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

by Cass, Laurie

  The crowd clapped, whistled, and cheered. “You go, girl!” “Got a good one there, pal!”

  Sabrina and Bill paid no attention. They wrapped their arms around each other and held on as if they’d never let go.

  The fifty strangers dispersed, laughing and smiling. After I retrieved Holly’s cinnamon roll, I went along with them, unsure whether to cry for happiness or stomp my foot at human idiocy. Those two had come close to not connecting the dots. That it had taken what could have been a serious accident was silly in the extreme.

  And due to the month-ago doctor’s visit, Bill D’Arcy wasn’t a suspect for Stan’s murder. One down and far too many to go.

  I sighed and headed back to the library.

  • • •

  Via multiple text messages, Tucker and I decided on Short’s Brewing Company as the location for our second date.

  “Not Chilson,” Tucker had typed.

  “Not this county,” I’d returned.

  Short’s fit both those requirements. A happy addition to the small town of Bellaire, which was about thirty miles south of Chilson, the brewpub was famous for its wide variety of beer selections. We arrived after the Friday night dinner rush and scored a small table as soon as we walked in the door.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were eating thick sandwiches, drinking adult beverages, talking about nothing in particular, and enjoying ourselves immensely. Sooner or later we’d get around to discussing the potentially problematic issues that could doom a relationship, but right now it was time to have fun.

  I looked around the room. “You know, I don’t see a single person that I know. How about you?”

  Tucker scanned left and right. “Not even anyone I’ve seen in the ER. Which is good, because that can get awkward. Especially if he’s cooking your dinner.”

  I frowned, then figured it out. “Oh, you mean Larry? You stitched him up after he sliced and diced himself?” I made vague sword-fighting motions. “If you did as tidy a job with him as you did with Rafe, I’m sure he’s healing fine and . . .” But Tucker was shaking his head. “What?” I asked.

  “It was a broken hand, not a sewing job. He’d fractured his—” His words screeched to a halt. “What I just said. Can you forget it?”

  I flicked a stray piece of lettuce off my finger and tried to figure out why he’d ask. “Larry told me he’d cut his hand. But . . . he broke it?”

  Tucker looked at me over his sandwich. “I was way out of line to say anything. Please forget it.”

  An odd itch climbed up the back of my neck, but I nodded because I now understood what he was talking about. “Librarians know all about respecting privacy laws.”

  Tucker’s nicely broad shoulders lost a little bit of tension. “Thanks,” he said. “I’d give you a hug, but . . .” He held up his hands, still filled with gooey sandwich.

  I smiled. “Can I ask a question, instead? How hard is it to break a bone in your hand?” I laid down my sandwich, made a fist with one hand, and pressed it into the opposite open palm, pushing hard. “And how long does it take to heal?”

  If you were hitting something, say the back door of a farmhouse, how much force would it take to break your hand? How hard would you have to hit, how much damage would you inflict on yourself, how much would you inflict on what you were hitting?

  But a better question was, why had Larry lied? He’d told Kristen the injury was from softball and he’d told me he’d cut himself, yet it was really a break. Why the multiple lies? Maybe he was just one of those guys who was trying to tell the best story. Sure, that could be it.

  “It’s easier than you think,” Tucker said. “Saw a lot of it, downstate. From street fights, but also people who’d get mad and haul off and hit a wall. Metacarpals with spiral fractures? Those guys are in a world of hurt for a long time. Surgery, nerve damage, sometimes they never get their strength back a hundred percent.”

  He talked about the importance of physical therapy for full recovery and how the length of recovery varied tremendously, but all I kept hearing was the loop of my question and his initial response.

  How hard is it to break a bone in your hand?

  Easier than you think.

  • • •

  Eddie and I sat out on the houseboat’s front deck, me on the chaise lounge in shorts and sweatshirt, Eddie warming my lap as the sunset glow faded. I’d set the chaise in the exact center of the deck. No chance of any accidental fallings-in tonight.

  “Mrr,” Eddie said, snuggling in closer to me.

