Due Or Die

CHAPTER 8

BRIAR CREEK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

Lindsey shrugged on her coat and was striding to the front door when Ms. Cole moved to stand in front of her.

“You’re leaving?” she asked. Although it seemed improbable, her lips puckered even more tightly in disapproval than usual. “It’s a little early for lunch, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Lindsey agreed.

She took a deep breath. She knew if she let Ms. Cole get under her skin, then they were done for in a working capacity. And although the woman drove her nuts with her lack of social skills, she was the institutional memory of the small library, and Lindsey wouldn’t want to lose her, not really.

Besides, Ms. Cole couldn’t help it if she carried a torch for the former library director, Mr. Tupper, and channeled her disappointment in love into disapproval of Lindsey. Still, Lindsey was the boss and she did not take orders from Ms. Cole.

“There is an emergency with the Friends of the Library, but no worries. I’ll be back in time for my meeting, and Jessica is here to cover the reference desk while I’m gone. If you need me, call my cell phone.”

Ms. Cole opened her mouth to protest but Lindsey made a preemptive strike by adding, “I know with your experience and skill, Ms. Cole, you’ll be able to handle anything that comes up.”

Before the lemon could say a word, Lindsey pulled on her gloves and strode through the front door.

Nancy was just parking her vintage powder blue Mustang behind the police station when Lindsey arrived. Since the library was just a few doors down from the police station, Lindsey was able to get there in just moments. Nancy must have put the stomp on her gas pedal to have gotten here so fast, which made Lindsey even more uneasy about the situation.

Emma Plewicki was manning the front desk when they walked in. She shook her head at the sight of them, as if she should have been expecting this but somehow hadn’t.

She was in her standard-issue blue uniform, the winter version with long sleeves. Her thick, shoulder-length hair was cut in a stylish sweep, which framed her heart-shaped face becomingly. She was pretty enough that Lindsey wondered if she ever had a hard time getting criminals to take her seriously. Judging by the hardware she wore on her belt, it would be a mistake a criminal wouldn’t make twice.

Lindsey liked Emma. She came into the library a lot and had a great rapport with the teens that congregated in the youth area after school. She knew them all by name and they seemed to like her, too. If a community’s safety was built on a foundation of trust between the police and the residents, then Emma was this department’s cornerstone.

“Lindsey, Nancy,” Emma greeted them. “Carrie’s in back talking to Chief Daniels and a state investigator.”

“Why the handcuffs, Emma?” Nancy asked. “That’s not how we do things around here.”

“This is a murder investigation,” Emma said. “Everything has to be done according to regulation. It may not seem like it, but it’s to protect Carrie.”

Lindsey noticed that she dropped her gaze to the countertop when she spoke. Clearly, she wasn’t as comfortable with this as she’d have them believe.

“Horse feathers,” Nancy snorted. “Since when did you start talking in police speak?”

“It’s my job,” Emma snapped, looking annoyed.

“The medical examiner gave a time of death, didn’t he?” Lindsey asked.

Emma gave her a sharp glance, and Lindsey knew she had reasoned it right. Emma sighed and confirmed, “Mark Rushton was killed between four and eight last night.”

“Making Carrie a viable suspect,” Nancy said.

Emma didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

“Can we see her?” Nancy asked.

Emma shook her head. “Not while they are questioning her.”

“Does she have an attorney?” Lindsey asked.

“She declined,” Emma said.

Lindsey swore under her breath. The one thing she had learned while engaged to a law professor who specialized in criminal law was to always have an attorney present when being questioned by police or going in front of a judge. The law was such a labyrinth of legalese that you needed one just to navigate the ins and outs.

“Listen, I got a really unsettling phone call on my office line at the library,” Lindsey said. “I’d like for you to hear it.”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “Can you retrieve it from any phone?”

“Yes,” Lindsey said. Emma turned the desk phone around so that it faced her.

Lindsey quickly dialed the number to hear her voice mail, queued up the message and handed the receiver to Emma.

She watched the officer’s face as she listened. A frown formed in between her eyes and she gave Lindsey a searching look.

“Interesting,” she said. “Hang on one second, would you?”

She handed Lindsey the receiver and then went to another desk in the back of the room. She opened a drawer and came back to the main desk with a mini tape recorder in her hand.

“Let’s play that again,” she said. She held up the recorder to the receiver, and when it was done, she clicked it off. “Do me a favor and save that message, okay?”

Lindsey nodded and took the receiver back. When prompted, she saved the voice mail message and then hung up.

Nancy glanced between them, but neither Lindsey nor Emma explained. Lindsey had a feeling Emma wanted to keep it quiet until they talked to Marjorie. To Nancy’s credit, she didn’t press.

