Hemlock Page 5

  Dorothea swallowed, stepped awkwardly back, dug into her sweater pocket for a tissue, and blew her nose. “Of course it doesn’t,” she said in a low voice. “Sorry—I don’t know why I did that. Just edgy, I guess. I’ve had a bad case of nerves lately. It is so kind of you to come, China. Thank you.”

  Well, there were certainly a few good reasons for nerves. I could understand why Dorothea had needed a change after her husband’s death—an opportunity to put time and physical distance between her old life and whatever lay ahead. And Penny had said she’d had to sell her house, which suggested that she was dealing with major money issues.

  But Dorothea had been a gregarious woman with many friends and interests. She had taught in the library program at the university, and she was active in the cultural life of her community. Hemlock House was hardly welcoming and not the easiest place in the world to get to. I wouldn’t blame her for feeling terribly isolated. Add to that the theft of the Curious Herbal, the sheriff’s investigation, and the inevitable fallout—plus the difficulties she apparently had with the board. No wonder she wanted somebody on her side, as Penny had put it.

  The tears stopped quickly and she gestured to me to sit in the wing chair on the other side of the fire. On a small table was a decanter of sherry and several vintage stemmed glasses, silver-rimmed and etched with roses.

  “Sherry?” she asked.

  “That would be wonderful,” I said, and she poured us each a glass before she sat down.

  “You left Texas awfully early this morning,” she said, retreating into small talk. “It must have been a tiring trip, and I’m sure you’re hungry. Jenna’s getting our supper together. It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

  “A little tiring, maybe, but interesting.” I can do small talk, too, when I have to. “The drive from Asheville was spectacular. Mountains, trees, amazing views—” I smiled. “Quite a treat for somebody from Texas. I don’t think I’d ever get used to the landscape.”

  “Yes, you would.” She took off her granny glasses and put them on the table beside her. “We can get so used to happy days and beautiful things that we don’t even see them—until they’re gone. Then we miss them.” She rubbed her eyes. “How long will you be staying with us?”

  I told her what I’d already told Jenna. “I have a return flight on Thursday. It’s spring break in Pecan Springs, and I’ll have work to do at the shop when I get back home.” I was ready to skip the rest of the small talk and dig into the subject of my visit. “So tell me about the Blackwell Herbal and how it came to be missing.”

  Wearily, she leaned back in her chair. “How much do you know?”

  “Only that it disappeared from a locked case in the library. I poked around online, expecting to find an announcement of the theft and a few more details, but I came up empty.” I sipped my sherry, adding in a neutral tone, “It might have been a good idea to warn other libraries that an active thief is out and about and could be a threat to their holdings.”

  “I’ll show you the case and the room later,” she said, setting her sherry glass on the table beside her spectacles. “And yes, I agree. It would be a good idea to publicize the theft, so booksellers and collectors could be on the lookout. The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association has a page on their website where people—librarians, booksellers, collectors—can list stolen items. There’s a new theft reported every few weeks.” She sighed. “Rare book theft is big business these days.”

  “So I understand,” I said. After Penny and I talked, I had done some basic online research. Recently, in Pittsburgh, a library archivist and a respected bookstore owner were charged with an eight-million-dollar theft of rare books, maps, and illustrations from the Carnegie Library. In Kentucky, four teenagers tied up a Transylvania University librarian and made off with two rare Audubon folios worth some five million dollars.

  And on my ebook reader, I had a copy of The Map Thief, Michael Blanding’s deeply researched book about E. Forbes Smiley III, an unlikely criminal important enough to have his own Wikipedia page. Smiley’s weapon of choice: an X-Acto blade, which he used to remove maps from valuable library books and which he carelessly dropped on the floor of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The blade was spotted by an attentive librarian and Smiley was apprehended with a briefcase full of stolen documents. By the time the investigation was finished, Smiley had been charged with stealing ninety-seven rare maps worth over three million dollars.

  Book theft not only grosses big money, it is an engrossing subject. But it’s also a subject that many victims want to avoid, and for obvious reasons.

  Dorothea pleated the fabric of her slacks between her fingers. “I’m afraid that the foundation’s board of directors doesn’t want the theft publicized. They’re concerned that people—potential donors—will think we’re negligent. The board hopes to raise funds to expand the library, and they don’t want to scare people off.” Another sigh. “I tried, China, I really did. A couple of members of the board sided with me, but the majority, no. They intend to keep the theft secret.”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning,” I suggested. “Tell me about the foundation and the board and”—I waved my hand—“this place. How it all works. What you think of it. What your goals are here.”

  She settled back in her chair, sipped her sherry, and began.

  Hemlock House and the surrounding estate of almost a thousand acres of native hemlock forest had been in the Carswell family for three generations. Reginald Carswell had made a sizeable chunk of money selling armaments during the First World War. When he died, the estate passed to his only son, Howard, who used the house as a hunting lodge and a setting for spectacular weeklong parties for politically well-connected friends. Howard died in the Reagan era, leaving everything to his only child, Sunny, who never married. She always hated the fact that the family money came from guns. So she turned Carswell Arms and Munitions over to a distant cousin, took up personal residence in the house, and spent her time gardening and indulging what had become her passion—or rather, Dorothea said, her obsession: collecting books about botany, horticulture, gardens, plants. Rare books, old books, new books, pamphlets, whatever. Not long before she died, she created the Hemlock House Foundation to manage her library and make it available to interested researchers—at least, that’s what she hoped.

