Booking the Crook

by Laurie Cass

  I smiled, because I felt the same way about the boardroom. Rather, I’d come to feel that way once I’d recovered from being intimidated by its atmosphere. Now that I was a mature thirty-four years old, I was over being intimidated by pretty much anyone or anything. My knee-jerk reaction regarding Graydon started to ease.

  “So. Tell me about the bookmobile,” Trent said, sitting back and steepling his fingers.

  “Do I have a time limit?” I asked, smiling.

  Otis laughed. “Minnie Hamilton can talk about the bookmobile for hours. I’ve heard her.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Trent glanced at a band of electronics strapped to his wrist. “Ten minutes should be plenty.”

  The man was delusional. That wasn’t anywhere near enough to tell the story of the bookmobile. How it got started, why it got started, its many successes, its few failures, and how we were using it to bring more outreach into the county’s many rural communities, none of which had a bricks-and-mortar library.

  And what was his hurry, exactly? We’d been told Mr. Trent Ross was a retired attorney, recently moved up from the Chicago area. What could possibly be more important to him than learning about the bookmobile?

  I tried to hitch my thoughts together into a cohesive heap. “Well, the bookmobile came about because—”

  “Sorry,” Trent interrupted, looking again at his wrist. “My ten o’clock appointment is early.” He stood. “Minnie, it was nice meeting you. Graydon, Otis.” He nodded at the men and left.

  As Otis drifted into regaling Graydon with tales about past library boards and off-color stories about past board members, my thoughts drifted into worry, in spite of my recent commitment to stop doing so. The bookmobile was my pride and joy, and keeping it funded was a constant preoccupation. If the new board president was anti-bookmobile, how long would it take for the full board to start thinking like that? How long would it take them to vote it away?

  * * *

  • • •

  I wasn’t all the way into the break room when my coworkers pounced.

  “What’s he like?”

  “Is he going to be a jerk?”

  “Did he say anything about the IT budget? We really need a new server.”

  “How did it go?”

  Ignoring the questions, I pushed through the group to get to the coffeepot. Once I had a mug full of caffeine, I started answering their questions. To Holly Terpening, a full-time clerk a few years older than myself, I said, “Graydon likes the building, so that’s a good sign.” To Kelsey, a part-time clerk a couple of years younger than me, I said, “He doesn’t come across as a jerk,” then buried my face in coffee.

  Josh, our full-time IT guy, shifted from foot to foot until I came up for air. He looked so anxious that I felt a little guilty that I was about to give him the facts of life. Which at thirty-something he should have known, especially since he was now a homeowner, but perhaps he wasn’t raised properly. “We didn’t talk about budgets or major purchases. They weren’t even mentioned.”

  I shut my ears to his moan of pain and turned to Donna. I still couldn’t decide who I wanted to be most like when I grew up; right now it was a tie between Aunt Frances and Donna, who at seventy-two was working part-time at the library to support her habits of running marathons all over the country and snowshoeing in faraway mountain lands after being dropped off by a helicopter. “You asked how it went. Well . . .” I took a sip of coffee. Then another one.

  The previous library director, Jennifer Walker, had been universally disliked. Though I’d tried valiantly to refrain from criticizing her during her short stay, I hadn’t always been successful. I wasn’t proud of that behavior, and since I was always trying to learn from my mistakes, I framed my response to Donna carefully.

  I wasn’t about to lie—not only did I think lying was unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong, but quality fibbing required a prodigious memory, a trait that had not yet emerged in my character—so the truth was my only option. However, there was no reason to tell the whole truth.

  “Graydon,” I said, “seems to be an all-around decent guy. He’s from Grand Rapids, and he’s spent a lot of time Up North over the years. Not just in the summer,” I said, forestalling a typical comment from locals regarding downstaters, “because he and his family like to ski.”

