Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery (19 page)

Which it was, but even when I’d dug up a few thousand dollars to cut, Stephen had latched on to the savings as a way to reduce library costs, not as a way to transfer funds to the bookmobile. In the past few weeks, I’d sent off applications to all the grant possibilities I could think of, but I was way past the deadlines for most of them, thanks to the one that had fallen through. Still, it didn’t hurt to try.

“I think it’s silly,” Lina said, thumping her crate of books onto a solid table. “Everybody knows that you can’t maintain a solid staff through volunteers. They’re just not a reliable source for long-term operations.”

Between young Lina and Thessie, my teenage summer volunteer, I would soon learn all I needed to know about everything. Smiling, I put my milk crate next to Lina’s. “I’ll be sure to mention that to the library board at their next . . .”
Volunteers.
Denise also volunteered for other groups. And hadn’t there been a fuss about—

“What did you say?” Lina turned to me, her hands full of the books she was about to shelve.

“I’d glad you had a good time today,” I said vaguely, and tried to concentrate on what I was doing, but my
brain was fizzing about something else altogether. Because I’d finally remembered why Denise had fingered the director of a nonprofit organization as a possible murder suspect.

*   *   *

I opened the door of the Northern Lakes Protection Association and walked in. As I turned around to shut the door, I looked at Eddie, who was maybe twenty feet away in my nicely warmed-up car. “Ten minutes,” I mouthed. Since he’d protested so loudly at the unanticipated stop, I’d let him out of his carrier. He was sitting on it and staring at me out the car window, giving me the Look That Should Kill.

“You’re lucky it doesn’t,” I muttered. “Who else would feed you like I do?”

His mouth opened and closed, but I didn’t hear what he said. Which was just as well. I closed the door and turned around.

The room had been painted in shades of blue; a light blue near the ceiling morphing into a medium blue at eye height, then feathering into a dark blue at the floor. On the walls were framed maps of area lakes, and the carpet was a squiggly pattern of blue and green. The whole space made me feel as if I were underwater.

A man was sitting behind a large desk and talking on the telephone. He smiled and held up his finger. He was older than me, but not by much. Then again, he had that whipcord-thin build and hair so short it didn’t give a good clue to its color, two things that could conceal a man’s age for decades.

“Sure,” he was saying to the person on the other end of the phone. “It’s your birthday, honey. We can go anywhere you want, even if it is in the middle of the week.”
He listened. “Grey Gables? Sure. I’ll make the reservations. Seven o’clock?” He picked up a pen and scratched a note on a desk-blotter calendar for the day after next. “Yes, I’ll put it in my phone, too. Don’t worry.” He said good-bye, hung up the receiver, and looked at me. “Sorry about the wait. How can I help you?”

I introduced myself, then asked, “Are you Jeremy Hull?”

Thanks to the photos someone had so kindly placed on the NLPA’s website, I already knew I was talking to Jeremy, the organization’s director and only full-time staff member, but saying so would have felt a little like stalking.

“Sure am,” he said, pushing back from his desk. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

I sat into what I immediately realized was a seriously uncomfortable chair for someone my size. If I sat all the way back, my feet would swing in the air like a small child’s. Since that wasn’t the image I wanted to project—not now, and not ever, even when I had been a small child—I perched on the edge of the seat.

“Have you seen the bookmobile?” I asked. Jeremy nodded, smiling a little. Seeing that, I forgave him for the chair. “Ever since we started up this summer,” I said, “we’ve been having problems finding volunteers to go out on the bookmobile. In a perfect world, we’d have money to hire part-time staff, but I just don’t see that happening. I know your organization runs mostly on volunteer power, so I hoped you might have some advice.”

He laughed. “Sure. Go back to school and get a degree in computer science. Make a pile of money, then retire early and spend your time volunteering for the bookmobile.”

“Gee,” I said thoughtfully. “I never once thought of doing that.”

“And on your off days, you could spend some time here,” he said. “Just to mix it up. Wouldn’t want you to get bored.” He laughed again, only this time it didn’t sound very happy. “Volunteers are the best part of this job. And the worst.”

“So you’ve had problems, too?”

He leaned back, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stories.”

Now was the time. “I hear Denise Slade used to volunteer with your organization.”

“Denise.” He said the word in a monotone. “That’s not a story; that’s a chapter.”

