Wrong Side of the Paw

by Laurie Cass

  Déjà vu all over again, I thought, and waited for the bad news. It didn’t take long.

  • • •

  “She wants you to do what?” Holly, in the act of spearing leftover macaroni and cheese onto her fork, stopped mid-stab and stared at me.

  I toed the refrigerator door shut and dropped my lunch onto the table. “I’m supposed to go upstairs to give her daily updates.”

  Through a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly, Josh asked, “Why can’t she come down and see what’s going on herself? I mean, if we were a big city library, maybe, but here? Sounds like a waste of time.”

  Though I agreed with him, I didn’t want to create any more discord and I was already regretting what I’d told them.

  Holly forked in a bite and swallowed. “What else did she want? She’s the master of efficiency. She wouldn’t have dragged you up there for just one thing.”

  “I think part of it was the new interior design theme.”

  “Old news.” Josh waved his half-eaten sandwich at me. “I saw it the other day when I had to go up there to hook her computer up again. I kind of like it.”

  “He showed me pictures,” Holly said, squinching up her face. “Nice for Manhattan maybe, but it doesn’t fit here.”

  “Who cares if it fits or not?” Josh frowned. “It’s her office. Can’t she set it up the way she wants without getting crap?”

  He had a point, but Holly wasn’t going to let him win the round. “If it’s in a public space, no,” she said. “There are expectations that public decor is suitable to its surroundings.”

  “Expectations by who?” Josh asked.

  From the sneer in the back of his voice, I could tell those two were about to launch into one of their habitual arguments. If I hadn’t met both sets of their parents, I would have assumed they were siblings. Ones that had never gotten along. To distract them, I said, “Jennifer also wants a written monthly report to take to the board.”

  “What’s the point of a monthly report,” Holly asked, “if you’re already doing an annual one? Sure, the annual came from Stephen, but everyone knows you wrote most of it.”

  The board didn’t, but I let her keep her illusions. “There’s value in keeping her up to date. Plus the annual report will be easy with the monthly ones in hand. If I have twelve monthly reports, practically all I have to do it staple them together and make a new cover.”

  “Sure,” Josh said. “Like you’re going to do that.”

  He was right, of course. No matter what, I’d spend hours and hours working on the annual report, laboring over what should be included and what should be left out.

  “Doesn’t she know how hard you work?” Holly said, a little too loudly. “Doesn’t she know that the last thing you need is more things to do, especially stupid things?”

  The conversation was headed straight into Jennifer-bashing territory, so I hunted for a new topic. “Do either of you know Leese Lacombe?”

  “Is that Brad’s sister?” Josh asked. “Isn’t she the one they arrested for killing their dad?”

  “Dale Lacombe was murdered?” Holly’s eyes went wide. “Where have I been that I hadn’t heard?”

  If I’d been smarter, I would have changed the subject to something less fraught. Whether schools should teach cursive writing, say, or whether our current taxation system was fair and equitable. “Leese didn’t kill anyone,” I said. “Anyway, no one has said it was murder.”

  And since I really didn’t want to talk about Dale Lacombe—those pale blue eyes—I cheated. “Did I tell you two that Jennifer has asked me to cut the bookmobile’s budget?” Cheating, definitely, but it worked like a charm.

  Eventually, I did get to eat my lunch. Which was a good thing, because going foodless for long stretches without getting cranky was not one of my gifts.

  After I ate, it was time for a stint at the reference desk. Late afternoon was my favorite time to be the reference librarian because that was the time the schoolkids came in to research their projects.

  The kids typically fell into two camps: the kind who had never talked to a librarian before and didn’t quite realize I was human, and the kind who thought my job was completely unnecessary, reference librarians having been replaced by the Internet years ago.

  I had a couple of each type that afternoon, all four of them boys in the twelve-year-old range, and all four had a list of things in the library they had to use.

