Wrong Side Of The Paw

Chapter 2

Julia, who’d been standing in the bookmobile’s doorway watching the scene unfold, was the first to recover enough to call 911. After she’d told the dispatcher the circumstances, given our location, and received instructions that all of us should stay away from the truck, she hung up and took a long look at Leese.

“You need to sit down,” she commanded, using her strongest stage voice. “Minnie, go inside and bring out the chair. We’ll sit Leese over there.”

She was indicating a spot near the bookmobile’s front bumper, in the sun and out of the light breeze. It was also out of view of the truck, which was certainly intentional. Nicely done, I thought, and hurried to do her bidding. First, though, I put Eddie, who I’d been clutching so hard he was starting to squiggle something fierce, into his carrier.

When I came out with the chair and put it on the sunny grass, Leese was speaking in short, awkward, and repeating sentences. “He can’t be dead, I just saw him last week. Why is he in the truck? I just saw him last week. Why is he in the truck? I don’t understand. He can’t be dead.”

But she was biddable enough that it wasn’t any problem for us to maneuver her into the chair. Her ruddy face was a peculiar shade of pale and her hands, typically strong and sure, were shaking and searching for something to do. Once she was sitting, her hands gripped each other and didn’t let go.

“Water,” I murmured.

“I’ll get mine,” Julia said quickly. “You stay out here.”

She vanished around the corner of the bookmobile, and I was glad she’d volunteered, because if I’d fetched the water, I would have had to see the truck, and then I’d remember those staring blue eyes, and—

“Hard to believe it’ll be October the day after tomorrow,” I said. Talking about the weather was banal, but it was always there to talk about, and getting Leese to talk about anything had to be better than letting her thoughts circle around inside her head.

Leese blinked. “What?”

“The weather.” I sat cross-legged on the grass in front of her. “It’s so warm, it feels like early September.”

She barked out a short noise that might have been a laugh. Probably not, but maybe. “You’re right. It is warm enough for early September.”

“Do you think this means we’ll have a mild winter?”

Weather discussions were easy and, if you encouraged them even the slightest bit, could fill hours of time. We didn’t require hours, but I did see a need to distract Leese from what lay across the parking lot for a little while.

One of the downsides about living in a rural area was the time it could take for emergency vehicles to respond. Thanks to my boyfriend, Ash Wolverson, a deputy with the Tonedagana County Sheriff’s Office, I knew where the sheriff’s satellite offices and the local fire and EMS stations were located, which was why I knew it would take at least fifteen minutes for anyone to get to us. We were in the far northeast part of the county, the least populated part with the least amount of emergency services, and even law enforcement can drive only so fast.

So Leese and I chatted about the weather and talked about the advantages of snow tires. I’d just started to edge into asking tentative questions about her father when an ambulance rolled up.

We stood as two EMTs got out of the vehicle. The driver, a blond woman in her forties, glanced from Leese to me to the bookmobile and back to Leese. “We got a report of a—”

“Over there,” I interrupted, not wanting to hear the words she was about to say. “In the bed of the truck.”

They nodded and moved away, and as they were pulling back the tarp, a police car pulled into the parking lot and a deputy I didn’t know climbed out.

After that, things moved quickly and, in retrospect, inevitably. Why I hadn’t put two and two together, I did not know, but it wasn’t until Leese was put in the back of the police car that I realized two things. One, that her father had been murdered, and two, that Leese was a prime suspect.

“I don’t understand,” I said to Julia, as we watched the police car drive away. Leese had been quiet throughout the entire episode. Now crunched up into the backseat, she was staring straight ahead.

I looked at the EMTs, who were sitting on their vehicle’s bumper. The sheriff’s deputy, a man I didn’t know, had asked them to wait to take the body away until a forensics detective arrived and cleared the scene. Judging from their slumped shoulders and crossed ankles, they were clearly bored. I thought about asking if they wanted to borrow some books, but figured they probably shouldn’t be reading on the job.

“There’s a lot about this I don’t understand,” Julia said. “But there is one thing I know for certain.”

