Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery

by Laurie Cass

  “You think so?” Laughing, I picked up the last plastic bag. “That noise you hear isn’t the engine; it’s Eddie’s snores.”

  She gave me a startled look, then leaned around to stare at my furry friend. He’d turned himself around and was doing a face-plant into the pink blanket. His snores had been a quiet, resonating drone for the last fifteen minutes.

  Still laughing, I went out into the fresh air, across the yard, and up onto the wooden porch. I knocked on the back door and poked my head in. “Mr. Hadlee? It’s Minnie Hamilton, from the library. I have your books.”

  “Come on in,” called a strong male voice. “Did you bring them all?”

  I pulled off my shoes and followed the voice, walking in my stocking feet, hefting the bag. “And then some.”

  In the living room, I found Mr. Hadlee—a farmer, volunteer firefighter, and freelance photographer—lying on the couch with his legs propped on pillows. He’d fallen off his barn roof the week before, broken two of two ankles, and now had multiple screws in both. His wife, a registered nurse, worked the afternoon shift at a nursing home, and between her job, taking care of him, and taking care of the farm animals, she didn’t have time to make sure he got his desired reading material.

  I sat in a nearby chair and pulled each book out of the bag like a magician pulling out rabbits. “The Guns of August, The Peloponnesian War, The Coming of the French Revolution, Imperial China 900 to 1800, and, for a special treat, a brand-spanking-new copy of Battle Cry of Freedom.” I created a pile on the table next to the couch and grinned at him. “You have them for a month.”

  He laid his hand on the tall stack with what looked almost like reverence. “You are the answer to my prayers, Minnie.”

  I started to make a joke along the lines of good things coming in small packages but stopped. The man was serious, and making light of his feelings was completely inappropriate. “Glad we could help,” I said, suddenly getting a little teary. “What do you want next time?”

  When I got back to the bookmobile, I must have had an odd expression on my face, because Donna smirked. “Got you, didn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The delivery.” She jerked her thumb in the direction of the Hadlee’s house. “They’re so grateful, it makes you want to cry.”

  “I didn’t cry,” I said indignantly.

  “No?” Her eyebrows went up. “Then why are you sniffling?”

  “That’s from . . . from going in and out of the cold. It’s hard on the nasal passages.”

  Donna grinned and made a hmph sort of noise. I ignored her, and we headed out.

  “Um, Minnie?” Donna asked ten minutes later. “I have a problem the size of a large coffee and two bottles of water. Any chance of a restroom anywhere close?”

  When I’d set up bookmobile stops, I’d made sure there was an available bathroom at every other location. With the home deliveries, though, I hadn’t considered the issue. Most people probably wouldn’t mind if we asked to use their facilities, but it didn’t seem right.

  “Okay,” I told Donna, thinking hard, trying to see a map of this part of the county in my head, and mainly seeing places that were closed for the winter. There was one place that wasn’t too far, but it was the last place I wanted to be.

  I sighed, shaking the map out of my head. It was the only place, and it had to be done. “Hang on,” I said. “We’ll be there in a jiffy.”

  “Sorry,” Donna murmured.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “Eddie and I will commune silently with each other in your absence.”

  She laughed, and in a few minutes we were driving around the back of the gas station where, less than a week ago, I’d waited for Roger Slade. I didn’t know if Donna knew that, but I wasn’t about to bring up the subject. “Go around this side,” I told her, pointing to the side of the building where I hadn’t found Roger.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Take your time.” I unbuckled and stretched. “We’re a little ahead of schedule.”

  “Mrr,” said Eddie.

  Donna laughed, and as I heard the door open, I leaned over to unlatch Eddie’s carrier. “You been in there a while, haven’t you? Sorry about that. From now on, when we do a bunch of home deliveries in a row, I’ll have to—”

  In a flash of black-and-white fur, Eddie zipped past me.

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s not way to thank the person who—”

  There was a small thump, and all was quiet.

