Pouncing on Murder (5 page)

“After that advertisement, how could I not?” I accepted the spoonful she held out. “What is it?” I sniffed the whitish sauce. Dark flecks that I assumed were intentional floated around.

“Bechamel.”

“What’s that?”

“White sauce.”

I rolled my eyes and tasted. It was a glorious burst of rich buttery flavor, heightened by the flavors of whatever herbs she’d tossed in. “This is awful?”

“You are the worst taster ever.” She turned off the burner and poured the sauce down a sink. “Couldn’t you tell that there were too many competing flavors?”

“Tasted fine.”

“Why do I even try to educate you?”

I grinned. “Because while you enjoy pain, the recovery time from this is far shorter than if you banged your head against the wall.”

“And involves exactly the same amount of reward.” She filled the pan with warm water and went to the refrigerator. “However, you are to be rewarded for being the person who can keep me sane even after I’ve failed at that stupid sauce ten times in a row.” She thumped two small white dishes on the counter. “Here. Eat.”

“I get to eat both of them?” The thought made me start to salivate. Eating Kristen’s crème brûlée was the closest I might ever get to heaven.

“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

T
he 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 meeting 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.”