Borrowed Crime

Chapter 15

During my lunch the next day, I hurried out through the start of what was predicted to be three straight days of rain, and drove a box of donation books I’d been collecting up the hill to the middle school.

Rafe and I had regular bargaining sessions regarding exchanges of labor, and last summer I’d agreed to set up recommendations for an after-school reading program if he did the electrical repair of my houseboat. As often seemed to happen, I was still working on his project when he was long done with mine. Whenever I mentioned this fact, he’d give me a white-toothed grin, say he was just more efficient than I was, and that maybe I should take some lessons from him.

“As if,” I muttered, trying to free a hand to open the school’s door. Efficiency lessons from Rafe would be about like etiquette lessons from Eddie.

The secretary’s desk was empty, so I wandered unannounced through the maze of small offices. “Eddie etiquette lessons would all be about what to do with my tail,” I muttered, plopping the box on Rafe’s desk.

“When did you get a tail?” Rafe, looking almost professional in a buttoned shirt and dress pants, craned his neck, trying to look around to my backside. “Bet wearing pants is a problem. You going to start wearing skirts? Poodle skirts, maybe?” He smirked.

I pointed at the box. “These are donation books that are on the after-school reading list.”

“Hey, cool.” He stood and sifted through the contents. Rafe had applied for a small grant to fund the project and it had been awarded, but he’d received only half the money requested. “This will help a lot.” He picked up a copy of Arnie, the Doughnut and started reading.

I cleared my throat. “Thank you ever so much, Minnie. You’re the best librarian ever.”

“Huh?” Rafe turned a page. “Yeah. Thanks, Min. See you later, okay?”

I rolled my eyes and walked out. Though the hallways were quiet, I could hear a distant din from the cafeteria. Lunchtime in a middle school. I shook my head, not wanting to remember those days too clearly. To distract myself, I looked into the classrooms through the small vertical windows in the doors, but it turns out you can’t see very much that way.

A blare of music startled me. I looked around, saw an open classroom door, and poked my head inside.

Don Weller was seated at a desk, peering into a computer monitor and singing along with the lyrics pouring out of his speakers.

“. . . Jingle all the way. Oh, what fun it is to ride in a . . .”

He was so busy singing and working on the computer that he didn’t notice my wave and didn’t hear my hello. I came into the room, saw what was on the monitor, and gasped.

Don spun around. “Hey, Minnie. What’s up?”

I knew he was looking at me, but I couldn’t look away from his computer screen. “Isn’t that Denise Slade’s house?”

He laughed. Or it started out that way; halfway in, it turned into more of a snarl that ended as a sneering sort of sigh. “Yeah. She’s my next-door neighbor.”

I considered what my strategy should be. “Rafe mentioned your fence issue.”

“Wasn’t an issue until Denise felt the need to turn me in.” He whacked at the keyboard. “She could have said something, could have said, ‘Gee, Don, did you know you need a fence permit? Just stop by city hall and talk to the zoning administrator.’” He was snarling again. “‘Doesn’t cost much. Paperwork’s simple. Just make sure you get one, because the penalty is a little fierce.’”

He thumped on his computer’s mouse, changing the screen away from the image of Denise’s house, whacked at the keyboard, thumped some more. “But, no, she didn’t do any of that. What did she do? She waited until I finished putting the dang thing up, then made the call. Freaking tattletale,” he muttered, whacking away.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Hang on . . .” He made a few more thumps and whacks, then shoved his chair back for me to see. “Wait for it.”

The screen went black. As I watched, “We Need a Little Christmas” started playing and lines of large white text scrolled up into view. Denise Slade, 1038 Ridgeline View, Tuesday, November 25. The text scrolled up and away; then Denise’s house slowly appeared. The night photo showed a house brightly lit with tiny lights. Red, green, yellow, and blue, the lights outlined every window, every eave, every corner, and every post on the wide porch. It was attractive, in a showy sort of way, but I was glad I didn’t live next door to it.

“That’s a lot of lights,” I murmured.

