One Book in the Grave: A Bibliophile Mystery

found my cell phone and called the police. The dispatcher told me to hang around until the police arrived and I assured her I would. I had no intention of leaving Joe alone.
     
    Now that I knew the police would arrive soon, I took the opportunity to observe the scene more objectively—without looking at Joe too closely. I tried to piece together his last minutes. He’d probably been in this room, putting away a book or straightening one of the displays. Or maybe the killer had lured him into the room, pretending to be a customer. Maybe they had a few words, discussed a book or two. Maybe Joe offered him a seat in that very chair. They walked over toward the Russian bible, Joe turned, and the killer attacked.
     
    Did the killer push him back? Was that why Joe was almost hidden by the heavy chair? I forced myself, holding my stomach as it pitched and rolled, to look at his body.
     
    I had issues with the blood that continued to seep out of Joe into the lovely, faded Oriental rug. The fact that it was still seeping out meant that Joe had been dead only a short while. If I’d arrived a few minutes earlier, I might have saved him.
     
    “And you might be dead now, too,” I told myself sternly, putting an end to that line of thinking.
     
    I tilted my head as something caught my eye. There was an object in the carpet reflecting the light from the chandelier. I took a step closer to the body, then reconsidered. I didn’t want to disturb the crime scene morethan I already had, and I certainly didn’t want to step in any blood. But my curiosity got the best of me. I grabbed hold of the back of the chair. Using its weight as leverage to keep from stepping too close to the body, I got a better look at the glimmering object.
     
    It was a knife. A bloody knife, oddly shaped, with a short wood handle and a four-inch, squared-off steel blade. I recognized it as a type of shearing knife used by bookbinders and papermakers. It was sturdy and inexpensive and sharp. I knew because I had several of my own that were almost identical to this one.
     
    “Oh, crap,” I whispered, and there went my stomach again as I contemplated the worst. It couldn’t be my knife, could it? This was a nightmare! I leaned over the chair as far as I could to study the knife. But it took almost a minute of squinting and peering before I was able to determine that it wasn’t one of mine.
     
    “Of course it’s not mine,” I mumbled. Why would it be? Just because someone had once stolen some of my bookbinding tools to use as murder weapons didn’t mean that my knife was the one used to kill Joe. I was just being paranoid. But come on. Who could blame me?
     
    I had the strongest urge to grab the knife and throw it away, but it was too late. The police would be here any minute, and let’s face it: anywhere I hid it, they would find it, along with my finge     
    It made me sick to think someone in the book arts world had killed Joe. But with that knife as the weapon, who else could’ve done it? Joe probably knew a hundred different bookbinders in the city and probably a few papermakers, too. It was a small community and a fairly peaceful one, or so I’d always thought. And Joe was one of the most mild-mannered men I’d ever known. Why would anyone kill him?
     
    A more important question—to me, at least—was, Did the killing have something to do with
me
?
     
    I stepped back and had to blink once or twice to clear my vision. As I did so, the colors and patterns of the rugs grew more vivid, the intricate inlaid wood designs of thecabinets more complex. The lights from the chandelier twinkled more brightly. It was as if the moment was being imprinted on my mind.
     
    Some experts—like my mother—say that at traumatic times like this one, the smallest details are marked in your memory and you can recall every facet of the scene for years to come. That must’ve been what was happening to me now. Or maybe I was getting a migraine headache. Either that or I was going crazy.
     
    “You’re not crazy,” I told myself, “but this situation is.”
     
    Glancing around the room again, I noted that nothing seemed to have been disturbed—except for Joe. And once again, one incredibly selfish thought whirled through my brain:
Why me?
     
    How had I become the Angel of Death? Was it karmic? Some kind of payback for living a really bad former life? That life must have been a beaut.
     
    Maybe I would talk to Guru Bob about this