Gone With The Whisker

Chapter 9

Dinner ended up with girls on one side of the table and boys on the other. Kate, Aunt Frances, and Minnie facing Otto and Rafe. We were in the bucolic backyard of Otto and Aunt Frances’s house. Birds twittering, water bubbling out of a fountain Otto had built, leaves sighing softly overhead, all that. It was a gorgeous summer evening. Peace and contentment reigned. Life was happy and good. All was well with the world.

Except it wasn’t.

Things were a little bit off all the way around the table. Rafe was picking at his food, something so unusual I was afraid he was coming down with something. Kate was, as usual, trying to avoid me as much as possible, and even Aunt Frances seemed to be keeping her distance. Otto was the only one behaving normally, but it was hard for two people to carry a conversation for five.

I ground black pepper on my salad and thought about what to say. It was time to leap into the topic that my aunt had been avoiding the entire meal. I didn’t want to upset her, but I also didn’t want to ignore what was going on. One more bite of salad, I figured, might help, so I forked in a small pile of greens, carrot, cucumber, feta cheese, and unfortunately, an inordinate amount of pepper.

The moment the bite went in my mouth, I started coughing. Which is bad when you have a mouthful of food. I grabbed my napkin and held it to my lips as I hacked away.

Rafe looked up from his plate. “Are you okay?”

Coughing, I shook my head. Definitely not okay.

Aunt Frances turned. “Do you need the Heimlich?”

Tears streaming down my cheeks as I kept coughing, I shook my head again. Definitely did not need the Heimlich maneuver. I’d be fine in a minute; I just had to get that pepper out of my throat . . .

“Here.” Kate reached in front of Aunt Frances and picked up my water glass. “Drink.”

At that point I might have taken a drink from the River Styx if it had been put in front of me. I grabbed the glass and drank deep. And like magic, my cough disappeared.

“What was that all about?” Aunt Frances asked.

“Pepper,” Kate and I said simultaneously. This struck me as hilarious, so I laughed, but since my throat was exhausted from the coughing jag, it was a soft and spasm-y sort of laugh.

My aunt looked from Kate to me. “Must be from your mother’s side of the family.”

And there was an excellent sequel opportunity! I thanked Kate for the water, and said, “Speaking of Mom, I talked to her the other day and she asked how Cousin Celeste was doing. You knew that Kate and I were over at the boardinghouse for breakfast the other day, right?”

“That’s what you said you were going to do,” Aunt Frances said, “so I assumed you did it. And I’ve been waiting patiently ever since to hear how it went.” She sounded almost snarky, a completely un-Aunt-Frances-like tone.

I glanced at Otto. He caught my eye and shook his head the tiniest bit. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I added Pull Otto aside to my mental list of things to do before we left.

“Sorry,” I told my aunt. “You’re right, I should have called.”

“Apology accepted. And I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s just . . .” She looked off into the dark green of the trees. “It’s just different.”

“Not as much as you might think,” I said. “At least across the street. A pair of guests made Sunday breakfast and were going to try kiteboarding in the afternoon. Another pair was asking about scenic back roads, and the final pair was looking forward to having the house to themselves. So it looks like the old Saturday breakfast routine has shifted to Sunday.”

I finished with a great big smile, but Aunt Frances just stared at me. “That’s nice,” she finally said. Then she must have heard how she sounded, because she added, “Really nice.”

Rafe glanced from her to me, opened his mouth, shut it without saying anything, then opened it again. “This chicken is great, Frances. What was in the marinade?”

Since he’d barely eaten two bites of chicken, I knew full well he was doing his best to change the subject. It was good timing, though, and I flashed him a grateful smile.

Afterward, I told my aunt that Otto and I would do the dishes. “You three play a game of croquet or something,” I said to Rafe. “If you’re feeling up to it. You looked a little funny earlier.”

“Just thinking about some work stuff.” He patted my head, something I didn’t tolerate from anyone else. “I’m fine.”

I frowned. “It’s July. What work do you have?”

“Work on the house,” he said. “It’s July, silly. Why would I be thinking about school?”

I gave him a gentle push in the direction of the croquet set and carried a pile of dishes inside. Otto loaded the dishwasher and I put the food away in what I hoped were the right places.

“So earlier,” I said, “I thought Aunt Frances would be glad. About Celeste running the boardinghouse the same as she did.”

“Ah.” Otto nodded. “She is. Or she will be. What she’s dealing with now is, if my experience with retirement is any judge, a dislocation of sorts. The old way of living is gone, but the new way hasn’t settled in yet.”

