And Then They Were Doomed Read online

  And Then They Were Doomed

  A Little Library Mystery

  Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

  For Joshua Mullin, who always steps in and puts me on the right path.

  For the crew at Arby’s in Kalkaska: Tera, Gina, Casandra, Sam (well, not really), Scott, and everybody else. They let me work there for hours on end and give me nothing but smiles.

  For Jessica Faust, Jenny Chen, and Jen Donovan for their kindness and caring during a difficult time in my life.

  And, as always, for Tony.

  A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

  —Agatha Christie, The Last Séance

  Prologue

  It was November, the month of death on the Great Lakes. Men and women, wrapped in heavy wool coats and jackets, huddled near the edge of a decaying pier jutting out above the river that curved north in wild, tumbling splashes toward Lake Superior.

  The people bowed into the cold wind, heads down, each reaching out a shaking hand as a woman passed among them with blue-capped vials. She whispered, “Bless you” as each took a vial of ashes and slipped it into a pocket to save.

  A man standing under the pier, just out of the reach of the turbulent water, waited for the word that she’d finished handing out the vials, and when it came he waded up to his knees into the river, waves breaking around him, each new wave trying harder to knock him over. His clothes were soaked, his hands and face turned raw with cold as he hung on to the wreath of white roses he carried, holding it high, keeping it above his head until she was ready.

  When the woman joined him in the water they held the wreath together. The people above watched but made no sound. No hymns were sung as the couple lifted the wreath as high as they could reach, then let it go to sail straight out until the wind caught it and it started to fall, then caught another current of air and sailed off, at first above the waves, and then down into the river, where it became a bobbing circle, slowly caught on the crest of a wave flinging itself out to where the river turned.

  “It won’t be long now,” the man called up to the others above the roar of the water.

  “An eye for an eye,” the woman said to her husband.

  Part 1

  The Invitation

  Chapter 1

  Zoe Zola knew somebody was dead.

  Somebody was always dead when one of these black-edged envelopes arrived.

  But not in such a long time.

  None since that last one killed Evelyn Zola, and Zoe moved north, to Bear Falls, up near the top of Michigan’s mitten, where she thought she was safe.

  * * *

  “Sorry, Miz Zola,” Mr. Cavendish, Bear Falls’ bent-over mailman, said when he placed the ominous envelope into her tiny hands. “Hate to do this to you. Found it in the bottom of my bag. Must’ve missed it yesterday.”

  Zoe smiled a weak smile up at the tall man, then looked at the black-edged envelope she held and worried about touching evil. Real evil. The kind that came in silently—left in the mailbox back when she lived with her mother in Detroit. The kind that was hidden in the bottom drawer of her mother’s dresser, until that last envelope left Evelyn bent and sobbing, weakening fast until she was dead.

  “Nobody likes to get things like that,” Mr. Cavendish mumbled and tipped his official hat.

  Mr. Cavendish had been a postman in Bear Falls for a long time, long before this little person, Zoe Zola, moved to town. He’d delivered things like this envelope a few times to others. Not much anymore, but enough to make him dread the deliveries that brought no happiness to people he liked—especially people like little Miss Zola, a favorite of his, whom he tried not to make unhappy and, but for this letter, usually didn’t.

  Whoever was dead must have meant a lot to poor Miz Zola. Her face went blank white when she looked down at the thing in her hand. Kind of knocked her off her feet. She’d turned away to take a deep breath while that crusty little dog of hers, which he didn’t trust completely, stood back, and eyed him.

  * * *

  Zoe shut the door after Mr. Cavendish hunched his bag over his shoulder and walked back down her curved walk through the little gardens of June blooms and gatherings of fairy statues.

