And my neighbor was not helping.
“Well,” Chris said, drawling out the word, “you got a good point there. I could narrow it down a little, make it easier for her to figure out.”
This could go on all morning. I stood and summoned my Librarian Voice. “Tell me,” I ordered.
Chris straightened imperceptibly. “Early this morning,” he said. “There was a fire in Petoskey. At their library. I heard the janitor was in the hospital—breathed in too much smoke, you know?—and he probably won’t make it. There was a bunch of damage . . . hey, Min, what’re you doing?”
Paying no attention to Chris, I unceremoniously dumped Eddie inside the houseboat and grabbed my backpack. When I came outside three seconds later, Chris was still talking.
“Hey, my pal Ed was liking it out here in the sun,” he said, sounding aggrieved. “What’s the matter with leaving him out here longer? Hey, where you going?”
But I was down the dock and gone.
Chapter 12
Detective Inwood stared at me over the top of a coffee mug. He blew off the steam, sending it my way, and lifted the mug toward his mouth. I looked away, hoping somehow that if I didn’t look, I wouldn’t be able to hear the slurping noises as clearly as I had a moment before, but, once again, the technique was a complete failure.
The detective’s swallowing sounds filled the small room. I sat as patiently as I could. After all, it was a Saturday morning, and I’d expected to tell my concerns to the on-duty deputy up front. Once I’d started talking, however, he’d called the detective, and here we were, back in the interview room. Ash was off this weekend, helping his mom with some outside chores, and I hadn’t wanted to bother him.
“My apologies, Ms. Hamilton,” the detective said, setting the mug onto the table. “My daughter and our new grandchild are staying with us for a few nights while her husband is out of town on business. It’s wreaking havoc on my sleep patterns. What do you have for me this morning? More mayhem, with dire complications for the future?”
He quirked up a smile. “And please tell me your cat isn’t involved this time. The sheriff’s been talking about getting an office cat ever since that night she spent with your Eddie.”
That had been months ago. If Sheriff Richardson was serious about an office cat, I was sure she would have brought one in by now, but I put on a thoughtful expression. “I know of a litter of kittens that’s almost old enough to go out on their own. I’ll have to remember to tell the sheriff.”
Inwood gave me a pained look, and I almost laughed out loud.
“What I wanted to tell you,” I said, “doesn’t have anything to do with cats.” My imagination almost saw Eddie picking up his head at the flagrant heresy and sending me a loud “Mrr!” but I plowed ahead.
“You’ve heard what happened at the Petoskey library?” I asked.
The detective frowned. “I have not.” I started to tell him what little I knew, but he put up his hand to stop my flow of words, pulled his cell phone from his inside suit pocket, and pushed some buttons. “Morning, Scott,” he said. “What’s with your library?”
As he listened to Scott, whoever he was, Inwood’s gaze came my way but focused on something behind my head. The wall, maybe, or—I mentally summoned a map of the area—maybe he was seeing far past me, all the way to the library in Petoskey. It was a fairly new building, and I ached for the library director and staff and the hundreds of people who used it regularly. A fire had to be about the worst thing that could happen to a library. Even if the books hadn’t actually burned, there’d be smoke damage or water damage from the sprinklers or firefighters.
I cringed to think of what it would take to bring a library back from a large fire, and started thinking about what we could do to help. First, I’d find out what books they needed most; maybe we had extras, or could at least lend them some of ours. Then, if they needed hands to help clean, I’d make phone calls to the libraries all over northern lower Michigan. For something like this, people would turn out to help in a heartbeat. Then, if they needed—
“The fire,” Detective Inwood said, putting his phone away, “was limited to a meeting room. An exterior window to the room was broken, and an incendiary device of some sort was thrown inside. The smoke detectors went off at two a.m., and a night custodian entered the room. He used a nearby extinguisher to put out the fire, but inhaled enough smoke that he was taken to the hospital by ambulance. He was treated and released.”
Inwood picked up his coffee mug. “The meeting room suffered damage to the furniture, walls, carpet, and ceiling, but there was no damage to any other portion of the building. Or its contents.”
I slid forward on my chair. While I was beyond pleased that the library was essentially fine, that wasn’t why I was here. “It was a diversion,” I said. “Someone who didn’t want to be seen needed uninterrupted time to look at their books.”
The detective’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t reply until after he’d upended the mug and drank down the last of its contents. “How so?” he asked.
So I told him. I told him about the kindness of a long-ago DeKeyser to an artist wanting to paint flowers. I told him how the artist had sent a copy of the completed book to the DeKeysers. I told him where Cade had seen the book. And, finally, I told him the current value of Chastain’s Wildflowers.
Then I sat back and waited.
Which wasn’t much of a wait, because he immediately said, “The X-Acto knife. That’s why it was in the library. Wildflowers may be worth a lot of money intact, but if you cut it apart and sell it page by page, you probably wouldn’t have to prove your ownership, and it’s possible you’d end up with a lot more money.”
I nodded.
“But why would anyone go to the trouble of doing that?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t she or the killer simply steal the book?”
I’d thought about that. “They probably assumed the security at the library is a lot tighter than it really is. Most downstate libraries have a chip embedded in the book that sounds an alarm if it’s not deactivated at checkout. And she probably figured we have security cameras that get reviewed for theft. Seeing someone walk out with a book in the middle of the night would be a huge red flag. Just seeing someone walking?” I shrugged. “If the cameras existed and we noticed it, we’d probably wonder, but if there wasn’t anything missing, I doubt we’d do anything.”
“Well.” Inwood started to lift his mug, realized it was empty, and stood. “Now, that’s worth brewing a new pot of coffee for.”
He smiled at me, but I couldn’t manage to return it.
Because I couldn’t stop thinking that, somewhere out there, a killer was on the loose. And if he’d killed once in search of this book, would he hesitate to kill again?
* * *
Ten minutes later, my knees were underneath the large dining table at my aunt’s boardinghouse, and I was enjoying the ebb and flow of conversation while eating a breakfast frittata made by the cooking team of Liz and Morris. I’d deciphered enough healthy ingredients in the dish—asparagus, tomato, and broccoli—to count it as my recommended daily allowance of vegetables. Plus, there were fresh strawberries and cubes of melon that looked good enough to be served in Kristen’s restaurant. Breakfast didn’t get much more nutritious, and I felt virtuous about my adultlike meal.
On a Saturday morning like this, the talk inevitably centered around what everyone was going to do with such outstanding weather. The forecast was for sun, light winds, and a high of seventy-seven degrees, a Chamber of Commerce kind of day.