Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery

by Laurie Cass

  “You know,” I said, “if you went downstairs to the kitchen, got the properly sized ladder, and brought it up here, you wouldn’t be running the risk of falling and breaking your neck.”

  “Risk is my middle name,” he said, putting on a deep, gravelly voice.

  I snorted, because I knew for a fact it was Theodore. “You probably don’t carry your cell in case of accident, do you? I bet it’s in that dusty mess you call a bedroom.”

  He popped the empty caulk tube out of the gun and held out his hand for a fresh one. “Did you stop by just to give me a hard time, or do you have another, even more nefarious purpose?”

  I watched as he took a utility knife from his tool belt and sliced off the tube’s plastic tip. Sitting down on a stack of lumber, I said, “I brought cookies.” The smell of Cookie Tom’s wafting through town had compelled me to buy half a dozen coconut chocolate chips.

  He grinned, pointing the loaded caulk gun at the ceiling. “That was my second prayer, you know.”

  I watched him bead out the caulk in a smooth line. “Is there anything you want me to do?”

  “Entertain me. My iPod ran out of juice ten minutes ago.”

  “How about if I ask you some questions?” Except for his college years, Rafe had lived in Chilson all his life, and if he didn’t know everything about everyone in town, it meant someone had only recently moved in.

  “My wallet’s downstairs next to last night’s pizza box,” he said. “But I know there’s at least two fives in there.” Rafe and I had a long history of making five-dollar bets, and one of these days I was going to have to start keeping track of who won most often. Rafe assured me that he had, but since he had memory issues with anything that didn’t concern his school or major-league baseball, I wasn’t about to take his word for it.

  “Different kind of questions,” I said.

  “Fire away.”

  The caulk gun clicked as he kept an even bead flowing, and I reflected on how many references we used on a daily basis that had to do with firearms and weaponry.

  “Don Weller still teaches at your school, right?” Don was a neighbor to Denise. On his list, Mitchell had noted Don as Roger’s neighbor and a sixth-grade teacher, and he was a man Denise had named as an enemy.

  “Sure,” Rafe said. “Good guy, even if he does cheer for the Green Bay Packers.”

  “Do you know what Denise Slade has against him?”

  “Yup.”

  I waited. Waited some more. I decided against picking up the circular saw and cutting off the legs of the ladder. “Are you going to tell me?” I asked, spacing out the words.

  “Do I get a cookie first?”

  “No.”

  He sighed and moved to the other side of the window frame. “It’s typical Denise stuff. He’d put up a few extra sections of fence on the property line between his place and the Slades, not thinking much about it, but she called the city zoning administrator and turned him in for a zoning violation.”

  “You need a zoning permit to put up a fence?”

  “In Chilson, yeah, if it’s within eight feet of a property line. Anyway, it was Don’s bad luck that there’s a new zoning administrator all hot to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and he got fined a hundred bucks.”

  A hundred dollars seemed like a lot, but since I didn’t know the least thing about zoning, I kept my opinion to myself.

  “But what really got him mad,” Rafe went on, “was he had to show up in front of the Planning Commission for a permit review on a night the Red Wings were playing in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Against Chicago.”

  “Now, that is truly horrible,” I said dryly.

  “Didn’t someone say that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor?”

  “That’s puns.”

  He grinned over his shoulder. “You know what’s really funny? Denise had better never put a foot wrong ever again, because if she does, Don will be on her faster than flies on dog doo-doo. If she’d kept her mouth shut about the fence, maybe told Don he had a violation but that she wasn’t going to say anything to the city if he went and begged for mercy, she’d have made a friend for life. As it is, she’s got an enemy forever.”

  I didn’t say anything, but thought about Denise all alone in her house. How hard could it be for someone to break in, especially a next-door neighbor?

  “It’s too bad about Roger, though,” Rafe said. “He was a good guy.”

  To Rafe, most people were good guys, women included. Only somewhere out there, someone wasn’t good. Someone had killed Roger, and someone, I was sure, had tried to kill Denise.

  The litany of professions recited by Detective Inwood came back to me. A local attorney, a middle-school teacher, a retail-store owner, and the director of a nonprofit organization.

  Shannon was the attorney and Don Weller was the teacher. Was Pam Fazio the store owner? And who was the nonprofit director?

  “Say, is it cookie time yet?” Rafe took out the caulk tube, now empty, and tossed it into an open cardboard box.

  I shook my head, trying to clear the fluff out of my brain. But, as usual, all that happened was my hair rearranged itself.

  “Sure,” I said. “Cookies coming right up.”

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon hanging out with Rafe, alternately helping and being annoyed by him, sometimes both at the same time.

  “Why is it,” I said with exasperation, frowning at the clamp that didn’t quite fit around the pieces of wood they needed to fit around, “that you never get annoyed like I do?”

  “Because,” he said, taking the clamp out of my hand and replacing it with one he’d fetched from another room.

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “Because? That’s it?”

  “What, you want me to say it’s because you’re a girl? I can, you know. It’s because you’re a—”

  “No,” I interrupted quickly, “I don’t want you to say that.”

  “Then don’t ask questions that you don’t want the answers for.”