  I scrambled to my feet. Donna must not have shut the door Eddie tight. He’d pushed his way outside and could already have . . .

  I kept my thoughts away from the road out front, and ran to follow my troublesome cat. Outside, the world was brown and gray, nothing like the whiteness of last week. I looked left, the way I’d directed Donna, and didn’t see anything catlike, or even Eddie-like. I looked in the direction I didn’t want to, toward the side of the building where I’d found Roger, and saw a flash of a tail.

  “Eddie,” I muttered, and hopped up into a fast trot. When he wanted to, Eddie could run rings around me at speeds that made me dizzy. The trick was to convince him that he didn’t want to run.

  “Here, kitty, kitty!” One of these days I’d remember to put a can of cat treats on the bookmobile. Shaking a cardboard can of treats was my best tactic for attracting a runaway Eddie. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  I ran around the building’s corner, swung wide to avoid the Dumpster’s wood screen, and skittered to a halt. There, nestled up against the building, as if he’d been sleeping for hours, was Eddie.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth in a silent “Mrr.”

  “Once again,” I said, “we have solid proof that you are the weirdest cat in the universe.”

  Eddie stood, shook himself, and picked up something in his mouth. It was a fairly large something, and he ended up dragging the thing more than carrying it.

  I squatted down to see. “A hat. You’ve found yourself a nice winter hat.” I looked at him. “But you’re a cat and you already have a fur coat. What do you need with a hat?”

  He ignored me and continued to prance his way back to the bookmobile, towing his new prize.

  “Hang on.” I picked up my cat and the hat, almost wishing that the cat had been in the hat, because if you squinted, Eddie could pass for the Dr. Seuss character. “Since you like it so much, I’ll check inside and see if anyone lost it. Maybe they’ll let us keep it.” The hat in question looked to be handmade, with ear flaps and braided yarn lengths that tied under the chin. It was a fun blend of colors—red and yellow and blue and orange—but not in such bright shades that they hurt your eyes. Though it was a little damp from being outside, it was clean enough. With a washing, it would be good as new.

  I slid it over Eddie’s head. “We can keep it on the bookmobile,” I told him. “You never know when someone will need a hat.”

  “Mrr,” he said, and that seemed to settle it.

  * * *

  When Donna returned, I secured permission from a shrugging convenience-store employee to take the hat, which both Donna and I agreed was hand knit, and we headed off to finish the day’s bookmobile schedule.

  These were the among the first stops I’d ever scheduled, and the first thing all the regulars—especially the family with six children, which was comprised of the statistically impossible three sets of twins—wanted to do was greet Eddie.

  “Hi, bookmobile ladies!” Each of the six kids greeted Donna and me as they breezed past on their way to the front of the vehicle, where Eddie had ensconced himself on the top of the passenger’s seat headrest. It was his current preferred position for receiving visitors, and he accepted their pets and coos of admiration with great tolerance.

  “Hey, Minnie,” said the childre
n’s father, Chad Engstrom.

  In their bookmobile visits over the months, I’d learned that Chad’s wife worked for Tonedagana County as an accountant, that Chad worked from home as a designer of educational video games, and that he homeschooled the children with the help of a retired neighbor who’d once taught high school biology.

  I’d also learned that the youngest Engstrom girl’s favorite color was orange, that her twin brother’s was red, that the middle girl was learning to play chess, that her twin brother didn’t like peas, that the oldest girl wanted to get a pony, and that her twin brother had already decided he was going to be an archaeologist when he grew up. It was amazing what you could learn about people on the bookmobile.

  “Nice day out there,” Chad said, stomping his feet and blowing on his fingers. “Can’t wait for winter.”

  “Do I detect a note of sarcasm?” I asked.

  “A note?” He snorted. “More like an entire symphony. One of these days I’ll convince my wife to move to a climate that doesn’t hate people.”

