Lending a Paw

Chapter 11

“Aunt Frances?” I asked. “How could Aunt Frances have been involved with Stan?”

Eddie’s eyes were closed. He was listening, though, I was sure of it. So while I tugged socks over my feet and tied my shoes, I kept talking.

“Caroline must be wrong, that’s all. The whole last winter I did nothing but go on and on about the bookmobile and Stan donating money, and Aunt Frances said she didn’t know him at all.”

I flexed my foot and realized I’d tied the laces on my right shoe too tight. Start the day like that and you never get them the way you want them. Growling to myself, I undid the laces, pushed the shoe off with the toes of the other foot, and started over again.

“And even if she did know him, it’s outside of the realm of any reality that she . . . that she . . .” I couldn’t make myself say the words. Then a thought started to ping around inside my head. If Caroline suspected Aunt Frances of killing Stan, would she tell the police? Had she already? Should I warn Aunt Frances?

“What do you think, Mr. Ed?”

My feline flopped over on his side and batted at my elbow.

I pulled my arm away. “Quit that. I’m not a cat toy, you know.”

He gave me the humans-are-soooo-stupid look and closed his eyes again.

“Thanks so much for your help.” I lightly thumped the top of his head, making it bounce up and down like a bobblehead. “See you later, Eddie-gator.”

His mouth opened and closed without making a sound, but I knew what he meant.

Mrr.

• • •

The boardinghouse was full of the beginnings of love. Unfortunately, it resembled the second mixed-up act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream more than My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

“It turned out okay in the end, though,” I whispered to Aunt Frances. The starry-eyed, middle-aged Quincy was handing twentysomething Dena a bowl of strawberries. Paulette, who’d been picked for Quincy, was giggling with sixty-five-year-old Leo, and Zofia was chatting with Harris, who was a perfect age to be her grandson. “Hermia ended up with Lysander,” I said quietly, “and Helena with Demetrius, just like they were supposed to.”

“That was a play,” Aunt Frances whispered back fiercely. “More than four hundred years old.”

My lips twitched as I watched Quincy pass Dena the powdered sugar. Shakespeare might have written it in the late fifteen hundreds, but it was still relevant.

The eight of us ate waffles and strawberries and whipped cream and sausages until we couldn’t eat any more. “More coffee, anyone?” Zofia, the cook for the day, held up the carafe. “Minnie? Or do you need to get to the library?”

I held out my mug. “Working tomorrow afternoon, off today.”

Zofia tsked at me. “They work you too hard down there. One of these days you’re going to work yourself into illness.”

“She does it to herself,” Aunt Frances said. “She makes up the schedule.”

I glanced at her as I poured cream into my coffee. Aunt Frances knew perfectly well that the library had a tight budget. Payroll was the library’s largest expense and since I was salaried, working more hours myself was money in my budget’s pocket.

“Say,” Leo said. “Did they ever figure out who killed that guy you found? What was his name? Stan something.”

Since my gaze was on Aunt Frances when Leo asked his questions, I saw her flinch as clear as the horizon on a cloudless day. “Larabee,” I said quietly, still watching her.

Leo snapped his fingers. “That’s it. So, did they? Find who killed him?”

“Not as far as I know,” I said. My aunt put her silverware and napkin on her plate and stood to take the dishes to the kitchen. “Aunt Frances,” I asked, “have you heard anything?”

She stopped. “No, I haven’t. But then, why would I?”

Zofia chuckled. “You know everyone in this town. How could you not know the richest man in Chilson?”

“Well, I didn’t,” Aunt Frances said, a little too quickly. “There are lots of people I don’t know. And there are some I know far too well.” Abandoning her plate, she took quick steps to the back door and left the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.

After a short silence, Harris was the first to speak. “Wow, I’ve never seen her like that. She sure seems mad about something.”

“Oh, dear.” Zofia fiddled with her spoon. “I hope I didn’t offend her.”

Paulette poured Leo another cup of coffee. “What do you think, Leo?”

He smiled at her. “I think this is a beautiful day. How do you feel about a drive up to Cross Village and lunch at Legs?”

Dena glanced around the table, ending with me. “Shouldn’t somebody go after her? She sounded pretty upset.”

“Not to worry.” Quincy patted her shoulder, his touch lingering a beat too long. “Give her some time to work it out herself. If she’s still upset this afternoon, I’ll talk to her.”

Through it all, I said nothing.

But the worries in my brain were starting to run in tiny little circles, around and around and around.

• • •

Chris Ballou sat cross-legged on my boat’s front deck, a bilge pump in each hand. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

I was sitting on the deck, too, looking at him across the open engine hatch. “I hate questions like that.”