That made sense. Sort of. I filed it away in my head, hoping to remember it when the time came for me to retire, which was at least thirty years off, so remembering was unlikely. “How long will it take her to get used to the new way?”

“Everybody’s different.” Otto looked out the window, where Aunt Frances was relocating the croquet wickets Rafe had haphazardly stuck in the ground. “Could be weeks, could be months. Some people never truly adjust to retirement.”

I must have made a noise, because he turned to me. “Don’t worry, Minnie. She’ll come around.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

“She will.” He smiled. “I have a plan.”

* * *

Otto’s plan, it turned out, was to take Aunt Frances on a tour of northwest lower Michigan. That she’d lived there more than forty years didn’t seem to bother him. And he was probably right, because when you live somewhere, you tend to get occupied by the work of living and don’t get around to doing the fun stuff.

He rattled off Up North summer things she hadn’t done in years. Ride the Ironton Ferry. Pick cherries. Sit on the patio at Legs and watch the sun go down over Lake Michigan. Kayak the Chain of Lakes. “And I don’t want to limit us to the northern lower part of Michigan,” Otto said. “We should tour the Soo Locks. Go up into Canada and take the Agawa Canyon train. Take the circle tour around Lake Superior.”

Ideas gushed forth, and by the time the dishes were washed and put away, he’d described activities to last five summers and I was half convinced his plan would work.

The next morning, standing and watching coffee drip down into the carafe, I wasn’t so sure.

“You look sad. What’s the matter?” Holly had just come into the library’s break room, carrying a small plate of her legendary brownies.

I hesitated, thinking about choices and consequences. Then, shushing the calorie-oriented part of my conscience, I reached for the closest brownie—which was also the biggest, but sometimes serendipity is a real thing—and said, “I’m suddenly feeling much better. What’s the occasion?”

She put the plate on the table and smiled at it. “Brian wanted a care package to take with him. These are what’s left after I boxed up his and the kids ate theirs.”

“Well, thanks for bringing any at all.” I ate a bite and closed my eyes, the better to enjoy the sensory rush. “These are so good.”

“Yep.” She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Sit down with me for a minute.”

“Sure, what’s up? Oh, hey, Mr. Goodwin. How are you this fine morning?”

The white-haired Mr. Goodwin, everyone’s favorite library patron (not that we had favorites, of course), came into the room, sniffing the air. “Does my nose deceive me? Ah, it does not!” He pointed at the brownies with his cane. “Fifty dollars to your favorite charity if I get the last one.”

Holly laughed. “No charge for you, Mr. Goodwin.”

“You sell yourself short, Holly Terpening.” He shuffled to the table and took the smallest square. “Now, tell me that Kelsey brewed the coffee, and then life will be perfect.”

“Sorry.” I smiled. It had been because of Mr. Goodwin’s self-diagnosis of caffeine deprivation that we’d opened the staff break room to the general public. It mostly worked out, except for the one time Mr. Goodwin set up the coffee. He made Kelsey’s version look like tea.

The three of us chatted for a bit, then Mr. Goodwin returned to the reading room and Holly turned back to me. “First off, what’s wrong? For a second you were looking like you did last winter when Fat Boys Pizza closed for a week.”

“Just some family stuff. I’m sure it’ll work out.”

Holly looked at me. “You don’t want to talk about it? No? Well, if you’re sure . . . what I really want to ask about is”—she glanced at the door, which was still empty—“is about Stan’s money for the library. Everyone has been saying what they want left and right, but you haven’t said a word. So I’m wondering. Do you know something we don’t?”

My response was immediate and one hundred percent truthful. “Nope.”

“Really?” Holly’s expression was disappointment mixed with a dash of disbelief and the tiniest sprinkle of hope.

“Really.” I watched the hope vanish, the disbelief fade, and the disappointment swell. “Sorry, but I just don’t. It’s a board decision. Graydon seems as clueless as we are.”

“Well, what do you think should be done with the money?” she asked. “You’re assistant director. You were interim director and could have been director if you’d wanted. So you can’t tell me you haven’t thought about how the money should be spent.”

Of course I had. And there was only one thing that made sense to me. “It’s a board decision,” I said weakly.

“Duh.” Holly rolled her eyes. “But tell me what you think.”

I smiled at the ceiling. “It would be great if they would put part of the money to buying a new bookmobile every five years.”