  I laughed, knowing he didn’t mean it, but his children heard his comment and clustered around.

  “Dad, we can’t move!” pleaded nine-year-old Cara.

  “But, Dad, I just planted daffodils,” said twelve-year-old Rose. “If we move now, I’ll never see them come up. And I really, really want to.”

  Her twin brother, Trevor, frowned at his father. “If we move out of state, what colleges am I going to apply to? In-state tuition is a lot cheaper, but I don’t want to go to a school that doesn’t have a good archaeology program.”

  “Well, I’m not going.” Six-year-old Ethan kicked at the carpet. “I’ll run away. I’ll come back here and I’ll stay with Granny Engstrom.”

  “Me, too,” said his twin, Emma. “She loves us. She won’t make us move.”

  The last child to be heard from, nine-year-old Patrick, spread his arms wide. “We can’t leave the bookmobile. We just can’t!” He looked at my cat. “Right, Eddie?”

  “Mrr,” said Eddie, right on cue.

  Chad laughed, a great, loud, uproarious sound that turned his children’s worried expressions to smiles. “All right, Eddie, you’ve convinced me. We’ll stay. But only because you asked so nicely.”

  I shook my head. Eddie as a chamber of commerce representative. The world was truly a strange, strange place.

  * * *

  When we got back to the library, I asked Donna to help me haul the returned books into the building, then said she could go.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I can help with the rest.”

  I grinned. “Careful. If you keep showing this much interest in the bookmobile, I might ask you to volunteer again.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?” She cast a last look at the vehicle, hesitating. “See you tomorrow,” she said, still looking at the bookmobile, and shuffled off across the parking lot to her car.

  I climbed back aboard, and the second I started doing all the closing-down chores, Eddie started pawing at his wire door.

  “Mrr,” he said. “Mrr.”

  “Oh, you want out, do you?” I sat on the console and looked down at him. “Well, you have been stuck in there for a while. Tell you what. I’ll let you out if you promise to go back in easy-peasy when it’s time to leave.”

  He blinked. “Mrr,” he said quietly.

  It was clearly a promise. Of course, what a cat’s promise was worth, I didn’t know, but there was only one way to find out. I opened the door. Eddie jumped up next to me and bumped his head against my shoulder.

  “Yeah, yeah. Save it for your adoring fans.” I kissed the top of his head and stood. “I have a few chores, pal. Why don’t you do something productive while I take care of business?”

  But instead of straightening the bookshelves or doing a little dusting or even working through the intellectual exercise of figuring out where to squeeze in a few more books, Eddie jumped to the small front desk, stretched out one paw, and snagged his new hat from where I’d stashed it behind the computer.

  He pushed it off the edge of the desk, watched it drop to the floor, and promptly jumped down to flop on it.

  “Fine,” I told him. “Just don’t think it’s yours forever.” Eddie ignored me, which was typical when I was telling him something he didn’t want to hear. It was the cat equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “La, la, la.”

  “It’s not big enough for a cat mattress, for one thing,” I said, eyeing him. “Your back feet aren’t even on—”

  The door to the bookmobile opened. Donna, no doubt, coming back to sign up for a lifetime of bookmobile volunteering. I turned, a big smile on my face.

  Only it wasn’t Donna. Not even close.

  “You,” Denise Slade said, pointing a shaking finger at me. “It’s your fault.”

  My arms dropped to my sides. I swallowed. “Denise, I am so sorry about your husband. If there’s anything I can do—”

  “Do?” she asked shrilly. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

  Gray sorrow raked at the inside of my chest. I wanted to protest, to say that I’d done all I could, to say that I’d done all anyone could, but how could I when I wasn’t sure that I had?

  Denise’s hair was unkempt. She wore a perky spring coat of lime green over cropped pants, with short white socks and plastic clogs that looked like something she’d gardened in for decades. Never once had I seen Denise look anything but tidy and ready to take on the world’s to-do list.

