Booking the Crook

by Laurie Cass

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “We have a lint roller.”

  “No worries.” Leon, who was sitting on the bookmobile’s carpeted step, gazed at his pant legs with a remarkable lack of concern. “He has interesting hairs. So many are variegated. I had no idea cat fur came like that.”

  I had limited experience with other cats, since my dad had been extremely allergic, and so as far as I knew, Eddie was the only one, but that seemed unlikely.

  Julia tidied some books that had been jostled by a big bookmobile thump into an unavoidable pothole. “Where have you been lately, Leon? We haven’t seen you in a few weeks.”

  Leon was an intermittent regular, if you could say that without spontaneously combusting from the sheer absurdity of the phrase. When he was home, he visited the bookmobile every time we showed up, but he and his nonreading wife traveled frequently. A couple of years ago they’d retired Up North from downstate attorney jobs, and Leon quoted his wife as saying that she didn’t care if she read another word again the rest of her life.

  I didn’t understand that attitude at all—surely she didn’t mean fiction, did she?—but it clearly existed, and if Leon couldn’t shift his wife to be a reader after forty years of marriage, odds weren’t good that the bookmobile’s presence could do it, either.

  “Hawaii,” he said. “Just got back yesterday. And I’m not sure it was a good idea. Nice to not be cold and to get some sun, but now . . .” He glanced outside and shook his head. “Now it seems like winter is going to last forever.”

  “How long were you gone?” Julia asked.

  “A month, almost exactly.” Leon went on to describe the Airbnb they had rented on the ocean. He was waxing lyrical about the scents of the blooming flowers, and when he took a breath, I interrupted him.

  “Did you hear about Rowan Bennethum? She doesn’t live that far from you, right?” If my math was correct, Leon and his wife had left town the day before Rowan had been killed, and this was the stop both Rowan and Leon usually visited, so their houses couldn’t be too far apart.

  The lines in Leon’s face, which were already deep with age, went even deeper. “Yes,” he said heavily. “I did. Out here someone who lives a mile away is a neighbor, especially if they’re full-time folks. Is it true she was poisoned?” At our nods, he sighed. “Such a cowardly way to kill. And delayed death can make finding the killer much more difficult. I don’t suppose they’ve arrested anyone?”

  “Not yet.” I hesitated, then asked, “Did you happen to see anything out of the ordinary that last day before your trip?”

  “Such as?”

  “Anything,” I said. “The sheriff’s office is investigating, but if you were out of town and your driveway wasn’t plowed, they might have assumed you were gone for winter.”

  “Hmm.” Leon put down the copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom he’d been reading. “Well, let me think. Martha was packing our bags and I was taking care of everything else, so we were busy. I certainly didn’t hear anything because we’d put on Hawaiian luau music to get us in the mood. And I don’t recall seeing anything . . .” He got a faraway look.

  “What?” I asked, my voice almost sharp. “You remember something.”

  “A car,” he said slowly. “We get so few cars down our road, and in winter we almost always recognize the vehicles, even in the dark. Speed, height, you’d be surprised how little it takes to pinpoint a familiar vehicle.”

  “You saw something unfamiliar?”

  He nodded. “An SUV. With only one headlight.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning, as I brushed fresh snow off the car, I waved at Eddie. He’d crowded himself onto a narrow living room windowsill and was giving me the evil eye through the glass.

  “Sorry, pal,” I called. “It’s a library day, not a bookmobile day, and I have errands to run. See you tonight!”

  I blew him a kiss—which he ignored—and got into the car, thinking about yesterday afternoon. After Leon had remembered the missing headlight, I’d immediately asked him to call Detective Hal Inwood and tell him about it. He’d protested, saying how could a missing headlight mean anything and telling Hal would only result in adding extra work for the already overworked sheriff’s office.

  While I was glad people recognized how hard law enforcement officers worked, I was insistent that Leon make the call. “You probably won’t even have to talk to him directly. He hardly ever answers his phone and you’ll end up leaving a voice mail message. It’ll take thirty seconds. Let him decide what’s important and what’s not.” Leon kept demurring until I stood tall, put my hands on my hips, and stared him down.

  “In just about every suspense movie ever filmed, there’s a piece of evidence that, at first, seems unimportant but ends up as the turning point of the entire plot. Right now, no one knows what’s important and what isn’t. Do you want the end of Rowan’s movie to peter out to a stupid ending?”

  Once I’d finished my little outburst, I was pretty sure I’d made the stupidest analogy ever, but Leon looked thoughtful.

  “Just like that Poe story,” he said. “‘The Purloined Letter.’ It was right in front of them all the time. You’re right. I’ll call that detective as soon as I get home.”

  Now I was itching to know if he had remembered to call, and what Hal Inwood was doing about it. If anything.

  “Probably nothing,” I muttered.

  “I’m sorry?”

  The question was a good one, because I was now standing at the front counter of Chilson’s urgent care clinic. During the hours I’d spent in Petoskey’s emergency room after Kristen’s post-skiing adventure, I’d looked around and thought that what they could really use was a healthy pile of fiction to read. The Petoskey emergency room was outside the Chilson district, but last year a 24/7 clinic had opened up in Chilson and it was past time I talked to someone.

