Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery (12 page)

“There’s a lot of work to do,” she said earnestly, turning her stack of books to face her and aligning all the edges. “I have a number of items I’d like to see implemented as soon as possible. Changes need to be made, and if there’s a little pain involved, well, sometimes that’s what has to happen.”

“Changes?” I didn’t know—or care—much about politics, but I did know that making changes, even in a small town like Chilson, could be fraught with the kinds of things that would make even the strongest want to whimper.

Allison smiled wide. “If we keep on doing things the same way here in Chilson, at the state level, and in Washington, we can only expect to get the same results. Improving our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren is worth working toward, don’t you think?”

It was a question that guaranteed a positive response, the kind of manipulative question that I found annoying. I gave her a polite smile. “Good luck,” I said.

Watching her go, I marveled at her enthusiasm for her new position. Working with Stephen and the
library board was as much politics as I ever wanted to deal with. I tried to remember what she did for a living. A council member’s job wasn’t anywhere near full-time, at least not in Chilson. Meeting pay and a small annual stipend were the extent of the compensation. Not even the mayor got much more than that.

Realtor? No, I would have recognized her name a lot faster. Attorney? Maybe. Or a—

“Hey, Minnie. Are you in there? I been standing here half an hour.”

I looked up. Mitchell was standing at the desk, flapping some papers in my direction. “Half an hour?” I asked.

“Well, it felt that long.”

He grinned, and I found myself smiling in return. A large part of what charm Mitchell possessed lay in the fact that he didn’t take himself seriously. Of course, he didn’t take much seriously, so maybe there wasn’t much virtue in it.

“What do you have?” I nodded at the papers.

“Oh yeah.” He pushed the small stack over to me, then readjusted his baseball hat. “This is what I been working on the last few days. What do you think?”

The pages were a long listing of names, phone numbers, and addresses. It was a nice list, and I was proud of Mitchell for such a professional presentation. Clean white paper, alphabetical by last name, correctly formatted; it was very well done. The only thing was, it lacked a title, and I had no idea what it was all about.

I looked through the names, many of which I recognized. Men, women; young, old. Mostly local addresses, but not all. No pattern to it, as far as I could tell, but there had to be a reason Mitchell had gone to
the trouble. There was always a reason for something, even if we didn’t know what it might be. Even if we thought the reason was dumb.

“You must have spent a lot of time on this.” I was fishing for an explanation, but Mitchell was oblivious. “Okay, I give up. What is this?”

He grinned. “The start of my investigation. You wouldn’t believe how many people I talked to in the past couple of days. I started with the easy ones, like the neighbors all down that short road he lived on. Then I did the guys he worked with—you know, that construction company.”

The lightbulb over my head went on with a loud
click
. Mitchell kept talking, but I pretty much stopped listening to him. What he had so laboriously—and probably unnecessarily—done was assemble a list of everyone Roger Slade had ever known. Mitchell was describing his efforts to track down the names of Roger’s fifth-grade classmates when I rudely interrupted him.

“You know what you should do with this?” I tapped the papers and internally smiled a small, evil smile. “Take it down to the sheriff’s office.”

“Yeah? You think so?” Mitchell’s eyebrows went up, disappearing into brown hair that badly needed cutting. “Because last time I tried to help, when that woman was killed last summer, they didn’t seem real happy to see me coming.”

I tapped the papers again. “But this time you have something concrete, something they really might be able to use.”

Mitchell was nodding. “You mean I got something to bring to the table this time.”

“Exactly.” Beaming, I returned the papers. “Make sure you deliver these to Detective Inwood. Tell him I sent you.”

“Sweet.” Mitchell tidied up the small stack. “You’re all right, Minnie, no matter what Chris Ballou says.” He saluted me with the papers and made his long-limbed way toward the front door.

Smiling, I leaned back and put my hands behind my head, laughing inside, knowing that Detective Inwood would soon be getting a Mitchell-sized surprise. It was a lovely day, and I didn’t see a single cloud on the horizon. Yes, I needed to figure out the whys and wherefores of Roger’s death, but for the moment, everything was—

“Hey.”