He grinned. “The good news is that your problem isn’t the bilge pump. I can put the old one back in and sell this to some other poor slob.”

Since I wasn’t completely ignorant of boat maintenance issues, I could see where this was going. “It’s electrical, isn’t it?”

“Got to be,” Chris said cheerfully.

“How much is it going to cost?”

“Well, that’s the bad news.”

I squinched my eyes shut and slapped my hands over my ears. “Don’t want to hear it, don’t want to hear it—”

Chris spoke loudly. “I got another set of good and bad newses.” I uncovered my ears and waited. “Bad first. Job like this on a boat like this, we’re looking at five hours if it’s easy, double that, or more, if it’s not.”

My chest went tight. Five hours of a boat mechanic’s time was equivalent to slightly less than a week of the Chilson District Library assistant director’s take-home pay. Ten hours was an amount that would require payments on my credit card for longer than I wanted to think about. My student loans were far from being paid off, my car wouldn’t be paid off for almost two years, and the houseboat loan was—

“Hey, don’t look like that,” Chris said. “You haven’t heard my good news.” He lowered his top half deeper into the engine compartment and his voice came out echoey, in a disembodied sort of way. “Rafe Niswander could do the work for you a lot cheaper.” His right hand extended up into the air. “Hand me those wire cutters, will you, Min Pin? Thanks. Yeah, Rafe used to work here, summers. He’s got those long skinny fingers that fit into tight corners no one else could reach without pulling the freaking engine.”

I’d never noticed that Rafe had long skinny fingers. I would now, though.

“But you know Rafe,” Chris said. “You’d have to work with his schedule. And he’s got that thing going with his arm right now. He says it’s good, but if it’s that good, why is he still wearing that ratty old bandage?”

Rafe. I grumped a grumpy noise to myself. Anyone with half an ounce of sense would have changed the bandage daily. Not Rafe. Oh, no, not oh-it’ll-be-fine-quit-worrying Rafe. The man needed a wife something fierce, but I couldn’t think of any woman I disliked enough.

Another couple minutes, and Chris pushed himself out into the sunlight. “There you go. All shipshape and seaworthy.”

Seaworthy I didn’t care about. “Is it lakeworthy?”

“Well.” Chris scratched his bristly chin with the end of a Phillips screwdriver. “I wouldn’t take her out on the big lake, but she’s probably okay for a one-cocktail cruise out there.” He pointed the screwdriver out at Janay Lake.

“How about tied up to the dock?”

He started putting his tools back into the red toolbox he’d brought with him. “If nothing changes, you might be fine for the season. But you know boats.”

Wind gusted my hair into my face and I reached into my shorts pockets for a hair elastic. My too-curly hair never wanted to stay in a ponytail, but better that than have my hair blowing into my mouth every time I tried to talk.

As he tidied his tools, he said, “Hey, did I tell you we’re full up?” He went on to list, slip number by slip number, the people who were up north already, the people who would be up for the Fourth of July, and the people who paid to have their boats put in the water but who rarely made it up at all.

I sat there, half listening, half not, enjoying the wind and sun on my face. Then something he said caught at me. I asked, “Did you say the Olsons wouldn’t be up until the Fourth?”

“Well, yeah. They never are.”

“But I saw some lights on board a couple of weeks ago.”

Chris was shaking his head. “Couldn’t be. There hasn’t been a car in their parking space all summer. Besides, he always calls and has me run a shakedown the week before they get here.”

He had to be right. Chris knew the marina and its inhabitants better than I knew the contents of my own closet. But still . . . “I saw lights.”

“Okay, you saw lights.” He clipped the toolbox shut and stood. “And Skeeter still says he saw a cougar up in the hills above town last year. See you later, Min-ster.” He reached out to pat me on the head with his greasy hand.

I ducked away. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks for coming over, Chris. I’ll talk to Rafe about the wiring, if you don’t mind.”

“Hey, why should I care? I like taking care of your boat, but your paycheck ain’t exactly like that one’s.” He tipped his head in the direction of Olson’s boat. “Or their pension.” He nodded at Ted and Louisa’s boat. “You’re okay, even if you’re not from here.” He grinned again, got one pat on my head before I could dodge it, and headed off.

I sat there, elbows on my knees and chin in my hands. I had seen lights on Gunnar Olson’s boat. I’d been studying the angles and there was no way I could have confused the beams from his looming boat with anything else.

But, really, who cared? It wasn’t any of my business if Gunnar or his wife had snuck up north for a quiet weekend. I yawned and pushed myself to my feet, then stopped cold.

The lights. I’d seen the lights on Gunnar’s boat the night Stan was killed.

