Proof of Murder (Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery #4) - Lauren Elliott Page 0,97
clear by the hotplate and dirty dishes sitting on a table that somebody lived here. She peered into a coffee cup. Dark liquid covered the bottom of it. And lived here recently. The ring on the cup’s bottom hadn’t set yet.
Addie’s gaze lingered, scanning the shelves along the walls filled with antiques and knickknacks. The same ones Blake had reported stolen from the estate. It was all here: the record player, the music box, everything that had been on the list he’d given to the police. She eyed the Georgian Irish decanter she’d coveted on her first visit.
Addie dialed Marc’s number. The line was dead. She checked the reception bars. No service. “Crap,” she muttered, digging around in her tote bag until she found her travel pack of tissues. Careful not to touch the crystal decanter, she wrapped it in tissues and placed it into her bag. Since she couldn’t bring Marc to her, she’d have to take proof to him. The way things were now, he wouldn’t simply take her word for it and launch an investigation based on her word alone. When she stepped back, her butt bumped the table behind her, sending a stack of books tumbling to the floor, the clatter echoing like cymbals in the small room.
What the heck? The first-edition set of the Holmes books lay butterflied open on the dusty floor. Trembling, she wrapped her last tissue around her hand and restacked them. They were all here. When she picked up A Study in Scarlet, a cold chill raced across her shoulders. The binding had a clean slice from the heel of the spine to the top and flapped open. She examined the cut line. Between the front and back sections of the bound cover was the corner of a yellowed piece of paper.
With the tip of her pinkie nail, she managed to get a hold of the corner and slide it out. It was a birth certificate for a child named Tobias Gallagher born in 1945. This baby must have been the great-grandson of the earlier Tobias Gallagher, the builder of this house with its many secrets. Addie searched between the binding pieces to see if a death certificate was also tucked inside, but all she could find was a small plastic bag with a lock of brown hair wrapped in a blue ribbon.
She stared at the plastic bag, her mind racing. If he was born in 1945, that means this person would be approximately seventy-five years old now. She ran through a mental list of the suspects on her board, figuring out which one might be the right age. Blake, Philip, Duane McAdams, Robert. No, they were all too young. Not one of them came close to being the right age. Whoever this Tobias was, living or dead. He was important enough for someone to have damaged a valuable book to get at this certificate. Not to mention continue with the charade of making the house seem haunted and even murdering someone to get his hands on this book.
Chills skittered up Addie’s back. She dropped the book into her tote bag, one more piece to add to the sizable puzzle growing on her blackboard. She took one more visual sweep of the table. Her heart constricted in her chest when she caught sight of Charlotte’s laptop and a piece of paper with the Greyborne Harbor town seal sticking out from underneath it. She snatched a pen from her bag and, using it as a barrier to fingerprints, released the paper from under the laptop. It was the 1950 missing documents from the town clerk’s office. “Wow, here’re the architect plans for the house, too.” She snagged another page from under a pile of papers. There definitely was more than enough evidence here to convict whoever was behind these thefts, and if she could prove it with the hidden chamber and staircase, also Charlotte’s murder.
Addie shuffled through the rest of the papers, and her breath caught. Here was the plastic-wrapped first edition of the Beeton’s A Study in Scarlet. She puffed out a sigh of relief. This meant that her cousin hadn’t helped herself to it, right? Or had she? Addie surveyed the room. Was Kalea the person living up here? Is that why she disappeared without a word? Addie closed her eyes and drew in a slow, deep breath and shook her head. No, this area obviously was inhabited by a man. There was definitely the faint, lingering scent of cedarwood