by Laurie Cass
“We do?” To the best of my knowledge, the library had been problem free for days, if not weeks. Well, if you didn’t count that minor episode in the children’s section with the three-year-old and the scissors, and that had ended easily enough with a time-out and a check to replace the damaged books. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Mitchell Koyne.” Stephen put his forefinger on the edge of my desk. “He’s been spending far too much time in this library. He’s keeping the staff from their duties with his endless questions and it must stop.”
“Ah.” Mitchell was indeed a fixture in the library. A large one. He was one of the tallest men I’d ever met, though he didn’t seem to know it, and it was hard to overlook his presence. From what I’d heard, Mitchell had various seasonal jobs—construction, snowplowing, ski lift operator—but he had more employment gaps than employment and none of us knew how he managed to feed and clothe himself. Not that his wardrobe of jeans, T-shirts, flannel shirts, and baseball caps could cost a tremendous amount, but still, you had to wonder.
Actually there were a lot of things about Mitchell that I wondered about, the first one of which was his true level of intelligence. At times he came across as one of the dumbest people you’d ever met, but at other times he’d say something that made you think he was one of the smartest people you’d ever met. Sometimes both would happen in the same conversation.
Plus, conversations with Mitchell tended to go on for five minutes longer than you wanted them to, and Mitchell seemed completely clueless that the library staff had job functions that didn’t include answering his questions, which could range from “What’s the longest suspension bridge in the world?” to “What’s mascarpone?”
On the plus side, I’d never seen Mitchell appear in the library before noon. Mornings were the most productive times for us, by far. The man had an odd charm, but a little bit of Mitchell went a long way.
I looked at Stephen’s finger, which was curving backward with the pressure he was exerting on it. “Well,” I said, “I’m not sure what we can do about it. This is a public institution. Mitchell has as much right to be here as anyone.”
“Of course he does,” Stephen said. “But he can’t be interfering with the duties of our staff.”
“He isn’t, not really.” I watched Stephen’s eyebrows go up. “I mean, maybe he talks a lot, but he’s not keeping anyone from doing their job.” Not for long, anyway. We’d all become experts at sliding out of the Mitchell zone.
Stephen stood up straight and folded his arms. “You think so? You’d know better if you paid more attention to the running of this library. You’re spending too much time on that bookmobile and not enough time doing what I hired you to do.”
I started to protest, but he ran right over me.
“And what did I hire you to do? To take care of the details. To take care of the day-to-day operations so I could be free to deal with the bigger issues. I did not expect to get mired down in the muck of daily minutiae at this point in my career and I resent being required to do so.”
He smoothed his tie. “Now, Minnie”—his voice dropped into that grating patronizing tone—“I know you’re trying to do your best. All I ask is that you exert a little more effort regarding your main function here. You are the assistant library director, remember?”
“Sure, but—”
“Mitchell Koyne,” Stephen said. “Take care of it.” He spun around, marched out the door, and soon I heard his leather-soled shoes go up the stairs to his office aerie on the second floor.
Most days it was easy enough to balance between placating Stephen and maintaining a sense of pride. “Not today,” I murmured. But if I was off my game, it could mean only one thing: time for more coffee.
I picked up my mug and aimed myself at the break room. Though I hadn’t checked the time, it must have been about ten o’clock. Josh, our IT guy, was at the vending machine shoving dollar bills in one end and taking diet sodas out of the other. Holly, a part-time clerk, was stirring creamer and sugar into her mug emblazoned with the logo of the American Library Association.
They both looked up when I came in, then exchanged a glance.
“What?” I grabbed the coffeepot and filled up.
“Um…” Holly continued to stir. “Nothing.”
Josh snorted and popped open one of his freshly delivered cans. “Stephen’s been talking to you, hasn’t he?”
I leaned against the counter. “What makes you say that?”
