Destroying Angels (Leigh Girard Book 1) Page 4

  Obviously, work was Ida Reeves’s cure for everything. After all, she'd discovered the body of her co-worker, Joyce Oleander, last night, yet here she was at work the next day. Her fortitude was both amazing and disturbing. We were sitting in the back office of the Egg Harbor Library, which served as a combination office/lunch room. It smelled of moldy books and tuna fish. Ms. Reeves spoke in a voice so low and clipped, I had to lean forward to hear her. Occupational habit, I figured.

  “I understand that you found the body.” No need to tread gently with this woman. Ida Reeves was as controlled as an IRS agent poised for a sting, and about as warm.

  She didn’t blink a myopic eye in reaction to my question. “Ten-thirty-seven p.m. I’d been calling her all day. To make sure she was opening the library today at nine. When she didn’t answer, I went over to her condominium in Sunset Shores. I was concerned that she might have had an endocardial infarction.” She paused a moment, and added with pride, “that’s the medical term for a heart attack. Studying the world of medicine is something of a hobby with me. Anyway, I thought her heart might have given out. The doctors were very concerned about it before the surgery.” She shook her head. “It was a logical deduction since both her parents had died in their forties from heart disease. And there’s no escaping heredity, you know.”

  “Really?” I kept thinking how some people fulfill their own stereotypes and destinies while others work against them. Ida Reeves seemed a blend of both. Although she had the requisite librarian's myopia and was dressed conservatively—navy tweed wool skirt, starched white blouse buttoned to the neck, navy cardigan affixed with a gold watch pin and a pearl sweater chain—her grey hair was cut in a stylish shag and her full, thick lips were emphasized with candy red lipstick.

  “I’m of the opinion that biology determines your whole life, even your personality.” No doubt about the challenge in her statement.

  “You don’t think there are other factors such as environment or bad luck?” I had to make this query, since no one from either side of my family has had breast cancer. Even the doctors hadn’t produced a definitive answer as to why I had developed the disease. None of the common causes— excessive drinking, smoking, fatty diet, too much red meat—applied to me. The conclusion I reached was—sometimes there is no answer. This view left me feeling powerless, angry, and fated.

  “No. It’s your genes, pure and simple. Did you know that scientists have isolated a gene that causes shyness? I read the study about this that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Would you like to read it?”

  “I seem to remember that study,” I said, trying to deflect her helpfulness back to the subject at hand. “So you went over to Joyce Oleander's condo in Sunset Shores,” I prompted impatiently. My stomach was making thunderous complaints. I had skipped breakfast, and lunch had consisted of a breath mint I’d dug out of my purse on the drive over to the library.

  “Yes. Sunset Shores. Joyce bought a condo there last year. That’s where I found the body. Joyce, that is.”

  She paused for a moment. I noticed how carefully she seemed to be choosing her words, almost with a politician’s care. “She was on the floor in the living room, face up. I knew she was dead by looking at her. Her eyes, you understand, were open in a fixed stare. But I checked her pulse to be sure. Then I called the hospital. It wasn’t until ten minutes later that I called the police.”

  “Why the police?”

  “Well, after I called the hospital, I found the empty pill bottle. It was on the coffee table. As I told the police, I was very careful. I didn’t move the body or touch the bottle. I merely read the prescription label. It was for 20 tablets of Vicodin, and it was dated November 1. And then there was the blood.”

  “Blood?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard her right.

  “Not a great deal. Mostly in her hair, on the left side. About here.” She touched the left side of her head near the temple. “I deduced that she lost consciousness after taking the pills, and had hit her head on the coffee table when she fell to the floor. Though probably not with much impact, since there wasn’t much blood. And head wounds can be notoriously messy.” She pursed her red lips. “She might have been reaching for the phone on the side table.”

  “What made you deduce that?” I challenged, not liking what she was suggesting. Suicide was bad enough, but to change your mind and fail? “Was the phone off the hook?”

  “No, because then I would have gotten a busy signal when I called. But what other logical reason could there be for the body being on the floor in that position?” Ida fingered her sweater chain as if it were a rosary.

  “There could be lots of reasons.” I knew she was probably right. But I persisted anyway. “Maybe someone before you came to her door.”

  Ida peered over her glasses at me, as if I had refused to pay my library fines.

  I glanced back to my notes. ““I’m just trying to get the full picture. So the injury was on the left side of her head, you say?”

  “Well, of course, where else would it be? I just told you the blood was on the left side of her head, so logically the injury had to be there.” Librarian Reeves didn’t like her conclusions questioned. “Joyce took an overdose of Vicodin, tried to get up for some reason, lost consciousness, fell and hit her head. And that’s it.”

  “Was there a suicide note?”

  “No, but no one accidentally takes that many pills.”

  It was unnerving to me how certain this woman was of her opinions, and worse, how detached she seemed from her co-worker’s death. I wanted to shake her.

  “To even consider foul play is . . . well . . . ludicrous,” she pronounced, as if I was the village idiot.

