Dangerous Alterations (20 page)

Leona’s swallow was audible. “You are?”

“What are you? Deaf?” Rose snapped. “I said it, didn’t I?”

Tori teed her hands in the air. “No fighting around the babies, you two.”

Leona turned to Rose, her mouth lifting in a smile. “You’re not so bad for an old goat, you know that?”

“Don’t tell anyone, Nana.” Rose’s head bobbed from side to side. “I’m not quite sure what I was thinking when I got down here but one thing is for sure, I wasn’t thinking about how to get back up again.”

Tori jumped to her feet then bent forward to hoist Rose upward. “Whoa. There you go. Why don’t you sit here in the rocker.”

Rose did as she was told, her gaze still riveted on Paris and her seven babies. “Nothing like Paris playing us all for a fool.”

Leona laughed. “Here I was thinking he was a male, telling him about women and dressing him up in bow ties. And all the while he was a girl. Perhaps I need new glasses.”

“Nah,” Rose countered. “It’s just life. It’s when people— or in this case, bunnies—stop surprising us that you start to worry.”

“Do you think Dixie could have purposefully started the fire in my office?” The second the words were out, Tori wished she could recall them. It was a notion she’d entertained yet hadn’t meant to share aloud. Not to this crew, anyway.

But it was too late. The statement had already drawn a gasp from Leona and a glare from Rose.

“What did you say, Victoria?” Rose spat through teeth that were suddenly clenched.

“I—I …”

“She asked if Dixie could have started the fire.” Leona raised her body up with her hands then shifted her feet to the side before settling back down on the floor beside Paris. “Isn’t that right, dear?”

“I—I …”

“How could you think such a thing?” Rose demanded.

How indeed.

She held up her hands in surrender. “Can we just pretend I didn’t say that? Chalk it up as post-traumatic stress or something? I mean, I just watched Paris become a girl and a mother in a matter of seconds.”

Leona shrugged. “It’s okay with me.”

“Well it’s not okay with me.” Rose toed the floor, finding the pace with which she wanted to rock. “Dixie may be grouchy and set in her ways, and she may be a bit of a grudge holder but—”

“A bit?” Leona repeated.

“She would never do something so destructive as set a fire and she most certainly wouldn’t do it to the library.” Rose rested her head against the back of the chair, her gaze never leaving Tori’s face. “I would have thought you’d know that by now.”

Tori sat on the edge of the bed and twisted her hands in her lap. “I did. And I do. I guess I just let the events of the past week get to me … get to my good sense.”

“Then let me help you get it back.” Rose stopped rocking long enough to look over the side of her chair at the bunnies, the glare in her eyes softening instantly. “First, there’s the matter of the fire. From what you and Georgina said when you got here this afternoon, it was deliberate. The library is a very public place. Someone saw something. So start asking.

“Second, there’s the matter of that tomcat who was murdered in the middle of the street.”

“We don’t know he was murdered,” Tori mumbled.

“Yes we do.”

She jerked her head up and stared at Rose. “We do? How?”

“Lynn called just after you left the room to talk to Leona. She said the preliminary autopsy has indicated his death wasn’t from natural causes.”

She heard the sharp intake of air through her mouth, felt the way her stomach clenched and her hands moistened at the news.

Leona looked up, too. “Was that why you were outside the door?”

Rose nodded at Leona then turned to Tori once again. “The toxicology report has been fast-tracked but his death is now classified as a murder.”

“A murder,” she whispered in echo.

“Which brings me to the next item in front of you,” Rose said. “Figuring out who killed him and why.”

Leona’s hand flew into the air. “I don’t see how or why that’s Victoria’s concern.”

Rose nodded again. “True. It’s not. But this is Victoria we’re talking about, yes?”

Leona’s ensuing silence said all that needed to be said. They knew her better than she knew herself.

“But how am I going to figure out who killed him when I don’t know anything about his life these past two years?”

“Look at what you know most recently.”

She considered Rose’s statement even as Leona asked the obvious why.

“Because it was
here
that he was killed,” Rose explained.