  The envelope still lay in Zoe’s hands, square and bulky but made of fine, white cotton paper. Her name and address were written in black ink, done in calligraphy with fancy, twisted curlicues, perfect spacing between the letters, all of them the same height. Someone had taken time over this. Someone had a very personal reason for perfection. Only an address in Calumet, Michigan, on the back. No name. It was the same as all the others sent over the years. Like poisoned darts they’d arrived one by one until that last, when Evelyn muttered, “My mother’s gone,” and bent her tired head over the envelope and cried until she was gone too.

  Zoe took the letter to her kitchen and set it on the oak table, leaning it against the vase of flowers she’d set at the very center. They were poison flag from her garden, from the flower bed where her favorite fairy, Liliana, stood watch. Purple poison flag set among white forget-me-nots—the favorite flower of her mother, Evelyn Zola.

  She stared at the envelope from where she sat—a chair she had to climb up the rungs to sit on so she could lean on her elbows, then rest her head in her hands, and keep watch so the envelope didn’t move or change.

  Fida sat at attention beside her on the floor. Fida, Zoe’s one-eyed, feminist dog (she liked women more than she liked men) always pretended to be looking elsewhere when there was trouble, but would roll her eye toward Zoe, ready to shoulder her share of the burden—or at least that’s what Zoe liked to think.

  There was black ink—like all of the letters. There were curlicues at the ends of the Z’s, plump E’s in Elderberry Street, a bloated B in Bear Falls, a mountainous M in Michigan. The return address was simply a box number in Calumet, Michigan.

  Sitting uncomfortably, with stinky Fida, who needed a bath, in her lap, she let a thought drift a minute, ignoring the black trim.

  A wedding invitation. Someone wanting her to be happy for them. It could have meant a gathering of Bear Falls neighbors, an afternoon or evening of celebration. A loud DJ. They would talk for weeks before about what they would wear. Jenny would grouse about having to wear white, swearing everybody would know she didn’t deserve it. Dora would be adamant that her daughter’s big day should be perfect. Tony would expect it.

  Zoe got madder as she thought how this could have been a happy sign that all was well with her next-door neighbors: Jenny Weston and her mom, Dora.

  Jenny could drive anybody crazy. Did not know what she wanted. First to marry Tony, then to stay single. “I need time. My first marriage was awful.”

  Tony didn’t know how to give Jenny enough space of her own—that was part of it.

  But it was Dora, Jenny’s mother, who loved both of them and suffered the most when they broke up—over and over again. Right now, Jenny was in the middle of one of her snits. Tony was pushing marriage.

  The damned thing on her table should have been their happy announcement that the war was over: they were getting married.

  Instead, it was this ‘thing’ trimmed in black, a kind of grave with hard, dark edges. And inside would be: Mrs. So and So is dead. Mrs. So and So won’t be knocking at your door—ever. Mr. and Mrs. So and So, your loving relatives, want you to know that another loved one is lost to all time. Everybody in the world around them must join in the mourning. Attention must be paid.

  And with each envelope, Evelyn Zola, who had no right to the name Zola and wasn’t wanted by her own family, the Jokelas, was to di
e a little more of her shame.

  * * *

  Zoe slid down from her chair to do more important things. She bent to lift Fida under her arm and take her back to the room where they did their literary detective work, searching into writers’ lives, into their writing, for who they really were, for what had been hidden. Now they were doing Agatha Christie—she and Fida. A woman well written about but still a figure of mystery.

  She nuzzled Fida’s head. Muse and guard and nudge and friend—everything Zoe needed wrapped up in dirty white hair that hung into the dog’s bright eyes—one of them no help at all in getting around fairy houses in the garden.

  Chapter 2

  Next door, Dora Weston was going through her mail—ads for hearing aids, which she thankfully didn’t need yet—and an electric bill.

  She left the mail on the dining room table. Jenny liked to go through it when she got up, though there was rarely anything for her, which made Jenny mad and, lately, took her dark mood deeper. Dora suspected it was fear that her life was changing while she sat it out.

  Dressed and ready for the day while Jenny was still asleep, Dora made herself a third cup of tea and sat down to take pleasure in the quiet, before whatever she was feeling was upon them.