Holly cast her eyes heavenward. “Well, let’s see. You didn’t say good morning, you didn’t say what a beautiful day it is in northern lower Michigan, and you didn’t ask how our weekends went.”
Josh stuffed cans into the side pockets of his cargo pants and continued the list of clues. “You’re drinking coffee that Kelsey brewed without making a face and you haven’t said anything about Saturday’s bookmobile run.” He took a slug of soda. “There’s only one thing that could do all that to you.”
“It’s that obvious?” I eyed the coffee in my mug. Kelsey was my most recent hire. Well, sort of. She’d been a library employee in the past but had left to have two children. Now that the children were older, she was pleased enough to drop them at her mother’s for a few hours while she skipped off to the library. She was excited to be a part of the library staff again, so excited that she’d taken over the task of making coffee. I’d told her that not everyone liked coffee strong enough to stand up and salute, but she’d just laughed at what she thought was a joke.
“Sweetie,” Holly said, “we all know what it feels like to have Stephen yell at us.”
“All of us who have worked here longer than three years, anyway.” Josh toasted me. “Now that you’re here, he just yells at you. Thanks, Min.” He grinned.
“Glad I could be of service.” As I took another sip of coffee, I considered telling Holly and Josh about the Mitchell Problem but decided not to. Stephen was right. I was the assistant director, and it wouldn’t be right to put any of the job’s weight on them. Maybe I’d ask for ideas, but the responsibility to find a solution was mine.
“You know what?” Holly asked, laughing. “Stephen reminds me of this algebra teacher I had in high school. He scared the crap out of everyone and whenever Stephen starts in on me, all I can think about is the Pythagorean theorem.”
And, just like that, my sour mood vanished. Because even though I was going to have to come up with a method of managing the previously unmanageable Mitchell, and even though I needed to tread carefully if I was to keep the bookmobile on the road, I had friends, I could always brew my own coffee, and Stephen obviously didn’t know about the bookmobile’s trip to the hospital.
I quirked up a smile. Most important of all, he still didn’t know about Eddie. Life wasn’t so bad. Matter of fact, it was pretty darn good.
“So,” I said. “How were your weekends?”
• • •
The rest of the library day passed uneventfully. Minor issues were resolved with small dosages of tact and large helpings of humor. Both were needed to pacify Mrs. Tolliver, an elderly, straight-spined summer resident from Wisconsin. Mrs. Tolliver insisted that the Nancy Drew mysteries in the library were substandard and far below the writing quality of the originals and she didn’t want her granddaughter to read anything but the best. She’d been mollified when I said I tracked down as many originals as I could through interlibrary loan, and the exchange had silently been declared a draw.
I unlocked the door to my houseboat. “Hey, Eddie, do I have a story for you! Would you believe that Stephen—” I stopped midsentence, because I’d seen the evidence of what the cat Thessie insisted on calling adorable had been doing in my absence.
“Nice, Eddie.” What had been a pristine roll of paper towels on the kitchen counter the day before was now on the floor in the form of a shredded mass of pulp.
Mr. Adorable looked
up from his current favorite napping spot—the dining table’s bench seat—and opened and closed his mouth without saying a word.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “The mess is my fault for leaving you alone for so long. My fault for not finding a friend for you to play with. My fault for not buying you the proper cat toys, whatever those might be.”
Since Eddie already knew that, he went back to nap mode. But since he’d likely been sleeping all day, I kept talking to him. If I didn’t keep him awake, he’d sleep all evening and then, at two in the morning, he’d want to play cat games with my hair.
“I suppose,” I said, “I should be grateful it’s only paper towels that you’re shredding and not furniture. Or the houseboat itself. This poor thing has enough problems as it is.”
My summer place of residence was the cutest little houseboat imaginable. Made of wood long ago in a Chilson backyard, it was smaller than my first apartment. It boasted one bedroom with two bunks, a tiny bathroom, and a small kitchen with dining area. The only generous thing about it was the view I got when I sat on the outside deck. It was the sheer pleasure of being able to see Janay Lake on my doorstep morning, noon, or night, in fair weather or foul, that more than made up for the cranky neighbors that lay to the right.
