Look It Up

by Shea Joy

The neighbor had heard gunshots, then the sound of a car careening out of the driveway. She said there was no answer either at her neighbor’s door or on the phone. She called 911 and was put straight through to Barnes. It was nasty out, so it was a slow night for crime. Half the force was out with flu. He told her to stay in her house. Foul play was suspected.

That’s how Barnes headed his notepad, scribbling it while he listened to her breathless report. He’d always been sarcastic, but he was burning out and now his thoughts were darker. These days, he had to keep up an on-going internal dialogue with a smart-ass he called I-Ronny, just to maintain.

It was raining and miserably cold. He could see nothing out of order at the front of the house. No answer at the door when he rang and banged on it with his flashlight. “Police! Open up.”

The neighbor’s garage door opened and she came out with an umbrella held over her head.

“Police, ma’am,” he yelled. “Are you the one who called in, Sharon Wiest?”

She nodded like mad.

“You got a key to the house?”

“No.”

“Stay here, please, or in your house.”

Barnes heaved on the front door with his shoulder. No luck there. The door was metal, the lock sturdy. Windows flanked the door, two sets of two, all wired for a security system. To the far right, a row of narrow clerestory windows overlooked the street. They were easily fifteen feet off the ground, due to a slope. You’d have to use a ladder to get in those, and there were no marks on the soggy ground. Barnes didn’t think he could fit in anyway, and he was pretty skinny.

The detective squelched around the house. There was so much water on the grass that it splashed over the top of his shoes. It was pitch dark behind the house. No moon tonight with these clouds.

“Shit.” Barnes looked down. He was wearing his last pair of clean socks, and they didn’t match.

He tried the back door and it, too, was securely locked.

Was Dr. Spoon a medical doctor?

“Shrink,” I-Ronny hoped, “lots of pharmaceuticals around.”

“True, it might make for a short list of solid suspects.” The house was too modest for a woman with a medical degree, however.

He had to break a window. There was no sticker from the alarm company, so he couldn’t call them to turn it off. Barnes rooted out a brick in the dry-set walkway and smashed the window. A loud series of beeps sounded. He carefully climbed in, gun in his hand.

It was either an office or a library. Lots of books. A fire sputtered on the hearth. Even the parrot was silent and watchful in his corner, trembling on his perch. The room was chilly and gloomy. The high ceiling rose to a peak crossed by crude beams. The high windows were in the front, two regular ones in the back. The room felt like a garage. It was a garage, Barnes saw, a converted garage.

Margaret Spoon, he assumed, lay akimbo on the hearth-rug, dead with a large bullet hole square in her forehead and one in her chest. He studied her with his flashlight, but didn’t touch her.

“Stick a fork in Spoon, she’s dead,” I-Ronny said.

Barnes looked around carefully, turning in a circle. He started when his flashlight revealed a movement from the tatty drapes next to the bookshelves, but it was just a draft. An oversized book lay open on a table next to a sagging armchair. Pages had been roughly torn out. A dictionary, old and well used. Next to the book was a nearly empty bottle of Haig and Haig, the distinctive pinched bottle familiar to Barnes from his childhood. He put his gun back in the holster on his chest and pulled on a pair of latex gloves he kept in his pocket. He knelt and removed his shoes and socks. He picked up the bottle carefully so as not to smudge fingerprints. He sniffed. Smelled the same as his old man.

He scanned the rest of the room. Books were piled in stacks on the floor, overflowing the bookshelves. A layer of dust covered everything. The bird cage was filthy, a mound of yellow bird crap easily a foot high in the large cage. Guano, surely, in this amount. Barnes noticed a broken glass under the pool table. Two pool cues lay across the table. A friendly game gone very wrong?

Barnes couldn’t unlock the door to the rest of the house without a key. No privacy lock here. This was serious business. Locking the barn door after the cow is gone. How had that cow gotten out? He checked Spoon for pockets. Nothing. He searched the desk and felt around under it. Bingo.

He unlocked the office door just in time to open the front door to a middle-aged man in a great suit.

He was the nephew, he explained. The neighbor had called him. “Is she…is she?”

“Dead, yes.” So there were two Spoons.

“Maybe a whole set,” I-Ron said.

“You can’t do anything for her now. Please have a seat in the other room. I’ll want to talk to you in a few minutes.”

Back in the library, he pulled out his cell phone and called for a forensics team. Beyond his cursory look at the vic, he’d have to wait until the coroner arrived to examine her more thoroughly. Time was vital, but Margaret Spoon was not, and her body wasn’t going anywhere.