Don snorted. “You ain’t kidding. But the thing is, she’s violating the rules.”

“There are rules about Christmas lights?”

“Our subdivision has a homeowners’ association,” he said. “No one is supposed to have holiday lights up before Thanksgiving—no way, no how. That there?” He stabbed at the screen. “It’s a flagrant violation of the rules, and after the fence thing, I swore that if she ever stepped out of line for anything—and I mean anything—I’d be on her so fast, her head would spin.”

His head must spin at a very slow rate, because Thanksgiving had been a week ago and his head looked as if it were in the same position it had always been.

I studied the screen and saw that it wasn’t a still image—it was a video, and the lights were starting to blink. “Oh, my,” I breathed.

“Yeah.” He stared at it with a fierce expression. “Right next door. She turns it off at midnight, just like the rules say, but I go to bed at eleven and have to try to sleep with that stuff pulsing away. Doesn’t matter how many curtains we hang up; the lights still get through. By New Year’s, I’m going to be seriously sleep deprived.”

I wished him good luck and walked out, thinking about rules and laws, about expectations and holidays, about families and friends.

And about neighbors.

* * *

Boxless and errand-free, I drove down the hill and back into town. I’d hoped to eat lunch at the Round Table and get the scoop from Sabrina on her new husband Bill’s treatments for his macular degeneration, but there wasn’t time after my conversation with Don.

I snagged a parking spot directly across the street from Shomin’s Deli and five minutes later, I walked out the front door with my new favorite sandwich: green olive and Swiss cheese on sourdough. I also walked out into precipitation. A fairly heavy version. It wasn’t exactly rain, but it wasn’t snow, either. I stepped back into the shelter of the store’s entryway and, one-handed, since my other hand held my lunch, I tried to wrestle my hood out of my coat’s zippered collar.

“Stupid curly hair,” I muttered, wrestling away. Most people’s hair could survive a little wet with no ill effects. Mine would spring into an unshapable mass at the slightest drop.

As I grunted with my hood-raising efforts, an ancient and battered SUV pulled up to the curb. Allison Korthase got out, jogged through the falling slush, and went into the eye doctor’s office next door.

I looked at the SUV, mud covered from bumper to bumper, then at the eye doctor’s. Hadn’t Allison been driving a sedan the last time I’d seen her? I mentally shrugged, and, hood in place, left the shelter of the entryway and started back across the street.

“Minnie?”

I jumped. Allison was standing on the curb, a small white plastic bag in her hand. She looked a little different, and it took me a second to realize the difference was that she was wearing glasses. “Oh,” I said, ever the brilliant conversationalist. “Hi, Allison.”

She nodded. “Thought that was you. Your height and that hair are dead giveaways.”

Which meant that my hair was escaping the hood and would be a mess the rest of the day. Nice. I nodded at the SUV, catching a glimpse of contents that could have passed for the product line of a nice-sized used-sports-equipment store. Hockey sticks, snowshoes, a bow, a gun case, at least two sets of skis, and what might have been a lacrosse stick crowded up against the window, giving the impression that more layers lay underneath. “I didn’t recognize the vehicle.”

She gave a small grimace. “My husband’s. Mine’s in the shop for some recall thing, so I’m stuck driving his for the day. So embarrassing. I asked him to at least get it washed, but you can see how far that got me.”

I smiled and tried to pull my hood up even farther. “Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” Which I should have asked when I’d seen her at the library the other day, but better late than never.

Allison jiggled her bag. “Would have been nicer if my new contact-lens prescription had come in on time. I spent the day having my glasses steam up every time I opened the oven door.”

Yet another reason to be grateful for twenty-twenty vision. Which I hadn’t had since I was ten, but since the idea of corrective eye surgery gave me the willies, I didn’t see that changing anytime soon. Happily, my contacts and I got along just fine.

“How about your Thanksgiving?” Allison asked.

