Hemlock Read online

  I had also done a quick check on the internet. Blue Ridge Crafts and Antiques Gallery proved to be an indoor mini-mall featuring several dozen craft vendors. According to its website, the gallery offered a variety of local arts and crafts, vintage wearables and collectibles, and antiques. One vendor even offered framed botanical prints, which caught my attention. I made a mental note to look for it when I got to the gallery, although I was pretty sure that a thief wouldn’t try to sell locally stolen wares under the noses of the local gendarmerie. That would be tempting fate.

  And I had no reason to suspect that Carole Humphreys had anything to do with the theft of A Curious Herbal. She was probably just a helpful, good-hearted member of the foundation’s board, with a little extra free time that she generously donated to help sort out Miss Carswell’s library.

  Or she might be something else altogether.

  Margaret Anderson, Miss Carswell’s friend and helper, also lived in Bethany. She was included in the list because she had stayed on at Hemlock House after Miss Carswell died and had still been working there when Dorothea took over. She would have had plenty of opportunity to rummage through the shelves and take whatever she liked. Which didn’t necessarily mean she had done that, of course. Or that she came back one weekend when the house was empty and made off with the Herbal.

  But at the Anderson house, all I got was an answering machine. Instead of leaving a message, I clicked off. I’d try again in a couple of hours. In the meantime, I would talk to Jed Conway and Carole Humphreys and see if I could get an update on the case from the sheriff.

  It was eleven-thirty by the time I got to town and I wasn’t sure when I’d have time for lunch. So after I passed the Hemlock Mountain Inn, I pulled in at Sam’s—the diner that Jenna had mentioned. In a few minutes I was enjoying a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of iced tea, while the radio behind the counter poured out a toe-tapping rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Good old mountain music.

  When I finished the sandwich, I browsed the snack racks and picked up a couple of bags of the banana chips Jenna had mentioned. As I paid my tab at the cash register, I caught just the tail end of the local weather forecast. The last word I heard was “snow.”

  “No kidding? Snow?” I smiled at the blond, fresh-faced young woman sitting on a stool behind the register. “I’m from the Texas Hill Country. Snow would be a real treat for me.”

  The girl shrugged. “I’m not just real crazy about snow so late in the season.” She got off her stool, leaned across the counter, and frowned down at my leather sandals. “If you’re from Texas, how come you’re not wearing cowboy boots?”

  I might have told her that I don’t wear my cowgirl boots when I fly because my feet sometimes swell and there’s nothing worse than cramped toes in your cowgirl boots. But that seemed like too much information, so I handed her the money for my lunch and the chips.

  As she gave me my change, she chirped, “Going to see the parrots, huh?”

  “Actually, yes,” I said, surprised. “I guess you know about the sanctuary?”

  “All I know is that something up there is eating banana chips by the bushel,” she said, and retired to her stool.

  It was almost noon by the time I drove down Bethany’s Main Street, but there was no noon-hour rush traffic. There were also no traffic lights and only a few pedestrians: an elderly lady with a two-wheeled cart filled with grocery sacks, a harried-looking mom with a pair of babies in a twin stroller, and a shaggy brown dog trotting purposefully on his way to a very important appointment.

  There was also a clutch of cars and trucks around the courthouse square, which was centered by a white-painted neoclassical courthouse. The building’s projecting front porticoes were supported by four stately Ionic columns, generally supposed to represent the reliability, durability, and stability of the law—pretty much a cultural fiction, in my experience. The law is what happens inside the courtroom and in the judges’ chambers, and it isn’t always what you expect. It varies from trial to trial and judge to judge and depends more than you’d like on who the plaintiff and the defendant are.

  Across the street from the courthouse, there were a couple of pickup trucks parked in front of a mom-and-pop grocery store. That’s where I saw a gray Dodge minivan with a green Hemlock House decal on the rear window and remembered that Dorothea said she was driving to town to go shopping. Down the block, there were no cars in front of the Open Book, although the sign on the front door (above Jedidiah Conway, Prop., in Old English letters) declared that the store was indeed open. I parked and got out.

