by Laurie Cass
Once again, she was right, and I pushed away my concerns. Because things would work out, one way or another, and worrying about it wouldn’t help. So I decided to stop thinking about it. Jennifer would start at the library the second week of August, and that’s when we’d find out what she’d be like. Why ruin the next few weeks worrying?
I told this to Aunt Frances, who smiled. “Just so you know,” she said, “I think you made the right decision about not applying for the director’s spot. You’re young and you’re enjoying what you’re doing. When it’s time to make a move, you’ll know.”
“Really?”
Her smile deepened. “Absolutely. It may be difficult in many ways, especially if the decision will create ripple effects for others, but, in the end, you have to think about what’s best for yourself. It’s no good making life choices based on what other people think.”
I looked at her carefully. “We’re talking about something else now, aren’t we?”
“Minnie,” she said, laughing, “you are not the most observant of nieces today.” She held up her left hand, and only then did I notice that it was glittering with the light of a thousand suns.
I gaped at the gorgeous ring, which was encrusted with light blue jewels that matched the color of her eyes. “Otto asked you to marry him?”
“He asked me over a month ago,” she said. “It took me this long to decide.”
Which explained her odd behavior the past few weeks. Hah!
“Well, it’s about time,” I said, grinning hugely, and reached over to give her a hug. Halfway through, a thought bolted into my brain and I pulled back. “Aunt Frances, what about the boardinghouse? Is Otto going to move here? Or . . .”
“Things will work out,” my aunt said, patting my arm. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”
And, since Aunt Frances was the best aunt in the whole wide world and was one of the wisest people I’d ever met, I believed her.
* * *
“What do you think?” I asked.
Eddie, whom I’d just told about the engagement, picked up his head and blinked at me.
“Never mind,” I said, giving him a long pet. “You had a long night two days ago and must be way behind on your rest. Go back to sleep.”
He sighed and settled in deeper on my legs.
We were sitting on the front deck of the houseboat, watching the sun slip down behind the horizon. Or at least I was, since Eddie’s eyes were closed. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, and the clarity of the air and water was so beautiful it almost hurt.
I watched the colors above me ease from medium blue to dark blue to indigo. As I watched the slow changes, I thought about all that had happened in the past weeks, and came to the conclusion that if people only spent more time watching the sun go down and the stars come out, that there would be less suffering in the world.
The marina lights were just bright enough for me to see the black-and-white tabby cat on my lap. “What do you think?” I asked, my hand on his warm back. “Am I being profound tonight, or what?”
He opened and shut his mouth in a silent “Mrr” just as my cell phone trilled.
To answer or not to answer? That was the question. An even better question, though, would have been why had I brought the cell out here in the first place? I turned it over. Detective Inwood? Why was he calling so late?
I snatched up the phone, suddenly worried about Ash. “Detective. What’s the matter?”
There was a pause. “Why would you think anything is wrong?”
Which could only mean that Ash was safe and sound. “Because it’s ten thirty at night.”
“It is?” He sounded surprised. “I apologize. I was working late, catching up on things, and didn’t realize what time it was. I’ll call you back tomorrow.”
I had a sudden sympathy for the man. He’d been gone for a couple of days and his desk must have been piled high with work. “Or you could just tell me now. Then you can cross something off your list.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate that. What I wanted to tell you is that all parties involved in the ownership of Chastain’s book have agreed on a temporary holding location.”
“Oh? That’s good.” Although why Inwood needed to tell me about it, I wasn’t sure.
“Yes,” he said. “The location is the rare-books collection of the Chilson District Library.”
“It . . . What?”
“You do have a rare-books collection, yes?”
“Well, sure, but . . .”
“And you have proper security for that collection?” When I didn’t answer straightaway, he prompted, “Or you can get some in a reasonable time frame?”
“Yes,” I said, visualizing various budgets. When I mentally located a line item for contingency expenses that had a four-figure balance, I said, “Yes,” again, this time more firmly. “Absolutely yes.”
“Excellent,” Inwood said, and I was pretty sure I heard the stroke of a pencil crossing out an item on a list. “Let me know when you have things in place, and I’ll have the book delivered.”
A copy of Wildflowers? In my library? There couldn’t possibly be anything I could do that would impress the new director more. Aunt Frances was right: Everything was going to work out. My heart began to sing.
“Nicely done, by the way, Ms. Hamilton,” the detective said.
The song came to an abrupt halt. Had he really said what I thought he’d said? “Sorry?”
“Saturday night. You found yourself in a difficult and dangerous situation and were alert enough to do what needed to be done.”
“Oh. Um, thanks.” He didn’t hang up, so I said, “Most people think I was nuts for rushing a guy with a knife.”
“Most people.” He chuckled. “You are not most people, Ms. Hamilton.” His chuckle turned into an outright laugh, and he ended the call, still laughing.
“‘Nuts’ wasn’t the first term that came to my mind,” came a voice out of the dark. “‘Brave’ was the first. Then ‘stupid.’ Then came ‘nuts.’”
