Prose and Cons Read online

  In the kitchen, Sadie sat at the round table by the window with a full breakfast in front of her: eggs, toast, bacon, juice, coffee, and, be still my heart, chocolate chip pancakes. Her meal was completely untouched.

  My grandmother was at the stove flipping more pancakes. It smelled heavenly. I wished that I had more time to enjoy it.

  “Grandma Daisy, can I borrow your car? I’m late for class and I don’t have either my bike or car here.”

  She held her spatula in midair. “Of course, but won’t you sit down for some breakfast? Sadie and I were just saying that we didn’t know what time you got home last night. I thought you were only running out on an errand.”

  I knew she wouldn’t say the name of the errand, watering the tree, in front of Sadie for fear of revealing our secret.

  “I’ll fill you in later. Right now, I have to run. I’m late for class.” I grabbed a piece of bacon from the plate by the stove. It was still steaming hot as I popped it into my mouth and burned the roof of my mouth. That was just par for the kind of morning that I was having. With one hand, I ripped a paper towel off the roll and grabbed two chocolate chip pancakes from the stack at my grandmother’s elbow. I shoved them into my tote bag. “For the road,” I said as I snatched up my grandmother’s car key from its hook on the kitchen wall.

  Outside the house, I typed the code into the console bolted to the side of the freestanding garage to reveal my grandmother’s ancient compact car. Grandma Daisy hardly ever drove. She rarely had a reason to. On those infrequent occasions she did drive, she went grocery shopping over in the next town, which had one of those grocery supercenters. Cascade Springs would never allow such a monstrosity within its borders. Or she would use the car when she had to pick up a shipment of books in nearby Niagara Falls. Sometimes it cost less to receive shipments there and then pick them up.

  As the garage door recessed into the ceiling, I winced as I took in the sight of my grandmother’s car. The compact was almost as old as I was and it still had only fifty thousand miles on it. It was the same car she had had when I was a child and it looked to be in perfect condition. Appearances could be deceiving, though. Over a decade ago, the lock on the driver’s side broke in the lock position. The car was so old that it predated automatic locks and key fobs. Grandma Daisy had yet to have the lock fixed. She saw no reason to spend the money on the door, since she hardly used the compact to begin with, and she claimed that climbing through the passenger side and over the seat like a contortionist kept her spry.

  I, however, saw the advantage of a working driver-side door as I yanked open the heavy passenger door, especially when I was so terribly late for class. I dropped my tote bag on the floor of the car, hoping the pancakes survived the impact, and scrambled into the vehicle. I banged the top of my head on the car’s ceiling and rammed my knee into the gearshift. Under these circumstances, being tall was not working to my advantage.

  Finally, behind the wheel and acutely aware of muscles that I hadn’t known I possessed, I started the car, shifted into reverse, and backed out of the garage and onto Grandma Daisy’s quiet street.

  Springside Community College was a picturesque wooded campus that sat on the outskirts of the village along the Niagara River.

  In my rush, I didn’t have time to appreciate the beauty of the campus as I usually did. I semilegally parked outside the academic building where my class was being held, hoping that campus security would forgive my parking violation just this once.

  I ran through the long hallway, grateful that my class was on the first floor, and I reached the classroom just as the students were packing up, ready to make their escape. The twenty or so students in the room groaned as I crashed through the door.

  I caught my breath. “Sorry, guys. I’m here. Get out the response papers you wrote for homework and pass them to the left. We will have a short critique session to begin class.” I tried to cover my panting.

  The groans became worse. No one liked the critique sessions. I’d hated them myself as a student, but the fifteen minutes the students would take to read and comment on one another’s papers would give me enough time to get my bearings.

  As I heard the shuffle of pages being passed throughout the room, I fell into my chair at the front of the room and started to rummage through my tote bag for my class notes. With longing in my heart, I pushed the chocolate chip pancakes aside and pulled out a thin volume of Poe’s works. My chest constricted. How had the book ended up in my bag? I distinctly remembered leaving the paperback of Poe’s works on my unmade bed in my grandmother’s house. The books had never appeared to me outside the shop. I didn’t know that the magic could work away from Charming Books. I shook my head. The book must have appeared in the bag before I took it from Charming Books. Yes, that must be it. I didn’t know if I could handle books flying around and appearing all over the village. I was just becoming used to it inside of the shop.

  “Professor Waverly, are you okay?” one of the students sitting in the first row asked. She had a bar going through her eyebrow that gave her round baby face a little edge. I assumed that was the motivation for the piercing.

  I looked up from my tote bag. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just your hair,” she said as sweetly as possible. “You sort of look like you’ve been electrocuted. Was that what you were going for?”

  I sighed and closed my bag. So much for class notes. It appeared that I would have to wing it. “Please return the response papers to the original owner. Would anyone like to read what they wrote?”

  The remainder of the class we discussed sentence structure and active versus passive voice. Even I was bored with the lecture by the time my students filed out of the room.