“She’s the president of our Friends of the Library group,” I said. “Should I be worried?”

He sat forward and put his elbows on the desk. “Can I ask you to keep this conversation confidential?”

I’d have to tell Eddie, but I doubted that would count. “Absolutely.”

“Denise Slade,” he said, spitting out the consonants, “might be the worst thing that ever happened to Northern Lakes.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s too bad about her husband—I was even out there that day, checking levels at the Jurco Dam—but after what she did, I couldn’t find it in me to even send a card. My wife says I should forgive and forget, and she’s right, but that just hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not something I’m going to fake.”

I studied Jeremy’s tight face. “How long ago did this happen?”

“Almost a year ago, but it might as well be yesterday.”

“What did she do?”

He made a disgusted sort of noise. “She was my assistant. Worked hard, cared about the projects, talked more people into volunteering, basically made herself indispensable.”

“That all sounds okay,” I said. “What went wrong?”

“You must know Denise. What would you guess?” he asked.

I thought a moment. “That your board made a decision she didn’t agree with, something she thought was just plain wrong. She told them so in a grand and very public manner, and she walked out.”

He nodded, his mouth a straight line. “Bingo. Walked out, didn’t look back, didn’t leave any notes for the next person, didn’t finish up any of her projects—nothing. She left me with a huge mess, and the board blamed me. I almost lost my job because of her. It took a lot of scrambling to hold everything together, and I’m still not sure I’ve regained the board’s complete confidence.”

It all sounded pretty horrible, and I said so.

“Thanks.” He smiled. “So, I guess the answer to your question about volunteers is to avoid using Denise Slade. The woman is a menace.”

We chatted for a few more minutes, tossing around collaboration ideas for next summer, and I left after having exceeded my ten-minute promise to Eddie by only five minutes.

“Oh, hush,” I said as I encouraged him back into his carrier. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. It’s not like you can tell time. And even if you could, you’re not wearing a watch.”

“Mrr!”

“Yeah, back at you.”

When he didn’t respond, I looked over at him as I buckled my seat belt. “Now what are you doing?”

He was scratching the side of his carrier, going at it with his claws as if he were trying to dig a hole and escape.

“What—did Timmy fall down the well again?”

He ignored me and kept scratching.

“Even if you did escape, where would you go? The backseat?” I started the car. “And even if you got out of the car, there’s nothing over there but the parking lot for the Protection Association. Are you going to volunteer to do their valet parking?”

Eddie flopped down with a loud thud.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “That was funny.”

He turned his head, ignoring me in a very obvious way.

I laughed. “Love you, too, pal.”

*   *   *

“What is your cat doing?” Aunt Frances asked.

Before I answered, I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing. My mother would be pleased to know that at least one of her admonitions had stayed with me. “You know that wooden puzzle of the United States? It’s in the living room on the shelves with the jigsaw puzzles.”

She frowned. “The puzzle that was a gift from my grandparents the Christmas I was six.”

I hadn’t known that, and said so.

We sat at the kitchen table, listening to the sounds of a cat playing with something he shouldn’t.

My aunt’s expression was a little pensive, so I dabbed my face with my napkin and got up. In the living room, Eddie was crouched in the corner, batting at two puzzle pieces, one much larger than the other.

“You,” I told him, “are a horrible cat.” I reached down, picked up the wooden bits, and carried them and the entire puzzle back to the kitchen. I set the puzzle on the table, checked the pieces for damage and Eddie spit, and handed them to Aunt Frances.

“Michigan,” she said. “And Maryland. Do you think he was going for the M states?”

“If he was, he missed Mississippi, Minnesota, and Maine.”

“Massachusetts.” She counted on her fingers. “Seven. There’s one more.”

“Missouri.”

“Mrr.”

We looked down at Eddie. “You missed some states,” I said. “Better luck next time.”

He jumped onto my lap, then up onto the table. Before I could grab him, he swiped at the Maryland puzzle piece and sent it skittering onto the floor.

“If you’re trying to destroy them alphabetically,” Aunt Frances said, “you should take out Maine first.”

“And if you’re trying to do it geographically,” I said, picking him up and putting him on the floor, “you still got it wrong, especially if you’re trying to go west to east.”

The two humans in the room started laughing.

