Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (20 page)

Darrow added, “And Hester – you
are to be the endowed librarian, whatever that means.”

Hester hung her head as it sank
in.

“It means,” she said in a very
small voice, “that I will have to sign all my letters with ‘Miss Sara Duffy
Bookmobile Librarian’ after my name until I retire, quit, or die of
humiliation, whichever comes first.”

Her attention was drawn back to
her faithful driver who was starting to shake like a small earthquake.

Pim’s deep, rumbling laughter
spilled over like lava flowing from Kilauea. Chicken gravy liberally splashed
the dancing pineapples and singing coconuts as a dumpling surfed slowly into
her lap.

The End

*     *     *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
B.B. Cantwell is the pen name
for the wife-and-husband writing team of Barbara and Brian Cantwell, of
Seattle. Barbara was formerly a bookmobile librarian for the Portland library.
Brian is an editor and travel writer for a daily newspaper. Learn more at
murdermobile.weebly.com
.

TURN THE PAGE
for a sample chapter from
“Corpse of Discovery,” the next installment in B.B. Cantwell’s Portland
Bookmobile Mysteries, released in April 2014 and now available on Amazon.com.

Corpse of Discovery

A

Portland

Bookmobile

Mystery

B.B. Cantwell

Chapter 1

Saturday, June 8, 1996

 Portland, Oregon

The bookmobile was starting to steam.

“Dagnabit, this is what they get for going cheap and
buying this ‘reconditioned’ thing instead of the new vehicle we were promised,”
fumed Ethel Pimala, perched behind the wheel of the Miss Sara Duffy Memorial
Bookmobile as it crept along Broadway in downtown Portland. The bookmobile
driver’s years of working with children always showed in her tame cursing.

Just ahead, Corvallis High School’s Spartan marching
band, in elaborate chrome helmets, tootled away at the “Washington Post March.”
At least their togas look well-ventilated, thought Hester Freelove McGarrigle,
the bookmobile’s librarian, wiping a limp wisp of auburn hair from her
perspiring brow.

It was an unseasonable scorcher of a June day for the
Grand Floral Parade, a highlight of the annual Rose Festival in a town known as
Oregon’s Rose City.

Putting the “new” Portland City Library bookmobile in
the parade was the scheme of the publicity-conscious president of the Portland
Pioneer Literary Society, the private organization – “our little aristocracy,”
Hester called it – that contracted with the city to provide library services
.
The president had crowed to his board that the shiny magenta bus with its
supergraphics of the late head librarian, Sara Duffy, reading to a circle of
adoring children would be “boffo” exposure for the library.

“Just how well it will play when the bookmobile blows
a gasket and they have to send paramedics to rescue us from heat stroke is
another question,” muttered Hester.

The willowy, blue-eyed “Miss Marple librarian,” as the
local TV stations had annoyingly dubbed her after her involvement in a local
murder investigation, scurried to the rear of the bus a third time to see if
she could get the jammed back window to open.

Once more, the library board had buckled to cost
constraints and gone with a bookmobile with no air conditioning. Who knew it
would be 92 degrees for the Rose Parade? When Hester had agreed to dress up as
pioneer Narcissa Whitman in an 1850s-era dress, complete with whalebone corset,
she had assumed it would be a typical cool and showery early-June day.

 The costume was in keeping with the Rose Festival’s
theme for this year: “Voyages of Discovery.” Keyed to Lewis and Clark’s Corps
of Discovery and the subsequent history of 19
^th
-century pioneers in
what was then called “Oregon Country,” the festival encouraged all Portlanders
to celebrate their heritage.

“Oh, Pim,” Hester called despairingly to her
diminutive, somewhat-pineapple-shaped driver whose Filipino-Hawaiian surname,
Pimala, was often shortened by friends. “My father, the band teacher, would
love this, but if I have to listen to one more John Philip Sousa march, I’m
going to tear off this corset and run screaming and naked into Nordstrom’s to
find some classical piano – and air conditioning!”

 Pim, who had come from Hilo decades earlier to study
at Portland State University before her scholarship had dried up, waggled the
fronds of her woven pandanus-leaf hat, a tribute to the “Kanaka” workers from
Hawaii who helped build and run nearby Fort Vancouver, the historic site where
Pim volunteered for re-enactments.

“Well, if we can’t keep this old bus moving so the fan
belt runs faster, you’re not the only one who’s going to have a breakdown,” she
warned.

It didn’t help that the Literary Society’s leader had
arranged to have two giant dugout canoes – “just like the ones Lewis and Clark
paddled” – strapped atop the bookmobile to add “historic flavor.”

