“Secrets, Kathleen,” Travis said bitterly. “All these years later and the two of them are still keeping secrets.”
I noticed he was still referring to Dani in the present tense. Marcus had done that a few times as well.
“I know,” I said.
“You know?” He narrowed his eyes at me.
I let out a long slow breath. “I know there’s something they were keeping from everyone. I don’t know what it is.”
Travis’s mouth worked before he spoke. “You’re okay with that?”
I looked away for a minute and then met his gaze again. “Marcus told me it wasn’t his secret to tell. Which means he’s protecting Dani. I don’t expect you to ever be friends again with Marcus after what happened, but you know whatever else he is, he’s deeply loyal to the people he cares about. Whatever his reason is for keeping this secret, he thinks it’s important. I know he’d do the same thing for me if I needed it.”
He looked at me for what felt like a long time. Then he cleared his throat and inclined his head in the direction of the room behind him. “I have a coffeemaker. You want a cup?”
I nodded. “I’d like that.”
Travis and I sat at the small round table just inside his room. He told me more about Dani, his face lighting up as he related the story of how they met in high school when he skidded down an icy stretch of sidewalk outside the school and she caught him. As he had before, he talked about Dani in the present tense, as though she wasn’t gone.
Very quickly I realized I wasn’t going to learn anything from Travis that would tell me more about who Danielle McAllister had been as a person. His memories were colored by how he felt about her. There was nothing critical or negative in them and while I’d thought more than once since her death that I probably would have liked Dani if I’d had the chance to get to know her, I knew that no one was quite as perfect as Travis described. It struck me that he had been a little obsessed with her.
Still, it seemed to help him to talk. “If I hear anything about the investigation, I’ll let you know,” I said when I got up to leave.
“Thank you,” he said. It seemed like there was something else he wanted to say so I waited for a moment without speaking. Finally he spoke, looking past me as he did. “Tell, uh, tell Marcus that Dani’s family is having a service for her a week from Sunday. Maybe . . . maybe we could, uh, drive up together.”
I nodded. “I’ll tell him.”
Hercules was sitting on the driver’s side when I opened the truck door. He looked up expectantly at me. “Let me get in,” I said. He moved over about a foot. I took the little box of crackers out of my bag and shook three of them onto the seat.
“Ready?” I asked after he’d eaten them. He made a quick pass at his face with a paw then moved over a few inches and gazed out the windshield. He was ready.
I got home in lots of time to change for work, make a sandwich and start dinner in the slow cooker before I left for the library. It was a quiet morning and I was arranging a display of Halloween-themed books when Simon Janes walked into the building just before lunch. He nodded to Mary, who was at the desk proofreading the mock-up of the poster advertising Spookarama, and walked over to me.
“Good morning, Kathleen,” he said with a smile.
I smiled back at him. “Good morning.”
“Could we talk somewhere private?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. I led him over to one of our meeting rooms. Once I’d closed the door he handed me the brown envelope he was holding.
“What is it?’ I asked.
“Ernie Kingsley is a lousy businessman and a first-class ass, but he didn’t kill anyone.”
“How do you know?” I said, my heart sinking.
Simon indicated the envelope. “Look inside.”
I lifted the flap. The only thing inside was a photograph. Looking at it, I realized it was a screen capture from a security video. The black-and-white image was of Kingsley and a young woman who barely looked eighteen wearing red stilettos, red fringed bikini bottoms and nothing else. She was giving him a lap dance.
I looked at Simon. “Where did you get this?”
“From a club just outside of Red Wing,” he said. “Look at the time stamp in the corner.”
I looked at the number on the bottom right-hand side of the picture.
“He was there for more than an hour,” Simon said. “I saw all the footage.” His hands were jammed in his pockets, feet apart. He looked uncomfortable.
I did the math in my head. “He didn’t kill Dani. There’s no way he had time.”
“No, he didn’t.”
I looked up from the picture. “You knew. That’s why you said you’d get me a meeting with him if I still wanted one.”
“I suspected,” he said. “I’d heard some talk—he wasn’t exactly discreet. It wasn’t that hard to find out for certain.”
I handed the photo and envelope back to him. “Thank you,” I said.
“I’m sorry it wasn’t the answer you were looking for.”
I sighed softly. “I just want the truth.”
Simon slipped the photo back into the envelope. “In my experience that’s not always so easy to find.”
There were even fewer people in the library in the afternoon than there had been in the morning so I was able to spend some time in the workroom doing some of the simpler repairs to our pile of damaged books. I left the more complicated work—including the sticky picture book from Tommy Justason—for Abigail, who had just taken a book-repair workshop in early September.
I was staring at a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, wondering how a piece of purple bubble gum had gotten wedged down between the spine of the book and the dust jacket, when there was a knock on the half-open door behind me. I turned around to find John standing there smiling at me.
“Hi,” he said. “Mary was downstairs. She told me to come up. I hope that was okay.”
I stood up and rolled my neck from one shoulder to the other. “Yes,” I said. “I could use a break. I’ve been hunched over so long I’m beginning to feel like Quasimodo.”
He was carrying a small white paper bag with handles. He offered it to me. “I just came to thank you for all your help, not just for letting me use the herbarium. You introduced me to Rebecca and Maggie. And I know you went out to check on Travis this morning.”
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said. “Thank you.” The bag held apples from Hollister’s.
“They’re Honeycrisp,” he said. “Good for eating and cooking, so I was told.”
“I’m sorry about everything, John,” I said, setting the apples on the table.
“Me too.” He swiped a hand over his neck. He seemed subdued, even given everything that happened.
“You didn’t find what you needed, did you?”
He shook his head. “The bats are on Wisteria Hill land. There’s no evidence of them in any caves on Ruby Blackthorne’s property or on the land around the lake. And it’s probably a good idea that you don’t ask me how I can be sure about that last bit.”
“So the development will go ahead?”
John shifted restlessly from one foot to the other. “Barring some kind of last-minute Hail Mary, yes.” He looked down at his feet for a moment. “I feel like I let her down.”
I knew he meant Dani. “I know how hard you looked for something, anything, to use to stop the project.”
He laughed but there really wasn’t any humor in the sound. “I thought about faking something, you know. Capturing a few bats somehow and relocating them. Looking for some plant and—” He shook his head. “I know how stupid that sounds. Dani would have said, ‘Have you lost your mind, John-Boy?’ I wanted to finish what she started, but not like that.”
“It was a good decision,” I said.
“I keep thinking that if she were alive she would have been able to find something.” He smiled. “We met in middle school, you know. In the rock club—Dani and thirteen geeky boys. We all spent more time looking at her than we did at rocks. Sometimes I wish we could just go back there and do things just a little bit different.” He shook his head. “I have to get going. I need to return the journals to Rebecca.”