by Laurie Cass
“Have to tell Wally next time I see him.” Rafe laughed. “Bet he never thought his prizes were that memorable.”
The young Mitchell of my imagination paused and looked back at me, his lower lip trembling. “What do you mean?”
“Wally gave every kid in his class a prize,” Rafe said. “It was a ceremony, sort of, on the last day of school. Wally would call up the kids by name and hand out whatever it was he’d picked out. The kids loved it, but it’s not like Wally spent a lot of money. He bought stuff at garage sales and thrift stores, everything from T-shirts to superhero juice cups to comic books.”
My dream bubble popped so loudly I almost flinched. “So Mitchell’s wasn’t anything special.”
“Special to him, maybe.” Rafe drained the last of his beer and tossed it over his shoulder onto the porch, where it rolled around and hit a number of other empties. “With Mitchell, who knows?”
Who knew, indeed?
Speaking of things I didn’t know, I remembered that I’d meant to ask Rafe about Cal DeKeyser’s nickname. “Is there some guy named Deke that’s famous in hockey?”
Rafe, who was in the act of opening the cooler, paused to look back at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Cal DeKeyser. I heard that people called him Deke, because of his last name and because he played a lot of hockey. Who’s Deke?”
“So much learning,” Rafe said, sighing and shaking his head, “but so little knowledge where it really counts. Deke isn’t a person, it’s a technique. When you fake out a guy and skate around him, that’s a deke.”
“Weird word.”
He shrugged. “They say it’s short for decoy, but who knows? Most of us who worked at Benton’s were calling Cal by his nickname within a couple of weeks.”
“Did Steve Guilder ever work at Benton’s?” I asked.
“Don’t know for sure, but it’s a good bet. That’s where he and Andrea first hit it off, right after she and what’s-his-name broke up.”
“Which what’s-his-name is that?” I asked idly, not really caring, though I was yet again astounded at the depth and breadth of Rafe’s knowledge of Chilson gossip.
“That Paul what’s-his-name. Attorney.”
I sat up straight. “Paul Utley?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met,” I said, my mind whirling in tiny circles. Andrea had probably known about the value of Wildflowers through a client. She had probably known about its existence because she was related to the family and been in and out of the house a hundred times as a kid. Paul, as the DeKeysers’ attorney, might have known of the book’s existence while making that inventory of the house he’d mentioned in Rianne’s office.
So the question was, had Paul and Andrea still been in contact? Could she have told him about the book? Could they have been in cahoots to steal it and he had, instead, killed her?
Rafe leaned over and tapped my head. “What’s going on in that curly-haired brain of yours?”
His hand lingered on my hair for a moment, and I felt that odd shiver again.
“You’re always thinking,” he said quietly. “That’s one of the things I like best about you.”
This time the shiver went deep into my bones.
Rafe cleared his throat and pulled away. “Of course, there are things I don’t like about you, too.”
The shiver vanished and was replaced by an uncomfortable feeling in my middle. Was it possible that I cared what Rafe thought about me? “Like what?” My question came out a little squeaky.
“Your taste in cars, for one,” he said.
“I don’t care about cars.”
“Like I said.”
I smiled into the dark.
“So, you going to tell me what you were thinking about?” he asked.
Too much, actually. Books and theft and murder, and now I was wondering if Andrea and Paul had been having an affair. Sighing, I got up and dusted off my behind. “Nothing much. I should get back and make sure Eddie hasn’t figured out how to get into the microwave.” The microwave was one of the few places truly safe from Eddie’s reach, and was where I stored the bread.
“Want me to walk you home?” Rafe asked.
I squinted at him. “What would you do if I said yes?”
“Die of shock, probably.” He grinned. “How about if I sit here and watch you walk over. If I see a suspicious character, I’ll heave this at him.” He held up his beer can.
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. A stupid plan, but a plan nonetheless. “See you later.”