I turned around. Josh was standing in the doorway between the back offices. Lurking, almost. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Well.” He fiddled with the doorjamb. Not that it needed fiddling with; it was relatively new woodwork, having been put in place barely three years prior, when the old school was converted into our present library facility, but whatever.

“It’s about, well, you know,” he said.

“Not a clue,” I said cheerfully. “Give me three guesses?”

Josh ran a hand through his dark curly hair and kept not looking at me. Clearly he wasn’t going to play my game. “It’s that stuff we talked about earlier,” he said. “About, you know.” He glanced up and sideways.

I looked in the same direction Josh was gazing and realized he was looking toward Stephen’s office.

My second mental lightbulb of the day went
click
and I remembered that Holly and Josh were trying to help me work out if Stephen knew about Eddie.

“When I went up to do those software updates on Stephen’s computer,” Josh said, “he left for a meeting with some software vendor down in Traverse City. Said he wouldn’t be back until late afternoon.”

Riiiight.
I knew for a fact that there was no software vendor. Stephen never met with vendors until I’d vetted the sales reps first. What was far more likely was that he wanted to see what was going on at the Traverse City library. I made a mental note to check their programming schedule.

“You think he knows about Eddie?” I asked, and was embarrassed to hear a catch in my voice.

“Nah,” Josh said. “The other way around. I bet he doesn’t know at all. If he did know, he would have thumped you for keeping things from him. He hates it when that happens.”

Which was true. Stephen was always talking about the need for more communication. However, I’d long since figured out that what he really meant was that
we
needed to tell
him
more things, not that he needed to share things with us.

“Thanks for trying,” I finally said.

Josh nodded. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, but I can go back in a couple of days. I’ll ask him how the upgrade is doing, then sneak in a couple of questions about the bookmobile.”

I eyed him. He hated going up to Stephen’s office. He’d said more than once it was like going up to the principal’s office after you’d been caught sneaking a look through the window of the girl’s locker room.

“You’re okay,” I said, “for a geeky IT guy.”

His smile flashed bright. “And you’re okay for a nerdy library girl.”

We bumped fists and went back to work.

*   *   *

That evening, my loving cat greeted me when I walked in the front door.

“Mrr,” he said, then yawned to demonstrate the enthusiasm he so deeply felt upon my return.

“You don’t fool me.” I picked him up from the back of the couch and gave him a good snuggle. Since I was still wearing my winter coat, my library clothes were relatively safe from a new influx of Eddie hair, which was the main reason I was still wearing it. I loved an Eddie snuggle when I got home, but the subsequent half hour of picking the cat hair off my clothing wasn’t how I preferred to spend my time.

“I bet you did nothing today except pine for my return.” I patted the top of his head. “Yep, I bet all you did was—”

Suddenly I noticed that something in the living room was different. Something was missing . . . wasn’t it?

Eddie squirmed out of my embrace and his feet double-thumped to the floor.

I turned in a small circle, trying to figure it out. The furniture was the same, the drapes were the same, the picture frames on the mantel were the same . . .

“Eddie!” I shrieked. “What have you done?”

“Mrr,” he said calmly.

“Don’t
mrr
at me!” I stomped over to the low bookcases that stood against the far wall. They held games and puzzles and scrapbooks and other things that the summer boarders used to while away rainy afternoons. For as long as I could remember, there had been local
maps hung above two of the three bookcases, and snowshoes above the third.

Now, thanks to what must have been Eddie Interference, the snowshoes were on the floor.

I tried to hang them up the same way they’d hung for decades. “Nice work, Mr. Ed. Did you not get enough exercise yesterday, running around the bookmobile, getting pats from everyone on board? Don’t look at me like that—I saw you sucking up to that guy who always gives you cat treats.”

“Mrr.”

“I did, too.”

“Mrr.”

“Did, too.”

“Mrr.”