• • •

Sunday was a quiet day at the library. We had afternoon hours only, from one until five. During the school year, most of the patrons were middle and high school students ostensibly working on homework. During the summer, the patrons were either parents looking to entertain their children, summer folks stocking up on a week’s reading, or tourists who wanted a tour of the library. Sundays in the library felt like a Sunday, somehow, and working hardly felt like working at all.

There was one consistency, however, winter, spring, summer, or fall, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, or any other day of the week.

Mitchell Koyne.

He’d started an inane conversation on Sunday, put it on hold when I shooed him out at closing, and continued it Monday afternoon when he walked into the lobby, dripping rain off his baseball hat, shirtsleeves, pant legs, and fingertips.

I spotted him as I was walking from the reference desk to my office, a stack of books and papers under each arm.

“Hey, Minnie,” he said. “I think I figured out what we should do if we get a hurricane. It all depends on the direction of the wind, of course, and since the only way we’d get a hurricane is if it came up the St. Lawrence Seaway—hurricanes die out over land, you know, so it’d have to—”

“Paper towels,” I told him.

“For a hurricane?”

“Go into the men’s room and dry yourself off with paper towels.”

“Nah, I’m good.” He shook himself like a dog and sprayed water all over the floor, a freestanding sign announcing the summer reading club, and me. “See?” He grinned, not seeing or not caring about the water droplets on my face, arms, hair, and, far, far worse, the books I was holding. “Now,” he said, “if you look at a map, you’ll see that . . . Hey, Minnie, where are you going? I got this all figured out. Minnie?”

I retreated in the direction of my office, ignoring Mitchell’s calls. There were days when Mitchell was interesting and a treat to talk to. Other days, it was front desk scramble to see who got stuck with him.

As I passed the open doorway to the break room, there was a reverberating crash of splintering china and splashing liquid. I peeked in the room and saw Holly standing with her hands to her mouth. Her wide gaze flashed to me, darted behind me, then dipped back to the monstrous mess on the floor.

“What did she do this time?” Josh shouldered past me. “Oh, great. Coffee. Nice. All sugared up, I bet. That’ll be nice to clean up. Who’s going to do it for you this time?”

“Josh,” I said sharply. “It’s just a cup of coffee.”

He snorted. “Cup of coffee today. The other day it was a whole pot. Bam! Coffee over the counters, over the floor, it even got in the refrigerator. Princess over there was too upset to clean it up, so guess who got volunteered?” He thumped his chest.

Holly started to say something, but stopped and crouched down to pick up the biggest shards of her former mug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It was an accident,” I said, trying to smile at them both. Not an easy task since they were on opposite sides of the room and neither one was looking at me, but I did my best. “These things happen.”

“Oh, yeah?” Josh smirked. “Last week Reva Shomin brought in a plate of cookies for everybody. Guess who let the full plate slip out of her hands? We didn’t get a single cookie, thanks to butterfingers over there. If we had a three-strike rule for breaking things, she’d be on her way out of here.”

I saw a tear trickle down Holly’s cheek. Enough.

“Josh!” My voice whipped his head around. “It was an accident. There’s no need to make her feel worse than she already does.”

“I don’t think—”

“What you think doesn’t matter right now. If you’re not going to help clean, why don’t you go do something more productive than mocking your coworkers?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. Though my assigned tasks in the library included personnel issues, I’d only once before had to cross over into being the disciplinarian. The experience had left me shaking, yet oddly elated. From that experience, I’d learned that it made no sense to put off tasks that you knew were going to make you uncomfortable. The delay only gave you time to worry, and what was the point of that?

“The printer in the bookmobile room is creasing the paper,” I said. “It would be great if you have time to take a look at it.”

He gave me a curt nod and stomped off.

I dropped my armloads of books onto a table. “Holly, sit down. If you don’t, you’re going to fall over into that sticky mess, then you’ll have to go home to shower and change, I won’t be able to send Mitchell over to you, and I don’t have time today to answer his questions about hurricanes.”

Her hands shook as she pulled out a coffee-free chair. “We don’t get hurricanes here, so why does he care?”

I grinned as I took the chair next to Holly. “Ask him. I dare you.”

Her smile was shaky. “No, thanks. I’ll leave him to you today, if you don’t mind. And I will clean this up, no matter what Josh says.” She cast a mournful eye at the mess. “And I would have cleaned up the other messes. I just need a minute, that’s all.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said, hesitated, then asked, “Is something wrong with Josh? He seems a little on edge.”

Holly nodded. “We all are, I think. The police are still asking questions, and now that thing with the will. Stephen’s hardly come out of his office in days. The rest of the clerks keep asking me what’s going on with him and I have to keep telling them I don’t know. Do you?”

