Curiosity Thrilled the Cat (20 page)

“I think you’d say that even if you weren’t. If you need anything—”

“—call Lita,” I finished. “I will.”

“Is Oren handy? I’d like to talk to him, if I could.”

“Hang on,” I said. I stepped out of my office just as Oren walked back into the building.

“It is the flashing,” he called up to me. “I can fix it for you.”

“Good,” I said. “Everett’s on the phone. He’d like to talk to you.”

Oren didn’t seem surprised. “Okay,” he said, swiping his hands on the bottom of his shirt. The phone at the desk was closer.

While Oren talked to Everett, I walked around the staging again. I didn’t like having it stay there all weekend, and it didn’t look like Will or Eddie or anyone else was coming back today.

Oren hung up and joined me. “Everett asked me to fix the window,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“He asked me to take the staging down, too—if Will’s boys don’t get back before the end of the day.” He studied me for a moment. “He said something fell off it and hit you.”

“That roll.” I pointed to the plastic, still leaning against the desk.

“Are you all right?” Oren asked.

I nodded. “Just a sore shoulder.”

“I don’t know where Will’s head is,” he said.

I could guess, but it wasn’t anatomically possible.

“I’ll get started, then,” he said.

I walked over to Mary, sorting a pile of picture books. “Break time,” I said.

“You sure?” she said.

“You’re working extra hours. You’re entitled to a break.” I looked at my watch. “Where’s Jason?”

“Upstairs.”

Mary stood up and I slid into her place. “Tell him to take his break now, too.”

“Sure thing,” she said, heading for the stairs and the staff room.

I kept busy until Mary returned; then I went back to my office to print off a copy of the library renovation budget and the running list I’d been keeping of what was finished and what still had to be completed. The painting had to be finished and the computer area wasn’t ready, not to mention the meeting room. And there were about a dozen other little tasks still undone. If Will would stop messing around we could get back on schedule. Big “if.”

While I waited for the printer I checked my e-mail. There was one message from Lise. Subject:
Easton
. I clicked on the message.

 

Gregor Easton was born Douglas Gregory Williams.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Lise

Douglas Gregory Williams. I copied the name on a blue library pad. So Easton had changed his name. Why? Maybe that was why I hadn’t been able to find anything online about his early life. “Curiouser and curiouser” was right. All I had were questions, questions, questions. Who was Gregor Easton, really? Why had he been in the library after hours? Who was he meeting? What happened to him? Not to mention the biggie: How had he died?

Lise was very good at ferreting out information. I was hoping she’d be able to tell me more about Easton/ Williams. And now that Detective Gordon seemed to be less suspicious of me maybe I could find out exactly how Easton—I couldn’t think of the man by any other name—had died.

There was a tap on my open door. I looked up. Oren stood in the doorway.

“I have the leak patched for now,” he said. “When things dry out a bit tomorrow I can do a permanent fix. I’ve checked the other windows and I don’t see any problems, but I left the bucket and the drop cloths down just in case.”

“Thank you for coming to the rescue,” I said.

He shrugged and ducked his head. “I’ll be back at the end of the day to take care of the staging.” He hesitated, then took a couple of steps into the room. “You’ve done a good job here, Kathleen,” he said. “When I was a boy I spent a lot of time in this building, my nose buried in a book—chasing pirates, solving mysteries, going on safari. No video games back then.” He smiled. “It was one of my favorite places. Before you got here everything—the books, the building—was worn out. You’re turning the library back into that kind of place—somewhere special.”

It was the most Oren had ever said to me at one time. I swallowed a couple of times, uncertain how to respond. “Thank you. That, uh, means a lot,” I finally managed.

Oren shifted from one foot to the other. “So, I’ll be back,” he said. He glanced down at my desk as he turned to go and saw the pad with Easton’s real name scrawled across it. He touched the pad with his index finger. “Easton wasn’t a good person.”

He cleared his throat and shook his head. “I better get going,” he said, and he was gone before I could ask him how he’d known that Douglas Gregory Williams and Gregor Easton were the same man.

O
ren knew Gregor Easton’s real name. How? Did he know Easton?