“What’s that?”

“That you’ll figure it out.”

I shook my head. “This is beyond me.”

Julia rolled her eyes dramatically enough so that, if we’d been in a theater, the people in the back rows could have seen it. “Leese is a friend. You know she didn’t kill her dad. And you won’t let her be arrested for something she didn’t do. Ergo, if the police don’t resolve this fast, you’ll jump in where no law enforcement officer would dare to tread and risk life and limb to save your friend.”

I did my own eye roll, a very slow version. If I couldn’t match the quality, at least I could outdo her in quantity.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Julia said.

But since she was essentially right, I couldn’t.

I’d anticipated a night of fitful sleep, tossing and turning and starting awake in the middle of the night from haunted dreams of staring eyes and flashing police lights, but instead I slept like a rock from the moment my head hit the pillow to the moment my alarm went off.

Though I wasn’t sure that sleeping so soundly after the shocking events of the previous afternoon said anything positive about my character, I was pleased to wake up well rested and practically perky.

“What are you going to do today?” I asked Eddie, who was snuggled between my elbow and hip. “Hey, here’s an idea. How about if you help pack? This warm weather isn’t going to last much longer and we don’t have any real heat in here, remember?”

“Mrr,” my cat said, and, without moving a muscle, wormed his way deeper into the covers.

“Fine.” I slipped out from underneath the sheets. “Just don’t blame me if your favorite cat toys get left behind.”

In my jammies and socks, I padded across the small bedroom and into the tiny bathroom. Everything was miniaturized because our current abode was a houseboat, the cutest little houseboat imaginable, and it was our home through the warm months.

When the weather turned cold, I dragged my stack of cardboard boxes out of the storage locker that came with my boat slip rental at Uncle Chip’s Marina, packed, and hauled everything that I didn’t want to get covered with a winter’s worth of dust up to my aunt Frances’s boardinghouse.

I wasn’t sure if I truly remembered my uncle Everett, the long-dead husband of Aunt Frances, or if I just thought I remembered him from looking at old family photos. My aunt had met him in college and it was soon after he died that she’d turned the Pixley family’s summer place into what it was now.

More than once I’d been told there was an exact total of one traditional boardinghouse left in the world, the one being the place my aunt ran. I had no idea if that was accurate or not, but I did know that I loved its wide front porch, its pine-paneled living room with its fieldstone fireplace and shelves of jigsaw puzzles and board games, the massive kitchen, and the back screen porch that looked out onto a tree-filled backyard.

When I told people about my unusual living arrangements, I typically saw furrowed brows and heard murmured concerns about building equity and establishing credit. I would say something about paying off college loans, which seemed to satisfy the questioners, but the truth was I loved the winters I spent with my aunt. We were more than relatives; we were friends.

Then again, sometimes it was hard to believe that Aunt Frances and I were close blood relations. I was short; she was on the tall side. I had pale skin; she tanned easily. She was also amazingly skilled with her hands and was equally capable of building a six-panel door and of cooking a perfect lemon meringue pie. I much preferred ordering takeout over doing dishes, and still wasn’t exactly sure what a router did.

But none of that seemed to matter, because we laughed at the same things and agreed on a basic fact of life—that worrying didn’t do much good. Aunt Frances was a lot better at not worrying than I was, but I was working on being more like her.

Of course, not worrying was getting a little harder, since Aunt Frances had agreed to marry her across-the-street neighbor, the distinguished Otto Bingham. Not until next spring, she kept assuring me, but I saw no reason for them to wait and had started saying so. The stalling was starting to make me a bit nervous.

“There’s no hurry,” Otto would say.

“No?” I’d ask, arching my eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet.” After all, I was the one who’d originally shoved Otto in my aunt’s direction and I felt a degree of responsibility for the pending nuptials.

“We have a few details to work out,” my aunt would say vaguely.

“Like what?” I’d demand. “Why waste time? Just go down to the magistrate and get it done. Why are you waiting?”

