Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery (22 page)

“True that.” Mitchell nodded seriously. “Why ruin a good morning by getting out in it, is what I say.”

I frowned and, for the first time in hours, looked at the clock on my computer.
Half past one? How can that be?

“What’re you doing, anyway?” Mitchell came around my side of the desk. “Working? Hey!” He pointed to the monitor before I could bring up another file to cover what I was doing. “You’re working on who killed Roger, too.” He put his hands flat on the edge of my desk and started reading. “Huh. You got a lot of the same stuff I did, only with more extra stuff. Like lots of details.” He read the narrative I’d been constructing all morning, the story of everything I’d learned about Roger and Denise.

He grunted and stood more or less straight. “How come you’re doing this?”

For a brief moment, I considered confiding in Mitchell. Telling him about the library board’s ultimatum, about my flashes of empathy for Denise, about my guilt and my responsibility for Roger’s death, about the possible end of the bookmobile.

My sanity restored itself a nanosecond later. The absolute last thing I needed was Mitchell’s bumbling, though well-intentioned, assistance.

“Just trying to help,” I said. Which wasn’t much of an explanation, but with any luck, he’d accept it.

“Yeah, I can see that.” He nodded. “That’s like what I’m doing here,” he said, pulling a pile of yellow legal pad sheets from where he’d stuffed them inside his coat. “Can you guess what this is? Just read; see if you can figure it out.”

It was another multipage listing of names, and this one was even longer than the list he’d prepared of all the people Roger had ever known. Much longer.

I scanned the handwritten sheets. Most of the names I didn’t recognize, but every few lines I’d pick out one that I did. Pam Fazio. Kelsey Lyons. Josh Hadden. Don Weller. Holly Terpening. Jeremy Hull. Donna Beene. Allison Korthase. Bruce Medler. Sondra Luth. Otis Rahn. Shannon Hirsch. Stephen Rangel. Minnie Hamilton.

I squinted up at Mitchell. “What’s my name doing here?”

“Yeah.” He grinned. “What kind of list do you think it is?”

As far as I could tell, it was a list of all the people who lived in Chilson. “I have no idea.”

Mitchell picked a pen out of my old ABOS coffee mug and, as he wrote a title on the top page, said the words out loud. “Anyone Who Has Ever Said Anything Bad about Denise Slade.”

I started to object, but stopped and felt ashamed of myself. Yes, every so often, I ignored my mother’s oft-repeated maxim about not saying anything if I didn’t have anything nice to say. I’d probably said uncomplimentary things about Denise, and if I’d said them within Mitchell’s hearing, I should be doubly ashamed.

“Yeah.” With a finger riddled with hangnails, Mitchell tapped at my name. “Once I heard you say that Denise sees everything in black and white. It didn’t sound
like a compliment, you know? So I had to put you down.”

Thinking about it, I had to agree.

Starting at the top of the list, Mitchell began telling me exactly why each of the names were included. Ten minutes later, he flipped to page two. “And Bruce Medler? That library-board guy? Well, this one day, I heard him—”

“Wow, I’m sorry, Mitchell,” I said, getting to my feet, “but would you look at the time? Why don’t you type all that up? Then e-mail it to me.”

“Yeah?” Mitchell gathered up his papers. “That’s a good idea, Minnie. Real good. Must be why you get the big bucks, right?”

“Right.” I ushered him out, shut the door behind him, and went back to my desk.

She sees everything in black and white.

I sat down and got to work.

D
uring my typical walk from the library to Chilson’s downtown, I made sure to admire the sunlight on the steeple of the Methodist church, the stonework on the former corner gas station–turned–real estate office, the window display in Upton’s Clothing, and the smells from Tom’s Bakery.

But instead of doing all that, this time I walked toward the deli, with my head down against the unending rain, thinking hard. Which was why I didn’t see the small child until I almost ran into him.

“Whoa!” I jumped back before I knocked the poor thing to the sidewalk. “Sorry about that.”

