Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery

Chapter 13

On Sunday morning, after I spent Saturday night intermittently texting with Tucker—who was, of course, busy at the hospital—and to Kristen, who was tending an extremely busy bar in warm Key West, Aunt Frances filled me with stuffed French toast, slightly crispy bacon, and apple slices. Then, when I’d finished the dishes, she told me to go outside and play.

I looked at her. “How about Eddie? Are you going to kick him out into the cold, too?” Outside the kitchen window was a stiff north wind and scattered clouds that had the look of snow.

Aunt Frances smiled. “Eddie and I are going to start our Christmas lists, aren’t we?”

My cat, who was sitting up tall on the seat of a chair, rearranged his feet a little and wrapped his tail around himself. “Mrr.”

“You know,” I said, “all his list is going to be is cat treats, cat toys, and fancy cat food.”

“Then we’ll have plenty of time for watching reruns of Trock’s Troubles.” She patted Eddie on the head, and he leaned into her, purring.

Those two were clearly ready for a day on the couch. Well, Eddie almost always was, but Aunt Frances was rarely off her feet for that long, and she deserved a quiet day, if that was what she wanted.

“I’ll have my phone,” I said, “if there’s anything you want.”

Ever so nicely, she shooed me away. “Get out of here, youngster. Do I have to count to three? One . . . two . . .”

Laughing, I went to the front closet for my coat, and pulled my wallet and cell from my backpack, which was hanging on a hook. “Are you sure you don’t need anything?” I called to the living room.

“Git!”

“Mrr!”

Outside, the crisp air stung the inside of my nose and sharpened my eyesight. I breathed in the scent of winter and smiled. Aunt Frances, in her infinite wisdom, had known I needed to get outside. How she’d known, I wasn’t sure, since I hadn’t realized it myself, but that’s why she was the best aunt in the world.

As I walked, thinking about this and that, I nodded and exchanged good-mornings with a woman walking her dogs, a middle-aged couple dressed in church clothes, and a skinny young man out running.

Though I thought I was walking with no particular destination in mind, I soon realized that my feet were taking me to the marina. This time of year, the marina was shut down and deserted, except for the ubiquitous seagulls. Which meant if I wanted to talk to anyone, there was only one person possible.

I picked my way carefully up the front steps of the house next to the marina and knocked on Rafe’s door. The steps had been sturdy and fully functional the last time I’d been up them, but with Rafe, you never knew. A project that looked fine to 99.99 percent of the people in the known universe could have a teensy-tiny flaw that would make Rafe shake his head and rip the thing apart.

When Rafe finally finished renovating his house, it would be the most beautiful home in Chilson, but the end date kept moving farther and farther away. After three years of work, he’d managed to wrangle an occupancy permit, but it wasn’t the kind of occupancy most people would be interested in.

I made a perfunctory knock on the front door, a heavy thing of oak and leaded glass, and went in. “Hey, are you home?”

“Minnie, you are the answer to my prayers.”

I looked in the direction of his voice, which had come down the wide, stripped-down wood stairs. “What were you praying for, exactly?”

“Someone to bring me another tube of caulk. There’s a box in the kitchen.”

If you could call it a kitchen. How he’d convinced any inspector to sign off on a house whose kitchen possessed only a utility sink, electricity for a refrigerator, and a series of milk crates for storage, I would never know.

I tromped through the bare studs in the living room and dining room and into the mess. “Had to be a man,” I said, still thinking about the inspector. I took two caulk tubes from the box and made my way up the stairs.

Rafe was in a back bedroom. Then again, it might have been the master suite’s sitting room. With so many walls gone, moved, or stripped to the studs, it was hard to tell. He’d shown me the blueprints dozens of times, but he’d also made so many changes on the fly that I was pretty sure the house bore little resemblance to the original plans.

I waved the tubes around. “I brought two, just in case. Where do you want them?”

“Anywhere,” he said, grunting a little with effort, “just so I won’t step on the buggers.”

The grunts weren’t surprising, because he was standing on a short stepladder, just past the DON’T STEP ON OR ABOVE THIS LEVEL step, trying to caulk a window frame and maintain his balance at the same time.