  “Don’t forget. Midterms are next week. You should be halfway through Huckleberry Finn at this point in the semester.”

  There was another groan.

  After the students left, I fell back into my chair to catch my breath. I was relieved that there wasn’t another class scheduled until noon. It gave me a few minutes to collect myself. I removed the band from my hair, which was mostly dry by now. My wavy hair, now curled from being restrained in the knot, bounced around my face. I did my best to finger comb it into submission. It was a futile act.

  I stuck my hand in the tote bag again and pulled out the volume of Poe’s work and the now-cold chocolate chip pancakes. I took a bite of one of the pancakes. It was cold, but the chocolate was still good. I flipped open the book on the table and began doing what the books had wanted me to do from the start, reading. Remembering the strange events of the night before, I began with “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As I read, I made notes in the book’s margins. The House of Usher was a house with a secret, just like Anastasia’s home.

  “I have class in here in ten minutes,” a deep female voice said, interrupting my concentration.

  I looked up from my notes to find a heavyset woman pushing a full skeleton into the classroom. “I’m so sorry,” I said, quickly gathering up my notes.

  She pushed the skeleton to the corner of the room.

  I dropped my last folder into my tote bag. “Decorating for Halloween?” I quipped.

  She wrinkled her nose. “No,” she said. “This is for an anatomy course.”

  Oh-kay. I sighed and gathered up my things as the anatomy professor’s students filed into the room. I left the building shaking my head.

  As I expected, there was a ticket from the campus police on my grandmother’s car for my illegal parking job. I crumpled it up and shoved it into my bag. I had no intention of paying the ticket, since it was unlikely that I would ever again drive my grandmother’s car onto campus, or at least I hoped that was the case.

  “Violet!” A voice called my name just as I was about to climb into the car through the passenger side.

  I dropped my bag on the car’s floorboard and turned to see Renee
Reid running toward me. Her owl-printed scarf trailed behind her, and she gripped a piece of paper in her right hand like her life depended on it.

  Students heading to class moved out of her way. It was the most natural response when a librarian ran across campus.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Renee waved the paper. “Violet, wait!”

  I closed the door to the car with a thud and met her on the sidewalk. “Renee, what’s going on? You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”

  She bent at the waist. “Oh, I hate running. Why do people run for fun? They must be crazy,” she gasped.

  I had wondered the same a few times myself.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m so glad I caught you. I’ve been waiting for you all morning.”

  “Waiting for me why?” I tried to remember if I had a research appointment with her that day. Renee has been an invaluable help to me in researching for my dissertation.

  She straightened up and thrust the printout into my hand. “This!”

  The paper was badly wrinkled from being held in her hand so tightly. I smoothed it out as best I could so that I could read it. It was an article from a premier publishing magazine. I recognized it right away because Grandma Daisy subscribed to the magazine to keep up-to-date on the trends in publishing, so she would know what to stock in the store.

  EVANNA BLUE UNMASKED, the headline read. The article went on to say that Anastasia Faber, a reclusive author who lived in the small village of Cascade Springs, New York, was in fact Evanna Blue. The author of the article claimed to have found undisputable evidence of Evanna’s identity. Then the article went on to describe Anastasia’s murder, naming Charming Books as the place of her death. Charming Books was noted as the location of a murder in a national magazine. Terrific.

  “Can you believe this?” Renee asked, still slightly out of breath from her run across campus or from the excitement. “Evanna Blue was living here in our little village all this time, and no one knew it!”

  I stared at the paper, trying to process what I had just read.

  She ran a hand through her tangled auburn hair. “Why aren’t you freaking out? Why are you not surprised?”

  I looked up from the article. “I already knew.”

  “What?” she shrieked. “How could you have already known? According to this, it was the greatest secret in Western civilization.”

  A student strolling the sidewalk did an about-face when the librarian screeched at me. Perhaps a yelling librarian was even more alarming than a running librarian. Not that Renee was your typical librarian, with her tendency to be loud and her infectious laugh that could be heard all over the library building multiple times throughout the day. She wasn’t one to whisper, and I had seen her shush a student only once, when a group of football players was especially rowdy.

  “I haven’t known for long,” I said quickly, not wanting Renee to think I’d kept the information from her. “I just learned about Anastasia’s secret identity last night.” I wrapped my coat a little more tightly around myself. “I was surprised that I didn’t see you yesterday in the village.”

  “I was out of town over the weekend visiting my sister and her kids. She has five boys under seven. If you ever need good birth control, I will give you her address.” She shivered in mock horror.

  I bit my lip. “They can’t be that bad.”

  “Wanna bet?” She waved her hand. “Never mind all that. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting to tell you this all morning,” she went on. “Usually, you come straight to the library after class. What happened?”

