Pouncing on Murder

by Laurie Cass

  “Do you want to help me perfect the summer’s signature dish, which will be topped by the new Three Seasons bechamel sauce?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then you only get one.” She took out two spoons. “Eat and be grateful for what you’ve been given.”

  Five minutes of silence ensued. When both dishes were empty, Kristen sighed. “Okay, I feel better now.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Took you long enough.”

  “Yeah, well.” She grinned. “It was a good winter.”

  “How much of that is due to Mr. Scruff?” I knew he’d visited Key West at least half a dozen times since Christmas and would be in town all summer running his father’s show.

  She winked at me and spooned up the last of her custard. “And how much of those rosy cheeks is due to the attentions of your doctor?”

  I scraped hard at the corners of the dish and licked a teensy bite of custard off my spoon. “Probably not a whole lot.”

  My boyfriend, Tucker Kleinow, known in Charlevoix Hospital’s emergency room as Dr. Kleinow, and I had been dating since last summer. After that rough patch when we’d realized he was horribly allergic to Eddie, things had smoothed out and had been going reasonably well until he’d accepted a short-term job downstate.

  “Still living with his parents, is he?” Kristen shoved our dishes to the side.

  I nodded. Tucker’s new job was a two-year fellowship position at the University of Michigan, and his parents lived less than an hour away from the university hospital. To save money, he’d chosen to move in with them instead of getting his own place. It made financial sense, but it also made my visits a little awkward.

  “Ah, it’ll all work out,” Kristen said. “And it’ll be easier this summer, when you’re on the houseboat instead of at your aunt’s boardinghouse. I mean, your aunt Frances is awesome, but it’s not the same as having your own place.”

  Many people had said the same thing to me over the years, with additional comments about the need to build equity and a solid credit record. I ignored them all. “Tucker’s taking his vacation up here,” I said. “Third week of June.”

  Kristen glanced at a wall calendar. “So you’re going downstate soon?”

  “Not that I know of.” Her eyebrows went rose dramatically, so I dredged up a quick explanation. “With the book fair and moving to the houseboat and . . . and everything, I’m just really busy. The bookmobile needs a good spring cleaning and . . . and . . .”

  “And you don’t get along with Tucker’s parents,” Kristen said, making it a statement of fact.

  I sighed. “I want to like them. I try to like them. But every time I go down there, I never know what to say.”

  Dinners were the worst. Tucker and his parents would talk about people I didn’t know and places I’d never been and I’d sit there with a polite smile on my face with absolutely nothing to contribute. I kept myself entertained by picking cat hair off my clothes, setting them free one by one, and guessing where they’d land. Once, an Eddie hair had stuck to Tucker’s dad’s right sock and I’d laughed out loud, which had proven awkward since everyone else had been talking about the early demise of a neighbor.

  “Talk about books,” Kristen advised. “That will keep you going for hours, if not days.”

  But I was shaking my head. “The only bookshelves in the entire house are in the study, and those hold more knickknacks than books.”

  Kristen dropped her jaw, opening her eyes wide. “They don’t read? Sacrilege! Have you warned them what might happen to their brains? Give them a librarian’s citation. That’ll shape them up.”

  I smiled. Kristen was the best friend a person could have, a tremendously hard worker, a brilliant chef, an outstanding employer, and had a tremendous sense of humor, but she was not a reader. “They have a lot of cookbooks in the kitchen.”

  “Ha!” She thumped the table with her fist. “Just as I suspected. You are a book snob. You don’t think cookbooks are real books, do you? No, don’t deny it. I’ve known you too long. I bet you’ve never even read a cookbook from cover to cover, so how can you pass judgment?”

  She ranted on, and the tight feeling in my stomach eventually faded. Which was, no doubt, what she’d intended because she had known me for a long time.

  And because she’d known me so long and so well, she eventually stopped talking and gave me a long look. “So, what’s wrong? No denials, I can see you’re sad about something. Save us both some time and tell me now.”

