Booking the Crook

by Laurie Cass

  What could I say to this young woman who was dealing with a kind of grief I’d never suffered, but almost inevitably would someday? I thought about my own mother, about the hole that would be left in my life if she died. “You’ll probably always miss her,” I said. “But I think it’ll get easier.”

  “That’s what everybody says.” Anya sniffed.

  “Since there’s no way everybody can be wrong,” I said, “it must be true.”

  She sniffed again. “I want to believe that. And I almost do, but . . . how long will it be? To get to the easier part, I mean?”

  I had no answer for that, of course, so I murmured something banal and trite about being patient with herself and to make sure she got plenty of rest and to eat right.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try.” After a beat, she asked, “So there’s nothing new, about Mom, I mean, to tell Collier?”

  “Not anything substantial.” I told her about the SUV with the broken headlight and she seemed to take it as seriously as Ash had.

  “Anything else?”

  “Well,” I said slowly. “There’s one thing.” I girded up my courage and dove in. “I ran into your dad two or three weeks ago and he said something about your mom and Land Aprelle getting into a big argument soon before she died. I know we talked about this at the library the other day, and—” I stopped, because Anya was doing the last thing I would have guessed she’d do.

  She was laughing.

  “Mom and Land had these huge arguments all the time. Like once a week, practically.”

  “They . . . did?”

  “Sure,” Anya said. “I was going to tell you about this, but you had someone you had to talk to.”

  Out of the vague recesses of my brain, a memory surfaced. That had been the day Graydon came back from training. “I said I’d call you, and I didn’t. I am so sorry.”

  “That’s all right. Anyway, Mom said the fights with Land were her weekly therapy sessions. Land called them catharsis. Every time, Mom would end up firing Land. He’d ignore her and keep on doing whatever he was doing, and five minutes later they were best buddies.”

  I laughed. “Sounds entertaining.”

  “Oh, it was,” Anya said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “They had some knock-down, drag-out fights. You know,” she said, “I don’t think Dad understood their relationship at all. But then he never liked Land in the first place.”

  We chatted for a few minutes longer. I told her I’d let her know the second I learned anything from the sheriff’s office, but when I hung up, I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the phone, wondering about the possibility of the worst complication of all.

  What if Neil suspected Rowan and Land had been having an affair? What if Neil himself was the killer?

  Chapter 15

  My dark thoughts about Neil stayed with me through the night and into the morning. Eddie, who’d slept in the exact middle of the foot of the bed, forcing me to have my feet in every place except the place I most wanted them, was of no help whatsoever when I asked him about Neil as I got dressed.

  “Do you think I should tell Ash?”

  No response.

  “Don’t tell me you think I should talk to the slightly scary Detective Hal Inwood instead of the friendly Deputy Ash Wolverson?”

  No response again. Yay. “Do you think I should stay home today and tend to your every need?”

  “Mrr,” he said sleepily, and rolled over so I could rub his belly.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “Mrr,” he said, or almost said, because I was pretty sure he fell asleep in the middle of it.

  With no guidance from Eddie, I decided to make my decision the old-fashioned way—with a coin toss. When the quarter I dug out of the bottom of my purse landed heads up, I nodded at it and called Ash. It went to voice mail, and though I tried to be straightforward and concise, there was a good chance my message was long and rambling and lacked any focus whatsoever, just like most of the voice mail messages I’d left in my entire life.

  “That went well,” I said after pressing the Off button. Still no response from Eddie. “Sarcasm, my furry friend. That was pure and unadulterated sarcasm. Do you think I’ll sound as stupid to Ash as I did to myself? Never mind,” I said quickly, because Eddie’s eyes had started to open and I didn’t want to hear his answer.

  I kissed the top of his fuzzy head and headed downstairs to get the day rolling.

  It was a library day, and it rolled along reasonably well from breakfast to noon, when I walked downtown for a prearranged lunch with Rafe.

  “This could work out well,” I said, sliding into a booth at Shomin’s Deli.

  “What’s that?” Rafe reached across the table for my hands. “Crikey, what have you been doing with those? Packing snowballs barehanded?”

  “‘Crikey’? I’m not sure anyone has said that out loud for seventy-five years.”

  “About time to bring it back.”

  I eyed my beloved, who was smiling at me in a way that made me want to throw myself into his arms and hold him tight, forever and ever. Two things kept me from doing so. One, the table between us would have made the throwing part logistically difficult. Two, if he kept using the word “crikey,” my undying love for him might take a hard turn.

  “Hey, you two.” Ash slid into the booth next to me.

  Rafe bumped knuckles with him. “Have a seat, why don’t you?”

  “Just here to pick up the man’s lunch,” Ash said. “Well, mine, too, but Hal was the one who made me come here because he wants that weird Swiss cheese and olive sandwich.” He made a face. “Bet Hal’s the only one in the world who eats it. Wait, really?” Because Rafe was pointing at me.

  “You should try it sometime,” I said.

  The fact that Hal Inwood and I shared a taste for anything was a little disconcerting, so I pushed that nugget of information to a back corner of my brain where it could keep company with Avogadro’s number, the laws of thermodynamics, and the Krebs cycle.