My aunt would look at Otto, Otto would look at her, and they’d exchange one of those happy-couple smiles. Then they would determinedly change the subject and I’d be given the choice of being an incredible pest or letting the subject drop.

“I should start being a pest,” I told Eddie. Now showered and dressed, I was rubbing my freakishly curly hair dry with a towel. Aiming a hair dryer at my head would create a frizzy mess that could only be solved by a ponytail and a hat. “I bet I could be a really good one. After all, I’ve been getting lessons from you for a year and a half now.”

Eddie, who was on the bed in the exact same position he’d been in fifteen minutes earlier, opened one eye, then shut it.

“What was that?” I asked, doing my best to make the bed with him still flopped on top of it. “Did you say something?”

He pulled himself into a tight ball, rolled over, and said absolutely nothing.

I laughed and kissed the top of his head. “Have a good day, my friend. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

“Mrr.”

• • •

After a quick breakfast of cold cereal and orange juice—which hit my self-imposed limit of morning dishes to wash at three, because spoons counted as dishes to me—I shouldered my backpack and let myself out into the morning.

The town of Chilson rose from the shoreline of Janay Lake on a shallow slope at first, then up steeper and steeper. The houses perched on the top of the hill had amazing views and property tax bills to match.

Uncle Chip’s, the marina where I moored my boat at a cut rate in exchange for updating their budget projections, was on the east side of town, the side where normal people with normal jobs could still find affordable homes to buy.

The west side was massive houses and mansionlike lakefront cottages, a mix of new money and old money left over from the years that steamers running up from Chicago stopped at the natural harbor created by the entrance of Janay Lake into Lake Michigan.

On bookmobile days, I always drove the mile from the marina to the library, since lugging Eddie and our lunches that far would have been too hard on both me and my friendly feline. The bookmobile’s maiden voyage had included a stowaway Eddie, who’d quickly become an integral part of the operations. If I didn’t bring him along on every trip, there would be innumerable unhappy patrons, something that was best to avoid. On library days, however, unless the weather was horrific, I walked. This hadn’t been a running morning for the Ash and Minnie team, so the walk to work and back would likely be my only exercise.

The bizarre warmness of the last few days was still holding and I barely needed the nylon shell jacket I’d tossed on over my library clothes of slacks, dressy T-shirt, and loose blazer. This time of year the sun came up just before eight o’clock, and if I timed things right, I’d see the sun rise above the horizon as I entered the library.

As I walked briskly off the dock and headed up the sidewalk and toward downtown, I glanced at the house closest to the marina. When I’d moved to Chilson, it had been a ramshackle mess, a hundred-year-old family cottage long since chopped up into apartments. For decades it had been given about as much tender loving care as you’d expect from an absentee owner who seemed to care primarily about getting the rents on time.

Rafe Niswander, a friend of mine, had bought the place about four years ago. The whys of that purchase still had the coffee-drinking geezers at the local diner scratching their heads every morning, but there was no denying that Rafe was doing a fantastic job of renovation.

From top to bottom and stem to stern he’d redesigned, rewired, and replumbed. He’d fabricated crown molding to match the original, haunted building salvage stores, and researched period colors. And then he’d stare at whatever he’d done, declare it unworthy, and rip half of it out.

He’d managed to wangle an occupancy permit out of the county’s building official, but no sane person would want to live in a house that had milk crates for kitchen cabinets and a persistent drywall dust issue. None of this, however, seemed to bother Rafe. If a casual observer asked how he could live in a permanent construction zone, he would shrug, start whistling the Seven Dwarfs’ “Heigh-Ho” song, and get back to work.

When the project was done, it would be a showpiece, but the diner geezers were laying long odds on any completion date within the next five years.

Yesterday I’d heard the buzz of a floor sander when I’d come home and had stopped by to tell Rafe what had happened on the bookmobile and to remind him to wear his dust mask, a reminder I was sure he’d ignored. This morning he must have left early for his job as principal of the middle school, because the house was dark. I shied away from imagining the dust he’d created the night before and headed up the hill.

