“It is,” Officer Thomas said. “We have an extensive data set for this monitoring project. We just like to have the paper copy in case it needs to be used in a court of law.” She waited a beat. “Do you have any other questions?”
“No. All set.” I tucked the clipboard into its home and shut the door. Jeremy couldn’t be the killer. I knew it for sure now.
* * *
A few minutes after I snuck back into my office, there was a knock on the door. Holly poked her head inside. “Minnie, it’s break time. I made cupcakes yesterday for Wilson’s classroom, and there are a few extras.”
“Sounds good,” I said vaguely, not taking my eyes off the monitor or my fingers off the keyboard. “I’ll be there in a little bit.”
Holly said something, I made an ambiguous noise, and she retreated, shutting the door softly behind her.
* * *
There was another knock on the door.
“I’ll be there in a second,” I said, still typing.
“Don’t go yet.” Mitchell slipped into my office and shut the door behind him. “Slipped” being a subjective word, of course, because it was hard for anyone that tall to be unobtrusive. “I got something to show you.”
“What are you doing here?” I squinched my eyes shut and opened them again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you’re never at the library before noon.” I leaned back, rotating my shoulders and flexing my fingers, all of which I suddenly realized were very, very stiff.
“True that.” Mitchell nodded seriously. “Why ruin a good morning by getting out in it, is what I say.”
I frowned and, for the first time in hours, looked at the clock on my computer. Half past one? How can that be?
“What’re you doing, anyway?” Mitchell came around my side of the desk. “Working? Hey!” He pointed to the monitor before I could bring up another file to cover what I was doing. “You’re working on who killed Roger, too.” He put his hands flat on the edge of my desk and started reading. “Huh. You got a lot of the same stuff I did, only with more extra stuff. Like lots of details.” He read the narrative I’d been constructing all morning, the story of everything I’d learned about Roger and Denise.
He grunted and stood more or less straight. “How come you’re doing this?”
For a brief moment, I considered confiding in Mitchell. Telling him about the library board’s ultimatum, about my flashes of empathy for Denise, about my guilt and my responsibility for Roger’s death, about the possible end of the bookmobile.
My sanity restored itself a nanosecond later. The absolute last thing I needed was Mitchell’s bumbling, though well-intentioned, assistance.
“Just trying to help,” I said. Which wasn’t much of an explanation, but with any luck, he’d accept it.
“Yeah, I can see that.” He nodded. “That’s like what I’m doing here,” he said, pulling a pile of yellow legal pad sheets from where he’d stuffed them inside his coat. “Can you guess what this is? Just read; see if you can figure it out.”
It was another multipage listing of names, and this one was even longer than the list he’d prepared of all the people Roger had ever known. Much longer.
I scanned the handwritten sheets. Most of the names I didn’t recognize, but every few lines I’d pick out one that I did. Pam Fazio. Kelsey Lyons. Josh Hadden. Don Weller. Holly Terpening. Jeremy Hull. Donna Beene. Allison Korthase. Bruce Medler. Sondra Luth. Otis Rahn. Shannon Hirsch. Stephen Rangel. Minnie Hamilton.
I squinted up at Mitchell. “What’s my name doing here?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “What kind of list do you think it is?”
As far as I could tell, it was a list of all the people who lived in Chilson. “I have no idea.”
Mitchell picked a pen out of my old ABOS coffee mug and, as he wrote a title on the top page, said the words out loud. “Anyone Who Has Ever Said Anything Bad about Denise Slade.”
I started to object, but stopped and felt ashamed of myself. Yes, every so often, I ignored my mother’s oft-repeated maxim about not saying anything if I didn’t have anything nice to say. I’d probably said uncomplimentary things about Denise, and if I’d said them within Mitchell’s hearing, I should be doubly ashamed.
“Yeah.” With a finger riddled with hangnails, Mitchell tapped at my name. “Once I heard you say that Denise sees everything in black and white. It didn’t sound like a compliment, you know? So I had to put you down.”
Thinking about it, I had to agree.
Starting at the top of the list, Mitchell began telling me exactly why each of the names were included. Ten minutes later, he flipped to page two. “And Bruce Medler? That library-board guy? Well, this one day, I heard him—”
“Wow, I’m sorry, Mitchell,” I said, getting to my feet, “but would you look at the time? Why don’t you type all that up? Then e-mail it to me.”
“Yeah?” Mitchell gathered up his papers. “That’s a good idea, Minnie. Real good. Must be why you get the big bucks, right?”
“Right.” I ushered him out, shut the door behind him, and went back to my desk.
She sees everything in black and white.
I sat down and got to work.
Chapter 17
During my typical walk from the library to Chilson’s downtown, I made sure to admire the sunlight on the steeple of the Methodist church, the stonework on the former corner gas station–turned–real estate office, the window display in Upton’s Clothing, and the smells from Tom’s Bakery.
But instead of doing all that, this time I walked toward the deli, with my head down against the unending rain, thinking hard. Which was why I didn’t see the small child until I almost ran into him.
“Whoa!” I jumped back before I knocked the poor thing to the sidewalk. “Sorry about that.”
His mother, or at least the woman I assumed was his mother, turned around and called. “Brody, what are you doing? I told you to hang on to my coat.” Her arms were full of shopping bags, a diaper bag, and an infant. “Hurry up, now.”
But the boy, who might have been five, didn’t move. He pointed at the sky. “Look, Mommy! It’s a bald eagle!”
“That’s nice. Now hurry up. We have a lot to do.” Mommy, busy and harried, didn’t look up, but I did. There was, in fact, a large bird floating about up in the sky, wings spread wide, head turning left and right, looking for whatever it was large birds look for. In this case, probably a late lunch.
“It’s a bald eagle,” Brody said, and it was instantly clear to me that the kid wasn’t going to move until Mom admitted that the bird was an eagle.
“Of course it is,” Mom said, sending me a busy smile. “This nice lady thinks so, too, I bet.”
I squinted up at the bird. In summer, sitting on the front of my houseboat, I’d see eagles every once in a while, but in spite of the bookmobile’s bird book, I was no expert and I didn’t want to name the bird incorrectly. Librarians aren’t big on that kind of behavior.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe, but I can’t quite see if it has a white head or not.” Even if it didn’t, if I remembered correctly from a long-ago science class, it could still be a bald eagle, a young one, since their heads didn’t get fully white until they were about five years old.
“Eagle.” Brody stomped his foot. “It’s a bald eagle.”
“Actually, it is.”
The three of us turned. Shannon Hirsch stood a few feet away, squinting a little as she watched the bird. “Big one, too, so it’s probably a female.”
“I told you.” Brody stomped his feet again, making small splashes on the wet sidewalk. “It’s a bald eagle.”
“You can tell?” Mom asked. “For sure?”
“Without any doubt.” Shannon grinned at me. “The trophies in my office? Having bizarrely sharp vision made winning all those a lot easier.”