His mother, or at least the woman I assumed was his mother, turned around and called. “Brody, what are you doing? I told you to hang on to my coat.” Her arms were full of shopping bags, a diaper bag, and an infant. “Hurry up, now.”

But the boy, who might have been five, didn’t move. He pointed at the sky. “Look, Mommy! It’s a bald eagle!”

“That’s nice. Now hurry up. We have a lot to do.” Mommy, busy and harried, didn’t look up, but I did.
There was, in fact, a large bird floating about up in the sky, wings spread wide, head turning left and right, looking for whatever it was large birds look for. In this case, probably a late lunch.

“It’s a bald eagle,” Brody said, and it was instantly clear to me that the kid wasn’t going to move until Mom admitted that the bird was an eagle.

“Of course it is,” Mom said, sending me a busy smile. “This nice lady thinks so, too, I bet.”

I squinted up at the bird. In summer, sitting on the front of my houseboat, I’d see eagles every once in a while, but in spite of the bookmobile’s bird book, I was no expert and I didn’t want to name the bird incorrectly. Librarians aren’t big on that kind of behavior.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe, but I can’t quite see if it has a white head or not.” Even if it didn’t, if I remembered correctly from a long-ago science class, it could still be a bald eagle, a young one, since their heads didn’t get fully white until they were about five years old.

“Eagle.” Brody stomped his foot. “It’s a bald eagle.”

“Actually, it is.”

The three of us turned. Shannon Hirsch stood a few feet away, squinting a little as she watched the bird. “Big one, too, so it’s probably a female.”

“I told you.” Brody stomped his feet again, making small splashes on the wet sidewalk. “It’s a bald eagle.”

“You can tell?” Mom asked. “For sure?”

“Without any doubt.” Shannon grinned at me. “The trophies in my office? Having bizarrely sharp vision made winning all those a lot easier.”

Mom thanked her and escorted Brody to their next task.

I looked at Shannon. “Have you won anything lately?”

“Not hardly,” she said. “My competition guns are at the gunsmith for maintenance. I usually do my own cleaning, but I’ve been too busy.”

“How long have your guns been out?”

“A month. About the longest month of my life.”

“Who do you use?” I asked casually. “Someone local?”

“There’s a guy down in Grayling I trust, but he’s been slammed with work because of hunting season. I should have known better, right?” She smiled ruefully. “Well, back to the trenches.”

We made our mutual good-byes and walked off in different directions.

Inside the deli, I found myself in line—if you could call the two people in front of me a line, and once you’d lived Up North for a full year, you did—behind Pam Fazio.

“Hey there,” she said. “Didn’t you say you have a couple of nieces?”

I nodded. “Katrina is fifteen, and Sally is eleven.” I also had a nephew, Ben, who’d been born in the middle. “If you have any ideas for Christmas presents, I’m open to any and all suggestions.”

“Got a shipment yesterday,” she said, “and the container—”

There had been conversation going on around us at the occupied tables, but the instant Pam had said the word “container,” everyone stopped talking.

“Yes,” she said, laughing and spreading her arms wide in invitation. “Yesterday was container day. I’ll have everything unpacked by early next week.”

“Where was this one from?” someone asked.

“Ireland,” Pam said, putting on an Irish accent. “With lace and glass and sideboards from foggy green
coasts. With boots and books and bottles and crates full of things unseen.”

“Books?” I asked. Pam made regular trips overseas, buying hither and yon and packing everything into a massive container that got stowed on a ship and eventually arrived in northern lower Michigan.

“Of all sorts. And,” she said, winking broadly, “some lovely hand mirrors that might be just the thing for young nieces.”

It sounded perfect. “How about a present for a thirteen-year-old nephew?”

“Now, Minnie,” she said, dropping the accent. “There’s only so much even I can do for you.”

I laughed and was really, really glad that this nice woman wasn’t a killer.

*   *   *

The afternoon flew past as quickly as the morning had. Just as I was thinking that it was time to pack up and go home, my phone rang. The line was full of pops and static, and I wasn’t sure there was anyone on the other end, but I said hello and gave my name anyway.