  “Say, Minnie, you know that message you left this morning?” Ash asked. “I’m looking into it. Just wanted you to know.” He nodded at me, did the knuckle thing again with Rafe, and went to the cash register to pick up his order.

  “Message about what?” Rafe asked.

  I studied him, but couldn’t detect the least amount of jealousy. Excellent. “It’s about Rowan’s murder,” I said in a low voice.

  “Hey.” Rafe frowned. “I thought we were partners in that, just like in everything else.”

  “Partners? Does that mean we’re going to play doubles tennis?”

  “Not a chance. You play the worst tennis in the history of the game.” Our order was called and Rafe slid out of the booth to fetch and carry. In seconds he was back and we were unwrapping our food: crispy chicken wrap for him, Swiss cheese and olive on sourdough for me. “But in everything else,” Rafe went on as if there hadn’t been any interruption, “we’re a matched set. So spill about what you told my man Ash.”

  As I did, I realized there were other things that had gone untold, from Anya and Collier to Bax Tousely. By the end of the telling, our lunches were gone and the ice cubes in our drinks were the size of small peas.

  Rafe put his elbows on the table. “Let me get this right. You think Rowan was killed for some complicated reason and that the killer will be revealed because of the combination of an empty sugar packet and a damaged headlight.”

  When he put it like that, it sounded weak. More than weak; it sounded stupid. “Well, yes.”

  He looked at me long enough for me to decide that what was taking him so long to say anything was that he was trying to figure out how to tell me I was completely bonkers. Finally, he said, “I think you’re right.”

  “You . . . do?”

  “Absolutely. What you’ve picked up on a
re the anomalies, and Rowan lived by rules. I bet she had a certain day of the week to do laundry, instead of doing it when the hamper was full.”

  I always did laundry on Saturdays, but I was too happy with his approval of my theories to argue about that small life choice.

  “So now what?” he asked.

  There was only one thing to do. “It’s time to make a list.”

  * * *

  • • •

  All I meant was a simple list of murder suspects, but Rafe wanted to make it a lot harder than it needed to be, saying that it should be a spreadsheet with columns of suspect names and rows listing dates, times, possibilities, and scenarios.

  I showed him my cell phone, which I’d opened to the notes application. “I’m done. How about you?”

  “That’s what I’d call a good start.” He pulled out his cell and snapped a photo. “And you were the one saying how complicated this was. How many complications can you get from a list of five names?”

  We parted ways; he drove back to the middle school and I made my way to the library through two inches of new snow. It was, I thought, the perfect amount of snowfall. Not enough to mess up driving in any significant way, but enough to blanket the landscape with a fresh layer of white.

  I was still thinking about snow and its powers when I arrived back at the library, and almost ran into a forty-ish woman in the entryway.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My thoughts were wandering, and . . . oh. Hey, Debbie. Here to check out the new releases?”

  Debbie Ottavino smiled as she buttoned her black velvet cape and pulled on bright pink mittens. “Not today.”

  I widened my eyes dramatically. “Don’t tell me your husband has convinced you to start reading science fiction.”

  She laughed. “Not yet. And no trying to convince me that The Martian was science fiction. That was a survival story from start to finish.”

  “You’ve almost changed my mind on that one. What did you check out?” I asked, nodding at her leather messenger bag. “Anything fun?”

  Debbie lived in Chilson, worked for an accounting firm in Petoskey, and was the library’s auditor. In some ways she was the stereotypical accountant—just the facts and nothing but the facts, please—but she also shattered that stereotype by having a tremendous sense of humor and a flamboyant sense of style.

  “Well, I think it’s fun,” she said, “but I’m an accountant, and you know how skewed our worldviews are. Then again, Graydon and Trent were all smiles just now, so maybe it’s contagious.”

  I watched her push out through the double doors. The annual audit was done, so why would our auditor be meeting with the library director and the library board president now? And what could possibly be making all of them happy?

  While the library’s finances were stable, we could always use more revenue. Josh wanted a new server, it would be great to expand our programming, and I’d love to be open more hours, but we couldn’t afford the staff time. And then there was that nagging need to start saving for a new bookmobile. Sure, this one was only a couple of years old, but they didn’t last forever and it would be better to start stashing money away now.

  The whole thing was making me nervous, a feeling I hated. Add the weird questions that Graydon and Trent had been asking and you have a recipe for Minnie anxiety that rivaled driving over the Mackinac Bridge in the dark during a howling snowstorm.

  I divested myself of outer clothing in my office and headed upstairs. “Knock, knock,” I said, poking my head in Graydon’s office. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Hey, Minnie.” He smiled and clicked his computer’s mouse. “What’s up?”

  “I just wondered why Debbie was here. Is everything okay?”

  “Oh. Sure,” he said. “I mean, they’re fine. It’s just . . . Trent and I wanted to go over a few things with her, is all. Trying to get more familiar with the library’s financials, not just now but the past, too, if you see what I mean.”

  Sort of, but not really. That was another reason I’d decided against applying for the library director’s job; to me, financial statements were a mystery, and not the fun kind with a plot and characters and snappy dialogue.

