Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery

by Laurie Cass

  “You’ve already had lots of ideas,” I told her. “My favorite is spinning Eddie’s loose hair into yarn and making a blanket of his own hair for him to shed on.”

  Lina giggled and patted her own long honey-brown hair. “Do you think it would work?”

  I had no idea. I liked reading about characters who knitted and weaved and sewed, but I’d never tried to do any of it myself. One of these days. Right after I finished reading Gravity’s Rainbow.

  “What’s your new idea?” I asked. “If it has anything to do with finding a revenue source for the bookmobile operations, I’d be your willing servant for a year, minimum.”

  I could feel her looking at me with a puzzled expression. Lina was bright and full of energy, but she and I did not share a sense of humor. Not that I was joking about the servant thing—not exactly.

  We were headed into the next stop, the parking lot of a mom-and-pop grocery store. Three cars waited for us, even though we were a few minutes early.

  Lina flung her arms out, gesturing at the bookmobile’s interior. “Look at all this! It’s a blank canvas waiting to be filled. It’s an undeveloped artistic endeavor. Just think what we could do with the ceiling and walls and even the bookshelves. And it’s the holidays, so it’s the perfect time to decorate this thing to the max.”

  Making noncommittal noises, I parked the bookmobile. Lina released Eddie, and we started the stop’s setup routine. As we did the small amount of necessary business, Lina kept talking.

  “Can’t you just see it?” She nodded at the shelves. “Wire garland, maybe, or at least crepe paper. We could put snowflakes up. Maybe get kids to make them.” Her face was getting a little flushed. “Or snowmen. Christmas stockings. Stars. We could turn this place into a traveling art show.”

  “Mrr,” Eddie said.

  I looked at him. He was sitting near Lina, on the foot-high carpet-covered shelf that ran along both sides of the bookmobile. It served both as seating and as a way for people like me to reach the highest shelf.

  “What do you think he said?” Lina asked. “I think he’d like decorations.”

  She was undoubtedly right, and what he’d like to do most would be to rip them to shreds. There was precedent for that kind of behavior.

  “It’s a fun idea,” I said, “but I’m going to have to say no. I don’t have time to put that together.” My heart panged. Not to mention the fact that the library board might be looking for a buyer for my single-bookmobile fleet in less than two weeks.

  “Maybe next year, though, right?” Lina asked.

  I made a sideways sort of nod (which, if she’d been reading my mind, she would have read as “Not a chance”), opened the door, and welcomed people aboard. They were all regulars, and they pushed past me on their way to greet Eddie, who was holding court from the passenger-seat headrest.

  Phyllis Chambers, recently retired from a state government job in Lansing and relocated Up North, got her Eddie fix and drifted toward me. I was sitting at the back desk, trying to get the chair to adjust to my height.

  “Minnie,” Phyllis said, “do you have that gluten-free cookbook we were looking through last time, the slow-cooker one? I don’t see it now.”

  “Let me see if it’s been checked out.” I tapped at the computer and frowned. “That’s weird. It says the book’s still here. Well, let’s take a look.” The 641s were on the right side of the aisle, about halfway down, at Minnie eye-height. I knew the book’s cover was dark, but it wasn’t there.

  “Huh.” I stood there, hands on hips, staring at the spot where the book should have been.

  I spent a lot of time making sure all the bookmobile books were shelved properly. As in a lot of time. Of course, someone could have walked off with the book, but theft was so unusual for our library that even Stephen didn’t see the need for the shrieking alarm devices that big-city libraries had. It was far more likely that someone had unintentionally taken it home, so with any luck, it would come back in a week or two.

  “Here it is!” Phyllis held the book aloft. “It was in with the biographies.”

  “Next to Julia Child?” I asked.

  Phyllis laughed. “Harry Truman.”

  “Maybe he took up cooking after the left the White House.” I beeped the book through the system. “Glad you found it.”

  “I wasn’t really looking,” she said. “I just opened my eyes, and it was there. Wrong place, but I was looking at the right time.”

  She nodded and went to the stairs. She might have said good-bye, but if she did, I didn’t hear, because her words were too loud in my ears.

  Wrong place, but I was looking at the right time.

  It had the ring of profundity, somehow. Was it possible that I was looking in the wrong place for Roger’s killer? Looking in the wrong place for the person who wanted to hurt Denise? Looking in the—

  There was a sharp pain in my shin. “Ow!”

  Eddie head butted me in the leg one more time, then sat and looked up at me. “Mrr.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I ruffled up his fur. “Without a doubt, I am indeed looking for both answers and profound statements in the wrong places. What I should really be doing is asking you.”

  “Mrr,” he said, and whacked me in the shin again.

  * * *

  By the time we returned to Chilson, Lina was ready to give up college, her future career, and her boyfriend, and do nothing but work on the bookmobile.

  “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

  I glanced at her, but it’s hard to judge facial expressions when you’re carrying milk crates full of books into a library’s basement. Though she sounded sincere, even Eddie could sound sincere when he really wanted something. “I’m glad you had a good time.” I said.