“Did—” I stopped and looked at my cat, who had reduced our conversation to that of two seven-year-olds. “Just leave the snowshoes alone, okay? They’re antiques and are definitely not cat toys.”

Eddie stalked off toward the kitchen, his tail straight up in the air, obviously sure he’d won the battle.

I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or to roll my eyes, so I did both. And somehow the act of doing so reminded me that I’d promised Aunt Frances I’d pick up some groceries on the way home.

“Hey, Eddie,” I called. “If Aunt Frances gets back before I do, tell her I’m getting provisions for the weekend.”

There was a pause; then I heard a faint “Mrr.”

“Thanks, pal,” I said, and headed out for the short walk to the grocery store.

*   *   *

The unseasonably mild weather of the past few days was on its way out, and I kept my head down against the rising wind and chill air.

Yes, winter was coming, no doubt about it. I took one mittened hand out of my pocket and zipped my coat up all the way to the top. Technically winter wouldn’t arrive for another month, but I judged the presence of winter more by the clothing I wore than by what the calendar said.

Thoughts of the upcoming season occupied me as I stepped into the sudden moist warmth of the grocery store and picked up a small basket. As I debated between red and green peppers, I wondered how well the bookmobile’s heater would combat the deep cold spells we’d get in January and February. Below-zero temperatures were not uncommon, and thirty below wasn’t out of the question.

While I looked at the rice choices, I wondered how the bookmobile would handle in the snowy road conditions. The icy road conditions. And, worst of all, the slushy road conditions. The commercial driver’s course I’d taken had taught me techniques to handle every possible condition, but driver’s-course knowledge was different from true road experience.

I stood in front of the freezer section—ice cream wasn’t on the list, but it never hurt to look—and told myself to stop being such a worrywart. There were numerous bookmobiles all across the country that drove through harsh winters, probably worse winters than this part of Michigan ever got. Everything would be fine. I just needed to relax and—

“Did you hear what happened to Denise?”

Though I couldn’t see the woman, her voice was loud and piercing enough to carry from the adjacent aisle. I gave a last, longing look at the quart of Cherry Garcia and started toward the registers.

“You mean Denise Slade?” another woman asked.

I stopped cold. Retreated a few steps. Kept listening.

“She left early this morning,” the loud-voiced woman said. “Headed downstate to visit her— Oh, I’m not sure. Her mother or aunt or some sort of relative.” There was a pause. “Or was it a relative of Roger’s? I don’t remember. Anyway, she’d gone over to the interstate since she was going to the Detroit area, when her engine just stopped.”

“You mean it turned off?” The other woman sounded puzzled, which was the same way I would have sounded if I’d asked the same question. And I almost had.

The loud woman said, “That’s what my husband said, and he’s a car guy, right? He said that the engine seized up.”

Sadly, I knew exactly what that meant. It had happened to the car owned by my best friend from high school. She’d started the engine, heard some horrible noises, smelled some terrible smells, and then the thing had simply stopped running. The fix had been horrendously expensive.

“Anyway,” the loud woman said, “this happened when Denise was on the expressway, going seventy miles per hour. When the engine seized, it made so much noise and scared her so much that she kind of ran off the road.”

The woman’s friend gasped. “Is she okay?”

“She didn’t hit anything, is what I heard, but when she went off the road . . . You know how much rain we’ve been having? She drove right into this deep ditch that was filled with water.” The loud woman’s voice dropped, and I had to strain to hear. “She almost drowned, is what they said.”

The woman talked on, but I made my way to the
front of the store, head down and thinking hard about things I really didn’t want to think about.

About circumstances, about cases of mistaken identity, about crimes of planning and patience.

About murder.

T
he next morning I did my best to sleep late, but the combination of my aunt’s jovial singing and Eddie’s ongoing efforts to find a comfortable sleeping position on my head woke me long before I’d hoped.

“It’s mostly your fault,” I told my furry friend as I toweled my hair dry, post shower. “I’ve heard Aunt Frances sing the theme song to
Gilligan’s Island
so many times that it’s something I’ve learned to sleep through. But I don’t see how I’m going to ever learn to sleep through you flopping yourself across my face. You might suffocate me, you know.”

