“I might have been distracted.”
“I noticed. You and that Tariq guy.” Joel looked around, as if worried they might be overheard. In a low voice he said, “How well do you know him?”
“We’re friends.”
“Did you know he and Delilah had a thing?”
“Yes. He told me so himself.”
Joel looked deflated, as though vexed to be deprived of delivering salacious details. “Okay, then. Did he also tell you he’s been having money problems?”
Harper assumed Tariq’s aquarium job was not exactly lucrative, but he did not seem to have many expenses. He drove a twenty-year-old Camry and rented a tidy but modest one-bedroom apartment downtown. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m from here, you know. I know people. Important people. Like in the police department.”
“And what did these important people have to say?”
Joel leaned in again. “Tariq said he was at work when Delilah was murdered, but my source in the police department said they’re trying to figure out if he had enough time to do the deed before joining us on the tour. Hard to gauge something like that, on account of how long does it take to bury someone? I mean, you have to dig the hole first, right? Now, I’ve never dug a grave, but that looks like an awful lot of work to me.”
Harper was speechless.
“Just sayin’,” Joel continued with a smug smile. “You might want to be careful, lest the story ofyourviolent end be added to the ghostly lore of Monterey.”
And with that Joel stood up quickly, then grabbed the table for balance. “I feel sort of funky…”
“Do you need help?”
“Naw, I’m good,” he said, and winked at her. He shuffled down the aisle and around the crowded stacks. A moment later the door to the research room creaked loudly then thudded shut.
Had Joel been drinking? She hadn’t smelled alcohol on him, but he seemed a bit off. And what about those insinuations he was making about Tariq? Surely the authorities weren’t seriously suspecting her old friend of Delilah’s murder. That was no doubt just gossip, the result of the populace trying to figure out what had happened, indulging in the very human need to fill in the blanks and make sense of the horror.
Tariq,herTariq, would never have been involved in such a thing. Impossible.
But…when she got down to it, how well did she really know Tariq? They hadn’t been particularly close in gradschool and in the years since then hadn’t exchanged more than a few texts and emails before she came to town six weeks ago.
Harper tried to shake off Joel’s odd remarks and lose herself, once again, in her research. She found several newspaper articles casting doubt on Soren Perles’s professional abilities, but she still wasn’t convinced. It was common at the time for people to refuse to go to hospitals or to summon a physician unless they were already on their deathbed, which no doubt skewed the statistics. Besides, in Soren Perles’s day, becoming a physician did not require going to medical school, and even those trained at the best medical schools were flying pretty much blind a good portion of the time. Essentially, medieval theories were still the go-to explanations for illness and disease. Physicians lost a lot of patients, and many medications and practices were sketchy or outright harmful.
She turned back to the account book.
Soren’s script was cramped and wildly slanted, the ink blotchy, as if his pen had pressed too hard at times and not hard enough at others.Demerits for penmanship, Dr. Perles. The book contained lab notes, lists of chemical solutions he had ordered and how much they cost, the patients he had visited each month, and how much he had charged them. Nothing especially noteworthy or unusual that she could see. Harper turned the pages of the old bound volume carefully, stopping at references to what appeared to be addresses: El Encinal, San Carlos, El Carmelo, La Vieja. Under each was a series of names or initials.
Harper checked the clock—she had to leave soon to make it to class on time. She used her phone to take photos of some of the more interesting parts of the account book, carefully packed the papers and logbooks back in the manuscript box, and returned the box to the shelf.
She paused. There was that tingling sensation again; the feeling that she was being watched. Had someone else come in while she was lost in her research?
“Joel?”
She heard the scraping of a shoe on the old boards, a creak.
“Constance? Hello?”
Harper thought she heard someone breathing, but in the deathly quiet archive the sound was drowned out by her own heartbeat.
That did it. She reached into her pocket and grabbed the pepper spray, holding it aloft as she peered around the stacks. She would immediately be banned from the archive and her membership revoked if Constance spied the pepper spray, but this felt like an emergency. As quietly and quickly as she could, Harper crossed the room to the door to the archive lobby, then slipped the pepper spray back into her pocket before flinging the door open. It made a loud, creaking protest.
Constance was murmuring into the phone, and a gray-haired man at a computer terminal was grumbling about forgetting his password. A fluorescent lightbulb hissed and flickered overhead.
Harper glanced behind her into the research room and repeated, “Hello?”
