Lending a Paw: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery (Bookmobile Cat Mysteries)

by Cass, Laurie

  “I ended up telling her everything,” I told Eddie. “About you stowing away, then you being the one to run over to that farmhouse. She thinks it was fate. I’m not a big believer in that kind of stuff. What do you think?”

  Eddie didn’t move.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Fate, shmate. Things don’t always happen for a reason; sometimes they just happen.” I smiled. “Zofia would agree with Kristen, I bet. She said it was fate that brought her to Aunt Frances this summer.” I put my chin on my knees. “You know, Aunt Frances took the news about Stan a little weird.”

  I thought back to breakfast, how her hand had left a mark on mine, how she’d eaten hardly a bite of food. “Maybe she’s just worried about me.” It didn’t fit, though. “Well, I’m out of ideas. What do you think, Edster?” No response. “Eddie?”

  A low buzzing noise came from my furry friend.

  Eddie was sound asleep. And snoring.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning was bright and sunshiny. “The perfect summer morning,” I told Eddie as I got dressed for work. “Too bad you’ll have to spend it inside.” He opened one eye, then closed it. I wasn’t sure if he’d been saying, “Yeah, and where will you be?” or “I’ll be inside? That’s what you think.”

  Though not likely, it was certainly possible that Eddie had found a way to get out. My houseboat was of wooden construction, lovingly assembled in a Chilson backyard years ago, in the days when I was putting freshly loosened baby teeth under my pillow. The only fiberglass on the entire boat was in the shower. I had a feeling my homemade status was what irritated my right-hand neighbor, Gunnar Olson, so much. Why he didn’t get a slip at the marina up by the point for his sleek forty-two-foot cruiser was a great mystery to many.

  “You didn’t, did you?” I asked the unmoving curl of black-and-white fur. “Find a way outside?”

  He didn’t answer. Of course, if he had figured a way out, I would be the last person he’d tell. I kissed the top of his head, did the whiteboard thing, and headed to work.

  The marina where I was moored, Uncle Chip’s Marina (now owned by Chris, Chip’s nephew), was on the southeast side of town. If there’d still been a set of railroad tracks that went through Chilson, Uncle Chip’s would have been on the wrong side of them. Relatively speaking, of course. This was an old resort town, one of those places where the same families had been summering for more than a hundred years, and even the dumpy parts of town were more tired than unkempt.

  Back in the late eighteen hundreds, the summer people came up by train or steamer in June and left in early September. In the last few decades, though, most cottages had been retrofitted with insulation and central heating. People came up for the fall colors, for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, stayed through New Year’s, and braved the snow and wind to come up skiing over the Martin Luther King and Presidents’ Day weekends.

  Then again, some things hadn’t changed a lick in eons. The Round Table was still the local diner. There was still a Joe running Joe’s Fish Market, and the movie theater, the Grand, was still showing second-run movies and their popcorn was still being popped by Penelope the Popcorn Lady.

  I walked to the library trying to think of all the changes someone Stan Larabee’s age had seen. The art galleries and antique stores must have housed other businesses in the forties, but the bank had a 1901 date on its cornerstone. The brick county courthouse had celebrated its hundredth anniversary a couple of years ago, and judging from the dust heaps in the corners of the auto parts store, that particular business had been in existence since the days of Henry Ford and the Model T.

  Then there was the library.

  Smiling, I trotted up the steps to the side entrance. The two-story L-shaped building had started life as the local school. The town had grown, more kids had enrolled, and the town fathers had decided to erect a new building to house the older students. Time passed, technology changed, and it was time to build a new elementary school. The old building, filled with Craftsman-style details, had been abandoned.

  Just before the roof was about to fall in, the library board put a bond proposal on the ballot. “The current library is stuffed to the rafters,” they said. “No room to expand. Let’s take the old school and renovate it into a library that will serve Tonedagana County for the next hundred years.”

  And that’s exactly what happened. The millage passed handily, an architect was hired, renovation commenced, and two months after I was hired, the Chilson District Library moved into its new home.

  I used my key to unlock the side door. My low heels clicked on the large square tiles of the wide hallways as I walked past the reading room with its fireplace and window seats, past the broad switchback stairs that led to the upper levels of meeting rooms, Friends of the Library book-sale room, and offices.

  Or, rather, office. Stephen’s lair was the only office on the second floor. It was a large space with a view of Janay Lake, and when the leaves were off the trees, the view included Lake Michigan. There’d been much muttering when Stephen had staked claim to the space. Let him, I’d thought. Who except Stephen would want to be up there all alone in January when the wind was howling and the snow was blowing? Double-paned windows or not, that corner office was bound to be a cold place to work.

  Only it turned out that Stephen had convinced someone to donate insulated curtains and someone else to donate a high-efficiency space heater. November through April, Stephen’s office was the warmest in the building.

  I pushed open the hinged solid slab of wood that served as the gate separating the public space from the employee area. My Saturday stint in the bookmobile collection had been productive, but there were a few things I needed to do in here. I’d originally been thrilled at the title of assistant director, but I’d quickly learned what it really meant.

  “Minnie.”

  I jumped. “Stephen! When did you get here?”