“You know,” I said, “if you went downstairs to the kitchen, got the properly sized ladder, and brought it up here, you wouldn’t be running the risk of falling and breaking your neck.”

“Risk is my middle name,” he said, putting on a deep, gravelly voice.

I snorted, because I knew for a fact it was Theodore. “You probably don’t carry your cell in case of accident, do you? I bet it’s in that dusty mess you call a bedroom.”

He popped the empty caulk tube out of the gun and held out his hand for a fresh one. “Did you stop by just to give me a hard time, or do you have another, even more nefarious purpose?”

I watched as he took a utility knife from his tool belt and sliced off the tube’s plastic tip. Sitting down on a stack of lumber, I said, “I brought cookies.” The smell of Cookie Tom’s wafting through town had compelled me to buy half a dozen coconut chocolate chips.

He grinned, pointing the loaded caulk gun at the ceiling. “That was my second prayer, you know.”

I watched him bead out the caulk in a smooth line. “Is there anything you want me to do?”

“Entertain me. My iPod ran out of juice ten minutes ago.”

“How about if I ask you some questions?” Except for his college years, Rafe had lived in Chilson all his life, and if he didn’t know everything about everyone in town, it meant someone had only recently moved in.

“My wallet’s downstairs next to last night’s pizza box,” he said. “But I know there’s at least two fives in there.” Rafe and I had a long history of making five-dollar bets, and one of these days I was going to have to start keeping track of who won most often. Rafe assured me that he had, but since he had memory issues with anything that didn’t concern his school or major-league baseball, I wasn’t about to take his word for it.

“Different kind of questions,” I said.

“Fire away.”

The caulk gun clicked as he kept an even bead flowing, and I reflected on how many references we used on a daily basis that had to do with firearms and weaponry.

“Don Weller still teaches at your school, right?” Don was a neighbor to Denise. On his list, Mitchell had noted Don as Roger’s neighbor and a sixth-grade teacher, and he was a man Denise had named as an enemy.

“Sure,” Rafe said. “Good guy, even if he does cheer for the Green Bay Packers.”

“Do you know what Denise Slade has against him?”

“Yup.”

I waited. Waited some more. I decided against picking up the circular saw and cutting off the legs of the ladder. “Are you going to tell me?” I asked, spacing out the words.

“Do I get a cookie first?”

“No.”

He sighed and moved to the other side of the window frame. “It’s typical Denise stuff. He’d put up a few extra sections of fence on the property line between his place and the Slades, not thinking much about it, but she called the city zoning administrator and turned him in for a zoning violation.”

“You need a zoning permit to put up a fence?”

“In Chilson, yeah, if it’s within eight feet of a property line. Anyway, it was Don’s bad luck that there’s a new zoning administrator all hot to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and he got fined a hundred bucks.”

A hundred dollars seemed like a lot, but since I didn’t know the least thing about zoning, I kept my opinion to myself.

“But what really got him mad,” Rafe went on, “was he had to show up in front of the Planning Commission for a permit review on a night the Red Wings were playing in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Against Chicago.”

“Now, that is truly horrible,” I said dryly.

“Didn’t someone say that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor?”

“That’s puns.”

He grinned over his shoulder. “You know what’s really funny? Denise had better never put a foot wrong ever again, because if she does, Don will be on her faster than flies on dog doo-doo. If she’d kept her mouth shut about the fence, maybe told Don he had a violation but that she wasn’t going to say anything to the city if he went and begged for mercy, she’d have made a friend for life. As it is, she’s got an enemy forever.”

I didn’t say anything, but thought about Denise all alone in her house. How hard could it be for someone to break in, especially a next-door neighbor?

“It’s too bad about Roger, though,” Rafe said. “He was a good guy.”

To Rafe, most people were good guys, women included. Only somewhere out there, someone wasn’t good. Someone had killed Roger, and someone, I was sure, had tried to kill Denise.

The litany of professions recited by Detective Inwood came back to me. A local attorney, a middle-school teacher, a retail-store owner, and the director of a nonprofit organization.

Shannon was the attorney and Don Weller was the teacher. Was Pam Fazio the store owner? And who was the nonprofit director?

“Say, is it cookie time yet?” Rafe took out the caulk tube, now empty, and tossed it into an open cardboard box.

