Jaded (17 page)

He barked out a laugh, then turned to look at her. She sat on the floor, her back to the boxes, the book balanced on her knees. “Ethical cheating?”

“She considered it a strategy for success, but yes, I suppose so.” She began reading. “Why roses?”

“What?”

“Why did your grandmother grow roses? It’s not an ideal climate for them.”

He went to work on another locked joint in the pipes. “She liked a challenge,” he said finally. “Every year it was a battle between her and the roses, and the climate. Some years the heat or the wind won, but most years she did.”

“She sounds tough.”

“She was determined to make her part of the world more beautiful.”

For a few more minutes they worked in silence. Alana removed gardening books and stacked them in a neat pile on top of a box, then quickly skimmed the contents of the rest of the boxes. She crossed the small space to stand next to him.

He gave an internal groan. “You found the photo albums.”

“I did indeed,” she said. “Is this you?”

He looked down at the picture of himself as a teenage boy. Shirtless, tanned, and wearing a pair of jeans with two inches of the elastic band of his boxers visible above the waistband of his jeans, he had one elbow braced on the roof of his car and the other on his hip. A smile split his face.

He hardly recognized the grinning, shaggy-haired boy in the picture. “That’s me. Uncle Nelson and I had just got the car running. I was a couple of weeks away from going home, and the deal was if I got the car running, I could take it with me.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“I thought it was a sweet deal until I realized my dad and Uncle Nelson cooked up the plan to keep me from spending the summer parked on the county roads in the backseat of a girl’s car,” he said.

This time she laughed as she flicked him a glance. Her glasses were still perched on top of her head, holding her hair back from her face. “But did it work?”

“Until I got the car running,” he said. “I had two weeks to go until I went home, and I made up for lost time in those two weeks.”

“Anyone I know?” she asked without looking up.

Absolutely.

She turned another page. “It’s none of my business.”

“It was just high school parking,” he said. “You know what it’s like.”

“I don’t actually. I went to a girls’ boarding school, then a women’s college.” She flashed him another smile, this one complete with the blush staining her cheeks.

Sometimes her innocence astonished him. Who blushed while talking about a high school rite of passage? “You’ve never been parking.”

“Not with a boy, no,” she said in a distracted little voice, her attention seemingly focused on the photo album.

His heart stopped in his chest. He felt like a bird flying solely on expectations then crashing into a freshly cleaned pane of glass. Because if she hadn’t parked with a boy, then . . .

Heat soared into his cheekbones, prickled along the back of his neck.

She flicked him a glance, then laughed—
laughed—
at him. “Look who else can blush.”

“Um . . . does that mean—?” he said.

“Yes,” she replied. “I’m such a cliché,” she said, then turned another page and pointed. “Who’s this?”

Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. He looked at the pretty blond girl on the page, her hair a tumbled mass of curls, her skin tanned and healthy, her eyes clear and unclouded. Her smile lacked the twist of bitterness that had crept in between her second and third rehab stints. She looked like she’d march out of the picture and smack someone around, and make them like it. “Tanya.”

Her eyebrows lifted, nearly sending her glasses down to her nose. “Oh. How stupid of me. Of course it is.”

“Don’t bother,” he said, cutting her off. “That was before she started using.”

Alana went back to the gardening books, and he went back to sealing the pipe. A tense silence ensued and he wondered when that boy lost the ability to charm a woman into the backseat of a car, or bed, rather than just making himself available for a one-night stand, or a series of them.

“What’s this?”

He glanced down at the page she was reading. She pointed at a tiny pencil drawing of a rose blooming around a small stone. “That,” he said as he turned back to the pipe, “is a drawing of Gran’s first engagement ring. She took it off all the time because the bud would get crusted with pie and bread dough. She’d tuck it in her apron pocket, then put it back on when she was finished. One day when she went to put it back on, it was missing. They looked inside, outside, nearly tore the house apart looking for it, but they never found it.”

“How sad!” she exclaimed.

