Better Off Read Page 2

  “Birds,” Cleo guessed, taking her eye off the road for a second. Above, whirligigs spun in chaotic metallic blurs. “Movement is supposed to scare them off. Mr. Krandall has a touch of avian phobia.”

  Leanna muttered something that sounded like “Of course he does.” “It’s like a fairytale forest,” she added. “Not the good kind—the kind where someone ends up in a cauldron. And these books! They’re even scarier!”

  “They are worrisome,” Cleo agreed, internally chastising herself. One of her firmest beliefs was that librarians should never judge reading taste. Still …

  “Many Murders and How They Were Done,” Leanna read out. “Unsolved Murders of Georgia and the Florida Panhandle: Methods and Bonus Maps? Red Dirt Blood? A Southern Field Guide to Unsolved Crime? What if Mr. Krandall’s onto a do-it-yourself project of killing someone? Are we accomplices? Is the library?”

  Cleo veered around a pothole and a direct answer. “All the books are by Priscilla Pawpaw, a local author. I’m to blame, I’m afraid. I recommended a gardening book to Mr. Krandall, and her guide to noxious and poisonous plants was beside it on the shelf. When he showed an interest, I encouraged him. I hoped he might tackle his vine problems. He found out she wrote other books. True crime.”

  Buford clearly hadn’t been gardening, Cleo thought, as Krandall House came into blurry view. Kudzu raced up the walls of the moldering mansion. Poison ivy gripped the gate, and air-potato vine—Cleo’s personal noxious-weed nemesis—dripped from decaying porch railings and once-stately columns.

  Cleo turned off the bookmobile and told Rhett to stay. The cat needed no further encouragement. They opened the doors to a racket that sent Rhett hurtling to hide in the kids’ nook.

  “What is that?” Leanna asked, hands to her ears.

  Metal clanged and grated. Deep thumps rumbled through the soles of Cleo’s sandals.

  Leanna inched backwards. “Maybe we should come back later. Later, as in never.”

  “He’s a friend of the library,” Cleo said. Buford Krandall was undeniably eccentric. But he did have influence around town and could, sometimes, be surprisingly rational and well-intentioned. “He loves books,” Cleo bellowed over the din. “He’s on the library board and town council, and as far as I know, he has no interest in fishing piers.”

  Leanna hoisted the bag of books. “Then we’re at the right place.”

  Cleo followed, mentally reassuring herself. They were here for the library. And more … If Buford Krandall was up to something sinister, Cleo wanted to know what.

  * * *

  Ringing the front bell hadn’t been an option in years. Vines locked the gate, and hollies blocked the verandah. Cleo and Leanna followed a flagstone path to the back, where they stopped short. A steel monster growled in place. Gears spun and locust-limb legs churned. A spiral fang jabbed the ground, spewing pale mud that trickled in slimy veins toward a nearby creek.

  Cleo stepped back and into a bony touch that made her jump.

  Buford Krandall had a ghost’s complexion of chalky skin and eyes set in caverns shaded by a hogback nose. He wore a dark suit several sizes too large and likely dating from the era of his antique black parasol. Since a brush with a precancerous mole several years back, Buford had avoided the sun like Dracula with hypochondria. Library board meetings were held after dusk to accommodate him, and he was known for his lengthy walks at night. Night strolls were better for his health, he claimed. Better to pry into dirty laundry, others suspected.

  “She’s a stunner, isn’t she?” he declared in his low, slow drawl.

  “She?” Indignation restored Cleo’s nerves. Why did men call their most terrible devices “she”? Gunboats and battleships. Bombs, bombers, and hurricanes. Cleo remembered when the National Weather Service finally began bestowing male names on storms. She and her best friend Mary-Rose had raised mint juleps to destructive equality. Recently, however, Cleo had read that more people perished during hurricanes with feminine names. Not because females of all sorts were inherently strong, but because folks underestimated forces with names like Mary-Rose or Cleo, Opal or Katrina.

  Buford spun his parasol, sending wormy fringe flying. “Yes, ma’am. She. My gorgeous lady. My great-granddaddy made her. All this time, she’s been waiting for me out in an outbuilding. Just look at her chew.” He gazed fondly at the metal monster, his eyes gleaming.

  “What’s it chewing?” Leanna asked.

  “Life’s blood, dear girl. The cold, clear, pure blood of life.”

  Leanna put a protective hand over the library books, but not fast enough.