Every so often, I untied from the dock and puttered around the lake, but I had no desire to venture out through the channel and into Lake Michigan. That lake was far too big for my top-heavy little houseboat, and if I sank the poor thing, I’d be homeless next summer.
October through April, I lived with Aunt Frances, my dad’s widowed sister, the aunt with whom I’d stayed during my childhood summers. Come warmer weather, however, I shooed myself out the front door to make way for her summer boarders. Every spring, she said I could stay, but I loved my houseboat, the camaraderie of Uncle Chip’s Marina, most of my neighbors, and all of the many moods of Janay Lake.
During a dinner of chicken stir-fry (for me) and dry cat food (Eddie), I told Eddie that Stephen had asked me to de-Mitchell-ize the library. My uninterested cat offered no advice, but he did jump up on the bench next to me and purr, so he was helpful in a different way.
After dinner the two of us wandered out to the boat’s deck, skirting my one flowerpot and the metal bucket I’d been filling with skipping stones. Eddie trotted out in front and claimed the chaise longue to the left, so I took the remaining one, the one that needed sanding and painting. I’d covered both with flowery cushions, and you could hardly see the maintenance that needed doing, but still.
“How do you do that?” I asked my feline friend. “Okay, sure, cats deserve the best, but shouldn’t that apply only to cat-oriented things, not people things?”
Eddie sat in the middle of the chaise’s cushion and licked his hind leg.
“Cats,” I muttered, and flopped down.
For a moment, I just lay there, listening to the sounds of water and wind and summer, smelling lake and from somewhere, fresh-cut grass, feeling the sun on my face, enjoying the warmth on my skin, enjoying the freedom that comes from outside temperatures that allowed you to wear shorts and T-shirt and not be a single bit cold.
“Mrr.”
I jerked out of a light doze, fluttering the newspaper I held in my hand. “Right,” I said. “What do you want first? Front section or sports?” Eddie gave me the are-you-an-idiot-or-what? glance. “Silly me. I forget how you need to have things read to you in order.”
The last couple of weeks, I’d fallen into the habit of reading the newspaper to Eddie. Reading out loud to a cat may be an extremely strange thing to do, but I found Eddie’s reactions entertaining. “Here’s one,” I said, and Eddie flopped down into his listening position. To non–cat owners, it might look as if he was sleeping, but I could tell from the way his ears twitched that he was paying attention.
In synopsis form, I read him an account of a local township board meeting. “Looks like they’re fighting over lake access again in Williams Township. Same old same old.” I scanned the article. “Yep. Adjacent property owners want it closed. Everyone else wants it open.”
Eddie slapped his tail against the cushion.
“Yeah, I know, all lake access points should be used only by cats.” I looked at him over the top of the paper. “But would you ever use one?”
He fixed his gaze on the horizon. Slap, slap, slap.
I almost started to argue with him but realized just in time that I would lose. “Fine. Next up is…” The rest of the front page was taken up with nothing Eddie would care about. The opening of a new movie theater, a local student winning a scholarship. I turned the page.
“Hey, how about this one?” I asked. “You know that TV cooking show, Trock’s Troubles? The one that’s filmed up here a few times each summer?”Actually Eddie didn’t know since the houseboat didn’t have a television. Come October it would be different, because Aunt Frances was a devoted fan.
Trock Farrand, the bumbling host of the long-running show, owned a summer home not far from Chilson and he’d persuaded the show’s producers to film the show at various area locations from Trock’s home kitchen to his patio to farm markets to the occasional restaurant. My best friend, Kristen, owner of the Three Seasons Restaurant, was on a short list and she was torn between excitement and anxiety.