I was about to answer when the slush suddenly turned to straight rain and began falling in big fat drops. We both said quick good-byes, and I scampered across the street to my car. A few minutes later, I was at my desk, biting into my sandwich and reading the e-mails that had multiplied during the hour I’d been gone.

Josh sidled into my office. “Hey, Minnie, you got a minute?”

As I was nodding, Holly came in after him. I looked from one friend to the other. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Stephen,” they said simultaneously.

“What’s he done this time?” I asked. “Recommended Helter Skelter to a nine-year-old?”

They ignored me. “He knows about Eddie,” Holly said, at the same time Josh said, “I’m positive he doesn’t know about Eddie.”

I put my sandwich down. “Hmm. One of you has to be wrong. I wonder who it is?” They pointed at each other. “Right,” I said. “Josh, you were here first. What’s your proof?”

“It’s like I was saying: I was in his office the other day, checking up on his computer. I pretended to pick a cat hair off my sleeve, see, and said, “Looks like a cat hair. Wonder how that got on me? And he didn’t say a word. Didn’t blink, didn’t move, didn’t do anything.” He grinned. “See? If he’d known about Eddie, he would have said or done something.”

“Oh, please.” Holly rolled her eyes. “This is Stephen we’re talking about. He has the best poker face ever.”

“Yeah?” Josh folded his arms across his chest. “What’s your proof that he knows?”

“Pinterest,” she said. “He has an account.”

“He does?” From what I knew, Pinterest was all about pictures. Pin a picture to your account’s board. Make comments. Make comments on other people’s pictures. It sounded fun, but I was wary of the time-suck factor.

“Yeah, it’s an open network, so it wasn’t hard to find him. He’s pinned a lot of photos of antique cars.”

I ran over the top of the sports-loving Josh’s surprise about Stephen having any interests outside of books. “So, how does Eddie come into this?”

“Stephen pinned a picture of this old car that had a cat sitting on its hood, and made a comment that the owner didn’t deserve to own it if he was going to treat it like that.”

“What kind of car?” Josh asked.

Holly and I looked at him.

“What? I’m just saying it’s important. If it was an antique Aston Martin, or, something like a Duesenberg, I’d have to agree with him.”

“You are such a guy,” Holly said.

He shrugged. “Goes without saying.”

I thanked them for their conclusions, but I wasn’t sure either one had definitive proof. A few weeks ago, I would have been concerned. This week, however, the Secret of Eddie was way down my worry list. Not that I had a list, but if I did, that’s where it would have been.

When I sighed, my friends exchanged glances.

“All right.” Holly dragged over the spare chair and sat herself down. “Tell Aunt Holly what’s wrong. And don’t leave anything out, because I’ll be able to tell if you do.”

I opened my mouth to say I was fine, that everything was fine. But before the first denial was out of my mouth, I knew I couldn’t do it.

“Tammy Shelburt’s negligence suit against the library starts next week,” I said, “and if the sheriff’s office doesn’t arrest Roger’s killer before then, the library board will probably take the bookmobile off the road. The library attorney said it will help the library’s case.”

Holly gasped. “Seriously? I mean, I know you told me they might, but I figured they’d have come to their senses by now.”

“No one has told me anything different.”

“Geez.” Josh shoved his hands in his pockets. “What are you going to do?”

I looked at my computer monitor, which had gone into screen-saver mode and was now showing a slide show of bookmobile photos. “The only thing that will save the bookmobile is figuring out who killed Roger Slade. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

Holly half laughed. “If anyone else told me something like that, I’d laugh in their face. But you know what? I believe that you’ll do it. Right, Josh?”

He nodded. They both smiled at me, and I smiled back, because if they could believe it, then I could, too.

* * *

By the time I left the library, the light had completely gone from the day. It was a school night for Aunt Frances, so I was on my own for dinner. She’d left the porch light on for me, and when I opened the front door, I called out, “Eddie? Hey, Eddie?”

No feline came bounding over to greet me. I put my coat in the closet and wandered through the house on a cat hunt. “Eddie? Where are you, pal?” No Eddie on the couch, no Eddie on the dining-table buffet, no Eddie in the kitchen or in the downstairs bathtub.