  “Ah, my books,” Buford said, whisking them away. “Just what I need. I’ll tuck them on the back porch.” He glided off ghostlike, leaving Cleo to wonder and Leanna to tiptoe toward the beast. By the time he returned, Cleo had one thing figured out.

  “Water,” Cleo said. “You’re drilling a well, aren’t you?”

  Their host flashed sharp teeth. “I can’t put anything past a librarian, can I? Yes, I’ll soon be pumping up pure spring water.”

  Cleo didn’t like to show off, but she spotted an obvious flaw. “Your water’s all muddy, Mr. Krandall.”

  “Phase one,” he said. “Drilling and agitating. See? It’s already working.” He pointed to the creek, winding through a brutally pruned cypress grove. “Go ahead, wave hello.”

  Wave? Cleo frowned at stubby stumps, wishing she’d never gotten Buford Krandall thinking about gardening.

  “Ah, forgive me.” He rummaged in deep pockets and extracted a small pair of binoculars. “Try these.”

  Cleo pressed the binoculars to her bifocals. She saw chartreuse needles and nubby cypress knees and … a pink sundress. A magenta cardigan. Freckles dotting high cheekbones and a face she’d known and loved since childhood: Mary-Rose Garland, Cleo’s dearest friend and the unfortunate nearest neighbor to Krandall House. Mary-Rose’s Pancake Mill was a local treasure, a historic sugar mill now engaged in other sweet enterprises, serving up pie and pancakes. The mill sat beside a large, round, spring-fed swimming hole, appropriately dubbed Pancake Spring.

  “Mr. Krandall, what are you doing?” Cleo spun. “Your mud is flowing straight into the spring. You have to stop it.”

  “I shall. Phase two is pumping and bottling. I plan to take up every drop of water I can.”

  Buford was right. He couldn’t trick a librarian. Cleo read widely, from mysteries to histories, to nonfiction, including local geology and ecology. “The aquifers and water tables are linked,” she said, Leanna nodding vigorously at her side. “Siphoning out water here will affect—” She stopped short. It would affect Mary-Rose and Pancake Spring, to Buford’s malicious delight. Mary-Rose’s relatives had acquired the mill from a spendthrift Krandall after the Civil War. Later Krandalls so resented the sale, they’d carried on a bitter feud with the “new” owners ever since.

  “Yes, indeed,” Buford said happily. “If Mary-Rose Garland wants spring water for her batter and bathers, she’ll have to buy it in bottles. From me.” He twirled the parasol, reminding Cleo of a deranged Mary Poppins.

  Cleo took Leanna by the arm, consoling herself with the knowledge that wild Krandall schemes rarely succeeded. “We’ll leave you to your projects,” she said.

  “I’ll see you at the next library board meeting,” he replied. “I hear there’s trouble brewing. A fishing pier on the Tallgrass? A casino? Unseemly. Unnecessary. I don’t approve.”

  With this, Cleo could agree. She remembered her library-saving purpose and told him about her upsetting meeting with the mayor.

  Buford Krandall looked disturbingly pleased. “Ah, this is good, very good,” he said. “Now I can go after our mayor with even more righteous gusto. We’ll have a fine fight on our hands, Mrs. Watkins. I have ways to make Mayor Day come around, and I bet I can raise more money than your gala too. I have a plan we can take to the bank.” Buford twirled the parasol. The fringe spun in confusion, much like Cleo’s mind.

  “I know,” Buford
said. “Let’s give our effort a fishing name in the mayor’s honor. ‘The bait and hook’? ‘Hook, line, and sunk’? Ooh, I have it: ‘We’ll be shooting fish in a barrel, and our boy mayor’s a carp!’” His dark eyes glittered.

  Cleo took a step back, pulling Leanna with her. “What are you planning?”

  Buford waved a bony finger, miming chastisement. “Oh no, not yet, ladies. I am biding my time. Letting the gears turn. Assembling resources. Your lovely books should help immensely.”

  Cleo had to ask. “What is your interest in these books, Mr. Krandall? Are you writing a book yourself perhaps? Researching a mystery?”

  “What a grand idea,” Buford said. “When my venture is done, maybe so. I could connect the dots for those with less nimble minds. It is all linked, Mrs. Watkins, like those aquifers you speak of.”

  “Not good,” Leanna said when they were back in Words on Wheels, bumping fast down the drive.