  I stood there, clamp in one hand, wood bits in the other, thinking about questions and answers, about things I didn’t want to know. About asking the right questions. And about the cost of finding the answers.

  “Hey, Minnie. You going to clamp that wood before the glue dries?”

  “I think so,” I said absently, and tried to focus on what I was doing.

  Half an hour later, Rafe kicked me out. “I’m done for the day,” he said, stretching. “I’m headed over to a buddy’s to watch the Lions lose another football game.”

  “And drink beer and eat junk food?” I asked.

  He slapped his flat stomach. “Dinner of champions,” he said. “Want to come?”

  I squinched my face. “As much as I want to bang my fingers with a hammer.”

  After I washed up in the kitchen sink (such as it was) and dried my hands on my pants (since there was no towel and the paper towels were upstairs) I poked my head into the bathroom where Rafe was showering and yelled good-bye.

  “See ya,” he yelled back. “Hey, thanks for the help.”

  “No problem. I’ll send you a bill.”

  “Sounds good. You’ll get paid as soon as this place gets finished,” he said, and so I was laughing as I left his house.

  * * *

  During the hours I’d been inside, snow had started to drift down. The light was mostly gone from the sky, and the glow from the windows of the Round Table was like a beacon.

  I stomped my feet free of snow in the entryway and slid into a booth. In my life with Aunt Frances, I was on my own for Sunday food after breakfast, and the cold slice of pizza Rafe had handed me for lunch wasn’t going to tide me over until tomorrow morning.

  “Menu?” the middle-aged waitress asked. For once, it wasn’t Sabrina.

>   “No, thanks, Carol. I’ll have an olive burger with a side salad.” I wanted fries, but chose the vegetable route. My parents would be on their way back from Florida right now, and my mom’s imminent entry into the state was making me aware of my eating habits.

  I sat back, uncomfortable at my bookless state, and looked about for something to read. A cast-aside newspaper would do, even if I’d already read it.

  “Minnie?”

  I turned. Ash Wolverson was smiling at me in a tentative sort of way. In the worn jeans and hoodie he was wearing, he didn’t look at all like a sheriff’s deputy.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He stood at the end of the booth, looking hesitant. “Are you waiting for anyone?”

  “Nope. Have a seat.”

  I watched him slide in, thinking that I’d never before met a man this good-looking who was also so unsure of himself. “How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked.

  “Okay,” he said. “How about yours? Did you drive or did you cook?”

  I laughed. “Mostly I did dishes.”

  There was a short silence that might have grown uncomfortably long had Carol not arrived with a glass of ice water. She eyed Ash. “You leave your dinner much longer, it’s going to get cold, and fried fish doesn’t microwave up anything decent.”

  Which was when I realized Ash had already been in the restaurant when I showed up. The place wasn’t that big, making it yet another day in which I wasn’t going to win a Power of Observation award.

  I started to talk at the same time he did. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Thanks.” I smiled and then peered at him. Was he blushing? Surely not. “I was just wondering if Detective Inwood has forgiven you for missing the hat.”

  Ash touched the edges of the paper placemat in front of him. “Hard to tell. He’s still letting me work with him, so I figure he can’t be too mad.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but maybe he was right. “I know you can’t talk about an active investigation, but can you tell me if there’s been any progress?” Please let there be progress. Please be close to figuring out what happened. And pretty please figure it out before the court hearing.

  “Some,” he said. “We’re working with a local conservation officer, putting together a case.”

  Which wasn’t really an answer at all, or at least not a useful one. If anyone asked me, Ash was following far too closely in Detective Inwood’s footsteps. No one was, but I was ready if the question came up.

  Still, if they were working with a CO, a type of officer who had full arrest powers and was responsible for enforcing the hunting and fishing laws, that probably meant they were still thinking a hunter with remarkably poor shooting ability had killed Roger by accident. And if they thought that, I was sure they were wrong. Denise was the one who—

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  I blinked away from my thoughts. Ash was studying the table. “Sure,” I said.

  “Would you . . .” He blew out a breath, looked up at me through eyelashes far too long to belong to a grown man, and asked, “Would you go out with me?”

  I blinked at him. Blinked again. “Go out with you?”

  Now the blush was evident. “Maybe have dinner and a movie? We could go anywhere you’d like. And see any movie you want. What kind of food do you like? I’ll eat anything, and I like almost everything. There’s a new place in Petoskey people are talking about and it sounds good.”

  The poor man was starting to babble. I had to stop him, and fast. “Thanks very much,” I said. “I appreciate the offer—really I do—but I’m seeing someone right now.”

  “Oh.”

  He deflated, and I felt horribly sorry for him. “I’ve been seeing Tucker Kleinow for a few months. Do you know him?” Ash shook his head slowly. “He’s a doctor,” I said, “an emergency-room doctor, at the hospital in Charlevoix. He hasn’t been up here very long; this will be his first winter Up North.” I suddenly realized I was talking too much, so I picked up my water and took a long drink.

  “A doctor,” Ash said dully. “That figures.” He slid out of the booth and stood. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “You didn’t.” I smiled at him, but he didn’t see it because he was studying his shoes. “Honest. And I’m sorry you didn’t know I was seeing someone.”