I shook my head, trying to clear the fluff out of my brain. But, as usual, all that happened was my hair rearranged itself.

“Sure,” I said. “Cookies coming right up.”

* * *

I spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon hanging out with Rafe, alternately helping and being annoyed by him, sometimes both at the same time.

“Why is it,” I said with exasperation, frowning at the clamp that didn’t quite fit around the pieces of wood they needed to fit around, “that you never get annoyed like I do?”

“Because,” he said, taking the clamp out of my hand and replacing it with one he’d fetched from another room.

I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “Because? That’s it?”

“What, you want me to say it’s because you’re a girl? I can, you know. It’s because you’re a—”

“No,” I interrupted quickly, “I don’t want you to say that.”

“Then don’t ask questions that you don’t want the answers for.”

I stood there, clamp in one hand, wood bits in the other, thinking about questions and answers, about things I didn’t want to know. About asking the right questions. And about the cost of finding the answers.

“Hey, Minnie. You going to clamp that wood before the glue dries?”

“I think so,” I said absently, and tried to focus on what I was doing.

Half an hour later, Rafe kicked me out. “I’m done for the day,” he said, stretching. “I’m headed over to a buddy’s to watch the Lions lose another football game.”

“And drink beer and eat junk food?” I asked.

He slapped his flat stomach. “Dinner of champions,” he said. “Want to come?”

I squinched my face. “As much as I want to bang my fingers with a hammer.”

After I washed up in the kitchen sink (such as it was) and dried my hands on my pants (since there was no towel and the paper towels were upstairs) I poked my head into the bathroom where Rafe was showering and yelled good-bye.

“See ya,” he yelled back. “Hey, thanks for the help.”

“No problem. I’ll send you a bill.”

“Sounds good. You’ll get paid as soon as this place gets finished,” he said, and so I was laughing as I left his house.

* * *

During the hours I’d been inside, snow had started to drift down. The light was mostly gone from the sky, and the glow from the windows of the Round Table was like a beacon.

I stomped my feet free of snow in the entryway and slid into a booth. In my life with Aunt Frances, I was on my own for Sunday food after breakfast, and the cold slice of pizza Rafe had handed me for lunch wasn’t going to tide me over until tomorrow morning.

“Menu?” the middle-aged waitress asked. For once, it wasn’t Sabrina.

“No, thanks, Carol. I’ll have an olive burger with a side salad.” I wanted fries, but chose the vegetable route. My parents would be on their way back from Florida right now, and my mom’s imminent entry into the state was making me aware of my eating habits.

I sat back, uncomfortable at my bookless state, and looked about for something to read. A cast-aside newspaper would do, even if I’d already read it.

“Minnie?”

I turned. Ash Wolverson was smiling at me in a tentative sort of way. In the worn jeans and hoodie he was wearing, he didn’t look at all like a sheriff’s deputy.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

He stood at the end of the booth, looking hesitant. “Are you waiting for anyone?”

“Nope. Have a seat.”

I watched him slide in, thinking that I’d never before met a man this good-looking who was also so unsure of himself. “How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said. “How about yours? Did you drive or did you cook?”

I laughed. “Mostly I did dishes.”

There was a short silence that might have grown uncomfortably long had Carol not arrived with a glass of ice water. She eyed Ash. “You leave your dinner much longer, it’s going to get cold, and fried fish doesn’t microwave up anything decent.”

Which was when I realized Ash had already been in the restaurant when I showed up. The place wasn’t that big, making it yet another day in which I wasn’t going to win a Power of Observation award.

I started to talk at the same time he did. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Thanks.” I smiled and then peered at him. Was he blushing? Surely not. “I was just wondering if Detective Inwood has forgiven you for missing the hat.”

Ash touched the edges of the paper placemat in front of him. “Hard to tell. He’s still letting me work with him, so I figure he can’t be too mad.”

I wasn’t so sure about that, but maybe he was right. “I know you can’t talk about an active investigation, but can you tell me if there’s been any progress?” Please let there be progress. Please be close to figuring out what happened. And pretty please figure it out before the court hearing.

“Some,” he said. “We’re working with a local conservation officer, putting together a case.”