  Not good, Cleo agreed. At the main road, she hesitated, but only for a moment. Cleo turned left, away from town, speeding around the bend to the Pancake Mill.

  * * *

  “I could kill him!” The words filled a lull in music and conversation. They rose to the tall open rafters of the mill house. They bounced from slow-spinning fans and the old wooden waterwheel and skidded off skillets sizzling with butter, batter, and blueberries.

  Late-morning diners looked up from their pancakes.

  Cleo, whose mind had drifted to Mayor Jeb Day, checked that she hadn’t blurted out her thoughts. Her mouth, however, was safely full of bitter, unsweetened tea.

  Across the table, Mary-Rose Garland sputtered like a berry about to boil. Scarlet flared behind her freckles, and her hazel eyes snapped.

  “Do you see what he’s doing to my spring?” Mary-Rose slapped the table and the thankfully cold, built-in griddle.

  Cleo saw. Muddy fingers gripped the waters. No swimmers made laps. No scuba divers hovered above the boil, the geologic spigot from which spring waters bubbled forth. A single couple walked the banks, slogging in thigh-high waders. Cleo recognized her gangly twenty-four-year-old grandson, Ollie. A recent college graduate, Ollie was presently engaged in what he called “gig” employment, and his father—Cleo’s fretful eldest son, Fred—deemed unemployment. Ollie lived in the little cottage at the back of Cleo’s garden. He helped with lawn mowing and sometimes paid rent. He was with a woman Cleo didn’t recognize, in camouflage shorts and a matching tank top. They pointed and aimed binoculars in the direction of Krandall House.

  Cleo turned her gaze to the only serene part of the scene, Leanna and Rhett. They sat at a picnic table, Leanna eating pie and soaking in some solitude, the cat eyeing the three resident peacocks with predatory interest.

  “When did this start?” Cleo asked, meaning the drilling.

  “When will it end?” Mary-Rose retorted. “Those Krandalls!” She dropped three sugar cubes in her already sweet tea. Cleo looked on with alarm and envy. Alarm because despite all the pancakes and pie Mary-Rose dealt in, she didn’t have a sweet tooth. Envy because Cleo’s new doctor considered Cleo’s glucose levels high and had put her on a joy-crushing, low-sugar diet.

  Mary-Rose gave her drink a violent stir. “The drilling started last week. He doesn’t care about bottling water. I swear, he’s just doing this to mess with me. He says he’ll siphon all the water away. I don’t think it’s possible, do you? Even if it’s not, the mud and racket could put me out of business.”

  Cleo repeated her earlier hope: Krandall projects flopped. Eventually.

  Her friend threw up her hands. “How long will that take? Months? Years? Krandalls are persistent.”

  “We could call someone,” Cleo said. “The police or—”

  “Oh, I’ve called,” Mary-Rose said with a huff of frustration. “I called the police and might as well have talked to a fence post. I called City Hall next. As soon as Mayor Jeb heard the name Krandall, he hung up.”

  It all sounded fishy. Cleo told Mary-Rose about her earlier meeting with their young mayor.

  Mary-Rose drained her tea to the sugary sludge. “Swapping our library for a pier? Appalling! Those scheming men. It’s good-old-boy connections and corruption, like always and before and forever more. I am tired, Cleo. Sometimes I think I should give up and move down to Florida.”

  Cleo gasped. Florida? Good gracious. Give up? Mary-Rose was fiery, always ready to take on a good fight. She reached for her friend’s hand. “Mary-Rose, I am so sorry.”

  Mary-Rose shrugged. “I know. You were only doing what’s best for the library.”

  Cleo frowned. She didn’t like Mary-Rose’s tone, as bitter as unsweetened tea. “What do you mean?”

  “You, that’s what I mean. Meeting with that awful Krandall. Ollie and I both saw you. Are you giving that man special treatment because he’s on the library board and battling the mayor? I know, ‘if we can’t beat ’em—’”

  “No, no,” Cleo said guiltily, for Mary-Rose was right. “I was thinking of the town. Catalpa Springs needs its library, and Buford can help. I didn’t know anything about the drilling.” But she did know about his books. Cleo held a librarian’s vow of silence when it came to patrons’ reading preferences. No one would hear from her, for example, that the Episcopalian priest’s wife enjoyed steamy paranormal romances. However, no code took precedence over a friend’s safety. Cleo reached across the table. “Mary-Rose, Buford hasn’t threatened you, has he?”

