Better Late Than Never

by Jenn McKinlay

  Lindsey lifted one eyebrow and glared down at him. “Are you using a movie line on me?”

  “That depends,” he said. “Is it working?”

  “You’re impossible.” Lindsey huffed and shoved him out of her lap.

  “Impossibly cute? Impossibly charming? Impossible to resist? I’m not picky,” he said. He propped himself up on an elbow.

  “Just impossible,” she said.

  Robbie fell back into an undignified heap on the industrial carpet. He lay there, clutching his chest and moaning. Lindsey ignored him and stood up, brushing off her clothes.

  The front doors slid open and a bark broke the quiet of the library. Lindsey glanced up to see her black fuzzball of a dog, Heathcliff, racing toward her at top speed.

  “Hey, buddy,” she said. She bent over to scratch his head while he hugged her leg with his front paws.

  Following behind him was Captain Mike Sullivan, or as he was known locally, Sully. He was wearing his usual jeans and a T-shirt. His trim build and muscle-hardened physique were made for the casual attire. His reddish brown curls were windswept and his face and arms were tan from hours spent in the sun. He was smiling when he saw Lindsey but his smile went sideways when he caught sight of Robbie on the floor.

  “Don’t tell me he finally wore out his welcome and you brained him with the heaviest book in the collection,” he said.

  Paula snorted and Ms. Cole made a hiccupping noise that Lindsey thought might have been a laugh, but then again, Ms. Cole and Robbie both liked to perform in the theater so she could very well be commiserating with him.

  “My heart is broken, if you must know,” Robbie said.

  “Really?” Sully asked. He frowned. “I thought you had to have a heart for it to be broken.”

  “Ah, and the hits keep coming!” Robbie clutched his chest and Heathcliff abandoned Lindsey to jump on him. He licked Robbie’s face as if his dog spit was a magical elixir with healing powers that would get Robbie back up on his feet.

  Robbie scratched the dog’s ears and sat up. “Thank you, mate. At least someone cares.”

  “Your heart is not broken,” Lindsey said. She held out a hand to him to help him rise to his feet.

  “Of course it is if he’s the one you’re in lov—” Robbie began but, realizing what he was about to say, Lindsey stomped on his foot, effectively cutting off his words.

  “Yeow!” Robbie cried.

  “Oh, sorry, clumsy me.” Lindsey turned back to Sully.

  “Thanks for bringing Heathcliff by,” she said. She smiled at him in what she hoped was a normally friendly way and not the panic-induced fit it felt like.

  “No problem,” he said. “Nancy asked me to bring him to you since she had self-defense class with Violet to attend.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot,” she said.

  Sully put a hand on the back of his neck, looking distinctly uncomfortable in front of the audience that was Ms. Cole, Paula and Robbie. “Did you want a lift home? I’m headed that way to visit my friend Tom.”

  “That’d be great, thanks,” she said.

  “What?” Robbie squawked. “He’s giving you a lift when I’m clearly the one who is crippled.”

  “You’re fine,” Lindsey said. She turned to Sully and said, “Would you mind grabbing my purse from my desk while I help Robbie to a chair? I feel bad that I’ve injured him.”

  “I can help him,” Sully offered. It was grudging at best.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “You might drop him on his head.”

  “Not the worst idea,” Sully said. He gave Robbie a mock scowl and then whistled for Heathcliff to follow him as they went into Lindsey’s office for her things.

  “Dogs aren’t allowed . . .” Ms. Cole’s voice trailed off as both Sully and Heathcliff ignored her. “Harrumph.”

  Lindsey took Robbie’s arm and led him to a nearby chair. His green eyes were twinkling at her.

  “Sorry I stomped on you,” she said.

  “I’m not.” His grin was full of mischief.

  “What? Why?” she asked.

  “You haven’t told him yet,” he said.

  “Told him what?” She tried to play dumb, but Robbie was an amazing study of people and there was no fooling him.

  “That you love him,” he said. “You two aren’t fooling me with this friends thing you’re trying to pull off. Anyone with eyes can see that there is more going on here.”

  She heaved a sigh. “Not that it’s any of your business, but we are just friends who are open to the possibility of more.”

  “Ha! So, he hasn’t said it yet either!” Robbie bounced up from his seat, looking awfully chipper for a guy who had just been in the throes of death and nearly crippled. “Now I have hope.”

  “No, you don’t,” Lindsey said. “This changes nothing, because you and I are really just friends. Period.”

  “Actually,” he said, “this changes everything. Mark my words, Lindsey Norris, I’ll win you over yet.”

  Then he took her hand and kissed the back of it like it was the year eighteen sixteen not twenty sixteen.

  Before Lindsey could utter a word of discouragement, Dylan appeared from the back room. She didn’t have the heart to chastise Robbie in front of his son. She merely shook her head at him and his grin deepened.

  Dylan glanced between them, clearly bewildered by what was happening between his father and his boss. He wasn’t the only one. Lindsey had a feeling Robbie was going to try her patience right to the end before she got through to him. Unfazed, Robbie threw his arm around his son’s shoulders and strode out the doors of the library with a cheery wave and a wink.