  I love bookshops, especially small indie shops, each as individual as its owner and as distinctive as its local community. The front window of this one artfully displayed a dozen regional titles, along with framed posters of mountain landscapes, mountain rivers, and mountain forests.

  I lingered, thinking I would like to read about the Appalachians while I was here. There was an anthology entitled Nature Writing from Western North Carolina and the Smoky Mountains, a book called Appalachia: A History, by John Williams, a couple of books on hiking and fly fishing, and Phyllis Light’s fine book, Southern Folk Medicine: Healing Traditions from the Appalachian Fields and Forests. There was also a book of photographs called Twilight of the Hemlocks and Beeches, by nature photographer Tim Palmer. Beside it was a large booklet called Poison Plants of the Blue Ridge, open to a dramatic color photograph of a hemlock plant in full bloom—the bad hemlock, the poisonous plant that Socrates had used to commit suicide. Across the open page was a generous scattering of small brown hemlock cones and some seeds that looked like they might be poison hemlock. Clever, I thought, to put the two hemlocks together for the display, although maybe not so clever to sprinkle those seeds around.

  The shop was quiet and smelled of new books, that delicious blend of paper, ink, and bindings. On my right, the wall was filled, floor to ceiling, with regional titles. On the left was a similar wall of bestsellers. Also on the left, the sales counter was angled across the corner, at the far end of the display window. In the middle of the shop, on either side of a narrow center aisle, were shelves of romances, science fiction, mysteries (my favorite), nonfiction, biographies, reference books, and such, all set at angles to the center aisle. At the back was a section of used books. The Open Book was larger and more prosperous than you might expect for a small town in the mountains. A ready supply of summer tourists, maybe? Strong sales from that online catalogue? Likely both.

  Standing here, surrounded by books, the idea that Mr. Conway could also be a rare book dealer seemed more plausible, and with that came another question. He might be able to tell me how and when Sunny Carswell had acquired the Herbal. Had he been involved with the acquisition? Had he arranged it?

  I looked around, but there was no one at the sales counter, and nobody browsing any of the shelves. Was I the first customer of the afternoon? I stepped to the counter, looking for a bell I could ring. No bell. Well, okay. I would wait.

  And while I waited, I could browse. On the counter, I saw a copy of Sharyn McCrumb’s The Song Catcher. I can get lost in McCrumb’s evocative prose, and I hadn’t read this novel about Appalachian music for . . . oh, a dozen years. It was one of her earliest. Maybe this was what I should buy and reread.

  But as I reached for it, I happened to notice that the computer monitor at my elbow was displaying an online bookstore simply called Socrates.com. On the screen: a thumbnail image gallery of antique books and botanical prints. Two of those prints, displayed side by side, were from Redouté’s Lilies—one for sale at an eye-popping $2,660, the other at $3,220. Dorothea had said that eight plates were missing from Miss Carswell’s copy of Lilies. Were the other six pages also for sale on this site?

  I sucked in a breath, the questions coming hard and fast. Why was the Open Book’s computer displaying this website? Who did Socrates.com belong to? Somebody here in Bethany? Those last two questio
n I thought I could answer when I got a chance to do some research on the internet. But the others . . .

  I turned the monitor toward me and leaned forward for a better look. But that didn’t help much. The image I was looking at was tiny. I’d have to enlarge it to be sure—and the computer keyboard and mouse were nowhere in sight. They must be under the counter.

  Another breath. I’d been in the shop a little bit more than a minute. Did I have another minute to step around the counter and grab the mouse? But even if I enlarged the image, I couldn’t be sure about its source. The Blackwell prints were all over the internet. I wasn’t going to prove a thing—and I might get caught. Wait until I got back to Hemlock House and ask Jenna to bring up the site?

