Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery (11 page)

I ran around the building’s corner, swung wide to avoid the Dumpster’s wood screen, and skittered to a halt. There, nestled up against the building, as if he’d been sleeping for hours, was Eddie.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He opened his mouth in a silent “Mrr.”

“Once again,” I said, “we have solid proof that you are the weirdest cat in the universe.”

Eddie stood, shook himself, and picked up something in his mouth. It was a fairly large something, and he ended up dragging the thing more than carrying it.

I squatted down to see. “A hat. You’ve found yourself a nice winter hat.” I looked at him. “But you’re a cat and you already have a fur coat. What do you need with a hat?”

He ignored me and continued to prance his way back to the bookmobile, towing his new prize.

“Hang on.” I picked up my cat and the hat, almost wishing that the cat had been in the hat, because if you squinted, Eddie could pass for the Dr. Seuss character. “Since you like it so much, I’ll check inside and see if anyone lost it. Maybe they’ll let us keep it.” The hat in question looked to be handmade, with ear flaps and braided yarn lengths that tied under the chin. It was a fun blend of colors—red and yellow and blue and orange—but not in such bright shades that they hurt your eyes. Though it was a little damp from being
outside, it was clean enough. With a washing, it would be good as new.

I slid it over Eddie’s head. “We can keep it on the bookmobile,” I told him. “You never know when someone will need a hat.”

“Mrr,” he said, and that seemed to settle it.

*   *   *

When Donna returned, I secured permission from a shrugging convenience-store employee to take the hat, which both Donna and I agreed was hand knit, and we headed off to finish the day’s bookmobile schedule.

These were the among the first stops I’d ever scheduled, and the first thing all the regulars—especially the family with six children, which was comprised of the statistically impossible three sets of twins—wanted to do was greet Eddie.

“Hi, bookmobile ladies!” Each of the six kids greeted Donna and me as they breezed past on their way to the front of the vehicle, where Eddie had ensconced himself on the top of the passenger’s seat headrest. It was his current preferred position for receiving visitors, and he accepted their pets and coos of admiration with great tolerance.

“Hey, Minnie,” said the children’s father, Chad Engstrom.

In their bookmobile visits over the months, I’d learned that Chad’s wife worked for Tonedagana County as an accountant, that Chad worked from home as a designer of educational video games, and that he homeschooled the children with the help of a retired neighbor who’d once taught high school biology.

I’d also learned that the youngest Engstrom girl’s favorite color was orange, that her twin brother’s was
red, that the middle girl was learning to play chess, that her twin brother didn’t like peas, that the oldest girl wanted to get a pony, and that her twin brother had already decided he was going to be an archaeologist when he grew up. It was amazing what you could learn about people on the bookmobile.

“Nice day out there,” Chad said, stomping his feet and blowing on his fingers. “Can’t wait for winter.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?” I asked.

“A note?” He snorted. “More like an entire symphony. One of these days I’ll convince my wife to move to a climate that doesn’t hate people.”

I laughed, knowing he didn’t mean it, but his children heard his comment and clustered around.

“Dad, we can’t move!” pleaded nine-year-old Cara.

“But, Dad, I just planted daffodils,” said twelve-year-old Rose. “If we move now, I’ll never see them come up. And I really, really want to.”

Her twin brother, Trevor, frowned at his father. “If we move out of state, what colleges am I going to apply to? In-state tuition is a lot cheaper, but I don’t want to go to a school that doesn’t have a good archaeology program.”

“Well, I’m not going.” Six-year-old Ethan kicked at the carpet. “I’ll run away. I’ll come back here and I’ll stay with Granny Engstrom.”

“Me, too,” said his twin, Emma. “She loves us. She won’t make us move.”

The last child to be heard from, nine-year-old Patrick, spread his arms wide. “We can’t leave the bookmobile. We just can’t!” He looked at my cat. “Right, Eddie?”

“Mrr,” said Eddie, right on cue.

Chad laughed, a great, loud, uproarious sound that
turned his children’s worried expressions to smiles. “All right, Eddie, you’ve convinced me. We’ll stay. But only because you asked so nicely.”

I shook my head. Eddie as a chamber of commerce representative. The world was truly a strange, strange place.

*   *   *

When we got back to the library, I asked Donna to help me haul the returned books into the building, then said she could go.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I can help with the rest.”

I grinned. “Careful. If you keep showing this much interest in the bookmobile, I might ask you to volunteer again.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?” She cast a last look at the vehicle, hesitating. “See you tomorrow,” she said, still looking at the bookmobile, and shuffled off across the parking lot to her car.

I climbed back aboard, and the second I started doing all the closing-down chores, Eddie started pawing at his wire door.

“Mrr,” he said. “Mrr.”

“Oh, you want out, do you?” I sat on the console and looked down at him. “Well, you have been stuck in there for a while. Tell you what. I’ll let you out if you promise to go back in easy-peasy when it’s time to leave.”

He blinked. “Mrr,” he said quietly.

It was clearly a promise. Of course, what a cat’s promise was worth, I didn’t know, but there was only one way to find out. I opened the door. Eddie jumped up next to me and bumped his head against my shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah. Save it for your adoring fans.” I kissed the top of his head and stood. “I have a few chores, pal.
Why don’t you do something productive while I take care of business?”