Eddie looked from me to Aunt Frances and back to me. Then he put his little kitty nose in the air and stalked off.

Which only made us laugh harder.

“Don’t go away mad,” I said, wiping the tears from my eyes.

“Just . . . go . . . away,” Aunt Frances managed to finish.

Eddie gave Maryland a final swipe, sending it underneath the stove.

“Hey!” I said, my laughter gone. “That wasn’t funny.”

He stopped, gave us a look that clearly said
I win—again,
and made a dignified exit.

T
he next day was a library day, and I spent the first part of the morning as I usually did, catching up on the jobs that had piled up when I was out on the bookmobile.

All was well until I opened the last of my forty-three e-mails, from a college friend who was working for a moneyed foundation, and read that she’d never heard of any grants for bookmobile operations.
There are purchasing grants, sure, but, Minnie, basically no one gives grants for operations. You know the theory, that if you can’t afford operations, you shouldn’t have purchased it in the first place. Good luck, though!

I sent her a quick thank-you and deleted her e-mail. If I deleted it, maybe it wouldn’t be true. Sure, that was it.

But I knew it wasn’t.

I put my head in my hands. What had I done? How could I have created a program that couldn’t be sustained? What had I been thinking?

Tears stung at my eyes. Tears of self-pity.

“Stop that right now.” I spoke out loud, and, instead of my own voice, I heard my mother’s. And Mom was
right—this was no time to feel sorry for myself. At this point it didn’t matter whether my championing of the bookmobile program had been the right thing to do. This was not a time for self-doubt; this was a time for action. And since, as everyone knew, action was fueled by caffeine, what I needed was a refill.

I grabbed my mug and headed for the break room. It was half past ten, a typical coffee-refill time. If I was lucky, I might even find someone to talk to.

Ten feet from the open doorway, I heard Josh and Holly arguing about something. I slowed, trying to get a handle on the topic before I entered the room, then realized they were fighting about the best way to cook a turkey. Since my opinion on that was simple and irrefutable, I was practically whistling when I entered the room.

“You are so wrong,” Josh was saying emphatically. “Hey, Minnie. What’s the best way to cook a turkey?”

I picked up the coffee carafe. “Have my Aunt Frances do it.”

Holly laughed, but Josh gave a snort of disgust. “That’s a cheater answer.”

I toasted him with my mug. “But accurate.” I couldn’t care less about the turkey-cooking methodology as long as I didn’t have to involve myself with the actual cooking.

Holly filled her own mug and ripped open two sugar packets. As she stirred them in, she asked, “Minnie, do you know if the Friends are going to have their postholiday book sale?”

“Haven’t heard.” A tickle at the back of my mind told me that I should have known, that I would have known if I hadn’t been so busy with the bookmobile. I took a tiny sip of coffee, hoping that would get rid of the tickle. “Why wouldn’t there be one?”

Holly took a sip of her coffee, grimaced, and set it down to rip open two more sugars. “It’s just that Pam Fazio was supposed to run the sale this year, and now that she’s gone, I wonder if anyone else will step up.”

I’d forgotten that Pam had been talked into doing the sale. “I’ll ask Denise,” I said. The annual postholiday book sale was held in mid-January and was the biggest winter event for the Friends. It was also the only winter event, but the sale was well attended and netted a reasonable amount of money. I would have thought they’d do better having a sale before Christmas, and had at one point said so, but the blank look I’d received had as good as said, “But we’ve always done it this way. Why would we ever change?”

Josh laughed. “I wish I could have been there to see Pam’s farewell scene.”

“If we’d known in advance,” Holly said, “we could have sold tickets.”

I sipped my coffee and realized why Holly had added so many sugars: It was a Kelsey-brewed pot. As I opened the refrigerator door and checked the sell-by date on the small jug of milk, I said, “I was out on the bookmobile that day. I missed the whole thing.”

“From what I heard,” Josh said, “it was spectacular. Pam just stood up, right in the middle of the meeting, right in the middle of whatever Denise was talking about, and walked out.”

Holly took up the tale. “Denise asked her where she was going, told her the meeting wasn’t over yet, and Pam said that it was for her.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Denise asked, ‘What do you mean, it’s over?’ and Pam said she was quitting. That the only way she’d ever come back to the Friends was over Denise’s dead body.”