  It had to be a happy day ahead. Lisa’d called. She was in the Upper Peninsula, working on a documentary about poor women fighting to keep their way of life. She was always excited when Lisa called—this daughter who wanted to change the world one documentary at a time.

  * * *

  “Finnish women, Mom. They stayed with their families when the copper mines up here closed. They live an old life. They’re poor but so proud. Think differently about everything we take for granted. They’ve got their own standards and beliefs. Some you won’t believe. Strict. I mean a way of living the world hasn’t seen for years.”

  “And when will you come home?”

  “Soon, Mom. When I’m finished. Or you and Jenny can come up. I’d like you to see what I’m doing. Maybe then you’d understand and—”

  “I understand, Lisa. You’re just like your father. But I worry. I mean, do you make enough money to take care of yourself?”

  “Oh, Mom. I can’t worry about that.”

  “I can, Lisa. I can worry about that a lot.”

  “Oh, Mom. Money’s not the only thing in the world to think about.”

  “I know, Lisa. Not the only thing. Unless you like to eat and have a roof over your head.”

  Chapter 3

  For the next two hours, Zoe stayed away from the kitchen. She worked on her book, Inside the Murderous Mind of Agatha Christie, losing herself to the devious interior of Agatha’s head and not her own.

  She was at a good place in Agatha’s life story, tracing Christie’s alter ego: Ariadne Oliver, a character, and a writer in A Pale Horse. If Ariadne was truly meant to stand for Agatha, Zoe had to watch her closely. Christie could be devious. She could dart and switch, be in her story, then out of it, on to creating something real and tragic in her own life, like her disappearance on Friday, the third of December, 1926. Her car had run down into a swamp and been left with the lights on and the driver gone, nowhere to be found for many long and frustrating days, a case that became the biggest news in the United Kingdom.

  In her books were hints of what had happened, hints of a woman scorned, a woman cruelly betrayed by her husband. Afterward there were claims of amnesia, but Zoe didn’t believe it. She smelled revenge. She smelled a woman’s retribution for not being loved.

  Zoe tried to stay inside her work, but she was tired by lunch, and Fida was whining to go out.

  In the kitchen, she put Fida out to pee in one of her favorite fairy gardens—still a matter of dispute between them—and climbed on a chair to stare again at the envelope as if it might announce the message at any minute.

  “My turn?” Zoe asked the envelope. She smiled at the inked address, the fancy handwriting.

  Shadows moved in her brain where shadows shouldn’t be allowed to live so long.

  * * *

  They lived in Detroit, on Beaubien Street, in a tiny house that hadn’t seen a paintbrush since Evelyn Zola was abandoned by the man she loved: Alfred Zola, who said he couldn’t stand babies and was long gone, leaving Evelyn behind with her too-tiny daughter and no wedding ring. Even so, Evelyn claimed the name, raising her little Zoe as Zoe Zola rather than Zoe Jokela, Evelyn’s maiden name, which didn’t have a lilt to it, and because the Jokelas didn’t want her either.

  This one thing—a purloined name because Alfred would never marry her, claiming he not only didn’t believe in babies but also didn’t believe in the married state—was all she had left of him, and Evelyn treasured it as one good thing she had done for Zoe. Her people, the Jokelas, led by her grandmother, Anas Jokela, found sin wherever they looked and set themselves up to seek it out and destroy all evil—beginning with Evelyn.

  One day Alfred had left their Detroit house to go out for a pack of cigarettes and had never come back. Evidently, Alfred also didn’t believe in obligations any more than he believed in the ‘married state’ or babies, as he never sent Evelyn money for his little girl, who would need a doctor’s care and a lot of love for the rest of her life.

  Evelyn became an expert at getting welfare and a little bit of disability from the hotel where she used to work before she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her right leg in many places.

  They stayed inside the house with the shades drawn most days because Evelyn didn’t trust the neighbors on Beaubien not to look in their windows.