He looked at the drawing. “I promised her I’d find it. On rainy days we’d have a treasure hunt in the house. She’d hide things for me to find, the silver candlesticks, her spoon collection. When I found them I’d take them back to the blanket fort in the living room. When I got older I took off all the baseboards, just in case the ring slipped between the cracks, look for it when I weeded the garden through the summer. It just disappeared.”

“You tried,” she said softly.

He shrugged. The memory felt distant, like someone else made that promise, searched that hard for something long gone. “I didn’t find it.”

“But she knew you cared that she lost it, and was sad about it. Did they buy a new ring?”

“Money was always tight, and she still had her wedding band. Grandpa bought her a ring for their fiftieth.”

“That’s lovely,” she mused.

The ring discussion sparked another thought in his mind. He set the wrench in the toolbox and reached in his back pocket. “Does this look familiar?”

She pursed her lips and studied the picture. “That’s Gunther Jensen, right?”

“Yes, but not the people. The ring on her finger.”

Alana tipped her glasses from her forehead to her nose and examined the picture more closely. “It’s a daisy. A really tiny daisy.”

“It’s the ring that was stolen when Gunther’s house was broken into. His wife’s gone, but he had planned to give it to his granddaughter for her sweet sixteen in a few weeks.”

Another small hum to indicate she’d heard him. “I haven’t seen it before,” she said.

“Keep your eyes open.”

“Why? You said it was stolen.”

“I went to pawn shops in Brookings today. None of them had it, but all of them said they’d think twice before they took something like this on pawn. The resale value was almost nonexistent, because the diamonds are so small.”

Alana peered up at him through those blue-rimmed glasses. “It’s a charming ring,” she said staunchly.

“It’s out of style.”

“According to men who staff pawn shops,” she pointed out, amused. “Why do you think I’ll see it?”

He didn’t respond, but her intelligence headed the list of things he liked about her.

“You think Cody did that. You think Cody broke into Gunther’s house and stole this ring, and when he can’t pawn it, he’ll hold onto it.”

She wasn’t asking a question. She was stating facts that transformed her from a rather sweetly shy woman to a staunch defender.

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s too many mouths to feed in that trailer, and his brother’s home with a felony conviction under his belt. He’ll have a hard time finding a job.”

“Cody’s certainly not eating enough,” she said, as if that made him less likely to steal, not more.

“Cody’s a kid in bad circumstances. He’ll try to do the right thing until he doesn’t have any more options. Then, who knows what he’ll do?” He sighed. “I’m not accusing him. I’m just asking you to keep your eyes open. You see more of those kids after school than I do. Maybe you’ll see it on a girl’s finger, or in someone’s bag.”

“I’ll pay attention,” she said.

“Come on a ride along with me,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because if you’re renovating the library, you need to see more of Walkers Ford and the county than just the route between the house, the library, and the Heirloom. You need to see the darker side of this town.”

“All right,” she said. “When?”

“Tomorrow night. Days are boring.”

8

T
HE SILENCE IN
the library was oddly expectant, different from the relieved quiet that settled after closing. Not even Cody’s presence changed that. Phone in hand, Alana shrugged purse, tote, and plastic take-out bag from the Heirloom onto her desk while Cody removed the wooden drop box and quickly sorted the books onto the cart. In an unspoken agreement, Cody took the Styrofoam box containing his breakfast and headed down the stairs to sort books in the basement. He paused in the doorway, box in hand, and said, “Thank you.”

The quiet words, buttressed by pride and offered with humility, diverted her attention from the list of links for reception sites she’d compiled in an e-mail. “You’re welcome,” she said.

The tips of his ears turned a dull red. “The little kids aren’t so little anymore. They eat more than they used to, but Mom’s hours were cut at the plant. Colt’s home, but he hasn’t found a job yet.”

Her throat tightened. “I’m sorry,” she said inadequately.

He shook his head. “We’ll figure something out,” he said. “We always do.”

She found when she lifted the lid from her oatmeal that she’d lost her appetite. In the hopes that if she distracted herself she’d regain her appetite, she dropped the last link into the e-mail on her iPhone and clicked Send, then shrugged out of her jacket. Freddie had asked for recommendations for movers to get her furniture and clothes moved to Toby’s flat in London.

