Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery (17 page)

“If you really cared about the Friends, you’d find ways to help.” She spun on her heel and marched away.

This time, I let her go.

I also added Allison Korthase to the list of suspects. Politics? Please. Whatever the real reason for their enmity, the fact that Denise didn’t want to talk about it was itself suspect.

The list of possible killers was starting to grow, but if I added everyone who’d had a fight with Denise, I’d have to add myself. It was becoming clear that a lot of people had developed, and possibly even nurtured, a long-term hatred of Denise.

The problem wasn’t going to be finding suspects; it was going to be narrowing the field down to one.

O
n Sunday morning, after I spent Saturday night intermittently texting with Tucker—who was, of course, busy at the hospital—and to Kristen, who was tending an extremely busy bar in warm Key West, Aunt Frances filled me with stuffed French toast, slightly crispy bacon, and apple slices. Then, when I’d finished the dishes, she told me to go outside and play.

I looked at her. “How about Eddie? Are you going to kick him out into the cold, too?” Outside the kitchen window was a stiff north wind and scattered clouds that had the look of snow.

Aunt Frances smiled. “Eddie and I are going to start our Christmas lists, aren’t we?”

My cat, who was sitting up tall on the seat of a chair, rearranged his feet a little and wrapped his tail around himself. “Mrr.”

“You know,” I said, “all his list is going to be is cat treats, cat toys, and fancy cat food.”

“Then we’ll have plenty of time for watching reruns of
Trock’s Troubles
.” She patted Eddie on the head, and he leaned into her, purring.

Those two were clearly ready for a day on the couch.
Well, Eddie almost always was, but Aunt Frances was rarely off her feet for that long, and she deserved a quiet day, if that was what she wanted.

“I’ll have my phone,” I said, “if there’s anything you want.”

Ever so nicely, she shooed me away. “Get out of here, youngster. Do I have to count to three? One . . . two . . .”

Laughing, I went to the front closet for my coat, and pulled my wallet and cell from my backpack, which was hanging on a hook. “Are you sure you don’t need anything?” I called to the living room.

“Git!”

“Mrr!”

Outside, the crisp air stung the inside of my nose and sharpened my eyesight. I breathed in the scent of winter and smiled. Aunt Frances, in her infinite wisdom, had known I needed to get outside. How she’d known, I wasn’t sure, since I hadn’t realized it myself, but that’s why she was the best aunt in the world.

As I walked, thinking about this and that, I nodded and exchanged good-mornings with a woman walking her dogs, a middle-aged couple dressed in church clothes, and a skinny young man out running.

Though I thought I was walking with no particular destination in mind, I soon realized that my feet were taking me to the marina. This time of year, the marina was shut down and deserted, except for the ubiquitous seagulls. Which meant if I wanted to talk to anyone, there was only one person possible.

I picked my way carefully up the front steps of the house next to the marina and knocked on Rafe’s door. The steps had been sturdy and fully functional the last time I’d been up them, but with Rafe, you never knew.
A project that looked fine to 99.99 percent of the people in the known universe could have a teensy-tiny flaw that would make Rafe shake his head and rip the thing apart.

When Rafe finally finished renovating his house, it would be the most beautiful home in Chilson, but the end date kept moving farther and farther away. After three years of work, he’d managed to wrangle an occupancy permit, but it wasn’t the kind of occupancy most people would be interested in.

I made a perfunctory knock on the front door, a heavy thing of oak and leaded glass, and went in. “Hey, are you home?”

“Minnie, you are the answer to my prayers.”

I looked in the direction of his voice, which had come down the wide, stripped-down wood stairs. “What were you praying for, exactly?”

“Someone to bring me another tube of caulk. There’s a box in the kitchen.”

If you could call it a kitchen. How he’d convinced any inspector to sign off on a house whose kitchen possessed only a utility sink, electricity for a refrigerator, and a series of milk crates for storage, I would never know.

I tromped through the bare studs in the living room and dining room and into the mess. “Had to be a man,” I said, still thinking about the inspector. I took two caulk tubes from the box and made my way up the stairs.

Rafe was in a back bedroom. Then again, it might have been the master suite’s sitting room. With so many walls gone, moved, or stripped to the studs, it was hard to tell. He’d shown me the blueprints dozens of times, but he’d also made so many changes on the fly
that I was pretty sure the house bore little resemblance to the original plans.

