This wasn’t a huge surprise. A mess by Denise’s standards would have been a comfortable clutter to anyone else. I’d once heard her berate a volunteer for walking past a shelf of sale books without straightening them to be flush with the front edge.
“How much of a mess are you talking about?” I asked.
“Come see,” she said, and shoved herself out of the chair and to her feet.
Not for the first time, I realized that I hadn’t given Stephen enough credit. When he’d been here, he’d been in charge of soothing Denise’s ruffled feathers, and I was now realizing it must have taken more time and patience than I’d ever dreamed. I made a silent apology to my former boss and remained seated.
“Sorry, Denise,” I said. “I don’t have time right now.” I nodded at the piles of papers on my desk. “Give me half an hour.”
She huffed out a massive sigh. “And here I thought you were going to be a better director than Stephen. You’re just as bad as he was at meeting the needs of the Friends.”
Though it was disheartening to be compared to a man whom I’d never thought had an ounce of management skills, I was learning. Slowly, but I was learning. “I’ll be up in half an hour.” I smiled politely and went back to my papers.
Half an hour later, on the dot, I walked into the book-sale room. “Wow,” I said, looking around. “You weren’t kidding.”
Denise rolled her eyes. “I told you, didn’t I? A mess.”
For once, she was making a huge understatement. Books were on the windowsills. Books were on the tables. Books were scattered across the floor. It looked as if a huge wind had rushed through the room, sucking every book off a shelf and spitting them out every which way. It was a horrendous mess.
“You’d better stop,” I told Denise.
“What?” She was crouching on the floor, picking up books, and sliding them onto the nearest shelf. “Don’t be ridiculous. We have to get this room back in shape before tomorrow. That’s sale day, you know.”
Once upon a time I’d known when the Friends opened the room to the public for sales, but Denise had switched it around so much the past few months that I never told anyone the sales days without running upstairs and checking the dates taped to the door.
“The police need to look at this,” I said.
“Police? That’s nuts. This was vandalism, pure and simple. Some kids snuck up here and, without Stephen in his office down the hall, they had time to do all this.”
I frowned. “Haven’t you heard what happened?”
“Heard what?” she said crossly. “I’ve been downstate visiting friends. Drove up this morning and came straight to the library.”
Oh, dear. If I’d had to make a list of the people who’d heard about the murder ten minutes after I’d called the police, Denise’s name would have been at the top. She was related to half the people in Chilson and had gone to school with the other half. That she hadn’t heard about Andrea Vennard might well be a sign that the world was about to end. I hoped not, though, because I had things to do. Like grow older.
I walked across the room and gently took the books out of her hands. “You’d better sit down. There’s something I need to tell you.”
Since murder had struck her own family less than a year ago, I thought she might take the news hard, and she did. She dissolved into sobbing tears after I’d told her a woman had been killed in the library, but after she’d recovered, I called the city police and they sent up the nice Officer Joel Stowkowski. He looked around, took notes, snapped photos, checked doors and windows, and offered a lot of sympathy, but he hadn’t been able to promise much in the way of retribution for anyone who had the temerity to damage books in a library, even if they weren’t technically library books.
It was all kinds of rotten, and I was glad to head home to the marina that evening and curl up with Eddie and a book. But that night the wind came up, slapping waves against the houseboat and rocking me into dreams that featured earthquakes and landslides. Then, as the dark edged into a gray, dreary, windswept morning, the heavens opened up and the rain came down.
Eddie and I sat at the dining table, me on the bench, Eddie on the back of the bench looking out at the wet world.
“It’s a bookmobile day,” I reminded him. “What do you think?”
There was no response from my feline friend.
“You don’t have to go, you know,” I said. “People will understand.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Once, last winter, Eddie hadn’t been feeling well and I’d left him at the boardinghouse instead of dragging him out into the cold. I’d had to explain his bookmobile absence, and he’d received more Get Well cards than I’d received Christmas cards. Not that it was a contest, but still.
Eddie jumped onto the table and started to stick his head into my cereal bowl.
“Hey!” I pulled what was left of my breakfast away from him. “What do you think you’re doing? This is mine. Yours is on the floor. You know, in the cat-food bowl? And get off the table. You don’t belong up there.”
He gave me a look, then started a slow ooze onto the floor.
“Faster,” I said, giving his hind legs a slight shove.
“Mrr!” he said just before he landed.
“Yeah, well, back at you.”
When I didn’t hear anything else, I turned and saw that he was sitting on top of his cat carrier. “Ready to go?” I asked.
Cat fashion, he managed to rearrange his feet without moving, staring at me the whole time.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Mrr!”
I laughed out loud. I was almost sorry I’d had Eddie fixed, because if I’d been able to find a girl cat who could tolerate him, their kittens would have been something extraordinary.
“Then again,” I told him a few minutes later, as I fastened my car’s passenger’s-side seat belt around the cat carrier, “having an entire litter of you might be too much. Yes, I know that none of your offspring could possibly be an improvement on your own unique species, but just imagine four or five or six little Eddies, all trying to talk to me at the same time.”
Months ago, I’d decided that Eddie had to be one of a kind and named him Felis eddicus. Very like the more common Felis domesticus, but not quite.
“What kind of cat would be your mate of choice?” I asked. “Tortoiseshell? Another tabby? A Siamese? How about a Scottish fold? They’re way cute.”
“Mrr.”
“Okay, no Scottish folds.” I glanced over. My cat was flopped on his back, wedging himself into a corner of the carrier, waving his legs in the air. “Though a better question might be, what self-respecting lady cat would have anything to do with you?”
“Mrr!”
“Yeah, whatever.” Grinning, I squinted through the rain. “You’re out of practice, pal. As I recall, the last time you talked to a female feline, there was a lot of fur flying and you weren’t the clear victor.” Last winter, my aunt Frances’s new love interest, Otto, had brought over his adorable little gray cat, hoping the two would become friends, but all had not gone well.
I flicked on the turn signal and made a right into the library’s back parking lot, which was the only place Stephen had allowed me to site a garage for the bookmobile. It was a very small garage, not much bigger than the bookmobile itself. This made hefting books back and forth to the library more than a small chore, but at the time I’d accepted his conditions willingly, because it was either accept or not have a bookmobile at all.
“If that estate ever gets settled,” I told Eddie, “what do you think the chances are that I’ll get to use some of that money for a real garage?”
“Mrr.”
“You think so?” Because he’d sounded optimistic. “That would be wonderful. And maybe the new Stephen will let me . . .” I trailed off. Holly and Josh and Donna and Kelsey and everyone else on the staff were still after me to turn in my application. “I could be the new Stephen. What do you think of that?”