  “It just seems so wrong that you can’t get the money to pay someone,” Lina said. “I mean, it would be part time—right?—so there wouldn’t be benefits or anything. How much could it really cost?”

  Too much, according to Stephen. As we entered the room that held the bookmobile’s collection, I shied away from thinking about the odds of the bookmobile program ending altogether and said, “The library’s budget is tight.”

  Which it was, but even when I’d dug up a few thousand dollars to cut, Stephen had latched on to the savings as a way to reduce library costs, not as a way to transfer funds to the bookmobile. In the past few weeks, I’d sent off applications to all the grant possibilities I could think of, but I was way past the deadlines for most of them, thanks to the one that had fallen through. Still, it didn’t hurt to try.

  “I think it’s silly,” Lina said, thumping her crate of books onto a solid table. “Everybody knows that you can’t maintain a solid staff through volunteers. They’re just not a reliable source for long-term operations.”

  Between young Lina and Thessie, my teenage summer volunteer, I would soon learn all I needed to know about everything. Smiling, I put my milk crate next to Lina’s. “I’ll be sure to mention that to the library board at their next . . .” Volunteers. Denise also volunteered for other groups. And hadn’t there been a fuss about—

  “What did you say?” Lina turned to me, her hands full of the books she was about to shelve.

  “I’d glad you had a good time today,” I said vaguely, and tried to concentrate on what I was doing, but my brain was fizzing about something else altogether. Because I’d finally remembered why Denise had fingered the director of a nonprofit organization as a possible murder suspect.

  * * *

  I opened the door of the Northern Lakes Protection Association and walked in. As I turned around to shut the door, I looked at Eddie, who was maybe twenty feet away in my nicely warmed-up car. “Ten minutes,” I mouthed. Since he’d protested so loudly at the unanticipated stop, I’d let him out of his carrier. He was sitting on it and staring at me out the
car window, giving me the Look That Should Kill.

  “You’re lucky it doesn’t,” I muttered. “Who else would feed you like I do?”

  His mouth opened and closed, but I didn’t hear what he said. Which was just as well. I closed the door and turned around.

  The room had been painted in shades of blue; a light blue near the ceiling morphing into a medium blue at eye height, then feathering into a dark blue at the floor. On the walls were framed maps of area lakes, and the carpet was a squiggly pattern of blue and green. The whole space made me feel as if I were underwater.

  A man was sitting behind a large desk and talking on the telephone. He smiled and held up his finger. He was older than me, but not by much. Then again, he had that whipcord-thin build and hair so short it didn’t give a good clue to its color, two things that could conceal a man’s age for decades.

  “Sure,” he was saying to the person on the other end of the phone. “It’s your birthday, honey. We can go anywhere you want, even if it is in the middle of the week.” He listened. “Grey Gables? Sure. I’ll make the reservations. Seven o’clock?” He picked up a pen and scratched a note on a desk-blotter calendar for the day after next. “Yes, I’ll put it in my phone, too. Don’t worry.” He said good-bye, hung up the receiver, and looked at me. “Sorry about the wait. How can I help you?”

  I introduced myself, then asked, “Are you Jeremy Hull?”

  Thanks to the photos someone had so kindly placed on the NLPA’s website, I already knew I was talking to Jeremy, the organization’s director and only full-time staff member, but saying so would have felt a little like stalking.

  “Sure am,” he said, pushing back from his desk. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

  I sat into what I immediately realized was a seriously uncomfortable chair for someone my size. If I sat all the way back, my feet would swing in the air like a small child’s. Since that wasn’t the image I wanted to project—not now, and not ever, even when I had been a small child—I perched on the edge of the seat.

  “Have you seen the bookmobile?” I asked. Jeremy nodded, smiling a little. Seeing that, I forgave him for the chair. “Ever since we started up this summer,” I said, “we’ve been having problems finding volunteers to go out on the bookmobile. In a perfect world, we’d have money to hire part-time staff, but I just don’t see that happening. I know your organization runs mostly on volunteer power, so I hoped you might have some advice.”

  He laughed. “Sure. Go back to school and get a degree in computer science. Make a pile of money, then retire early and spend your time volunteering for the bookmobile.”

  “Gee,” I said thoughtfully. “I never once thought of doing that.”

  “And on your off days, you could spend some time here,” he said. “Just to mix it up. Wouldn’t want you to get bored.” He laughed again, only this time it didn’t sound very happy. “Volunteers are the best part of this job. And the worst.”

  “So you’ve had problems, too?”

  He leaned back, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stories.”

  Now was the time. “I hear Denise Slade used to volunteer with your organization.”

  “Denise.” He said the word in a monotone. “That’s not a story; that’s a chapter.”

  “She’s the president of our Friends of the Library group,” I said. “Should I be worried?”

  He sat forward and put his elbows on the desk. “Can I ask you to keep this conversation confidential?”

  I’d have to tell Eddie, but I doubted that would count. “Absolutely.”