When I reached the dock, I could see Eric standing on the end of his boat, casting a fishing line into the water.
“Catch anything?” I asked.
“Nah.” He reeled his line in slowly. “Niswander over there was making so much noise that I swear he scared all the fish.”
Either that or the lake bed in a marina wasn’t the best fish habitat. “When I left for dinner, he and Skeeter were sitting on his front porch, looking like they were stuck there for the night.”
“That would have been nice.” Eric whipped his fishing rod back and cast out again with a long, slow ratcheting noise. “They spent the past two hours on their hands and knees, sanding that porch with hand sanders. Horribly whiny things. Sound like dentist drills.”
I laughed. “Well, they’re probably done now.”
“Oh, it’ll be something else tomorrow.” He watched his bobber for a moment, then started reeling in again. “Is Niswander ever going to finish that place? Chris Ballou said he’s been working on it for three years.”
“Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t ask him. Do that and next thing you know, he’ll dragoon you into helping. If he’s sanding the porch now, painting will be next.”
“Painting? Now, that’s a job for a surgeon. With hands as steady as mine, you don’t need any of that so-called painter’s tape.” He reeled in fast and clipped the hook to his fishing rod. He plopped his rod across the arms of a chair and stepped off the boat and onto the dock. “See you later, Minnie.”
And he was off, headed in Rafe’s direction. Thirty seconds later, I heard two male voices, and the pop of another beer can.
I shook my head and opened the houseboat’s front door. “If you had thumbs,” I asked my cat, “would you spend all evening on Rafe’s porch, hanging out with the guys?” Not that Rafe had done that, technically, but he’d certainly given a fine imitation of a man who would eschew things that needed to be done for the sake of beer.
“Mrr,” Eddie said, simultaneously yawning and stretching.
He was on the dashboard again, and I suspected he’d fallen asleep while watching the seagulls swoop around the marina.
“So, I was a little disappointed,” I told Eddie, “learning the truth behind the story of Mitchell’s award from his Mr. Wahlstrom. And I was also disappointed that Kristen didn’t have any insight into who killed Andrea. I mean, the why is pretty clear—well, to me, anyway—but the who of it isn’t coming.”
I flopped myself onto the dining bench. “If someone killed Andrea to keep her away from Chastain’s Wildflowers, hurt Pam while rifling through her store”—the thought made me jump off the bench and walk around the kitchen, fists clenched and jaw tight—“and is willing to set a library on fire and risk the entire building and everything in it, what else is that someone willing to do to get that book?”
Eddie looked straight at me and yawned again.
“Yes, I know I’m boring you.” I stopped my pacing about and patted him between the ears. “But do you really have to make it so obvious that I’m not nearly as interesting as I think I am?”
“Mrr.”
“Gotcha.” What he’d said, I had no idea, but agreeing with Eddie was usually the best course of action for both of us.
At that point, my fu
rry friend thumped off the dashboard, pawed at the front door, and let himself out.
“Hey! Don’t you dare—”
But he was already gone, out into the night.
“Rotten cat,” I muttered, although it was my own fault for not making sure I’d shut the door tight behind me. I opened a kitchen drawer, snatched out a small flashlight, and headed after my furloughing feline. “Where are you, Eddie? Here, kitty, kitty!”
“Mrr.”
He hadn’t sounded far away, but sounds carried across water like nothing else. It wasn’t unusual for us to hear a dog barking from the other side of Janay Lake, a mile and a half off. “Eddie?” I shone the flashlight over the front deck, picking out all his usual haunts. Not on the chair, not on the table, not behind the flower pot, not—
“Mrr.”
I whipped around and spotlighted my cat. “Eddie! You get off Eric’s boat this minute!”