  “I was jotting down some notes after my last class and lost track of time.” I read the article. As far as I could tell, the journalist had gotten all the facts right. I glanced at the byline. The article was written by one “Daven York.” However, it wasn’t so much his name as his grainy photo that caught my attention. The picture of the article’s author was tiny, but it was easy to make out the man’s features, which included a beard and glasses. “It’s him!”

  “Him?” she asked, apparently distracted by my hair. “Him who?”

  “The guy who chased me last night,” I said. The piece of paper shook in my hands.

  “Wait, you are going to have to back up and tell me that again. Someone chased you last night? Is that the reason for the crazy hair?”

  “Please forget about the hair.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

  So I did, telling her everything that had happened from the moment I reached Anastasia’s home the night before.

  She folded her arms across her chest. “You do know it was really stupid for you to have gone in there, don’t you?”

  “What was I supposed to do? Emerson was inside. If I left him there, David would have found him.”

  A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “David? Would you be referring to the chief of police?”

  I frowned. “Yes. At the time, I didn’t see any reason to risk getting more tangled up with the police than I was already. Anastasia died in Charming Books, you know. It wouldn’t be good for me to be caught snooping at her house a few hours later.”

  Her smile was broad now. “But David and the police know now, don’t they? What did he say when he found out?” She was just short of rubbing her hands together in anticipation of the news.

  “He wasn’t thrilled.” I held up the article. “Can I take this?”

  She sighed as if disappointed that I wouldn’t tell her more about my encounter with Rainwater. “I e-mailed you a copy too. Do you think it is connected to the murder?”

  I bit my lip. “I don’t know, but since Sadie Cunningham is the police’s main suspect at the moment, anything I can give the chief to distract him away from her is good.”

  “Sadie Cunningham,” she yelled for a second time in our conversation, causing another student to change course.

  If I ever wanted to clear the sidewalk, I would have to remember to bring Renee with me. She could really project her voice. If the librarian thing ever fell through, she could always try stage acting.

  “How could the police chief possibly think Sadie Cunningham had anything to do with Anastasia’s death? She is the least murderous person on planet earth. I saw her carry a spider out of her shop once like it was made of gold. A spider. In my book, if a spider comes into my domain, all bets are off.”

  I had to agree with her stance on spiders—I had seen Arachnophobia at a very impressionable age—and about Sadie too. Sadie wouldn’t hurt any creature on earth.

  “Does the police chief suspect Sadie because he’s still upset that Grant Morton got nothing more than a reprimand from the DA after all the trouble that he caused last summer?”

  Until Renee made that comment, I hadn’t considered that, but the thought that David might be treating Sadie differently because of Grant’s mistakes made me heartsick.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Faintly, I heard my phone ring from deep in the recesses of my tote bag. I dove into the car to grab it. It was Grandma Daisy. “I just heard from David,” she said without a greeting. “He said it’s fine for us to go back to Charming Books this afternoon. I’m heading over now to open up shop. He wants us to stay away from the back stairs and kitchen, but other than that, we have free rein of the shop. Thankfully the kitchen and stairs are away from where any customers would go anyway.”

  “That’s great news. I’m shocked that he’s letting us back in so fast.”

  “He gave me the impression that he was getting some pressure from the mayor. You might want to thank Nathan next time you see him.”

  Nathan. Of course Nathan was behind it, and I was grateful. I only hoped that he didn’t expect anything in return.

  “Can I go in my apartment?” I asked.

  “Yes.” She sounded so relieved, and I couldn’t help feeling the same despi
te my misgivings about Nathan’s involvement. The Food and Wine Festival lasted the entire week, and to be closed for any part of it could sorely hurt our business.

  “I’m done teaching for the day, so I will head over there now.”

  “All right, dear,” she said distractedly.

  I slipped the phone into the back pocket of my jeans. “That was my grandmother. The police are letting us reopen Charming Books.”

  “That’s great,” Renee said. “But what are you going to do about that?” She pointed at the article in my hand.

  I folded the piece of paper and dropped it into my tote bag. “I’ll give it to Chief Rainwater and let him take it from there.”

  She cocked her head. “I don’t doubt you will give it to the police chief, but I don’t believe for a minute that you are going to let the case go.”

  “Private citizens shouldn’t mess with police investigations,” I said, having heard it a time or two repeated to me.

  “Says you,” she said with a laugh. “I suggest you go home and make yourself presentable before you see the police chief.”

  My brows knit together. “Presentable?”

  Her eyes twinkled. “He’s a handsome man.”

  “And your point is?” I dropped my bag back onto the floor of my car.

  She pantomimed zipping her lips closed and throwing away the key.

  I wanted to question her more about what all that meant, but I didn’t have the time. The sooner I reached Charming Books, the better. I had a feeling my grandmother might have some grand plan to distract festivalgoers from the murder. That couldn’t be good. “I’d better go.”

  She gave me a quick hug. “At least promise that you will be careful. I know Chief Rainwater will be keeping an eye on you, but you could have been killed last night. Cut down on the stupid, okay? For Rainwater and for me.”