Eddie’s ears had pricked at the name of the show, so I went on. “This says Trock was out on his bicycle yesterday and was almost run over by a car. He was out on that road that runs right next to Lake Michigan, and he fell halfway down the bluff.”
I paused, thinking. Farrand had been lucky to escape with the scrapes and bruises the article described. Tumbling down that steep hillside covered with scrub trees, briars, and who knew what else, he could easily have had a serious injury.
Eddie jumped down from his seat and up onto mine. He bumped the back of the paper with his head.
“Right. Sorry.” I read through the rest of the article. “He says it was a black SUV with tinted windows that ran him off the road.”
“Mrr.” Eddie turned around twice and, finally facing the water, settled himself onto my legs.
“Yeah, doesn’t narrow things down much, does it? That’s what probably half the summer people drive.”
“Mrr.”
I started to pet him. “No, I’m not going to get a black SUV with tinted windows just because you want one. Think of how your cat hair would look on black upholstery.”
He turned his head around to look at me.
“Fine. When I get a black SUV, which is unlikely unless I win the lottery, which is unlikely unless I start playing it, we’ll get leather seats.” Although that would be problematic in a different way since Eddie still had all his claws.
But my nonsensical capitulation must have satisfied Mr. Ed, because he started purring. Clearly, he was done with the newspaper.
Smiling, I closed it. “If you’re done, I’m done, pal.”
“Mrr.”
Chapter 4
Early the next morning, I woke to the unmistakable noise of a cat doing something that he shouldn’t.
“Eddie, whatever you’re up to, stop it.”
He, of course, ignored me and went on making odd noises out in the kitchen area.
Growling to myself about cats and mornings and alarm clocks, I rolled out of bed, and padded down the short hallway and up the three steps in my bare feet and jammies. At the top of the stairs, I stood over him, hands on my hips. “Although it’s more what you’re down to, isn’t it?”
He looked up at me with an expression that could only be saying, “Who, me?”
“Yes, you.” I kicked at the newspaper he’d pulled off the top of the recyclables pile and dragged to the middle of the floor. “What is it with you and paper products? Paper towels, newspapers. And last month it was stuff out of the printer. What are you going to attack next week?” I almost said toilet paper but kept my suggest
ion to myself and crouched down to gather up his minor mess.
“I suppose I should be grateful you hadn’t started shredding this stuff. Having to pick up tiny pieces of newsprint first thing in the morning would be truly annoying.” I tried to arrange the papers in a neat pile by shoving them around. Didn’t get very far.
Eddie appeared to be finding my efforts interesting to the point that he was stretching out with his front paw to tap the paper. “Oh, quit. This isn’t a cat toy, okay?” I looked at the date. “This is yesterday’s paper and…” My voice faded away as I caught sight of an article I hadn’t noticed the night before.
“Check this out, Eddie. A boat exploded out on Lake Michigan.”
My furry friend edged closer, his paw still extended. I moved the paper up out of his reach. His easy reach, anyway. “The boat’s owner was blown clear and picked up by a nearby boat. Marine experts are investigating the cause.”
The short paragraph hadn’t told me—the owner of a boat—nearly enough. Had the guy been hurt? Had the boat sunk? What had caused the explosion? Every good boat owner knew that you had to air an inboard engine before you started it in case noxious gases had collected in the engine well, but that boat had been out on the lake. Of course, maybe he’d—
Eddie’s white paw darted under the bottom of the newspaper and pulled. The print ripped cleanly from south to north. I jumped to my feet.
“Cut that out! This is not, I repeat not, a cat toy.”
Eddie gave me a sour look, obviously thinking that if I balled up a sheet and tossed it down to the bedroom, it would be.
“No,” I said. “This is headed for the outside recycle bin. We live on a houseboat, a small one, and organized tidiness is key.” I gathered up the paper, an empty glass jar, and the flattened can that last night had held chicken broth. “Tidiness, from here on out,” I said, slipping into the sandals I’d kicked off near the door.