Collectors, Cats & Murder Read online

“Leta,” said Constable James, “if we think something may have been stolen, is it possible that book was here but taken?”

  “I suppose it is. But I can’t imagine why anyone would bother to steal it. I loved it and got a kick out of all the books that were mentioned in it, but you can get it at any bookstore. I think it’s much more likely they stole a few of Teddy’s collectible books like the older Ian Flemings and Graham Greenes. But where does that leave us?”

  It was Belle who had the brainstorm. “You know, Wendy had me read a nonfiction book—not my usual cup of tea—but I enjoyed it. It was The Diary of a Bookseller.”

  “Oh my goodness, I loved that book,” said Beatrix. “Here it is, by Shaun Bythell, and here’s another clue!”

  Ah, yes, I do feel a kinship with this author, but I have one other passion.

  Guess right, and you will find the key.

  “Have you noticed,” said Belle, “that you’ve found most of the clues in the bookcase by the desk? Don’t know that it’s significant, but maybe we’ll solve this last bit more quickly if you stay over there. So, Beatrix, what was his other passion?”

  She plopped down in the desk chair and twirled it around. “Books, isn’t it everything to do with books?”

  I looked up and down the shelves. “It must be. I mean, look around. This room is filled with books and book memorabilia. He even has a typewriter that belonged to J.M. Barrie and figurines of characters from children’s books and book covers and clippings. Wait, that’s it!”

  All eyes were on me. I could tell they had no clue what I meant. “It’s not only books. It’s everything to do with books. He’s passionate about his collection. That’s why he invited Dave and me to visit him. That’s why he invited Gilbert over. To show off his collection.”

  Pulling out his phone again, Constable James started searching. “Collecting,” he muttered. “Good grief, there must be a million books about collecting. Stamps, china, knives—what am I looking for?”

  My face lit up as I glanced at Belle. “You noticed most of the books had been on this one set of shelves.” I pointed to the bookcase by the desk as I walked to the safe. Next to the Ken Follett book was one by John Fowles, The Collector. “This has to be it.” This time, the piece of folded paper was in an envelope—with the key.

  You’ve found the answer and the key! I’m passionate about collecting.

  The brass key had a dainty bronze-colored tassel attached to it. This is straight out of an Agatha Christie movie, I thought, as I handed the key to Beatrix. Cue the suspenseful music.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I set my phone to video so I could tape the big scene. Beatrix inserted the key into the lock with her right hand and placed her left on the tiny brass knob above the keyhole. Like a book, the door opened to the left. We collectively held our breath.

  Inside were two grey archival storage boxes, standing upright. There was something beneath them, but I couldn’t quite see what it was. Beatrix removed one box from the safe. Her movements were almost reverential as she examined her find. “It doesn’t have a lid,” she murmured. “It has an insert.”

  She gasped when she slid the insert out to reveal its contents. “It’s volumes one and two of Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works—and they’re quite old. I know there was a four-volume set published in the UK. Could this be one of those?” She handed me the insert holding the two books and removed the second box. It contained volumes three and four. “Oh my goodness,” she said as she opened volume three. “It’s dated 1857. I’m not sure, but this may be the earliest Poe collection published here. Leta, see what it says in volume one.”

  My eyes wide, I carefully opened volume one to reveal the title page. The date was 1857. I looked at Beatrix and nodded. “The same.”

  It was as though a dam had broken. We all started speaking at once.

  “Didn’t they use his middle name back then? Why does it read Edgar Poe’s instead of Edgar Allan Poe’s?” I asked.

  “He wrote all that?” asked Constable James. “I thought it was only a few stories.”

  “They must be terribly valuable,” said Belle.

  “I can’t believe Teddy never told me he had these!” exclaimed Beatrix.

  We placed the boxes and books on the desk, and Beatrix sat in the chair studying them, seemingly oblivious to anything else. I could appreciate they were rare and valuable, but I wasn’t a collector. Right this minute, I’m more interested in what else is in the safe.