Eddie, however, was playing Cat Statue. In this mode, his ears didn’t work, which was often very convenient for him.

“Then again,” I said, “if Aunt Frances ever sang anything other than theme songs to old television shows, who knows what it might do to my sleep habits?”

The thought humored me, mostly because there was little chance she’d ever sing anything different. Her brain, she’d said seriously, didn’t maintain a hold on any other song lyrics. I was very grateful her brain didn’t stick on Christmas songs, because the idea of
hearing “Frosty the Snowman” every Saturday morning October through April made me want to scratch out the insides of my ears. Hearing “Frosty” in December was fine, of course, but, in my opinion, a little went a long way.

“You know,” I told Eddie, “I almost feel like singing myself.” Because it was a beautiful day for the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Clear skies and no wind, and what more could you really hope for at this time of year?

“Any requests?” I pulled an almost-cat-hair-free sweatshirt over my head. “‘Cat’s in the Cradle’? ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’? No, wait, I have it: ‘Stray Cat Strut.’”

Laughing, I looked around for Eddie, but all I saw was the end of his tail as it whisked out the bedroom door.

“How about ‘Cat Scratch Fever’?” I called. “‘Honky Cat’? And don’t forget ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’” I waited for a positive response to at least one of my suggestions, but all I heard was the thumping of his feet on the stairs.

Cats.

I smiled a Saturday-morning-that-I-didn’t-have-to-work smile, and headed down the stairs after him.

*   *   *

After a breakfast of slow-cooked oatmeal and orange juice, I decided to go for a walk while the sunshine lasted. “Do you want to come with me?” I asked my aunt.

Aunt Frances turned the page of a cookbook. It was one of many that were scattered around the kitchen table. “I’ll go later,” she said absently. “I want to try a new stuffing recipe for Thanksgiving, and I know I saw
something in one of these books last summer. All I have to do is find it.”

I looked at Eddie, who was lying Sphinx-like on the newly installed padded shelf underneath the window. “How about you?” I asked. “A walk would do you good.”

He turned his head and closed his eyes.

“Well, it would,” I said, but all I got in response was a tighter closing of his eyes and another page turn from my aunt. Smiling, I headed for the outside world by my wild lone.

Once there, though, I wasn’t sure I’d made the correct decision. Last night’s wind had been a north one, and it had brought air so cold that it belonged more in January than in November.

I didn’t see another soul out and about on this chilly morning, and I felt almost as if I were the only person on the planet. For a moment I played with that idea, and decided that I would be a gibbering madwoman within a month. Maybe less.

Just as I was starting to feel what that might be like, I heard a distant noise. Mechanical, and in no rhythm whatsoever. It was clearly human in origin, and I felt as pulled to it as a child being led by the Pied Piper.

A few blocks later, I figured out where the noise was coming from: Bryant’s Repair, the garage that helped me take care of the bookmobile. Darren Bryant, mechanic extraordinaire, had willingly done a vast amount of research so he could do whatever maintenance and troubleshooting the vehicle would inevitably need. He’d even developed an e-mail network of bookmobile mechanics across the country. “If one bus has something going on, odds are good another one has already had the same problem,” he’d said.

Darren was a treasure, one of those mechanics who could talk car stuff both to enthusiasts and to people like me, who just wanted their vehicles to function. He was patient and he never used that annoying, condescending voice, and if he hadn’t been a little too old for me and married to a very nice lady who regularly checked historical fiction out of the library, I might have wanted to marry him.

I opened the shop’s door, and the noise, which had been muffled from without, was extremely loud within. Darren was standing on the front bumper of a large white pickup, leaning over the engine with what I now knew was an impact wrench in his hand.

He looked over at me. “Hey, Minnie. What’s up?” He triggered the wrench one last time while I put my fingers in my ears; then he jumped down and put the tool on the bench.

