Due or Die (2 page)

Lindsey and Nancy glanced between the mother and
daughter. Charlene was the image of her mother, Violet; in other words, she was gorgeous, but even more than that, she shared her mother’s formidable intelligence and love of literature.

Violet had been a stage actress in New York in her youth, while Charlene was currently a local newscaster in New Haven, but both women had the ability to command the attention of any room they entered. Lindsey figured it must be in their genetic code.

“Nicely played, Mom.” Charlene laughed and Violet bowed her head in acknowledgment. “But I thought we were discussing E. M. Forster today. What have I missed?”

“Not much,” Nancy said. Her blue eyes twinkled as she added, “Just Violet being testy because Lucy didn’t go off with George right away.”

“Not much of a book if Lucy picked the right man at the start,” Charlene said. She pulled the ripple afghan she was working on out of her project bag. It was the perfect weather to work on a blanket, and hers was coming together nicely in rows of black, gray and country blue.

The small room boasted cushy chairs and a toasty fire in the gas fireplace. Recently, Lindsey had added a couple of short bookshelves where she kept extra copies of crafting books for the club to peruse during meetings.

The lone large window in the room looked out over the town park and offered a picturesque view of the bay beyond. Today the sea was a deep gray, reflecting the steely cold January skies that loomed above.

The crafternoon club met every Thursday in this small room in the Briar Creek Public Library, of which Lindsey was the director, to work on a craft, discuss their latest
book and eat. This week it had been Lindsey’s turn to provide the food, so she had baked apple cinnamon muffins, brought a large block of Brie with wheat crackers and made both coffee and tea.

“Who picked the right man at the start?” Beth Stanley asked from the doorway. She was dressed as a giant spider, and the other women watched as she turned sideways to fit her eight limbs, four of which were add-ons suspended by fishing wire from her arms, through the doorway.

“Here let me help you,” Mary Murphy offered as she followed Beth into the room and held the back of Beth’s story time costume so she could wiggle out of it.

“Thanks. I have a new respect for spiders,” Beth said. “I had a heck of a time getting all my legs to go in the right direction while I read
Mrs. Spider’s Tea Party
to the kids. I whacked poor Lily Dawson on the bum with one of them.”

Lindsey exchanged a smile with Charlene. Beth was the children’s librarian and the kids adored her. Mostly because she was a big kid herself. When she did the hokey pokey, her enthusiasm made everyone in the library feel the need to put their left foot in, as it were.

Beth hung her spider outfit on the coat rack by the door, which was already straining under the weight of all their winter coats and hats, and plopped into one of the available seats.

Mary hung up her coat as well, sat beside Beth and pulled out the tea cozy she was working on for her mother. It was white with retro aqua starbursts on it. She thought it would match her mother’s vintage 1950s kitchen perfectly.

Mary was a native of Briar Creek and had grown up on one of the Thumb Islands out in the bay. Currently, she ran the Blue Anchor Café
with her husband, Ian, and was known for making the best clam chowder in the state.

Her parents still lived out on Bell Island, and Lindsey wished she could see what their vintage kitchen looked like. As she watched the cozy take shape in Mary’s skilled hands, Lindsey couldn’t help but feel the teensiest bit jealous. She had a feeling if she attempted a tea cozy, it would turn out looking like a muffler for an elephant.

“How far have you gotten in the discussion?” Mary asked.

“Not very. We were talking about how short
A Room with a View
would have been if Lucy had picked the right man from the start,” Lindsey said. She glanced at her watch. It was only fifteen minutes past the hour, which gave them plenty of time to finish their discussion. Being employees of the library, both Lindsey and Beth had to confine their crafternoon club time to their lunch hours.

Beth glanced around the group. “Well, I for one am relieved that she picked the clunker first and stayed with him. It made me feel like less of an idiot.”

Violet reached over and patted Beth’s knee in sympathy. “It happens to all of us, hon.”

“Which is why sometimes it is easier to fall in love within the safety of a book,” Nancy agreed.

“I hear that,” Charlene said.

This was one of the many reasons Lindsey loved her crafternoon friends. They were made up of all different ages, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds, but the one thing they had in common was a deep and abiding love of books. Yeah, basically, they were all nerds.