“Minnie . . . you?”

I stood, as if that might help the reception. It didn’t, of course, but at least I’d tried. “Cade? What’s up?”

“Nothing . . . just closed . . . auction . . . price was . . . thousand dollars.”

He sounded excited, but that had to be the line’s poor quality, because there was no way he should be pleased about selling a painting for a thousand dollars. I’d looked up his work and had been shocked to find out that some of his larger paintings had sold for six figures. In front of the decimal. Not that a thousand dollars wasn’t a nice donation to the library, but I’d held out hopes for more. “Thanks for letting me know,”
I said. “I’m happy the family even considered the library.”

“Not . . . library . . . thousand . . .”

“Cade? Are you there?”

Nothing. The line wasn’t just quiet—it was dead.

I returned the receiver to its cradle. So much for the library board being thrilled with my fund-raising efforts. They’d see the thousand-dollar check, pat me on the head (in so many words), and ask what I was going to do for them next month.

“Stop that,” I said out loud. As in, stop feeling sorry for myself. Stop acting as if there was nothing I could do to find Roger’s killer. Stop acting as if there was no way to save the bookmobile. Stop acting as if I was scared of the library board and the pending lawsuit. Stop acting if I was a helpless pawn in the game of life with no options and no way out.

What I needed to do was remember how much I’d accomplished and move on from there. I was smart, on good days, and resourceful almost always. I would figure this out. Whether I’d figure it out by next Wednesday was another question, of course, but I wasn’t going to worry about that now. Right now I was going to go home and eat whatever Aunt Frances was making for dinner.

I pulled on my coat, grabbed my backpack, and was about to shut down the computer for the weekend when my e-mail program dinged with an incoming message.

Read or don’t read; that was the question.

“Don’t read,” I said, and powered down. Whatever it was could wait until Monday.

*   *   *

Over a meal of fettuccini with various types of squash in some sort of olive oil–based sauce, I told Aunt
Frances about my day, about how I’d fact-checked as many of my theories as I could, and about the conclusions I’d reached.

“First, I typed up reasons why Roger could have been the intended victim all along.”

“Mrr,” Eddie said. He was sitting in his new favorite spot: the seat of a rocking chair that had been moved into the corner of the kitchen from the screened back porch. You would have thought rocking chairs would be anathema to a creature with a long tail, but Eddie seemed to like it. “Mrr,” he said again.

“Yeah.” I nodded agreement. “It wasn’t a very long list.” My own list had been inspired by Mitchell’s lists of names, and maybe someday I’d tell him that. Probably not, but maybe.

My conclusion, arrived at after hours of typing, researching, and thinking, was that Roger was exactly who he appeared to be. A happy man, content with his place in life and comfortable in his own skin. Maybe he had made enemies at some point, but if he had, I hadn’t found any, and that’s a hard thing to hide when you’ve lived in the same small town your entire life.

I speared a piece of squash. “So, I went with the working assumption that Denise was the intended target.”

My aunt gave an unladylike snort. “Good luck. That one has done nothing but make enemies since she was a child.” She contemplated her fork. “I suppose I should feel sorry for her. Maybe she was born that way, maybe she can’t help having a personality like a hacksaw, but there are some people who make empathy hard.”

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

Aunt Frances and I looked at him. He looked back, blinked, then started licking his front paw.

“Anyway,” I said, turning my attention back to the topic at hand, “Denise has alienated half the town.”

“Is that all?” my aunt murmured.

“But alienation,” I went on, “does not necessarily an enemy make.”

Aunt Frances got a questioning look on her face. “So what makes an enemy an enemy?”

“Exactly!” I beamed. “That was the next phase of my research.”

“You researched enemy making?” She smirked. “What did you do, Google it? Bet that turned up some interesting links.”

“Mrr!” Eddie glared in her direction.

Aunt Frances laughed. “I don’t think he likes it when I make fun of you.”

“We have a bond.”