  Mary-Rose murmured something noncommittal. She craned her neck, looking over Cleo’s shoulder toward the front door.

  Cleo turned to see Ollie and his companion wiping their waders at the entry.

  The woman clomped toward the restrooms in loud, squishy steps. Ollie kissed Cleo lightly on the cheek. “Hi, Gran,” he said, his messy brunette locks falling over his face. Mary-Rose got a more serious greeting. “We got visuals. We reconned the northeast perimeter, like you suggested. We’ll surveil the rest after dark.”

  “You didn’t get made, did you?” Mary-Rose said.

  They went on, sounding more like a tactical team than Cleo’s friend and grandson.

  “Ollie, dear,” Cleo interjected. “You weren’t trespassing, were you?”

  He grinned wide. “I sure was!” He addressed Mary-Rose. “Now we wait for … you know what.”

  They nodded knowingly. “Need to know only,” Mary-Rose said.

  Cleo felt left out. “I can know,” she protested.

  But her friend was standing, pulling Ollie aside to the dim corner where the old wooden waterwheel peeked through high windows. Grumpy and defiant, Cleo sunk two sugar cubes in her remaining tea.

  She couldn’t very well chide her grandson for trespassing when she’d done so much herself. As kids, she and Mary-Rose had explored every corner of their town. They’d sneaked into abandoned buildings, scaled garden fences, and rowed up to private docks, making maps and journals of their discoveries. Cleo still occasionally engaged in a little offtrack information gathering. “Sleuthing,” the Catalpa Gazette once grandly called her efforts, after Cleo had solved a rash of burglaries. The newspaper repeated the praise when Cleo quietly assisted in nabbing a murderous nurse’s aide, and again when Cleo applied her research skills to a cold case. Cleo saw it as setting things straight, cataloging the truth, solving a puzzle. After all, librarians were good readers, not only of books but also of people and situations. Mary-Rose often joined in these endeavors. Why was her friend excluding her now? Was it because Cleo had met with Buford Krandall? Did Mary-Rose not trust her? That possibility hurt.

  “We can all work together,” Cleo said when Ollie and Mary-Rose returned along with the woman in waders.

  Ollie, bright-eyed and flushing, introduced his companion as Whitney Greene. “She’s—”

  “Busy,” Whitney snapped. “We have to go.”

  Cleo frowned at the young woman’s abruptness. Whitney squished off, yelling for Ollie to follow.

  Cleo reached out and squeezed her gr
andson’s hand. “Ollie, dear, come for supper sometime soon. Bring your friend and tell me what’s going on. I’ll make your favorite chicken and biscuits.”

  He clamped both hands over hers. “I’d love to, Gran. When we’re not so busy, okay? Nothing’s going on. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  He kissed her cheek and hurried off.

  Nothing to worry about? Cleo loved her grandson, but she didn’t believe him one bit.

  Chapter Three

  Worrying was like a rocking chair. It kept your head moving but didn’t get you anywhere. Cleo was sitting in a rocker as she thought this. She swayed faster.

  “More tea? Scone?” Henry Lafayette sat in an identical chair, a tippy folding contraption of blue canvas and aluminum framing. A tiny tray table perched between them, piled high with goodies from the Spoonbread Bakery, the best (and only) bakeshop in downtown Catalpa Springs.

  The bakery served up twists on Southern specialties. Cleo’s favorite was the strawberry spoonbread. Sweet berries and cream topped the bakery’s namesake, a cross between cornbread and a soufflé, so soft and airy it required scooping. However, in a sugar-ban pinch, a pimento-cheese scone would do. Cleo chose a golden pastry, surely fortified with unmentionable amounts of butter. She slathered on extra. It was a Saturday morning, after all, and she was keeping to her diet.

  Words on Wheels stood behind them, parked at Cleo’s now regular stop at Fontaine Park. A group of moms and toddlers filled the back nook, flipping through storybooks, reading aloud, and giggling. About a dozen patrons had already come and gone, all quizzing Cleo about when the main library would reopen. Cleo took a buttery bite of scone, thinking she should have told them all to storm the mayor’s office, demanding their library back. Instead, she’d suggested letters and calls and support at the Ladies League Gala. What more could she do? Something more than sitting around rocking and eating, she thought.

  “A gorgeous morning,” Henry said, sounding as sunny as the day. He’d shown up soon after Cleo, bearing the picnic brunch, folding furniture, and flimsy excuse that he’d overbought at the bakery.