He completed a circuit of the carpeted room in his bare feet. No wet spots. Near the body, he found a bit of torn paper. When he examined the heap of ashes in the fireplace, he found burned pages, same size as the book. Interesting. Why would anyone rip pages out of a dictionary and then burn them? A code? People had been known to use words or numbers in books for a code. He’d never seen it, except on TV. It would be pretty dramatic.

The alarm company guy — Sam Shepherd from his name tag — showed up.

“Nothing to protect now,” Barnes told him. “You have any idea why she had such good security?”

“No idea. We don’t ask. They prefer it that way. I’ll leave this to you and make a report back at the office.”

The coroner and forensics arrived and did their thing. Less than ten percent of all cases were solved with forensics, and it was expensive, but juries, judges, and the victims’ families expected it.

“Too much fuckin’ CSI,” I-Ronny added.

Barnes held his index finger up. “Excuse me for just a minute,” he told the nephew. “Be right back.”

The next door neighbor, who was watching from the window, let him in. She sank back down in her chair, used tissues balled up next to her. Her husband was in another chair looking groggy. Barnes grilled them with the usual questions: did either of them know of any person who would want to kill Dr. Spoon? Did they know of anything unusual going on in the house or the neighborhood? Where were they in the last two hours, and did anyone see them? Why had she come to the house?

The answers were no, with her husband eating a late dinner at La Rose, and the noise. Her husband’s dazed expression was explained. He took a sleeping pill every night. Barnes would check it out, but he didn’t like the two for the murder.

As he returned, he studied the outside of the Spoon house again. No windows broken. Doors locked, alarm on. What the hell?

Until the crew was done with the office and the body, Barnes questioned the nephew. When the body was removed and they’d finished and packed up, Barnes asked Spoon to look around the room to see if anything looked out of place or was missing.

“I can try,” Spoon said, “but I haven’t been in there since she locked it up ten or twelve years ago.”

The man found two anomalies. Barnes had to give it to him, he was pretty sharp.

First, Spoon noticed the empty book stand. “It’s used for a dictionary or some other book that’s used often or is on display. She was a Professor Emeritus of English and wrote for professional journals.”

Barnes explained that forensics had taken the dictionary as evidence.

Second, he noticed the parrot. “The bird was uncovered, and he should have been covered at this time of night.”

I-Ron was skeptical. “If she didn’t shovel out the guano, why would she be careful to cover him?”

Barnes had a bird when he was married. After she moved out and left Putty Tat behind, Barnes couldn’t tolerate the bird’s screeching and having to clean up after her, the guano, feathers, seed, the many eggs. She was a fecund thing, and she got mean when she was sitting on her sterile eggs, which was most of the time. He’d smuggled the little love bird into the aviary at Disneyland and set her free. It was I-Ronny’s suggestion. Barnes was a little uneasy about the size of the other birds compared to Putty Tat.

“Circle of life,” I-Ron said.

“I don’t see anything valuable. Why do you think she kept this room locked up tight?” Barnes asked.

“I have no idea. I surmised that it was a harmless eccentricity,” Spoon answered.

“Did she have any others?”

“No. Well, she loved books and bought them quite frequently. She didn’t spend a lot though. She bought them used.”

“The few calls Dr. Spoon made in the last month were to people listed in her contacts: you, a guy named Jeremy Jenkins, and Office.”

“Jenkins has a used bookshop.”

“We’ll give him a call.”

***

Four days later, Barnes was getting restless at headquarters. The dictionary had given him false hope when they processed fingerprints off the cover that weren’t Margaret Spoon’s. A search turned up a match: Jeremy Jenkins. That wasn’t surprising, since he’d sold Spoon many books, but Jenkins wasn’t able to give them any help when he was questioned. He said his relationship with Spoon was entirely professional. The lab was unable to pin down exactly which pages were missing from the dictionary because they weren’t able to find another copy for comparison. The pages were somewhere after “able” and before “about.” Barnes could get nothing out of that.

There wasn’t a single solid lead. They didn’t even know how the perp got into the house or the room. There was no sign that anyone other than the vic had been inside. They found only the one glass. The pool table was undisturbed, and the sticks had been lying there for a while. He checked out the cleaning service and found no dirt. The IT squad searched the vic’s computer and found only used-book purchases from Amazon and eBay. They had no trouble getting into either Spoon’s email or her accounts for the online book purchases. Her browser saved her password. All they had to do was hit enter.

Barnes hadn’t been able to figure out yet how sellers could afford to pass on books for a penny. It must be in the $3.99 shipping fee, but how many books would you have to sell to live on that? The frustrated detective leaned back in his squeaky office chair and put one leg up on an open drawer. He shuffled through the list of used books taken from the computer purchases again. There it was: the dictionary, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Volume 1, $5, plus shipping. He hadn’t found other volumes on her shelves or in her account. Jenkins said he knew nothing about it. What good was an incomplete dictionary?