  “This is a stupid assignment,” one of the boys said, looking at the grimy, crumpled list in his hand. “No one needs libraries anymore. Everything is on the computer.”

  I pointedly glanced around the room since almost every table was occupied by one or more people. The kid didn’t clue in. I considered giving him the Neil Gaiman quote of “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one,” but let it go. From the set of his chin, I could tell the kid wasn’t willing to listen to Neil Gaiman or to the possibility of joyful serendipity that only browsing through book stacks could bring.

  “Not everything,” another of the boys said. This one wore a Green Bay Packers hat, which illustrated his willingness to stand out. “There are lots of books in the library that aren’t on the Internet. I mean, they’re there, but you can’t read them without getting someone to buy them for you.”

  “Who wants to read a bunch of dumb books?” his classmate said. “How many of those stupid Harry Potter books do you need?”

  “Either way,” I said, cutting in before the argument went the way of Holly and Josh’s discussions, “your assignment still needs to be done. Let me show you some tricks to remembering the Dewey decimal system.”

  All four of the kids got such pained looks on their faces that I laughed. “Don’t think of it as having to remember more numbers,” I said. “Think of it as a shortcut to finding what you want.”

  “Never thought of it that way,” said one of the boys.

  “Me, either,” said a taller female voice.

  I turned and saw Leese leaning against the reference counter. She smiled. Sort of. “When you’re done, can I talk to you for a minute?” she asked.

  At my nod she pulled out the nearest chair, dropped into it, and started flipping through a book that had been left there ten minutes ago, one I’d yet to return to its home in the 590s. Though I was pretty sure that my friend had no interest in the history of taxidermy, you never knew.

  I pulled my attention back to the already restless kids. In spite of wanting to hurry them through their assignment so I could talk to Leese, I did my best to make sure they understood why there were numbers in front of and behind Mr. Dewey’s decimal. At the end, it was possible that half of them might retain ten percent of what I’d said, so I considered the tutorial a success.

  “What’s up?” I sat in the chair next to Leese.

  She turned a page of the book, which showed a picture of a stuffed weasel, then shut it, saying, “Oh, I was in town to get some paperwork recorded at the county building, so I thought I’d stop by.”

  I squinted at her, not quite believing the story. “You said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “What’s that? Oh, sure. Well, I meant, you know . . . just chatting.”

  Right. “Leese, if you want to talk about anything, you know I’ll listen. I’m a good listener, just ask Eddie.”

  She smiled at that, but still didn’t say anything.

  I slid forward on my chair so no one else would hear me. “If it’s about your dad,” I said softly, “I’ll listen. If it’s about the police investigation, I’ll listen. If it’s about not being able to find pants that fit, I’ll listen.” And I would. Not only because I felt a vague sense of guilt that Eddie had been the one to discover Dale’s body and hence drag Leese into trouble, but mostly because she was a good person and a friend.

  For a long moment, she didn’t say a
nything. Then, at last, she half turned toward me and said, “The final autopsy report on my dad is done. My attorney got a copy of it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That must be . . .” But I had no idea how that must have been. Painful? Difficult? Weird?

  Leese gave a twisted smile. “Yeah. Exactly. It’s bizarre, is what it is. Autopsies are done down in Grand Rapids, at Spectrum, after they’re brought downstate by the county’s medical examiner investigator.”

  More bizarreness. I suppressed a shiver and waited for her to go on.

  “One of the main conclusions was that the time of death was approximately twelve hours before the EMT squad arrived that afternoon, with a three hour possibility of error either way.” She paused and went on. “The cause of death was a broken neck.”

  “A . . . what?”

  Leese looked off into the distance. “A neck broken so badly that the spinal cord was severed, which caused a nearly instant death. Apparently a broken neck doesn’t always mean death, but in this case it did.”

  “But . . .” I didn’t know where to go with my question so I just let it hang there.

