by Laurie Cass
I brushed the back of my hand across my face, getting rid of the smile. “Just trying to be pleasant, Detective.” I looked at him brightly. “How was your day?”
He sat back, crossed one of his legs over the other, and clasped his hands around his raised knee. “The usual mix of miscreants and troublemakers. How about you?”
Over in Ash’s direction, I sensed a small movement that might have been a smirk, but I kept my gaze focused on Inwood. “I convinced a nine-year-old boy that reading wasn’t a complete waste of time and might even be fun, given the right book.”
The detective smiled. “Then I think you had a much more productive day than I did.”
For a moment I considered what the daily life of a law-enforcement officer must be like. Putting bad people in jail had to be rewarding, but, after a while, it must feel like most of the people in the world are, well, bad. Coworkers and family members would be the only ones you could assume were on the side of the angels, and on dark days, maybe not all of them.
I felt an unexpected wave of sympathy for the two men. “If there’s an opening at the library, I’ll let you know.”
They shared a glance, which I interpreted as a mutual expression of Is she insane?, and my sympathy dried up.
“Let me tell you what I found,” I said in an exquisitely polite tone. From there I launched into the Tale of the Hat, starring Eddie and the bookmobile, costarring me, and featuring the supporting character of the bereaved widow.
“So, I’m thinking that maybe it was really a murder attempt,” I concluded. “And that Denise was the real target.”
The detective released his hands from around his knee and reclasped them. “The hat is in the possession of Mrs. Slade?”
I nodded. Maybe it was evidence, and maybe I should have told her to take it to the police, but after seeing her put it against her cheek like that, there was no way I’d suggest such a thing.
Detective Inwood made a noise that wasn’t quite a grunt. “And where at the convenience store did your . . . cat find the . . . hat?”
I studied him, but he didn’t appear to be laughing, even on the inside. Then again, if anyone could conceal laughter, it had to be the man sitting in front of me. “Just past the northeast corner.”
“Hmm.” The detective squinted at the ceiling tiles. He had to be looking straight at the stains, and I wondered what pattern he saw. Probably not the fire-breathing dragon with the big talons that I kept seeing, but you never knew.
“Wolverson,” Inwood finally said, “why don’t you drive out there? When you come back, you can let me know why you didn’t find that hat on Saturday.” He gave Ash a straight look that made me sit back flat in my chair.
“There was a lot of snow,” I said. “Anyone could have missed it.”
The detective’s gaze slashed at me. “The average person, yes. But what would you say about a deputy who is training to be a detective? You’d say that if the snow was six inches deep, if it was sixty inches deep, he shouldn’t have missed it.” Detective Inwood stood and almost shouted right Ash’s face. “And you’d be right!”
He banged the table with his fist, glared at both of us, and stomped out. I winced in anticipation of the door being slammed, but he shut it in a surprisingly gentle fashion.
I looked at Ash. “Sorry about that,” I said. “If I’d known . . .”
He shook his head. “You did the right thing. I should have found the hat the other day, no matter what.”
“Well, I’m still sorry. He didn’t have to yell at you like that.”
Ash shrugged. “It’s just Hal. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
Which made no sense to me, but whatever. I stood, made good-bye noises, and started to leave.
“Hey, Minnie?” Ash asked.
When I stopped and turned back to face him, he started to say something, then stopped. Started again. “Thanks for bringing the hat.” He grinned, revealing his extreme good looks once again. “Even if it did get me in trouble.”
I smiled back. “Anytime.”
* * *
That night, I told Aunt Frances about the cat, the hat, and the detective. The phrase didn’t quite scan, but I couldn’t think of a rhyming word that would fit Detective Inwood. Brat? Drat? Mat?
“So you think Denise was really the target?” Aunt Frances asked. “That it really was murder?”
I didn’t want it to be. Though tragic accidents are a hard thing to make sense of, at least you could do your best to make sure they didn’t happen again. But murder? An uncomfortable prickle went up the back of my neck. I shivered, which made the cat on my lap twist his head around to look up at me.
“Sorry about that,” I murmured, scratching the tip of Eddie’s nose.
Murder made everything different. In a general sort of way, people are pretty nice to each other, at least when they’re face-to-face. Sure, there’s the occasional incident, but on a daily basis our lives are made up of coworkers saying “Good morning,” and things like the person heading into the post office three steps ahead holding the door open for you. If people started being nasty to each other as a matter of habit, where would we be?
“Minnie?” Aunt Frances asked.
I blinked out of my dark reverie. My aunt was sitting on the couch across from me, a crocheted blanket covering her legs. A cheerful fire burned in the fieldstone fireplace, and there was a mostly empty plate of cookies on the low table between us. Two empty mugs that had formerly held hot chocolate stood nearby.
“If it was really murder, the police will find out.” I’d meant the words to sound confident, but they came out as almost a question.
“Hmm.” Aunt Frances leaned forward and took the last peanut butter cookie, leaving the chocolate chip for me. “You don’t have any inclination to find out for yourself?”
