Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) Read Free Page B

up in a few minutes,” Darrow said curtly, indicating the Police Bureau
clerk who had set up shop with a laptop and printer near the bookmobile.  “As
soon as you have signed, the patrolman over there will give you a ride to
wherever you need to go. We’re impounding your vehicle. But you’re free to go
about your business for now.”
    “For now,” Hester whispered to
Pim as they walked toward the waiting patrol car. Pim, who had become quiet and
grim, nodded, “I don't like that man.”
    Hester, turning to look back at
the bookmobile, had a different thought.

Chapter Four
    Tuesday morning dawned strangely
quiet. Sunlight filtered with an unusual clarity through the kitchen window of Hester’s
apartment as she emerged from her tiny bathroom and looked out. A half inch of
ice coated the outside of the pane.
    “A silver thaw!” Hester
experienced a moment of delight. She turned up the radio to hear the beginning
of a long list of school closures.
    Portland's famous silver thaw was
a local phenomenon Hester had grown up loving. It must have snowed some in the
night and then warmed just enough to change to freezing rain. The city turned
into one gigantic ice palace – just like the one in “Dr. Zhivago.”  The streets
became ribbons of ice, making travel unthinkable. The schools usually closed
and that was always cause for celebration!
    “Oh please, please, please, let
the library be closed,” a grown-up Hester cooed to the radio just as she had as
a child from her upstairs bedroom in her family’s old Italianate three-story in
Portland’s historic Irvington neighborhood. Maintaining the decaying barn of a
house stretched her parents’ teaching salaries but her band-conductor father
said the 12-foot ceilings were necessary for good acoustics. Her mother, an
English teacher who taught tap-dancing in their basement on weekends, liked to
call the house a combination of Jane Austen’s “Northanger  Abbey” and P.G.
Wodehouse’s Totleigh Towers.
    But despite the thin-paned windows
that frosted on the inside on winter’s coldest days and a cranky oil furnace
whose blower wasn’t quite up to the task, that house was a cozy fortress in
Hester’s memory. Snow days, when school was canceled, meant her whole family got
to sleep late. An only child, Hester fondly remembered Third Grade when a big
winter storm closed schools for a week and every morning she had climbed in
between her parents in their big four-poster bed so her father would read aloud
from “Chronicles of Narnia” while she imagined the White Witch riding her
sleigh down their street.
    The reading bug claimed her
early. A saintly neighborhood librarian who helped Hester choose books from the
time she was old enough to have her own library card, then hired her for her
first after-school job, inspired her future. From that time, she never stopped
working in libraries. “Or wanted to,” she mused aloud.
    The crackling radio brought
Hester out of her reverie.
    “Mollala, Mollala High and Dickey
Prairie districts are closed,” the announcer droned. “Tualatin, Estacada and
the Portland Public Schools are closed.”
    Hester didn't have any faith that
the library would close. The current board felt that the library was an essential
service and not to be closed unless truly necessary. Usually Hester agreed.
    “All county offices are closed.” 
    Her breath caught. The county
offices hardly ever closed. Hester looked outside again. The ice distorted the
view. It was really closer to an inch thick and there wasn't a soul passing the
neatly restored Victorians and brick-fronted apartments of her Northwest
Portland neighborhood.
    “The Portland City Library is...”
    BRRRINNG! BRRRINNG!
    Hester ran to the shrilly ringing
phone. “What?” she shouted into the ancient black receiver of the old telephone
that fit her fondness for things that were classical and well-built. Missing
that last bit meant waiting another 20 minutes for the next reading of