Which wasn’t really an answer at all, or at least not a useful one. If anyone asked me, Ash was following far too closely in Detective Inwood’s footsteps. No one was, but I was ready if the question came up.

Still, if they were working with a CO, a type of officer who had full arrest powers and was responsible for enforcing the hunting and fishing laws, that probably meant they were still thinking a hunter with remarkably poor shooting ability had killed Roger by accident. And if they thought that, I was sure they were wrong. Denise was the one who—

“Can I ask you a question?”

I blinked away from my thoughts. Ash was studying the table. “Sure,” I said.

“Would you . . .” He blew out a breath, looked up at me through eyelashes far too long to belong to a grown man, and asked, “Would you go out with me?”

I blinked at him. Blinked again. “Go out with you?”

Now the blush was evident. “Maybe have dinner and a movie? We could go anywhere you’d like. And see any movie you want. What kind of food do you like? I’ll eat anything, and I like almost everything. There’s a new place in Petoskey people are talking about and it sounds good.”

The poor man was starting to babble. I had to stop him, and fast. “Thanks very much,” I said. “I appreciate the offer—really I do—but I’m seeing someone right now.”

“Oh.”

He deflated, and I felt horribly sorry for him. “I’ve been seeing Tucker Kleinow for a few months. Do you know him?” Ash shook his head slowly. “He’s a doctor,” I said, “an emergency-room doctor, at the hospital in Charlevoix. He hasn’t been up here very long; this will be his first winter Up North.” I suddenly realized I was talking too much, so I picked up my water and took a long drink.

“A doctor,” Ash said dully. “That figures.” He slid out of the booth and stood. “Sorry to bother you.”

“You didn’t.” I smiled at him, but he didn’t see it because he was studying his shoes. “Honest. And I’m sorry you didn’t know I was seeing someone.”

“A doctor,” he muttered under his breath, and trudged back to his dinner.

I wanted to call him back, wanted to make him smile and laugh, but I knew he needed time to get over what he would undoubtedly be considering a rejection. How hard it must be, sometimes, to be a man.

Sighing, I thought about the specific hardships of being a man. Then I thought how hard it was to be a woman. Really, it could be a hardship just plain being human.

I shook my head, trying to jolt free the sadness and the worry. Worrying didn’t help anything and it didn’t make tomorrow any better. Plus, worrying had the definite minus of making the present worse.

Worrying, I realized with a sudden shock, was what I did when I didn’t have anyone to talk to or anything to read. In theory, I could read on my cell phone’s e-book app, but that gave me a headache.

So I got up and grabbed a real-estate guide from the rack next to the cash register.

After all, anything to read was better than nothing.

* * *

I ate my meal while perusing advertisements for lakeshore homes I could never hope to afford, and tried not to notice when Ash left. The poor guy. I wondered again at his odd lack of self-confidence in a social setting, then stuck a fork into my salad and concentrated on criticizing the multimillion-dollar houses that were for sale.

When dinner was eaten and paid for, I zipped my coat and headed home. One step outside, and I came to a sudden stop. The snow that had been coming down gently when I’d arrived at the Round Table must have been falling heavily ever since. A three-inch coating of white lay over everything in sight—buildings, streets, sidewalks, trees. Even in the winter darkness, the town almost glowed with snow-white brightness.

I stuck out my tongue to catch a few flakes and smiled, because this would be the perfect night to take the long way home and check out the holiday decorations.

On one street there were two armies of wire-framed snowmen on a front lawn, set up in a snowball-fight formation. On another street there was a spectacular display that included a pair of five-foot-high nutcrackers and a slightly creepy ten-foot-tall Santa Claus. Another family had put up a tall pole and strung lights down from the top, creating a massive treelike structure that changed color every few minutes.

But I saved the best until last. Two streets away from the boardinghouse, I stopped in front of a two-story Victorian-era home and smiled.

The front yard had been transformed into a winter fantasy scene. There was a waist-high small village, complete with a train station, church, blacksmith’s shop, horse-drawn sleighs, and even a pint-sized ice rink. Adults walked, children ran, and a pair of dogs tussled over a gift-wrapped box. A restrained hand had lit the miniature town with tiny lights that illuminated the scene in a golden tone. I was completely entranced, just as I was every year, and I didn’t hear the footsteps until they were closing in on me.