  I turned to see what the boxes had been sitting on. It was an 8x10” burgundy leather notebook. Embossed on the cover in elegant gold script were the words “Teddy’s Treasures”, and lying beside the notebook was a gold-trimmed black Mont Blanc pen. Inside were ledger pages with column headers written in black ink—Item, Date, From, Price, and Where. I puzzled over the entries in the Where column for a few moments—BC, AL, M, W, US, and S. Then I realized they must indicate where to find the item, either in one of the binders—Bless the Children, Author Letters, or Miscellany—on a wall, in the umbrella stand, or on the shelves around the room.

  I smiled as I pictured Teddy sitting at his desk documenting his acquisitions. The first was dated 7_5_1989, and the final entry was made in early April of this year. Beneath that entry was a yellow sticky. The scribble was difficult to read, but it looked like “Ask A / Twain / Barrie letter.” What does it mean?

  “Leta,” said Belle, “You’re grinning. What have you found?”

  “It’s the list of the items in Teddy’s collection. With this, figuring out whether anything’s missing will be easy as pie.”

  My last statement got Beatrix’s attention. “A list?! Oh, thank goodness. My brain is fried from the mystery of the key—which, by the way, sounds like the title of a novel. Anyway, I could go for something easy. And, I could go for tea. Anyone else?”

  When we all answered yes, Beatrix headed to the kitchen, and I followed her. She seemed to know her way around Teddy’s cabinets and quickly located stoneware mugs. “Those china teacups he set out with the teapot are sweet, but not very practical. I need a large mug of tea, don’t you?”

  I nodded yes as Dickens came into the room and went to the French doors. “Looks like Detective Dickens wants to go out.” I stepped outside with him. “Dickens, you’ve been awfully quiet. Are you okay?”

  He cocked his head. “Just kind of bored. I was hoping Watson would be here, and I could introduce him to Christie.”

  Smiling, I kissed him between his ears and told him to see what he could find in the garden. I found a wooden tray and set the mugs and sugar dish on it. A sniff of the cream in the fridge told me it was still good, so I filled the matching pitcher and added it to the tray. When the tea was ready, Beatrix and I carried everything to the library.

  Belle closed her eyes and sipped. “Hits the spot. Thanks, ladies. Tell me, when you were in the bedroom, did you see a cane?”

  Beatrix, Constable James, and I looked at each other and shook our heads no.

  “What made you ask that, Belle?” I said.

  “I mentioned the sword cane to you, but when I was looking through the umbrella stand, I didn’t see it. And logic tells me it should be near the bed. Teddy was like me in needing a cane to get around, even more so as the day goes on, so he would have used it to go to the bedroom Friday night. Perhaps it fell under the bed when the police were in and out.”

  I flashed back to when I was here Saturday. I didn’t recall seeing it. Probably too distraught to notice. But I didn’t remember seeing it Sunday either, and I’d been on my hands and knees looking under the bed. Maybe it’s shoved way up against the wall—not visible in the dark. “Sounds like a job for me and Christie. She can help me search beneath the bed.”

  “Finally, a job for Detective Christie,” she meowed as she leaped from Belle’s lap.

  She followed me to the bedroom. My memory was accurate. There was no cane between the bed and the nightstand. Christie stuck her nose beneath the bed skirt. “Eeew
, dusty.” She disappeared beneath the bed, and I got down to watch her progress. As I rolled over to grab my phone, her sneeze told me she’d encountered the dust bunnies. “Pfft.”

  I shone the flashlight on her and laughed as she stopped to clean her face. “Come on, Christie. You can bathe after you’re done sleuthing. Look at the head of the bed near the wall. Is there anything lying by the baseboard?”

  “Nothing, nada, zilch. Unless you want dust bunnies, you’re out of luck.” She crawled out and leaped on the bed to rub her nose on the comforter. I checked the closet to be sure the cane wasn’t propped in there before I picked Christie up and carried her back to the library.

  “No luck. No cane anywhere, not under the bed, not in the closet.”

  Belle frowned. “I don’t want to jump to the conclusions, but unless the police carried it off, I think our killer did. We folks ‘of a certain age’ don’t like to risk falling and breaking a hip. There’s no way Teddy took himself to bed without a cane.”