  I tried to smile, but it wasn’t a big one and it didn’t last. After a moment, I said, “Remember the guy on the bookmobile who gave me the maple syrup?”

  “Sure.” She nodded.

  “He’d dead.” I sighed. “An accident, they say. A tree fell on him and . . . and . . .”

  “Oh, honey.” My best friend stepped close and wrapped her arms around me. “You go ahead and cry. I’ll hold you, and you cry.”

  So I did.

  Chapter 3

  The next bookmobile day was clear and bright and even though there wasn’t a hint of green growth anywhere, the sunshine was enough to make me believe that someday summer would indeed come.

  “Just think, Eddie,” I said. “Soon we’ll be on the front deck of the houseboat on the chaises, me reading the newspaper while you try to sleep on top of it.” I did, on occasion, read parts of the paper out loud to my cat, but I’d drifted away from the habit while living with Aunt Frances. Some things are best kept private.

  At this point on the bookmobile route, it was just Eddie and me. There were a number of housebound stops to make, and the library board had agreed that the inviolate rule to always have two people on the bookmobile didn’t apply to the housebounds, as long as I kept a fully charged cell phone on my person.

  “One of these days,” I said to Eddie, “someone should revise the library’s bookmobile policies.” The set I’d drawn up a year ago, before the maiden voyage, had been a good start, but things had evolved, as things tended to do, and the policy should be updated to reflect that.

  Of course, doing so would take time, and that was a commodity in short supply.

  “How about you update the policy for me?” I asked Eddie as I made a right turn onto a gravel road. “You know how we do things. All you’d have to do is read over the existing document and make a few changes. I can help with the spelling.”

  Eddie’s “Mrr” was half swallowed by one of his slurpy yawns.

  “Nice,” I said. “Hope you wiped your chin.” I braked and made another right turn, this time into an empty barnyard large enough to accommodate tractors hauling pieces of large and expensive equipment.

  “Don’t get all excited,” I said to the sleepy Eddie. “It’s the neighbor who’s getting the books. His driveway, because of its length and narrow width, is not what you might call bookmobile friendly and this farmer was kind enough to let us park here.”

  We came to a complete stop and I reached for Adam Deering’s bag of books. Though I’d never met Adam, I’d met his wife, Irene, soon after the pair moved up North. The first time she’d walked into the library, I’d been at the reference desk and had smiled at her expression of happy awe.

  I understood her look, because the Chilson District Library was flat-out gorgeous. After the town’s middle school had moved into a brand-new building, the old one was converted into a stunning facility of wood-paneled walls, Craftsman-style light fixtures, mosaic-tiled bathrooms, spacious community rooms, and so many books that I sometimes felt light-headed when I looked at them all.

  Irene’s rapt face had been the start of an acquaintanceship that held the strong possibility of turning into friendship, given the right circumstances, so when she’d called and asked if the bookmobile could drop off some books to her husband, who was recovering from heart surgery, I’d been happy to help out.

  I’d wondered, of course, about a woman who couldn’t be much older than forty having a husband who’d had heart surgery, and was curious about meeti
ng Adam. “They say that curiosity killed the cat,” I said, unlatching Eddie’s cat carrier, “so don’t get carried away with your freedom, okay?”

  He snuggled more deeply into the pink blanket that one of Aunt Frances’s boarders had made him last summer, and purred.

  To get around the fence that bordered the two properties, I tromped out to the road, down to the Deerings’ mailbox, and up the long, narrow, winding driveway that would have been a challenge to maneuver in anything larger than a VW bug. The plastic bag of books got heavier and heavier, digging deep into the insides of my fingers. “Onward and upward,” I muttered, and hoped that Adam’s recovery wouldn’t last until next winter.

  Half a century later, their two-story log-sided house came into view. I heaved a sigh of relief, climbed the steps to the wide front porch, and knocked on the door.

  From inside, I heard a male voice call out, “Come on in.”

  I pushed open the wood-slab door and poked my head inside. “Hi, I’m Minnie Hamilton. Your wife asked me to bring you some books.”