I turned and exchanged nods with my aunt’s neighbor Otto Bingham.

“Nice,” he said, gesturing at the display. “All in wood, isn’t it? Professionally done, it looks like.”

The man can speak? It’s a Christmas miracle! I smiled. “I’ll tell my Aunt Frances.”

“Oh?” He tilted his head slightly to one side. “Did she help put it up?”

Laughing, I said, “No, she made it. Plywood, most of it, with some hard maple for the blocky bits, like the church steeple.”

His mouth dropped slightly open. “She made this?”

I pointed. “If you squint a little, you can see the date above the front door of that city hall.”

“Nineteen eighty-two?”

“Yup.” I put my hands in my pockets. “She grew up helping her dad—my grandpa—in his woodshop, and when she married a guy who lived up here, she made sure to have space for a shop herself.” It was in the basement, which wasn’t an ideal location, but the addition of an exterior stairway had made it a lot better.

I loved to brag about my aunt. Since everyone in the county knew about her talents, I didn’t get to do it very often, yet here was someone right in front of me. Perfect!

“She made little projects for years,” I said, “but when my uncle died, she got into it more seriously. Before long she was teaching wood shop at the high school.” Which was where Rafe had first learned his woodworking skills, something about which I reminded him every so often.

“Teaching?”

“Yep.” I grinned, enjoying myself. “These days she’s teaching woodworking classes at the community college in Petoskey and kind of tutoring some advanced students for the wooden boat–building school up in Cedarville.”

“Tutoring?” Otto asked faintly.

“She loves it—says it keeps her young, even though she spends a lot of hours doing it. And now she’s getting into wood turning. You should see some of her work—it’s just gorgeous. I keep telling her she should sell some pieces at the art shows in the summer, maybe even the art galleries, but she just keeps giving them away.”

“A professional craftswoman,” Otto muttered. “That figures.”

I glanced over at him. For a second, he’d sounded exactly like Ash had an hour earlier. “What do you mean?”

But he just sighed, said good night, and walked away.

* * *

“You know what would be great?” my newest bookmobile volunteer asked.

I glanced over at Lina Swinney. I’d met the young woman at the Lakeview Art Gallery a few months ago. We’d gotten along well, so when I’d heard over the Thanksgiving dinner table that she was taking a semester off from college to help her mom recover from a bout with pneumonia, I’d given her a call. She was glad to help out when she could, but it was another temporary solution to the volunteer problem, and I still needed a real answer.

“You’ve already had lots of ideas,” I told her. “My favorite is spinning Eddie’s loose hair into yarn and making a blanket of his own hair for him to shed on.”

Lina giggled and patted her own long honey-brown hair. “Do you think it would work?”

I had no idea. I liked reading about characters who knitted and weaved and sewed, but I’d never tried to do any of it myself. One of these days. Right after I finished reading Gravity’s Rainbow.

“What’s your new idea?” I asked. “If it has anything to do with finding a revenue source for the bookmobile operations, I’d be your willing servant for a year, minimum.”

I could feel her looking at me with a puzzled expression. Lina was bright and full of energy, but she and I did not share a sense of humor. Not that I was joking about the servant thing—not exactly.

We were headed into the next stop, the parking lot of a mom-and-pop grocery store. Three cars waited for us, even though we were a few minutes early.

Lina flung her arms out, gesturing at the bookmobile’s interior. “Look at all this! It’s a blank canvas waiting to be filled. It’s an undeveloped artistic endeavor. Just think what we could do with the ceiling and walls and even the bookshelves. And it’s the holidays, so it’s the perfect time to decorate this thing to the max.”

Making noncommittal noises, I parked the bookmobile. Lina released Eddie, and we started the stop’s setup routine. As we did the small amount of necessary business, Lina kept talking.

“Can’t you just see it?” She nodded at the shelves. “Wire garland, maybe, or at least crepe paper. We could put snowflakes up. Maybe get kids to make them.” Her face was getting a little flushed. “Or snowmen. Christmas stockings. Stars. We could turn this place into a traveling art show.”

