Booking the Crook

by Laurie Cass

The evening before, Rafe, Aunt Frances, and Otto had gathered together in the boardinghouse living room while I’d huddled on the hearth in front of a roaring fire with my hands around a mug of hot chocolate and Eddie on my lap. I’d stayed awake long enough to outline what had happened on Lolly Road, but now it was morning, the same group was gathered, and my aunt wanted details. So, being the kind and generous niece that I was, I did my best to oblige.

  “I’m not sure.” Anticipating the expression she was about to assemble her face into, I kept going before she wasted all that energy. “If he was going to hurt Eddie, absolutely. If he was going to hurt me . . . probably. But I might have kept wondering if he’d really do it, might have kept thinking about a different way out. So . . . I just don’t know.”

  Just at that moment, the jar of orange marmalade called to me, so I busied myself with toast and knife as the trio exchanged looks.

  “You’re nuts,” my loving aunt said.

  I kept slathering on the marmalade. Eddie, who I’d left on my bed, snoring, wandered into the kitchen and flopped on the floor next to me. I angled my foot to touch him and felt his breaths going in and out.

  Rafe was next. “You could have,” he said confidently. “In some part of that quick-moving brain, you would have figured out there wasn’t any other option and done it.”

  The marmalade was getting thick, but I kept laying it on.

  Otto stirred. “There’s no point second-guessing. Minnie did an outstanding job in a difficult and frightening situation.”

  “Mrr!”

  “And it goes without saying,” Otto continued, almost without a break, “that we’re grateful she had Eddie with her yesterday. Without his critical assistance, she might not be here this morning.”

  “Mrr,” Eddie said, apparently mollified.

  Aunt Frances handed around a bowl of scrambled eggs. “But what I don’t understand is the why. Why did Stewart kill Rowan?”

  Last night I’d been too tired to explain. Had actually fallen asleep while describing how the responding sheriff’s deputies had found Stewart, with hands and ankles still bound, hunting for a hidden spare set of bookmobile keys so he could start the engine. He was getting cold, he’d said.

  My sympathies had not been with him, and I was very glad that two different law enforcement vehicles had arrived because I would not have been happy to share a backseat with the man who’d tried to kill me.

  Once we arrived at the sheriff’s office, the story eventually came out. It had taken a while, but the combined questioning of Hal and Ash and Sheriff Richardson, with perhaps a bit of pressure from the glowering presence of myself and Eddie (in his carrier), got results.

  “It was a cover-up,” I said, forking off a piece of sausage. “He was covering up that he’d stolen something from Rowan.”

  “You mean something valuable?” Rafe asked.

  After chewing and swallowing the yummy maple-flavored sausage, I said, “That’s the thing. She didn’t know it was worth more than a penny. Only Stewart did.”

  My aunt sighed. “The cold has addled her brain. We can only hope that someday she’ll recover completely.”

  Rafe pushed a stack of blueberry pancakes in my direction. “Have some carbs. They can’t hurt and might help.”

  Otto smiled and added coffee into my mug. “Tell us more,” he said.

  I added a pancake to my plate, ladled a generous dollop of maple syrup over it, and told the rest of what I knew.

  “When Stewart and Rowan’s grandparents died, Rowan, as the oldest grandchild, inherited their grandmother’s coin collection, a collection all the cousins had played with as kids.”

  The trio was nodding, so I went on.

  “Collier and his girlfriend got engaged at Thanksgiving, remember? And the big family dinner was at the Bennethums’, so there was a lot of talk about family and heirlooms and Rowan remembered the coin collection, which she’d almost forgotten about.”

  Ash had corroborated this by calling Neil (who hadn’t answered) and Anya and Collier (who had). I took in one bite of pancake and another of eggs. “When it came time for dessert, along with the pumpkin and apple pies, Rowan put Grandma’s coin collection on the table for everyone to see.”

  “What kind of collection was it?” Otto asked. “From a certain time period? Civil War? Or gold coins?”