  “More than anything,” I said quietly, “I wish that your husband was still alive. I am so very sorry for your loss.”

  “Sorry?” she shrieked. “What good does ‘sorry’ do me now? ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to shovel the driveway this winter. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix that leak under the kitchen sink. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to finish the landscaping that never got done last summer.”

  She was right, but what else could I say? Nothing that would make any difference, so I stood there and took the abuse.

  “Sorry!” She tossed her hair back out of her face. “‘Sorry’ isn’t going to keep me warm at night. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix my Sunday breakfast. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to help me rake the leaves next fall, and ‘sorry’ isn’t going to help me one little bit when the car breaks down.”

  I wanted to ease her pain, to make her feel even a tiny bit better, but I had no idea how. Maybe there wasn’t a way. “Denise . . .”

  “Don’t ‘Denise’ me!” She took a step forward, her face mottled red with fury. “All you had to do was drive the bookmobile around and bring my husband back home. Instead you got him killed. This is all your fault!”

  I gasped, feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I tried to talk, but nothing came out.

  “Rrrrr,” Eddie said from the floor—not exactly a growl, but not the friendly sound he usually made, either.

  “And that cat!” Denise transferred her focus to Eddie. “How can—” She made a soft mewling sound and fell to her knees, her hands reaching out toward Eddie’s new mattress. “The hat,” she whimpered. “This is where he left it.”

  “This is Roger’s hat?” I stared at one of the tasseled ends, the one Eddie had been chewing on.

  “It was mine,” she whispered. “My sister made it for me, but I wanted him to take a hat on Saturday. All that snow—I thought he might need something, he just had surgery, and it was the first one I found. He laughed and said he’d wear it. He said . . .”

  I crouched down, rolled Eddie off the hat, and handed it to Denise.

  Slowly she stood, holding it to her cheek, stroking it. She stared at nothing, her lips moving, and though no sound came out, I knew what she was saying.

  “Roger. Roger. Roger . . .”

  Without another word to me, she turned and left the bookmobile, her fo
otsteps on the gravel parking lot slowly fading away to nothing.

  I sat down on the console. Eddie jumped up beside me.

  “Mrr.”

  “Yeah, pal,” I said absently, “I hear you.”

  I would have bet money—and lots of it—that Roger wouldn’t have worn that feminine hat unless he’d been in danger of having frostbite take his ears off.

  Then a flash of memory came back to me: Roger giving Eddie one last scratch, taking a couple of steps, then stopping and saying, “Almost forgot.” Had it been the hat? Had he been taking it out of his pocket so he could tell his wife he’d kept his promise to her and worn it out in the cold?

  The bright design would have been visible to anyone with a scoped rifle.

  A unique design made especially for Denise.

  Had Denise been the killer’s real target?

  I dug through my purse and found the business card Ash Wolverson had given me. “Hi. Minnie Hamilton here. Are you at the office? Because I have something you might want to hear.”

  Chapter 8

  Half an hour later, I was sitting in what I was coming to think of as My Chair. I even knew to avoid catching my pant leg in the tiny crack on its front right edge. But if I was going to keep spending so much time in here, something needed to be done about the ceiling tiles. Even if those stains had been from something as completely innocuous as a roof leak, they weren’t at all appealing. In some areas—right by the door, for instance—the pattern was downright scary.

  Detective Inwood, tall and skinny like the letter I, walked in, followed closely by Ash. Deputy Wolverson, not at all shaped like the letter I, was in a tidy uniform of dark brown shirt and lighter brown dress pants that exactly matched his tie. The detective, with evidence of morning coffee on his white shirt and what might have been mustard stains on his gray pants, bore more resemblance to the ceiling tiles.

  “Something amusing, Ms. Hamilton?” Detective Inwood asked, sitting in the chair directly across from me. Ash, who was being as quiet as a detective in training should probably be, sat to the detective’s right.