  “Yeah,” I told him, petting him long from head to tail. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  I’d asked Tucker if he wanted to come aboard. “Love to,” he’d said, and I’d started smiling. “But I have to work tomorrow, so I’d better get home.” So, once again, it was me and my pal Eddie hanging out.

  In a minute, I’d go figure out who was hosting the Friday night party. One dock down, maybe two. It wasn’t far. Over the quiet water I could hear music and laughter and the popping of beer cans. Eddie and I would sit here for a while and then I’d put him inside and head for the lights and the noise.

  Soon.

  The stars came out, bright in the moonless sky. The scattered white of the Milky Way eased into view. It must be at least eleven o’clock. I should find the party before the diehards were the only ones left.

  Soon.

  Eddie purred gently. “Trying to get me to stay?” I asked, resting my hand on his back, feeling the vibrations up through my arm, shoulder, and deep into my heart. “I should really go and be social.”

  He shifted and his purrs became lower and even more soothing.

  I thought about Stan, about how he’d died, how he’d lived, and about how much I owed him. I thought about my responsibilities to the library, to the ever-increasing number of bookmobile patrons, to Holly, to Aunt Frances. I thought about my obligations. Which overlapped quite a bit with the responsibilities, but wasn’t an exact match, somehow.

  What is a friend obligated to do? Did I want to be the kind of person who ran the risk of being taken advantage of, or be the kind of person who walked away? And what is a niece obligated to do? More than a friend? Less?

  I thought about the times I’d talked to the detectives. Had I been too impatient? Unrealistic in my expectations? Maybe I’d assumed too much; maybe I hadn’t listened to them just as much as they hadn’t listened to me.

  The party noises faded. Up above, a yellowy green curtain waved into view, a slow dance moving to a beat I could almost feel in my bones. The northern lights, gorgeous and unworldly, beautiful and primeval.

  I watched the show all the way to the end, hours past the time I should have gone to bed, watching and wondering.

  And thinking.

  Chapter 18

  The next day, Saturday, had been scheduled to be a Bookmobile Day. Unfortunately, the bookmobile was still in the mechanic’s garage. I’d called all the stop contacts and volunteered to bring a selection of books in my car. “Tell me what you’re interested in, and I’ll make sure I bring something that suits.”

  They’d all asked the same question: “Is Eddie going to be with you?”

  When I’d said no, there wouldn’t be enough room in my small car for books and cat, I’d gotten a universal response. “Thanks for the offer, but we’ll make do until you come around next time.”

  So instead of driving around southwestern Tonedagana County, I headed to the library itself to cover for a part-time clerk who was in the Upper Peninsula attending a family funeral.

  “You believed that story?” Josh laughed. He was in the break room, up to his elbows in printer parts. Why he hadn’t taken it to his office I didn’t know, but some questions were best left unasked, since if you asked, you ran the risk of getting an answer that included things you didn’t want to know.

  “Yes, I believed her,” I said, “and so would you if you’d seen how upset she looked.”

  He snorted. “What I see is the U.P.’s weather forecas
t of eighty degrees and sunny all weekend when it’s supposed to be maybe seventy and rainy down here. They’re saying really heavy rain, too.”

  “So young, yet so cynical.” I mock-sighed heavily and left him to his tinkering.

  I was deep into the task of processing the Friday night returns when Stephen strolled past. “Good morning, Minerva,” he said. “How are you this fine day?”

  “Uh . . .” I stared at the apparition. Though the presence in front of me resembled my boss, it couldn’t be him. Stephen had made it a Thing that he was never at the library on a Saturday. He’d said repeatedly that if he was doing his job properly, overtime hours weren’t necessary. Plus as far as I knew, Stephen had never once wasted time on the casual conversational exchanges made by everyone else in the universe. “Uh, hi. You seem . . . chipper this morning.”

  “Why, yes. Yes, I am.” He smiled broadly. “Last night we got the news that my sister and the new baby are going to be fine. Out of the woods and out of the ICU today.”

