Stephen took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I need you to put together a staff meeting for this morning. Ten o’clock in the conference room. I want everyone there.” He replaced his glasses. “Everyone. Call them all in.”
A comprehensive staff meeting two hours from now? It couldn’t be done. He knew that. He had to know that.
“Everyone,” he repeated, and this time the command was delivered with steel.
I watched him go. What being assistant director meant, at least in this library, was that I did whatever the director wanted me to do. I went straight to my office, riffled through my desk drawers for a staff directory, and picked up the phone.
It took a fair amount of cajoling and some outright bribery to get everyone to come in. Most of our staff was part-time, and many had young children who needed watching, or a second job, or both. I promised doughnuts, tracked down a high school kid to babysit in the children’s section, and swore that the meeting wouldn’t take longer than an hour.
At ten o’clock I taped signs to the exterior doors that the library would be open by eleven and shooed everyone upstairs.
Stephen had seated himself at the head of the long conference room table. He was in a pensive pose, elbows on the polished wood, fingers interlaced, brow furrowed. The chatter and laughter that had accompanied us on the climb up the stairs fell away as we entered the high-ceilinged room. The signs of pending doom were all too easy to recognize.
I came in last, closing the door behind me.
Stephen glanced around. “Is this everyone?” At my nod, he positioned his glasses on the table and rubbed at his face. Which, I noted with something akin to shock, was stubbly. Stephen was always dressed impeccably. Shoes shined, pants ironed to a crease, button-down collars buttoned firmly. I felt a twinge of misgiving.
“I’ve called you together this morning,” he said, “because I have news that could drastically change the Chilson District Library.”
The twinge became a tremor. I clasped my hands together and leaned against the wall. A chair would have been better, but the only empty one was next to Stephen, so I decided the wall was perfectly comfortable.
Stephen cleared his throat. “I assume everyone has heard the news that Stan Larabee is dead.”
Heads nodded.
“In the last two years, I’ve had many discussions with Mr. Larabee. Matter of fact, I had the privilege of getting to know him quite well.” Stephen fingered his glasses. “In his youth, Mr. Larabee was mentored by a Chilson librarian. He always felt the books he’d been encouraged to read had much to do with his financial success.”
If Stephen had called this meeting to tell us how libraries and librarians could be a power for good, I was going to—
“Which is why Mr. Larabee left a generous portion of his large fortune to our library.”
There was a short, stunned silence, which quickly erupted into a conversational babble that filled the room.
“Sweet! Can we get new computers?”
“But I thought his family would get all the money.”
“Someone told me he was going to set up a foundation, you know, one of those places that gives away a little money to lots of people.”
“I heard he was leaving everything to some university.”
Stephen thumped the table. When everyone quieted, he said, “I have no idea of the size of Mr. Larabee’s estate, or who the other beneficiaries might be. Frankly, it’s none of our business. But there is the serious matter of Mr. Larabee’s murder. Before anything else, the killer must be found. I expect the police will be questioning each of you. I also expect each of you to cooperate fully.”
And with that, he left.
The buzzing started before he’d even closed the door.
“Generous? What does that mean?”
“Did you see Stephen’s eyes? Bloodshot red, all through. Man, I’ve never seen him look like that.”
“The police? But we didn’t do anything. Why do they want to talk to us?”
“But I heard they already found Larabee’s killer. One of the EMTs knew sign language, and Larabee spelled out the name of his killer right before . . . you know.”
“No, Minnie found him, right before he died.”
“Minnie found Stan Larabee?”
“Yeah, when she was out in the bookmobile.”
One by one, all the employees turned to look at me. But since that happened on a regular basis, I’d been expecting it. It had turned out that another part of my job was asking Stephen the questions the rest of the staff was too afraid to ask. Our employees ranged in age from fresh out of high school to pie-baking grandmothers, with a hefty core in the twentysomething to fortysomething range, and every single one of them came to me if they needed to ask the library director a question.
Time and time again, I told them to ask him themselves, that he wasn’t so bad, not really. Time and time again, I was moved to pity by the looks of abject fear. “You do it, Minnie. You know how to get around him.”
What I knew was that by aiding and abetting I was making a bad situation worse. I was being an enabler. And one of these days I’d figure out a solution.
“Don’t ask me,” I said to the questioning eyes. “Whatever you want to know, I don’t have the answer.”
Josh, our IT guy, said, “You got to know something.”
“I do,” I said. Everybody leaned forward. “I know that it’s time to open the library.”
“Aw, Minnie . . .”
“Doughnuts are downstairs in the break room. Thanks for playing and better luck next time.”
That got me a few laughs. I hurried out of the room and down the stairs to unlock the doors. Not even half past ten. It wasn’t uncommon for summer mornings to be slow. Maybe we hadn’t turned anyone away, maybe—
I spotted a shape at the tall window next to the front door. A large human shape, with hands cupped around its face, peering into the library with its forehead against the glass. Which would leave a mark high enough that I’d have to stand on my tiptoes to clean it off.
The dead bolt made a snick noise as I turned it. I opened the door and put my head out. “Mitchell, what are you doing?”
“Huh?”
Mitchell Koyne was about my age and I had no idea how he made a living, because he spent more time hanging out at the library than he did working at his various seasonal jobs. From our conversations, I knew he’d worked on his share of construction crews, that he did snowplowing and was a ski lift operator, but what he did to fill the gaps between seasonal jobs was another of life’s little question marks.
My friend Holly, one of the clerks, insisted that he smuggled drugs from Canada. When I’d pointed out that he didn’t have a boat, she said, “Not that we know of.” But I couldn’t see it. Mitchell was many things, but a good liar was not one of them, and it takes lies to be a criminal.
Now Mitchell unstuck his forehead from the window, turned his baseball cap around, and grinned at me. “Waiting for you guys to open. What’s the deal?”
I looked up, way up. Mitchell was one of the tallest men I’d ever met. I much preferred to talk to him when he was seated. “Staff meeting.” I untaped my note. “What brings you here so early?”
“Would you believe I’ve turned over a new leaf?”
I headed back inside and he kept step with me. Sort of. “Does this new leaf include paying your overdue fines?”
“Funny, Min. You’re really funny today.”
“I thought I was funny every day.”
“Every other, maybe.”
We walked a few steps; then Mitchell blurted out, “What did you do this weekend?”
That was when I knew it wasn’t the pursuit of abstract knowledge that had Mitchell here before the crack of noon. He was intelligent, computer savvy, and read a wide range of books and magazines (heavy on the science fiction), but the only other time we’d seen him in the morning was the Monday after the time change. He’d forgotten to move his clocks back and come in at a quarter to noon.