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

I looked at him. He was sitting near Lina, on the foot-high carpet-covered shelf that ran along both sides of the bookmobile. It served both as seating and as a way for people like me to reach the highest shelf.

“What do you think he said?” Lina asked. “I think he’d like decorations.”

She was undoubtedly right, and what he’d like to do most would be to rip them to shreds. There was precedent for that kind of behavior.

“It’s a fun idea,” I said, “but I’m going to have to say no. I don’t have time to put that together.” My heart panged. Not to mention the fact that the library board might be looking for a buyer for my single-bookmobile fleet in less than two weeks.

“Maybe next year, though, right?” Lina asked.

I made a sideways sort of nod (which, if she’d been reading my mind, she would have read as “Not a chance”), opened the door, and welcomed people aboard. They were all regulars, and they pushed past me on their way to greet Eddie, who was holding court from the passenger-seat headrest.

Phyllis Chambers, recently retired from a state government job in Lansing and relocated Up North, got her Eddie fix and drifted toward me. I was sitting at the back desk, trying to get the chair to adjust to my height.

“Minnie,” Phyllis said, “do you have that gluten-free cookbook we were looking through last time, the slow-cooker one? I don’t see it now.”

“Let me see if it’s been checked out.” I tapped at the computer and frowned. “That’s weird. It says the book’s still here. Well, let’s take a look.” The 641s were on the right side of the aisle, about halfway down, at Minnie eye-height. I knew the book’s cover was dark, but it wasn’t there.

“Huh.” I stood there, hands on hips, staring at the spot where the book should have been.

I spent a lot of time making sure all the bookmobile books were shelved properly. As in a lot of time. Of course, someone could have walked off with the book, but theft was so unusual for our library that even Stephen didn’t see the need for the shrieking alarm devices that big-city libraries had. It was far more likely that someone had unintentionally taken it home, so with any luck, it would come back in a week or two.

“Here it is!” Phyllis held the book aloft. “It was in with the biographies.”

“Next to Julia Child?” I asked.

Phyllis laughed. “Harry Truman.”

“Maybe he took up cooking after the left the White House.” I beeped the book through the system. “Glad you found it.”

“I wasn’t really looking,” she said. “I just opened my eyes, and it was there. Wrong place, but I was looking at the right time.”

She nodded and went to the stairs. She might have said good-bye, but if she did, I didn’t hear, because her words were too loud in my ears.

Wrong place, but I was looking at the right time.

It had the ring of profundity, somehow. Was it possible that I was looking in the wrong place for Roger’s killer? Looking in the wrong place for the person who wanted to hurt Denise? Looking in the—

There was a sharp pain in my shin. “Ow!”

Eddie head butted me in the leg one more time, then sat and looked up at me. “Mrr.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” I ruffled up his fur. “Without a doubt, I am indeed looking for both answers and profound statements in the wrong places. What I should really be doing is asking you.”

“Mrr,” he said, and whacked me in the shin again.

* * *

By the time we returned to Chilson, Lina was ready to give up college, her future career, and her boyfriend, and do nothing but work on the bookmobile.

“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

I glanced at her, but it’s hard to judge facial expressions when you’re carrying milk crates full of books into a library’s basement. Though she sounded sincere, even Eddie could sound sincere when he really wanted something. “I’m glad you had a good time.” I said.

“It just seems so wrong that you can’t get the money to pay someone,” Lina said. “I mean, it would be part time—right?—so there wouldn’t be benefits or anything. How much could it really cost?”

Too much, according to Stephen. As we entered the room that held the bookmobile’s collection, I shied away from thinking about the odds of the bookmobile program ending altogether and said, “The library’s budget is tight.”

Which it was, but even when I’d dug up a few thousand dollars to cut, Stephen had latched on to the savings as a way to reduce library costs, not as a way to transfer funds to the bookmobile. In the past few weeks, I’d sent off applications to all the grant possibilities I could think of, but I was way past the deadlines for most of them, thanks to the one that had fallen through. Still, it didn’t hurt to try.

“I think it’s silly,” Lina said, thumping her crate of books onto a solid table. “Everybody knows that you can’t maintain a solid staff through volunteers. They’re just not a reliable source for long-term operations.”