“Well, the only man I plan to date for a while is Austen’s Mr. Darcy,” Beth said. “He
always makes such a nice transitional man between boyfriends. Honestly, neither Cecil nor George is really doing it for me.”

Beth had recently gotten out of an unfortunate relationship, and Lindsey was sure it had clouded her reading of the novel.

She knew her own recent breakup had changed her take on the story. Her former fiancé, John, had taken up with one of his graduate students while she was in the midst of being downsized from her archivist job. John was a law professor at Yale and he had never seemed the type to be interested in chasing the cute, young coed, but obviously a good education was no buffer against the male midlife crisis.

Lindsey knew she was better off without him, but still it chafed to be tossed aside after five years of thinking she had found the one, especially when her career had been on the skids as well. She shook her head, refusing to dwell in the past. She had a good job in a nice town where she was surrounded by friends. Where was the down?

“Here you are, dear.” Nancy handed back Lindsey’s scarf, and it was all perfectly tidy with the extra mohair rolled into a neat little ball. How very kind and annoying.

There was a sharp knock on the door frame, and Lindsey turned, expecting to see Ms. Cole, one of her crankier library employees, standing there with her usual scowl of disapproval, but, no, it was Carrie Rushton.

Carrie was a nurse at the local hospital and an über volunteer in the community of Briar Creek. She was on several boards and committees and always seemed to be busy doing something for someone.

“Hi, Lindsey, I hate to interrupt,” she said. “But could I talk to you?”

“Absolutely.”
Happy to put her crochet aside so as to not risk tangling what Nancy had untangled, Lindsey carefully tucked it into her canvas tote bag.

She rose to her feet and crossed the room in a few strides. “What can I do for you?”

“Well.” Carrie paused and bit her lip. It looked as if she was trying to decide what to say. “Could you come to our Friends of the Library meeting tonight?”

Carrie was wearing her hospital scrubs under her winter coat, so she was on her way either to or from work. Her long, dark brown hair was knotted at the nape of her neck and fastened into place by a large plastic hair clip. Streaks of gray were just beginning to show at her temples, while a hint of wrinkles had begun to form in the corners of her eyes.

Carrie was on the short side of medium in height, and her figure was gently rounded as if she had been built specifically for giving hugs. She had a maternal softness about her that Lindsey felt sure was one of the reasons she was such a popular nurse.

“Yes, I can make it,” Lindsey said. “Any particular reason?”

Carrie let out a worried sigh. “We’re having the vote tonight.”

“A
h,” Lindsey said. Now it was all coming into focus. “Bill Sint is still mad that you’re running against him?”

“He called me a usurper,” Carrie said. She turned her nose up in the air as she said it, and Lindsey could just see Bill saying it in the same snooty way.

“I suppose he could have called you worse,” Lindsey said with a chuckle.

“The way he said it, it didn’t sound like it could be much worse.”

Lindsey patted her shoulder. “I’ll be there to keep the peace. I promise. What time?”

“We’re meeting in the lecture room at seven,” Carrie said.

The library closed at eight, but Lindsey knew that
Jessica Gallo, the library assistant for the adult department, was scheduled to work, so the reference desk would be covered and she could attend the meeting.

“I’ll see you—”

“Carrie, what is taking you so long?” a whiny voice interrupted. “I’ve been waiting for hours.”

“Markus, we’ve only been here for five minutes,” Carrie said over her shoulder. She turned back to Lindsey and said, “Sorry, he’s overtired.”

Lindsey raised her eyebrows in surprise. Carrie was apologizing for her husband, Markus Rushton, as if he were a toddler who had missed nap time.

She glanced over Carrie’s shoulder and saw a middle-aged man, bundled from his thick boots and puffy purple coat up to his scarf-wrapped head, stomping his feet behind her as if he were contemplating throwing a tantrum.

“No problem, I’ll…”

“Why do we have to be here anyway?” Markus interrupted her again. “Books are stupid. I mean who wants to waste their time reading when you can watch TV or surf the Net?”

“Excuse me,” Lindsey said.