Since he was a cat, he didn’t pay attention to a word I said, but instead sat down on the boat’s edge, a little sideways, and started licking his back paw. “Nice,” I said, stepping onto the dock. “They say cats are elegant creatures. What happened to you? Oh, that’s right. You’re not exactly a cat, are you? You’re a different species entirely. I’m almost sorry I had you fixed. I could have made all sorts of money putting you out for stud. Tens of dollars, I’m sure. Not all at once, but as a total, I can definitely see it.”
My babble covered the noise of my soft footsteps, and as soon as I got close enough, I reached out and pulled Eddie into my arms.
“You are a horrible cat,” I told the annoying animal, who was already purring. “Jumping over to the neighbor’s, acting as if you belonged. You probably hoped Eric would be there, ready to hand out treats and—”
I stopped in the middle of the dock, my words forever lost.
Because I suddenly knew, flat-out knew, what had happened to the DeKeysers’ copy of Wildflowers.
Chapter 16
The next morning, I wasn’t so sure.
Yes, maybe Talia DeKeyser, in her last months of living in the family home, had given away a book about flowers to the little girl next door who had a penchant for picking the things, but what proof did I have?
None whatsoever.
And how seriously would Detective Inwood take this if I toddled down to the sheriff’s office and insisted on talking to him face-to-face since he hadn’t yet bothered to return my phone call?
Not at all.
Which meant that instead of turning my suspicions over to Inwood or Ash, who also hadn’t called back, I flexed my research muscles—I am librarian, hear me type into a search engine!—and thanks to the parcel-search function on the county’s Web site, within minutes, I’d tracked down the name and mailing address of the people who owned the property next to the DeKeysers.
“Nathan and Chandra Wunsch,” I said out loud. The last name wasn’t familiar and it was too early to call my local sources. It wasn’t even eight o’clock; Kristen would be sleeping for another hour, as would Rafe, who slept deep and late the couple of weeks after school was done for the summer. It was tempting to call Rafe anyway, just to annoy him, but he’d be groggy and uncooperative, and any information he gave me would be suspect.
So I pulled the phone book out of the back of my bottom drawer and flipped through the flimsy pages. The names went from Wunderlich to Wyant, no Wunsch in sight. No landline, then.
I looked up and down the column of small print, hoping that maybe the phone book people had made an alphabetizing mistake, but saw nothing helpful.
After uttering a short curse, I tossed the book into the spot from whence it came. Lunch. I’d walk over to the Wunsches’ house during lunch.
* * *
It didn’t happen, of course. By the time I caught up on e-mails, the phone calls started, and by the time I finished with those, there were more e-mails to answer. Lunch came, and only the fact that Donna called back to ask if I wanted an order from the Round Table kept me from going hungry.
It was midafternoon by the time I’d taken care of the library’s immediate needs. I got up, stretched, and, since it was in the neighborhood of the traditional three-o’clock break time, I grabbed my coffee mug and headed for the break room. Huddled together at the table were Holly, Josh, and Kelsey.
I was about to make a comment about an unholy triumvirate when Holly whirled around. “Oh, it’s you,” she said.
This was a little deflating, and I was about to say so, but Josh spoke first.
“If they hire a jerk, it’ll be your fault.”
I blinked at the fierceness of his tone. “‘They’ being who, exactly?”
Holly blew out an exasperated sigh. “The library board, doofus. If we end up with that Jennifer Walker as our boss, I’m dead meat. She hated me on sight—I could see it.”
I frowned, not remembering if Jennifer had been the one Eddie had deposited his stomach contents onto, or if she’d been the one I hadn’t met due to being out on the bookmobile. “What was Jennifer like?”
“She was wearing city clothes,” Kelsey said. “All sleek and shiny.”
The one who’d been Eddified.
Josh got up and started making a pot of decaf. “And if they hire Theodore, I’m giving my two weeks’ notice. No way am I going to work for some guy who thinks he knows everything about IT. He was giving me pointers on how to store data on the cloud. Did I ask for advice? No. But he wanted to give it, so I had to listen.”