“And about 500 more pounds to haul up Broadway,” Pim
had been grumbling all morning.

Hester remembered with alarm her first car – a stubby
little blue Toyota from the 1960s with a high ceiling and truck-sized steering
wheel that she had fondly called her “Mr. Magoo car.” It had been a good little
car except for its penchant for overheating at stoplights on warm days. Just out
of library school, she’d spent a year as an elementary-school librarian in the
sun-baked Yakima Valley of Washington, where she’d carefully plotted routes to
work that allowed her to turn right and circle around a block until a light
changed in order to keep air flowing through the radiator.

“Oh, dear. Pim, would it help if we turned on the
heater? That’s supposed to help drain heat from the engine, isn’t it?”

 “I’ve already got it going full blast, and since the
only cooling we’re getting is from these window-defroster fans, it’s getting to
be a question of whether this bus melts down first or we do!” Pim replied,
reaching down to unbutton the top of her Aloha shirt, part of a collection
well-known among her colleagues. Today’s was hot pink with hula-dancing
tropical fish and scenes of Diamond Head.

Scanning the gauges on the “new” bus – recently
retired from Ketchikan, Alaska, one of the few places in the United States
where A.C. wouldn’t be considered necessary – Pim gave a low whistle.

“We’re just edging into the red on the temp gauge.
Hester, if this parade doesn’t get moving, I’m going to have to take desperate
measures.”

*     *     *

Leading the parade marched the man responsible for
Pim’s worries.

Pieter van Dyke, president of the Portland Pioneer Literary
Society, was also chairman of the Rose Festival. And chairman of the Oregon
Zoo. And vice chairman of the Portland Art Museum. And a socially-climbing
member of boards of half a dozen other influential Portland-area community
groups, colleges and nonprofits.

In his late 50s, thick-bodied with pouchy eyes and
thinning flaxen hair on a head shaped a bit like a tulip bulb, van Dyke today
was celebrating his Dutch heritage – and his position as self-appointed grand
marshal of the Grand Floral Parade – by marching at its head in wooden shoes.

The impractical footwear was shared by van Dyke’s
taller, grayer, pinch-faced law partner and fellow Dutchman, DeWitt Vanderpol,
limping at his side. Trailing just behind, their baldheaded, bespectacled and
plumply unfit junior partner, Gerhard Gerbils, sported lederhosen to reflect
his German ancestry. This particular garment fit better in the lawyer’s younger
days, a few thousand sausages ago. His partners joked that Gerbils’ dimpled
thighs looked “the wurst for wear.”

Gerbils’ father had changed the spelling of the family
name from “Goebbels” – yes, they
were
related to the infamous Nazi
propaganda wizard – when fleeing Germany just before Hitler invaded Poland.
Much to his descendants’ consternation, old Goebbels simply Anglicized the
spelling but kept the pronunciation, with the hard “G,” though the new spelling
meant his descendants were often mocked as school boys for having the same name
as a pet rodent.

Van Dyke and Vanderpol didn’t often let their partner
forget his distant Nazi relative, smirking together over their private joke the
day they appointed Gerbils to handle the firm’s public relations.

Gerbils thought their sense of humor mean-spirited.

Today, van Dyke was in his element, waving happily at
the crowd lining the curb and beaming with a smile that spoke of dental-chair
whitening treatments.

The parade was rounding the block to Fifth Avenue to
pass in the shadow of “Portlandia,” the 34-foot Statue-of-Liberty-like copper
sculpture kneeling over the entry to the neo-art-deco Portland Building. Van
Dyke, always hamming it up in public, a habit dating to a high-school role in
“Guys and Dolls,” threw his hand to his chest and mimicked getting skewered by
the giant trident the statue brandished. Onlookers guffawed.

“Wait till they see the bookmobile,” he shouted into
Vanderpol’s ear so as to be heard over the sound of the marching bands.
“Getting that reconditioned model left us enough money to hire the airbrush
muralist out of Atlanta who does all the fancy graphics on the trucks that
carry NASCAR teams. Old Sara Duffy never looked so good!” he said of the
elderly librarian, the victim in the murder case Hester had helped solve. “That
little glint in her eye? The guy actually uses diamond dust to get that effect!”

The grandson of Vincent van Dyke, a former governor
and subsequent Oregon Supreme Court justice, Pieter van Dyke had grown up
watching his father, Vincent Jr. – also a lawyer – unsuccessfully run for one
public office after another. Pieter’s basic life strategy was to glad-hand his
way into the public’s heart. He had a reputation for throwing Portland’s most
lavish high-society parties, including hosting the annual Friends of the
Library New Year’s Costume Ball, the group’s premier fundraiser. Pieter always
dressed as Pierrot.