  Constable James pulled out his notebook. “I’ll double-check with the SOCOs. If they didn’t bag it as evidence, we’ll count it as missing.”

  Glancing from the binders on the desk to the elegant ledger book, I wondered how to proceed. “Beatrix, I think we need to take inventory, but I hate to make marks in Teddy’s ledger. I could run to Bluebird Books to make copies so we can jot notes as we go. What do you think?”

  Before Beatrix could respond, Belle piped up. “Could you pick up sandwiches too? It’s going on 11:30, and if we mean to complete this task, we need to get on with it.”

  That settled, Constable James and Belle stayed behind with Dickens and Christie while Beatrix and I drove the short distance to the High Street. My friend wanted to treat us to lunch, so she went to the sandwich shop, and I went to Bluebird Books. I’d grabbed the pages of clues too. I thought they were clever and wanted to copy them to show Dave.

  Fiona was at the front desk again today and smiled as I entered. “Hello, Leta. What brings you back so soon?”

  I brandished the parchment pages and the ledger book and explained I wanted to use the copier.

  “Why don’t you let me do that for you so you can look around some more? I could tell yesterday that you’re a book lover,” she said.

  Great customer service, I thought. Probably a good salesperson too. I accepted her offer and returned to wandering the shop. Near the counter was a wire stand with a sign labeled Staff Recommendations. It was written in the same script I’d admired the day before. Rhys Bowen’s Tuscan Child was displayed, as was the latest Deborah Crombie mystery. I’d read a few of Bowen’s Maggie Hope books but not this one, which was described as a standalone novel. I placed a copy on the counter and moved deeper into the store.

  I was in the biography section when I noticed another movie poster, this one for Can You Ever Forgive Me? I recalled seeing the trailer at the theater and hearing the story was based on the autobiography of Lee Israel, an author who turned to forgery when her writing career dried up. I was surprised to see the poster was signed by Melissa McCarthy, who’d starred in the movie. Wouldn’t it be ironic if that signature turned out to be a forgery?

  Flipping through Israel’s book, I thought about Dave and the research for his book, Barrie & Friends. At Edinburgh University and elsewhere, I knew he’d be focused on correspondence between Barrie, Tolkien, Arthur Conan Doyle, and their many literary friends. I bet he’d be intrigued by the Lee Israel autobiography, given she was caught forging author letters.

  I took a copy to the front desk and put it with the Rhys Bowen book just as Fiona emerged from the back room. “You were too fast, Fiona. Given more time, there’s no telling how many books I’d add to this stack.”

  Laughing, she placed the ledger book, the parchment pages, and the copies into a baby blue bag. “Hopefully, you’ll return. By the way, I got a kick out of copying the loose pages. I’d forgotten writing those for Teddy. I never knew exactly what he did with them, but I could tell he was up to something and was enjoying himself.”

  “I should have known! I bet you calligraphed all the small signs around the shop too, right? They’re lovely.”

  Beaming, she explained she’d taken a calligraphy class at the community center and enjoyed sitting quietly in the evenings writing signs and notecards and whatever else. She also occasionally addressed wedding invitations for customers. “Some people knit or cross-stitch to relax. I write.”

  With the bag of copies in one hand and a bag of books in the other, I exited the shop and found Beatrix leaning against the car in front of the sandwich shop. We were at the cottage laying out lunch in no time.

  Constable James insisted on washing the dishes after lunch. “Thanks, ladies. That hit the spot. I don’t often get a decent lunch.” To me, he had the appearance of an overgrown child, one who could use a bit more meat on his bones, so I was happy we’d been able to treat him.

  In the hopes of making our inventory go more quickly, I’d asked Fiona to make several sets of copies. My idea was for us to use the Where column as our guide. One of us could check for items listed as being on the shelves. Another could cross-reference the Author Letters binder with the ledger, and so on.

  “If I get a choice,” said Belle, “I want to work on Bless the Children, and I’ll sit here at the kitchen table where the light is good.”

  I offered to take the walls and shelves, leaving Beatrix to start with Author Letters, and whoever finished first could move on to the binder labeled Miscellany. Christie chose to help Belle by curling up in her lap, and Dickens followed me around the library as I searched.