  I broke into the narrative. “Jenna tells me that your resident ghost is named Sunny. Any relation to Miss Carswell?”

  “Ah yes, Jenna,” Dorothea said, with the first real smile I’d seen. “Isn’t she a lovely girl? I’m so glad to have her here with me. She’s good company, and she’s done some quite remarkable research on the Herbal and on Elizabeth Blackwell’s background. You’ll have to ask her to tell you what she’s discovered. Knowing your interest in herbs, I’m sure you’ll find it fascinating.”

  Her smile faded. “But while Jenna is one of the most creative young people I know, she is also quite imaginative—and dramatic. There’s no question that Sunny Carswell continues to inhabit this house, in more ways than one. When I’m being uncharitable—which is often, I’m afraid—I actually think of that woman as quite wicked, especially when it comes to her collection.”

  She frowned. “But whatever you may have heard, Miss Carswell is no ghost. That’s Jenna’s little dramatic fiction. The child is very curious about psychic matters, you see, and she wants her ghost to be real. She seems to enjoy being frightened—although I very much doubt that her fear is genuine.” Her smile was almost maternal. “Jenna is a bit of a drama queen. She likes to play at being frightened.”

  Perhaps, although Jenna hadn’t struck me as a child. I said, “Miss Carswell lived here until her death, I understand. How long ago was that?”

  “Last summer. She killed herself, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” I said, surprised.

  “She used her father’s gun—gruesome, reall
y. She shot herself in the head.” Dorothea’s tone was studiedly neutral. “Howard Carswell killed himself with the same gun. His father, too.”

  “Her father’s gun?” I shivered. “Oh, Dorothea, that’s tragic!” It sounded like a kind of ritual suicide. Women don’t usually shoot themselves in the head—the theory is that they don’t want to disfigure themselves.

  “Yes, tragic. But she was nearly eighty, the last of her family and suffering from breast cancer. I’m told that she was a longtime supporter of the right-to-die movement—there’s a local group, the Bethany Hemlock Guild. From what members of the foundation’s board have said, they weren’t terribly surprised when it happened. She had mentioned it more than once.”

  I filed that away for more thought. “What can you tell me about her?”

  “Sunny? She seems to have been a recluse for most of her life, and very independent. After college—Radcliffe—she came here to live and basically never left, except to visit gardens and booksellers. She loved books and plants above everything—and everyone—else. I never met her, but I understand that she could be hard on the staff here, when she felt like it. Which was pretty often.”

  “The staff?”

  Dorothea put down her sherry glass. “Her father had been in the habit of bringing friends here for weeklong house parties, so he kept a large staff—kitchen, housekeeping, grounds. That wasn’t Miss Carswell’s thing. After his death, she lived in this wing, very privately, and closed off the rest of the place. So she only needed a cook-housekeeper, a maid or two, and toward the end, a nurse. Rose and Joe Mullins, her cook and general handyman, are still with us. Rose cooks and does the laundry. Joe manages the garden, with help from a young man who lives down the road. When there’s a public garden event, we bring in extra help. They’re gone now, of course.”

  “Nobody to help with her book collection?”

  “No. At least, not until the last year or so. She was quite private about her books. Secretive, you might even say. I don’t think she wanted anybody to know what she had.”

  I studied her. “Doesn’t that seem a little, well, odd?”

  “Book collectors, especially the serious ones, are all a little odd. There’s a reason it’s called bibliomania.”

  I chuckled, and a smile ghosted across Dorothea’s mouth.

  “But as far as being secretive,” she went on, “that may be justified. Someone who is collecting a particular author or subject is competing with other collectors for a finite resource. They might not want the world to know what they are looking for. And Miss Carswell liked to dicker. If she wanted a certain book, she wanted it—but she also wanted to get it at a good price. From what I’ve been told, she played her cards close to her vest. She never published a catalogue. In fact, so far as I can discover, she never even made a comprehensive list of her holdings.”

  “Which must be a problem,” I said. “For you, I mean.”

  Dorothea nodded emphatically. “A massive problem. There are thousands of books in her library. Finding anything is like looking for a needle in a haystack—and sometimes you’re looking for a needle you don’t even know is there.”

  “Thousands? Really?” I was skeptical.

  “Oh, yes. It’s as if she got a visceral pleasure from surrounding herself with stacks of books. Maybe they were a kind of protection for her, a wall between herself and the world. Or between herself and others.” She shrugged. “Books mean different things to different people. For Sunny, they were her refuge. For us, there are all kinds of problems, now that we’re trying to organize the holdings. Lots of things are junk, pure and simple. Others . . . well, there are some serious jewels. Like A Curious Herbal.”

  “Miss Carswell didn’t catalogue the books as she acquired them? Or put them on a list, or in a computer file?”

