When I’d said no, there wouldn’t be enough room in my small car for books and cat, I’d gotten a universal response. “Thanks for the offer, but we’ll make do until you come around next time.”
So instead of driving around southwestern Tonedagana County, I headed to the library itself to cover for a part-time clerk who was in the Upper Peninsula attending a family funeral.
“You believed that story?” Josh laughed. He was in the break room, up to his elbows in printer parts. Why he hadn’t taken it to his office I didn’t know, but some questions were best left unasked, since if you asked, you ran the risk of getting an answer that included things you didn’t want to know.
“Yes, I believed her,” I said, “and so would you if you’d seen how upset she looked.”
He snorted. “What I see is the U.P.’s weather forecast of eighty degrees and sunny all weekend when it’s supposed to be maybe seventy and rainy down here. They’re saying really heavy rain, too.”
“So young, yet so cynical.” I mock-sighed heavily and left him to his tinkering.
I was deep into the task of processing the Friday night returns when Stephen strolled past. “Good morning, Minerva,” he said. “How are you this fine day?”
“Uh . . .” I stared at the apparition. Though the presence in front of me resembled my boss, it couldn’t be him. Stephen had made it a Thing that he was never at the library on a Saturday. He’d said repeatedly that if he was doing his job properly, overtime hours weren’t necessary. Plus as far as I knew, Stephen had never once wasted time on the casual conversational exchanges made by everyone else in the universe. “Uh, hi. You seem . . . chipper this morning.”
“Why, yes. Yes, I am.” He smiled broadly. “Last night we got the news that my sister and the new baby are going to be fine. Out of the woods and out of the ICU today.”
I blinked. Stephen had a sister? “That’s great. Your family must be thrilled.”
“Thrilled and relieved both.” He laughed, an unexpectedly rich sound.
“This is a younger sister?” I asked. “Have you been to see her?”
Up until that point, his face had been open and easily read. Now it closed down. “Younger,” he said shortly. “She and her husband live in Oregon.”
I grinned on the inside. Crankmeister that he was, it was good to have the old Stephen back. “Well, I’m glad she and the baby are okay. You must have been worried sick.”
“Concerned, yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t say worried.”
I watched him walk off and snorted quietly. Maybe he didn’t want to admit it to his assistant director, but whatever had been wrong with his sister and her baby, it had been so serious that he’d worried himself almost to the point of illness.
He headed out through the front door and I heard what might have been him singing, and words that might have been a chorus of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”
And my teeny tiny worry that Stephen might have been involved in Stan’s death, that he’d been a mess the last few weeks over guilt and fear of getting caught, puffed away into the air and disappeared forever.
The phone rang. “Good morning, Chilson District Library,” I said. “How may I—”
“Yo, Min,” Kristen said. “Got a question for you.”
It had been a while since Kristen had called with a job for her personal search engine. I pulled the computer keyboard toward me. “Ready and waiting, ma’am.”
“Kyle says Onaway potatoes are named for Onaway, Michigan, and I say they came from Maine. Who’s right?”
“Hang on.” In a few seconds I found the answer. “You both are. The first seedling came from Maine, but it was sent to Michigan for research and development and named the Onaway potato. Don’t ask me why it was sent here because I don’t know. And who’s Kyle?”
“What? He works here. You’ve met him a zillion times.”
I frowned. “There’s no Kyle at the Three Seasons.”
“Sure there is,” she said. “You know. Larry Sutton.”
Either Kristen was suffering from serious sleep deprivation or something very strange was going on. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I guess you wouldn’t know. Back in high school, Kyle played basketball and the story is, the coach kept calling him Larry because he looked like his uncle Larry, a guy the coach grew up with.” She paused. “He looks like a Larry, I guess, so the name stuck. But it’s just a nickname.”
She chattered on about the new potato dish she was making up, but I didn’t hear much of what she said. Any of it, really, because I was suddenly back on Audry’s front porch, drinking her lemonade, and hearing her say, “And one of them used names that started with K. Kevin, Kyle, Karla, and Kendra.”
• • •
Late in the morning, the sky clouded up. The rain held off, but started to spatter down as I locked the building at four o’clock. Josh had been right, or at least right about the weather. When I got home, I found Eddie sleeping in a new spot. The seat of the shower stall.
“Why?” I asked him. “You don’t look at all comfortable.”
He blinked at me and didn’t say anything.
“Okay, sure, I must not have latched the door all the way and this was a brand-new place for you, but still. It’s fiberglass. And it was probably wet.”
He stood, stretched, and jumped down. “Mrr,” he said, and stalked off.
“Yeah, well, don’t come crying to me if you wind up with a . . . with a stiff neck.” Did cats get stiff necks? I watched him trot down the steps to the bedroom. He didn’t look as if he had one, but if he did, how would I know?
I tossed together a fast dinner of grilled cheese and a broccoli/cauliflower mix steamed in the microwave. (“Of course I’m eating my vegetables, Mom.”) I ate sitting at the dining table with the company of Eddie and my laptop, which was displaying the local weather. More specifically, the radar.
“Lots of yellow coming across Lake Michigan,” I told Eddie. “Quite a bit of red, too. You know what that means.”
He sniffed at my sandwich.
I used my forearm to push him away. Like a boomerang, he came right back. “It means a lot of rain. Hard rain that could wash away any of those quad tracks out by the farmhouse.” There’d been rain since Stan’s death, but not the heavy, driving stuff that was coming. “I should get out there,” I murmured. “See if there are any tracks. I’m sure the detectives haven’t been out there.”
Eddie’s sniff stopped abruptly.
“Could have told you you wouldn’t like broccoli,” I said. “Cats don’t do vegetables. Your pointy teeth don’t chew them up right.”
When the kitchen was tidied, I dumped the contents of my backpack out on the bed and repacked with new items. “Flashlight, check. Bottle of water, check. Cell phone with charged-up battery, check. Map, pen, granola bar, all check. Am I forgetting anything?”
Eddie, who’d been supervising my efforts, said, “Mrr.”
“Right.” I snapped my fingers. “A book. Good idea.” I picked through my To Be Read stack and selected a Frost mystery by R. D. Wingfield. When I turned around, Eddie was slithering into the backpack.
“Hey!” I grasped him around the middle and pulled him out. “This isn’t a cat carrier. At least not today.”
“MMrrrrRR!”
I blinked. “That was quite a howl. Did I hurt you?” He squirmed out of my arms, thumped to the bed, and said, “MRR!”
The guilt that had been advancing retreated fast. “Well, sorry if I injured your feline dignity, but you can’t go with me. I’m going to be tromping around the woods and going up and down hills, and that’s just not your style.”
He hurled himself into the backpack.
I pulled him out.
He gave a little growl.
“Eddie!” I held him up and stared. “What’s gotten into you?”