She glanced more closely at Markus and could just make out a beaky nose and a pair of eyes that were too close together. That was all the skin he had exposed. She bit back the suggestion that he take his scarf and go for a full head wrap, but just barely.

“Oh, you’re
her
, the new librarian,” he said. He looked her up and down. “I thought people said you were hot.”

“Markus!” Carrie gasped, obviously horrified.

“What?” he asked. “The way everyone was talking about
her, I expected a little more
Baywatch
Pam Anderson and a little less old Meg Ryan.”

Lindsey blinked at him. She had no idea what to say to this. Obviously, Markus found her lacking in the looks department, but she was hard pressed to think of that as a bad thing.

Lindsey pulled her gaze away from him and looked at Carrie. “About tonight, yes, I’ll be there.”

“Thanks,” Carrie said.

“Yippity-do, can we go now?” Markus asked. “Sheesh, if you ask me, they should just sell all these old books and turn this building into someplace fun, like an arcade with mini golf. Now that would be cool.”

He turned on his heel and stomped toward the exit as if expecting Carrie to follow on his heels like a faithful puppy.

Lindsey pressed her lips together to keep herself from saying what she was thinking, which would have blistered Markus Rushton even through the layers of his purple puffy coat.

“I’m so sorry,” Carrie said. Her face flushed a deep shade of crimson. “He’s not much of a reader.”

Lindsey forced her lips to curve up. “That’s all right, not everyone is a book person.”

Carrie squeezed her hand in thanks and turned to go. “I’d better…I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll be there,” Lindsey said.

The group was silent when she sat back down in her seat. They must have heard. Lindsey blew out a breath, not knowing what to say.

“Mark Rushton is as stupid now as he was as a child,” Nancy Peyton finally said. “He went from having his mama
take care of him to having his wife take care of him. I hate to say it, but that man is a dreadful waste of space.”

“Talk about picking the wrong guy,” Charlene said. “Carrie is so nice, how did she hook up with him?”

“For exactly that reason,” Mary Murphy said. “She is too nice. We all went to high school together and Mrs. Rushton asked Carrie if she would be Mark’s prom date because no one else would go with him. Carrie said yes, and she hasn’t been able to shake loose of him ever since.”

“I heard he went on disability for a slipped disk in his back a few years ago and doesn’t even work now,” Violet said with a tsk.

“Two kids in college and poor Carrie has to do it all,” Nancy said. “She has a job, does all the cooking, cleaning and upkeep on their house. Do you know last year she reroofed her house by herself? Markus refused to help because of his back, and she couldn’t afford to hire anyone.”

“Sully and Ian went over to help,” Mary said. “They were surprised to find that Markus could pick up and move his flat-screen TV during Sunday’s football game but couldn’t apparently hammer down some shingles.”

“Now that her kids are grown, why doesn’t she leave him?” Lindsey asked.

“It must be the nurse in her,” Nancy said.

“She’s always taking care of someone,” Violet agreed.

“She’s just a good person,” Beth said.

Lindsey considered herself to be a pretty good person, but she couldn’t imagine staying with someone who treated her so badly. She wondered if Carrie ever thought about leaving Markus, but then reminded herself that it was none of her business.

“Let’s
get back to George and Cecil,” she said. She didn’t like gossiping about someone she liked. “I don’t know about you, but suddenly, Cecil is not looking so bad to me.”

There were a few sheepish laughs, and then Mary led the charge into the Brie and crackers and all thought of Markus Rushton was erased by good food and good conversation.

It wasn’t until the Friends of the Library meeting that evening that Lindsey thought again about Carrie and her marriage.

She sat on the window seat at the back of the lecture room, which had once been the upstairs study of the sea captain who had originally built the stone building that the library was housed in. Half of the second story of the main building had been knocked out to make vaulted ceilings, but this room, which seated forty people quite comfortably, had been kept for special meetings, such as tonight’s Friends of the Library meeting.

Bill Sint, Carrie’s competition for the position of president of the Friends of the Library, was dressed in a dark brown corduroy blazer with tan suede elbow patches over a pale blue turtleneck. His jeans were pressed with razor-sharp creases, and his heavy winter boots showed not a trace of the mud and slush that covered the walkways outside. Lindsey wondered how he managed that.