  “Denise Slade,” he said, spitting out the consonants, “might be the worst thing that ever happened to Northern Lakes.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s too bad about her husband—I was even out there that day, checking levels at the Jurco Dam—but after what she did, I couldn’t find it in me to even send a card. My wife says I should forgive and forget, and she’s right, but that just hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not something I’m going to fake.”

  I studied Jeremy’s tight face. “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Almost a year ago, but it might as well be yesterday.”

  “What did she do?”

  He made a disgusted sort of noise. “She was my assistant. Worked hard, cared about the projects, talked more people into volunteering, basically made herself indispensable.”

  “That all sounds okay,” I said. “What went wrong?”

  “You must know Denise. What would you guess?” he asked.

  I thought a moment. “That your board made a decision she didn’t agree with, something she thought was just plain wrong. She told them so in a grand and very public manner, and she walked out.”

  He nodded, his mouth a straight line. “Bingo. Walked out, didn’t look back, didn’t leave any notes for the next person, didn’t finish up any of her projects—nothing. She left me with a huge mess, and the board blamed me. I almost lost my job because of her. It took a lot of scrambling to hold everything together, and I’m still not sure I’ve regained the board’s complete confidence.”

  It all sounded pretty horrible, and I said so.

  “Thanks.” He smiled. “So, I guess the answer to your question about volunteers is to avoid using Denise Slade. The woman is a menace.”

  We chatted for a few more minutes, tossing around collaboration ideas for next summer, and I left after having exceeded my ten-minute promise to Eddie by only five minutes.

  “Oh, hush,” I said as I encouraged him back into his carrier. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. It’s not like you can tell time. And even if you could, you’re not wearing a watch.”

  “Mrr!”

  “Yeah, back at you.”

  When he didn’t respond, I looked over at him as I buckled my seat belt. “Now what are you doing?”

  He was scratching the side of his carrier, going at it with his claws as if he were trying to dig a hole and escape.

  “What—did Timmy fall down the well again?”

  He ignored me and kept scratching.

  “Even if you did escape, where would you go? The backseat?” I started the car. “And even if you got out of the car, there’s nothing over there but the parking lot for the Protection Association. Are you going to volunteer to do their valet parking?”

  Eddie flopped down with a loud thud.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “That was funny.”

  He turned his head, ignoring me in a very obvious way.

  I laughed. “Love you, too, pal.”

  * * *

  “What is your cat doing?” Aunt Frances asked.

  Before I answered, I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing. My mother would be pleased to know that at least one of her admonitions had stayed with me. “You know that wooden puzzle of the United States? It’s in the living room on the shelves with the jigsaw puzzles.”

  She frowned. “The puzzle that was a gift from my grandparents the Christmas I was six.”

  I hadn’t known that, and said so.

  We sat at the kitchen table, listening to the sounds of a cat playing with something he shouldn’t.

  My aunt’s expression was a little pensive, so I dabbed my face with my napkin and got up. In the living room, Eddie was crouched in the corner, batting at two puzzle pieces, one much larger than the other.

  “You,” I told him, “are a horrible cat.” I reached down, picked up the wooden bits, and carried them and the entire puzzle back to the kitchen. I set the puzzle on the table, checked the pieces for damage and Eddie spit, and handed them to Aunt Frances.

  “Michigan,” she said. “And Maryland. Do you think he was going for the M states?”

  “If he was, he missed Mississippi, Minnesota, and Maine.”

  “Massachusetts.” She counted on her fingers.
“Seven. There’s one more.”

  “Missouri.”

  “Mrr.”

  We looked down at Eddie. “You missed some states,” I said. “Better luck next time.”

  He jumped onto my lap, then up onto the table. Before I could grab him, he swiped at the Maryland puzzle piece and sent it skittering onto the floor.

  “If you’re trying to destroy them alphabetically,” Aunt Frances said, “you should take out Maine first.”

  “And if you’re trying to do it geographically,” I said, picking him up and putting him on the floor, “you still got it wrong, especially if you’re trying to go west to east.”

  The two humans in the room started laughing.

  Eddie looked from me to Aunt Frances and back to me. Then he put his little kitty nose in the air and stalked off.

  Which only made us laugh harder.

  “Don’t go away mad,” I said, wiping the tears from my eyes.

  “Just . . . go . . . away,” Aunt Frances managed to finish.

  Eddie gave Maryland a final swipe, sending it underneath the stove.

  “Hey!” I said, my laughter gone. “That wasn’t funny.”

  He stopped, gave us a look that clearly said I win—again, and made a dignified exit.

  Chapter 14

  The next day was a library day, and I spent the first part of the morning as I usually did, catching up on the jobs that had piled up when I was out on the bookmobile.

  All was well until I opened the last of my forty-three e-mails, from a college friend who was working for a moneyed foundation, and read that she’d never heard of any grants for bookmobile operations. There are purchasing grants, sure, but, Minnie, basically no one gives grants for operations. You know the theory, that if you can’t afford operations, you shouldn’t have purchased it in the first place. Good luck, though!

  I sent her a quick thank-you and deleted her e-mail. If I deleted it, maybe it wouldn’t be true. Sure, that was it.