I entered the records department and found an older woman with perfectly coiffed gray hair sitting behind a glass window. She looked up from her computer when I entered and surveyed me with sharp eyes from behind wire-rimmed glasses attached to her neck with a beaded chain that matched her purple dress.
She had the posture of a queen on her throne. Next to her computer, a nameplate readMarlene Pruitt, Town Clerk.
“Good morning,” she said. “How may I help you?”
“Hi, I’m?— ”
“You’re Evelyn’s niece,” she said.
I nodded. “How’d you know?”
“It’s my job to know things about Blackwell Hollow.” She gave me a satisfied smile. “The important things anyway.”
Perfect.
“I’m looking for…” What was I looking for exactly? “Well, anything that might have Harold Pembroke’s initials on it.”
She lifted her eyebrows.
“It’s vague, I know. But I guess… a town planning document?”
She blinked. “Harold was the town treasurer.”
“Then maybe a new spending initiative or something like that?”
She held my gaze and I had the sense that she was taking the measure of me and that whatever conclusion she came to would probably be the correct one.
Then she started tapping at her computer.
A minute later she got up from her chair. “One moment.”
Moving through the office on the other side of the glass, she seemed smaller than she had in the chair behind the window. Tiny actually, short enough that she would have had trouble seeing over the counter without her chair.
I tapped my fingers on the counter as she disappeared through a door in the office.
I turned over the pieces of the puzzle surrounding Harold’s murder. I had a theory, but I wasn’t sure it was right. I needed to confirm Harold’s initials before I could mention it to Sheriff Crowe.
Which I was going to do. Because I’d promised Beck.
Still, I felt distracted and on edge, the confusion of the past week converging on the question of — and possible solution to — Harold’s murder.
Because if I was right, there really was a murderer in Blackwell Hollow.
And it wasn’t Victor Ames.
Marlene re-entered the room behind the glass holding three pieces of paper in her hands.
“If all you’re looking to do is confirm Harold’s initials, this should do.” She slid the papers toward me through the opening in the glass.
I grabbed them eagerly, my heart racing as I looked over the paper on top, which outlined the spending approved for the library.
I used my phone to pull up the pictures I’d taken of the slide from the basement wall in the library, then set my phone next to the papers Marlene had given me so I could compare the signatures side-by-side.
And there they were: Harold’s initials on both the slide and the library initiative, the familiar hook on the H, the tail on the final E inPembroke.
“I knew it.” The triumph of discovery rushed in my veins. I looked at Marlene. “Sheriff Crowe works next door right?”
If Marlene was surprised by my question, it didn’t show. “Of course.”