  Chilson was one of those small towns that was full to bursting from Memorial Day to Labor Day with tourists and summer people up to their lakefront cottages. Old money had come up the Lake Michigan shore on steamers to escape the Chicago heat, and new money was still building houses everywhere else. Tourists included everyone imaginable, and in summer you could see just about anyone on the street, from your third grade teacher to the owner of the biggest tech company in the world.

  In winter, though, things were different. Winter was when some restaurants and retail stores closed down completely, because there was no reason to stay open for the two people who might wander in.

  On the plus side, winter in Chilson was when you never had to wait in line anywhere for anything. It was when there was never any problem finding a parking space. And when, if your car happened to slide in a ditch, the next car going past would stop and help you get out. Yes, winter was snowy and cold, but it was also full of friends. It was almost a pity that Jennifer hadn’t stayed long enough to understand that.

  “Good,” Donna said. “So Graydon has potential to not be a total disaster. How about Trent?”

  I’d felt the question coming, so I’d buried my face in my coffee mug to give me more time. Two swallows later, I was ready. “It seemed like Trent and Graydon have a lot in common.” Their commonality might be surficial, but if I kept talking, odds were good that no one would ask for details. “Trent is an Up North newbie, and it seems like he wants to get involved and help make us even better.”

  Holly and Josh grinned and bumped knuckles, but Donna gave me a searching look, and I remembered that she had years of experience working with boards of various shapes and sizes.

  “Good morning!” Lloyd Goodwin shuffled in the door. Mr. Goodwin was in his late seventies, and if we’d been allowed to have favorite patrons, he would have been in everyone’s top five. Full of good humor and friendlier than a puppy, Mr. Goodwin had a self-professed medical need for morning coffee, and because of this, we’d opened up the staff break room to library patrons. The only bad thing was that Mr. Goodwin and Kelsey both liked coffee brewed strong enough to burn your stomach lining—some mornings it was a race to the coffee grounds.

  Mr. Goodwin received a chorus of return “good mornings.” He nodded at everyone and asked, “Do you folks know how to keep Canadian bacon from curling? No?” He smiled. “It’s easy. Take their little brooms away.”

  A half second of silence was followed by multiple laughing groans, and I took the opportunity to sketch a smiling wave and head out. It was bookmobile time.

  * * *

  • • •

  Fresh-fallen snow blanketed the world. In Chilson there’d been barely an inch of fresh white stuff, but in this part of Tonedagana County at least six inches had come down overnight. I smiled at the sight. New snow transformed the world. Yesterday’s line of dark green cedar trees was now a bumpy white row. The dirty rawness of a local gravel pit had been magicked into a soft hole. And that little five-acre lake was now a field of white. If you didn’t know there was a lake under there, would you know there was a lake under there?

  “Don’t tell me you’re smiling at the snow,” Julia said.

  “Mrr,” Eddie said in a way that sounded like a Julia echo.

  I glanced at the passenger’s side of the bookmobile. My part-time bookmobile clerk was, as per usual, resting her feet on Eddie’s strapped-down cat carrier. Eddie was flopped against the carrier’s door, his black-and-white fur sticking out through the wire in square sections. “The snow likes it when we smile.” I’d t
exted basically the same thing to Rafe when I was working through the bookmobile’s preflight checklist, and he’d sent back a tiny, one-second cartoon of a stick figure’s head exploding into falling snow. I didn’t know exactly what message he’d been trying to send, but I’d decided to assume kindly humor.

  Julia snorted, connoting in that one short noise disbelief and a bit of derision that was covered up with humor. It was a lot to convey with a snort, but if needed, she could have troweled on three additional messages.

  Though Julia had been born and raised in Chilson, she’d moved to the big lights of New York City before the ink dried on her high school diploma. She’d intended to find fame and fortune as a model, which hadn’t worked out, so she’d tried her hand at theater. This had worked out far better—as it turned out, she oozed acting talent and had more than one Tony Award to show for it.