Intending to hand off her phone to Cody, she followed the narrow staircase to the basement. In the small room the books were now sorted into various stacks: Give Away, Sell. The unsorted stack shrank nicely every day Cody worked. “Here you go,” she said, and offered Cody the phone.

“Thanks,” he said.

“What are these?” she asked as she shifted a stack at the back of the table so she could read the spines.

“Ones to sell,” he said without looking up from the phone.

His voice was too noncommittal. As if he didn’t care that she’d looked at the stack. But she was becoming an expert in noncommittal responses that were truly unemotional, and Cody couldn’t quite match Lucas’s even tone. “Oh. Good.”

Upstairs she powered up the computers, then she opened the link to the resale market Cody set up online. Three, no, four pages of books were listed, and nearly a page of sales came up. They’d need to get to the post office in the next day or two.

On a whim, she searched for one of the titles in the box in the corner. A list of used options appeared on the screen, but the cheapest price was a seller with no ratings, located in South Dakota, open for just a few days. Chalkart was the seller’s name.

Oh, Cody.

Alana rubbed the base of her thumb against her forehead, then clicked on Chalkart’s other books for sale. They matched the titles in the innocuously invisible stack, as well as several others Alana remembered from her initial survey of the boxes. She pushed her glasses up on top of her head and rubbed her eyes.

Mrs. Battle pulled open the library’s front door. “There are three universal truths to life,” she said precisely as she crossed the marble floor. “Death, taxes, and the trash that remains behind after the Walkers Ford baseball team wins an away game. Send that boy outside to pick up—what’s wrong?”

She joined Alana at the computer. Alana tilted the screen down and toward the shorter woman. “I don’t know what I’m looking at,” she said.

Alana clicked back a couple of screens. “These are the books we’re selling online.”

“Yes.”

“And these are the books matching a seemingly innocent stack downstairs that we should be selling online but are instead being sold by a brand-new retailer who lives in South Dakota and calls himself Chalkart.”

She expected exclamations of disbelief and righteous indignation. Instead the elderly woman’s face sagged a little before she spoke. “Oh.”

“I don’t know how to handle this.”

“Obviously, the right thing to do is to call Chief Ridgeway and tell him Cody is stealing from the library.”

“Is that the right thing to do? I mean, I know that’s what I
should
do. But . . . is it the
right
thing to do?”

Mrs. Battle’s cornflower blue eyes held a hint of doubt. “You’re the library director. That’s your decision.”

It was her decision, at least for a few more days. She had options. She could turn a blind eye to Cody’s theft and let whoever the mayor hired deal with the problem. He needed the money. But so did the library foundation, and in the end, it was wrong.

She looked at the clock. They had fifteen minutes until the library opened. “You’re here early.”

“We need to talk about the final proposal. I have garden club this afternoon, then a doctor’s appointment, after which I will need to lie down. You’re delaying.”

Alana straightened her shoulders. “No, I’m not.”

She took the stairs more slowly this time, walking past the Styrofoam container in the trash can just inside the door. Cody turned as she walked in, and the smile he flashed her nearly broke her heart.

“We need to talk upstairs,” she said.

The smile dimmed a little, but he followed her up the stairs. When he crossed the floor to stand by the computer, she held out her hand. The smile flicked off, then back on. He gave her the phone, but the smile disappeared when he saw the seller page on Amazon.

Shoulders hunched, chin dropped, mouth compacting back to sullen. The movements were so small and so telling. To cover her own disappointment, she skimmed through the history on the phone’s browser. Three books uploaded to the library’s sale page. Two uploaded to Chalkart’s page. The two least expensive of the five books, she noted. Honor among thieves.

“Explain this,” she said.

“You said our taxpayer dollars paid for them. You gave me one.”

“Yes, and after you left, I deposited the book’s value into the library’s fund,” she said. “Money from sales should go to the library, to the community. Not to benefit one person.”

Or three little kids who don’t get enough to eat?
She didn’t ask what he would use the money for. She knew.
Food insecurity
was a phrase she knew well, but only from program descriptions. Now food insecurity stood in front of her. See also:
angular
and
bony
and
skeletal
.