  I shook my head and smiled as I picked up a piece of bacon. “It was the most romantic coin collection ever. Grandpa had given Grandma a brand-new uncirculated coin as an anniversary present for every year they’d been married, starting in 1936.”

  “What kind of coin?” Aunt Frances asked. “Half-dollars?”

  I paused for coffee. “What he gave her were pennies.”

  “Pennies?” Otto laughed. “Not much of an anniversary present.”

  “Family lore says it started as a joke and just kind of continued on.”

  Rafe took my coffee mug and topped it off. “Bet I know how it started. That movie Pennies from Heaven came out in 1936.”

  I blinked. He’d said it with such assurance that I believed him implicitly. It could have been a ruse, but since I’d almost died less than twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t think he’d be trying to scam me for at least another day. “How do you know that?”

  Looking serious, he tapped his head. “Steel trap. Never forget a thing that’s unimportant.”

  “Good to know,” I said, toasting him with my mug. “Anyway, with all the pennies out on the table, there was plenty of opportunity to take a close look at them, and Stewart did.”

  “That boy was always looking for get-rich-quick schemes,” Aunt Frances mused. “A few years after he graduated from college, back in the late nineties, he quit the company he was working for and started one of those dot-com companies. And don’t ask me what they were supposed to be doing, because I have no idea.”

  Otto chuckled. “Exactly. I still find it hard to believe so much money was invested in dot-coms. A classic speculation bubble. We can all be fooled some of the time.”

  “The pennies,” Rafe said, dragging the conversation back to center. “What was with the pennies?”

  I held up two fingers. “It wasn’t all of them. Just a couple of very special ones.”

  Aunt Frances cut into her waffle. “How special can pennies be? I’ve heard of silver dollars worth a couple of hundred dollars, and you see those special offers in magazines for commemorative coins, but I don’t remember anything about a penny.”

  “In Grandma’s collection,” I said slowly, because I was trying to remember the details and didn’t want to get any of it wrong, “were a mint condition 1944 steel wheat penny and a mint 1943 copper Lincoln penny.”

  I waited a beat because Otto was getting a faraway look on his face. But he didn’t say anything and I carried on.

  “Together, the two of them are worth more than three hundred thousand dollars.”

  Coffee spewed across the table as my aunt started choking. Otto patted her on the back until her spasms eased and Rafe got up for paper towels.

  I cut and ate my sausage and, when the fuss died down, started talking again.

  “That’s just the amount of money Stewart needed for the boat he’d been dreaming about for years, the boat his now ex-wife would never let him buy. He thought he could sneak the pennies out of the collection, replace them with garden-variety 1943 and 1944 pennies, and no one would ever know.”

  “So what happened?” Rafe asked. I’d paused, because the next part was the hardest to tell.

  I sighed. “At the family Christmas party, Rowan told Stewart she’d decided to hand over the coin collection to Collier as an engagement present, and that she’d do so when he and his fiancée came up during Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend. Stewart . . .” I stared at my plate.

  “That was when,” I said quietly, “Stewart realized time was
running out. Up until then, he thought he’d have time to find replacement coins. But now that he only had three weeks, he decided it was easier to just kill Rowan. He knew she had heart issues, so he put together a cocktail of medications he’d accumulated, crushed the pills, stopped by her house, and dropped the powder into her coffee, hoping that the stimulants would give her a heart attack.” Which it did. “With Rowan dead, Stewart had all sorts of time to replace the pennies since the coin collection was pretty much the last thing on anyone’s mind.”

  There was a long pause, at the end of which Aunt Frances said, “In the back of the shop, there’s a stack of cherry that came out of the orchard down the road from the Bennethums’ house. What do you think about me making Collier and his fiancée a clock out of it for a wedding present? A grandfather . . . no, a grandmother clock.”

  “Sounds like a grand idea,” Otto said. “Let me know when it’s time to sand. That seems to be my forte in the woodworking area.”

  Rafe nodded. “Great idea. I can take a few days off from the house if you need some help.”