  “Hi,” I said, and introduced myself. “I have an eight o’clock appointment with Dave Landis.”

  The twenty-something receptionist, whose name tag said RONNIE, gave me a closer look. “You’re the bookmobile librarian, right? With the cat, Eddie. What’s your name again?”

  Five minutes later, I was in the office of Director Dave Landis, explaining what I had in mind. “So do you think this would be helpful?” I asked. “I’d choose the books carefully, nothing bloody or gory, nothing that deals with horrible diseases. A lot of short stories, so people could finish up. And a fair amount of nonfiction, too. Essays, probably. But they’d all be donated books, so it would be fine if people took them home.”

  Dave, about forty and with zero hair on his head, had started nodding about halfway through the spiel I’d put together, but since I’d spent so much time preparing for this meeting, I was determined to get the whole thing out.

  “Plus we’re doing more and more programming at the library for all age levels, and the participation is doing nothing but going up. If you have information you’d like to get out into the community, this could be a great opportunity.”

  “Drug abuse,” he said, jumping in when I paused to take a breath. “Opioids and heroin. I moved here from downstate last year, and I had no idea how much addiction was going on Up North.”

  My eyes had been opened to the problem when Ash and I were dating. As a sheriff’s deputy, he saw more than his share of tragic tales with roots in addiction. “Done,” I said. “It’s a huge problem and I’d love to help even in a small way.” And if the library board took issue with bringing an addiction discussion into the library, well, I’d just convince them they were wrong.

  Dave smiled. “You’re dating Rafe Niswander, aren’t you? That’s too bad. I don’t suppose you have a sister?”

  I didn’t ask how he knew Rafe. Even though he’d been in town less than a year, with his job he would have met more people in that one year than I did in five. “Sorry,
no sister,” I said. Then, trying to learn more, I asked, “If I did have a sister, and if she had a serious addiction, could I bring her here?”

  He nodded. “You bet. Matter of fact, that exact thing happened about a month ago. It was the day we got hardly any snow here, but there was six inches on the other side of the county? A woman who lives halfway to Charlevoix brought her sister here.” His gaze drifted to a business card on the corner of his desk. I hadn’t paid attention to them until just now, but I sat up a bit straighter when I recognized the colorful and cheery logo on the card. The Red House Café.

  “We don’t have beds for long-term addiction care,” Dave said, “but we can treat overdoses and we have contacts with substance abuse facilities in the region. Though we do our absolute best to find beds for those in need, there are only so many out there. I tell people we’ll call as soon as we find something”—absently, Dave picked up Sunny’s card and tapped it on his desktop—“and we do, but sometimes it takes weeks.”

  “That must be hard,” I said. “Telling people you can’t help them.”

  Sighing, he nodded. “Worst part of the job.” He brightened. “But when you can help people, when you know that someone has turned their life around, that makes it all worthwhile.”

  I thanked him for his time, told him I’d be in touch, and as I scraped my iced-over windshield, I thought about what I was pretty sure I’d learned.

  Yes, sometimes I jumped to conclusions, but it wasn’t much of a leap to think that Sunny Scoles had been at the urgent care clinic the day Rowan had died. If she’d taken the poison the day it had arrived at her house, and it seemed to make sense that she would have, then Sunny had an alibi. So why did the sheriff’s office still consider her a viable suspect? Why on earth hadn’t she told them about her alibi?

  * * *

  • • •

  I split the rest of the morning between working on the March work schedule and rewriting position descriptions. For weeks I’d been dodging the description task, but decided that today was the day to take care of the part-time positions. And like many tasks, once I got going, it became clear that the job wasn’t going to take nearly as long as I’d thought it might.

  “Not half as long,” I said out loud as I finished the first draft of the clerk’s description. Clearly, a celebration was in order.

  I spun around in my chair and made for the coffeepot. The break room was empty, so I filled my Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services mug with the stuff of life and wandered out to the front desk, where Donna was frowning at a computer.

  “Problems?” I asked.

  She grimaced, but didn’t look away from the screen. “Operator ones, I’m afraid, not electronic ones.”

  “Want me to call Josh?”

  “And have him lord his knowledge over me? Let him make me feel like an imbecile? Be forced to admit that I’m incompetent and incapable of anything different?”

  I eyed her over the top of my mug. “Are you feeling okay?” Because though I was well aware that there were some IT people in the world who had an unfortunate tendency to treat the people they were supposed to help with sneering condescension, Josh wasn’t one of them.

  “Bugger.” Donna pushed herself back from the computer and folded her arms across her chest. If she’d been seventy years younger, I would have said she was pouting, but since she was seventy-two, she couldn’t have been.

  “Please don’t tell Josh I was slandering him,” she said to her knees. “I’m just in a rotten mood.”

  “Um, you’re not getting sick, are you?” I started to back away, but stopped when she shook her head. So far, I hadn’t been sick at all that winter, and I was dearly hoping to keep it that way. “Is there anything you want to talk about? Can I help with anything?”