I waved the tubes around. “I brought two, just in case. Where do you want them?”

“Anywhere,” he said, grunting a little with effort, “just so I won’t step on the buggers.”

The grunts weren’t surprising, because he was standing on a short stepladder, just past the
DON’T STEP ON OR ABOV
E THIS LEVEL
step, trying to caulk a window frame and maintain his balance at the same time.

“You know,” I said, “if you went downstairs to the kitchen, got the properly sized ladder, and brought it up here, you wouldn’t be running the risk of falling and breaking your neck.”

“Risk is my middle name,” he said, putting on a deep, gravelly voice.

I snorted, because I knew for a fact it was Theodore. “You probably don’t carry your cell in case of accident, do you? I bet it’s in that dusty mess you call a bedroom.”

He popped the empty caulk tube out of the gun and held out his hand for a fresh one. “Did you stop by just to give me a hard time, or do you have another, even more nefarious purpose?”

I watched as he took a utility knife from his tool belt and sliced off the tube’s plastic tip. Sitting down on a stack of lumber, I said, “I brought cookies.” The smell of Cookie Tom’s wafting through town had compelled me to buy half a dozen coconut chocolate chips.

He grinned, pointing the loaded caulk gun at the ceiling. “That was my second prayer, you know.”

I watched him bead out the caulk in a smooth line. “Is there anything you want me to do?”

“Entertain me. My iPod ran out of juice ten minutes ago.”

“How about if I ask you some questions?” Except for his college years, Rafe had lived in Chilson all his life, and if he didn’t know everything about everyone in town, it meant someone had only recently moved in.

“My wallet’s downstairs next to last night’s pizza box,” he said. “But I know there’s at least two fives in there.” Rafe and I had a long history of making five-dollar bets, and one of these days I was going to have to start keeping track of who won most often. Rafe assured me that he had, but since he had memory issues with anything that didn’t concern his school or major-league baseball, I wasn’t about to take his word for it.

“Different kind of questions,” I said.

“Fire away.”

The caulk gun clicked as he kept an even bead flowing, and I reflected on how many references we used on a daily basis that had to do with firearms and weaponry.

“Don Weller still teaches at your school, right?” Don was a neighbor to Denise. On his list, Mitchell had noted Don as Roger’s neighbor and a sixth-grade teacher, and he was a man Denise had named as an enemy.

“Sure,” Rafe said. “Good guy, even if he does cheer for the Green Bay Packers.”

“Do you know what Denise Slade has against him?”

“Yup.”

I waited. Waited some more. I decided against picking up the circular saw and cutting off the legs of the ladder. “Are you going to tell me?” I asked, spacing out the words.

“Do I get a cookie first?”

“No.”

He sighed and moved to the other side of the window frame. “It’s typical Denise stuff. He’d put up a few
extra sections of fence on the property line between his place and the Slades, not thinking much about it, but she called the city zoning administrator and turned him in for a zoning violation.”

“You need a zoning permit to put up a fence?”

“In Chilson, yeah, if it’s within eight feet of a property line. Anyway, it was Don’s bad luck that there’s a new zoning administrator all hot to dot the
i
’s and cross the
t
’s, and he got fined a hundred bucks.”

A hundred dollars seemed like a lot, but since I didn’t know the least thing about zoning, I kept my opinion to myself.

“But what really got him mad,” Rafe went on, “was he had to show up in front of the Planning Commission for a permit review on a night the Red Wings were playing in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Against Chicago.”

“Now, that is truly horrible,” I said dryly.

“Didn’t someone say that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor?”

“That’s puns.”

He grinned over his shoulder. “You know what’s really funny? Denise had better never put a foot wrong ever again, because if she does, Don will be on her faster than flies on dog doo-doo. If she’d kept her mouth shut about the fence, maybe told Don he had a violation but that she wasn’t going to say anything to the city if he went and begged for mercy, she’d have made a friend for life. As it is, she’s got an enemy forever.”

I didn’t say anything, but thought about Denise all alone in her house. How hard could it be for someone to break in, especially a next-door neighbor?

“It’s too bad about Roger, though,” Rafe said. “He was a good guy.”

To Rafe, most people were good guys, women
included. Only somewhere out there, someone wasn’t good. Someone had killed Roger, and someone, I was sure, had tried to kill Denise.