  “Hello,” I called innocently, trying again to see if I was really alone. “Anybody, hello!”

  I waited, listening for an answer. What I heard was something else. A moan, low but distinct, from somewhere near the back of the store.

  The skin across my shoulders prickled. I dropped the book and took the center aisle toward the back, moving fast. The man was face-down on the floor behind the farthest bookcase at the rear of the store, one arm over his head, the other flung out to one side. He was wearing a white long-sleeved dress shirt, no jacket, and there was a neat round hole in his back, just one, a couple of inches below his collarbone. Blood was welling out of it, staining his shirt and soaking into the carpet beneath him.

  I knelt beside him and pressed two fingers against the side of his neck, above what I could see was a red polka-dot bow tie. There was a pulse, faint and irregular. He took a breath, then another, both very faint.

  “Hang on, Mr. Conway,” I said urgently and reached for my cell phone.

  The 9-1-1 operator was quick and crisp and when I said that the shooting victim was in the bookstore, she said, “They’ll be there in three minutes, hon. They’re right around the corner.” And then, to remind me of my civic duty, she added, “Now, don’t you go nowhere. You just stay right there, you hear? The chief’ll be wantin’ to talk to you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. My heart was hammering. I was trembling. “Please hurry. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

  But as I clicked off, I could already hear a siren burp and rise to a wail, then another. Help was coming. I bent down, close to the man’s face, which was turned toward me. His eyes were open and staring, unfocused. His skin was as white as bleached paper.

  I put my hand over his, holding it tightly. Delicate hands, long fingers. Nails clean and nicely manicured, one gold ring, a college class ring. The hands of a man who handled books for a living, worked on the computer, met the public. I squeezed, but the fingers were unresponsive.

  “Three minutes,” I told him. “They’re on their way. Just hang on.”

  The seconds seemed to stretch into minutes, then hours, measured by the man’s thin, reedy breaths. Bird breaths, sparrow breaths. His eyelids fluttered. His lips began to move. He opened his eyes and seemed to focus but only halfway and without any real recognition. Then he lost it again and his eyelids drifted closed. Outside the siren grew louder.

  “Hang in there,” I repeated, even though I wasn’t sure he could hear me. “Stay with me. Jed. Don’t give up.”

  And then his fingers moved in mine and he made a sound—was it a word? I couldn’t quite hear. Was he trying to tell me something? I bent closer, and asked the question any cop would ask, or any lawyer.

  “Did you see the person who did this? Do you know who shot you?”

  He didn’t even try to open his eyes. Instead, he seemed to reach down inside himself to pull up strength, or maybe he was just trying to get some breath behind the sounds so they could be heard.

  “B . . . b . . . black,” he whispered faintly. He grimaced. Bubbles of blood and spittle formed on his lips. A brighter, thicker blood was running out of the corner of his mouth.

  Outside, the siren got louder, then cut off suddenly in front of the store. Somebody shouted. A horn blared. Doors slammed.

  His fingers suddenly flexed in mine and he pulled the word out of somewhere deep inside himself. Two syllables. “Black . . . well.”

  I stared at him, stunned. Blackwell. That’s what I heard—but maybe I hadn’t heard it right. Was that what he had said? If so, was it a confession or an accusation? Which?

  But I didn’t have time to reflect on this. Things were happening, lots of things, different things, all at once and fast. Another siren on the street out front. Vehicle doors slamming. The bell at the front of the shop jangling. Male voices, a female voice.

  “Medic. Medic here! Where are you?”

  “Back of the shop,” I called, scrambling to my feet.

  A pair of emergency medical technicians wearing navy-blue jumpsuits and carrying kit bags appeared around the bookshelf. I ducked back fast, getting out of their way. Deftly, they rolled Conway over. Yes, it was him, no mistake—the same round face and gingery hair I had seen in the online photograph, the same signature bow tie, the front of his white shirt soaked in blood from an exit wound. One of the med techs cut his shirt open and worked to stop the bleeding while the other spoke urgently into a shoulder mike. A moment later, a third tech appeared at a run, pushing a gurney.