Ahead of me lay a downtown that edged into quaintness but thankfully stayed on the side of reality. The home-grown blend of old and new, brick and wood, stylish and traditional, was part of the charm of Chilson and I thought, as I almost always did while walking to work, that I was the luckiest person alive.

I unlocked the library’s side door just as the sun shot over the horizon, and let myself in.

“Minnie? Is that you?”

Of course, no life was perfect.

Strong-mindedly, I resisted the urge to turn and flee and, instead, pasted a smile on my face. “Good morning, Jennifer,” I said, advancing into the lobby. “How are you on this gorgeous morning?”

The new library director, standing tall behind the main counter, didn’t return my smile. “Well enough, I suppose.”

My former boss, Stephen Rangel, had given me a lot of latitude to do my job, for which I was still grateful. He’d also been humorless and mired in the necessity to follow rules, however arbitrary they might be. Plus, he hadn’t been a fan of the bookmobile and had provided only a grudging support throughout the early stages. (“Minerva, are you certain you’re up to this?” “Minerva, the library board only approved this project because you’d found a generous donor. How, exactly, do you plan to fund the operations?” And so on.)

We’d all expected Stephen to stay in Chilson until his retirement and he’d even confided he’d been grooming me to be his replacement. That shock had barely faded when he’d stunned everyone by announcing that he’d accepted a library director position in another state.

My coworkers had pleaded with me to apply. I’d seriously considered it, but in the end decided to pass on the opportunity. If I moved up to director, there was no way I’d have time to drive the bookmobile and I wasn’t ready to give that up.

On the other hand, if I was now the library director, I wouldn’t be facing the sleek and citified Jennifer Walker, who was sending waves of disapproval at me for no reason that I was aware of. Back before she’d started, I’d patted myself on the back for having been responsible for the library becoming the temporary home of a very rare and valuable book, thinking that the new director would be impressed at my connections and abilities. If she had, the feeling hadn’t lasted.

“What can I do for you?” I slipped my backpack off my shoulder. Into the returns bin went the books I’d finished reading, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, a comfort book published in 1948 that I’d reread for the umpteenth time.

“I asked you to reduce the bookmobile’s budget,” Jennifer said. “I expected a draft this week, yet here it is Friday and I haven’t seen anything from you.”

After Stephen’s departure, the staff had breathed a collective sigh of relief. No more didactic pronouncements, no more unfunded mandates, no more unrealistic expectations. Though I’d respected Stephen, I’d never managed to like him, and I’d looked forward to a deeper relationship with the new director.

This hadn’t happened yet.

The last of my books thunked into the return slot. Jennifer had, in fact, asked me to reduce the bookmobile’s budget. She’d also asked for it to be done by the middle of October, and this morning my phone said it was September. Just barely, but still.

Why she wanted the bookmobile’s budget reduced was a question she hadn’t yet answered. Thanks to a generous donation last winter, we had over two years of operations money in addition to a healthy budget for vehicle maintenance. There was also a small, but growing, fund for the future purchase of a replacement bookmobile.

To my way of thinking, clearly the sensible way, there was absolutely no reason to touch the bookmobile’s budget. But Jennifer had been hired by a beaming library board and it was my job to do as she asked.

“I’ve been working on some ideas,” I said, turning to face her, “and I’ll have a budget completed by your deadline, which was the middle of October.”

“When I said the middle of October,” she said to the air above my head, “that was the latest I want to see it. I fully expect to get a completed budget ahead of that time.”

“Oh.” I stared at her. How on earth I was supposed to have known that, I wasn’t sure. “I didn’t realize.”

“No? Everyone says how on the ball you are, Minnie. I assumed that would include early delivery dates of things I request.”

If I’d been a mind reader, sure.

I looked up at the bottom of her chin. “I’ll have it to you next week,” I said. “If I’d known you wanted it earlier, I would have sent it to you earlier.”

“It’s not a matter of wanting.” She smoothed the front of her jacket. “It’s a matter of your performance. As soon as you finish, please e-mail it to me.” With that, she and her high heels clicked down the tiled hallway.