Between young Lina and Thessie, my teenage summer volunteer, I would soon learn all I needed to know about everything. Smiling, I put my milk crate next to Lina’s. “I’ll be sure to mention that to the library board at their next . . .” Volunteers. Denise also volunteered for other groups. And hadn’t there been a fuss about—

“What did you say?” Lina turned to me, her hands full of the books she was about to shelve.

“I’d glad you had a good time today,” I said vaguely, and tried to concentrate on what I was doing, but my brain was fizzing about something else altogether. Because I’d finally remembered why Denise had fingered the director of a nonprofit organization as a possible murder suspect.

* * *

I opened the door of the Northern Lakes Protection Association and walked in. As I turned around to shut the door, I looked at Eddie, who was maybe twenty feet away in my nicely warmed-up car. “Ten minutes,” I mouthed. Since he’d protested so loudly at the unanticipated stop, I’d let him out of his carrier. He was sitting on it and staring at me out the car window, giving me the Look That Should Kill.

“You’re lucky it doesn’t,” I muttered. “Who else would feed you like I do?”

His mouth opened and closed, but I didn’t hear what he said. Which was just as well. I closed the door and turned around.

The room had been painted in shades of blue; a light blue near the ceiling morphing into a medium blue at eye height, then feathering into a dark blue at the floor. On the walls were framed maps of area lakes, and the carpet was a squiggly pattern of blue and green. The whole space made me feel as if I were underwater.

A man was sitting behind a large desk and talking on the telephone. He smiled and held up his finger. He was older than me, but not by much. Then again, he had that whipcord-thin build and hair so short it didn’t give a good clue to its color, two things that could conceal a man’s age for decades.

“Sure,” he was saying to the person on the other end of the phone. “It’s your birthday, honey. We can go anywhere you want, even if it is in the middle of the week.” He listened. “Grey Gables? Sure. I’ll make the reservations. Seven o’clock?” He picked up a pen and scratched a note on a desk-blotter calendar for the day after next. “Yes, I’ll put it in my phone, too. Don’t worry.” He said good-bye, hung up the receiver, and looked at me. “Sorry about the wait. How can I help you?”

I introduced myself, then asked, “Are you Jeremy Hull?”

Thanks to the photos someone had so kindly placed on the NLPA’s website, I already knew I was talking to Jeremy, the organization’s director and only full-time staff member, but saying so would have felt a little like stalking.

“Sure am,” he said, pushing back from his desk. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

I sat into what I immediately realized was a seriously uncomfortable chair for someone my size. If I sat all the way back, my feet would swing in the air like a small child’s. Since that wasn’t the image I wanted to project—not now, and not ever, even when I had been a small child—I perched on the edge of the seat.

“Have you seen the bookmobile?” I asked. Jeremy nodded, smiling a little. Seeing that, I forgave him for the chair. “Ever since we started up this summer,” I said, “we’ve been having problems finding volunteers to go out on the bookmobile. In a perfect world, we’d have money to hire part-time staff, but I just don’t see that happening. I know your organization runs mostly on volunteer power, so I hoped you might have some advice.”

He laughed. “Sure. Go back to school and get a degree in computer science. Make a pile of money, then retire early and spend your time volunteering for the bookmobile.”

“Gee,” I said thoughtfully. “I never once thought of doing that.”

“And on your off days, you could spend some time here,” he said. “Just to mix it up. Wouldn’t want you to get bored.” He laughed again, only this time it didn’t sound very happy. “Volunteers are the best part of this job. And the worst.”

“So you’ve had problems, too?”

He leaned back, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stories.”

Now was the time. “I hear Denise Slade used to volunteer with your organization.”

“Denise.” He said the word in a monotone. “That’s not a story; that’s a chapter.”

“She’s the president of our Friends of the Library group,” I said. “Should I be worried?”

He sat forward and put his elbows on the desk. “Can I ask you to keep this conversation confidential?”

I’d have to tell Eddie, but I doubted that would count. “Absolutely.”

“Denise Slade,” he said, spitting out the consonants, “might be the worst thing that ever happened to Northern Lakes.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s too bad about her husband—I was even out there that day, checking levels at the Jurco Dam—but after what she did, I couldn’t find it in me to even send a card. My wife says I should forgive and forget, and she’s right, but that just hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not something I’m going to fake.”