  I almost couldn’t breathe. The sensations rushing through me were a tangled mess. I was sad, but joyful. Unhappy and happy at the same time. Tired, yet energized. But I knew one thing for certain. I was lucky to have these people in my life. So very, very lucky.

  My aunt looked at me. “What do you think, Minnie?”

  And all I could do was smile.

  * * *

  • • •

  Otto and Rafe headed out after breakfast, Otto to an appointment with a nonprofit agency that would undoubtedly land him some volunteer work as their bookkeeper, Rafe to the school, because somehow it was Friday and the world was continuing as it normally did.

  Aunt Frances told me to sit and drink coffee while she finished the dishes, but I felt an urge to move. Last night, Ash had driven me to the hospital, where they’d pronounced me fit to continue life. Rafe had arrived just as I was checking out, sweeping me into a huge hug that had warmed my heart, but my body racked with the occasional shiver all the way home.

  “I’m fine,” I’d told the three of them last night as I’d sat close to the fire. My aunt had paid no attention to me, and as soon as I’d told the bare bones of what had happened, she’d shooed me upstairs and tucked me into bed, taking my e-reader out of my hands and putting Eddie on my chest.

  This time I wasn’t about to let her coddle me, so I ignored what I assumed was a suggestion and started to dry the dishes as she washed.

  Aunt Frances rolled her eyes, but didn’t actually force me back to the table and put the coffee mug in my hands. “When did Darren say they were going to get out there?” she asked.

  Darren was the bookmobile’s mechanic and he’d been the first number I’d called after dialing 911 and Rafe. I’d called Darren even before I’d called Aunt Frances, a tiny little fact that she had no reason ever to learn.

  I glanced at the wall clock. “The tow truck should be on its way. I’ll know after lunch what Darren thinks the damage will be.” And then I’d be on the phone with the insurance people. My afternoon would be nothing but fun.

  Aunt Frances dropped a handful of silverware into the strainer. “Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone into the car repair business instead of woodworking.” She grinned. “But then I remember I can’t stand the feel of grease under my fingernails.”

  Before I could acknowledge that could be an occupational difficulty, she said, “Forgot to tell you. Celeste must have read about your bookmobile escapade on Facebook. She sent me an e-mail this morning and her exact words—her only words—were, ‘Tell Minnie to keep her feet warm.’”

  I smiled and wiggled my toasty-warm toes. Cousin Celeste understood priorities. It was entirely possible we’d get along just fine.

  My phone, sitting in the middle of the table, dinged with an incoming text. I wandered over to look. It was from Trock: Had my scout look at Red House Café, like you said. Will fit in perfect for a spring episode since we need a replacement restaurant for one that closed. (Off to buy a tux for the wedding. Always wanted one, couldn’t justify until now. Life is good.)

  I texted him a quick thanks with lots of exclamation points, and hummed a happy tune. It was good to have friends, and every once in a while it was great to have a friend who was the star of a popular television restaurant show.

  Aunt Frances, still washing, said, “Forgot to tell you. Yesterday I met up with Land Aprelle.”

  My ears perked up. “You did? How did that go?”

  “Seems odd he’s only a year younger than I am,” she said. “But age is a funny thing. Anyway, I did what you suggested, stopped at his house and didn’t go away until he showed me some of his pieces.”

  I waited, but she didn’t say anything. She’d fallen into a fast and sudden silence, and it was clear from the way she was missing half the soapsuds as she plied the spray nozzle that her mind wasn’t on what she was doing.

  “And?” I prompted. “What did you think of Land’s work?”

  “What?” She blinked out of her trance. “Oh. It’s outstanding. Truly amazing stuff. I’m still trying to figure out how he did the interior hinge work on that box. He said he didn’t use a biscuit joiner or a hand chisel, so how on earth . . .”

  She went quiet again, but before she went to a mental dimension where I couldn’t follow, I asked, “The big summer art show. Is his stuff good enough?”