I went upstairs. No Eddie on or under my pillow, no Eddie on any shoes in my closet. No Eddie in my aunt’s room, and no Eddie in the upstairs bathrooms. I stood at the top of the stairs and called again. “Eddie?” There was no need to get worried—of course there wasn’t—but there was a chance he could have scooted outside when the door was open and no one had noticed. He could have been outside all day. He could be lost, cold and shivering and—

Something thumped me in the back of my knee. “Ahh!” I jumped and yelled at the same time.

“Mrr.”

I put my hands on my hips and looked down at my cat. “Funny, mister. Very funny. I was calling and calling you. Where have you been?”

He sat down and started cleaning his back paw.

“Okay, I can see you don’t want to talk about it. But you could at least give me a hint.”

He glanced at me, then switched to cleaning the other back paw.

I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the need to talk to someone. About the bookmobile, about the library board, about Roger and Jeremy and Pam and Don and all the things I’d learned in the last two and a half weeks. And about how none of it was adding up to a motive for murder.

“Mrr.”

“Thanks,” I said, “and I’m sure you’re right, but your advice would be more helpful if I could understand cat speech.”

Eddie had nothing else to say, so I reached into my backpack for my cell phone. “Now or never,” I muttered, and tapped in the name. “Hey, Denise,” I said when she answered. “Do you have a couple of minutes?”

“Not really.” Her voice was hard to hear over what sounded like a large crowd. “I’m down in Traverse City, eating at Red Ginger with some friends.”

My mouth watered. Red Ginger was an Asian restaurant with a hefty list of sushi offerings. I didn’t get there often, because of the distance and the prices, but it was still one of my favorite places to eat in Traverse. “This won’t take long,” I said.

Even over the background noise, I could hear her sigh. “Fine. Hang on.” She made excuses to whomever she was with. “There. I’m headed downstairs, but our food is coming soon, so I can’t talk long. What do you want?”

Condensed conversation was ideal. I skipped what I’d planned as an introduction and, talking fast, went straight to the heart of it. “Remember when I saw you right before Thanksgiving, outside the grocery store, and you mentioned some people who might be your enemies?”

“Yeah. What of it?”

Sometimes it was really hard to be nice to people. At least certain people. “Can you think of anyone else?”

“You mean, is there anyone else running around who might want to kill me?” She laughed. “The police are about to arrest the guy who killed Roger—they’ve told me so. And that slice in my radiator hose probably came from some mechanic who cut it accidentally. Really, Minnie, is your life so boring that you have to manufacture drama?”

Boring might be nice for a change. “Can you think of anyone else?”

“Minnie, you’re being—”

“Can you,” I cut in forcefully, “think of anyone else?”

“I already gave the police all the names I could think of,” she said. “I’m sure they’ve followed up on everyone.”

Or not, because they were sure they knew who the guy was.

“Just think a minute,” I told her. “Assume there’s someone else. Assume someone does want to kill you. Assume you’re still in danger.”

“That’s a lot of assuming,” she said, chuckling. “You know what assuming does, don’t you? It makes an—”

“What about Allison Korthase?”

She huffed in a breath, but didn’t say thing for a moment. Then . . . “What about her?”

“Would Allison want to kill you?”

“Well, she might if she knew. But she doesn’t.”

“Denise,” I said warningly.

“Oh, keep your shirt on. All I meant was, there’s no way Allison could know it was me.”

“Know what was you?”

She sighed. “When Allison was running for city council, she came to a Friends meeting. She talked about literacy and the importance of libraries, and how if she was elected she’d support the library any and every way she could.”

“That was a problem?” I asked.

“It wasn’t that she showed up,” Denise said. “It was what she said.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Her speech,” Denise said impatiently. “Part of it sounded weird. Different from the rest of what she was saying. Right off the bat, I thought she’d copied it from someone, so I started writing it down. When I got home, I typed it into the Internet and I was right.” She chuckled. “Allison had pulled from one of Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. She didn’t think anyone would notice, but I did, so I sent her an anonymous note.”