I sank onto the edge of the desk. Oren knew Gregor Easton. There was no other explanation. I could feel my stomach tying itself into a knot. Was it Oren that Easton had met here at the library? Did Oren have anything to do with Easton’s death?
No. No. No.
I couldn’t believe Oren had hurt Easton. I wouldn’t believe it.

The stiffness in my shoulder had turned into a throbbing pain all the way down that side of my back. I fished in my top drawer for a couple of ibuprofen.

It was almost time to leave for the clinic. What was I going to do about Oren? Call Detective Gordon? No. Talk to Oren? I wasn’t sure. I just couldn’t fit the idea of Oren hurting anyone—even by accident—into my mind. There had to be some logical explanation for Oren knowing Gregor Easton’s real name. I’d just have to figure out what that was.

I went to my clinic appointment. My shoulder was bruised, not broken. The doctor suggested ice; the same advice Roma had given me, which just proved to me that she was a pretty good people doctor, too.

I stopped at Eric’s for Chinese chicken salad to go and a giant brownie, because it had been an I-deservea-giant-brownie kind of day. When I got back to the library Abigail had given up sorting books for the yard sale and was at the desk. The staging was gone.

I looked up at the foyer ceiling. No medallion, so I was pretty sure neither Will nor Eddie and the crew had been back. But what the heck, I asked Abigail, anyway.

She gave a snort of laughter. “Friday afternoon? Not likely.”

“I didn’t think so.” I set my take-out bag on the desk.

“How’s your shoulder?” she asked.

“Nothing broken, just a big bruise.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said, smiling. “Oh”—she snagged the notepad at her left elbow—“the electrician said to tell you he’s finished, except for one plug by the window and that’ll have to wait until Oren has fixed the leak. He’ll be back Monday.”

Upside down, Abigail’s handwriting looked like a cross between cave-wall drawings and the Cyrillic alphabet. I leaned over the desk to look at it right side up. It looked the same. “How do you read that?” I asked.

“It’s code,” she said, flipping her braid over her shoulder.

“Seriously, is it some type of shorthand?”

“Seriously, it’s code.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“That’s the point.” She set the pad on the desk and spun it around so I could see it. “I have five older brothers, Kathleen.” She held up five fingers. “Five. They gave Malibu Barbie a Mohawk and a Sharpie tattoo when I was eight.” She shook her head. “A tattoo that says ‘Bite Me’ is not a good look for Barbie.”

“Not really,” I said sympathetically.

“I had zero privacy, so I came up with the code. I was reading
Pippi Longstocking
and a book about pirates at the time.” She laughed at the memory. “It was so complicated in the beginning I couldn’t remember all the rules, but over time I made up something that was a cross between shorthand and my own private language” She shot me a sideways look. “It does make me seem like a nutcase, doesn’t it?”

“Not even close,” I said. I pushed the notepad back to her. “Abigail, my parents are actors. When they get into a part they become entirely different people—twenty-four hours a day. Creating your own language seems pretty tame to me.” I picked up my food. “I’ll be in my office,” I said.

The rest of the evening went by quietly. The walk home up Mountain Road seemed longer than usual. My shoulder ached, and while I’d managed to push Oren out of my mind for a while, what to do with what I knew was niggling in my brain again.

The cats were waiting just inside the kitchen door. “Hi, guys,” I said. “My day was pretty crappy. How was yours?” Hercules meowed but was immediately drowned out by Owen, who yowled louder. “Okay, okay, it’s not a competition,” I said.

I made us toast and peanut butter, propped a bag of ice between my shoulder and the back of the chair, and told the cats all about the leak, my shoulder, Lise’s e-mail and Oren. They listened intently—although that may have been because I was the one with the toast—but they didn’t offer any insights.

I had a shower and went to bed.

In the morning my shoulder actually felt a little better. On the other hand, it looked worse. I felt a bit like a circus contortionist, trying to look at my back in the bathroom mirror. There was a black-and-purple bruise, about the size of a slice of bread, on my right shoulder blade. Seeing it made me angry with Will Redfern all over again, and at myself for being nice a lot longer than I should have been.