  The front door opened straight into the living room. Plaid blankets were draped over the back of the couch and over armchairs, the large hanging light fixture was a clever driftwood sculpture, and botanical prints hung on the walls. Instead of the braided oval area rug I’d expected to see on the wooden floor, there was a faded Oriental carpet. It wasn’t too Up Northy and it wasn’t too Transplanted City Folk. It was just right.

  There was a fortyish man sitting in a recliner with his feet up. His dark hair had just a touch of gray, and from what I could tell of what showed above the blanket, he looked to be tallish and in the could-use-some-exercise category. “Hi,” he said, waving. “I’m Adam. Sorry for not getting up, but—”

  “But Irene, your cardiologist, your general practitioner, and the entire nursing staff at Munson Hospital will scold you if you do.” I smiled at him. “How are you doing?”

  “Bored,” he said. “There’s only so much ESPN even I can watch.”

  “ESPN?” I gave him a puzzled look. “That’s a new cooking network, right? Extra Special Potato Noodle.”

  He laughed. “I can see why you and Irene have hit it off. She’s not what you might call a sports fan, either. Actually she’s mostly a city girl, though she’s taking to life up here like a duck to water.”

  A woman after my own heart. I emptied the books onto the table next to Adam’s chair and made a mental note to look into the purchase of a wheeled book carrier. “Irene said you like to read,” I said, “but that you haven’t had much spare time for years. I brought a wide selection today, but if you let me know what you like and what you don’t, I can do better next time.”

  Adam reached for the books, then winced. “Piece of advice,” he said, grimacing with pain, “avoid emergency heart surgery at all costs. The recovery time is brutal.”

  “Can I get you anything?” I stood there, helpless, watching as he took fast, shallow breaths. “Water, or . . . anything?”

  He laid his head back against the chair. “Do you have time to give me some quick book summaries? I’ll choose one, and then you can hand it to me so I don’t rip open my staples.”

  I blinked away the vision of a doctor using the latest Swingline product to tidy up a surgical incision and glanced at my watch. “If it means luring you away from a twenty-three-year-old football game played by two teams you don’t care about much, then sure.”

  The top book on the stack was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I’d done no more than cite the title when Adam started smiling. “How did you manage to bring the one book I’ve read in the last fifteen years? My boss, down in Chicago, loved it so much that he bought me a copy and wouldn’t let up until I’d read it.”

  I tried to remember if Irene had said what Adam did for a living, but I came up dry. “What kind of business are you in?”

  “Numbers,” he said, shifting a little in his chair. “I’m an accountant. And yes, you’d think I could manage to sit at a computer while recovering from heart surgery, but they don’t want me working for at least two months.”

  I thought about how that much enforced inactivity would mess with my head and reached into the pile of books for Atlas Shrugged. “Eight weeks should give you enough time to read this.”

  He looked at the heft of the book. Laughed, then winced and sighed. “Forty-one years old,” he said, “and I’m a mess. I can’t work for two months, and I’ve been self-employed since we moved north, so that means no income for probably three months. I have medical bills up the wazoo thanks to our crappy health insurance, and my wife is working two jobs to make ends meet.”

  My heart ached for him, but there wasn’t anything I could say that would help, so I just sat.

  He sighed again, then put on a fake smile. “But I’ll get better, right? And at least I found out about this congenital heart condition I didn’t know I had.”

  “Alive is almost always better than dead,” I agreed.

  His mouth twisted. “Yeah. I could have ended up like Henry.”

  I blinked. “You mean Henry Gill?”

  Adam blinked back. “You knew him?”

  “He was a regular. I first knew him at the library, but when the bookmobile started up, he decided it was easier to let the books come to him instead of him going to the books.”

  Adam’s smile was faint. “Sounds like Henry. I was there . . .” His voice faded away to nothing.

  I didn’t understand, and then suddenly I did. “You were there the day Henry died?”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly.

  “That must have been awful.”

  “Yeah.”