  I blinked. Stephen had a sister? “That’s great. Your family must be thrilled.”

  “Thrilled and relieved both.” He laughed, an unexpectedly rich sound.

  “This is a younger sister?” I asked. “Have you been to see her?”

  Up until that point, his face had been open and easily read. Now it closed down. “Younger,” he said shortly. “She and her husband live in Oregon.”

  I grinned on the inside. Crankmeister that he was, it was good to have the old Stephen back. “Well, I’m glad she and the baby are okay. You must have been worried sick.”

  “Concerned, yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t say worried.”

  I watched him walk off and snorted quietly. Maybe he didn’t want to admit it to his assistant director, but whatever had been wrong with his sister and her baby, it had been so serious that he’d worried himself almost to the point of illness.

  He headed out through the front door and I heard what might have been him singing, and words that might have been a chorus of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

  And my teeny tiny worry that Stephen might have been involved in Stan’s death, that he’d been a mess the last few weeks over guilt and fear of getting caught, puffed away into the air and disappeared forever.

  The phone rang. “Good morning, Chilson District Library,” I said. “How may I—”

  “Yo, Min,” Kristen said. “Got a question for you.”

  It had been a while since Kristen had called with a job for her personal search engine. I pulled the computer keyboard toward me. “Ready and waiting, ma’am.”

  “Kyle says Onaway potatoes are named for Onaway, Michigan, and I say they came from Maine. Who’s right?”

  “Hang on.” In a few seconds I found the answer. “You both are. The first seedling came from Maine, but it was sent to Michigan for research and development and named the Onaway potato. Don’t ask me why it was sent here because I don’t know. And who’s Kyle?”

  “What? He works here. You’ve met him a zillion times.”

  I frowned. “There’s no Kyle at the Three Seasons.”

  “Sure there is,” she said. “You know. Larry Sutton.”

  Either Kristen was suffering from serious sleep deprivation or something very strange was going on. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “I guess you wouldn’t know. Back in high school, Kyle played basketball and the story is, the coach kept calling him Larry because he looked like his uncle Larry, a guy the coach grew up with.” She paused. “He looks like a Larry, I guess, so the name stuck. But it’s just a nickname.”

  She chattered on about the new potato dish she was making up, but I didn’t hear much of what she said. Any of it, really, because I was suddenly back on Audry’s front porch, drinking her lemonade, and hearing her say, “And one of them used names that started with K. Kevin, Kyle, Karla, and Kendra.”

  • • •

  Late in the morning, the sky clouded up. The rain held off, but started to spatter down as I locked the building at four o’clock. Josh had been right, or at least right about the weather. When I got home, I found Eddie sleeping in a new spot. The seat of the shower stall.

  “Why?” I asked him. “You don’t look at all comfortable.”

  He blinked at me and didn’t say anything.

  “Okay, sure, I must not have latched the door all the way and this was a brand-new place for you, but still. It’s fiberglass. And it was probably wet.”

  He stood, stretched, and jumped down. “Mrr,” he said, and stalked off.

  “Yeah, well, don’t come crying to me if you wind up with a . . . with a stiff neck.” Did cats get stiff necks? I watched him trot down the steps to the bedroom. He didn’t look as if he had one, but if he did, how would I know?

  I tossed together a fast dinner of grilled cheese and a broccoli/cauliflower mix steamed in the microwave. (“Of course I’m eating my vegetables, Mom.”) I ate sitting at the dining table with the company of Eddie and my laptop, which was displaying the local weather. More specifically, the radar.

  “Lots of yellow coming across Lake Michigan,” I told Eddie. “Quite a bit of red, too. You know what that means.”

  He sniffed at my sandwich.

  I used my forearm to push him away. Like a boomerang, he came right back. “It means a lot of rain. Hard rain that could wash away any of those quad tracks out by the farmhouse.” There’d been rain since Stan’s death, but not the heavy, driving stuff that was coming. “I should get out there,” I murmured. “See if there are any tracks. I’m sure the detectives haven’t been out there.”