  He had the rumpled, harried look of someone who’d been working hard for hours. Which was difficult to fathom. While Stephen was organized, effective, and politically connected, he was also of the firm belief that nothing important got done before ten in the morning, and planned his arrival at the library accordingly.

  Stephen took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I need you to put together a staff meeting for this morning. Ten o’clock in the conference room. I want everyone there.” He replaced his glasses. “Everyone. Call them all in.”

  A comprehensive staff meeting two hours from now? It couldn’t be done. He knew that. He had to know that.

  “Everyone,” he repeated, and this time the command was delivered with steel.

  I watched him go. What being assistant director meant, at least in this library, was that I did whatever the director wanted me to do. I went straight to my office, riffled through my desk drawers for a staff directory, and picked up the phone.

  It took a fair amount of cajoling and some outright bribery to get everyone to come in. Most of our staff was part-time, and many had young children who needed watching, or a second job, or both. I promised doughnuts, tracked down a high school kid to babysit in the children’s section, and swore that the meeting wouldn’t take longer than an hour.

  At ten o’clock I taped signs to the exterior doors that the library would be open by eleven and shooed everyone upstairs.

  Stephen had seated himself at the head of the long conference room table. He was in a pensive pose, elbows on the polished wood, fingers interlaced, brow furrowed. The chatter and laughter that had accompanied us on the climb up the stairs fell away as we entered the high-ceilinged room. The signs of pending doom were all too easy to recognize.

  I came in last, closing the door behind me.

  Stephen glanced around. “Is this everyone?” At my nod, he positioned his glasses on the table and rubbed at his face. Which, I noted with something akin to shock, was stubbly. Stephen was always dressed impeccably. Shoes shined, pants ironed to a crease, button-down collars buttoned firmly. I felt a twinge of
misgiving.

  “I’ve called you together this morning,” he said, “because I have news that could drastically change the Chilson District Library.”

  The twinge became a tremor. I clasped my hands together and leaned against the wall. A chair would have been better, but the only empty one was next to Stephen, so I decided the wall was perfectly comfortable.

  Stephen cleared his throat. “I assume everyone has heard the news that Stan Larabee is dead.”

  Heads nodded.

  “In the last two years, I’ve had many discussions with Mr. Larabee. Matter of fact, I had the privilege of getting to know him quite well.” Stephen fingered his glasses. “In his youth, Mr. Larabee was mentored by a Chilson librarian. He always felt the books he’d been encouraged to read had much to do with his financial success.”

  If Stephen had called this meeting to tell us how libraries and librarians could be a power for good, I was going to—

  “Which is why Mr. Larabee left a generous portion of his large fortune to our library.”

  There was a short, stunned silence, which quickly erupted into a conversational babble that filled the room.

  “Sweet! Can we get new computers?”

  “But I thought his family would get all the money.”

  “Someone told me he was going to set up a foundation, you know, one of those places that gives away a little money to lots of people.”

  “I heard he was leaving everything to some university.”

  Stephen thumped the table. When everyone quieted, he said, “I have no idea of the size of Mr. Larabee’s estate, or who the other beneficiaries might be. Frankly, it’s none of our business. But there is the serious matter of Mr. Larabee’s murder. Before anything else, the killer must be found. I expect the police will be questioning each of you. I also expect each of you to cooperate fully.”

  And with that, he left.

  The buzzing started before he’d even closed the door.

  “Generous? What does that mean?”

  “Did you see Stephen’s eyes? Bloodshot red, all through. Man, I’ve never seen him look like that.”

  “The police? But we didn’t do anything. Why do they want to talk to us?”

  “But I heard they already found Larabee’s killer. One of the EMTs knew sign language, and Larabee spelled out the name of his killer right before . . . you know.”

  “No, Minnie found him, right before he died.”

  “Minnie found Stan Larabee?”

  “Yeah, when she was out in the bookmobile.”

  One by one, all the employees turned to look at me. But since that happened on a regular basis, I’d been expecting it. It had turned out that another part of my job was asking Stephen the questions the rest of the staff was too afraid to ask. Our employees ranged in age from fresh out of high school to pie-baking grandmothers, with a hefty core in the twentysomething to fortysomething range, and every single one of them came to me if they needed to ask the library director a question.

  Time and time again, I told them to ask him themselves, that he wasn’t so bad, not really. Time and time again, I was moved to pity by the looks of abject fear. “You do it, Minnie. You know how to get around him.”

  What I knew was that by aiding and abetting I was making a bad situation worse. I was being an enabler. And one of these days I’d figure out a solution.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said to the questioning eyes. “Whatever you want to know, I don’t have the answer.”

  Josh, our IT guy, said, “You got to know something.”

  “I do,” I said. Everybody leaned forward. “I know that it’s time to open the library.”

  “Aw, Minnie . . .”

  “Doughnuts are downstairs in the break room. Thanks for playing and better luck next time.”

  That got me a few laughs. I hurried out of the room and down the stairs to unlock the doors. Not even half past ten. It wasn’t uncommon for summer mornings to be slow. Maybe we hadn’t turned anyone away, maybe—

  I spotted a shape at the tall window next to the front door. A large human shape, with hands cupped around its face, peering into the library with its forehead against the glass. Which would leave a mark high enough that I’d have to stand on my tiptoes to clean it off.