The insides of my palms were tingling. “Then what?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Denise puffed a breath of air into the phone. “In the note I told her that people knew what she’d done and she needed to clear her conscience if she was ever going to amount to anything. I said she needed to write a letter to the editor and admit she’d stolen that speech. She didn’t, of course, because there’s no way that woman would apologize for anything, but I did my duty. Still. There’s absolutely no way she could have known it was me who wrote the note.”

It all made an icky sort of sense. Denise was seeing her anonymous request as a way of righting a wrong, but Allison would have seen the completion of that request as grounds for public vilification.

I remembered the high-quality signs she’d posted far outside the city limits. Remembered the biographies of female heads of state she’d checked out of the library. Remembered her comment about Washington, DC.

This was a woman with lots of ambition. A woman who wouldn’t let anything get in her way.

I was pretty sure my mother wouldn’t approve of anonymous notes that were almost poison-pen letters, but I was glad Denise hadn’t signed her name. It meant Allison didn’t have any reason to do anything to Denise. “Her plans go far beyond Chilson,” I murmured.

“What’s that?” Denise asked. “Never mind. I have to go. I’m missing dinner.” She hung up, Stephen style, and I was left with a silent phone in my hand.

Eddie bumped his head against my shin. I looked down. “I don’t suppose you have an opinion on what really happened the afternoon Roger died. You were there, after all. Do you remember anything?”

He stopped cleaning and sat very, very, still, looking at me intently.

“Go ahead,” I encouraged. “You can tell me.”

“Mrr.” He shifted forward a little and said it again, a little louder. “Mrr!”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” I sighed and patted him on the head. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, okay?”

“Mrr.”

I gave him one more pat and started down the stairs. “Of course I’ll drive carefully.”

“Mrr!”

“Yes, I promise to be home before midnight.”

“MRR!”

I grabbed my coat, pulled my wallet and keys out of my backpack, and opened the front door. “Yes, I promise not to do what the cool kids do just so I can try to be cool, too.” And I slipped out the door and shut it before he could finish one more “Mrr.”

* * *

Half an hour later, I was checking the time on my cell phone and walking into Charlevoix’s hospital. Five minutes ago, assuming there were no emergencies that needed tending to, Tucker would have gone on his dinner break.

He didn’t know I was coming, but we’d had such a nice time last night at Grey Gables that I figured he wouldn’t mind a surprise visit. If he wasn’t there, then no harm, no foul. I’d go home and call Kristen.

I trotted down the stairs, one hand on the cool metal railing, thinking about our good-night kiss. It has started out as polite, had gone into the tender mode, then had suddenly taken a hard turn into passionate. Where this was going I wasn’t sure, but I was liking where we were right now. A lot.

The cafeteria wasn’t crowded, and I spotted Tucker almost immediately. He was sitting with his back to me, a tray of food in front of him. He was leaning forward, obviously talking to someone, but there was a half wall blocking my view of his dining partner.

I slowed, not wanting to interrupt what might be a private medical conversation. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Some people didn’t like surprises, and maybe Tucker was one of them.

A woman’s laugh rang out, and Tucker laughed, too.

My slow walk became an even slower shuffle.

Fingers reached out toward Tucker. Female-shaped fingers. He took the woman’s hand and squeezed it.

I stopped dead. My mouth opened to say something, anything, but although my face muscles moved, no words came out. For an eternal moment I stood there, locked in place, sure that there was no world outside of my bubble of shock.

Then a nearby clatter of silverware broke me free. I could breathe again, and I could move.

So I did. Out the door; up the stairs; and into a cold, rainy night.

* * *

An hour later, I was sitting in the living room with Eddie at my side, watching a DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when my phone bleeped.

“Incoming text,” I murmured to Eddie. “Think it’s important enough to interrupt the movie?”