  Eddie’s sniff stopped abruptly.

  “Could have told you you wouldn’t like broccoli,” I said. “Cats don’t do vegetables. Your pointy teeth don’t chew them up right.”

  When the kitchen was tidied, I dumped the contents of my backpack out on the bed and repacked with new items. “Flashlight, check. Bottle of water, check. Cell phone with charged-up battery, check. Map, pen, granola bar, all check. Am I forgetting anything?”

  Eddie, who’d been supervising my efforts, said, “Mrr.”

  “Right.” I snapped my fingers. “A book. Good idea.” I picked through my To Be Read stack and selected a Frost mystery by R. D. Wingfield. When I turned around, Eddie was slithering into the backpack.

  “Hey!” I grasped him around the middle and pulled him out. “This isn’t a cat carrier. At least not today.”

  “MMrrrrRR!”

  I blinked. “That was quite a howl. Did I hurt you?” He squirmed out of my arms, thumped to the bed, and said, “MRR!”

  The guilt that had been advancing retreated fast. “Well, sorry if I injured your feline dignity, but you can’t go with me. I’m going to be tromping around the woods and going up and down hills, and that’s just not your style.”

  He hurled himself into the backpack.

  I pulled him out.

  He gave a little growl.

  “Eddie!” I held him up and stared. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “MMMRRR!” he said, three inches from my nose.

  I winced at the cat breath and tried to give him a good snuggle. Nothing doing. He struggled away, jumped to the floor, and ran down the short hall and up the steps.

  Fine. After I made a note on the whiteboard, I put on my rain gear and slung the backpack over a shoulder. “Hey, pal. I’m headed out and—”

  And there was Edward, sitting on the boat’s dashboard, poised to jump out the door as soon as I pushed it open half an inch.

  “Not a chance,” I told him. I stood in front of the door and turned my back to the dashboard. Slowly and carefully, I pushed the door open and slid one foot outside, then eased my body out, too, using the other foot and the backpack as a cat barrier.

  Eddie thudded to the floor. Tried to jump over the backpack. “MRR!” His claws slid off the nylon.

  I shut the door before he could gather himself for another effort.

  “MMR
RR!!” He stood on his hind legs and scratched at the glass door. “MRR!!!”

  I was a horrible kitty mother. Clearly, he needed to get outside more. Maybe I’d get a cat harness and take him for walks. We could walk to get the mail, or down to the ice-cream shop for double dips of black cherry.

  “See you, Eddie.” I waved at him. “I’ll be back before you know it. We’ll go harness shopping tomorrow.”

  “Mrr!” He was sounding less like he was complaining and more like he was crying out a question. He kept crying as I walked off the dock and across the parking lot, and I almost thought I could still hear him as I drove out of town, the windshield wipers keeping time with his cries.

  • • •

  The farmhouse didn’t look any different than it had the last time I’d seen it. I tromped up the driveway, following the path the emergency vehicles had created, and kept my gaze high. The last thing I wanted was to catch even a small glimpse of what was still on the ground. Even if rain had fallen for forty days and forty nights, I’d be able to see the red stains.

  I stood near the back porch and looked out at the tall grass. Looked hard. Squinted and looked some more and saw nothing but grass waving in the light breeze. If there had been a path, I couldn’t see it.

  “A tracker I’m not,” I murmured, and cautiously climbed up onto the far corner of the porch. Maybe an elevated view would help.

  And, oddly, it did. Or something did. I closed my eyes, not seeing anything, trying to think of blank slates and flat lakes and smooth expanses of snow. When I opened my eyes and saw the hills rising up behind the house, I immediately saw the grassy trail. Not a very distinct trail, and maybe not even a trail at all, but maybe, just maybe, it was something to follow.

  “Hey, Eddie, check it out!” I looked around my feet, all excited to share, then remembered that I’d left him home.

  That’s what happens when you start talking to cats. You think they actually understand what you’re saying. And sometimes you even think they might be contributing to the conversation when, in reality, what they’re saying is “Mrrr.”