The cats followed me around while I dressed, dried my hair and then sighed at my reflection, regretting, the way I did every morning, my ill-advised haircut. I fed Owen and Hercules, and when I was ready to head out to meet Maggie they were both waiting by the back door.

“I’m not going to be that long,” I told them. “Stay in the yard. No going over to Rebecca’s to mooch treats.” I glowered at Owen. “Or anything else.”

Maggie was already at Eric’s at a table by the window. Our waitress appeared with coffee before I’d even settled into my seat. Eric waved from behind the counter. I waved back.

“How’s your shoulder and why didn’t you call me?” Maggie demanded.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said. “I’m fine. Thank you. And, yes, it’s a lovely morning.” I put cream and sugar in my coffee, stirred and took a long sip.

Maggie waved her hand as though shooing away a fly. “Okay. Good morning. Nice day. I’m fine. Is your shoulder all right?”

I set the cup on the table. “I’m fine. I have a bruise but nothing’s broken. Roma checked me over and I went to the clinic and I had X-rays. I’m fine.” I stage-whispered the last two words.

Mags twisted her teacup in its saucer. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Because all I wanted to do was go to bed.” I took another sip of my coffee. “How did you know, anyway?”

“Mary told Susan. Susan told Eric. Eric told me.”

“Ah yes, the information superhighway,” I said wryly.

The waitress came back to take our orders. While Maggie changed her mind half a dozen times about what she wanted in her omelet, I looked around the café. It was mostly families stopping for breakfast before or after a trip to the farmers’ market. So much for questioning people involved with the festival. Not that it was a really practical idea. What was I going to do? Go from table to table saying, “Good morning. Did you kill Mr. Easton?”

Maggie finally settled on tomatoes and asparagus. While we waited for the food I brought her up-to-date on what had been happening at the library.

“I’m glad you’re going to talk to Everett,” she said.

“I should have done it before now.”

“Will’s always been the type to start late and finish early. If I didn’t know better I’d say he doesn’t want the job to get finished.”

“Susan said the same thing,” I said. “But there’s no reason for Will to want this job to go badly. In the end, the only person that’s going to be hurt is him.”

Maggie edged her chair sideways into a patch of sunlight. “Will’s always been the kind of person who takes the easy way, but he wasn’t always so careless. A little lazy, but not irresponsible.”

“Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.” I looked around for our waitress so I could get more coffee.

“You could be right about that,” Maggie said. “He’s dyeing his mustache.”

“What?”

She nodded.

“How do you know?”

Eric came over with the coffeepot before she could answer. He was a much more serious person than his wife. Eric and Susan seemed to prove the old adage that opposites attract. “Hi, Kathleen. How are you?” he said, filling my cup.

“I’m good, Eric,” I said. “I owe you for the breakfast you sent to the hotel for Mr. Easton.”

Eric shook his head. He’d cut his salt-and-pepper hair very short and it suited him. “I never sent it. I called over there to get Easton’s room number—we do their continental breakfast, so I thought I’d send everything at once—and they said he’d gone out the night before and hadn’t come back. The next thing I heard, he was dead.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Your order will be out in a minute,” Eric said, heading for another table with the coffee.

So, after Easton had been at the library he hadn’t gone back to his hotel room. Did that mean he’d gone directly to the theater? And had he been alone? More questions to add to my list.

I turned my attention back to Maggie. “How do you know Will dyes his mustache?”

She took a sip of her tea. “Ruby saw him buying a box of L’Oréal Excellence number forty-six at Walgreens.”

“It could have been for his wife,” I said, adding cream to my coffee.

“Forty-six is Copper Red, and Will’s wife is a blonde,” Maggie said. “He dyes his mustache, Kath. It’s not even the same color as his hair. And he traded his old truck for that huge thing he drives now—long bed and extended cab. How Freudian is that?” She held out both hands. “Midlife crisis,” she said, lightly banging the table to make her point.

Our breakfast arrived then, which meant, thankfully, that we didn’t have to talk about Will Redfern’s midlife crisis—real or not.