“Sorry, Eddie,” my aunt said.

Outwardly mollified, Eddie curled himself into a cat-sized ball, thereby withdrawing himself from our conversation.

“One conclusion of my research,” I said, “is that the result of irritating someone is most often a distancing effect.”

I could see a puzzled expression on my aunt’s face, so I knew I wasn’t making complete sense. It was all straight in my head, though. “Pam Fazio, for instance. Denise annoyed her to the point that she walked out on the Friends.”

“And said that she’d only return over Denise’s dead body,” Aunt Frances added.

I squirmed a little. “Yes, but that’s just something people say. And anyway, Pam was out of the state that day on a buying trip.” A fact I’d confirmed with one of her neighbors.

Aunt Frances nodded. “Okay, we can eliminate Pam. But what about the others you’ve talked about? That new council member, Allison. Plus Jeremy Hull, Don Weller, and Shannon Hirsch.”

“Jeremy.” I lined my mental ducks up in a row. “He holds a nasty grudge against Denise for leaving his organization in a tight spot and for almost getting him fired. Plus I saw his car out there the day Roger was killed. But I confirmed that he was checking the water levels at the Jurco Dam and the timing doesn’t work. The data sheets have an entry for time of day, and Jeremy’s job hangs on being accurate, so it doesn’t make sense that he did it.”

I’d done some checking up on Jeremy and had quickly found out that although his reputation for management wasn’t outstanding, he was reported to be a top-notch environmental scientist. And he was smart; if he’d wanted to kill Denise, he would have figured out a way that didn’t include falsifying data.

“What about Don Weller?” Aunt Frances asked. “Seems to me anyone who lived next door to Denise would end up wanting to kill her.”

I grinned. “You should have seen that video he made. Don wants revenge, all right, but he didn’t hate her enough to kill her.” And I had no doubt that someday he would get his revenge. Not for a year or two—he was a decent man and would wait until the shock of losing Roger had diminished—but someday he would gleefully turn her in for some minor infraction.

“Then who’s left?” My aunt thought back. “Allison Korthase. And Shannon Hirsch.”

Shannon’s sharp eyesight and honed shooting skills made it unlikely that she would have mistaken Roger for Denise, but what if I was wrong and Roger had
been the target all along? Or maybe Shannon intended to kill both Slades, righting an old high-school wrong that had festered for years. I shivered at the thought.

“This afternoon,” I said, “I ran into Shannon, and she said her guns are at the gunsmith for maintenance. She said he was in Grayling, so I made a few calls and tracked him down. He’s had her guns for almost five weeks.”

For more than a month, Shannon’s guns had been out of her hands. Roger had died three weeks ago. Ergo, Shannon had not killed him. Okay, she could have borrowed a gun or purchased a new one, but I didn’t see it. Not for someone who’d just said the month without her guns had been the longest of her life. And that meant . . .

My aunt twirled a last bit of fettuccine onto her fork. “Have you talked to the police about this? You do realize that they’re trained investigators and are paid to do this kind of work.”

I picked at the remains of my dinner. One thing I hadn’t told Aunt Frances was that Ash Wolverson had asked me out on a date. The uncomfortable awkwardness between us would pass soon enough, but right now it was still, well, uncomfortable. And since Detective Inwood pushed the legwork of the investigation to Ash . . .

“I’ll call the detective on Monday,” I said. “Besides, I really don’t know anything, not for sure. All I have are guesses and theories.”

“But the killer doesn’t know that,” my aunt pointed out. “She or he is still out there. Denise could still be in danger.”

“That was two weeks ago,” I said. “Nothing has happened to her since then. I bet the killer got cold feet,
realized that getting away with one murder was a minor miracle, and won’t try again.”

My aunt looked at the rocking chair. “What do you think?”

Eddie opened his eyes and made a silent “Mrr.”

Aunt Frances frowned. “Are you sure he doesn’t understand us?”

“Pretty sure,” I said, but my mind was still circling with the thought that had been haunting me for days.

Anyone can commit murder.