“Do you think it does?” Oh, Lord, if I could find that Darryl would be in seventh heaven. He could make such hay of that in the book it would surely become another best-seller. Then we would both be lynched by a vengeful crowd of little old ladies who had graduated from Miss McCallum’s.

  “Of course not,” Ms. Higgins said with a dismissive calm. “From all non-hysterical accounts, Miss McCallum was almost ludicrously straight-arrow. Why would she keep a secret file? But that rumor has caused more trouble than anything else.”

  “Why?”

  “Most of the students came from wealthy, well-known families. Then they married well and became prominent themselves, and when they’re well-married and prominent it makes them nervous to realize that there is a record showing that they had failed something or other or that they had been caught drinking on campus or whatever was considered so bad in those days.”

  “Surely after so long…”

  Ms. Higgins shook her head and chuckled. “My predecessor told me of a girl who came to Carlisle and worked in the library just so she could get access to the McCallum archives. As you know, all archive keys are checked in and out every day from the possession of the head librarian, so she stole a set and had copies made. She wasn’t very good at skullduggery apparently, because they caught her down there, trying to change her granny’s grades from barely passing to As.”

  “Why?” I asked as soon as my mouth would close again. “Who cares about grades from a charm school given so long ago?”

  Ms. Higgins shrugged, sending sparkles of light from her various piercings. “No one sensible, but apparently the girl’s father, the grad’s son, was going into politics, and granny was convinced that the tabloids were going to find out about her and make her history public to embarrass her son.”

  Considering the state of politics both local and national, I didn’t think anything less than being the son of an axe murderer or being an axe murderer oneself could hurt someone’s chances, and said so.

  “That’s not the way these people think. They’re pre-Copernicans. They think the universe revolves around them, and their record has to be perfect so they can justify saying they’re better than everyone else. Once someone filed a lawsuit to get the archives changed because they claimed Miss McCallum had deliberately falsified their records out of personal dislike and they wanted to set the record straight.”

  “For whom?” I asked scornfully. “Posterity? What difference do they think it makes?”

  “They don’t think. They want, and they have to get what they want. It’s important to them, so it has to be just as important to the entire world.”

  Roberta Madelyn Standifer Womble. My soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law. Sophronsiba Higgins had just described her to a T. Suddenly it all made sense. I drained the last drops of my beer and swallowed heavily.

  “So you don’t think I need to worry about that note?”

  “No. You’re a careful person. And,” she added with a grin, “our library security is good. I don’t think we’re going to be attacked by a horde of rampaging old charmettes. Want another?” She waggled her empty bottle.

  I did, but I shook my head. Our little talk had made me feel better, but I couldn’t let go of it all yet. “Was anyone down in the vault while I was gone to lunch?”

  Her eyes widened slightly and her smile decreased equally. “No, not that I saw. Is something wrong?”

  I ran my fingers over the smooth, cold case of the computer and was glad they weren’t shaking. “I don’t know. I think someone might have searched my desk, and it seems some of the file boxes have been moved.”

  Her smile died and she became businesslike. “Are you sure? Is it messy?”

  “No… just a few things seemed to have been shifted.”

  “The elevator was locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the archive vault?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the McCallum vault?”

  “Yes.”

  I was starting to feel very foolish.

  “Miss McMann, I was at the front desk all during lunch hour and I didn’t see anyone near the elevator.” Ms. Higgins spoke slowly and calmly, but she was very serious. “You can’t get into the vault without a set of keys, and there are only three sets – my master set, the one we made for you. which was locked up in the cash drawer until you came back, and an emergency set that’s kept in a private safe here in the library. Only I and a few trustees know of its location. I don’t know how anyone could have gotten down there.”

  Now I not only felt foolish, I felt embarrassed.

  “That space is very small. Is it not possible that you bumped the table getting in or out? Maybe the file boxes too?”

  On top of everything else, I now felt stupid.

  “It’s possible.” I admitted with some reluctance. It was. I had done both things several times. “But I didn’t hit either one this morning.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Well, I had been until she had asked me. It could have happened that way. I had been in a rush to meet Tony. It was certainly a less threatening explanation than anything my imagination had created.

  “I really didn’t think I had…” I answered ambiguously.

  “It’s something so easy to forget,” she said gently. To her credit she didn’t sound the least bit patronizing. “And the place has been secure all the while you were gone.”

  “I feel so foolish.”

  “Don’t. It is terribly creepy down there. I wouldn’t like working down there. Tell you what – let’s go down and I’ll have a look around.”

  To have a child only a few years older than my own son escort me to work… it was humbling. I should be ashamed to call myself a grown-up.

  “I have to anyway,” Ms. Higgins went on. “I am the librarian and if there is anything going on down there, I should investigate. Come on.”

  On the way down she chatted of other things – her new favorite band (of which I had never heard) and the island resort where she was hoping to spend her vacation (of which I had never heard, either). I was just impressed that she could talk so much and really say so little in such a short time.

