Page 46 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

“It would help if I had some more input beside her name. What can you tell me?”

“She’s from Miami. Her husband, Steve, was a yacht broker. He died a year ago of a heart attack. She studied art at Hunter College, and her grandmother was a famous doctor back in the 1920s, but I don’t know her name.”

“That’s a start,” Beth said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

“Do you want me to come back Monday, or do you need more time?” I asked.

“Honey, it’s a computer. Just pull up a chair near the staff help desk and give me twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes passed. Then another twenty. And then one of the other librarians came out with a message that Beth needed just a little while longer.

Finally, an hour and fifteen minutes into the wait, Beth came out, looking very serious. “You are one incredibly insightful young woman,” she said.

“You found something?” I asked.

“Something? Sweetheart, I hit the jackpot,” she said, waving the computer printout she had in her hand. “Connie Gilchrist may indeed be charming, but according to some very reliable sources, she was arrested for grand larceny in three different states.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Grand larceny?” I said, loud enough for several admonishing heads to snap in my direction. But when they saw that I was already face-to-face with the chief enforcer of library decorum, they smugly went back to what they were doing.

Beth put a finger to her lips and guided me over to a table in a far corner.

“Did she stick up a bank?” I asked, dropping my decibel level dramatically.

Beth smiled. “No, that would be armed robbery. Larceny simply means she was charged with taking someone’s property without permission. Grand larceny means that the property was worth more thanXdollars. The amount varies from state to state.”

“And she did it in three different states?”

“Georgia, Texas, and Maryland.”

I was dumbfounded. “I thought she lived in Florida.”

“That’s debatable. I didn’t find a record of her in Florida. At least not yet, but I’d kept you waiting so long that I decided I had more than enough to tear myself away and confirm that your instincts were spot-on.”

“Did she go to jail?” I asked, and the image of Connie hunched over her Thanksgiving dinner flashed in my mind.

“Not the first time. But in 1985 she was sentenced to three years in prison in Texas. She did eighteen months and was released. In 1989, she was sentenced to five to seven years in Maryland. She did four and a half and was released a year ago.”

“What did she steal?”

“Money and things she could sell for money,” Beth said. “But what’s interesting is whom she stole it from.”

“Who?”

“Her husband.”

“What?” I said, my whisper getting louder and harsher. I caught myself and adjusted the volume. “She robbed him three times? Why did he take her back?”

“Nobody took her back. She didn’t rob one husband three times. She robbed three different husbands.”

I held up three fingers and waved them frantically at Beth. It was the closest I could get to a shout.

Beth stifled a laugh and nodded her head violently. We were silently screaming in the library and getting away with it.

“She said her husband who died was a yacht broker in Florida,” I said softly. “I assumed his last name was Gilchrist, but maybe it wasn’t. Were any of her husbands named Steve?”

Beth shook her head.

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