Do Unto Others

I opened the storage room door and saw Beta Harcher’s body lying across the tile floor. I wanted to yell, but my throat didn’t work and instead I just leaned soundlessly against the open door. I could hear Candace humming a favorite Garth Brooks tune of hers, and it sounded as small and as distant as a cricket’s hum in a summer night. I never associated baseball bats with evil. To me, they were just thick sticks of wood, lying in the grass of the backyard. You’d sling a bat over a shoulder and walk down to the weedy field at the elementary school, where for a while you and your friends could forget about schoolwork, parents, and bossy big sisters. Bats were tokens of boyhood and of a game that I never excelled at, but loved to play. They appeared from my closet early in the spring, usually around March when the rains abated, and retired after another season of service when I went back to school. To me, bats represented happiness, an innocence that I had before I left Mirabeau to venture beyond river and highway. The bat I’d found yesterday and left in my office was next to Beta Harcher’s body. I could see one huge bruise, about an inch above the imaginary line between left eye and left ear. From what I was told later, she probably didn’t suffer. Her left eye was swollen shut. Her heart must’ve kept pushing blood into her brain and the pressure of that blood inflated her tissues before she breathed her last susurration of air. I saw blood and hair, but not much of either, on the flared end of the bat. Specks of blood dotted the floor by her head. My voice asserted itself and I screamed, “Candace!” She came running like a jackrabbit on fire. I felt her arm close around mine and her harsh shudder of air. She pulled me away from the door. “My God!” Candace gasped. “Miss Harcher! How? What happened?” “She’s dead. I think.” I pulled away from Candace, stepped back into the room, and put my fingertips to Beta’s neck. Her throat was as cool and still as a winter day. I leaned back. How-and why-was Beta Harcher dead in my library? I stared at her again, as if expecting her to raise her battered head and provide an answer. The only other item to register in my mind was her clothing; she was wearing a black turtleneck, a black skirt, black pantyhose, and black shoes. She’d always dressed frumpy but now she looked like a New York Bohemian poet. Tar-black mud caked her shoes, and I saw tracks of mud on the floor. I turned and grabbed Candace’s arm. I pulled her away from the room and headed for the phone at the checkout counter. Dialing 911, I wondered how the hell Beta Harcher had gotten into the library. And that’s when I remembered my creepy sensation of being observed last night.