  The items on the shelves varied from books to memorabilia—from extremely valuable to merely interesting. I checked off a first edition of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, for which Teddy had paid £250 in 1990, and wondered what it would be valued at today. At the other extreme, he had an 8x10” framed print featuring first-edition covers of ten of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster novels. He’d paid only £12 for the colorful arrangement in 1998.

  I chuckled at the Jeeves collection. “Beatrix, do you recall the Ask Jeeves website from years ago? It never occurred to me the name came from Wodehouse’s novels—maybe because I’ve never read any of them.”

  “Oh yes, and there was a BBC Jeeves & Wooster series in the ’90s. Hugh Laurie was one of the stars. That was long before he became famous in the States as Dr. House.”

  “Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Henry and I enjoyed that show, and I was always tickled at how much my friend Bev loved it. As an anatomy teacher, she was intrigued no end by all those obscure diseases and symptoms.”

  The figurines Dave and I’d noticed on Saturday were listed as being on the shelves. When I moved to that side of the room, Dickens yelped and stood on his hind legs with his paws on the shelf. “Look, it’s a dog.”

  “Yes, Dickens, it is. That’s Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and she’s holding Toto.” According to the ledger book, Teddy had paid next to nothing for it. The typewriter that had belonged to J.M. Barrie, on the other hand, had cost what in my book was a small fortune—£1075 in 2004. He’d discovered it on eBay of all places.

  Beatrix was murmuring to herself, and I wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or a bad one. I was searching for a Sherlock Holmes pipe when Christie ran into the room. “Leta, you have to see this,” she meowed as she turned and ran out.

  I followed her to the kitchen, where she leaped into Belle’s lap and stood with her paws on the table. She placed one black paw on a picture in the binder. “It’s a black cat, and it’s singing. I can sing, you know.” With that, she gave a few high-pitched meows. I cracked up.

  Belle laughed aloud. “I’m beginning to believe she recognizes cats, not just live and in person, but in pictures. Whenever I turn the page and find a cat on a book cover or page torn from a comic book, she stands in my lap—as though she knows what it is. Her reaction to this one, though, takes the cake. I think she’s partial to Felix th
e Cat.”

  Christie turned around in Belle’s lap and reached up to the collar of Belle’s dress. “He’s cute, don’t you think?”

  Too bad I can’t tell Belle she’s right. “Well, sure Belle, if you say so. Now, how are you doing with this binder? Anything missing?”

  “Not a thing, but I’ve a long way to go yet. The good news is it’s in chronological order. The bad news is I can’t help reading the clippings and taking detours down memory lane, so I’m only about halfway through.”

  I assured her she could take her time, as Beatrix was still working on Author Letters and we hadn’t started on Miscellany yet. I finished with my list of shelf items pretty quickly and turned to the few listed as being in the umbrella stand. These were all canes—the shot glass and gambler’s canes I’d seen earlier—plus one with a compartment for cigarettes, another that opened to become a tripod, and as I should have expected, one that housed a pool cue. Many of these were quite pricey—anywhere from £500 to close to £2000. The man was definitely passionate about collecting.

  Constable James had been quiet as Beatrix and I worked. I’d noticed earlier he’d picked up The Monkey’s Raincoat, and I wondered what he’d think of the LA private eye Elvis Cole. I glanced his way and caught him with his head bowed and eyes closed. Full stomach, comfy chair. It was bound to happen.

  There were only ten items listed for the walls and none appeared to be in the library. I returned to the only other room I’d spent any time in—the bedroom. Funny, I hadn’t noticed an arrangement of five photos on the wall to the side of the dressing table. They were autographed pictures of actors who had played Sherlock Holmes through the years—Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Ian McKellen, Douglas Wilmer, and Stewart Granger. Interesting that I don’t recall the last two in the role.

  I’d also missed an arrangement near the closet. Three documents on yellowed paper were framed—typed on ancient typewriters, it appeared. I cross-referenced the ledger sheet and checked them off. I had two more items that were listed as being on the wall.