  My aunt gave a very unladylike snort. “Are you kidding me? He’ll be the star of the show and I’m going to make sure he prices his pieces right. He has a dining table inlaid with the state of Michigan, showing inland lakes, for crying out loud, that he had priced for a few hundred dollars. He’s an idiot if he doesn’t sell that one for thousands.”

  Smiling, I dried and put things away as she talked. After last night, hearing some good news was soothing. “You’re still my favorite woodworker,” I said. “Especially since you’re making that wedding present for Collier.”

  “Ah, he’s a decent kid,” she said. “By the way, I hear Anya and Bax Tousely are talking again.”

  “Really? Where did you hear that?” Social media wasn’t her thing.

  “I have my sources,” she said airily. She glanced at me and relented. “Emily Tousely, one of my students, is Bax’s younger sister. Before class started, I heard her chatting with a friend. She was all excited that her brother was talking to Anya again. He’d been worrying about it for days, trying to get up the courage to call, and he finally did.”

  Then that day at Lakeview, the look on his face probably hadn’t been sadness or guilt, but anxiety. So much for my powers of observation.

  But at least a few things were starting to right themselves for the Bennethums. Rowan’s killer was behind bars, which should help Collier come to grips with his mother’s death; Anya and Bax might get back together; and the mystery of Neil’s absence had also resolved itself.

  Last night at the sheriff’s office, just as I was getting ready to leave, he’d returned Ash’s call and apologized for his recent noncommunication, saying that he wasn’t dealing well with Rowan’s death and had checked into a personal retreat center, and one of the conditions of staying there was to leave all electronics behind. He’d told Anya and Collier where he was going, but being one of those guys who felt therapy wasn’t manly, he’d asked them to keep quiet about it.

  I almost felt guilty about briefly suspecting him of his wife’s murder, but not quite, since I still thought he’d let down his children by leaving when they needed him most.

  “Speaking of weddings,” I said, “we should talk about yours.”

  My aunt scrunched up her face. “Do we have to? Because I’d really rather not.”

  “Yes, because I have the answers to all your problems.”

  “How nice,” Aunt Frances muttered. “I can hardly wait.”

  “Oh, ye of l
ittle faith,” I said, and I was probably smirking a bit, because I really did have all the answers. They’d come to me as I was tromping about in the cedar forest, fully formed solutions to problems that, compared to freezing to death while running from a guy with a gun, were easily solved.

  “Problem number one,” I said, “is the wedding and honeymoon venue. You wanted it to be in Bermuda, but that just isn’t possible. The solution is to have the wedding here—and I’ll offer the library’s community room as a location—and have the honeymoon in Bermuda. You don’t get to have a destination wedding, but you still get to go to Bermuda, and isn’t that what you really wanted?”

  I knew it was, because she’d talked about visiting Bermuda for years. The destination wedding angle had been a spark of an idea that had managed to find enough fuel to grow, but it was time to toss a final bucket of water on it and move on.

  “Hmm.” Aunt Frances slowly slipped the plates into the sink. “You know, you could be right.”

  “The other real problem,” I said with confidence, “isn’t directly a wedding problem, but is more of a post-wedding problem. You hate Otto’s kitchen and can’t stand the idea of cooking in it.”

  “I’ll get used to it,” she said stoically. Then she completely undercut the stiff-upper-lip attitude by sighing and adding, “Eventually.”

  “Or not.”

  Aunt Frances frowned. “Don’t toy with me, young lady. What are you talking about?”

  “Last night when you were making hot chocolate, Otto and I had a little chat. No, don’t look like that. He said he always suspected you hated the kitchen and was already planning a renovation. He’s just going to move it up a little, is all. Give him the name of your favorite kitchen designer and he’ll get an appointment as soon as possible.”

  My aunt stared at me, slack jawed. “You didn’t. He didn’t. He’s not.”

  “He is,” I said. “And if the timing works out—and if you make decisions as fast as you normally do, it should—the work can happen while the two of you are in Bermuda.”

  Though her jaw moved up and down a couple of times, no words came out. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I kept going.