The current vehicle had celebrated its second birthday in late May, but we were driving over twenty thousand miles a year and new ones cost the earth and the money I’d been putting aside wouldn’t buy even a used one for roughly a hundred and ten years. I’d been told that Stan had wanted to create a foundation with enough capital to buy a new bookmobile every ten years, but I wasn’t sure Stan had written his will so tightly that it couldn’t be interpreted differently by an attorney whose clients had a different agenda.

“We all want something,” I said, wiping the corners of my mouth with a napkin.

Holly nodded, and we sat there for a moment, just thinking.

Because we all did want something and there was no way all of us were going to get what we wanted. Some of us were going to end up disappointed.

Or even all of us.

* * *

After my library day ended, I walked back to the marina through downtown. I’d felt my feet moving to go around and had corrected myself. “No way,” I told my feet, and reoriented them in the direction of the main drag. “You enjoy downtown. You like the people and the energy. You will not be afraid of getting pushed into the street again.”

More than a week after I’d fallen, I’d come to the conclusion that whatever had happened had been sheer accident. No one had tried to kill me; that was silly. No one had tried to kill me since, right? If they’d been serious about the effort, there had been plenty of times when I’d been by myself and could have been picked off by various methods without too much trouble. Ergo, it had been an accident.

“It couldn’t have been anything else,” I murmured, and promptly walked straight into a large human being.

“Sorry!” I gasped, backing up and almost running into an elderly couple and their little dog. “Sorry,” I said to them, then turned to face whoever it was I’d collided with.

He was big and tall and sturdy, and luckily, he was smiling. “Hey, Minnie,” Mitchell Koyne said. “Funny running into you here.” He laughed.

I sort of laughed back, because he clearly thought he’d made a joke. “Sorry,” I said again. “My mind was elsewhere, I guess.” We edged out of the way of foot traffic and stood next to the toy store, under the perky striped awning.

“Me too.” Mitchell hefted a broom. “The beach is a quarter mile away but somehow sand gets tracked in all day long.” He made a face. “Hate the feel of sand under my shoes.”

I wasn’t sure what was more surprising, that Mitchell knew exactly how far away the city beach was, that he was skilled in broom handling, or that he had an opinion on cleanliness. For the millionth time, I told myself not to underestimate Mitchell. All these years, he’d been hiding an upright and contributing member of society underneath an aw-shucks exterior. It had taken the love of a good woman to bring forth the butterfly from the caterpillar, and if, every so often, I missed the old Mitchell, then shame on me.

Mitchell leaned on his broom and looked down at me. That downward look was something I was used to, because most adults and many children on the planet looked down on me that way, but especially Mitchell, because he was more than a foot taller than I was. It made conversations with him a bit awkward, because if I stood a normal distance away, I risked a stiff neck, and if I inched far enough away to ease my neck pain, it looked like I was trying to escape.

“I keep meaning to talk to you about your niece.”

“Oh?” I kept my tone light, but on the inside everything from my shoulders to my toes clenched tight. Kate was insubordinate. She didn’t deal well with the customers. She was late, left early, took long breaks, and used her cell phone all day long. He needed to fire her and wanted to let me know first. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Just wanted to say that she’s a great kid.”

I blinked. “She’s . . . what?”

“Well, I figured she’d be a decent worker, being your niece and all, but she’s really good.”

“She . . . is?”

“You bet,” he said, nodding. “If all of my employees worked as hard as she does, I’d be able to hire fewer people.”

Kate was a hard worker? Pam had said much the same thing, but it was difficult to reconcile Kate the Industrious Employee with the Kate who didn’t bother to fold her clean laundry. “So things are working out?”

“Absolutely.” He beamed. “So I wanted to thank you for sending her my way, that’s all. I’ve already told her that if she wants to come back next year, she’ll probably get bumped up to—”

My phone rang loudly. “Sorry,” I said, fumbling to turn it off. But since it’s almost impossible to turn off a ringing cell phone without looking to see who’s calling, I looked and saw it was Ash.

“Um, Mitchell,” I said, “it’s great that you like Kate, and I’d love to talk more, but I need to take this call.”

“Sure. See you later,” he said, and went back to his sweeping task.

I poked at my still-ringing phone. “Hey,” I said. “Any news on the investigation front? Or is this a social call?”

“Both,” he said.

I sucked in a quick breath. His voice had been terse and grim. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s your niece. She’s been hauled in by a deputy. You’d better get over here.”