The Pickled Piper by Mary Ellen Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

enjoying the exercise but also appreciating the shade offered by the trees that lined both sides of Beech Street on that warm day.
    Piper had visited the library often during her summers with Aunt Judy and Uncle Frank but hadn’t been back since her move and all the hustle and bustle of setting up her new shop. But she remembered many happy hours spent browsing through the children’s books, then graduating to more grown-up sections. She may have seen Lyella among other library workers in those days, but the adults might as well have had fuzzy blobs for faces, focused as Piper had been on finding the perfect book.
    She turned off Beech Street, remembering that the library would be one more turn off of Third Street two blocks ahead. With her thoughts busy with what she wanted to learn about Lyella, Piper forgot for the moment about the library’s drastic color change. As she turned onto Maple, however, it hit her full force.
    â€œWhoa!”
    Her informant from the fair’s livestock barns had compared the look to a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and he hadn’t exaggerated. The library, which Piper remembered as a stately, decades-old converted house with white siding and black shutters, had been turned into an amusement park fun house. The shutters were still black, but that only served to emphasize the garish pinkness of the rest of the building.
    Piper was at once horrified and on the verge of giddy laughter. It was just too awful. She could only imagine how Lyella Pfiefle must have felt to see it and to hear her beloved library become the butt of jokes. Did it make her mad enough to want to kill the person responsible? Piper hoped to find out.
    Fighting down the feeling of walking into a giant clown’s mouth, she entered the library and was relieved to find the interior pretty much as she remembered it. A scattering of patrons browsed among tall shelves of books, and one or two sat at computer tables. The overall quiet gave an air of both study and coziness and brought back all of Piper’s good feelings of years ago. To her, going to the library had always been like a treasure hunt, with riches only waiting to be discovered. Today, however, she was on a totally different kind of hunt and wasn’t all too sure what she might find. Piper went up to the checkout desk and asked the plump, friendly-looking woman there if Lyella Pfiefle was around.
    â€œShe’s in the meeting room right now,” the woman said. “It’s story time for the preschoolers. You can go in if you like and wait. She’ll be done in a few minutes.”
    â€œThanks.” Piper headed toward the meeting room at the back, catching the sounds of a woman’s reading voice and children’s titters as she drew closer. The open doorway allowed her to slip in quietly, and she joined a line of mothers—and a few fathers—at the back, who shuffled together to make room for her. Once Piper settled in and got a good look at the librarian standing at the head of the room, she sputtered out a laugh—luckily during a loud shriek from the children.
    Lyella Pfiefle looked about as unlikely a murderer as anyone could. She was tiny, for one thing, barely reaching five feet tall by Piper’s estimation. Most storytellers who Piper remembered from her childhood days had perched cozily on chairs to read to their groups. But it was clear if Lyella sat, she’d disappear from view.
    The librarian was slim to the point of too thin, causing Piper to think a rogue puff of wind from the window might easily blow her over. Piper would, at first guess, have put her at late middle age. But a look beyond the simple blouse and cotton skirt showed an unlined face framed by dark, shiny hair that, despite being pulled back severely into a ponytail, signaled a woman at least ten years younger.
    Taken altogether, though, Piper could not imagine Lyella Pfiefle—currently describing the antics of bunnies and