Mom thanked her and escorted Brody to their next task.
I looked at Shannon. “Have you won anything lately?”
“Not hardly,” she said. “My competition guns are at the gunsmith for maintenance. I usually do my own cleaning, but I’ve been too busy.”
“How long have your guns been out?”
“A month. About the longest month of my life.”
“Who do you use?” I asked casually. “Someone local?”
“There’s a guy down in Grayling I trust, but he’s been slammed with work because of hunting season. I should have known better, right?” She smiled ruefully. “Well, back to the trenches.”
We made our mutual good-byes and walked off in different directions.
Inside the deli, I found myself in line—if you could call the two people in front of me a line, and once you’d lived Up North for a full year, you did—behind Pam Fazio.
“Hey there,” she said. “Didn’t you say you have a couple of nieces?”
I nodded. “Katrina is fifteen, and Sally is eleven.” I also had a nephew, Ben, who’d been born in the middle. “If you have any ideas for Christmas presents, I’m open to any and all suggestions.”
“Got a shipment yesterday,” she said, “and the container—”
There had been conversation going on around us at the occupied tables, but the instant Pam had said the word “container,” everyone stopped talking.
“Yes,” she said, laughing and spreading her arms wide in invitation. “Yesterday was container day. I’ll have everything unpacked by early next week.”
“Where was this one from?” someone asked.
“Ireland,” Pam said, putting on an Irish accent. “With lace and glass and sideboards from foggy green coasts. With boots and books and bottles and crates full of things unseen.”
“Books?” I asked. Pam made regular trips overseas, buying hither and yon and packing everything into a massive container that got stowed on a ship and eventually arrived in northern lower Michigan.
“Of all sorts. And,” she said, winking broadly, “some lovely hand mirrors that might be just the thing for young nieces.”
It sounded perfect. “How about a present for a thirteen-year-old nephew?”
“Now, Minnie,” she said, dropping the accent. “There’s only so much even I can do for you.”
I laughed and was really, really glad that this nice woman wasn’t a killer.
* * *
The afternoon flew past as quickly as the morning had. Just as I was thinking that it was time to pack up and go home, my phone rang. The line was full of pops and static, and I wasn’t sure there was anyone on the other end, but I said hello and gave my name anyway.
“Minnie . . . you?”
I stood, as if that might help the reception. It didn’t, of course, but at least I’d tried. “Cade? What’s up?”
“Nothing . . . just closed . . . auction . . . price was . . . thousand dollars.”
He sounded excited, but that had to be the line’s poor quality, because there was no way he should be pleased about selling a painting for a thousand dollars. I’d looked up his work and had been shocked to find out that some of his larger paintings had sold for six figures. In front of the decimal. Not that a thousand dollars wasn’t a nice donation to the library, but I’d held out hopes for more. “Thanks for letting me know,” I said. “I’m happy the family even considered the library.”
“Not . . . library . . . thousand . . .”
“Cade? Are you there?”
Nothing. The line wasn’t just quiet—it was dead.
I returned the receiver to its cradle. So much for the library board being thrilled with my fund-raising efforts. They’d see the thousand-dollar check, pat me on the head (in so many words), and ask what I was going to do for them next month.
“Stop that,” I said out loud. As in, stop feeling sorry for myself. Stop acting as if there was nothing I could do to find Roger’s killer. Stop acting as if there was no way to save the bookmobile. Stop acting as if I was scared of the library board and the pending lawsuit. Stop acting if I was a helpless pawn in the game of life with no options and no way out.
What I needed to do was remember how much I’d accomplished and move on from there. I was smart, on good days, and resourceful almost always. I would figure this out. Whether I’d figure it out by next Wednesday was another question, of course, but I wasn’t going to worry about that now. Right now I was going to go home and eat whatever Aunt Frances was making for dinner.
I pulled on my coat, grabbed my backpack, and was about to shut down the computer for the weekend when my e-mail program dinged with an incoming message.
Read or don’t read; that was the question.
“Don’t read,” I said, and powered down. Whatever it was could wait until Monday.
* * *
Over a meal of fettuccini with various types of squash in some sort of olive oil–based sauce, I told Aunt Frances about my day, about how I’d fact-checked as many of my theories as I could, and about the conclusions I’d reached.
“First, I typed up reasons why Roger could have been the intended victim all along.”
“Mrr,” Eddie said. He was sitting in his new favorite spot: the seat of a rocking chair that had been moved into the corner of the kitchen from the screened back porch. You would have thought rocking chairs would be anathema to a creature with a long tail, but Eddie seemed to like it. “Mrr,” he said again.
“Yeah.” I nodded agreement. “It wasn’t a very long list.” My own list had been inspired by Mitchell’s lists of names, and maybe someday I’d tell him that. Probably not, but maybe.
My conclusion, arrived at after hours of typing, researching, and thinking, was that Roger was exactly who he appeared to be. A happy man, content with his place in life and comfortable in his own skin. Maybe he had made enemies at some point, but if he had, I hadn’t found any, and that’s a hard thing to hide when you’ve lived in the same small town your entire life.
I speared a piece of squash. “So, I went with the working assumption that Denise was the intended target.”
My aunt gave an unladylike snort. “Good luck. That one has done nothing but make enemies since she was a child.” She contemplated her fork. “I suppose I should feel sorry for her. Maybe she was born that way, maybe she can’t help having a personality like a hacksaw, but there are some people who make empathy hard.”
“Mrr,” Eddie said.
Aunt Frances and I looked at him. He looked back, blinked, then started licking his front paw.
“Anyway,” I said, turning my attention back to the topic at hand, “Denise has alienated half the town.”
“Is that all?” my aunt murmured.
“But alienation,” I went on, “does not necessarily an enemy make.”
Aunt Frances got a questioning look on her face. “So what makes an enemy an enemy?”
“Exactly!” I beamed. “That was the next phase of my research.”
“You researched enemy making?” She smirked. “What did you do, Google it? Bet that turned up some interesting links.”
“Mrr!” Eddie glared in her direction.
Aunt Frances laughed. “I don’t think he likes it when I make fun of you.”
“We have a bond.”
“Sorry, Eddie,” my aunt said.
Outwardly mollified, Eddie curled himself into a cat-sized ball, thereby withdrawing himself from our conversation.
“One conclusion of my research,” I said, “is that the result of irritating someone is most often a distancing effect.”
I could see a puzzled expression on my aunt’s face, so I knew I wasn’t making complete sense. It was all straight in my head, though. “Pam Fazio, for instance. Denise annoyed her to the point that she walked out on the Friends.”
“And said that she’d only return over Denise’s dead body,” Aunt Frances added.