“Going on?” Stephen himself came into the room. “Why should there be anything going on?”

I put on a smile. “Hello, Stephen. How are you today?”

He put his hands on his hips. “You never reported back to me about your talk with Caroline Grice. I’m now forced to come fetch information from you. Is she or is she not going to donate money to the library?”

My face froze. During Caroline’s revelations the other night, I’d decided that soliciting for a donation wasn’t that important. I still felt my decision was the right one, but coming up with a cover story would have been an excellent idea. “Our meeting was interrupted,” I said. “We didn’t have time to discuss anything except the—”

“Do you have another appointment with her?” he said, enunciating each consonant very, very clearly.

“Not yet, but—”

“See that you call her today,” he snapped. “More donations are imperative if we’re going to keep this library functioning at its present level.” He spun around and marched out.

“Well,” I said, turning to Holly. “That was—”

But she was gone, having slipped out the side door. I looked at the shards of former coffee mug. At the spatters of coffee.

Shards and splatters and splinters and sarcasm, and it was only Monday.

I sighed and got up to hunt down the mop and vacuum cleaner. My happy library world was falling apart and I had no idea what to do about it.

• • •

When I left work at six, light rain was still coming down. I stood in the front doorway, backpack in hand, staring out at the sodden world.

“Want a ride?” Mitchell appeared at my side, jingling a set of keys. “I’m parked right over there.” He pointed to a maroon pickup that had a beige driver’s door and a yellow hood.

“No, thanks.” I smiled. “I have a couple of errands to do on the way home.” In my youth, I’d owned cars that had looked worse than Mitchell’s, but mine had never had stacks of empty pizza boxes piled so high on the passenger’s seat that you could read “Fat Boys Pizza” from fifty feet away.

“You sure?” Mitchell squinted out into the rain. “It’s coming down pretty good.”

“Thanks, anyway.” I pushed the door open and went out into the wet.

To make good on my statement of having errands to run, I stopped at the grocery store for cheese and fresh lettuce and at the fudge store for a slab of chocolate with walnuts. Both got shoved unceremoniously into my backpack at the point of purchase, and both were slightly dented when I got home and put them on the kitchen counter. Sugar and salad. The ideal dinner to soften the edges of a cranky day.

I cut open the cheese and nicked off a small corner. “Hey, Eddie, I have a treat for you.”

No padding of cat feet, no sleepy mrrs.

“Hey. Ed.”

Silence.

I picked up the cheese and started the Eddie hunt. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”

No Eddie under the kitchen table, no Eddie behind the bench seat’s two small throw pillows. No Eddie under the kitchen sink, no Eddie under the bathroom sink.

I trod down the three steps to the bedroom . . . and found pieces of paper strewn everywhere. White bits on the floor, white bits on the bunks, white bits magically stuck to the walls.

“Eddie!” I shrieked. “What have you done?”

I crouched down to pick up two crumpled sheets of paper that looked largely intact. Underneath was Eddie, sleeping in a meat loaf shape. When the light hit his face, he blinked, yawned, and rolled over onto his side, purring.

“You are a horrible cat,” I said, scratching him behind the ears. “And as soon as I think up a suitable punishment, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Mrr,” he said, opening his eyes and looking at me intently.

“Oh. Right.” I placed the piece of cheese directly under his chin. “This is for you.”

He didn’t even sniff at it. Instead, he continued to look at me with an unpleasantly direct gaze.

“Cut that out.” I put my hand over his eyes. “You know I can’t think when you do that.”

“Mrr.” He jerked his head away.

“Yeah, to you, too.” I knelt and started gathering up his mess. “What did you destroy, anyway?” Since the boat didn’t have a second cabin, I used the second bunk as office space. Laptop in the middle, printer on a bed tray behind the laptop, papers for filing on the right, bills to pay on the left. But what Eddie had shredded was neither.

“Huh. I thought I’d thrown these away.” It was the papers I’d printed when I was trying to find a genealogical link between me and Caroline Grice. “Wasted effort,” I told a recumbent Eddie. “I found a better way to talk to her.”

Of course, that way had ended up with her accusing Aunt Frances of Stan’s murder.

He flopped down onto the two intact sheets of paper. “Mrrrrowww!”

“Chill a little, will you? No need to scare the neighbors.” I reached to gather in the biggest bits of Eddified paper. Mr. Ed scrambled to his feet, stalked to a small pile of clawed-up paper, turned to face me, and sat in the middle of it.

“Fine,” I said. “Your work, your toy. But just until bedtime.”

“Mrroww.”

“Back at you.” I snatched the unwanted cheese offering from the floor and went to make dinner.

Cats.