I studied the unit for a moment. “I think we need to detach the shelves first,” I said. I took a look at the underside of one of the long barn-board planks and then opened the toolbox to find the right screwdriver.
Maggie had the neatest toolbox I’d ever seen. Everything was organized by size and function and there wasn’t a speck of dirt or rust on anything. She picked up the cordless drill that had been lying on the bottom shelf of the unit. “Do you want this?” she asked.
“No, the screwdriver is fine,” I said. I knelt down and started on the lowest shelf while Maggie, who was taller, used the drill to work over my head.
“Do Marcus and Hope have any suspects?” she asked. She smelled like lavender oil.
“Not exactly,” I said. I was twisted so my head and one shoulder were under the shelf and my voice was muffled.
“So what do they have, exactly?”
I gave the screwdriver one more twist and the screw in the back corner of the shelf came loose. I pulled my head out from under the length of barn board and sat back on my heels. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Devin Rossi?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Is that who they think took the Weston drawing and killed Margo Walsh?”
“It’s what Gavin thinks,” I said.
Maggie frowned. “He could be right.”
I looked up at her. “Seriously?”
She adjusted the drill bit, tightening the chuck. “You could say she ‘works on commission.’ She never hits the big galleries or museums. And I heard she used to be a gymnast, so getting in through the roof would be something she could do.” She turned the drill over in her hands. “But no one’s ever been hurt as far as I know. In fact Devin Rossi has a bit of a Robin Hood reputation.”
“I think Robin Hood’s thing was take from the rich, give to the poor. Not take from the rich, give to the rich.”
She smiled. “Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy.”
I pushed my hair back off my face and leaned under the shelf again. “What you’re saying is she has her fans.”
“In the art world, to some people, she’s kind of a folk hero, yes,” Maggie said. “Not everyone is a fan of big museums and galleries.”
I twisted onto my left shoulder so I could reach the screw in the other back corner of the shelf. “That doesn’t mean it’s okay to take things that don’t belong to you.”
“I know,” Maggie agreed. “Some people just seem to lose sight of that. Robin Hood was probably nothing like Sean Connery or Kevin Costner in tights.”
I grunted as I tried to get some torque on the screw. “No, he wasn’t. Some historians think Robin Hood was a real person. Others think he was a character based on the exploits of people like William Wallace. Still others say he’s totally a creation of folklore—the outlaw hero of ballads.”
Maggie laughed. “How did I know you’d know that?”
I slid my head out from under the shelf. “Was I being obnoxious?” I asked.
She nudged me with her foot. “No,” she said. “It just fascinates me how you know so many things.”
“I spent a lot of time in the library when I was a kid,” I said, just a little self-consciously.
“And I spent a lot of time taking pictures with my mother’s Polaroid instant camera and then coloring in the image with magic markers,” she said. She looked over at Ruby. “Hey, Ruby, what did you like to do for fun when you were about ten or twelve years old?”
“Shoplift Kool-Aid and use it to dye my hair,” she said immediately. Ruby had been on the road to being a juvenile delinquent as a kid before her school principal, Agatha Shepherd, had taken an interest in Ruby’s flair for art. When Agatha died, Ruby had used the money the older woman had left her to fund an art program for children as well as an art school scholarship.
I looked up at Maggie and smiled. “It seems our destinies were set before we even hit puberty.”
She smiled back at me. “No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”
I spent about an hour and a half helping Maggie; then I walked up to Henderson Holdings to see Lita. I called Marcus before I left. “Any chance I could stop by the library and get some files from my office now?” I asked.
“You can,” he said, “but I’ll have to take a look at whatever you take out. Will that be a problem?”
Even though I knew it was impossible, it seemed as though I could feel the warmth of his voice against my ear. “It’s just some files on books I want to buy and a draft report on the library’s new damage-control strategy. You’re welcome to look at all of it.”
“I’d rather look at you,” he said.
I felt my cheeks flood with color. Marcus wasn’t a wildly romantic hearts-and-flowers kind of man, but every once in a while he’d say something that would make me either blush or forget how to breathe.
“I’ll be there in about . . .” I glanced down at my watch. How long did it take to walk over to the library? Why couldn’t I remember that? “A few minutes . . . I mean ten minutes,” I said, stumbling over my words.
“I’ll see you soon, then,” Marcus said, and I could picture the smile I knew was on his face.
I ended the call and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly.
I liked to think of myself as being pretty unflappable, growing up with my eccentric actor parents and a younger brother and sister who could both be pretty out there sometimes. Someone had had to be the sensible, practical person who remembered to buy milk and carry the health insurance cards. Marcus had the ability to turn me into a blushing, giggly teenager. I’d never really been that and, truth be told, I liked it.
Lita was watching me, a knowing smile on her face. “You two are so adorable,” she said.
“And you and Burtis are?” I teased.
“A mature love ripened by time,” she countered. “Like a bottle of fine wine or an aged wheel of Brie.”
It sounded like an answer she’d given before. I laughed as I picked up my bag. “I’m sure Burtis would like the comparison to a wheel of stinky cheese,” I said.
Lita threw back her head and laughed. “He certainly eats enough of it for it to be an apt comparison.”
I thanked her for her help and headed out. I couldn’t get the image of barrel-chested Burtis, whose hands were big enough that one of them would cover my head, holding a tiny water cracker with a smear of soft cheese, his pinkie raised in the air. The image made me smile all the way to library.
Marcus was waiting for me on the steps to the building. He smiled when he caught sight of me.
“Hi,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm.
“What were you thinking about?” he asked. “You were smiling all the way up the sidewalk.” He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the doors.
I told him what Lita had said about Burtis’s love of old cheese. “I just always thought of Burtis as a beer-and-brats kind of guy,” I said.
Marcus punched in the codes for both security systems and we stepped into the library proper. “Burtis is a complex man,” he said. “There’s a lot more to him than just what you see on the surface.”
Marcus was very much a law-and-order, the-rules-apply-to-everyone kind of person, while some—or maybe all, for all I knew—of Burtis Chapman’s business enterprises danced on the edge of illegality and sometimes fell in. But Burtis was intensely loyal to the town and to people he called his friends. I was lucky to be one of them. And Marcus was the same way, so the two of them had always had a grudging respect for each other. But last winter Owen and I had been trapped in a burning building and Burtis and Marcus had worked together to get me out. It had changed the relationship between the two men in ways I couldn’t exactly figure out.
Curtis Holt was in his chair next to the Plexiglas half wall that still separated the exhibit area from the rest of the library.
“Good morning, Curtis,” Marcus called.