  The dead bolt made a snick noise as I turned it. I opened the door and put my head out. “Mitchell, what are you doing?”

  “Huh?”

  Mitchell Koyne was about my age and I had no idea how he made a living, because he spent more time hanging out at the library than he did working at his various seasonal jobs. From our conversations, I knew he’d worked on his share of construction crews, that he did snowplowing and was a ski lift operator, but what he did to fill the gaps between seasonal jobs was another of life’s little question marks.

  My friend Holly, one of the clerks, insisted that he smuggled drugs from Canada. When I’d pointed out that he didn’t have a boat, she said, “Not that we know of.” But I couldn’t see it. Mitchell was many things, but a good liar was not one of them, and it takes lies to be a criminal.

  Now Mitchell unstuck his forehead from the window, turned his baseball cap around, and grinned at me. “Waiting for you guys to open. What’s the deal?”

  I looked up, way up. Mitchell was one of the tallest men I’d ever met. I much preferred to talk to him when he was seated. “Staff meeting.” I untaped my note. “What brings you here so early?”

  “Would you believe I’ve turned over a new leaf?”

  I headed back inside and he kept step with me. Sort of. “Does this new leaf include paying your overdue fines?”

  “Funny, Min. You’re really funny today.”

  “I thought I was funny every day.”

  “Every other, maybe.”

  We walked a few steps; then Mitchell blurted out, “What did you do this weekend?”

  That was when I knew it wasn’t the pursuit of abstract knowledge that had Mitchell here before the crack of noon. He was intelligent, computer savvy, and read a wide range of books and magazines (heavy on the science fiction), but the only other time we’d seen him in the morning was the Monday after the time change. He’d forgotten to move his clocks back and come in at a quarter to noon.

  No, this morning Mitchell was after gossip about Stan, just like everyone else.

  I stopped in front of the checkout counter. “I’ll say this once and only once.” I looked around. Half the staff was still mingling, eating doughnuts and dropping crumbs into the carpet. “You guys might as well listen, too. Yes, I found Stan Larabee. Since he was already dead, he told me nothing about his killer and he left no clues about his killer. And I didn’t know about his will. I didn’t even know he had a will.”

  “What will?” Mitchell asked. “Did he leave you a bunch of money or something?”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, swallowing down the sniffs that were suddenly coming, “I have work to do.” Then, like Stephen, I left. Only I doubted that after his speech he hurried down to the bookmobile’s circulation room and bawled his eyes out.

  • • •

  My unexpected crying attack didn’t last long, but by the time I’d washed my face and made my way back upstairs, two representatives from the sheriff’s office were at the circulation desk getting a list of employees from Holly. One was tall and thin, the other short and stout. Both looked close to retirement age. Mr. and Mr. Sprat.

  Holly Terpening was my best library friend in spite of the many differences between us. She was about my age, but was happily married, loved to cook, had two small children, a dog, and straight brown hair, and was average in height, which meant she was six inches taller than I was. Though the only commonality we shared was the love of the same books, it turns out that’s enough for a strong friendship.

  “Are you going to want to talk to all of us?” Holly stared at the officers. “Why? I mean, none of us knew anything about the will before this morning.”

  The officers exchanged a quick glance. Hm
m. Had Stephen committed a faux pas in giving us that information?

  I shook my head. Too many television plots were rattling around inside my skull. I didn’t know the first thing about the real-life behavior of law enforcement officers and wished it could have stayed that way.

  “This one.” The tall officer pointed at a name. “That’s who we want to talk to first. Minerva Hamilton.”

  I rubbed at my eyes. Dry this time. Excellent. I pasted on a smile and went to talk to the officers.

  • • •

  Come midafternoon, Holly and Josh and I found ourselves in the break room at the same time. Josh shoved dollar bills into the soda pop machine and pushed buttons. “What’d they ask you?” The machine clunked out three cans of diet cola. One can went into the left side pocket of his baggy cargo shorts, another went into the right side pocket, and he popped the top on the third and started drinking.

  I shrugged. “The same questions the deputy asked on Friday afternoon. Why was I there, what did I see, that kind of stuff.” Over and over and over again. The only things I’d gleaned from the recent conversation was that the weapon had been a rifle and the uncomfortable knowledge that the killer had been waiting in the farmhouse for Stan to approach. This was why the back door had been open. Broken open, they’d said, with scuff marks from a boot and a fist to prove it. My hesitant question about getting prints or DNA from a fist had earned me polite smiles and what felt like a pat on the head. “Sorry, Ms. Hamilton. There was nothing to get off that door.”

  Josh lowered his soda can. “Did they ask if you knew about Larabee’s will?”

  “I said up front that I didn’t know about it.”

  “Jeez, Minnie, you’re not supposed to volunteer information. Everybody knows that.”

  Josh, as the only male on full-time staff under the age of fifty, sometimes took on the persona of Man of the World. The fact that he’d never set foot outside of Michigan’s borders didn’t dent his attitude at all.