My coworkers continued to vent their anxieties, ranging from Josh’s concern that a new director wouldn’t want to fund his full-time IT position, to Holly’s fear that a new boss would move everybody to part-time, to Kelsey’s worry that the most recent hires would be considered unnecessary.
As they talked, I recognized a common theme: all three were afraid of change. It was natural and to be expected, and it was why they’d wanted me to apply for the position. But change was inevitable, and they had to be prepared.
When I told them as much, I received a universally sour expression.
“Don’t want to,” Josh said.
“We wouldn’t have to change if you’d applied,” Holly added.
“Just think,” Kelsey said morosely. “The next director might be worse than Stephen.”
And with that encouraging sentiment ringing in my ears, I headed back to my office.
* * *
Hours later, I walked up the steps to the front porch of the house owned by Nathan and Chandra Wunsch. The porch floor’s wooden boards had been replaced by composite, one of those materials that didn’t have to be painted and wouldn’t need to be replaced for a thousand years.
Rafe railed against the stuff being installed on period homes, saying it was nothing but plastic, that if you didn’t have time to take care of real wood then you shouldn’t buy a period house in the first place. He had a point, but he was so emphatic about it that I’d been compelled to poke at him with a sharp-ended conversational stick. “Okay, but don’t people have the right to do what they want with their own house?”
“Not if what they want to do is stupid,” he’d said.
This had sent us into a long debate about who got to decide what was stupid—Rafe saying that he should be the ultimate arbiter of any stupidity issue, me saying that no man who ever climbed an extension ladder carrying a sixteen-inch chainsaw should be able to judge someone’s stupidity level—and we’d ended up playing rock, paper, scissors for the final decision. He’d tried to cheat, of course, by using the world-destroying-meteor option to win, something I’d banned from the game the year before, so we’d called it a draw.
Remembering all that, I was smiling when I used the lion’s-head knocker to rap on the front door.
It opened immediately, and the little girl I’d seen playing in the garden a few nights before looked up at me. She pushed her long sandy bl
ond hair back behind her ears and said, “I saw someone on the porch and my mommy told me to answer the door. She’s in the kitchen stirring something.”
“Macey?” her mother called. “Who is it?”
The girl squinted at me, then over her shoulder, yelled, “I’m not sure!”
It was so like what I would have done at her age that I almost laughed out loud. “Here,” I said, digging into my backpack for a business card. “Take this to your mommy.”
“Okay.” Macey left me standing in the doorway and scampered back to the kitchen.
There was a murmur of voices, the rattle of pots and pans, and a woman a few years older than me, with hair even curlier than mine, came out of the kitchen and through the living room, drying her hands on a small towel as she walked. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Chandra Wunsch. Sorry, but we don’t get to the library much.”
“Hi,” I said. “And I’m sorry to barge in like this, but I have a quick nonlibrary question for you.”
Macey appeared and tugged at her mother’s elbow. “Mommy,” she whispered. “I think this is Miss Minnie. She drives the bookmobile.”
Chandra looked down at her daughter. “She does?” She looked back at me. “You do?”
I nodded. “Two or three times a week.”
Macey tugged again. “She has a cat.”
Her mother put an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “How nice. But the cat isn’t on the bookmobile.”
“Yes, it is,” Macey said. “His name is Eddie and he makes a noise like this: mrr!”
The kid had it down. She must have been in the second-grade class that had toured the bookmobile a couple of months ago. It had been a fun afternoon, and I’d already decided to do it again in the fall with other elementary schools.
“The bookmobile has a cat?” Chandra looked at me questioningly, and I sketched out the story of Eddie and the bookmobile. “How fun,” she said, laughing. “Almost makes me wish we lived outside of town so we could visit the bookmobile.”
I told her the bookmobile’s schedule was on the library’s Web site and that we’d be happy to see them at any stop. “But I didn’t stop by this evening on account of the library,” I said. “This has to do with the DeKeysers.”