  “Everybody wants to see who we are,” Evelyn would lean down and whisper to Zoe. “We don’t want them to know things about us, do we, Zoe?”

  “We’ve been here a long time, Mom. Nobody cares.”

  Evelyn only made a noise and kept the shades firmly pulled to the sill.

  * * *

  When Zoe went to school, she found books and a teacher, Miss Hunt, who slipped her at least one new book a week. She kept her nose in that book (as Evelyn said) most of every day and ignored the other children, who weren’t very nice and grew way above her as the years passed.

  In books, Zoe found that people didn’t necessarily live the way she and Evelyn lived—hidden away as if it was a terrible shame they were alive at all.

  Other people lived in big houses—or little houses—that were clean and in order. Other people had family that came to dinner—or family like Tiny Tim’s, who loved him and celebrated with a big turkey on Christmas, which Zoe didn’t even understand. Not what Christmas meant, nor all the fuss about giving presents and pretending to be happy.

  When Zoe turned sixteen, she realized the life they lived wasn’t normal, and she began to clean their four-room house and, in summer, get the grass at the front cut by a boy from down the street in exchange for chocolate chip cookies she bought at the corner store. Trimming the grassy edges on her knees was fun. Summer sunshine made her body feel better, her arms stronger.

  She noticed flowers in her neighbor’s yards on her walks to the Roy Jones Hardware Store and back. She looked up different flowers in an old encyclopedia and then found racks of flower seeds at the hardware store. Roy Jones pretended not to see her, because her head barely came to counter height. He would call toward the door: “Somebody there? Think I hear a voice, but I can’t see you.”

  That was Mr. Jones’s joke. He liked it and said it every time she came to the store. But soon he answered her questions: “Did this flower grow in Michigan? Is that flower tall or short? When can I plant seeds?”

  Mr. Jones was impressed with her love for flowers, unlike that of most of his customers, who only wanted a washer for a faucet or a gallon of paint. He offered her tips, like digging in manure before planting. He told her which fertilizers to give the Peace rose she bought to go dead center in front of the house. Then, because she didn’t have enough money for all of those things, and she couldn’t have carried them home anyway, he gave her broken bags of composted manure
; torn bags of fertilizer; and his son, Malcolm, to carry them for her.

  Malcolm was the only boyfriend she’d ever had. They both liked flowers and they both liked talking about the universe and all those stars. But Malcolm went to California to live with his mother and never came back to Detroit.

  When the flower bed was finished and growing, filled with white forget-me-nots and zinnias and sunflowers along the back and the peace rose was in bloom, she coaxed her mother out to the porch, to see what Zoe had created.

  Only that one time. Evelyn never came out of the house again, despite the forget-me-nots. That day, too, one of the dreaded letters trimmed in black was in their mailbox, and Evelyn grabbed it from Zoe’s hands, clutched it to her breast, and began to cry.

  For those last few years, when her mother was bedridden most of the time and on a lot of medication, Zoe didn’t let her see the black-trimmed envelopes because they weren’t only letters about another dead person; they were letters Zoe was sure were meant to kill.

  By this time Evelyn was afraid for Zoe to go out the door alone. To go out after dark. To go out in rain or snow or heat. Most of all, afraid of what people would say. They had that much power to hurt her. “Be careful out there, Zoe. Don’t look at people; they’ll only make you sad, the way they treat you. The way they call you names.”

  In Evelyn’s last year, Zoe threw out the black-trimmed envelopes that arrived, though there were only two that year. She was sure the people who sent them didn’t mean her mother and her any good.

  Zoe shook her head as Evelyn one day sighed and said she wondered whatever happened to her sister, Susan. “She’s the only one I care about. I loved Susan. I think she loved me.

  “At least she was always kind to me.” Evelyn leaned over the side of her bed, clutching her faded robe, with one hand, at the neck. The thought of Susan made her happy for a little while.