Due to a convenience-store snack on the way to the meeting, I’d ended up with coins in my pants pocket instead of in my car, where I usually put my loose change. I’d set it on the dresser, intending to move it to the car in the morning.
“Not a cat toy,” I said, moving Eddie back to the bed. I picked up the dime and the penny he’d pushed to the floor, and tossed all the change into my sock drawer. “None of it is a cat toy, understand?”
“Mrr!”
I crawled back into bed and, with my cat perched on my hip staring down at me like a furry bird of prey, drifted into a sleep that was punctuated by dreams of Collier, at the altar with his bride, staring at the gaping dark space where his parents should have been.
Chapter 17
The next day, Rafe and I met for lunch again, but this time it was brown bags in his office.
“It still surprises me sometimes,” I said, removing the cover from my nifty new sandwich container. My mom, who was constantly trying to get me to cook more and eat out less, had given me a nice set of storage doohickeys for Christmas. I’d used this one and a cube-shaped version, which I’d recently discovered was perfect for leftover restaurant oatmeal. The other eight containers were awaiting their opportunities for a useful life.
“What does?” Rafe was sitting in his desk chair with his feet propped on an open lower drawer. He asked the question around a mouthful of baloney sandwich and followed it with a chaser of bottled water. At some point we needed to have a chat about table manners, but since he had a meeting with the president of the school board in fifteen minutes, I decided to give him a pass. For now.
“That you’re a middle school principal.”
“Surprises a lot of people,” he said. “Me, my parents, my grandparents, my aunt and uncles, my cousins, all of my friends, and every teacher I ever had, including Sunday school.”
“So pretty much everyone you’ve ever met.”
“Well, there was this one girl,” he said meditatively. “She told me I had a lot of potential, but if I didn’t shape up, I was going to end up a complete loser and die a lonely and bitter old man.”
A surge of jealousy leapt into my throat. I batted it down and, as casually as I could, asked, “Oh? Anyone I know?”
He grinned. “She runs this restaurant in town. You might know it. Three Seasons?”
I stared at him, then started laughing. “Seriously? Kristen said that? When?”
“First summer I met you.”
Still laughing, I said, “When I was, what, twelve?” Kristen and Rafe were a year older than I was, but the three of us had formed a summertime trio throughout our adolescence. Our bond faded during college and the first postcollege years, but when I moved to Chilson full time about the same time Kristen chucked her fancy science job with a large pharmaceutical company, we’d slid back into the comfortable old ways.
“You were short then, too.” He bit into his sandwich.
“Some people see consistency as a virtue.”
Rafe shrugged. “And some people play with rattlesnakes.”
The link between consistency and rattlesnakes was so thin as to be nonexistent, but when I’d started this conversation, I’d wanted to say something specific, so I pulled away from poking holes in his analogy. “Like I said, it sometimes surprises me that you’re a middle school principal, and—”
He made a rolling motion with his sandwich. “Move on.”
“Trying,” I said. “But what I want to say is I’m not surprised you’re a good one.”
His sandwich stopped mid-roll. “You’re . . . what?”
“I always knew that once you’d decided on what you wanted to do with your life, you’d be successful at doing it.” Awkward sentence, which only proved something I’d known for years, that I should rehearse anything important I ever wanted to say to anyone, ever.
Plunging on, I said, “It’s just that you have all these great qualities—some incredibly annoying ones, too, so quit smiling—and I’m not at all surprised that the teachers, kids, and parents think you’re the best principal this school has ever had.”
He shoved a dangling piece of lettuce back into his sandwich. “That’s because people have short memories.”
It wasn’t. In the last few months more than one teacher who’d reached early retirement age had stopped me on the street to tell me they were planning on continuing to teach for another few years, and it was all due to Rafe Niswander. “Who would have thunk it?” Mr. Conant had said wryly. “The kid who drove me batty in seventh grade is now my boss, and I can’t imagine having a better one.”
“Speaking of short memories,” Rafe said.
He shoved the last of his sandwich in his mouth, then, thankfully, chewed and swallowed. That last bite had been huge, and though I’d been trained in emergency first aid, I’d never had to perform the Heimlich maneuver in a real-life situation.
“Speaking of short memories,” I prompted, because he’d taken his feet off the drawer and was reaching for his computer mouse.
“Yeah. That.” He clicked away. “There it is. Take a look.”
I wolfed down the last of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, came around, and looked at the screen. It was filled with a busy spreadsheet. “Is that your suspect list?”
“Columns are the suspect names, rows are the different bits of clues, evidence, and whatever other information we think might be useful.” He tapped the screen. “You know, this might be better in a database than a spreadsheet. What do you think?”
What I thought was that he would have been better off spending his time finishing the drywall in the upstairs bathroom, but I kissed the back of his head. “This is great. Can you e-mail it to me?”
“Yes, I could, but no I won’t, because I’m going to put it into Google Docs. That way we can both work on it at the same time, see? I’ll e-mail you the link.”
Um. “Sounds . . . great.” I peered at the screen and saw that he’d added rows titled “Alibi,” “Background,” “Motive,” “Movements,” and “Previous Incidents.”
“This could be really useful,” I said, starting to warm to the idea. “Especially the ‘Background’ and ‘Previous Incidents.’ Those are things I have to find out, but for people like you who grew up around here the information is practically imprinted into your DNA.”
He sat back, putting his hands behind his head. “And here you thought this was a waste of time.”
“I didn’t—” Well, I had, actually, so I took a deep breath and said the magic words. “You were right and I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
He smacked a kiss on the side of my face. “And now I’m afraid I have to kick you out. My meeting starts in three minutes and this guy is always on time.”
We exchanged a long kiss that made me want to lock his office door for an hour, but we eventually separated and I headed out. A quiet “Hey” made me stop and turn around. Rafe was fiddling with his mouse. “Thanks,” he said, not looking up. “For what you said. About not being surprised that I’m successful.”
Even though the clouds outside were thick and unyielding, sunshine suddenly filled me. “You’re welcome,” I said softly, and left him to his meeting.
• • •
Julia zipped Grant Jelen’s last book through the scanner. “And there you go,” she said, piling The Historian onto a teetering stack. “Sure you have enough to last until next time?”
Grant, gray-haired but tall and straight, started moving his books from her desktop to the empty backpack he’d brought in. “No,” he said. “But I can borrow e-books if I have to. Prefer print, though.”
“Ah.” Julia glanced at me, and her blank face was a clear request for help. Her gift with patrons was more in the line of jollying along the slightly cranky ones; I usually took over when patrons were reluctant to communicate at all.