  We sat there, each thinking things that were probably similar, thoughts along the lines of sudden death, of pain and suffering and tasks left undone, of tender feelings never spoken and wonderful places never visited.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

  Adam shook his head, then started talking. “I met Henry early last summer. I’d gone out for a long bike ride and was in the far southeast corner of the county, you know, where the land isn’t quite as hilly but there are all those little lakes?”

  I nodded, but he wasn’t paying attention to me, he was back in time, watching his memory spin out.

  “There must have been some glass in the road or who knows what? I ended up with a really flat tire, so I stopped on the side of the road to fix the tube.” He gave a wry smile. “I’d checked my patch kit before I left, but I hadn’t made sure the glue was still good. Stuff was hard as a rock.”

  My knowledge of bike tube repair was hazy, but even I knew that hard glue was bad. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Adam grinned. “I was sitting there, staring at the tire, feeling like an idiot. I had my cell phone, but Irene was at work and there wasn’t anyone I could call.”

  This, I knew, was what often happened when people moved north. New folks would have a few friends, usually coworkers and neighbors, but it could take a long time to forge relationships that allowed you to call someone half a county away to come save you from your own stupidity.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Henry,” Adam said promptly. “He was out in that beater pickup of his. He slowed down, took a good look at me, and stopped. Asked where I lived, and when I said, he gave that grunt of his, you know?”

  I certainly did.

  “Anyway, he said he’d drop me off at my house, then told me to put my bike in the bed of his truck.”

  I smiled, knowing what was coming.

  “Took Henry fifteen minutes to get it strapped down the way he wanted. I told him it wasn’t an expensive bike and not to worry about it, but he said driving with an unsecured load was dangerous.” He smiled. “Then we got into the truck and headed southeast.”

  “Um . . .”

  “Yeah,” Adam said. “The opposite direction from here. Henry had a guy he needed to talk to about a part for a lawn tractor and he wasn’t about to quit the errand
just because I wanted to get home.”

  “How long did it take you to get back?” I asked, laughing.

  “About as long as it would have taken to walk.” Adam gave a crooked smile. “After the tractor part, Henry stopped to see a guy whose dog had just had pups. Then it was close enough to lunchtime to eat at the restaurant out there. And you know what that means.”

  I nodded. “Coffee. Lots of coffee.” A discussion regarding what made the perfect cup of coffee had been the first real conversation Henry and I ever had.

  “Henry didn’t drink it hot,” Adam said. “And he wouldn’t dream of diluting it with a single ice cube. We sat at that greasy table for more than an hour, drinking coffee, eating ham sandwiches, and hardly saying a word.”

  Classic Henry. I felt my eyes mist up. Cranky and crusty as he’d been, I would miss him terribly.

  “And you know what happened next?” Adam asked.

  “Yep,” I said. “Henry wouldn’t let you pay the bill, he thanked you for the best lunch he’d had in a dog’s year, and he slapped you on the back so hard you almost fell over.”

  Adam’s chuckle was quiet and deep. “So you’ve been out to eat with Henry, too.”

  “A couple of times.” Chilson’s downtown diner, the Round Table, was a congregating place for the entire area, and I’d run into Henry once or twice at Sunday morning breakfast. He’d wave me over, make me sit, and we’d have the same type of silent conversation. “He was one of a kind,” I said.

  Adam sighed. “I’ve felt awful about the whole thing.”

  “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

  “It wasn’t enough,” he said, looking at a vacant spot in the air. “And I wish the sheriff’s office . . .” He stopped and shook his head.

  I frowned. It wasn’t that I believed the Tonedagana County Sheriff’s Office didn’t know what they were doing—in fact, I knew very well how dedicated and capable they were. It was more that I knew a little too much about the department.

  For instance, I knew one of their two longtime detectives had recently retired and the new guy wasn’t quite ready to roll out on his own. And thanks to my friend Rafe, who knew everything about everything in the city of Chilson, I knew that a number of deputies were out sick and on short-term disability. The whole place was understaffed and if that didn’t change soon, the busy summer months were going to become a large problem for the sheriff.