While I was glad people recognized how hard law enforcement officers worked, I was insistent that Leon make the call. “You probably won’t even have to talk to him directly. He hardly ever answers his phone and you’ll end up leaving a voice mail message. It’ll take thirty seconds. Let him decide what’s important and what’s not.” Leon kept demurring until I stood tall, put my hands on my hips, and stared him down.
“In just about every suspense movie ever filmed, there’s a piece of evidence that, at first, seems unimportant but ends up as the turning point of the entire plot. Right now, no one knows what’s important and what isn’t. Do you want the end of Rowan’s movie to peter out to a stupid ending?”
Once I’d finished my little outburst, I was pretty sure I’d made the stupidest analogy ever, but Leon looked thoughtful.
“Just like that Poe story,” he said. “‘The Purloined Letter.’ It was right in front of them all the time. You’re right. I’ll call that detective as soon as I get home.”
Now I was itching to know if he had remembered to call, and what Hal Inwood was doing about it. If anything.
“Probably nothing,” I muttered.
“I’m sorry?”
The question was a good one, because I was now standing at the front counter of Chilson’s urgent care clinic. During the hours I’d spent in Petoskey’s emergency room after Kristen’s post-skiing adventure, I’d looked around and thought that what they could really use was a healthy pile of fiction to read. The Petoskey emergency room was outside the Chilson district, but last year a 24/7 clinic had opened up in Chilson and it was past time I talked to someone.
“Hi,” I said, and introduced myself. “I have an eight o’clock appointment with Dave Landis.”
The twenty-something receptionist, whose name tag said RONNIE, gave me a closer look. “You’re the bookmobile librarian, right? With the cat, Eddie. What’s your name again?”
Five minutes later, I was in the office of Director Dave Landis, explaining what I had in mind. “So do you think this would be helpful?” I asked. “I’d choose the books carefully, nothing bloody or gory, nothing that deals with horrible diseases. A lot of short stories, so people could finish up. And a fair amount of nonfiction, too. Essays, probably. But they’d all be donated books, so it would be fine if people took them home.”
Dave, about forty and with zero hair on his head, had started nodding about halfway through the spiel I’d put together, but since I’d spent so much time preparing for this meeting, I was determined to get the whole thing out.
“Plus we’re doing more and more programming at the library for all age levels, and the participation is doing nothing but going up. If you have information you’d like to get out into the community, this could be a great opportunity.”
“Drug abuse,” he said, jumping in when I paused to take a breath. “Opioids and heroin. I moved here from downstate last year, and I had no idea how much addiction was going on Up North.”
My eyes had been opened to the problem when Ash and I were dating. As a sheriff’s deputy, he saw more than his share of tragic tales with roots in addiction. “Done,” I said. “It’s a huge problem and I’d love to help even in a small way.” And if the library board took issue with bringing an addiction discussion into the library, well, I’d just convince them they were wrong.
Dave smiled. “You’re dating Rafe Niswander, aren’t you? That’s too bad. I don’t suppose you have a sister?”
I didn’t ask how he knew Rafe. Even though he’d been in town less than a year, with his job he would have met more people in that one year than I did in five. “Sorry, no sister,” I said. Then, trying to learn more, I asked, “If I did have a sister, and if she had a serious addiction, could I bring her here?”
He nodded. “You bet. Matter of fact, that exact thing happened about a month ago. It was the day we got hardly any snow here, but there was six inches on the other side of the county? A woman who lives halfway to Charlevoix brought her sister here.” His gaze drifted to a business card on the corner of his desk. I hadn’t paid attention to them until just now, but I sat up a bit straighter when I recognized the colorful and cheery logo on the card. The Red House Café.
“We don’t have beds for long-term addiction care,” Dave said, “but we can treat overdoses and we have contacts with substance abuse facilities in the region. Though we do our absolute best to find beds for those in need, there are only so many out there. I tell people we’ll call as soon as we find something”—absently, Dave picked up Sunny’s card and tapped it on his desktop—“and we do, but sometimes it takes weeks.”
“That must be hard,” I said. “Telling people you can’t help them.”
Sighing, he nodded. “Worst part of the job.” He brightened. “But when you can help people, when you know that someone has turned their life around, that makes it all worthwhile.”
I thanked him for his time, told him I’d be in touch, and as I scraped my iced-over windshield, I thought about what I was pretty sure I’d learned.
Yes, sometimes I jumped to conclusions, but it wasn’t much of a leap to think that Sunny Scoles had been at the urgent care clinic the day Rowan had died. If she’d taken the poison the day it had arrived at her house, and it seemed to make sense that she would have, then Sunny had an alibi. So why did the sheriff’s office still consider her a viable suspect? Why on earth hadn’t she told them about her alibi?
• • •
I split the rest of the morning between working on the March work schedule and rewriting position descriptions. For weeks I’d been dodging the description task, but decided that today was the day to take care of the part-time positions. And like many tasks, once I got going, it became clear that the job wasn’t going to take nearly as long as I’d thought it might.
“Not half as long,” I said out loud as I finished the first draft of the clerk’s description. Clearly, a celebration was in order.
I spun around in my chair and made for the coffeepot. The break room was empty, so I filled my Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services mug with the stuff of life and wandered out to the front desk, where Donna was frowning at a computer.
“Problems?” I asked.
She grimaced, but didn’t look away from the screen. “Operator ones, I’m afraid, not electronic ones.”
“Want me to call Josh?”
“And have him lord his knowledge over me? Let him make me feel like an imbecile? Be forced to admit that I’m incompetent and incapable of anything different?”
I eyed her over the top of my mug. “Are you feeling okay?” Because though I was well aware that there were some IT people in the world who had an unfortunate tendency to treat the people they were supposed to help with sneering condescension, Josh wasn’t one of them.
“Bugger.” Donna pushed herself back from the computer and folded her arms across her chest. If she’d been seventy years younger, I would have said she was pouting, but since she was seventy-two, she couldn’t have been.
“Please don’t tell Josh I was slandering him,” she said to her knees. “I’m just in a rotten mood.”
“Um, you’re not getting sick, are you?” I started to back away, but stopped when she shook her head. So far, I hadn’t been sick at all that winter, and I was dearly hoping to keep it that way. “Is there anything you want to talk about? Can I help with anything?”
She perked up. “You’re good at persuading. How about you come over to my house tonight and convince my husband that our next vacation should be in Antarctica. I’ve always wanted to go and there’s this expedition next month that just had a cancellation from two volunteer research assistants. He said no so fast that he couldn’t possibly have really thought about it. If you could just talk to him . . .” She sighed. “You’re not going to, are you?”