But instead of straightening the bookshelves or doing a little dusting or even working through the intellectual exercise of figuring out where to squeeze in a few more books, Eddie jumped to the small front desk, stretched out one paw, and snagged his new hat from where I’d stashed it behind the computer.

He pushed it off the edge of the desk, watched it drop to the floor, and promptly jumped down to flop on it.

“Fine,” I told him. “Just don’t think it’s yours forever.” Eddie ignored me, which was typical when I was telling him something he didn’t want to hear. It was the cat equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “La, la, la.”

“It’s not big enough for a cat mattress, for one thing,” I said, eyeing him. “Your back feet aren’t even on—”

The door to the bookmobile opened. Donna, no doubt, coming back to sign up for a lifetime of bookmobile volunteering. I turned, a big smile on my face.

Only it wasn’t Donna. Not even close.

“You,” Denise Slade said, pointing a shaking finger at me. “It’s your fault.”

My arms dropped to my sides. I swallowed. “Denise, I am so sorry about your husband. If there’s anything I can do—”

“Do?” she asked shrilly. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

Gray sorrow raked at the inside of my chest. I wanted to protest, to say that I’d done all I could, to say that I’d done all anyone could, but how could I when I wasn’t sure that I had?

Denise’s hair was unkempt. She wore a perky spring
coat of lime green over cropped pants, with short white socks and plastic clogs that looked like something she’d gardened in for decades. Never once had I seen Denise look anything but tidy and ready to take on the world’s to-do list.

“More than anything,” I said quietly, “I wish that your husband was still alive. I am so very sorry for your loss.”

“Sorry?” she shrieked. “What good does ‘sorry’ do me now? ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to shovel the driveway this winter. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix that leak under the kitchen sink. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to finish the landscaping that never got done last summer.”

She was right, but what else could I say? Nothing that would make any difference, so I stood there and took the abuse.

“Sorry!” She tossed her hair back out of her face. “‘Sorry’ isn’t going to keep me warm at night. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix my Sunday breakfast. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to help me rake the leaves next fall, and ‘sorry’ isn’t going to help me one little bit when the car breaks down.”

I wanted to ease her pain, to make her feel even a tiny bit better, but I had no idea how. Maybe there wasn’t a way. “Denise . . .”

“Don’t ‘Denise’ me!” She took a step forward, her face mottled red with fury. “All you had to do was drive the bookmobile around and bring my husband back home. Instead you got him killed. This is all your fault!”

I gasped, feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I tried to talk, but nothing came out.

“Rrrrr,” Eddie said from the floor—not exactly a growl, but not the friendly sound he usually made, either.

“And that cat!” Denise transferred her focus to Eddie.
“How can—” She made a soft mewling sound and fell to her knees, her hands reaching out toward Eddie’s new mattress. “The hat,” she whimpered. “This is where he left it.”

“This is Roger’s hat?” I stared at one of the tasseled ends, the one Eddie had been chewing on.

“It was mine,” she whispered. “My sister made it for me, but I wanted him to take a hat on Saturday. All that snow—I thought he might need something, he just had surgery, and it was the first one I found. He laughed and said he’d wear it. He said . . .”

I crouched down, rolled Eddie off the hat, and handed it to Denise.

Slowly she stood, holding it to her cheek, stroking it. She stared at nothing, her lips moving, and though no sound came out, I knew what she was saying.

“Roger. Roger. Roger . . .”

Without another word to me, she turned and left the bookmobile, her footsteps on the gravel parking lot slowly fading away to nothing.

I sat down on the console. Eddie jumped up beside me.

“Mrr.”

“Yeah, pal,” I said absently, “I hear you.”

I would have bet money—and lots of it—that Roger wouldn’t have worn that feminine hat unless he’d been in danger of having frostbite take his ears off.

Then a flash of memory came back to me: Roger giving Eddie one last scratch, taking a couple of steps, then stopping and saying, “Almost forgot.” Had it been the hat? Had he been taking it out of his pocket so he could tell his wife he’d kept his promise to her and worn it out in the cold?

The bright design would have been visible to anyone with a scoped rifle.

A unique design made especially for Denise.

Had Denise been the killer’s real target?

I dug through my purse and found the business card Ash Wolverson had given me. “Hi. Minnie Hamilton here. Are you at the office? Because I have something you might want to hear.”

H
alf an hour later, I was sitting in what I was coming to think of as My Chair. I even knew to avoid catching my pant leg in the tiny crack on its front right edge. But if I was going to keep spending so much time in here, something needed to be done about the ceiling tiles. Even if those stains had been from something as completely innocuous as a roof leak, they weren’t at all appealing. In some areas—right by the door, for instance—the pattern was downright scary.

Detective Inwood, tall and skinny like the letter
I
, walked in, followed closely by Ash. Deputy Wolverson, not at all shaped like the letter
I
, was in a tidy uniform of dark brown shirt and lighter brown dress pants that exactly matched his tie. The detective, with evidence of morning coffee on his white shirt and what might have been mustard stains on his gray pants, bore more resemblance to the ceiling tiles.

“Something amusing, Ms. Hamilton?” Detective Inwood asked, sitting in the chair directly across from me. Ash, who was being as quiet as a detective in training should probably be, sat to the detective’s right.

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 sideways 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?