  At a certain age, however, offers for leading roles tend to slow to a trickle, even for the best of actors. Just before that happened, Julia and her husband moved back to her hometown, where she had too much time on her hands until the bookmobile came along. Now she and her storytelling abilities were woven into the fabric of the bookmobile as much as Eddie’s hairs were.

  “Everyone needs a smile now and then,” I said. “Even the snow.”

  “Snow is not a sentient being.”

  “Maybe. But what if it was? What if it had feelings? Thoughts and dreams for a better future?”

  “Mrr.”

  Julia tucked her long strawberry blond hair behind her ears and gently tapped the top of Eddie’s carrier with one heel. “I’m pretty sure he said you’re loony tunes and shouldn’t be allowed out in public.”

  “I’m pretty sure he said you should stop pounding on his roof.”

  When I’d hired Julia, Eddie’s presence on the bookmobile had been a deep, dark secret I’d been trying to keep from Stephen, my then-boss. Eddie had been a stowaway on the vehicle’s maiden voyage, and I’d intended it to be a one-time deal until Eddie’s absence on the following trip had caused the lower lip of Brynn, a young girl with leukemia, to tremble.

  There was no way I could deal with her tears, so Eddie had been installed as a permanent passenger. Soon after, the doctors had declared that Brynn’s cancer was in remission, something that Brynn’s mother tended to give Eddie credit for. Now everyone knew the bookmobile cat, and I was pretty sure more people knew his name than mine.

  Julia leaned forward against her seat belt’s shoulder strap. “Which of us is right, Mr. Edward? Please indicate with a point of your elegant white-tipped paw.”

  Eddie yawned and rolled into an Eddie-size ball, tucking all four of his paws underneath him.

  I laughed. That Julia played along with my game of talking to Eddie as if he were fluent in the English language was one of the reasons I hoped she’d work with me forever. “Last stop of the day,” I said, and took a right turn into a convenience store parking lot, which I was glad to see had been plowed clean of snow.

  The day hadn’t been a stellar one, as far as the number of patrons went. Though the main roads had all been plowed by the time we were traveling them, many of the side roads were not, and people didn’t tend to make optional trips on unplowed roads, even with four-wheel drive. The few people who had come aboard, though, stayed long and borrowed much, which pleased my librarian’s soul to the core.

  I parked and we quickly went through the preparations. Unlatch Eddie’s cage, rotate the driver’s seat to face a small desk, turn on the two laptop computers, release the bungee cord that kept the office chair in the back in place, and ensure that no books, DVDs, jigsaw puzzles, or our most recent loan item of ice fishing poles had jostled out of place.

  Eddie took part by jumping onto the dashboard, his current favorite spot. This meant I would later be cleaning paw prints off the dash and nose prints off the inside of the windshield and my arms weren’t long enough to do it easily, but doing the cleaning was far easier than getting Eddie to change his mind.

  “Think we’ll have anyone show up?” Julia asked.

  “Rowan,” I said. “Thanks to her son, she recently discovered that she likes fantasy. I have a stack of Tad Williams and Ursula K. Le Guin books waiting.”

  Julia made a face at Rowan’s name but didn’t say anything.

  I knew many people found Rowan Bennethum unfriendly and abrasive, but I tended to find her dryly dark comments funny. Rowan had become a dependable bookmobile patron since last summer when she’d started working from home three days a week. She was a loan officer for the local bank and, thanks to computer magic, had convinced the higher-ups that not only would she get more done at home, but it would be even more secure.

  Julia, in her early sixties, was about fifteen years older than Rowan, so her animosity couldn’t be due to high school rivalries. And as far as I knew, they weren’t related. I looked up from the daily chore of picking Eddie hair off the long carpeted riser that served as both sitting area and a step to reach the top shelves. Vertically inflated people, such as Julia, didn’t need the step, but vertically efficient people such as myself found it very helpful.

  “Why don’t you like her?” I asked.

  After a moment, Julia said, “Personality conflict.”

  I was about to drill down and get a real answer out of her when I realized the dashboard was feline-free. “Have you seen Eddie?”