He laughed again, but his laughter trickled off. “Okay, that’s not as funny now as it was before . . . well, before.” He shifted, obviously remembering Roger’s death and the probable attempt on Denise’s life, which was now public knowledge, thanks to Facebook.

I wasn’t so sure Josh’s retelling was accurate. When I’d heard it from Denise, she hadn’t used that quote, and when Pam had told me, she certainly hadn’t. Then again, would she have? And if Denise hadn’t remembered the events accurately, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Then again, maybe Josh’s version was correct. What I needed to do was talk to some other Friends and find out. Of course, what I’d probably hear was yet another version. Who could accurately remember a conversation from that long ago? I could barely remember what I had for breakfast that morning.

“Say, Minnie, I wanted to tell you.” Josh went to the doorway, looked left and right down the hallway, then came back. “I have another software update to do on Stephen’s computer. I’ll tell him it’ll only take a couple of minutes. He’s sure to stay this time, so I have it all figured out what I’ll ask him to find out if he knows about Eddie. I’m almost positive he doesn’t know, but what do you think about this?”

Josh sketched out his impending conversation, using an improbable squeaky voice for our boss, but I had a hard time paying attention to Josh’s theoretical questions to Stephen because I couldn’t steer my thoughts away from the darkest part of the just-told tale of Pam’s farewell speech.

The only way I’ll come back is over your dead body.

*   *   *

Come noon, I held down the main desk while Kelsey and Holly took their lunch breaks. In summertime, I
would have scheduled two people, but now that it was December, the tourists were long gone and the snowbirds had flown south. Foot traffic in the library was much slower, and there was occasionally time to breathe.

I had just tidied up the last of the morning’s book returns when I saw Mitchell slouch his way in. “Hey, Mitchell. What’s up?”

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Nothing.”

It sounded more like a pronouncement than a social response. “Is something wrong?” I asked, then winced inwardly.

Why,
why
had I asked him something like that when there was no Holly around to summon me with a manufactured emergency? A perky Mitchell, which was the normal version, was something I could deal with. A despondent, down-in-the-dumps Mitchell was a different entity altogether, and while I did want to help him, I was also working and couldn’t dedicate the rest of the afternoon to jollying him.

He heaved out a massive sigh. “Remember you told me to go to the cops with that list I made? After I gave it to them, I expected that they’d, you know, give me something else to do for the case. Some legwork they don’t have time for or something.”

Why he would have thought that, I had no idea, but the workings of Mitchell’s brain were a deep mystery that I didn’t in the least want to solve. “But they’re not giving you anything?”

“Nothing.” He put his hands in his pockets and stared at the floor. “Not a freaking thing. I’ve called that detective lots of times, asking if there’s anything I can do, but he says the investigation is progressing, and that’s it.” He kicked at the counter’s baseboard.
“And now when I call, I don’t even get the detective—I have to talk to some deputy.”

I turned a laugh into a cough.

“So, now what should I do?” Mitchell asked, kicking at the baseboard again.

He could stop the kicking, for one thing. Then a flash of brilliance struck. “I have an idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Well,” I said, “on TV and in movies, when the police are stuck on a case, they always go back to the beginning. Start looking at things all over again, trying to see everything from a fresh point of view.” It was the vaguest of vague ideas, but if Mitchell picked it up, it might keep him busy for a while.

He was nodding vigorously. “That’s a great idea. Go back to the beginning. Awesome. Thanks, Minnie!” He walked off, his hands still in his pockets, but with his posture straight and tall. He turned and bumped open the front door with his hip, and I was suddenly reminded of Eddie.

A new thought pinged into my head:
If my cat were human, would he be like Mitchell?

I pondered the notion and finally decided that even if Eddie took on human form, he couldn’t possibly be anything but an Eddie. No way, no how.

A woman approached the desk and put a stack of books on the counter for checkout. “Something funny?” she asked, smiling.

I laughed and said, “Almost everything, really,” and got back to work.

*   *   *

The rest of the noon hour zipped past, not so much because I was busy, but because snippets from recent conversations kept echoing around inside my head.

Anyone can commit murder.

Wrong place, but I was looking at the right time.

The only way I’ll come back is over your dead body.

Go back to the beginning.