  “Did he really just kiss your hand? I think I might be ill,” Sully said. He handed Lindsey her purse and stared out the door at Robbie’s departing back.

  “There seems to be a lot of that going around.” At Sully’s questioning look, she added, “Never mind. And don’t worry. You know Robbie, he just likes to make an exit.”

  “Yes, but why does it never last?” Sully asked.

  Lindsey laughed. “I think you’d miss him if he was gone,” she said.

  “Not even a little,” Sully said. He gave her a side eye and then said, “Okay, maybe a smidgen, but that’s it, and that’s only because you have chosen not to date him.”

  “He grows on you.”

  “Like a fungus.”

  Lindsey grinned. She wanted to hug him, but they were still in public and they had been avoiding any sort of public displays of affection to keep the gossip on their status to a minimum until they were ready to share.

  “Come on, I have so much to tell you about today,” she said.

  “Really?” he asked. “Now I’m intrigued. Let’s go.”

  Lindsey glanced back at her staff. Paula waved and Ms. Cole gave her a curt nod. It was their night to close the building, so she knew she didn’t have to worry.

  That was the beauty of Ms. Cole. Despite her medieval librarian ways, she was a model of efficiency when it came to the policy and procedure of closing the building down. In the few years Lindsey had been here, she had come to rely on Ms. Cole to get the job done.

  “Good night,” Lindsey said. “Call me if you need me.”

  Beth popped up from behind the children’s desk and waved. Sully paused in the doorway to clip Heathcliff’s leash onto his collar and the three of them left the building in the very capable hands of Lindsey’s staff.

  “Dinner at my place okay?” Sully asked. “I have steaks to grill.”

  “Sounds perfect,” she said.

  He opened the passenger door for her and she waited for Heathcliff to jump into the pickup truck before climbing in herself. Sully shut the door after her and then strode around the front to climb into the driver’s seat.

  As soon as Sully turned on the engine, Hea
thcliff climbed over Lindsey’s lap to stick his head out the window. She rolled it down and took ahold of his leash on the off chance he got overexcited and tried to leap out.

  It was a short ride to Sully’s house on the shore. As soon as Sully parked the truck, Heathcliff jumped out of the cab and began to mark his territory around the yard of the weathered gray house as if afraid in his absence another dog might have laid claim to the three-bedroom cottage.

  “My curiosity is killing me,” Sully said as he unlocked the door. “Tell me what happened today.”

  Lindsey and Heathcliff followed him into the tiled foyer, which gave way to the kitchen. Heathcliff went to patrol the house, again probably checking that his turf was secure, while Sully went to the fridge and grabbed a beer for himself and poured a glass of wine for Lindsey. As she dropped her handbag on the floor and took a seat at the granite counter, she took a moment to appreciate the sense of homecoming she felt being here with Sully.

  He ducked outside to switch on his gas grill and when he came back, he pushed the glass toward her and said, “Talk.”

  Lindsey took a sip and settled in to watch him prep their dinner. She did love to watch him cook.

  “Candice Whitley,” she said.

  Sully was foraging in his vegetable crisper for the fixings for a salad and when Lindsey said the name he jerked upright, smacking the back of his head on the top shelf of the refrigerator.

  “Sorry!” Lindsey cried.

  “It’s okay.” He turned around, holding the back of his head with one hand while cradling a head of butter lettuce with the other. “But I could have sworn you said—”

  “Candice Whitley,” they said together.

  “I did,” Lindsey confirmed.

  “The same Candice Whitley who was murdered twenty years ago, the high school English teacher found strangled to death under the football bleachers?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Sully put down the lettuce and picked up his beer. He eyed Lindsey over the bottle while he took a long drink. Then he shook his head as if trying to shake off a passel of bad memories.

  “Okay, I’m ready now,” he said. “Explain.”

  “Today was our first library fine amnesty day,” Lindsey said. “Any overdue books or other materials were accepted no matter their condition and fines were wiped clean. We got way more books than I anticipated, but that’s okay.”

  Sully nodded. “I noticed the pile behind the circulation desk. Plus, Ms. Cole appeared to be battling an eye twitch.”

  Lindsey smiled. “Yeah, there was that. Anyway, one of the returned books was over twenty years overdue, so I had to know who had checked it out. Ms. Cole keeps all of those records, so we looked it up and it had been checked out to Candice Whitley.”

  “Whoa.”

  “It gets weirder. It was checked out to her on the day she was murdered.”

  Sully glanced down at his forearm and then rubbed the hairs that were standing up. “Chills. I just got chills.”

  “We all did,” she said. “Ms. Cole actually hyperventilated. Thank goodness Milton was there to help me calm her down.”

  “She recovered enough to stay at work,” Sully said. “Then again, I imagine it would take more than hyperventilating to get her to call out, especially during a fine amnesty.”

  “She is made of good New England stock,” Lindsey said. “I was surprised at how emotional she became. It really wasn’t like her at all.”

  “Ms. Whitley touched a lot of lives,” Sully said. “What book was it?”

  “Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.”

  “Huh.” Sully frowned.

