Free Where Monsters Dwell by Jørgen Brekke Page B

to the fact that all the museum employees except for Efrahim Bond and one external conservator were women between the ages of twenty-four and sixty-three. He had spoken with all of them. There weren’t that many: two ticket sellers, who worked alternate shifts; one person who worked in the gift shop; three docents (all master’s students in English, who worked there part-time); Bond’s secretary; and the curator, who actually worked at the University of Richmond but came in one morning a month to tend to the collection of books, furniture, and rarities.
    “But doesn’t it tell us something about Bond, that he hired only women?” said Stone, keeping her tone neutral.
    “Sure, it shows he was a man,” said Patterson with a laugh. “And that he had business sense,” he added a moment later. He tilted his chair back and gave her a boyish grin.
    “Naturally I asked all of them what sort of relationship they had with Bond,” Reynolds went on, “and the whole bunch said that it was good, but professional. It seems like he was a fair and knowledgeable boss, but slightly reserved. Of course, one of them could be covering something up. There might have been some other type of relationship going on. But I don’t think all of them would lie, and he wasn’t exactly the Casanova type. In fact, one of the employees … I think it was the one who works in the gift shop,” said Reynolds, as he paged through a notebook. “Yes, it was Julia Wilde. She claimed that Bond seemed to have no further interest in women after he and his wife were divorced years ago.”
    “No interest in women? If you ask me, that just raises suspicion that he was hiding something,” Patterson sneered.
    It irritated Stone that he felt it necessary to behave like a jerk. But she did think he might be on to something. As a rule, a controlled exterior concealed something underneath.
    “I believe we can make more progress by starting close to the bone,” said Morris. This was one of those rather oracular statements he came up with from time to time.
    “You mean closer to the victim than his workplace?” Stone asked.
    “Precisely. The man had a family. It’s the natural place to start.”
    “The problem is that everybody I’ve talked with so far claims that Efrahim Bond no longer had any contact with his family. His parents are dead, he had no siblings, and his kids all live in other parts of the country and didn’t visit him even on Thanksgiving. His ex-wife moved out of state long ago to live closer to her grandchildren up north somewhere.”
    “So we have to do some digging. No man can completely escape his family,” said Morris.
    Stone groaned. Everyone in the room looked at her as if she had something important on her mind.
    “We’re starting with a rather empty slate here,” she said. Then she turned to Reynolds. “Didn’t anything concrete come out of your morning at the museum? Has anything special happened in the past few days?”
    “Zip. Things have been absolutely normal. The only thing is that the secretary and the cleaning woman both thought that Bond was a tad more introverted than usual. The cleaning woman described him as secretive. And there could be something else. Bond’s secretary got a message to send a piece of leather from one of the book bindings to the university for examination. I didn’t write down which book. He wanted to know what sort of animal the leather came from. I think she found it a rather strange request, and that’s probably why she mentioned it. But I have no idea if it has to do with our case.”
    “I’ll look into it,” Stone said, casting a glance at Morris. She would do anything to get out of flying north for a series of depressing interviews with long-lost relatives. She also had a hunch. From the beginning she thought that this murder had some connection to the museum: not necessarily to the people who worked there, but to the museum itself, to the objects it contained, or to Poe’s