It made sense. It really did. But still …

“I don’t know anything about him here, either.”

“Yes you do.” Rose shifted her legs outward, a grimace masking her facial features as she did. “You know he tried to get you back and failed. And you know that he came into a large sum of money.”

“What does trying to get me back have to do with anything?” she asked.

“Perhaps a lot,” Rose mumbled as her eyes grew heavy. “Or, perhaps nothing at all. That’s what you’re going to have to figure out if you get involved in this.”

“Rose?” Leona’s hand shifted from the rabbit to Rose’s knee. “Are you okay?”

“I’m old, Leona. That means I need bifocals to see, people to scream, medication to walk without pain, and the television set to be on so I don’t get lonely.” Rose’s hand closed over the top of Leona’s. “Besides that, I’m simply wonderful.”

Silence fell over the room as each of them retreated into their own thoughts, their own worries. In the end, though, it was Leona who finally spoke.

“You get lonely, Rose?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

Leona looked from Rose to the bunnies and back again, a sparkle in her eyes making Tori suck in her breath in anticipation. Sure enough, Leona did not disappoint.

“How would you like to be a mother?”

Rose’s eyes sprang open. “What are you talking about, woman?”

Leona gestured toward the makeshift delivery room at her feet. “You can have the first pick.”

“I couldn’t keep a bunny.”

“Why not?”

“Leona is right, Rose, why not? It would be fun.”

“The first pick?” Rose whispered.

“The first pick,” Leona confirmed.

A quick burst of emotion splashed across Rose’s weathered face, prompting the woman to swipe a trembling hand across her eyes. “The gray one with the little white spot between his ears reminds me of a cat I had as a young girl.”

Tori placed her hand on top of Rose and Leona’s. “What was its name?”

“Patches.”

“Patches it is.” Leona leaned forward, her mouth nearly touching the new mother’s ear. “When you’re ready, my sweet Paris, your baby just found a wonderful home.”

As a devout reader, Tori had always considered setting to be important in literature. It set mood and tone in a very sensory way. But she’d never stopped to think of setting’s role in real life until just that moment.

Twenty-four hours earlier, she was relatively relaxed in Margaret Louise’s rented mountain cabin—the isolated location and rustic feel lending itself to an aura of safety. As if nothing bad could find her in the middle of the woods, surrounded by her closest friends.

Yet now that she was back among civilization, standing in the main room of the library, she didn’t feel quite so safe and it bothered her. From the moment she’d moved to Sweet Briar, the library had been her safe haven, the place where she could think her way through just about anything while feeling relatively calm and content.

Knowing that someone had deliberately set her office on fire two nights earlier changed all of that.

She said as much to Fred Granderson.

“We’ll figure out who did this, Victoria. Too many people are in and out of this building in the course of a day, people who cherish this library and cherish you. Once word gets out that this was deliberate, people will start searching their memory banks for anything they may have seen.” Fred crossed to the center of the room and shot his arms out. “The structure is sound. This room is fine. That’s why you have the green light to open as early as tomorrow if you want. But the children’s room needs a good cleaning. Might want to hold off on opening that up until the end of the week.”

She nodded in lieu of trying to speak around the lump in her throat. It wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful for the lack of damage, because she was. Things could have been a million times worse. Still, the notion that someone had set out to hurt the library was upsetting at best.

“Your office, though, is another story. That will take weeks, maybe months before it’s back to normal.” Fred pulled his arms in and fiddled with the master key ring the department held for the various public buildings in town. “You do realize that everyone is going to chip in and do what they can to get you and Ms. Morgan back in there as soon as possible, right?”

Nina.

She closed her eyes against the image of her intensely shy yet loyal assistant who was at home, feet up, awaiting the birth of her first child. The woman had been Tori’s righthand man since day one, helping her acclimate to the library and its patrons in much the way her late grandmother had taught her how to sew.

Oh, how she missed Nina’s contagious calm. Especially now.