I turned off the phone. “Hey, Eric.” Over our Sunday-morning newspapers, I’d told my neighbor about the events of the night before. “How long have you been sitting out there?”
“Long enough to hear you ask your cat about being profound. Were you?”
“Doubt it.”
“Tell me anyway.”
So I shrugged and did, telling him how sunsets and stars might lead us to a better world.
After a long moment, he said into the evening’s darkness, “You know what, Minnie? You’re probably right. I can’t believe your cat didn’t say so.”
Smiling, I gathered Eddie up into my arms. “See you tomorrow, Eric.”
“Night, Minnie.”
I carried Eddie inside and set him gently on the bed. I brushed my teeth and changed into jammies, and, finally, slid between the sheets, trying to disturb my sleeping cat as little as possible. “Night, pal,” I whispered, and kissed him on the top of his head. “Sleep tight. Tomorrow’s a bookmobile day.”
“Mrr.”
And I would have sworn that he was smiling.
Read on for a sneak peek of
Minnie and Eddie’s next adventure,
available in August 2017!
There are many tasks that I find difficult. Braiding my annoyingly curly hair, for starters. Differentiating equations and putting down a good book before one in the morning are also beyond my capabilities. Another thing I’ve found hard for all of my thirty-four years? Choosing a favorite season.
Though summer is easy to enjoy with its warm freedoms, winter offers skiing and ice-skating and the sheer beauty of a world transformed by a fleecy blanket of white. Spring is exciting with its daily growth spurts, but right in front of me was a glorious hillside in its early-autumn colors of green with sprinklin
gs of red and orange and yellow, a scene so stunningly beautiful it was hard to look away.
“Fall, it is,” I murmured to myself.
I was standing at the bookmobile’s back door, the door wide-open to let the unseasonably warm air of late September waft around the thousands of books, the hundreds of CDs and DVDs, the jigsaw puzzles, my part-time clerk, me, and Eddie, the bookmobile cat.
“Mrr,” Eddie said. On his current favorite perch, the driver’s-seat headrest, he stretched and yawned, showing us the roof of his mouth, which was the second-least attractive part of him, then settled down again, rearranging himself into what looked like the exact same position.
Julia, who was sitting on the carpeted step under the bookshelves, which served as both seating and as a step to reach the top shelves, looked up from the book she was reading. “What does he want now?”
One of the many reasons I’d hired the sixtyish Julia Beaton a few months ago was her tacit agreement to always pretend that Eddie was actually trying to communicate with us. Julia had many other wonderful qualities, among them the gift of empathy, which was a huge plus for a bookmobile clerk, and an uncanny ability to understand people’s motivations.
Those two traits had undoubtedly contributed to her success as a Tony Award–winning actress, but when the leading roles had started to dry up, she’d retired from the stage, and she and her husband had moved back to her hometown of Chilson, a small tourist town in northwest lower Michigan, which was the town where I now lived and worked, and there wasn’t anywhere on earth I’d rather be.
Though I hadn’t grown up in Chilson, I’d had the good fortune to spend many youthful summers with my long-widowed aunt Frances, who ran a boardinghouse in the summer and taught woodworking during the school year. It hadn’t taken me long to fall in love with the region, a land of forested hills and lakes of all sizes, and I soon loved the town, too, with its eccentric restaurants, retail stores, and residents.
Soon after I’d earned a master’s degree in library and information sciences, I’d heard about a posting for the assistant director position at the Chilson District Library, and spent half the night and all the next day working on a résumé and cover letter.
I’d sent the packet off, crossing my fingers as I imagined it being read by the library board, and, after a grueling interview and a couple of nail-biting weeks, I’d been ecstatic to be hired as the library’s assistant director.
Since then, not all had been exactly rosy, but the bookmobile program I’d proposed had become a reality a little over a year ago, and in spite of sporadic funding problems, library director issues, and the occasional library board confrontation, I was a very happy camper.
Eddie, on the other hand, did not look like a contented cat. Instead of the relaxed body language he’d been exhibiting moments earlier, he was now sitting up, twitching his tail, and staring at me with a look with which I was intimately familiar.
“What he wants,” I said, “is a treat.”
“He had treats at the last stop,” Julia pointed out.
“Which is why he thinks he deserves a treat at this one, too.”
“If he has treats at every stop,” she said, “he’s going to get as big as a house.”
I’d first met Eddie a year and a half earlier. In a cemetery. Which sounds weird, and probably is, but Chilson’s cemetery had an amazing view of Janay Lake to the south and, to the west, the long blue line that was massive Lake Michigan.
The day I’d met Eddie had been another unseasonably warm day, and I’d skipped out on the cleaning chores I should have been doing and gone for a long walk up to the cemetery. I’d taken advantage of a bench placed next to the gravestone of an Alonzo Tillotson (born 1847, died 1926) and been startled by the appearance of an insistent black-and-gray tabby cat.
In spite of my commands for him to go home, he’d followed me back to my place. By the time I’d cleaned him up, making him a black-and-white cat, I’d fallen in love. Even still, I’d dutifully run a notice in the local newspaper’s lost and found and had been relieved when no one answered the ad. Eddie was my first-ever pet; my father had suffered horrible allergies, and until last year I’d never felt the connection a human and a pet could have. I’d also never realized how opinionated and stubborn a cat could be.