  Ida had a point, but her self-righteous attitude made me want to challenge everything she said. “What else made it obvious that Ms. Oleander committed suicide? The Vicodin could well have made her woozy enough not to know what dosage she was taking or had already taken. Unless the depression you mentioned before really wasn't attached to her gynecological surgery.”

  My own deductive reasoning and medical terminology stopped Ida cold.

  “That’s not what I meant by obvious.” She blew out a small breath of air. “Well, that’s all I can tell you.”

  I had pushed her too far. Ida Reeves wasn’t going to speculate further about why Joyce Oleander had committed suicide. At least not with me. Still, I persisted. “I just need a few more facts about Joyce for my feature story.” I emphasized the word facts. "How old was she at the time of her death?”

  Ida folded the plastic wrap from her sandwich over and over again until it formed a tidy, creased square. “She was thirty-six. Her birthday’s next month. Would have been next month, on December thirteenth.”

  I wrote 36 and December 13 in my notebook. “Had she always worked at the library?”

  “Yes. She started part-time when she was in high school.”

  “How would you describe her?”

  Ms. Reeves hesitated long enough to make me wonder if she would answer. “Bookish girl. She would sit behind the checkout desk and read.”

  “Was she ever married?”

  “No.” Her eyes strayed around the room. I had hit a nerve.

  “Boyfriends?”

  The librarian, now clearly annoyed with me, took a deep annoyed breath. “She was engaged briefly to Elliott Stillwater right after high school. But they didn't go through with the marriage.”

  She was supplying the facts, all right, and that was about all. I was willing to bet the only reason she hadn’t booted me out of the library was her compulsion, genetic or not, to share information.

  “Do you know why they didn't get married?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “She never confided anything to you about Mr. Stillwater?”

  Ida put her hand over the collar of her blouse. “She might have said something about things not working out, and that being her fault, or rather, her decision. But you’re not to print that.”
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  “Of course not.” I decided to try another tack, appealing to Ida as a trusted confidant. I looked down at my notebook as if the next question was already there. “You mentioned that her parents died in their forties from heart disease.”

  “Yes. The father first, then a year later the mother.”

  “Was there a connection between the two deaths?”

  “I already told you, they both had heart disease. What do these questions have to do with Joyce’s obituary?”

  She had a right to ask that. What was I after? Maybe some explanation for Joyce’s suicide, if that's really what happened. Or maybe I was just trying to force this cold cliché of a woman to show some emotion, even if it was anger.

  “I’m just trying to get this right, be accurate. Did Joyce have any friends outside of her work here at the library?”

  “No other friends that she mentioned to me. I believe I was her only friend.”

  This information gave me pause. Then I recovered enough to ask, “How about activities or hobbies?”

  “She volunteered at the hospital every Saturday. She worked in the children’s ward.” Her voiced dropped. “Compensating.”

  “Compensating?” I knew what she meant, but I wanted to hear it from those lush, red lips.

  “For not having any of her own.” Ida lowered her voice even more. “Children. Some women have this need to satisfy their unfulfilled maternal instincts.”

  This obit was going to require a lot of adjectives. Joyce Oleander seemed to have had such a sad and lonely life that it made me depressed just thinking about it. “How about other relatives?”

  “She had a grandmother who took care of her after her mother’s death. She died about fifteen years ago. I think she once mentioned some distant cousins in Minnesota, but I don’t know their names or addresses.”

  “Who’s handling the funeral arrangements?”

  “I am. I made arrangements with Father Lewis at St. Patrick’s in Egg Harbor. There’ll be a funeral mass, even though she was a suicide.” There was enough edge in her tone to suggest condemnation. “And she’ll be buried in the church cemetery. At nine-thirty, Monday. I expect you’ll be there.”

  An invitation I couldn’t refuse. Ida Reeves was like the nuns I’d had as teachers in grammar school. There was an implicit authority in their every demand. After all, they were God’s disciples in the classroom. How could they be wrong? How could you ever refuse them?

  “Do you have any recent photos of Joyce? I’d like to include a photo with the article.”

  Ida pushed back her chair and walked over to the green steel desk. “As a matter of fact, I have quite a few.” She seemed relieved and suddenly talkative again. “The most recent were taken at a librarians' conference we attended last spring. I had planned to retire in a few years, then Joyce would take over the reins here.”

  So Joyce’s suicide had messed up Ida's neat and tidy life. How could I have missed that? Ida was likely furious at Joyce. That explained her intense control, and her arch coldness.

  She came back to the table with a photo album and an envelope. She looked at the watch on her chest. “I still have fifteen minutes.” Quickly, she sorted through the envelope, barely glancing at the photos. “Here, how about this one? It’s the only one of Joyce alone. She didn’t care to have her picture taken.”

  Joyce Oleander was bone-thin with a protruding belly that made her look three months pregnant. Her skin was sallow, and she wore no makeup to compensate. Her light hair was parted in the middle and pulled back from her gaunt face. A face that, if it hadn’t been so stark and haunted, might have been pretty. She had large dark eyes that some poets would no doubt call soulful. They were her best feature, and they were averted away from the camera. She stood huddled beneath one of the stone lions that I instantly recognized as guardians of the front entrance to the Chicago Art Institute.