He decided to go back to the scene for another look, hoping he’d find something hinky. It beat poring over the room’s inventory. He folded up the file and left it on his desk. Barnes left police headquarters deep in thought, fiddling with the keys in his pocket. He would forget the case until he got to the house, relax with some music in the car.

When he arrived at the house, he was feeling better. Something would break, he was sure. It was early days.

“And late days,” I-Ronny quipped.

Barnes had been working until midnight or later since the murder and had trouble going to sleep after that. He decided to ease up, get some rest tonight. Crossing the yard, Barnes squinted up at the smaller front windows. They were long and narrow, more like horizontal slots. The glass was dark and murky. She didn’t clean those windows.

Nothing new jumped up, so he went into the house with a copy of the vic’s key. He went straight back to the office, carefully examining the door and lock again. Once again, he pivoted for his initial scan of the room. Something wasn’t right. It was driving him crazy.

Finally Barnes got it — the windows. They were maybe three feet from the roof outside, but they were all the way up to the very top of the ceiling here. His attention had been drawn to the windows, probably because he was bothered by something odd, but he hadn’t seen it. There was a small space over the ceiling of the office. Geez, how could they have missed it? The ceiling followed the same angles as the roof. It wasn’t flat. That was why. You wouldn’t think there was a space between roof and ceiling.

He couldn’t find a ladder, but the neighbor was home and loaned him the one lying in her yard next to her garage. He carried it over and propped it on the tall wall. He searched the ceiling. There it was, a small square cut into the drywall, well hidden by the dark, the two-by-four beams, and cobwebs. He got down and repositioned the ladder, climbed to the top, and pushed the square open. The height from the ceiling to the roof was no more than eighteen or twenty inches. At one end he saw an air vent, its screen hanging loose.

The murderer must have leaned the ladder on the brick walkway at the side of the house, climbed in, and dropped through. All you’d have to do is hang, swing to the ladder attached to the bookshelves, and scamper down. No wonder the locks were no deterrent.

Now he knew how the perp got in and out, but why?

Barnes reviewed all the physical evidence. Scrap of paper on the floor near Dr. Spoon, pages burned in the fireplace. The room was full of what? Books. It had to be the books, specifically the book. It wasn’t quite coming together.

Back at headquarters, Barnes got on his computer and dug deeper. The book was called a fascicle, a partial publication of a longer work. This one covered “A” to “ant,”  some three hundred pages, and this damned volume took twenty-three years to put together, using scraps of paper and volunteers. The full title of the dictionary was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society. Only 4,000 copies were sold, for about three dollars each. Today, there were only three known copies still in existence, and they were priceless.

The book was the foundational publication of what is now The Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most historically-important books in the world. And who would know that? The bookseller with fingerprints on the book he hadn’t sold her in a room he’d never been allowed to enter.

Barnes called for a cruiser to pick up the bookseller, Jeremy Jenkins.

The sniveling bookseller confessed readily, explaining that he’d snooped in Dr. Spoon’s Amazon account after she’d left his store one day. She needed information on the publisher of a book she wanted so he could try to locate a copy and then didn’t close out her account. Jenkins was very familiar with Amazon, and he’d gone into “Your Account,” which listed her purchases. He was curious to see if she’d bought any valuable books online rather than from him. The bookseller became obsessed once he knew she had the rare edition, and he burned to have the dictionary for himself.

He waited in the crawl space for hours, but she didn’t go to bed, and he had to go to the bathroom so badly he couldn’t wait any longer. He didn’t mean to shoot her, just scare her. That’s why he wore a ski hat pulled down over his face, he explained earnestly. He shoved her when she tried to snatch the book away from him, and as she fell back she tore a fistful of pages out. In a fury, he shot her and threw the ripped pages in the fire. Afterward, he left the book. It was virtually worthless now.

It was hard to tell which tormented the bookseller more, killing the woman or the destruction of the book. He said he was relieved to have the whole thing over, that he hadn’t had any peace since “it happened.”

A lot of perps told Barnes that. He had news for them: they wouldn’t be resting real good in the slammer.

The way Barnes and I-Ronny saw it, the only place where peace comes before punishment is in the dictionary.

Shea Joy is a graduate of University of Texas, Austin, Universidad de Barcelona, and the University of Florida.  She taught writing at UF for many years and now works as a writer. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Lynchburg, Virginia, with her husband, daughter, dog, cat, horse, and loud mean bird.