  “Okay,” I said. “Because you’d tell me if something was wrong, right?”

  He smiled. “You’re my assistant. I’ll always need help.”

  I nodded and left him to his work, but it wasn’t until I was halfway down the stairs that I realized he hadn’t answered my question. Frowning, I considered my options. Should I ask Trent? Or the board’s vice president?

  No, and no. Reason number one against stepping over my boss to satisfy my curiosity was that it would be a rotten way to treat Graydon. Number two against was I barely knew Trent and hadn’t known the vice president very long, so asking a semi-sneaky question was a poor foundation for what I hoped would be long and productive relationships.

  Which meant I was stuck. Being glued in place without any way to get to my objective was frustrating. Which meant a crappy mood for Minnie until I pulled out of it.

  I took a deep breath, tried to summon a happier frame of mind, and felt myself failing. Rats. What was it Aunt Frances said? “This, too, shall pass,” I said out loud as the stairwell door shut behind me.

  “True words,” Stewart Funston said. He was standing in front of the drinking fountain, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “But you can make time pass faster by having as much fun as possible.”

  I tried not to glare at him, but that’s how my look probably came across, because I was still cranky. “Sounds like what people say to justify the dumb things they do. Like that time you vandalized the principal’s office.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to grab them back. “Stewart, I am so sorry. I’m in a bad mood and I’m taking it out on you.”

  Smiling ruefully, he waved away my apology. “One of the worst things about living in the town where you grew up is that your youthful escapades never go away.”

  “Makes me glad I moved north.”

  Stewart laughed. “I find it hard to believe you’ve ever strayed from the straight and narrow.”

  Now why did that annoy me? I was, in fact, pretty much a Goody Two-shoes, but somehow I didn’t like people knowing. “Well, sorry again for dredging up your past,” I said, and went back to my office, thinking that I wouldn’t classify the damage that Aunt Frances had described (“furniture reduced to kindling”) as a mere escapade.

  * * *

  • • •

  Just as I was finishing the bookmobile’s April calendar—well done, Minnie; this is the earliest you’ve ever sent out a schedule!—my cell phone made its incoming call noise. At lunch, Rafe, thinking he was funny, had downloaded the bleats of a herd of goats as my ringtone, and since it was actually pretty funny, I hadn’t yet changed it.

  I flipped my phone over and saw it was Barb McCade. “Hey, Barb. What’s up?”

  “We will be, or at least we will in a few minutes.”

  “Should I act as if I know what you’re talking about, or should I admit that I’m clueless?”

  Barb laughed. “We’re at the Traverse City airport, waiting for our row to be called.”

  “Heading back to the sun and sand?”

  “More rock than sand,” she said. “Have you ever been to Arizona? No? You have to come visit us someday.”

  “Sounds great,” I said, although I wasn’t being completely sincere as I was not a fan of snakes, big spiders, scorpions, or anything remotely similar. While I understood that Arizona was outstandingly beautiful, I wasn’t certain that I’d fit in well with all of its creatures. “Did Cade finish his new series?”

  “Close enough,” Barb said. “He’s going to let them sit until we get back here in April. The time lag will do him good. I think they might be his best work ever, but you know Cade.”

  I laughed. “Right now
he thinks they’re so horrible that he’s on the verge of whitewashing them all.”

  “With a big fat brush,” Barb said. “Anyway, I just wanted to hear how Kristen was doing.”

  “She’s fine. Already back at work.” She’d actually returned to tending bar less than a week after her fall. When I’d questioned the wisdom of that decision via text, she’d texted back: Being bored makes me think about starting a new restaurant.

  Me: In New York? Scruffy would like that.

  Kristen: Not in winter. Brr.

  Me: Their winters aren’t like Chilson winters.

  Kristen: Colder than Key West.

  There was no point in arguing with that, so I didn’t. How Kristen and her fiancé were going to work out their geographical separation once they were married was still a big question mark, but I’d long ago put that on the list of things I wasn’t going to worry about.

  Barb said, “Good to hear. I wouldn’t want my favorite chef to have a permanent injury. The world would be a lesser place without her crème brûlée. And now we really have to go. See you in April, Minnie!”

  “Have a good—” But she was already gone.

  I clicked the phone off, flipped it around in my hands a few times, then stood up.

  Something in my conversation with Barb had tweaked my sense of urgency about finding Rowan’s killer. Yes, I could call the sheriff’s office to ask about progress, but I was tired of leaving messages that might or might not be taken seriously. Sure, Ash had appeared to be paying attention to my suggestion regarding Neil, but there was more to discuss, and if there was something I could do to push the investigation forward, to help Anya and Collier, well, I was going to do it.

  I slid off my shoes and put on my boots. It was time to beard the lion in his den.

  * * *

  • • •

  I stopped at the front desk and told Kelsey I had to run an errand, that I’d be back in half an hour, then zipped my coat and headed out. At which point I discovered that the friendly two inches of snow I’d been so fond of a couple of hours earlier had turned into a sloppy layer of mushy slush.