“Of course I do.” If it had been murder, I wanted the killer put in prison so he couldn’t kill ever again—not me, not Denise, not anyone.
The cat-oriented weight on my legs was starting to cut off the circulation to my feet. I shifted and though I tried not to move Eddie, the movement made him unhappy enough to stop purring and give me a look. “Sorry,” I said. I was pretty sure I’d made more apologies in the few months I’d been a cat caretaker than I had in the entire decade prior.
“So, what are you going to do?” my aunt asked. “About Roger?”
I thought about that and came to a fast conclusion. I was a librarian. Research was one of my favorite things in the whole wide world, so it only made sense to—
My cell phone, which I’d flopped on the table next to the cookies, started vibrating. I picked it up.
Aunt Frances gave me a quizzical look. “Tucker?” She made getting-up movements, but I waved her back down. Making her leave the comfort of her own couch was ridiculous.
“Give me a sign if it gets too personal,” I said, “and I’ll go upstairs.” I thumbed on the phone. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself,” Tucker said.
There was a long beat of silence. Another one. Two seconds later we were sliding deep into the uncomfortable-pause phase, because in spite of our exchange of text messages on Monday, I’d never heard back from his nonexistent secretary. We’d done more texting, but none of it had to do with his schedule, and I was getting a little annoyed.
Eddie purred.
“Are you still there?” Tucker asked.
“Still here,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Sorry about not getting back to you, but we’ve had a couple of staffing issues that made a huge hole.” He sighed. “We’re not even close to having December nailed down.”
I squinted at the fireplace. “But it’s almost Thanksgiving.”
“Thank you, Minnie,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of that.”
The starch in his voice made me stiffen. Eddie turned his head sidewa
ys and almost upside down to look at me. I started petting him, long, gentle strokes from head to tail, creating a small mound of loose Eddie hair at the end.
“Until we get this straightened out,” Tucker was saying, “I won’t be able to make any plans.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Look, Minnie, I’m sorry about this—I really am—but there’s nothing I can do. This is what being a doctor can be like. You know that.”
Not really, but I was learning. Fast. “So, you’ll let me know when you have some free time?” I asked.
“Sure. We’ll work it out, Minnie.”
If he’d sent me those words in a text I might have believed him; as it was, I could hear the doubt in his voice.
“Tucker . . .”
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
But it was hard not to. After we said limp good-byes, I pulled Eddie close and buried my face in his side.
“Minnie?” Aunt Frances asked. “Is everything all right?”
I rubbed my eyes against Eddie’s thick fur, which absorbed my half tears easily. Aunt Frances was a matchmaker of the first order; if she knew Tucker and I were having troubles, she’d be rolling up her sleeves and getting to work.
“I’m fine,” I said, looking up at her with a painted-on smile. “It’ll be fine.”
* * *
That night I didn’t sleep well. Every time I felt myself start spiraling down into the darkness, my thoughts would jerk me back awake.
Well, either my thoughts or Eddie. It was one of those nights he thought I should be awake and attending to his every need. The first hint I had of this was a wet nose on my cheek. That was my cue to roll onto my back so his front half could lie across my shoulder and his back half could cozy up into the inside of my elbow.
After a while, though, this position didn’t suit him. He stuck out a paw and pushed on my nose. This was my cue to turn onto my side so he could snuggle up against my chest with my arm around him.
But he didn’t stay that way very long. A few minutes later, he slid out from underneath my arm, stood, stretched, and walked down the length of me to flop on my feet. This, of course, kept me from moving the rest of the night, since it Just Doesn’t Do to disturb a sleeping cat. Cats have amazing powers, and if they ever decided to take over the world, it wouldn’t be long before they asserted their control over us.
The next morning, as I picked an Eddie hair off my pant leg, I again considered the possibility of cats controlling the world. “It’s possible,” I muttered to myself as I dropped the hair into a wastebasket, “that they already do.”
“Sorry?” The woman standing at the library’s checkout desk was eyeing me cautiously.
I considered gifting her with the Eddie Hair of the Day, but decided against it. Judging from the look of her winter-white jacket and pants, they were dry-clean only, which meant they were pet-hair magnets, and I knew I wouldn’t appreciate a gift of cat hair if I’d been wearing them. Not that I would have been. Dry-clean-only clothing wouldn’t be in my budget until I paid off my college loans.
“Just talking to myself,” I told the woman. She looked a little older than my thirty-three years and she also looked familiar, yet I could have sworn I’d never met her. “That’s a pretty necklace you’re wearing,” I said, nodding at the simple yet elegant pendant of fused glass in multiple colors.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “I designed it myself.”
It was noon, and I was covering the front desk while Kelsey took her lunch. It had been awhile since I’d done this, and I was remembering how much fun it was. On the bookmobile, I knew the likes and dislikes of the patrons inside and out, but here I typically didn’t know people’s preferences, which left me free to imagine why they checked out certain books. I also had a regrettable tendency to recommend the books they should be checking out, but I kept those recommendations in my head. Mostly, anyway.