  “I know,” Leese said. “How did someone with a broken neck get into the back of the truck? Especially considering how his neck was broken.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Leese shuddered. “His neck wasn’t the only thing broken. One scapula, a collarbone. The pelvis. Metatarsals and metacarpals. And his skull was fractured.”

  I closed my eyes briefly. “What could have caused all that?”

  “A fall,” Leese said quietly. “That was the report’s conclusion anyway. And from quite a height, at least thirty feet. Other factors are involved, too. The surface he fell onto, for one. They’ll be analyzing his clothes and skin.”

  Of course they would. Maybe they’d find that Lacombe had fallen onto landscaping dirt specially ordered from a South American greenhouse that grew only exotic orchids, orchids that only one person in all of Michigan cultivated. Or maybe they’d find he’d fallen onto asphalt of the kind that paved every road and driveway in this part of the state because there was only one asphalt plant.

  Questions bubbled up inside me. Were they trying to build a case against Leese? Would they wait for the forensics evidence to come in? From Ash, I knew that would take days to weeks, not the hours or minutes as shown on television. Would they start talking to her neighbors? Talking to her friends? To her clients?

  Leese shifted. “So did he fall, or was he pushed? And how did he end up in the back of that truck?” She shook her head. “I’m a start-up business. Brand new. I can advertise all I want but what’s going to grow my practice is personal recommendations. Word of mouth.”

  She toyed with the corner of the book. “In the last two days, I’ve lost two clients. They didn’t say why, but I believe it’s the suspicion that I killed my dad. The police came with a search warrant and went through my house, and—” She eyed me. “You hadn’t heard that, had you?”

  “No.” And I didn’t like it one bit. That could only mean they were still considering Leese as a serious suspect.

  “As far as I know, they didn’t find anything incriminating.” She gave a half laugh. “But the word is getting around. If I lose more clients, if I can’t get any more, I’m done. I can work without income for another few months, but I have to get more clients by the end of the year. I . . .”

  Her voice cracked. She stopped talking and looked at me, her panic tamped down, but still visible in the taut lines around her eyes. “What am I going to do?” she whispered.

  “Wrong question,” I said.

  She blinked. “What?”

  “The question,” I told her, “is what are we going to do. Because I’m going to help you.”

  “You . . . are?”

  “Absolutely. And I know exactly how to do it.”

  Chapter 6

  A little more than two hours later, I was done with work—leaving at five o’clock on the dot for the first time since I’d been hired—and was pulling into Leese’s driveway, the last one on the road before the asphalt turned into a dirt track.

  Made of fieldstone, Leese’s house was snugged underneath a set of maple trees whose leaves were just starting to blossom into crimson. It had diamond-paned windows, a wide front porch, and a set of adorable eyebrow windows on the second floor.

  She’d put a tasteful sign out front announcing the presence of LACOMBE LAW, SPECIALIZING IN ELDER AND COTTAGE LAW, and put an identical but smaller sign on the front door, clearly indicating where clients should enter.

  As she’d instructed, I didn’t go in that way, but instead went around to the back door, which was right at ground level. I knocked a few times, opened the door, again as instructed, and went inside and up the few stairs to the kitchen.

  One glance around the cream-colored room was enough to tell me that Leese was far more interested in cooking than I could ever imagine being. In addition to the shelves full of cookbooks, the knife block was fully occupied with actual knives, and there were countertop appliances whose functions I wasn’t completely sure about. There was also a plugged-in Crock-Pot issuing tantalizing smells.

  Leese noticed my sniff. “Clam chowder,” she said. “For when you’re done. You didn’t eat already, did you?”

  I shook my head, since no rational adult would consider a can of soda and a granola bar anything close to a meal. “It smells great.”

  “Good. Gives you something to look forward to.” She paused, then said, “Good luck, I guess.”

  The warm weather was holding, so there was no need to zip my coat as I walked down the driveway. I went out to the road and walked along the shoulder—the closest sidewalk was back in Chilson, about twenty miles away—and a few minutes later arrived at the driveway of Leese’s closest neighbor.

