Murder in Wonderland (4 page)

              When Allie finally re-entered her home, she felt as if it didn’t recognize her. Something had washed it down, cleansed it of its ability to know its own. She felt it reject her, sniff her warily and skulk away.

              Inside the living room, where it had all taken place, was a post-mortem snapshot frozen in time. The coffee table was still askew. The cups and saucers were haphazard—some were tipped, others were on the floor, the rug awash in spilled tea. She needed salt and club soda to clean those stains, and a lint-free cloth, one that wouldn't leave any bits behind.

              She went to her everything closet. It was its usual jumbled mess of odds and ends, homeless tchotchkes and gadgets. Something caught her eye as she rummaged: a die from an old board game, who knows which. It was translucent red with white dots that had faded somewhat with the years. She turned it over in her hand, and then went to fetch a pad of paper and a pen.

              The pad was on the fridge. It contained a grocery list in progress. One of the items was honey.

              She said the
word
. She knew she'd forgotten to buy it. She tore off the second page and got herself a pen and went to her dining room table. The first thing she did was remove that horrid tablecloth. The eye stared at her judgmentally. She slid her ever-present trivet over it and sat down.

              She jotted a neat vertical line of numbers 1 through 6. Then she wrote the names of each book club guest next to it, excluding Tori and herself.

             
Don't think
, she told herself. Let fate decide. Then she rolled the die.

              Four.

              June Brody.

              What did she know about June, aside from the fact that she'd acted in a few of Del's stage productions? She wasn't terribly good. She knew that. She jotted down the first few things that came to mind: bad actress, cold, distant, jewelry, husband, rich, tired.

              Why tired? She figured her subconscious knew what it was doing and continued with another roll.

              Two.

              Jill/Jenny Metzger without glasses.

              She pulled out her phone and texted Del:
Which Metzger twin wears glasses for God's sake?

              A half a minute later:
Damned if I know.

              She gave an exasperated sigh and wrote down twin, charity, wealth.

              Her phone beeped. It was Ben:
Jill wears glasses.

              She laughed, and then remembered something. She added honey beside Jill's name and rolled again.

              Six. That was for Ben.

              She sat with her pen hovering above his name, and then scratched it out.

              She rolled another four.

              Then a two.

              Then a six again.

              This wasn't working.

              The die was a way of dissociating from her little list of suspects, but Allie Griffin wasn't a machine that could let randomness work for her. To her, understanding randomness was necessary to understand the world, but randomness was also darkness to her, she realized. There was light that needed in. And what good was randomness anyway when you had questions burning you from the inside that needed solid answers that lodged well in well-lit certainty and predictability?

              She walked over to where the body had lain. She analyzed the tea stains on the rug; around one of them, a little black smudge. She took a mental snapshot of the scene as it lay before her, then froze the image in her mind and started it up like an old film projector. Only she played it backwards. She imagined the table slowly moving back to its normal spot, the appearance of teacups overturned on it, the steam from spilled tea sinking in the air toward their fresh spills on the rug.

              Then Tori Cardinal's body faded into view, twisted and unnatural.

              She focused for a moment on the dead woman's hands. In her mind's eye, she watched those hands come back to life, reach out to her, the way they did when Tori offered her phony olive branch after their awkward exchange about the tablescape.

              Was it so phony after all?

              If there are people who are born without sight or the ability to hear or even smell, could there be people who are just born without the ability to make people like them, no matter how hard they try?

              Why was she entertaining these thoughts?

              Guilt, that's why. A murder had been committed in her house. And it wasn't the table's fault, or the eye or the cheap plastic cloth. This murder happened on her watch, when she was too involved in a search for honey that wasn't even in the cupboard to begin with.

              It was ridiculous to be carrying on this way.

              But one thing was certain: she was beginning to feel sorry for Tori Cardinal.

              Yes, she was the Queen of Hearts. But her least favorite character in her favorite book was still a character in her favorite book.

              She stared at the floor. There was the cellphone with the vague message, "croquet mallet," in progress. Then it faded.

              And gone was the rewound picture of the dead body, the overturned cups and the displaced table.

              And gone was the cellphone message.             

              There were just stains now. Around one of them, a little black smudge.

              A smudge of many parts.

              Dead ants?

              Her own cellphone alerted her to an incoming text.

             
I need to see you. Can we meet somewhere?

              Why in the name of Lewis Carroll's ghost would June Brody want to see her?

              She had thin lips. That's the first thing Allie noticed when she met the woman in the quiet corner of the Verdenier Public Library's science fiction section. She'd never noticed them before.

              It was an old building, and there were creaks and clicks all around that sounded like the cracking bones of elves awakening behind the walls. But it was Monday morning just after opening and this was the only sound, save for a sporadic rustle of paper or an errant load of books dropped onto the shelves of rolling carts. Without humans making human sounds, it was a very lonely, quiet place indeed.

              They spoke in hushed tones.

              June Brody steadied herself on the edge of a shelf: Asimov to Bova. "Why here? I feel like I'm in church."

              "You can tell if there's someone lurking nearby."

              "Everyone up front knows us both," said June. "Aren't you worried?"

              "No."

              "Everyone's talking about this like it’s a murder now. It happened in your house. I was there. Everyone's talking. You don't think anyone will get suspicious?"

              Allie blinked slowly at her. "Listen, if there's anyone who knows how to keep a town's secrets, it's the librarians."

              June Brody took a deep breath and bit the inside of her cheek. "My husband is missing."