“I know that, Fred. The people in this town are beyond generous when it comes to this library. But …” Her words trailed off as she soaked in the room—the books, the computer bank, the information desk, the reading chairs. “I guess I just feel, oh, I don’t know. I’m rambling like an idiot.”

Fred’s large hand closed over her forearm. “Are you worried someone will try to finish the job?”

“I suppose.” Though, in all honesty, that thought hadn’t crossed her mind. Yet.

“It’s not gonna happen, Victoria. Everyone is on high alert.”

“Don’t you think that for someone to take an outlet cover off the wall and install a device that’s designed to set a fire they have to be pretty motivated?”

“That’s one word to describe it.” Fred loosened his grip on Tori’s arm and stepped backward. “Though, if you ask me, I’d say angry.”

“Angry?”

He shrugged. “Not the kind of angry that makes a person snap and pour gasoline all over, but the kind that makes a person plot.”

She released a pent-up sigh. “Seems as if this town has had a lot of angry people doing angry things this past week.”

“How so?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.

It was her turn to shrug as she struggled to put into words the thoughts that had been teasing at her subconscious all day long. “Do you know about that man who died while running?”

“Sure I do.”

“The coroner apparently suspects foul play. Which means yet another person was angry enough to cause harm.” She stepped behind the information desk and sat down on the stool. “But who does these things? And why?”

Fred turned around and leaned forward on the counter, his triceps bulging from the pressure on his forearms. “I’m not a cop but I read. And all those thriller novels can’t be wrong, can they?”

“I don’t follow.”

“What drives people to kill in all those books? Revenge, greed, jealousy, betrayal, right? I imagine those same things can apply to someone who would want to set a fire, too.”

“It’s a good thing I wasn’t the killer type two years ago,” Tori quipped, the words flowing from her mouth without any sort of filter. When her brain caught up, she swallowed. Hard. “Oh, wait, that didn’t sound right.”

A smile spread across Fred’s face. “Oh no. You don’t get to say something like that and then get all prissy.”

“Prissy?” she echoed.

“C’mon, spill it, Miss Victoria. Who would you have killed two years ago?”

She shot both hands up. “I wouldn’t have killed anyone. I don’t have it in me.”

He made a face. “Like I needed you to clarify that. C’mon. Who would you have killed if you had it in you?”

She gave in. “Well, based on your list, I would have beat whoever killed Jeff to the punch. I did, after all, have betrayal and revenge as motive.”

“Whoever killed Jeff? Who’s Jeff?”

“The guy who dropped dead in the middle of Sweet Briar last week.”

Fred’s mouth hung open.

“I knew him. From Chicago. We were engaged at one time.”

His mouth slammed shut.

“He cheated on me with a mutual friend and I called off the engagement.”

A long, low whistle escaped through Fred’s lips. “Wow-ee, I had no idea.”

“It’s not exactly the kind of information you share when you’re new in town.”

He laughed. “Well, that certainly narrows the field for who might have done him in.”

“How so?”

“If he betrayed you, you can bet he betrayed some other unsuspecting female. Clowns like that have a pattern of hurting women. Makes them feel powerful, I guess.”

She considered the fire chief’s words, compared them with the things she already knew about the Jeff of today, or, rather, the Jeff of last week. Had he done the same thing to Julia that he’d done to her? And what about Kelly? She certainly seemed to think the world of Jeff at the funeral home, yet Jeff had been nothing short of rude to her in return. Ditto to how he’d talked to her on the phone while standing on Tori’s front—

“Oh. Oh my,” she mumbled. “I may have just come up with a”—she looked up, felt her face warm under Fred’s scrutiny—“never mind. I’m rambling again.”

“Sounds to me like something just rang a bell of truth in that pretty little head of yours.”

Had it? Or was she grasping at straws?

“Maybe.” She reached her arms above her head and stretched them toward the ceiling. “People are hard to figure out sometimes, aren’t they?”

Fred pushed off the counter and tipped his ball hat to Tori. “Only if you try, Victoria. Only if you try.” He repositioned his hat atop his hair and studied her closely. “Can I walk you out to your car?”