  The vault was just as I had left it. Ms. Higgins turned on all the lights and we walked every one of the three aisles, finding nothing more than some dust and a dead mouse, which prompted her to mutter about getting the exterminator in early this year. The McCallum vault was just as I had left it and, seeing it through Ms. Higgins’ eyes, I felt very stupid. Everything could have happened just as Ms. Higgins had said. The space was terribly small. Unfortunately, to add to my troubles, my hips seemed to be expanding.

  “Well, I can’t see anything wrong. You’re probably just tired. Why don’t you take the afternoon off? I’ll wait if there’s anything you want to do before leaving?”

  The idea of taking the afternoon off sounded delicious. If I could, I would have taken the rest of my life off, but being a soon-to-be-single woman, I had to work. Already I’d cheated Darryl out of almost half an hour and that was about as elastic as my conscience got. “No, thanks. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  Ms. Higgins grinned and asked playfully, “Sure you’ll be okay down here?”

  “I think so. Keep an ear out for my screams, though,” I said with a laugh, but it was only half in jest.

  Ms. Higgins left all the lights on when she went upstairs, but in spite of that shadows, like doubts, began to creep back. Bad things happened even in the light.

  Chapter Four

  At random I grabbed the income financial ledger of 1943; one of the things Darryl had been most insistent about knowing was how wartime shortages and rationing had affected the life of the young ladies of Miss McCallum’s. I tried to work, but my mind wouldn’t cooperate. Instead I began to think, chin in hand, trying to concentrate and not wish for a cup of coffee.

  I had not bumped the table or the files on the way out. I was positive. And if I had, it would have been the ones at hip height which were disturbed, not the ones on the bottom.

  Kneeling, I examined the labels on the boxes that looked different. All of them had to do with students and student records. The financial and academic records were on the top shelves and I had started with them. Forget that! What was so important that an intruder would write a threatening note and then come to search the archives while I was gone? And if so, how did they get in?

  Was someone trying to hide something before Darryl could put it in his book?

  Had it, whatever it was, already been taken?

  The neatly arranged storage boxes were mockingly bland. White and plain, they were called banker’s boxes. As if bankers were ever plain... A wave of bitterness washed over me. Obviously I had a long way to go towards reconciliation with the circumstances if a single word could bring such a flash of emotion.

  Damn you, Jed Womble! How dare you mess up our lives so much over a cheap little floozie!

  No, not cheap. Venetia Turnbull was a very expensive luxury floozie, at least according to what gossip said about her three ex-husbands. Was Jed going to be her fourth?

  I didn’t care. I didn’t dare let myself care. I had to work, had to support myself, had to make a new life, and at the moment that new life rested solely on the late Miss McCallum’s College of Charm.

  What was there about the ultra-proper Miss McCallum’s College of Charm that caused such overreaction?

  What if one of these newly disturbed boxes now contained a bomb, something that would obliterate the McCallum records – and me – forever?

  With much effort I forced myself back to rationality, undermining and defusing such overwrought fantasies. Jed had always said I had too active an imagination.

  Disregarding what it might do to the black jeans that were pretty much my workaday uniform, I sat on the floor and started pushing back the lids of boxes.

  Files. Half a dozen boxes of them sat on the bottom shelf, double stacked. Beneath them the heavy duty steel shelving sagged slightly. With exaggerated care I lifted the lids of the boxes on top and peeked in. There was no way to tell for sure, but it didn’t look like the mysterious intruder had taken anything from these. They were all so tightly packed that getting one file out would be a job and half a dozen others would probably pop out with it. The boxes that had been moved contained student files - A to An, Ga to Gl and Ma to McA.

  Ma to McA. Grace Marshall’s file would be in there.

  Except it wasn’t. Right after Marsh, Corinne Beatrice was Marshall, Elizabeth Jane, and then Massey, Agnes Maud. No Grace Marshall. Just to be sure it hadn’t been misfiled I looked at every name on every file in the whole box. The only Marshall was an Elizabeth, and her file was marked ‘Graduated’ some three years before Grace’s death.

  Had the mysterious intruder taken Grace’s file? Or had it never been here? Considering how meticulous Miss McCallum’s files were, it looked as if it had to be the former, unless she herself had removed it. To her rumored ‘secret file’ perhaps? It would be comforting to think that such a thing existed, because that would explain the absence of Grace Marshall’s file. No folder would dare be misfiled under such a severe regime!

  That left one thing to do, and for the sake of my own future I didn’t want to do it.

  I had to call Darryl.

  * * *

  Darryl did not like to be disturbed when he was writing. So far we had spoken only once or twice since he had hired me and given me my instructions. For me to interrupt him twice in one day did not improve his attitude.

  “Really, Mindy-my-darling,” he said after I had reported the day’s happenings. This time his drawled words had an edge to them. “Someone searched the storage area? Even though it was locked?”

  “Yes,” I replied more than a little exasperated at his attitude.

  “And it was locked? You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, Darryl,” I said with more certainty than I really felt. “I know how to lock a door and I know when things have been tampered with.”

  He sighed, sounding more than a little exasperated. “Really, Mindy, first an ancient accusation of murder and then a threatening note and now a locked room being searched... this is starting to sound a little bit like something out of the Hardy Boys.”