“Speaking of the good old book bus, I wonder where it
ended up in the parade? I told them to put it near the front,” van Dyke told
Vanderpol, as both peered over their shoulders.

*     *     *

Watching the bookmobile’s temperature needle climb
every time the hot engine idled, Pim was sweating from nerves as much as from
the heat.

“I’ve got to keep this thing moving and keep that fan
spinning or she’s going to boil over for sure!” she told Hester. “Hold on, I’m
going through the marching band!”

“Pim, be careful!” Hester grimaced, covering her eyes
with both hands.

Pim, who had been driving for the library for 40
years, gently goosed the accelerator and the bookmobile edged toward the
waddling derrières of the Spartan band’s tuba section. Then fate took a hand.
It was time for the band’s special drill, and as the drum major’s whistle
shrieked, the band members pivoted to march backward, aiming straight for the
oncoming 12-ton bus, whose magenta hue – the favorite color of Portland’s first
head librarian – made it hard to miss.

Pim flashed the high beams through a cloud of steam
and Hester waved her long arms like a Navy signal officer working the
semaphore.

The drum major – a quick-thinking member of the Math
Club – nodded his high, plumed hat, shrilled his whistle three times and
waggled arms in his own special code as the band magically parted on each side
of the big bus. Pistoning trombone slides narrowly missed the rearview mirrors.
Pim hit the air horn in rhythm to the band’s march – Hester recognized “Stars
and Stripes Forever” – and the crowd cheered at what looked like a planned bit
of choreography.

But disaster loomed.

“Pim, look out, the sheriff’s horse patrol is stopped
in front of us!” Hester warned.

“I will not be a horse murderer!” Pim said grimly. Her
love of animals started at home with her ancient cockapoo, Queen Liliuokalani.

“Quick, take this right turn and maybe we can circle
around the block and rejoin the parade after this thing has cooled off a bit!”
Hester coached.

“Just like in your old Magoo car!” Pim grinned,
gunning the engine. Giving it all the leverage her 4-foot-10 physique could
muster, she cranked the wheel to swing the lumbering vehicle onto Yamhill
Street.

*     *     *

City father Simon Benson wanted Portland to be
walkable, so downtown blocks were platted half the size of city blocks in New
York.

“Pim, we’re going to need to go several streets over
if you really want to give the fan time to cool down this beast,” opined
Hester, leaning out the open passenger window in an effort to get some fresh
air. She reached up and yanked out a pearl-handled hair pin so her coppery
tresses fell out of the pioneer bun and caught the breeze.

Glancing in the bus’s side mirror and catching a
reflection of her own slim face with strong cheekbones straining for the air
currents, she suddenly felt like one of those floppy-eared dogs who just love
to go for rides.

 “And I don’t give a hoot!” she thought, relishing the
few cooling freshets.

Pim leaned on the horn, ran yellow lights and sent
more than one baby-jogger-pushing mother scurrying for the curb. Hester,
peering down side streets, finally glimpsed the parade where it had turned a
corner and headed back on a parallel course.

“Pim, hang a left, I think there’s an opening for us!”

The big bus bobbed and swayed, and as it leaned around
the corner a few unsecured books flew from the mystery shelves.

“OK, the needle’s dropped, thank you Goddess Pele!”
said Pim, addressing the sky. “And look ahead up there at the parade, Hester,
that looks like the Allee-ANCE Fran-SAY fur trappers from over at the fort,”
she added, tackling the re-enactment group’s name with her usual exaggerated
diction reserved for tweaking what she called “them highfalutin’ languages.”

“Oh, are those the fellows you know from the
historical park? Do you think they’ll let us barge in?”

“Sure, that’s my buddy Pomp Charbonneau leading them!
He’s a direct descendant of one of the Lewis and Clark gang. He was the guy who
helped me print up those fliers for the Kanaka Village fundraising picnic.
Remember, you met him that once.”

Leading two columns of unshaven men in buckskin
breeches was a wiry, raven-bearded Gaul in an eye-catching raccoon hat. And
this wasn’t just the raccoon’s
tail
– it was a whole taxidermied
raccoon, wrapped around his head. As he waved the tricolor flag of Napoleon,
Pomp Charbonneau’s green eyes danced and the raccoon’s shiny marble eyes bobbed
above. Its little paws waved as if in a plea for help.