  His bright blue eyes looked lost in thought and Lindsey wondered what he was thinking. She didn’t ask, knowing that he would tell her when he was ready. Instead, she sipped her wine and waited.

  “I had Ms. Whitley for English two years before she died,” he said. “At the time, she seemed like such a grown-up to me, but looking back I realize she wasn’t much older than any of her students. She was only in her midtwenties, so she had maybe ten years on us, if that.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Smart, pretty, patient,” Sully said. “I remember we had a guy in class, Joey Prentice, who was a menace. His entire academic career was spent seeing if he could make his teachers cry, including the male ones.”

  “I think I know the type,” Lindsey said. “They’re the ones who usually avoid the library at all costs, so my run-ins with them during my youth were few and far between.”

  “Yeah, I doubt if Joey even knew the school had a library, at least for most of his high school career,” he said.

  “Did Joey make Ms. Whitley cry?”

  “He tried. He had it in for her from day one. He did every textbook rotten thing a student could do to a teacher. He put tacks on her seat, glued the pages of her dictionary together—”

  Lindsey let out a gasp of alarm and he smiled.

  “He stole knickknacks off her desk and held them for ransom, he moved the hands of her clock ahead so that she thought class ended ten minutes earlier than it did.”

  Sully was grinning and Lindsey gave him a chastising look. “It looks like he wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the pranks.”

  “Oh, it was funny,” he said. “But Ms. Whitley wasn’t one to take that kind of behavior sitting down.”

  “Especially with tacks on her seat.”

  “Exactly. No, you don’t need to feel bad about Joey picking on her. She got her revenge.”

  “How?” Lindsey asked. Her mind began to race. Had Ms. Whitley publicly shamed the prankster? Maybe Joey murdered her as payback in their prank war and no one had put it together until now.

  “She taught him how to read,” Sully said.

  Lindsey blinked. Of all the answers she had expected that was not one of them, not even close.

  “I know,” he said. “Pretty amazing, right? Joey caused so much of a ruckus in her classroom that she had him stay after school just about every day. What he didn’t realize is that she used the time to diagnose his dyslexia and teach him how to cope with it. It was an intensive one-on-one learning session that by the end of our school year had him passing English with a solid B+.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “That’s the sort of teacher she was,” Sully said. His voice was soft. “No one cried harder when she was killed than Joey.”

  Lindsey ran a finger down the side of her glass, following the drips of condensation. The loss of such a good teacher had to have been quite a blow to the small community.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went on to college and became a teacher,” Sully said. “Now he teaches history in New London.”

  “She made a lasting difference there,” Lindsey said. “What more could she have done, how many other students could she have helped, if her life hadn’t been cut short? I suppose we can only hope that the book offers some clues as to who murdered her so that justice is finally served.”

  Sully slowly lowered his beer and gave her a pained look. “I’m guessing you have more to tell me.”

  “Just a teeny bit,” she said.

  She held up her thumb and pointer finger so that they were just an inch apart. Then she told him about the rest of her day. He prepped the food while she told him about giving the book to Emma and about Herb’s nervous visit to the library.

  When Sully gestured for her to follow him outside, she picked up her wine and followed him out onto the deck where he cooked and she talked until the steaks were sizzling and she was out of details to share.

  Sully leaned against the railing on his back deck and stared past the sandy dunes and out into the bay.

  “It’s hard to believe that after all this time, her murderer would be so dumb as to return the book she had with her on the day she died,”
he said.

  “It might not have been her murderer,” Lindsey said. “It’s just that the coincidence of her checking out the book on the same day that she died is . . . unsettling.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences generally. Besides, if it wasn’t her murderer who took the book when he killed her then why wasn’t it turned in years ago?” Sully asked.

  “That is the question, isn’t it?”

  Lindsey moved to stand beside him and pressed her body into his, seeking comfort. Sully put an arm around her and they stared out at the bay together.

  “You know who you might want to talk to about the book?” he said after a few minutes.

  “Me? Talk to anyone about the book?” she asked. She gave him a surprised look that she knew he knew was bogus. “That sounds like you think I might meddle.”

  “Shocking thought, I know,” he said with a chuckle. “I am just embracing what I know to be true.”

  “I like the embracing part,” she said. She hugged him to her. He returned it by wrapping both his arms around her and holding her close. It was the most peaceful Lindsey had felt all day.

  “I’m thinking you should talk to Chief Daniels—rather, former Chief Daniels,” Sully said.

  Lindsey pulled back to study his face. “Daniels? Who was the chief before Emma? The one who thought I was a nosey parker and if I remember right was not exactly my number one fan?”

  “That’s the one,” Sully said. “He was on the force at the time of Candice Whitley’s death but wasn’t chief yet. He might remember something about the book, if it was found at the scene or whatnot. It’s worth a shot.”

  “Do you really think he’d talk to me?” she asked.

  Sully shrugged. “You won’t know until you try. Besides, I’m sure Emma will talk to him, too, so he’ll probably be expecting you.”

  “Because I’m that big of a buttinsky?” Lindsey asked.

  “Well, it does have to do with a library book, so you’ve got that connection going for you, but yes, your reputation for being inquisitive is well-known.”