  “A doctor,” he muttered under his breath, and trudged back to his dinner.

  I wanted to call him back, wanted to make him smile and laugh, but I knew he needed time to get over what he would undoubtedly be considering a rejection. How hard it must be, sometimes, to be a man.

  Sighing, I thought about the specific hardships of being a man. Then I thought how hard it was to be a woman. Really, it could be a hardship just plain being human.

  I shook my head, trying to jolt free the sadness and the worry. Worrying didn’t help anything and it didn’t make tomorrow any better. Plus, worrying had the definite minus of making the present worse.

  Worrying, I realized with a sudden shock, was what I did when I didn’t have anyone to talk to or anything to read. In theory, I could read on my cell phone’s e-book app, but that gave me a headache.

  So I got up and grabbed a real-estate guide from the rack next to the cash register.

  After all, anything to read was better than nothing.

  * * *

  I ate my meal while perusing advertisements for lakeshore homes I could never hope to afford, and tried not to notice when Ash left. The poor guy. I wondered again at his odd lack of self-confidence in a social setting, then stuck a fork into my salad and concentrated on criticizing the multimillion-dollar houses that were for sale.

  When dinner was eaten and paid for, I zipped my coat and headed home. One step outside, and I came to a sudden stop. The snow that had been coming down gently when I’d arrived at the Round Table must have been falling heavily ever since. A three-inch coating of white lay over everything in sight—buildings, streets, sidewalks, trees. Even in the winter darkness, the town almost glowed with snow-white brightness.

  I stuck out my tongue to catch a few flakes and smiled, because this would be the perfect night to take the long way home and check out the holiday decorations.

  On one street there were two armies of wire-framed snowmen on a front lawn, set up in a snowball-fight formation. On another street there was a spectacular display that included a pair of five-foot-high nutcrackers and a slightly creepy ten-foot-tall Santa Claus. Another family had put up a tall pole and strung lights down from the top, creating a massive treelike structure that changed color every few minutes.

  But I saved the best until last. Two streets away from the boardinghouse, I stopped in front of a two-story Victorian-era home and smiled.

  The front yard had been transformed into a winter fantasy scene. There was a waist-high small village, complete with a train station, church, blacksmith’s shop, horse-drawn sleighs, and even a pint-sized ice rink. Adults walked, children ran, and a pair of dogs tussled over a gift-wrapped box. A restrained hand had lit the miniature town with tiny lights that illuminated the scene in a golden tone. I was completely entranced, just as I was every year, and I didn’t hear the footsteps until they were closing in on me.

  I turned and exchanged nods with my aunt’s neighbor Otto Bingham.

  “Nice,” he said, gesturing at the display. “All in wood, isn’t it? Professionally done, it looks like.”

  The man can speak? It’s a Christmas miracle! I smiled. “I’ll tell my Aunt Frances.”

  “Oh?” He tilted his head slightly to one side. “Did she help put it up?”

  Laughing, I said, “No, she made it. Plywood, most of it, with some hard maple for the blocky bits, like the church steeple.”

  His mouth dropped slightly open. “She made this?”

  I pointed. “If you squint a little, you can see the date a
bove the front door of that city hall.”

  “Nineteen eighty-two?”

  “Yup.” I put my hands in my pockets. “She grew up helping her dad—my grandpa—in his woodshop, and when she married a guy who lived up here, she made sure to have space for a shop herself.” It was in the basement, which wasn’t an ideal location, but the addition of an exterior stairway had made it a lot better.

  I loved to brag about my aunt. Since everyone in the county knew about her talents, I didn’t get to do it very often, yet here was someone right in front of me. Perfect!

  “She made little projects for years,” I said, “but when my uncle died, she got into it more seriously. Before long she was teaching wood shop at the high school.” Which was where Rafe had first learned his woodworking skills, something about which I reminded him every so often.

  “Teaching?”

  “Yep.” I grinned, enjoying myself. “These days she’s teaching woodworking classes at the community college in Petoskey and kind of tutoring some advanced students for the wooden boat–building school up in Cedarville.”

  “Tutoring?” Otto asked faintly.

  “She loves it—says it keeps her young, even though she spends a lot of hours doing it. And now she’s getting into wood turning. You should see some of her work—it’s just gorgeous. I keep telling her she should sell some pieces at the art shows in the summer, maybe even the art galleries, but she just keeps giving them away.”

  “A professional craftswoman,” Otto muttered. “That figures.”

  I glanced over at him. For a second, he’d sounded exactly like Ash had an hour earlier. “What do you mean?”

  But he just sighed, said good night, and walked away.

  * * *

  “You know what would be great?” my newest bookmobile volunteer asked.

  I glanced over at Lina Swinney. I’d met the young woman at the Lakeview Art Gallery a few months ago. We’d gotten along well, so when I’d heard over the Thanksgiving dinner table that she was taking a semester off from college to help her mom recover from a bout with pneumonia, I’d given her a call. She was glad to help out when she could, but it was another temporary solution to the volunteer problem, and I still needed a real answer.