  The three men were well-trained and professional, quick and efficient. I didn’t have a stopwatch on them, but I know it didn’t take much more than a minute, ninety seconds at the outside. They heaved Conway onto the gurney, strapped him in, started an IV, and disappeared around the bookshelf—rushing him, I supposed, out to the waiting ambulance. If he made it, the credit belonged to them.

  If. I didn’t think his chances were good. He was ghostly white and he’d left a lot of fresh red blood in that puddle soaking into the carpet. What he’d whispered had been just a thin thread of breath with a couple of fragile syllables hanging from it—so fragile they might have been my imagination.

  Black . . . well. Blackwell.

  I have never cared very much for coincidences. It’s been my experience that ninety-nine percent of real events have real causes and that if you look hard enough, you’ll find the causes right where they’re supposed to be, hiding in plain sight. It was difficult for me to believe that Jedidiah Conway just happened to have been shot by a random burglar whose name just happened to sound like Blackwell.

  And I didn’t really believe that I was making up the name I thought I’d heard. The shooting was somehow connected to the theft of Blackwell’s Herbal. Conway hadn’t wanted to die without passing that information along to somebody, anybody—even if they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

  But did he know that he was passing it along to me? Did he know who I was and what I was doing there? I didn’t think that was likely. I had learned about him just that morning and he didn’t know me from Eve. So the only coincidence in this spider’s web of intersecting incidents was my happenstance blundering into the store just after Conway had been shot. Had the shooter made off with the Herbal? Had he—

  But I didn’t have time to dig any deeper, for another man had just stepped around the bookshelf. He was neatly uniformed: polished brown boots, dark brown pants, crisply pressed tan shirt with shoulder epaulets and stripes on the long sleeves, a full gear belt with a prominent sidearm on his right hip, and a police chief’s gold shield on the left shirt pocket, above the name badge: Chief Jeremy Curtis.

  “And you are—?” Curtis asked. He was in his late thirties, early forties, dark hair, a jagged scar through his right eyebrow, an open, intelligent face, an attractive face. His eyes—a cop’s careful eyes—were searching me, taking notes.

  “I’m the person who found him and called 9-1-1.” I fished in my bag for my driver’s license and one of my minimalist business cards (name, email address, and cell phone number) and produced them for Curtis. He studied both for so long that I thought he must be looking for a secret code.

 
“Texas,” he said at last, handing the license back and pocketing the card. “You’re a far piece from home. Got business with the bookstore, or just browsing?” His voice was low and slow and deeply baritone, with a resonant mountain twang.

  I gave him my two-sentence cover story. “I’m writing an article about Miss Sunny Carswell. I’m staying up at Hemlock House, and it was suggested that I might want to talk to Mr. Conway.” I added a third sentence for good measure. “I understand that he did some book business with Miss Carswell.”

  I hate lying to cops. It can get you into tricky situations. About seventy percent of what I had just said was true, but I was realizing that (having just told this story to a police officer) I might have to actually write the article. Which I could, of course. Sunny Carswell’s botanical library would make a nice piece for my column in the Pecan Springs Enterprise and for my Thyme and Seasons blog. And writing it would square my conscience.

  “Did you see anybody when you came into the store?” Curtis asked. There was a muscle working at the corner of his jaw, and I wondered how many Bethany shopkeepers got shot during the year. Not many, I’d guess.

  “No. There was no one up front when I came in. I looked around, then called out. There wasn’t any answer, so I picked up a book and leafed through it for a couple of minutes while I waited.” I didn’t need to mention Socrates.com. What I had glimpsed on the computer monitor wouldn’t mean anything to him. “After a minute or two, I called out, thinking that somebody must be around. That’s when I heard him moan and came back here and found him. There.” I pointed to the red bloodstain, already turning dark, in the carpet.