“Depends.” Kristen shrugged. “How big? What kind of food will be served? How cool do you want it to be? I know one guy who found a used truck, hunted down used equipment, and fitted it out himself. Cost under twenty thousand. But I’ve also heard about high-end rigs costing more than two hundred grand. I know, right? But I’d say the average for a used vehicle and a little retrofitting is in the sixty to eighty thousand range.”
Hmm. I texted Ash, asking if he knew the amount of the loan Sunny had requested. Almost immediately, he texted back: 300 grand. Why?
Kristen’s here, I wrote back. She said they usually cost about $70,000.
Well, Ash wrote back, that’s probably why Rowan denied the loan.
As I turned off the phone, I wondered why on earth Sunny would have inflated her loan request by so much. When I’d met her, she’d seemed capable and sensible. Why would she have done something so dumb?
• • •
I stayed up late into the night to finish addressing the wedding invitations. Kristen apologized so many times that I was forced to threaten her with replacing all the good wine she was ordering for the wedding with cheap stuff from the grocery store.
“You wouldn’t,” she said.
“Do you want to risk it?” I asked, eyebrows raised.
She did not, so she subsided and accepted her role of envelope licker. I’d pointed out that she could use the sponge that I’d dampened, but she said licking so many envelopes was penance for going out to ski when she should have been working on wedding stuff.
What we both knew, but were never going to say out loud, was that essentially all of the planning and preparations could have been done remotely. But it was more fun this way, and since we could spend a few days planning the wedding Kristen had never dreamed of having, we’d done so.
The next day, though, I was dead tired. I yawned all the way through showering, dressing, and breakfast, and even the blasts of cold air in my face walking out of the house and before boarding the bookmobile didn’t do much to wake me up.
“Coffee,” I murmured to Julia as we headed out of Chilson. “Where’s the closest place to get coffee?” The single cup I’d poured down my throat at breakfast wasn’t doing the job I’d asked it to do.
Wordlessly, Julia pointed at an upcoming gas station, which was even on the right side of the road. I drove into the parking lot, parked, and stood. “Anyone want anything? No, Eddie, you don’t get coffee.” It didn’t do to think about the damage a caffeinated Eddie could do to the world.
I brought back a cup of coffee roughly the size of my head, a cup of tea for Julia, and a wadded-up piece of paper for Eddie. Fifteen minutes later, at our first stop, I was feeling almost awake. Eddie, however, had been batting around the paper nonstop and was sound asleep when Julia opened the door of his carrier.
“Isn’t he sweet,” she cooed. “Look at him, resting his head on his little white paws.”
“You wouldn’t think he was so sweet if he’d woken you up at three in the morning trying to pull your hair out of your head.”
She laughed. “Isn’t it adorable that he tries to fix your hair?”
“Adorable” hadn’t been the word I’d used, but since we had people coming aboard, I declined to share what I had actually said.
“Good morning,” I said, smiling at the young woman who’d just climbed the stairs. With her were two small children, one girl walking mostly steadily, one boy being carried. All three had bright blond hair and round, open faces.
“Morning,” the woman said, a little breathlessly. “We’re looking for picture books.”
“Kitty,” pronounced the toddler. “Kitty!”
The woman deposited the child she’d carried on her hip onto the carpeted step and unzipped both of her children’s coats. “Emily, what did I tell you? Books first, then we’ll ask about the bookmobile cat.”
“Kitty!”
She looked up at me apologetically, and I suddenly knew who she was. “You work at the bank,” I said, and searched my memory for her name. Something unusual and pretty. Started with an M, two syllables . . . “Mara.”
“And you’re Minnie.” She smiled. “It’s nice to finally get on the bookmobile. I usually work Saturdays, but the bank’s closed today for software maintenance.”
Julia took Emily in hand and guided her toward the picture books, murmuring about cat stories and cat adventures. The smaller child seemed content to sit on the step and look about, wide-eyed.
“Eddie’s up front,” I said. “He’s sleeping in his carrier, but we can haul him out in a little bit. He won’t mind.” And maybe if he stayed awake all day, he’d sleep through the night. I eyed the small child and wondered if there were parallels between cat and kid sleeping habits.
“I wanted to thank you,” Mara said.
“Uh.” I stared at her blankly. We’d had a few interactions at the bank, but most of my financial activities were online.
“For what you did at Rowan’s. I hear you tried really hard to save her life, and I wanted to say thanks. She was fun to work with, once you got used to her, and I was sad when she started working from home so much.”
“Oh. Well.” I shifted from one foot to the other. “It was what anyone would have done. I’m just sorry it didn’t help.”
Mara watched her toddler and Julia stack a pile of books. “They’re saying she was murdered,” Mara said softly. “That’s so hard to think about.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything because it seemed as if something was hanging in the back of her mind, waiting to come out, and I didn’t want to break her focus.
“You know,” she said, “I wonder if the police know about that day at the bank.”
More specifics were needed. A lot more. “What day was that?”
She glanced at her smaller child, who was happily stuffing both of his hands into his mouth, and inched closer to me. “It was Bax Tousely.”
For a moment there was no sound, no movement, no nothing. Then my heart restarted its beats. “What happened?”
Mara took her son’s hands out of his mouth and inserted a pacifier she’d deftly pulled from her pocket. “He came in a while back when everybody else was at lunch and asked about a commercial loan. I told him to talk to Rowan, and a couple of weeks later, on one of the days she was in the office, he marched in and slammed her office door shut so hard all the windows in the building rattled.”
“She turned down his loan?”
Mara nodded. “Even with the door shut, you could hear him yelling. Not what either one of them said exactly, but enough to get the idea. Her office is mostly glass, so I could see it all. It was scary, to tell you the truth, and I was thinking about calling the police when Bax threw the loan application across the desk at Rowan—papers went everywhere—and he stormed out of her office.”
“Did he threaten her?” I asked.
She looked troubled. “Bax is such a nice guy, I’ve never seen him be anything but considerate and thoughtful. But he was really upset, and that’s when people say things they don’t mean, right?”
Sometimes. Other times people said exactly what they meant but under normal circumstances kept buttoned up inside, safe from view. “What did he say?”
Mara looked troubled. “He said . . . he said, ‘I won’t take this lying down. You’ll pay for this if it’s the last thing I do.’”
• • •
“Earth to Minnie. Hello, Minnie.”
“What? Oh. Hey, Josh. How are you doing?” It was Tuesday morning, I’d just dropped Kristen off at the airport, and I was standing in front of the coffeepot watching the dark liquid dribble down.
“It would be better if I had some of that stuff.” He leaned around me and, in one deft movement, pulled the pot aside and shoved his mug underneath the flow. Four seconds later, he reversed the move, saying, “You’re a coffee freak. Don’t you do it this way when you’re in a hurry?”