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Back The Silence of the Library Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. COVER
  2. PRAISE FOR TITLES BY MIRANDA JAMES
  3. ALSO BY MIRANDA JAMES
  4. TITLE PAGE
  5. COPYRIGHT
  6. DEDICATION
  7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  8. ONE
  9. TWO
  10. THREE
  11. FOUR
  12. FIVE
  13. SIX
  14. SEVEN
  15. EIGHT
  16. NINE
  17. TEN
  18. ELEVEN
  19. TWELVE
  20. THIRTEEN
  21. FOURTEEN
  22. FIFTEEN
  23. SIXTEEN
  24. SEVENTEEN
  25. EIGHTEEN
  26. NINETEEN
  27. TWENTY
  28. TWENTY-ONE
  29. TWENTY-TWO
  30. TWENTY-THREE
  31. TWENTY-FOUR
  32. TWENTY-FIVE
  33. TWENTY-SIX
  34. TWENTY-SEVEN
  35. TWENTY-EIGHT
  36. TWENTY-NINE
  37. THIRTY
  38. THIRTY-ONE
  39. THIRTY-TWO
  40. THIRTY-THREE
  41. THIRTY-FOUR
  42. THIRTY-FIVE
  43. THIRTY-SIX
  44. THIRTY-SEVEN
  45. THIRTY-EIGHT
  46. THIRTY-NINE
  47. FORTY
  48. AFTERWORD
  49. LETTER TO THE READER
  50. SPECIAL EXCERPT FROM BLESS HER DEAD LITTLE HEART

What proof did I have? I had a lot of odd facts that I thought suggestive, but Kanesha needed convincing evidence.

Short of walking up to the fake Mrs. Cartwright and snatching the red wig off her head, what could I do?

I had a sudden vision of grabbing hold of the hair, pulling, and Mrs. Cartwright screaming in protest. I shuddered.

No, I had to be completely sure about my theory before I could test it like that.

What incontestable proof could I muster? Surely there was something.

My gaze fell on the scrapbook. Pictures of Mrs. Cartwright. A vague idea began to form.

Hard on those thoughts came another point. Photographs could be the reason the killer took away Carrie Taylor’s files. Why Carrie Taylor had to die. She had the proof right there in her file cabinet.

Surely the killer had to realize, however, there were almost certainly copies of Mrs. Taylor’s photos elsewhere. Maybe a photograph wasn’t the proof after all.

A memory surfaced. At the meeting with Mrs. Cartwright and Marcella, Carrie Taylor mentioned a photo of the author in the garden shed where she wrote her books. I didn’t recall seeing such a picture in Aunt Dottie’s scrapbook.

I went back to my laptop and typed Electra Cartwright garden shed in the search engine. The result was a couple of pages of hits. I clicked on the first one, and that led me to an article in a fan publication devoted to children’s books—not Carrie Taylor’s newsletter.

An examination of the other links revealed nothing useful. I clicked the link for an image search, and the result was a screen full of pictures. Some were of the author as a much younger woman; others were of garden sheds. Not a single one showed Mrs. Cartwright and a garden shed.

Back to square one on that idea. I glanced at the scrapbook again. This time I pulled it close and found the section Aunt Dottie devoted to Mrs. Cartwright and Veronica. There were a couple of portrait-type photos from magazines pasted in, but those didn’t tell me anything.

I stared at the image of Mrs. Cartwright with Marietta Dubois. Both women wore shoes with low heels, from what I could tell. The actress looked tall next to the writer, but if Miss Dubois had been six feet tall, that would make Mrs. Cartwright about five-eight. How could I find out how tall Marietta Dubois was?

The encyclopedia entry I found earlier didn’t have that information. I searched for Marietta Dubois height but that didn’t get me anywhere, except increasingly frustrated. As a test I entered Judi Dench height and retrieved the information right away. Too bad Marietta Dubois hadn’t been more famous.