My hand, which had been on the man’s wrist, came away slightly red and wet. Blood. What on . . . ?
I swallowed. The blood had come from a small hole in his shirt, right where his heart was. A small, bullet-sized hole. My gaze went from the wound upward to his face. Which was looking familiar, even in the slackness of death, even in this strange place.
Recognition clicked and on its heels came an instinctive reaction that, later, I would never be able to explain. But I’d had to try, couldn’t not try.
“Stan! Can you hear me? I’m calling 911 right now.” I reached into my pocket for my phone. The instant I heard the dial tone, I pushed the three numbers. “The EMT guys will be here before you know it. They’ll take care of you, okay?”
I pushed the SEND button hard and leapt up to straddle Stan Larabee’s midsection. My CPR class hadn’t been that long ago. I could bring him back. I could. I had to.
“Nine-one-one,” the dispatcher said. “What is your emergency?”
Chapter 4
An infinitely long time later, Eddie and I were sitting in the bookmobile driver’s seat, waiting for a deputy from the county sheriff’s office to give us the okay to go home. Though my tears had dried up half an hour ago, sniffles remained.
“I couldn’t save him, Eddie. I tried and tried but nothing I did mattered.” I hugged Eddie tight and he didn’t make even a squeak of protest. “I did everything they told me to in that class, but it wasn’t enough.” Sniff.
The EMT crew had arrived seventeen minutes after I made the 911 call. Amazing, really, considering the distances in this part of the county, but it hadn’t been soon enough to bring Stan Larabee back.
“He’s gone, Eddie, he’s really gone.” Sniff. “It seems so wrong. He was so full of life. There were so many things he wanted to do.” During the planning phase of the bookmobile purchase, Stan and I had met on an almost daily basis. I’d learned enough about him to know that he deeply regretted some of the things he’d done while a wheeling and dealing real estate developer. I also knew that he’d divested himself of his third wife a decade earlier, had never had any children, and was working almost as hard at giving away his money as he had at making it.
“But no handouts,” he’d told me. “I’m attaching strings to the checks I write. And no money for poor planning. If you can’t use the money you have in a sensible way, why should I give, or even loan, you some of mine?”
Eddie bumped my chin with the top of his head.
Absently, I started petting him. “I don’t even know who to call. I mean, sure, the police will notify the next of kin, but I feel that I should say something to one of his relatives.” As far as I knew, though, there wasn’t anyone. He lived alone in a great big house on a great big hill that had been designed to take advantage of the views of both Lake Michigan and Janay Lake.
A big fat raindrop splattered on the bookmobile’s wide windshield. Then another, and another. The blue skies that had accompanied us through the morning and halfway through the afternoon were gone. A thick layer of low clouds, heavy with rain, had moved across the sun and now the bookmobile was getting its first shower.
“Hope it doesn’t shrink,” I murmured.
Eddie settled back down into my lap and turned on his purr.
“You’re not so bad for an Eddie.” I laid my hand on his back. His body heat seeped into my skin, warming me in more ways than one.
It had been my Florida-based brother who had made me aware of Stan’s existence. Matt, a Disney Imagineer, had run into “this older guy who said he’d just built a place in Chilson. He was down here to tidy up some business, sounded like. Anyway, I told him my sister was a librarian up there and he said for you to give him a call.”
I’d demurred, but Matt had pressed me with all the pressure a big brother can bear. “Do it, Min. This guy is a big deal down here.”
So I’d called. Stan invited me to lunch at the local diner and before we’d finished our burgers, it was clear that we were going to be friends. Despite the disparity in our ages, backgrounds, and life experiences, there was an instant rapport between us that defied all understanding.
But the more I’d gotten to know Stan, the more I didn’t understand the difference between the man I knew and the Stan Larabee that everyone else seemed to have encountered. The comments I heard ranged from “He should have stayed in Florida” to “Stan Larabee never lifted a finger to help anyone in his whole life” to “Larabee wouldn’t part with a dime unless he was guaranteed a quarter back.”
Yet he’d written a check to the Chilson District Library with so many zeros I wasn’t sure how he got them all to fit on the line.
“Here you are, Minnie,” he’d said, ripping it out of his checkbook. “The only way this county is going to get a bookmobile is if someone pays for the whole dang thing. Give that shortsighted library board this check and my compliments.”
I’d thanked him profusely and said something about the discrepancy in how I saw him and how the rest of Chilson saw him. He’d roared out a laugh that somehow held an edge of black. “You’re not from a small town, are you? Stay here long enough and you’ll see.”
“See what?” I’d asked.
“That you can’t live long enough to outlive a reputation.”
Soon afterward, I’d stopped by to see my best friend, Kristen, owner and operator of the Three Seasons restaurant, and begun to see what he’d meant. Kristen had been horrified when I’d told her I’d gone to Stan and asked for money.
“You did what?” She’d looked down at me, every inch of her five-foot-eleven self vibrating with disapproval. “Stan Larabee doesn’t hand out money. Everybody knows that.”
“Everybody is wrong.” I handed her the copy I’d made of the check.
Kristen pushed at a wisp of her blond hair that had escaped its tight ponytail and read the numbers out loud. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” Her voice squeaked. “Are you serious?”
“As your double chocolate cheesecake.” I’d plucked the paper out of her hands. The way her mouth was staying open made me anxious about drool. I planned to frame the copy and hang it in my bedroom so I could see it first thing when I woke up in the morning and last thing before I went to sleep at night. A raised spot from Kristen-drool would ruin the effect completely.
She squinted as I tucked the copy away in a folder. “Did it cash?”
“Of course it cashed. Do you think Stan Larabee would write a bad check?”
“I’d believe anything about that man,” she said darkly.
“Oh, pooh. I bet most of those stories are rumors made up at the bar at closing time. He was perfectly nice to me.”
Kristen gave me one of those you’ve-only-lived-here-three-years looks, but said, “Maybe. I’ve never talked to him more than a couple of times, myself.”
“Well, there you go. Makes you wonder what people say about you, doesn’t it?” Grinning, I’d waved and toddled home, elation filling me so full I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d started floating. I’d bearded the lion in his den. Not only had I survived to tell the tale, but I’d been rewarded beyond anything I’d expected.
“Mrr.”
Eddie brought me back from my year-old memory by bumping me on the chin. I’d stopped petting him. “Sorry about that.” I scratched the top of his head and the purr machine restarted. Outside, the high hills, now half-hidden by the driving rain, looked cold and empty and lonely. Tears threatened again and I bent down to put my face against Eddie’s fur.
“Miss?”
I shrieked, Eddie yowled. I shrieked again as Eddie’s claws sank into my thighs. He yowled again as I scrambled to my feet. He detached his claws from my skin and launched himself across the console, onto the passenger seat, and into the back corner of his cupboard.