  Dorothea laughed shortly. “That would have been too easy. She saved paid invoices and bills of sale, most of which have book titles and the amounts she paid. But she didn’t file them in one place. They keep turning up, one or two at a time, here and there.”

  In the fireplace, a burning log broke in two with a fountain of sparks. Dorothea got out of her chair, picked up a poker, and pushed the log back into the flames, watching it for a moment.

  “For a while, she worked with a bookseller down in Bethany. Jed Conway. But at some point, they had a disagreement and Jed—whom I’ve met only a couple of times—was out of the picture. He offered to help Jenna and me with the inventory, but since I don’t know why Miss Carswell cut him off, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea.” She gave the log another nudge. “And sometime before she died, she connected up with a local woman named Margaret Anderson. Margaret writes a regionally syndicated book column and a quite popular book blog. Reviews and book news and the like. She’s a little . . . unusual, perhaps. But she has always been eager to help out.”

  There was something in Dorothea’s voice suggesting that she didn’t altogether appreciate Margaret Anderson’s eagerness to help. But I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of her story with another question. She put the poker back in its stand and resumed her chair.

  “The two of them hit it off, and Margaret managed to persuade Sunny to begin organizing her collection. Unfortunately, they were just getting started on the project when Sunny was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She died six or eight months later. Margaret stayed on for a while after her death, but she wasn’t trained in library management or in working with rare books. More importantly, she didn’t seem to know or care much about book conservation, which—given the age and condition of most of the collection—pretty much disqualified her. The foundation’s board of directors realized that they needed to know what they had here. They opened a search for a professional who could catalogue the library and appraise its value, as well as determine which items need special conservation and which ought to be disposed of. This information would give the board a better understanding of the collection and they could plan for its future. Which they presumably want to do,” she added, in a drier tone. It sounded as if she thought the board wasn’t exactly eager to undertake the task of planning for the collection’s future.

  I finished my sherry and put the glass on the table. “They rejected Margaret Anderson?” It might not take much to turn a disgruntled employee into a thief.

  “She didn’t apply. It was an amicable parting, I understand. She was in over her head. She was quite ready to leave.”

  I’d take that at face value—for now. “And that’s when you got involved?”

  “Yes. My husband was dead. I needed to do something other than teaching, somewhere other than Madison. I had already requested a leave of absence from the university. Through a friend, I heard about this position. I met with the foundation’s board a couple of times and came to Hemlock House for a visit.”

  “And you liked it?” She must have, if she’d uprooted herself and moved here.

  With a smile, she glanced around the room. “In some ways, you know, it’s ideal. I was intrigued with the idea of working with an uncatalogued collection. For all its frustrations, it’s rather like a treasure hunt. You never know what gems might be hidden on those dusty shelves. Every now and then we come up with something extraordinary. And I’ve always loved mountains, and gardens. So I came. Jenna came shortly after.” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. “I didn’t count on the isolation, I’m afraid. I’m used to lots of people coming and going, colleagues dropping in to talk about their ideas, young people laughing and talking, stirring things up. There’s not much of that here. We have a satellite dish, so we have television, cell service, and internet access. There’s Wi-Fi in your room—no password, since we don’t have any near neighbors. And of course, you’re welcome to take books out of the library, although we’d appreciate it if you asked first and returned the items to my desk. We’re trying to keep the shelves organized.”

  Spoken like a l
ibrarian. “Glad to hear about the Wi-Fi and cell service,” I said, thinking that I needed to let McQuaid know that I’d arrived. “Who else is here, besides you and Jenna?”

  “Now? Only Rose and Joe. Rose shops and cooks and keeps house for us, and Joe is our general handyman. After Sunny died, they moved out to the old gatehouse.” She paused. “As far as visitors are concerned, there’s Claudia Roth. She claims to have had some sort of tangential relationship to the Carswells, but I don’t know if that’s true. She lives up the mountain about half a mile and drops in every now and then, when she’s not rescuing birds. One of the board members comes in a couple of times a week to help with—”

  I stopped her. “Rescuing birds? As in wild birds? Hawks and eagles and such?”

  “No, parrots. Apparently some people think they would love to have a parrot but the reality is . . . well, it’s something they didn’t quite bargain for.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said wryly. “We have a parrot—or more accurately, he has us. Spock is quite an amazing fellow. It’s a challenge to keep ahead of him.”

  It’s also a lost cause. Recently, I heard the microwave beep and went over to take the food out—and then remembered that I hadn’t put anything in. It was Spock, teasing me. He loves to imitate sounds that make us do something. It’s a game for him, or a not-so-subtle form of the manipulation that makes parrots so human-like.

  Dorothea nodded. “You’d probably get along with Claudia, then. She strikes most people as a little odd—bizarre, even. But she and Sunny appear to have been friends of a sort. And she’s dedicated to those birds. Jenna and I don’t see much of her, but the two of you would probably have a lot to talk about.”

  A little odd—bizarre, even? Well, given the exceedingly strange situation at Hemlock House, that hardly seemed out of line.

  “I’d like to meet her,” I said. “But I interrupted you when you were telling me about a board member. Somebody who comes here to work with the books?”