Eddie yawned and rolled over. Since I had no idea if that was a negative or positive response, I leaned forward to pick the phone up off the coffee table. It was time for Aunt Frances to leave the college—it was possible she was having car trouble. Or maybe it was Kristen, responding to my earlier message. Or my mom, although we usually talked on Sunday nights. Or any number of library employees, calling in sick for the next day.

“Or not,” I said out loud. It was Tucker. I thumbed open the message.

Sorry, can’t make the movie tomorrow night. Call you later.

I tossed the phone, sending it skittering across the table. My toss had been a little too hard, and it fell off the other side, dropping onto the carpet with a small thud.

“It’s over,” I said quietly.

Eddie stood and climbed into my lap. I gave him a few pats and felt his purr start to rumble. But even the strength of an Eddie purr wasn’t going to do the trick—not tonight, not now.

I kissed the top of his head. “I’m headed out for a walk, okay? I’ll be back in a little while.”

* * *

The night’s chill air bit into me as I went down the porch steps. I zipped my coat to the top, where it brushed the bottom of my chin in a slightly uncomfortable way. Staying warm was always a trade-off in winter, since it so often involved being uncomfortable, whether through too many layers of clothes, just the time involved to put on proper boots, or the squishing of your hair with a warm hat.

I stopped halfway down the front walk and looked up. While rain clouds still covered most of the sky, there were spots where stars were spangling through, twinkling down from so many unimaginable miles away. Many people found perspective while looking at the stars; I usually found myself wishing I’d brought out a luminous star chart. I was okay with identifying the simplest constellations, the dippers and Orion, but I wouldn’t have been able to find Cassiopeia on a double bet with Rafe.

The stars twinkled, the Milky Way glowed, and since it was too early to expect to see any northern lights and my toes were getting cold, I headed for the sidewalk. A jaunt of a few blocks would help set my mind straight. If Tucker had found someone else, well, I’d learn how to move on. I’d done it before; I could do it again.

With my mind made up to be cheerful, I headed out, head high. If Tucker didn’t want me, then I didn’t want him, either. It was his loss. It was—

The light slam of a door turned me around. Otto Bingham was standing on his front porch, looking across to the boardinghouse.

“Hi,” I said.

Otto jumped at the sound of my voice.

“Nice night,” I went on, “if you’re a polar bear.”

He nodded in my general direction, then turned back around and put his hand on the door handle.

With an internal flash of light and heat, I’d suddenly had enough. Enough of Tucker, enough of Stephen, the library board, and definitely enough of this man, who had spoken to me only once in all the times I’d been friendly to him, and even then it had been a short and strange conversation.

“Mr. Bingham,” I said firmly, using my librarian voice as I marched up to him. “Why do you walk away from me almost every time I talk to you? If I’ve done something to offend or anger you, please tell me so I can make amends. It seems as if you’re avoiding me, and I hate being on bad terms with my neighbors.”

Otto Bingham stood quietly, his hand still on the oval doorknob. “I’m . . . I’m not avoiding you. It’s just . . .” He stopped talking and shook his head.

“Just what?” I practically shouted. “It’s my hair? You can’t stand curly hair—is that it? Or maybe you don’t like short people? Which is a silly prejudice, but that’s pretty much an oxymoron. Or, wait, you hate librarians. You were scolded by one as a small child and still haven’t recovered. Or it is that you have an innate hatred of cat hair, and, since I have a cat, you have to hate me, too?”

Suddenly, I realized that I was waving my arms and shouting at the top of my lungs. Mom would not have approved, and actually, I didn’t approve of myself, either.

I dropped my arms and took a deep breath before starting my apology about having a bad day, about being tired, about having no excuse for that kind of behavior. But before I got out the first “I’m sorry,” I heard an unexpected sound. Otto Bingham was laughing.

“It’s the curly hair,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

I peered up at him. “You’re joking, right?”

“Of course I am.” He pushed open the door to his house and stood back, inviting me in. “If you have a few minutes, I have a story to tell you.”

Who could resist a story? I sent a quick text to my aunt (At Otto’s—be home soon) and followed him inside.