              Allie shook her head. "Ethan's missing?"

              "Last night. He took an early day home from the shop. I said no problem. Business is a little slow right now. I came home around eight o'clock and he wasn't there." She paused to walk to the end of the aisle, casually inspecting the stacks, poked her head around the corner to sneak a peek for any unwelcome eavesdroppers, and then sidled back down the aisle almost on tiptoes.

              "June, I take it you didn’t call the cops."

              "How could I? I was present at—you know. People are calling it a murder now."

              "I know, June. We just discussed that. Remember? But the cops aren't. So what are you worried about?"

              The thin-lipped girl put two fingers to the bridge of her nose. "Ok, I'm sorry. Anyway, it's not uncommon for Ethan to go out with a friend or two to the tavern. But it was getting awfully late and he didn’t text or call, so I texted him. Then I called, and that's when I heard his phone ringing in the bedroom."

              "Oh June."

              "His wallet was home. His jacket was in the closet." She started to walk away again, then stopped and turned and came back quickly. "Allie, I don't know what to do."

              "June, I really think you ought to go to the police. The longer you wait, the worse it will be."

              There was the look on June Brody's face that Allie had seen before: the look of hesitation, like there was something more to say but something was getting in the way of her saying it.

              "June," said Allie, "what else?"

              "We were warned about this."

              Allie took a breath. "Ok. And you won't go the cops?"

              "No?"

              "Why?"

              June took a walk to the edge of the aisle again, this time taking a longer look around the corner, her eyes lingering on the front desk. Then, apparently, all was clear and she walked back.

              Allie repeated her question. "June, why can’t you go to the police?"

              The woman swallowed hard and began speaking in rapid-fire cadences, as if she wanted to get it all out before someone or something descended on her and shut her up for good.

              "About four years ago, there was a string of drug busts that spanned three counties. Ours was one of them. Look it up. The statistics were underreported, falsified. For every supposed bust they made, they made new contacts for a massive, police-sanctioned drug ring in and around the tri-county area. It quickly fell apart when criminals began threatening cops with blackmail. There were murders, mafia-style assassinations, all in an effort to clean up the mess they'd made and to leave no traces of it. One of the cop assassins was careless and left a body behind. Ethan stumbled upon it one night on the way home from the tavern. He had no idea what he was getting himself into when he went and gave some pretty damaging testimony to the wrong people about what he found. Clues left behind by the murderer and so on. If he chose to talk to anyone else, there could be an investigation."

              "Ok," said Allie, digesting the information slowly.

              June walked quickly to the end of the aisle and back again before continuing.

              "About two weeks ago, we started receiving threatening phone calls. Ethan's brother Ray is a freelance journalist who was in the process of investigating the unsolved murder that Ethan had come across. Well, Ray turned up dead in his apartment. The official death certificate lists heart attack, but these phone calls were insisting that Ray's death was a message, a warning, and that Ethan had better watch his step or he'd wind up in the same boat. Three nights in a row, three phone calls. Then they stopped, only to resume about two days before the—before the book club. They got wind, they said, that Ethan was going to go to the press about his brother, which wasn't true. Last night I came home and he wasn't there. And that was that. And then...there's the Tori connection."

              "The Tori connection."

              "Well, you know Tori and Ethan and I know a lot of the same people, don't you?"

              "I guess I do."

              "Well, we'd all been social on a number of occasions. The cops know about this the way you and everyone else knows about it. Damned small town gossip. Anyway, I sincerely believe Tori was a cop-sponsored hit to put the fear of God into Ethan and me. I gave very little info to them that day, but they knew who they were dealing with. And maybe... I don't know...maybe my testimony somehow got turned around on us, that we weren't going to back down on bringing Ray's murderer to justice."

              June's voice died to a mere whisper. "So, no police. If they know you’re delving into this, there will be trouble. I'm telling you."

              Allie watched June fold her arm tightly around herself, putting two fingers to the bridge of her nose again. And while she did, the riddle came back around again in her mind: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

              There was no answer.

#

              We all have our quiet places, our safe places, our friendly, warm places. Allie chose to linger in hers for a while after June left. The library was full of friends. Friends from all centuries and of every persuasion. Friends who knew more than she could ever know, and volunteered their information freely. From Aristotle to Agatha Christie, From Zoroaster to Zusak, here was a world of thinkers that held their wisdom for her at the ready, like a freezer of fine foods.

              Wandering the stacks, she was safe. She hated the notion of June Brody pacing around here in her sanctuary, a nervous eye on the lookout for predators. She'd reassured the thin-lipped woman that she would work to help her figure out a solution before sending her home with some friendly and very non-medical advice to take one of those little yellow pills that everyone seemed to be toting around these days, and to get some rest.

              The shock of the recent death—murder it was, that's what everyone was calling it now, that's what she was calling it, despite what she told June—paled in comparison now that some sinister plot was underway involving June Brody, and the police, of all people.

              But something wasn't right here.

              She ran her fingers along the spines of books in the literature section, hoping to absorb knowledge by osmosis.

             
But it wasn't in those books, now, was it?
the White Rabbit spoke to her from down the well.
For a book is like the mind that uses it: neither will work if either is closed.

              No, it wasn't in these books. It was in something June Brody said to her. Something that needled Allie now, like a very small pebble in the shoe—too small to hinder her progress, but large enough not to go unnoticed.

              Business in the jewelry industry is slow.

              In March?

              With the wedding peak season only three months away?