At most, Darren was an inch taller than I was, which had created a bond between us that we would never, ever, discuss. He grabbed a dirty rag and wiped his hands. “Anything wrong with the bookmobile?”

I shook my head. “Just my normal worries about the generator.” From everything I’d heard and read, generator issues were the bane of a bookmobile librarian’s existence. A generator was critical to the bookmobile’s operations, since it powered the lights and heat when the engine wasn’t running.

Darren switched to a slightly cleaner rag. “And I’ll tell you again, there’s nothing to worry about. It’ll be fine.”

I looked at him askance. “Are you saying that just to make me feel better or do you really mean it?”

“Don’t ask questions,” he said, grinning, “unless you really want to know the answer.”

I laughed. “I need to remember that. I’ve run into trouble more than once, because . . .” Something on the other side of the garage caught my attention. I couldn’t remember what I was saying, so I let the sentence trail off.

“Are you okay?” Darren frowned.

“Um, sure,” I said, peering at a crumpled SUV in the far bay of his shop. “Is that Denise Slade’s?” I pointed.

“Got it in yesterday morning. The insurance guy’s coming in to look at it on Monday. They’ll probably total it.” His face went from friendly and cheerful to thoughtful and considering. Maybe even troubled.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

He redirected his considering look from Denise’s SUV to my face. I don’t know what he saw there, but he gave a small nod and said, “If you were anyone else, I wouldn’t say anything, but you were there when Roger was killed.”

That didn’t make sense to me, but maybe things would become clear if he talked a little longer.

“Yeah.” He tossed the rag he was still using on his hands onto the workbench. “I know I don’t need to tell you to keep quiet about this, so I won’t. Denise’s SUV over there? I was poking around at it, seeing how much damage there was to the front end, and I think . . .” He stopped, sighed, and shook his head. “I think someone intentionally sliced the radiator hose. That’s why the engine seized up—I’m sure of it.”

The world around me tilted. I wanted to grab onto something, anything, to help steady me, but there was nothing that wasn’t scary, expensive, greasy, or all three, so instead I pulled in a deep breath and waited for the tilting to stop. “Did you tell the sheriff’s office?”

Darren laughed shortly. “I’m not telling those
yahoos anything I don’t have to. I talked to Scott from the Chilson Police.”

I looked at him curiously. “You have a problem with the sheriff?”

It was the wrong question. He immediately launched into a long story involving an open trailer, a pile of metal he was hauling to the scrap yard, and an overeager deputy who ticketed him not only for an unsecured load, but also for driving too fast for conditions. And for having expired plates.

Darren, red-faced, was waving his arms and saying that his birthday wasn’t until the end of the month, and why should he pay for registration any earlier than he had to? But I wondered how quickly Detective Inwood would learn about the cut in the radiator hose.

Because he needed to know.

He needed to know that Roger had been murdered, that Denise had been the intended victim all along, and that Denise’s life was in danger.

*   *   *

I burst into the sheriff’s office. “I know it’s Saturday,” I said breathlessly, “but is there any chance that either Detective Inwood or Deputy Wolverson are here?”

The heavyset woman behind the counter nodded. “Both. You want to talk to them?”

I nodded, gave her my name, and I was soon admitted to the back, into the interview room.

A short time later, the detective came in. “Ms. Hamilton, what brings you to see us on a Saturday morning?”

I looked at him suspiciously. “You’re smiling.”

“My wife tells me I should do it more often,” he said, sitting at the table.

“She’s right.” His face transformed completely when
he smiled. And in a good way. He didn’t look nearly the dour everyone-is-guilty-of-something cop when he did. “Why are you so happy about being at work on a Saturday morning?”

His smile went even wider. “You’ll be glad to know that we have a solid lead on the person responsible for Roger Slade’s death.”

“You . . . do?”

“No arrest, but with the help of the area’s conservation officer, we have a very good idea about what happened out there.”

“You do?”

Detective Inwood’s smile slipped a bit. “Don’t look so surprised, Ms. Hamilton. We may not solve crimes in an hour, but we actually do know what we’re doing.”