  Julia glanced around. “He was here a second ago.”

  Cats had an amazing ability to compact themselves into half the volume they should reasonably occupy. I’d found Eddie in places a small squirrel shouldn’t have been able to fit into, including the thin space underneath my dresser and out a window when the window was open maybe two inches.

  There weren’t many places he could hide on the bookmobile, but even still, it took us a few minutes to find him tucked behind the 200–400 shelf of nonfiction books.

  “What are you doing back there?” I peered at him. His yellow eyes blinked back. “Do you have any intention of ever coming out?” I fully expected to get a “Mrr” in reply, but he was silent. “Are you feeling okay, little buddy?”

  “What did he say?” Julia asked.

  “Nothing.” I reached in and petted him, expecting to feel a purr, and got nothing.

  “He’s not sick, is he?”

  “Probably he’s just tired. He only got twelve hours of sleep last night.”

  Julia laughed. “The poor thing.”

  “Yes, he needs his beauty rest.” I gave him one last pet. “I’m sure he’ll be fine with some sleep.”

  But at the end of the stop, he still hadn’t moved. The few bookmobilers who’d shown up couldn’t entice him out to say hello, not even the five-year-old boy who jangled Eddie’s treat can. “He won’t come out,” the kid said. “Can you get him for me, Miss Minnie?”

  Since Eddie still had his claws, I had no intention of doing anything remotely like that. “Our Eddie is feeling a little sick.” I took the can of treats away from the child. “When you’re sick, you stay home and sleep, right? Eddie likes to sleep behind books when he’s not feeling well.”

  “He’s going to get better, isn’t he?”

  “You bet.” I smiled at the boy. “He has a little kitty cold, that’s all.”

  But I was concerned. This was not Eddie-like behavior. I’d never known him to have anything other than the occasional sneeze. As we closed up the computers, a low guttural whine issued from behind the nonfiction section.

  “Something isn’t right,” I said to myself. But more than one thing wasn’t right, I realized. I looked at the stack of fantasy novels I’d specially selected for today. “Rowan never showed up.”

  “She probably got busy and forgot,” Julia said.

  Could be. But that wasn’t like Rowan. The only time she hadn’t shown up for her bookmobile stop was last fall, when she’d been downstate
for a conference. She’d told me well in advance, and when she’d mentioned that she needed someone to water her plants, I’d volunteered, and now a tiny part of my brain was permanently stuck with the knowledge of the keyless entry code to her house.

  It wasn’t like Rowan to order books and then ignore them. Not like her at all.

  I looked at Eddie’s shelf, looked at Rowan’s books, and came to a decision. “Let’s go,” I said abruptly.

  Julia, who’d been securing the rear chair, looked up. “That didn’t sound like the normal homeward-bound announcement.”

  I pulled a suddenly willing Eddie out from behind the books. “We’re going to Rowan’s house.”

  “Minnie—”

  “It’ll only take a few minutes,” I said, cutting into her objection before it could get started. “And don’t tell her I told you, but Rowan has some sort of heart issue. She takes medication, but still.” I’d discovered this by accident, when I’d run into Rowan at the pharmacy a month or two ago, and she’d been discussing side effects of the medication with the pharmacist.

  Julia’s chin took on an obstinate stance as we buckled up. “Isn’t this taking outreach a little far?”

  Since I was captain of the ship, I could have ignored the question, but since I liked to have the support of my troops, I said, “Just a quick stop. It’s barely out of our way.”

  This was true and Julia knew it, so she refrained from further comment on the subject. Actually, she refrained from any comment at all, something almost as unusual as Eddie refraining from snoring in the middle of the night. I glanced over a few times on the short drive, but each time Julia was studying the scenery out the passenger window with a concentration that telegraphed a clear message that she didn’t want to talk.

  I sighed. Julia’s dislike of Rowan was deeper than I’d realized. And after dropping off Rowan’s books, I’d have to find out why. I did not want to have a mysterious issue hovering in the air between us.