Page 33 of Confessions of the Dead

The brake lights of the Toyota minivan in front of them blinked off, and they started to creep down the blacktop.

“Finally!” Danny took his foot off the brake and rolled slowly forward. They gained maybe five feet before they were forced to stop again.

“Or not.”

“Or not.”

Hannah tagged “Bubbly” by Colbie Caillat. She loved that song.

Danny rolled his window down and leaned out, then fell back in his seat. “I can’t see anything up ahead. I don’t know where this ends. We could be stuck out here all day.”

Playlist, done!

Hannah connected to the stereo in Danny’s car via Bluetooth and hit Play. Jason Mraz strummed his guitar and went into his latest. Hannah listened for a moment, then leaned across the center console and rested her head on Danny’s shoulder. “Maybe today’s not the day to go to Boston. Maybe it’s the day to do something else.” She stroked his thigh again and gave him a gentle squeeze.

Danny grinned mischievously and slipped the transmission in reverse. “I like where your head’s at, Ms. Hernandez. Hang on.”

24

Sheriff Ellie

“WAIT HERE.”

With a soft grunt, Ellie took the fire extinguisher from Newton and started down the main aisle of the library before deciding it might be better to follow the outer wall and come up behind Gilmore while she was doing whatever it was she was doing.

As sheriff, Ellie had crossed paths with Arwa Gilmore twice in the librarian’s seventy-six years, first in 1996 and again in 2008. Her father had a file on Gilmore from 1983. In all three instances, she’d buried a husband. Each had died of a heart attack. The first had been thirty-eight, the second forty-seven, and the third fifty-one. Each man had been wealthy prior to marriage. While her father had no reason to charge her with anything, he always thought something was off about her first husband’s death; a heart attack at thirty-eight was rare. The autopsy had found a blocked artery to be the cause, completely natural, but he had trouble letting it go. Said it was Gilmore’s reaction that troubled him—he didn’t buy her grief. Ellie’s father was dead and she was sheriffwhen husband number two died, and again, the cause was due to a coronary induced by not one but two blocked arteries. Ellie had petitioned to have the first husband’s body exhumed and was denied. It took a third man dying before a judge finally signed off on digging up both predecessors and granted a warrant to search the house. All three bodies went to the federal lab in Boston and were tested extensively, but nothing was found. The warrant didn’t turn up anything, either. Two days later Ellie had gone to Gilmore’s house to confront her, but she wasn’t home. Ellie was walking back to her cruiser when she noticed a string of ants eating something leaking from one of Gilmore’s trash cans. Ellie removed the lid and found it stuffed with food—milk, cream, three different kinds of butter, at least twenty pounds of thawing cuts of meat, sausage, hot dogs, salami, ice cream … If Ellie hadn’t recently undergone a physical, it probably wouldn’t have clicked, but her cholesterol was up and the doctor had given her a pamphlet listing foods to avoid. Mainly saturated fats—damn near everything in that trash can.

Had Gilmore killed off three men just by feeding them too much of the wrong foods?

Ellie had never shared that theory because it was fucking crazy, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. It only took some patience. Ellie was patient, too. She kept an eye on the woman, waited for her to remarry, but she never did. Ellie had spied her eating salads for lunch out on the commons a couple of times. That wasn’t lost on her.

A loud bang came from the far end of the library. That was followed by the shuffling of feet, then quiet.

There were many times in her life Ellie cursed the fact that she was short, this being one of them. While the bookshelves along the outside walls went to the ceiling, the ones in the center of the room topped out at six feet. That was fine and dandy for someone like Newton, but not so much when you’re five foot nothing.She couldn’t see a damn thing, and Ellie knew if she tried climbing one of those shelves, the boards were likely to come out from under her feet and leave her ass-up on a pile of books long before she’d see anything useful.

“She moved to the children’s section.”

The whispered voice came from behind her.

Ellie banged her elbow on a shelf as she spun around.

Newton was standing there, both palms held out defensively. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I told you to wait back there!” Ellie growled between clenched teeth.

“And you’re going the wrong way. I’m not going to stand by while you wander about and someone burns down my library.”

Ellie rolled her eyes. “Which way is the children’s section?”

He held out a bony finger and pointed to the right.

“Okay, but stay behind me.”

Ellie heard Arwa Gilmore a moment before she saw her. The woman was muttering softly to herself. Harsh, abrupt words, chopped and cut off as she spat them out. Like some kind of argument with herself.

I’m afraid something in her may be … broken.

That’s what Newton had said.

---