I studied Jeremy’s tight face. “How long ago did this happen?”

“Almost a year ago, but it might as well be yesterday.”

“What did she do?”

He made a disgusted sort of noise. “She was my assistant. Worked hard, cared about the projects, talked more people into volunteering, basically made herself indispensable.”

“That all sounds okay,” I said. “What went wrong?”

“You must know Denise. What would you guess?” he asked.

I thought a moment. “That your board made a decision she didn’t agree with, something she thought was just plain wrong. She told them so in a grand and very public manner, and she walked out.”

He nodded, his mouth a straight line. “Bingo. Walked out, didn’t look back, didn’t leave any notes for the next person, didn’t finish up any of her projects—nothing. She left me with a huge mess, and the board blamed me. I almost lost my job because of her. It took a lot of scrambling to hold everything together, and I’m still not sure I’ve regained the board’s complete confidence.”

It all sounded pretty horrible, and I said so.

“Thanks.” He smiled. “So, I guess the answer to your question about volunteers is to avoid using Denise Slade. The woman is a menace.”

We chatted for a few more minutes, tossing around collaboration ideas for next summer, and I left after having exceeded my ten-minute promise to Eddie by only five minutes.

“Oh, hush,” I said as I encouraged him back into his carrier. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. It’s not like you can tell time. And even if you could, you’re not wearing a watch.”

“Mrr!”

“Yeah, back at you.”

When he didn’t respond, I looked over at him as I buckled my seat belt. “Now what are you doing?”

He was scratching the side of his carrier, going at it with his claws as if he were trying to dig a hole and escape.

“What—did Timmy fall down the well again?”

He ignored me and kept scratching.

“Even if you did escape, where would you go? The backseat?” I started the car. “And even if you got out of the car, there’s nothing over there but the parking lot for the Protection Association. Are you going to volunteer to do their valet parking?”

Eddie flopped down with a loud thud.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “That was funny.”

He turned his head, ignoring me in a very obvious way.

I laughed. “Love you, too, pal.”

* * *

“What is your cat doing?” Aunt Frances asked.

Before I answered, I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing. My mother would be pleased to know that at least one of her admonitions had stayed with me. “You know that wooden puzzle of the United States? It’s in the living room on the shelves with the jigsaw puzzles.”

She frowned. “The puzzle that was a gift from my grandparents the Christmas I was six.”

I hadn’t known that, and said so.

We sat at the kitchen table, listening to the sounds of a cat playing with something he shouldn’t.

My aunt’s expression was a little pensive, so I dabbed my face with my napkin and got up. In the living room, Eddie was crouched in the corner, batting at two puzzle pieces, one much larger than the other.

“You,” I told him, “are a horrible cat.” I reached down, picked up the wooden bits, and carried them and the entire puzzle back to the kitchen. I set the puzzle on the table, checked the pieces for damage and Eddie spit, and handed them to Aunt Frances.

“Michigan,” she said. “And Maryland. Do you think he was going for the M states?”

“If he was, he missed Mississippi, Minnesota, and Maine.”

“Massachusetts.” She counted on her fingers. “Seven. There’s one more.”

“Missouri.”

“Mrr.”

We looked down at Eddie. “You missed some states,” I said. “Better luck next time.”

He jumped onto my lap, then up onto the table. Before I could grab him, he swiped at the Maryland puzzle piece and sent it skittering onto the floor.

“If you’re trying to destroy them alphabetically,” Aunt Frances said, “you should take out Maine first.”

“And if you’re trying to do it geographically,” I said, picking him up and putting him on the floor, “you still got it wrong, especially if you’re trying to go west to east.”

The two humans in the room started laughing.

Eddie looked from me to Aunt Frances and back to me. Then he put his little kitty nose in the air and stalked off.

Which only made us laugh harder.

“Don’t go away mad,” I said, wiping the tears from my eyes.

“Just . . . go . . . away,” Aunt Frances managed to finish.

Eddie gave Maryland a final swipe, sending it underneath the stove.

“Hey!” I said, my laughter gone. “That wasn’t funny.”

He stopped, gave us a look that clearly said I win—again, and made a dignified exit.