Barb coughed into her fist, but it was a multisyllabic cough that sounded a lot like the word “Plagiarism.”
Once again, her loving husband ignored her. “So, of course I looked at the books. And there, at the bottom of that small stack, underneath the mass-produced copies of children’s books that are in half the houses in the country, was a first edition of . . .”
He stopped for a moment, shook his head, then said, “Right there on the sideboard, well within the reach of grubby-fingered five-year-olds, was a first-edition copy of Chastain’s Native Wildflowers of North America.”
* * *
Eddie, who was doing his best to sprawl across the full length of the dining booth’s seat back, and doing a very good job, didn’t look impressed at my story.
Clearly, he hadn’t been listening.
“You must not have been listening,” I said. “Chastain’s Wildflowers is, well, it doesn’t have anything close to the value of Audubon’s book, but a complete copy in good condition is worth upward of half a million dollars.” And possibly much more. Cade, a fan of Chastain’s work, had said no first-edition copy had gone up for public auction in years.
That night at the DeKeyser’s, Cade had told Deke about the worth of the book that was casually lying underneath a copy of the Cat in the Hat. Cade had also advised Talia and Deke to move the book to a climate-controlled environment, but, he’d told me wryly, “It’s hard to communicate the value of a book that’s been sitting on the same piece of furniture for close to a hundred years.”
Over dinner, Deke had told the McCades that the book had been given by Robert Chastain himself to the then-matriarch of the family for her kindness in showing him a variety of wildflower he’d never seen. The family story was that Robert Chastain had been a nice gentleman who was a little nuts about flowers. The DeKeysers smiled at Cade’s story of the book’s value, and Cade had said it was obvious they didn’t believe him.
“Thus, the sideboard,” I said.
Eddie, unblinking, looked at me and flicked the tip of his tail up and down, up and down.
“Cade,” I told my uncaring cat, “had even confessed that he was a hugely successful artist himself, and that he knew what he was talking about when it came to a first edition of Chastain’s, but Deke and Talia just smiled and said they were fine with things the way they were.”
And, I realized, maybe they were right. What did a happy elderly couple need with the headache of a valuable volume like Wildflowers? Let the next generation worry about it.
Which was exactly what was happening.
I’d driven home from Petoskey, thinking about it, and to me there was no doubt that Chastain’s Wildflowers was why the book-sale room, the bookmobile, and Pam’s store had all been broken into and tossed around into a huge mess. Someone out there knew about Wildflowers and was looking for it in all the places that Talia might have been expected to gift a book.
That someone had also killed Andrea.
“You know what else?” I asked the question of Eddie, but I was looking at the last two flowers from Ash’s bouquet that hadn’t dropped all their petals or been turned into cat toys. “I bet I know why that X-Acto knife was at the murder scene.”
Either Andrea or her killer had expected to find the book in the library, and one of them had planned to slice out individual pages of the stunningly gorgeous flower paintings and sell them one by one.
The thought of that beautiful book being ripped into bits stirred up outrage in every cell of my librarian’s body. “No,” I said out loud. “I won’t let that happen.”
Of course, I had no idea how to stop it from happening, but there had to be a way.
And if there wasn’t, I’d make one.
* * *
The next morning, I woke up late. Eddie did, too, but, then, he almost always did.
“You know,” I told him as I stood, yawning, “if you didn’t try to turn my head into your pillow, I’d sleep a lot better.”
He opened one eye a fraction of an inch, then closed it again.
I tried again. “Experts recommend that you don’t allow pets into your bedroom at all. They say pets on your bed disrupt sleep patterns and bring dust and hair and dander and who knows what into a space where you don’t want any of that stuff.”
Eddie wriggled himself deeper into the bedcovers. Half a second later, I heard the dulcet tones of his snores. Smiling, I patted him on the head and headed to the shower. What did experts know, anyway?
Fifteen minutes later, I was clean and dressed, and we were both on the boat’s front deck, me with a fortifying mug of coffee.
“It’s Saturday,” I said to Eddie. “And I’m not working at all today.” For the summer, I’d scheduled the bookmobile three Saturdays a month, and this was the off day.
Though I was tempted to go to the library and get some work done, Holly and Donna and Kelsey had all vowed to make my life miserable if I didn’t get some fun into me. When I’d protested, saying that working at the library was fun, they’d said that alone was proof that I needed to get out more. Since it was possible they were the teensiest bit right, I’d agreed to stay away for an entire day and a half.
“Only what should I do with myself?” I scooped out the last bit of cereal, swallowed, and put the bowl onto the deck. Eddie slid off his chair and trotted over to get the last drops of milk out from the bottom of the bowl.
I listened, shaking my head at the lap-lap-lap. You’d think a creature as graceful as a cat would drink more quietly.
“Hey, Minster. Did you hear?”
I turned. Standing on the dock that ran between my boat and Eric’s was Chris Ballou, the marina’s manager. If I’d been forced to guess his age, I’d have said Chris was in his early forties, but he had a whippet-thin body that could be making him look fortyish even if he were pushing sixty. Then again, his speech patterns were those of a twenty-year-old. Since I hadn’t taken enough advanced math to figure out how all that might shake out, I’d long ago decided not to think about it.
What I did need to think about was how to make a new deal on keeping my boat slip’s reduced rental rate. Up until now, I’d been given a cut rate because no one else would take the slip next to the cranky guy who used to rent Eric’s slip. Now that Eric was here, however, Chris should have upped my rate to normal. He kept dodging the issue, saying that what his uncle Chip didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, but I knew that was wrong, and one of these days I’d get Chris to be serious about the situation.
“Hear about what?” I asked.
“Huh,” he said. “Looks like I get to break the news.”
My skin tightened. A hundred possibilities occurred to me. Something had happened to my parents. To my brother. My brother’s family. To my aunt Frances. To Ash. To Rafe or Kristen, or Holly or Josh or any of the library staff. Then, when I ran out of people, I wondered if something had happened to the bookmobile. Or the library. Or downtown. Or my hometown of Dearborn. Then I started wondering if something had happened to something bigger, like the Mackinac Bridge or the state capitol or the US Capitol or—
Eric’s head popped out of the entry to his boat’s lower regions. “What news?” he asked.
“Hey,” Chris said, nodding a good morning to Dr. Apney. “I just wondered if Min-Bin here knew what happened.”
Chris was a great mechanic, a solid marina manager, and a decent enough guy, but he had two bad habits. One, he enjoyed making new nicknames for me a little too much. Two, he couldn’t relate simple facts without turning them into a long-winded story.
Eric squinted into the morning sunshine. “That’s an extremely open question. I mean, it’s a guarantee that lots of things have happened, after all. Tightening the time frame would be helpful.”