“Can you do us a favor and tell Carrie that we’re here?” Nancy asked. “So she doesn’t feel so alone.”

“Of course,” Emma said. She pushed back from the counter and strode toward the back.

“Well, we may as well have a seat,” Lindsey said. “There’s no telling how long this will take.”

“I can wait,” Nancy said. “Why don’t you head back to the library? You don’t want to give Ms. Cole a reason to suggest your termination to the board.”

“Do you really think she’d do that?”

“The lemon? Are you kidding?” Nancy asked. “You know she wanted your job, right?”

“No, I didn’t,” Lindsey said. “Huh. I thought she always gave me a hard time because she was in love with Mr. Tupper.”

“What?” Nancy gaped. “The lemon had the hots for Tupper? No way!”

“According to Beth,” Lindsey said. “But why didn’t she tell me that Ms. Cole wanted my job?”

“She may not have known,” Nancy said. “I only know because Milton was on the hiring committee. The committee members were the only ones who got to look over all of the applicants. He asked me, as a resident, what I thought of Ms. Cole’s people skills.”

“And you said?”

“That although she had her merits, working with people is not her gift.”

“She must have been pretty upset,” Lindsey said.

“Honestly, it’s hard to tell,” Nancy said. “She scowls as much as ever.”

“But she’s been there for thirty years,” Lindsey said. “And she has her degree in library science. Don’t you think she earned the promotion?”

Nancy sighed. “Can you imagine her running the Briar Creek Library? Just because you have the paper and do the time does not make you the best leader.”

They walked across the police station lobby to the line of vacant chairs placed in front of the window. They were hard plastic in a shade of orange usually reserved for bowling alleys and the department of motor vehicles. They did not invite lingering.

Nancy sat down and promptly pulled her crochet out of her tote bag. She had begun a new project, a baby blanket in aqua for her niece who was expecting a boy. It was a super-soft yarn that she was crocheting in a large circle, and she had a fluffy yellow yarn to crochet around the border to give the baby something tactile to grab.

Lindsey watched as she looped the yarn around her hook and pulled one loop and then another in a double crochet. Nancy made it look so easy it was positively annoying.

A glance at the clock and Lindsey knew she had to get back to the library. Ms. Cole would be watching, and it didn’t seem that there was anything she could do here.

“Will you call me if I can help?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Nancy said. “I’ll keep my ears open and let you know if I pick up anything.”

Lindsey stepped back and studied her merry-eyed friend. Nancy had been widowed young when her captain husband went down with his ship in a bad storm. She had never gotten over it, and during particularly bad storms, she’d been known to climb out onto the widow’s walk of her house and look for her husband’s ship.

Lindsey wondered if she was feeling a kinship with Carrie because of the dead-husband thing that brought her to this crocheting vigil she was keeping for Carrie. She would have asked, but there was no way to do it without being rude.

“Call me when she’s out,” Lindsey said.

“Will do,” Nancy agreed. “Now shoo.”

Lindsey fastened her coat closed and headed out the door. She hadn’t known that the lemon wanted her job. Suddenly, Ms. Cole’s hostility made so much more sense. It must have been very hard to be passed over for a job she had probably expected as her due. As the wind blew in off the water and yanked at the ends of her coat, causing a wicked draft to slap up inside, Lindsey tried to picture Ms. Cole in charge.

Time clocks and docked pay, no sick time, and vacations denied, that’s what it would have been, Lindsey had no doubt. The committee had been right to choose someone else, but Lindsey knew that had to fester like a boil within the lemon’s heart.

She needed to call Carole Towles, her mentor, to see if there was a better way to handle Ms. Cole. Along with Milton, Carole was her favorite member of the library board. A former librarian herself, Carole had an understanding of how to motivate staff in a positive way. Although she was presently at her winter home in Arizona, Lindsey knew she could call her and see if she had any ideas for projects to give Ms. Cole that would make her feel important but not give her power over the other staff persons.

Lindsey had never been a supervisor before her position here in Briar Creek. In fact, when she had applied for the job, she was certain her lack of supervision would keep her out of the running. To her surprise, the hiring committee had felt otherwise.

What Lindsey had come to understand over the past nine months was that her staff needed to be invested in the library in order to give it their best. If they felt they had the right to make decisions that best served their patrons and felt empowered to do so, well, their service was exemplary. The only one not embracing the flexible policies was Ms. Cole. Not a big surprise.

Still, there must be a way to utilize Ms. Cole’s unique skill set for the good of the library. She just had to figure out what it was.

Feeling marginally better about the situation, Lindsey stepped on the rubber mat in front of the library that activated the automatic doors. As the doors slid open, she stepped inside to find her library in complete chaos.