“He’s already pretty big,” I said, “but the vet says he’s a healthy weight.”
“Mrr,” said the cat in question, starting to ooze off the headrest and toward the driver’s seat.
“Thanks so much,” I muttered. “I love it when you sleep there and shed all over the upholstery so I get your hair on the seat of my pants.”
Eddie thumped himself onto the seat. “Mrr!”
“I think,” Julia said, laughing, “that he took offense to that ‘big’ comment.”
“Who you calling big?”
Julia and I turned. Up until that point, the bookmobile’s stop had been empty of patrons. I smiled, pleased that we weren’t going to turn up completely dry. Of all the facts and figures that my library board scrutinized, the numbers from the bookmobile got the most attention. So far, the trends were upward ones, but I didn’t for a moment assume that all would be well forever.
“Hey, Leese,” I said to the woman, who was almost a foot taller than my efficient five feet. Her height was the same as my best friend’s, who owned a restaurant in Chilson, but instead of Kristen’s slender blond Scandinavian inheritance, Leese Lacombe’s ancestors had endowed her with a broad build, olive skin tone, and brown hair almost as curly as my unruly black mop.
Leese, a few years older than me, possessed a razor-sharp brain, a quick wit, and a prestigious law degree. She’d spent her time in the corporate trenches in a big downstate firm, and had moved back north a few months ago to start up her own law office, one that specialized in elder law. To keep costs down, she was using her home as an office, and had taken to borrowing books from the bookmobile instead of making the half-hour drive into Chilson.
“What’s new with you?” Julia stood and went to get the stack of books Leese had requested online. I was still tweaking the bookmobile schedule, but at that point we were visiting each stop every three weeks. Though that wasn’t a very long time to most people, it was an eternity for bibliophiles, and we were getting used to bringing along huge piles of requested books and lugging back the corresponding huge piles of returns. I doubted that any bookmobile librarian had ever needed to buy a gym membership to get an upper-body workout.
“New?” Leese perched the books on the corner of the rear checkout desk. “I’m glad it’s almost October, for one thing. My summer neighbors have slammed their trunks for the last time.”
Julia and I nodded, understanding the feeling. We lived in a part of Michigan that was the summer playground for a large number of folks from the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Chicagoland areas. Some people visited for a weekend or a week, while others had seasonal residences they occupied from May through September.
The population of Chilson and the entire Tonedagana County more than tripled in the warmer months, and summer came with a complicated set of issues. Most of us were glad to renew the friendships that had been put on hold the previous fall—not to mention the fact that many businesses depended on the summer dollars—but October was undeniably a sigh of relief. No more parking problems, no more waiting in line for a restaurant table, and no more waiting anywhere, really.
“It is nice to have our town back,” Julia said. “We’ll be tired of looking at one another by April, though.”
Leese laughed, and it was a surprisingly gentle sound from such a large person. “Undoubtedly. But without this quiet time, would we appreciate the busy time?”
The question was an interesting one. I gave up trying to shift Eddie from the driver’s seat and walked down the aisle to join the conversation. “So it’s part of that old question: How can we value the highs of life if we do
n’t know what the lows are like?”
“Exactly!” Leese beamed at me with a high-wattage smile, and I knew exactly what was going to happen next. She would sit on the carpeted step, Julia would pull around the desk chair, I would perch myself on the edge of the desk, and the three of us would dive into a long, leisurely discussion when we all had better things to do. But it was nearly October, the summer folks were mostly gone, and it was warm enough to prop the door open. What could it hurt to let the bookmobile chores wait a few minutes longer?
Julia pulled the chair around, and Leese dropped onto the step. “It’s the swings in life that make things interesting,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hitching myself up to sit on the edge of the desk. “Isn’t that some Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”
“Would you rather live in a boring era?” Leese challenged.
Julia laughed. “Minnie Hamilton couldn’t live a boring life if she wanted to. She’s just attracted to trouble.”
“Am not,” I said automatically. “I’m just—”
“Do you know what this tiny woman did earlier this spring?” Julia demanded of Leese. “In the middle of a massive power outage, she managed to hold a very successful book fair.”
Leese looked at me with interest. “You did that? Wasn’t Trock Farrand the headliner?”
“Minnie’s show, from top to bottom,” Julia said. “When the original big-name author pulled out, Trock heard about it and flew out from New York.”
“He’s a friend. That’s all,” I said, knocking my shoes together. “He wanted to plug his new cookbook.” Trock, host of a nationally televised cooking show, owned a summer place just outside of Chilson and in spite of the differences in our ages, backgrounds, and interests, we’d struck up a solid friendship.
Another solid thing was the relationship between Trock’s son, Scruffy, and my friend Kristen. I had the inside scoop that a proposal was in the near future, and I was having a hard time keeping quiet.
“Whatever.” Julia waved off my comment. “And just a couple of months ago, Minnie figured out that—”