“It’s not that,” I said quickly. “It’s just that Denise, Roger’s wife, she had a car accident a few days ago, and her mechanic just told me that the radiator hose had been cut.”

I waited for the light to dawn, but instead he simply nodded. “Yes, we know about that. The city police notified us.”

“And?” I asked. “Does that fit with the guy you think killed Roger?”

His smile took on a polite cast. “Ms. Hamilton, anyone truly trying to kill Denise Slade would have cut her brake lines. A slice in a radiator hose?” He shook his head. “She’s been known to call nine-one-one and report loud parties. Most likely she left her car in the drive, and one of the neighbor kids took the opportunity.”

“What if it wasn’t?” I leaned forward. “What if Denise was the target all along? What if Roger was killed
by accident, because he was wearing her hat? What if Denise is still in danger?”

The detective stood. “Thanks for the information, Ms. Hamilton. We’ll consider what you said, but please let us do our jobs.”

I started to protest, to try to convince him that he was wrong, but he was already gone.

*   *   *

When I left the sheriff’s office, it was past ten o’clock and the stores were opening. The Round Table, our local diner, had been serving food for hours, but now the signs on the retail stores were being flipped from
CLOSED
to
OPEN
, lights were being turned on, and there was an overall feeling that the town was stretching its arms, yawning, and waking up to another day of business.

“Good morning, Minnie!”

I looked around for the origin of the voice and saw a woman waving at me from the entry of an antiques store. It was Pam Fazio, the owner of Older Than Dirt, and I didn’t understand why she was there.

“And a fine morning it is,” I said, smiling at her as I crossed the street. “But aren’t you going to be late for the Friends of the Library meeting?” For decades, Friends meetings had been held once a month on Saturday mornings.

Pam scowled. “Funny, Minnie, really funny.”

I blinked at her. “It was? I wasn’t trying to be.”

She blinked back. “Oh. Sorry. You must not have heard.”

No, I hadn’t, and whatever it was, I was getting a bad feeling about it.

“It was at the last Friends meeting,” Pam said, wrapping her arms around herself. She’d stepped outside to talk to me, and the cascading purple cardigan she wore
over black pants and ankle-high shiny black boots wasn’t keeping out the cold.

“I guess you were out on the bookmobile that day,” she said. “By the time you got back it was all over.”

Yep, I was getting a very bad feeling. “What happened?”

“Denise Slade happened,” Pam practically spat. “I know I should feel sorry for her, with Roger being killed and her crash and everything, but that woman is impossible! Why Roger stayed married to her is a huge mystery.”

“What happened at the meeting?” I asked.

Pam rubbed her upper arms. “Typical Denise, really, but something about that day just sent me up the wall. Just because she’s the president doesn’t mean she has executive privilege to make decisions. She told us—told us!—that from now on the Friends were going to open the used bookstore on Wednesdays and Saturdays and not have it open any other time.” Pam’s face was a fierce scowl. “No vote, no nothing—just Denise changing the way we’ve done things for years because she thinks she knows the best way to do things.”

That sounded like Denise, all right.

She clutched at her arms, her fingernails digging deep into her sleeves. “No one else said a thing. Denise has them beat down to nothing. I said something like we should have a vote, or at least a general consensus. Denise gave a smirk—you know the one, right?”

I did, and my expression must have shown how much it annoyed me.

Pam nodded. “Yeah, well she gave that smirk and said there already was consensus, and if I didn’t like it, that I knew where the door was.” She stopped. Smiled a little. “So you know what I did?”

An uneasy feeling crinkled around in my stomach. “Do I really need to know?”

She grinned. “I lit into her the way I’ve been wanting to do for months. And you know what? It felt great.”

“Minnie? Minnie!” A woman was waving from the passenger’s window of a dark sedan.

“Surprised to see us?” she asked, laughing. “We’re headed to the gallery, if you have a few minutes.”

I stared at the mid-fiftyish couple in the car, who were both smiling broadly.

They weren’t supposed to be here. They should have been long gone. Why were they still in Michigan?