  The idea of the precious jaded sophisticate Darryl Knedsyn ever reading the Hardy Boys boggled my mind, but not enough to make me forget that my workspace had been invaded.

  “What’s going on, Darryl? There has to be something you’re not telling me. What’s so explosive about Miss McCallum’s?”

  Darryl laughed heartily, but it wasn’t a real laugh. It was forced and false and unnerved me greatly. “Explosive? Mindy-my-darling, you’re getting all upset over nothing. I told you that you must stop reading those cheap romantic thrillers.”

  “Good bye, Darryl,” I said and hung up.

  I had been intending to tell him that Grace Marshall’s file was gone, but thought better of it at the last moment. That segment of Miss McCallum’s school history was important to him and, if he thought it was gone, Darryl was just volatile enough to call off the project, which would put me out of a job.

  Besides, I was curious and intended to find out a few things. I’ve always been stubborn and, according to Jed, perverse. Perhaps it was a blessing that he chose to call me ‘Stub’ in perpetual reminder of that trait. After all, he could have called me ‘Perv.’

  Shaking my head, I tried to stay on the mental subject line. I didn’t need to be thinking of Jed. There was enough in this ever-deepening witches’ broth to keep my mind occupied. Because I am an habitual list-maker, I opened a new file and started typing.

  1. Has there really been someone in here, or am I just creating mountains out of molehills?

  2. Why is Darryl so interested in a long-defunct women’s finishing school? The son of wealthy parents, he doesn’t have to earn a living; he writes because he enjoys the cachet it gives him. The fact that he is so successful is just an extra perk.

  3. Is there some dark secret at Miss McCallum’s?

  4. Had Miss McCallum really kept a secret file? What could possibly be in it?

  5. Where is Grace Marshall’s file? Who has it? Did it even still exist?

  6. Why am I sitting here speculating when I should be working?

  Put like that, it all seemed pretty stupid.

  It took some concentration, but I finally got back to the 1943 financial ledger and the wartime shortages at Miss McCallum’s, what there had been of them. From the evidence it didn’t seem that rationing and other wartime problems had affected the school very much. Oh, Meatless Tuesdays and ration card notations and such were all through the ledger, but also were notations that so-and-so’s father had donated a side of beef or such-and-such’s uncle had sent a couple of cases of canned goods, which had been practically worth their weight in gold during the war. There was a large number of such ‘gifts’ and that set my suspicious little mind to quivering.

  A quick check of the registrar’s grade ledger confirmed my nasty little idea. So-and-so of the side of beef had been given a generous ‘scholarship.’ Miss Canned Goods hadn’t received a scholarship, but she had been a student the next semester in spite of grades that dropped off the scale. Apparently the sainted Miss McCallum and her crew had not been above a little specialized black market activity.

  I created another new file and made copious notes, complete with specifications of which year and ledger. This would certainly be interesting to Darryl, who loved depressing pretension almost as much as he loved scandal, and it was pretty hard to find any kind of scandal these days.

  Scandal. I paused in mid-keystroke. It was a horrible concept to those who inhabited the world of Miss McCallum and her girls. Reputation back then had been the end all and be all and it could be ruined just by a rumor, even unto the second and third generation. Could this have been the reason for the search, and not Grace Marshall? After all, Grace’s death had been regarded as an accident for the last fifty-odd years and apparently no one even knew of that funny little note I had found.

  No! No more speculating. There was work to be done. Grimly I went back to analyzing Miss McCallum’s housekeeping records.

  * * *

  There is no respite for the wicked.

  Exhausted from the alarums of the day and later than usual because of trying to catch up, I had barely walked in my apartment door before my phone started ringing.

  First it was Jed, cajoling and with suspicious generosity forgiving me for making public our divorce, then turning more than a little ugly as he demanded I do something about the kitchen situation. That went nowhere; it was hard to do after half a lifetime of catering to his wishes, of trying to keep him happy no matter what, but I just kept saying no. Finally I simply said I didn’t want to talk any more and hung up.

  There was barely enough time to make a quick sandwich of the tuna salad I had been eating on for the last two days before the phone rang again. I almost didn’t answer it, thinking that Jed was calling back for round two, but I had decided when I moved out that I wouldn’t let him dictate my life in any way however bad it got.

  One glance at the caller ID showed it was worse.

  “Hello, dear.”

  “Hello, Mother,” I said with a sigh, then settled down for a long session of pure agony.

  No, not about the divorce. Mother had never cared for Jed; she wouldn’t have cared for any man who took her dear baby girl away from the parental nest. The divorce, in her opinion, was the perfect vehicle to ensure that I moved back home to live under her beneficent and dictatorial eye for the rest of my life.

  “I cleaned your room this afternoon,” she said after we had discussed my brother’s latest promotion. Lucky stiff; Rich had joined the Marines directly from college and after serving his last deployment in some unnamed city in Eastern Europe, safe from our mother’s daily phone calls, he had just been transferred to Washington, where presumably his staff protected him. He had believed in self-protection, though; he had always written or called just often enough to keep Mother satisfied. He knew if he didn’t she was more than capable of hunting him down through some Congressman’s office or another.

 

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