I watched her open the door to the stairwell and, as she clicked up the stairs to her second-floor office, shook my head and headed to the staff break room. Normally, at this time I was the only one in the building; the only time I’d ever seen Stephen in his office before nine o’clock was the Monday after a time change when he’d been out of town and neglected to turn back the clocks in his house.

But at least Jennifer was headed upstairs. If the last few weeks were any indication, she wouldn’t be back down until after the library opened to the public at ten.

After a quick stop in the break room to start a pot of coffee, I went to my office, dropped off my backpack, grabbed my favorite coffee mug, the one emblazoned with the logo of the American Bookmobile and Outreach Services, and returned to fill up with the fuel by which the Chilson District Library operated: caffeine.

A few sips of the steaming hot nectar of the gods later, I began my morning the way I’d been doing ever since Jennifer had moved into Stephen’s office, by walking through the library and seeing what was what. Our new director had a habit of zeroing in on the slightest negative, and if I could head off those comments, maybe she’d eventually realize that the library wasn’t a total disaster or a complete mess in need of a huge overall.

“Not a mess at all,” I murmured, looking around and marveling, once again, at the gorgeous setting. We’d been in this building, which everyone still called the new library, for almost exactly four years. And even then it hadn’t been new. The residents of Chilson, when faced with the question of whether or not to fund the expensive renovations of a vacant and century-old school for the purpose of giving their jammed-packed library more space, had overwhelmingly voted to fund the project and the result was a place of pride for everyone.

The designers had opted to expand on the Craftsman style of the original building, giving us oak- paneled walls, oak ends on the shelving units, metallic tiles around the drinking fountains, and a working gas fireplace in the reading room. We had a computer lab, a Young Adult lounge area, and meeting rooms with projectors and a catering kitchen.

It was flat-out gorgeous, but Jennifer continued to find faults, so I cruised the entire place, adjusting picture frames with the precision of an art gallery manager, making note of which shelves needed books to be soldiered to the front, and making sure Gareth, the maintenance guy, hadn’t missed a single speck of dirt when vacuuming.

Satisfied that I’d done everything I could to avert Jennifer’s wrath, I returned to my office and fired up the computer. Though I hadn’t exactly lied to Jennifer about the bookmobile budget—I did have some ideas—they remained just that and I needed to move the ideas into the practical realm if I was going to make my new boss happy.

I stifled a thought that popped into my head (Nothing I do is going to make her happy), tossed down some more caffeine, and started working.

A couple of hours later, the sound of voices and footsteps penetrated my consciousness. I leaned back, stretching, and got up, mug in hand.

“Oh, no,” I said, entering the break room, dismay clear in my voice.

“Hah!” Kelsey Lyons, one of our part-time clerks, grinned at me and pushed the coffeemaker’s start button. “I was here first. Timing is everything and you don’t have it this morning.”

Though our library ran on coffee, the strength of the stuff varied widely. Donna, our seventy-one-year-old marathoner and snowshoer, preferred it weak enough that you could see through it. Holly, one of my best library friends and about my age, liked it in the middle. Josh, the IT guy, also a good friend and within a year or two of Holly and myself, preferred it the way I did, strong, but not so strong that it could pass for espresso.

Kelsey, on the other hand, would probably eat the grounds raw, but it was an unwritten rule that whoever emptied the pot could make the next one whatever strength they wished.

“Rats,” I muttered.

“You snooze, you lose,” she said, her face all sunshine and roses. Clearly, this was not going to be her first cup of the morning.

“Oh, man.” Josh, mug in hand, came to a halt in the doorway. “Please tell me you made this pot, Minnie.”

“Sorry. I was two minutes late.”

He sighed heavily. “Knew I should have waited to install that program.”

“Cut it with water,” Kelsey said.

“That’s what you always say,” Josh said, shoving his free hand into a pocket of his cargo pants. “And it always tastes like crap.”

Up until a few months ago, the stocky Josh had been a diet soda guy, shoving dollar bills into the soda machine like there was no tomorrow. Since he’d purchased his first house, however, that habit was a thing of the past.