  Ida pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and sniffed. “Maybe you can crop it. She looks so sickly.”

  “What about this one?” A photo had slipped from the envelope. Joyce and Ida were arm-in-arm in front of Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain. Neither looked especially happy, but at least they were smiling, or maybe it was just the sun in their eyes.

  “No.” Ida took the picture from me and placed it back in the envelope. “We want this to be about Joyce. Not me.”

  “We can crop you out,” I suggested.

  She patted the photo of Joyce. “I gave you a photo to use.”

  “Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about Joyce?”

  Ida considered for a moment. “You could count on her.”

  What a bizarre comment considering Joyce had messed up Ida’s retirement plans by dying.

  She looked at her pin watch again. “Lunch time is over. So if you don’t mind.”

  I did mind. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. Ida had suddenly gone as quiet as the library.

  “And I’d like it back,” she said, pushing her lunch bag down in the trashcan beside the desk. “That photo. I’d like it back.” Ida locked the office door and walked me to the main room of the library. She didn’t seem to trust me, or likely anybody else for that matter.

  “Was this Joyce’s main work area?” I asked, pointing to the front desk.

  “When she worked front desk.” There was a note of impatience in Ida's voice.

  “What if she wasn’t working front desk?”

  “Then she sat over there.” She indicated a wooden desk placed directly under the FICTION SECTION sign. “Now I really do have to open the library.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll just take a look at her desk. If you don’t mind.”

  Ida sniffed again. “I don’t know what you expect to find. I’ve told you everything. Joyce was pretty transparent. There’s no mystery here.”

  “How about why she committed suicide?” I asked, hoping to shake her up.

  To my surprise, she answered without hesitation. “If I was to offer up a reason . . ." She paused and clicked her tongue. “I’d say the surgery. It unbalanced her brain chemistry. Quite literally, she wasn’t in her right mind. But go ahead, you look through her desk. If you must.” She turned away and went to unlock the front door.

  I didn’t have to explore the desk, but Joyce Oleander’s suicide and her repressive life now weighed heavily on my spirit. I needed to find something, anything that might redeem her life and explain her death for me. For whatever reasons, my motives were now purely selfish.

  I sat in Joyce’s chair, a stiff wooden contraption that was in need of cushioning. Sitting here for longer than fifteen minutes had to constitute thirty days' indulgence from the pangs of purgatory, if those were still available to the Catholic faithful. Alas, the desk proved devoid of any personal items: not a photo, a coffee mug, nor a scraggly plant. I slid open the top drawer. It could have been an ad for an office supply store. Paper, pencils, pens, paper clips, rubber bands, post-it notes: each neatly arranged within an assigned place. The two side drawers were just as business-like. I had difficulty opening the bottom side drawer and was about to give up when it finally jerked open. Buried under a stack of yellow legal pads was a dog-eared copy of Catcher in the Rye. One of my favorite books, but hardly the book I expected Joyce Oleander to be savoring. A marker protruded from one end. Curious, I opened the book to the marker. It was a yellowing color photo of Joyce and another girl. They were on the brink of puberty—maybe ten or eleven—that age when they were all arms and legs with the merest suggestion of breasts. I knew it was Joyce because there were those dark, soulful eyes again. Only now they stared directly at the camera. Both girls were dressed in identical bathing suits and had struck rather suggestive poses. Hands on hips, hands behind heads, nubile chests thrust forward. Although they were smiling and showing lots of teeth, their smiles looked forced. The photo made me shiver.

  Quickly, I scanned the room for Ida. She was directing a woman toward a back shelf. With my heart doing double time, I slid the
photo into my jacket pocket.

  After leaving the library I walked down the street looking for a pay phone, cursing myself once again for not recharging my cell phone. I found a phone outside the post office. I flipped to the page in my notebook where I’d written Sarah Peck’s home phone number and punched it in. The phone rang five times before a woman answered.

  “Is Sarah Peck there?” I asked.

  “Speaking. Who is this?” Sarah Peck had a husky voice that I was sure had been enhanced by years of cigarette smoking.

  “Leigh Girard from the Gazette. We met at your mother’s. I want to talk to you about your father’s autopsy.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Then I guess I’ll just have to contact your mother about the autopsy.”

  “My mother is very upset right now. She doesn’t know what she’s saying or doing. Why don’t you back off?” she snapped.

  “Will you talk to me then?”

  I heard her take a deep breath. “Fine, all right. I can give you ten minutes. Be at the White Cliffs at four-fifteen. If you’re late, tough.” Then she hung up on me.

  I looked at my watch. It was 2:10; I had about two hours to kill before my meeting with Sarah Peck. Plenty of time to grab a sandwich at the Egg Harbor market and work on the obit. I closed my notebook, shoved it into my purse and walked back to my truck.

  The market was at the other end of town. A short jaunt by foot or truck. I decided to drive. I picked up a turkey sandwich and a bottle of water and sat in the market parking lot munching on the sandwich and trying to give Joyce Oleander’s obit some attention.