Holly was on her way out of the room, but she took one look at my face and backed up. “Are you okay? No, you’re not. I can see that something horrible has happened. Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee—don’t worry, I didn’t let Kelsey make it this morning—and you can tell Aunt Holly all about it. Oh, and take a brownie. Josh’s mom dropped them off.”
I let Aunt Holly take charge, not even objecting when she cut off a huge slab of brownie and put it on a napkin in front of me. “Eat,” she commanded. “Then talk.”
Three bites later, I started to feel a little less shell-shocked. Two more and I was almost ready to talk. We adjourned to my office so I could be close to my phone, and I told her what had happened upstairs. Well, except the part where I might be forced to resign.
Holly objected in all the right places. “Are they nuts?” she asked, her face a little pink. “The bookmobile is the best thing that’s ever happened to this library! Sure, this new building is awesome and everything, but has it changed anyone’s life? People who come here were already coming to the library, maybe a few more, but not like the bookmobile. Did you tell them how many new library-card forms you’ve completed out there?”
I smiled. “You should have talked to the board instead of me.”
She shook her head rapidly. “No way. I freeze up something silly if I have to speak in public.”
“The board meetings aren’t like that,” I said. “It’s just a bunch of people sitting around a table.”
“And all of them staring at you when you say something. I’ll pass, thanks.” She gave a mock shudder. “But, hey, I wanted to tell you that I had to give up on Facebook.”
Facebook? Why . . . ? Then I remembered. My concerns that Stephen had learned about Eddie felt long ago and far away.
“No matter who or what group I tracked,” she said, “I couldn’t find anyone who would have liked the same collection of groups Stephen would. So either he’s being smarter about this than I would have guessed, or he’s just not on Facebook.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said.
“Maybe, maybe not.” She pursed her lips. “The way I figure it, he’s got to be out there somewhere. Lurking. Spying on us. That’s the way he is, right? So he’s there, taking notes. I just have to figure out where he is. Twitter might be more his thing.”
“Or,” I offered, “he might not be on social media at all.”
Holly shook her head. “No, I don’t see it. It’s too big of a chance for him to gather up information.”
She was making him sound like a grand spymaster. Stephen had his quirks, and it wouldn’t hurt him to attend a few workshops on playing well with others, but he was an excellent library director, and I was starting to feel a little sneaky for, well, sneaking around about him.
“Thanks for doing this, Holly,” I said, “but I don’t want to take up so much of your time. If Stephen knows about Eddie, there isn’t much I can do about it until he decides to tell me.” Of course, if the board was going to fire me or keep the bookmobile from running, Stephen wouldn’t have to do anything.
I sighed.
Holly, who was a mother and therefore had that supermom sense for noticing the slightest mood anomalies, gave me an empathetic glance. “Yeah, I know. You’re worried about what the board is going to say. When they call, let me know, okay?”
My phone rang. For two full rings, I just stared at it. My insides felt tingly and my head felt two sizes too small. When the third ring started, I snatched up the receiver. “Minnie Hamilton,” I said. “How may I help you?”
“The board has made a decision,” Stephen said.
My mouth’s dryness was immediate and absolute. There was no way I was going to be able to say a word until I got some fluid into it. I scrabbled for my coffee mug and took a long gulp. “What did they say?”
“They chose not to take a vote on requesting your resignation, at least for the time being.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “What about the bookmobile?”
He let out a sharp breath. “Your point about the possibility of murder pushed that discussion in a completely new direction. The board now feels that if Roger Slade was, in fact, murdered, the library cannot be seen as negligent. We had a short conference call with the library’s attorney, and while he isn’t in complete agreement, he did agree that the case against the library would be weaker if murder could be proved.”
“So, I can keep the bookmobile on the road?”
Stephen barked out something that might have been a laugh. “Is that all you care about—the bookmobile?”
I wanted to say that I cared about a lot of things—world peace, finding a clean source of energy, and discovering a way to walk in the rain without getting mud splatters on my pants—but I was pretty sure Stephen’s question was rhetorical.
“The case will first appear in court the second Wednesday in December,” Stephen said. “How they got it on the docket so soon, I don’t know, but they did. If you care so much about the bookmobile, you’d better solve this situation before then.” He banged the phone down.
Slowly, I returned my own receiver back to its cradle.
“What?” Holly demanded. “What did they say?”
The small tent calendar on my desk was on November. I flipped it over to December and counted the days until the second Wednesday of the month. “Two weeks,” I murmured. “I have two weeks.”
“For what?”
I looked at her, looked at the calendar, then looked back at her. There was only one real answer to her question. “To figure out who killed Roger Slade.”
* * *
Thanksgiving came and went with a flurry of cooking (Aunt Frances), a massive amount of dishwashing (me), and a stunning show of eating ability on the part of everyone who came for dinner.
Our ten guests included two former boarders who were now married to each other, an elderly couple that Aunt Frances and her long-dead husband had been friends with, a husband and wife and their two children from one street over, and two strays.
My stray was the widowed Lloyd Goodwin, one of my favorite library patrons, whose children couldn’t make the trip north this year, and Aunt Frances had invited a man whose name I never did get right. It was Brett, Brent, or Brant, and since he seemed to answer to any of the three, I gave up figuring it out before dinner was ready.
“Where did your stray come from?” I asked Aunt Frances when I popped into the kitchen to check on turkey timing. “He’s hot, for an older guy.”
And he was, in a white-haired, sturdy-shouldered sort of way. He was also a bit on the pompous side, but since he’d laughed at my jokes, I was trying to forgive that.
“Hardware store,” my aunt said. “He kindly helped me see the difference between wood screws and metal screws.”
I laughed. “And that turned into an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Minnie,” my aunt said severely. “No one should have to eat Thanksgiving dinner alone.”
An undeniable fact. I grinned at her. “You’re a nice person. Did you know?”
“The salt of the earth. Now get out of my kitchen unless you want to carve the turkey.”
I couldn’t think of much I wanted to do less, so I skedaddled back to our guests until I was summoned for plating duty. At first, Eddie stayed on the stairs, observing through cautious eyes, but he eventually came down to join the fun and shed on everyone that he could.
The rest of the afternoon and evening zoomed past with good food and fine friendship, and I tumbled into bed glad to have been able to forget the library board’s dictate, at least for a day.