  She perked up. “You’re good at persuading. How about you come over to my house tonight and convince my husband that our next vacation should be in Antarctica. I’ve always wanted to go and there’s this expedition next month that just had a cancellation from two volunteer research assistants. He said no so fast that he couldn’t possibly have really thought about it. If you could just talk to him . . .” She sighed. “You’re not going to, are you?”

  Laughing, I said, “No, but I’ll okay your time off if you find someone else to go with you. Or if you decide to go alone.”

  “Not as much fun by myself,” she said. “But if it’s that or not go at all . . . hmm. I suppose I could, couldn’t I?”

  “If it’s that important to you, absolutely.” How that would play out with her husband, I wasn’t sure, but they’d been married for almost fifty years, so there was a good chance an agreeable resolution could be reached.

  “How did it go at the township hall the other day?” Donna asked.

  For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered. “Bookmobile stop is all set. It was so easy to get permission, I wish I’d gone to them in the first place.”

  “Well, there’s been some changes there in the last year or so,” Donna said. “It’s probably best you waited.”

  Once again, I didn’t understand. “You live in Chilson Township, not Wicklow.”

  “I do. But my sister lives over there, and Bill, that’s her husband, used to be on their planning commission, so I hear more than I want to about their goings-on.”

  And once again, I had underestimated how easy it was to obtain information when you knew the person to ask. “So what’s the story with the new township hall?”

  Donna laughed. “That’s been an issue for ten years, ever since the township bought that property on the highway for far too much money. That’s what Bill says anyway.”

  I remembered what Charlotte, the township clerk, had said, that the board was divided on the topic. “The previous township board didn’t want to build?”

  “No, they absolutely did, and half of them got voted out last election because of it. The new board is more approachable and more transparent about their decision-making process—the township even updates their website now, if you can believe it—but the word on the street is now that Rowan Bennethum’s gone, the board will vote to build.”

  “She had that much influence?” I asked.

  Donna shrugged. “All I know is that Hugh Novak and his buddies have been at every meeting the last six months, trying to get this approved, and now that Rowan isn’t there, no one else is speaking up against it. Not everyone liked her, but she was smart and she was respected. Her opinion carried weight with the board.” She smiled faintly. “From the way Bill tells it, there were some heated public comment periods.”

  Interesting. I encouraged Donna to apply for the Antarctica trip and headed back to my office, thinking about what she’d said and wondering why Neil had never called me back.

  And then I moved Hugh Novak to the top of my suspect list.

  Chapter 14

  The hardware store’s bells jingled. I shut the door behind me and stomped the snow off my boots and onto the winter entrance mat. From behind the counter, Jared said, “Morning, Minnie.”

  Well, some of him was behind the counter. His top half was leaning over it as he paged through a newspaper. The Petoskey News-Review, it looked like. Which must have been an old newspaper, since I was pretty sure there wasn’t a morning newspaper within two hundred miles.

  “No, hang on, I’m wrong. It’s afternoon,” he said, glancing up at the wall clock, which had probably hung on the wall for fifty years but was going strong, still advertising Syncro power tools.

  “Just barely, though,” I said, smiling. “I won’t mark you down.” Librarians didn’t do that, of course, but many people seemed to blend the roles of teacher and librarian, so I tended to play along. “How are you doing, Jared?”

  “Like most days, could be better, could be worse.”

  “Most things are relative,” I said. “Even g
ravity.”

  “Gravity?” He narrowed his eyes and thought a minute, then nodded. “It is, isn’t it? Gravity may be constant when we’re down here with our feet on the ground, but if you’re on the moon or Mars or whatever, it’s completely different.”

  “Exactly,” I said, beaming at my prize student. “The physical properties that produce gravity are the same no matter where you go—and please don’t ask me what they are because I have no clue—but its strength varies depending on where you are.” I was pretty sure I’d read there was a detectable difference in the strength of gravity between sea level and the tops of mountains, but I couldn’t remember the source, so I kept quiet since I didn’t want to spread science misinformation.

  Jared flopped the newspaper shut. “What can I do for you, Minnie? Ready to order your cabinet hardware?”

  “Yes, I am.” Rafe had promised if I made a final decision this week that he would read one fiction book of my choosing from cover to cover in less than a month. I put up my chin and squared my shoulders. “Lead me to the catalogs. I’m ready.” Sort of. I’d done some of the hardware homework Jared had assigned, but what I mostly knew was what I didn’t like.

  He studied me. “You look like you’re about to face a firing squad. This kind of thing is fun for most people.”

  I slumped a bit. “Once again I’m different from everybody else,” I said gloomily.

  “No, I get it. The problem is information overload. Too many choices. How about this? We’ll work it like a flow chart, making one decision at a time, and at the end you’ll have exactly what you want.”

  “But that’s the problem. I don’t know what I want.” I was horrified to hear my voice shake. “Sorry, I just . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” Jared said. “You’re just nervous about making the wrong decision. It happens a lot in the construction business.” He laughed. “One of the reasons I got out of it. Loved the work, but it got so I couldn’t deal with the customers.”