The bits were banging into each other so much that they were starting to create new sentences all on their own. Unfortunately, none of them made sense. It was when I caught myself thinking
Anyone can look at the beginning
that I knew I had to clear my head if the afternoon was going to be at all productive. As soon as Kelsey returned, I abandoned the front desk, wolfed down my lunch of turkey sandwich and warmed-up mashed potatoes, and went out for a walk.

The snow from the other night was still on the ground, and talk was that it was going to stick this time and not be gone until April. I counted the months in my head, three times, and got to five every single time. It seemed like a lot. “But you’ll be gone before the end of April,” I said to the snow. “Won’t you?”

Happily, the snow didn’t answer, which I took as an affirmative. Snow through the first week of April was tolerable; snow after that might be reason to move to a warmer climate.

I walked downtown, enjoying the chill air in my lungs, enjoying the sight of high clouds chasing low ones, enjoying the cheery holiday displays in the storefronts, and enjoying the nearly empty sidewalks. I was having such a nice time soaking in the world and thinking about as little as possible that I almost didn’t notice when a tall, thinnish man on the other side of the street waved at me. “Afternoon, Minnie,” he said.

A blink or two later, I recognized the voice and returned Jeremy Hull’s wave. Then I stopped in my tracks as I saw him open the door of a dark blue vehicle
that wasn’t quite a sedan and wasn’t exactly an SUV. A dark blue vehicle that had half a dozen bumper stickers on its back end, one of which read
THIRTY-SEVEN MILLION ACRES IS A
LL THE MICHIGAN WE W
ILL EVER HAVE
.

I stared as Jeremy started the vehicle and drove away. Stood there staring until my feet got cold, stood there a little longer, then slowly made my way to the sheriff’s office.

*   *   *

When I was ushered to the conference room, I sat in my regular seat. For a moment I debated about walking on the wild side and taking a different chair, but I decided a sheriff’s office wasn’t the best place to start being wild.

I sat and suddenly realized that, once again, I had no book to read. Worse, there was no reading material anywhere in the room. There wasn’t anything, actually, except the table and chairs. A more boring room couldn’t possibly exist. I considered going to the front window and begging for a copy of
Law Enforcement Monthly
, or whatever their professional magazine was, but sighed and stayed in my seat.

I’d tipped my head back and was staring at the water stains on the ceiling tiles when the door opened. “I’m pretty sure that’s an armadillo,” I said, pointing up. “What do you think?”

“Sorry, but I never thought about it.” Ash Wolverson walked to the opposite side of the table and pulled out a chair.

I scrambled to sit up straight. “I thought Detective Inwood was going to talk to me.”

“He had a phone call.”

“Oh.” I put my hands on my lap. Put them on the table. Didn’t like how that felt and put them back on
my lap. Wasn’t comfortable with that, either, and wished they could disappear for a while.

Ash took out his notebook. “You had something to tell us?”

He kept his head down, but even so I detected a faint shade of red on his cheeks. It was some comfort to know that he was uncomfortable, too. As the silence started to lengthen, his color deepened, and I saw that he was, in fact, far more uncomfortable than I was. The poor guy.

“I remembered something,” I said. “From the day Roger was killed.”

Ash gave me a quick glance, then started writing as I told him about seeing the not-a-car, not-an-SUV, that it had sported a number of bumper stickers, and that I’d just seen Jeremy Hull driving in that same vehicle not far from the gas station. Jeremy had said he was at Jurco Dam, but the dam was miles from there.

“You’re sure?” Ash asked.

Once again I saw the thirty-seven-million acres sticker, saw it on the bumper, right next to the decal of the Great Lakes. “I’m sure.” I didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all, but I was sure.

He wrote a few notes and thanked me, but he didn’t once meet my eyes.

“You still think a hunter accidentally killed Roger?” I asked.

Ash’s jaw tightened. “You know I can’t talk about an active investigation.”

So what else was new? I nodded and left.

*   *   *

My return walk to the library wasn’t nearly as full of cheerful feeling as the walk out had been. Instead of a
jaunty saunter, with my head up and my spirits light, I was practically scuffing my feet, with my head down.

I didn’t want Jeremy Hull to have killed Roger. Didn’t want anyone to have killed him, really. What I wanted was for Roger to be hale and hearty. Swallowing down a clump of sorrow, which didn’t sit at all well in my stomach, I climbed the steps of Older Than Dirt.