He frowned at the coffeepot, then turned and frowned at me. “Hey, did I hear right about what happened on the bookmobile yesterday?”

Kelsey, who was in the act of deftly pulling out the coffeepot and letting the brew drip straight into her mug, asked, “Something happened? Is the bookmobile okay?”

It warmed my heart every time I realized that people were concerned about the bookmobile’s health. The library staff cared about the bookmobile. The library board cared. The downtown merchants cared. Complete strangers cared. Even people who didn’t have a library card cared, a concept that baffled me, but I’d stopped trying to understand that one.

“The bookmobile is fine,” I said. “It’s just . . .” My eyes were suddenly filled with moisture. I looked down, took a quick breath, and smoothed out my face. “Remember I told you about Leese Lacombe, that attorney who moved back north last summer? Specializing in elder law?”

Though I got two blank looks, I kept on going. “Anyway, yesterday was so warm we left the bookmobile door open. Eddie got out and, well, he found Leese’s father in the bed of the pickup truck she was driving.”

“What do you mean, Eddie found him?” Kelsey pulled away her mug and plopped the pot back down. “If her dad was with her, he couldn’t have been lost.”

“You’re not getting it,” Josh said. “He was dead.”

“He was . . .” Kelsey blinked.

I nodded. “The ambulance came, the police came, and eventually the medical examiner came.”

Kelsey gave her head a little shake, rearranging her short blond hair. “I don’t understand. What was he doing there? Had he died and she was taking him to the hospital or . . . something?”

“I don’t know.” I flashed on an image of Leese in the back of the police car, determinedly looking forward.

“The guys downtown are saying she killed him.” Josh shrugged. “Not saying she did, but that’s the talk.”

“Why is it that men talk,” Kelsey asked me, “but women gossip?”

“Don’t tell me you’re still hoping that life is going to start being fair,” I said, smiling a little. “Do your kids know you’re so unrealistic?”

She laughed. “It’s because of them that I keep on hoping.”

“Speaking of hope,” Josh said, “I heard that Jennifer is trying to find money for more computers in the lab.”

“Oh? She’s been asking me to cut the bookmobile’s budget.”

Josh smirked. “Then I guess we know where that money is going. And who better to get it than the computer lab?”

Though I’d been in the act of reaching out to fill his coffee mug, I abruptly yanked it away. “No way am I pouring you coffee after a remark like that.”

He grinned. Josh, better than anyone other than my friends Rafe and Kristen and my brother Matt, knew exactly how to push my buttons. And he probably enjoyed it more than any of them. Well, except for Matt.

“If you’d wanted to be Jennifer’s favorite,” Josh said, “you shouldn’t have let your cat puke all over her shoes.”

I tried to keep a straight face, but ended up laughing. The day Jennifer had interviewed with the library board, we’d had to abort a bookmobile run and Eddie ended up in the library for the day. In spite of my efforts to keep him contained in my office, my fuzzy friend had wandered out, made a beeline for the candidate’s Italian shoes, and rid himself of some troublesome hair balls.

“Eddie has excellent taste,” Kelsey said, giggling.

I sensed the turn the conversation was about to take, and though I wouldn’t have minded joining a Jennifer-bashing session, I couldn’t. Assistant directors didn’t do that kind of thing. Or at least they shouldn’t. “She’s working a lot of hours.”

“Check it out,” Josh said to Kelsey. “She’s sucking up to the boss when the boss isn’t even here.” He made a vacuum cleaner noise.

“Nice,” I said. “That pretty new manager of the wine store is getting to be a regular patron. If she asks about you again, I know what I’ll tell her.”

“Yeah?” he asked cautiously. “What’s that?”

“Now Josh,” I said as patronizingly as I could, “you know I always tell the truth.” I bestowed a wide smile upon him. “And now I have to get back to the business of the library. Cheers.” I toasted my friends with the sludge in my mug and headed to my office.

But though I’d intended to sit down and get straight to work, I stood at the window for some time, trying not to worry about Leese.