?” Tom complained. Getting up, he fetched another beer and then sat down again at the table.

“That’s because I’m one step ahead of you.” Charlotte smiled, and reached into her handbag for the catalogue notes. “Here,” she said, handing the papers to him.

He started leafing through them.

“They’re papers I pinched from Thornhill’s library this morning,” she explained, putting on her glasses. “I came across them in the middle of a pile of auction house catalogues that were annotated with Thornhill’s notes. I noticed that the handwriting on these was different from Thornhill’s.”

“MacMillan’s?”

Charlotte nodded.

“Then, these are the notes for the catalogue?”

“Yes. Felix had mentioned that MacMillan was working on a catalogue at the time of his death. Otherwise, I never would have guessed what they were. Now,” she said, retrieving the other piece of paper from her purse, “this is the bill of sale for the books, signed by MacMillan. Compare the dates.”

He examined the papers. “The catalogue notes are dated December, and the bill of sale is dated June.” He looked at the papers again. “I get it. Thornhill steals the books from the estate, forges a phony bill of sale, and backdates it to six months prior to MacMillan’s death.”

“Exactly. The question is whether this is just an interesting fact about the honorable professor or whether it’s related to the murder. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter.”

“Now we know why Thornhill didn’t report the theft,” said Tom. “The chances of his being caught were too great. Some savvy book dealer might have decided to do a little research on the history of the ownership of the books, and Thornhill would have been in big trouble.”

“I’ve got an idea,” said Charlotte.

“I’m listening.”

“The person who knew that Thornhill stole the books—namely our friend Felix—would have the perfect opportunity of stealing them himself. The risk would have been minimal: he could have stolen them knowing that the chances of Thornhill’s reporting the theft were almost nonexistent.”

“Very good, Graham, but you forgot one thing. Why was Thornhill murdered?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” she said with a smile.

They sat in silence, finishing their lunch. Charlotte faced the cove, where she could see Wes making his way from one to another of the red-, white-, and black-striped buoys that marked the spots where his baited traps rested on the ocean floor. The round of Gilley Cove was his last; it was an announcement to his wife that he would soon be home for dinner. He tended his traps with the dexterity that comes from years of experience: gaffing the warp, winching the trap over the side, checking the contents. The keepers—the lobsters that measured over a certain length—were tossed into a barrel in the cockpit, and the undersized lobsters were tossed back over the side. The trap was then rebaited and lowered back overboard.

The lobster trap was a clever contraption. Tracey had explained to her how it worked, on their walk up to Ledge House. Lured by the smell of decomposing fish, the lobster entered the first compartment, the kitchen, through a funnel-shaped net, or “eye,” that prevented it from backing out. In its confusion, it crawled through another eye into the second compartment, the fatal bedroom. There, it crawled aimlessly, unable to find the narrow end of the eye, which was located well above the floor.

Just so, she thought, had Thornhill been lured by the bait of his tea ritual. The question was, who had baited the trap?

The silence in the kitchen was interrupted by the sound of a knock on the door. It was Tracey—on foot, since the tide was up.

Since the discovery that Thornhill had been poisoned, Tracey had had his hands full. Charlotte hadn’t seen him since Thursday afternoon, when the police had taken her statement, but she’d talked with him on the phone several times, including the evening before when she’d called to tell him what Tom had discovered about Felix. He had been impressed by Tom’s legwork, and delighted he would be meeting the author of
Murder at the Morosco
.

Now she and Tom filled him in on what they had since discovered, namely that Thornhill had taken the books over twenty years ago and that Felix, for one, knew about it. She made sure that Kitty and Stan were out of earshot. Much as she loved her, she knew Kitty had a tendency to talk. And for the time being she thought they should keep this newfound fact about Thornhill under their hats, just in case it turned out to have something to do with the murder. Tracey wasn’t especially shocked that a respectable citizen had turned out to be a thief. Charlotte supposed he was accustomed to seeing the underside of people’s public personas. Also, he was too tired to be shocked by much. The sparkle was gone from his eyes, and the skin beneath them hung in grayish-violet folds. He’d been assigned all the routine work: checking the names on hotel registers, parking tickets, and credit card receipts against criminal records; checking out the boats that had been in the vicinity. All to no avail. For the moment, he’d given up on the murder and was pursuing the book theft instead. He’d been calling rare book dealers on the off chance that the books had been sold to a dealer who wasn’t aware that they had been stolen. At least he could make the calls from home, enabling him to spend some time with his wife and two boys, who hadn’t seen much of him of late.

However, he said, the sparkle coming back into his eyes, one avenue of exploration had bore fruit—the background checks of the suspects. Two of the people in the house on the day Thornhill had been poisoned had criminal records. One was John, who had a record of several arrests in connection with left-wing political demonstrations.

Charlotte wasn’t surprised, but arrests for civil disobedience hardly indicated a propensity for murder. “Who’s the other?” she asked.