CHAPTER 24 SHERIFF ELLIE

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 sheriff when 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.

Gilmore was standing among the tiny chairs in the story-time area next to a giant cardboard bunny dressed in a suit. The librarian was holding a book, studying the print on the back. She normally wore her gray hair pulled back in a neat bun. Ellie noticed wiry strands standing out all over her head as if she'd slept with her hair up and hadn't bothered to fix it this morning. Her silver glasses were perched precariously at the end of her nose as she turned the book to its spine, frowned, and flipped through the pages. "Absolute filth," she groaned before throwing the book on a pile at her feet.

Ellie glimpsed the title: If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss.

Gilmore plucked another from the shelf and gave it only a cursory glance before throwing it aside. The Cat's Quizzer , also by Dr. Seuss.

The air was hazy and stank of lighter fluid, but that didn't keep Gilmore from taking the small can from the purse hanging off her shoulder and dousing the books, the surrounding carpet, and part of the wall. Even the cardboard rabbit hadn't escaped.

Ellie motioned for Newton to stay behind her, then said in the calmest voice she could muster. "Arwa, want to tell me what you're doing?"

At first, the woman didn't acknowledge her; she seemed to look right through her to her boss. Her eyes narrowed to tiny pinpricks. "I'm trying to clean up the mess made by that man!" She grabbed another book off the shelf and shook it. Another Seuss book— On beyond Zebra! "This garbage has no place here! It's poison to anyone who touches it!" She threw it on the pile and zigzagged the colorful cover with a spray of lighter fluid, which splashed up on her shoes and the hem of her dress. A large box of matches stuck up from her open purse.

Ellie's grip tightened around the fire extinguisher. "I imagine there is some kind of process in place if you'd like to remove a title from the library. No need for you to do this, right?"

"Process …" Gilmore huffed and blew a strand of loose hair from her face. "I've been telling Mr. Newton to remove these books for the better part of a year. I've shown him the supporting literature, the studies, the peer reviews. You know what his answer to me has always been?" She paused and licked her chapped lips. "He said, ‘I like Dr. Seuss.' He told me the same thing with all the others." She grabbed another title off the shelf and waved it around. "He even left Charlotte's Web in the stacks, of all things! Banned by numerous school boards in 2006! And when parents come in here asking why we still have it, he expects me to defend it!" She dropped the book on the pile and saturated it. "I will do no such thing!"

Newton cleared his throat. "Ms. Gilmore and I have a difference of opinion, which we've discussed at length. When she's running the library, she's more than welcome to exercise those opinions."

Newton was seventy-two and more than likely to die in that library than retire. Gilmore must have come to the same conclusion, because she raised the bottle of lighter fluid and doused him—one quick stream starting at his shoe and getting halfway up his suit jacket before he managed to back away.

"Arwa!"

Ellie tried to slap the can from the woman's hand, but Gilmore was far faster than she looked. Not only did she pull away, but she managed to hit both Newton and Ellie with another stream, splashing Ellie's cheek and left eye.

Ellie screamed and twisted away. She nearly dropped the fire extinguisher when she wiped at her face with her uniform sleeve. The burning came on a delay, not as bad as she expected, but bad enough to cause tears to cloud her vision and set her nose running. She spotted a water fountain against the wall and started for it when Gilmore told her not to move.

"Just stay right there," the woman said, and Ellie realized she was no longer holding the can of lighter fluid. She'd dropped that and managed to strike a match.

While Ellie stayed where she was, Mr. Newton did not.

He backed away at a quick shuffle and managed to get behind some kind of craft table. He pulled a phone from the wall and frantically punched in 911. Little good that would do—Sally would get the call at the station, if it went through at all.

One eye closed, the other a hazy mess, Ellie locked on that flickering flame in Ms. Gilmore's hand and tried to keep her voice calm. "You're covered in accelerant, Arwa. Put that out before you hurt yourself."

The woman was staring at the flame, too; her eyes were locked on it. Mesmerized. She watched the matchstick dwindle until it was nearly to the tips of her fingers. "I think you're looking at this all wrong, Sheriff. Fire sets us free. It's nature's equalizer."

Ellie threw the fire extinguisher at her.

It caught Gilmore under the chin, sent her staggering. She fell back and cracked her head against the side of a table. The match tumbled, rolled, and landed on the carpet. Ellie quickly stomped out the flame and crouched next to the other woman.

Gilmore wasn't unconscious, but the two blows had stunned her. A good size knot had already started to form on the side of her head, but she wasn't bleeding. Ellie pulled several zip ties from her pocket and quickly secured the woman to a chair before getting to her feet and staggering toward the water fountain to wash out her eye. Waving a hand behind her back, she shouted at Newton, "Watch her! I need to get this shit out of my eye …"

If the head librarian heard her, he didn't say anything. Didn't sound like he was on the phone anymore.

Ellie pressed the bar on the front of the fountain, scooped the water in her palms, and splashed her face. Her left eye didn't want to stay open so she pried it with her fingers, forced the water in, and kept at it until the burning turned to a dull ache. Nearly five minutes had gone by before she finally stood upright again and blinked away the last of it.

"Mr. Newton, are you—"

She heard a strange swoosh followed by a loud chomp!

Ellie turned to find Newton still standing behind the craft table. He was staring down at a large paper cutter, the large blade glistening under the overhead lights.

He'd just chopped off four of his own fingers.