  It was a ranch house with vinyl siding, clipped foundation hedges, and a recently sealed asphalt drive. The landscaping was so tidily maintained that not a single leaf lay on the broad expanse of lawn. Not a shred of personality showed and it made me a little twitchy.

  Earlier, I’d asked Leese if she knew them, and she’d said their names were Alice and Bill Wattling. “We wave at each other when I drive past,” she’d said. “They seem nice enough.”

  My idea to help Leese had been to talk to her neighbors, to see if any of them had noticed any vehicles stopping by her house at the time her father’s body must have been placed in the truck. This was a little difficult because we didn’t know the exact time we were talking about, but Leese had narrowed it down.

  “There was nothing under the tarp on Wednesday night,” she’d said at the library, “because I’d gone grocery shopping and put some of the heavy stuff in the back. I would have noticed if . . . you know. And Thursday was the bookmobile day.”

  All of which meant that Dale’s body had been moved between the time Leese had arrived home from the grocery store and when she’d left for the bookmobile on Thursday afternoon. She’d finished her grocery shopping just before the store closed at 10 p.m. and had left for the bookmobile after a post-lunch phone call with a prospective client.

  That all worked out to about sixteen hours the truck was out in the driveway, unattended. Since it was unlikely anyone would have done the deed in broad daylight, what we were after was any information about Wednesday night.

  Or early Thursday morning, I amended in my head, because if I’d been trying to sneak around, I’d do it at 3 a.m., a time far too late for most people to be up and too early for people working the night shift to be home.

  Other people lived on the street, but the Wattlings were by far the closest. I trod up the prefabricated concrete steps and I pushed the rectangular doorbell button, lit from inside by a slightly creepy orange glow.

  Inside, a low electronic chime gonged hollowly. Footsteps approached and the door swung open. “Alice said she saw someon
e coming up,” said the man I assumed was Bill Wattling. “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not buying.”

  This was the neighbor who seemed nice? He was fifty-ish, with cropped graying hair and a mustache that badly needed a trim. The dress pants and plaid buttoned shirt he wore indicated some sort of professional job.

  “Hi,” I said, being friendly, but not friendly enough to hold out my hand. “I’m Minnie Hamilton, assistant director of the Chilson Library,” I told him, figuring it never hurt to establish myself as a person worthy of trust, and if you couldn’t trust a librarian, the world might as well end. “I’m a friend of your neighbor, Leese, and I’m guessing you’ve already heard about her father.”

  Wattling’s face was closed and uninformative and he didn’t say a thing. Nonetheless, I plunged ahead.

  “What we’re hoping to find out,” I went on, “is if you saw a car or any headlights, or heard anything unusual last Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. Because that must have been when her”—those pale blue eyes—“when her father’s body was left in the truck.”

  “That’s your story?” Wattling asked, snorting. “That someone did a body dump? Nice try, but I doubt the police are going to go for it.”

  “Leese didn’t kill her father,” I said, strongly and firmly, almost the Librarian’s Voice, but not quite. I reserved that for truly difficult situations. This was just uncomfortable. “Someone made it look like she was involved, that’s all. And I’m sure the police will be asking these same questions, so you might as well tell us, too.”

  “If the cops come,” he said, “I’ll tell them the truth. That no one came past either night.” He took a quick step back and shut the door in my face. From inside, Wattling turned the deadbolt and I flinched at the noise.

  From his point of view, Leese had already been tried and convicted. The only thing left was the sentencing.

  I trod back down the steps, down the driveway, and planned what I’d say to Leese about the Wattlings. “Those folks might have been nice at a distance, but up close they’re clearly not folks you’d want to spend a lot of time with. I mean, have you seen the flooring in their entryway?” I practiced a scrunched-up face. I hadn’t actually noticed the flooring, but I was willing to bet Leese had never seen it, either.