I took her card and ran it under the reader. Allison Korthase. The name was familiar, but I couldn’t put her into any of my frames of reference. Mentally I zipped through all the places I was likely to run into people. The library, the sheriff’s office, downtown, grocery store, post office . . . but none of them jingled anything in my memory.
The only other place I went on a regular basis was on the bookmobile, and I was sure I’d never seen this woman on—
My brain took a big bounce and the answer came to me. Bingo!
I started beeping her checkouts through the computer. Every book in the pile was a biography of a prominent woman, with a concentration on women in politics. Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Emily Murphy, Indira Gandhi. It suddenly all made sense.
The checked-out books went back across the counter to her. “So, how’s it going at city hall?” I asked, smiling.
Because I’d finally remembered that Allison was newly elected to the Chilson City Council. Her political signs were among the signs Roger and I had wished gone from the landscape. I thought about recommending another book for her, The Wartville Wizard, but held back. “Righting all the wrongs? Forging a new path to a brighter future?”
I spoke in jest. She’d been elected barely two weeks earlier; I wasn’t sure there’d even been a council meeting since the election. And I knew many of the other council members; they were thoughtful, well-intentioned people who were doing their best for the city. How much could there possibly be to fix?
“There’s a lot of work to do,” she said earnestly, turning her stack of books to face her and aligning all the edges. “I have a number of items I’d like to see implemented as soon as possible. Changes need to be made, and if there’s a little pain involved, well, sometimes that’s what has to happen.”
“Changes?” I didn’t know—or care—much about politics, but I did know that making changes, even in a small town like Chilson, could be fraught with the kinds of things that would make even the strongest want to whimper.
Allison smiled wide. “If we keep on doing things the same way here in Chilson, at the state level, and in Washington, we can only expect to get the same results. Improving our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren is worth working toward, don’t you think?”
It was a question that guaranteed a positive response, the kind of manipulative question that I found annoying. I gave her a polite smile. “Good luck,” I said.
Watching her go, I marveled at her enthusiasm for her new position. Working with Stephen and the library board was as much politics as I ever wanted to deal with. I tried to remember what she did for a living. A council member’s job wasn’t anywhere near full-time, at least not in Chilson. Meeting pay and a small annual stipend were the extent of the compensation. Not even the mayor got much more than that.
Realtor? No, I would have recognized her name a lot faster. Attorney? Maybe. Or a—
“Hey, Minnie. Are you in there? I been standing here half an hour.”
I looked up. Mitchell was standing at the desk, flapping some papers in my direction. “Half an hour?” I asked.
“Well, it felt that long.”
He grinned, and I found myself smiling in return. A large part of what charm Mitchell possessed lay in the fact that he didn’t take himself seriously. Of course, he didn’t take much seriously, so maybe there wasn’t much virtue in it.
“What do you have?” I nodded at the papers.
“Oh yeah.” He pushed the small stack over to me, then readjusted his baseball hat. “This is what I been working on the last few days. What do you think?”
The pages were a long listing of names, phone numbers, and addresses. It was a nice list, and I was proud of Mitchell for such a professional presentation. Clean white paper, alphabetical by last name, correctly formatted; it was very well done. The only thing was, it lacked a title, and I had no idea what it was all about.
I looked through the n
ames, many of which I recognized. Men, women; young, old. Mostly local addresses, but not all. No pattern to it, as far as I could tell, but there had to be a reason Mitchell had gone to the trouble. There was always a reason for something, even if we didn’t know what it might be. Even if we thought the reason was dumb.
“You must have spent a lot of time on this.” I was fishing for an explanation, but Mitchell was oblivious. “Okay, I give up. What is this?”
He grinned. “The start of my investigation. You wouldn’t believe how many people I talked to in the past couple of days. I started with the easy ones, like the neighbors all down that short road he lived on. Then I did the guys he worked with—you know, that construction company.”
The lightbulb over my head went on with a loud click. Mitchell kept talking, but I pretty much stopped listening to him. What he had so laboriously—and probably unnecessarily—done was assemble a list of everyone Roger Slade had ever known. Mitchell was describing his efforts to track down the names of Roger’s fifth-grade classmates when I rudely interrupted him.
“You know what you should do with this?” I tapped the papers and internally smiled a small, evil smile. “Take it down to the sheriff’s office.”
“Yeah? You think so?” Mitchell’s eyebrows went up, disappearing into brown hair that badly needed cutting. “Because last time I tried to help, when that woman was killed last summer, they didn’t seem real happy to see me coming.”
I tapped the papers again. “But this time you have something concrete, something they really might be able to use.”
Mitchell was nodding. “You mean I got something to bring to the table this time.”
“Exactly.” Beaming, I returned the papers. “Make sure you deliver these to Detective Inwood. Tell him I sent you.”
“Sweet.” Mitchell tidied up the small stack. “You’re all right, Minnie, no matter what Chris Ballou says.” He saluted me with the papers and made his long-limbed way toward the front door.