The litany of professions recited by Detective Inwood came back to me. A local attorney, a middle-school teacher, a retail-store owner, and the director of a nonprofit organization.

Shannon was the attorney and Don Weller was the teacher. Was Pam Fazio the store owner? And who was the nonprofit director?

“Say, is it cookie time yet?” Rafe took out the caulk tube, now empty, and tossed it into an open cardboard box.

I shook my head, trying to clear the fluff out of my brain. But, as usual, all that happened was my hair rearranged itself.

“Sure,” I said. “Cookies coming right up.”

*   *   *

I spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon hanging out with Rafe, alternately helping and being annoyed by him, sometimes both at the same time.

“Why is it,” I said with exasperation, frowning at the clamp that didn’t quite fit around the pieces of wood they needed to fit around, “that you never get annoyed like I do?”

“Because,” he said, taking the clamp out of my hand and replacing it with one he’d fetched from another room.

I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “Because? That’s it?”

“What, you want me to say it’s because you’re a girl? I can, you know. It’s because you’re a—”

“No,” I interrupted quickly, “I don’t want you to say that.”

“Then don’t ask questions that you don’t want the answers for.”

I stood there, clamp in one hand, wood bits in the other, thinking about questions and answers, about things I didn’t want to know. About asking the right questions. And about the cost of finding the answers.

“Hey, Minnie. You going to clamp that wood before the glue dries?”

“I think so,” I said absently, and tried to focus on what I was doing.

Half an hour later, Rafe kicked me out. “I’m done for the day,” he said, stretching. “I’m headed over to a buddy’s to watch the Lions lose another football game.”

“And drink beer and eat junk food?” I asked.

He slapped his flat stomach. “Dinner of champions,” he said. “Want to come?”

I squinched my face. “As much as I want to bang my fingers with a hammer.”

After I washed up in the kitchen sink (such as it was) and dried my hands on my pants (since there was no towel and the paper towels were upstairs) I poked my head into the bathroom where Rafe was showering and yelled good-bye.

“See ya,” he yelled back. “Hey, thanks for the help.”

“No problem. I’ll send you a bill.”

“Sounds good. You’ll get paid as soon as this place gets finished,” he said, and so I was laughing as I left his house.

*   *   *

During the hours I’d been inside, snow had started to drift down. The light was mostly gone from the sky, and the glow from the windows of the Round Table was like a beacon.

I stomped my feet free of snow in the entryway and
slid into a booth. In my life with Aunt Frances, I was on my own for Sunday food after breakfast, and the cold slice of pizza Rafe had handed me for lunch wasn’t going to tide me over until tomorrow morning.

“Menu?” the middle-aged waitress asked. For once, it wasn’t Sabrina.

“No, thanks, Carol. I’ll have an olive burger with a side salad.” I wanted fries, but chose the vegetable route. My parents would be on their way back from Florida right now, and my mom’s imminent entry into the state was making me aware of my eating habits.

I sat back, uncomfortable at my bookless state, and looked about for something to read. A cast-aside newspaper would do, even if I’d already read it.

“Minnie?”

I turned. Ash Wolverson was smiling at me in a tentative sort of way. In the worn jeans and hoodie he was wearing, he didn’t look at all like a sheriff’s deputy.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

He stood at the end of the booth, looking hesitant. “Are you waiting for anyone?”

“Nope. Have a seat.”

I watched him slide in, thinking that I’d never before met a man this good-looking who was also so unsure of himself. “How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said. “How about yours? Did you drive or did you cook?”

I laughed. “Mostly I did dishes.”

There was a short silence that might have grown uncomfortably long had Carol not arrived with a glass of ice water. She eyed Ash. “You leave your dinner much longer, it’s going to get cold, and fried fish doesn’t microwave up anything decent.”

Which was when I realized Ash had already been in the restaurant when I showed up. The place wasn’t that big, making it yet another day in which I wasn’t going to win a Power of Observation award.

I started to talk at the same time he did. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Thanks.” I smiled and then peered at him. Was he blushing? Surely not. “I was just wondering if Detective Inwood has forgiven you for missing the hat.”

Ash touched the edges of the paper placemat in front of him. “Hard to tell. He’s still letting me work with him, so I figure he can’t be too mad.”