Otto laughed and got up. He leaned over and whispered, “I think you’re doing a fine job of that all by yourself, Minnie. Keep up the good work.”
The two of them made their good-byes and walked off, hand in hand.
Smiling, I watched them go, then turned back to Kristen, who remained on the bench as if she meant to stay there for months. “What?” I asked. “We’re going to be late.”
“Details,” she said, holding out her hands, palm up, and making “come here” motions with her long fingers. “There are more details to come and I’m not moving until I hear them all.”
Though I’d glossed over my near death from hypothermia in the story I’d just related to my aunt and Otto, since Kristen was the one who’d picked me up from the hospital, she was aware of those particular circumstances. “What details?”
“That Seth, for one. I thought you’d thought he was a murder suspect. Say, did I ever tell you that I finally saw Tony Wartella?”
I shook my head.
“Oh. Well, I did. He and his wife came in the other day. I asked if he had a relative named Seth, and he said he did, a cousin of some sort. But Tony also said that since his dad had passed away, and that was years ago, he’d never once seen him.”
I thanked her, but it hadn’t mattered, not since Irene realized she’d mistaken a law enforcer for a lawbreaker. And I’d also heard, via Ash that morning, that Detective Inwood had tracked down Seth via his probation officer and made the appropriate inquires. “They checked,” I said. “Turns out Seth had a solid alibi for the day Henry was killed.”
“What about for the day Adam was almost run over?”
“Then, too.”
Kristen nodded. “Good. Just wanted to make sure that Duvall can’t wriggle out of this by having his attorney point the finger at anyone else. If they can’t recover the audio from your phone, the prosecuting attorney might have a problem.”
She had a good point, but the motive and the opportunity were so clear to me that I didn’t see that happening. Even Felix Stanton had been ruled out as a suspect by Detective Inwood’s Saturday investigations. It turned out that Felix had been meeting with potential investors the afternoon Henry died, and had been downstate trolling for new clients when Adam came so close to being hit by that car.
I held out my hand and hauled Kristen to her feet. “Remember Neva Chatham?”
“The lady with the gun? Sure.”
“Turns out that the entire county except you and me knows that Neva’s shotgun has been a squirrel’s acorn cache since the Reagan administration.”
My morning phone call with Ash had also revealed that little tidbit of information. And I’d learned, through Sabrina that morning at the Round Table, why Rachel Carter, the mother of the little boy who’d defended Neva, had never called back. There had been a family wedding in Hawaii, and they’d turned the event into a long vacation. “Lucky buggers,” Sabrina had said, topping off my coffee. “The warmest place any of my relatives live is Escanaba. I’m the one who moved south.”
Though I still didn’t think it was a good idea for anyone to be waving around any sort of a firearm at harmless strangers—Neva might get herself into real trouble someday—now that I’d spent time in her kitchen, I could also see why there was a sort of tacit understanding in the community about her.
The one unknown still hanging out there was whether Duvall had tried to push those bricks onto Adam’s head. Ash said that Duvall had sworn he’d had nothing to do with it, but they were looking into it. Not that it mattered, prisonwise. Duvall would stand trial for Henry’s murder and the attempted murder of Adam and me, and would undoubtedly be imprisoned for the rest of his life.
My own personal unknown, a possible huge hike to my boat slip rental fee, was also still hanging out there, but I wasn’t going to worry about that. It was too nice a day.
“Hey, know what?” I asked. We were walking along the waterfront now, and I pointed at a gorgeous wooden boat tied up to the city dock. “Aunt Frances is going to teach a boat restoration class this fall at the college.”
“How nice,” Kristen said.
I grinned. My friend, although she’d lived next to water most of her life, couldn’t stand being out on it. “And you know what boat they’re going to restore?”
“Haven’t the foggiest . . . Hang on.” She stopped and stared at me. “Don’t tell me.”
“Yep. They’re going to restore Neva’s boat as a class project. Won’t cost her a dime.”
Kristen gave a long whistle. “How’d you manage that?”
I smiled a little smugly. “Librarian magic.” Well, that and a lot of fast talking. I’d called Neva ahead of time and invited her to the book fair to meet Trock. He was interested in local farmers, I told her, which was true, and while it hadn’t been easy to get Neva and my aunt in the same spot at the same time, I’d managed to do so with Holly’s help, and once I’d steered the conversation in the direction of boat restoration, everything fell into place.
Kristen and I, still talking, arrived at Josh’s small ranch house. The yard was trim and neat, with low shrubs softening the foundation. Pale blue siding with white trim gave the house a friendly look, and the brass of the light fixtures that flanked the front door winked bright in the sunshine.
“I suppose,” Kristen said, “that Holly is going to be here.”
“Yes, and you’re going to behave, just like you promised.” For some reason I’d never quite grasped, Holly and Kristen, who had known each other since they were in kindergarten, couldn’t be in the same room without sparks flying.
My best friend squinched up her face. “Did I really promise?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and we went up to the front door and knocked.
The door opened to a smiling Josh. “Hey, Minnie. Hi, Kristen. Come on in.” Behind him, there were a number of people milling about, drinks and plates of food in hand. Some of the people I didn’t know, but I saw Kelsey, Donna, and a number of other library staff.
We stepped up and in, and I blinked at the color the living room walls were painted. “Isn’t that—”
A female shriek from the recent arrival behind us made everyone in the room wince. “Josh Hadden!” Holly yelled. “You are such a jerk!”
Josh laughed. “Gotcha!”
Holly pointed at the walls. “This is the exact color I told you about, isn’t it? Not a taupe, not an olive, not a brown, but something that’s part of them all.”
“Yep,” he said.
She craned her neck around to see. “And your dining area. That’s the same dark red I was talking about.”
“And the kitchen is the sage green you picked out,” he said, grinning. “I even painted the bathroom that pink you liked so much.”
“You did not!” Holly said.
He shrugged. “It’s just paint. I figured if I hated it, I’d do it over again in beige. Didn’t turn out so bad.”
Holly gave him a hug. “You,” she said, “are the biggest jerk I know.”
“But seriously good-looking,” he said, combing back his hair with his fingers. “You got to admit that part, at least.”
They started in on their siblinglike bickering, and Kristen and I eased away. “Food’s in the kitchen,” Donna said. “And you have to take a look at the bathroom. The color is gorgeous. I don’t know how he had the guts to do that.”
In the kitchen, ladling meatballs from a slow cooker onto a paper plate, was Mitchell Koyne.
“Hey, Mitchell,” I said. “How are you doing?”
He looked at me, looked left and right, then looked back at me. It was a classic deer-in-the-headlights expression, but I had no idea why it was on Mitchell’s face.
“Uh, hi, Minnie,” he said. “Hey, Kristen.”
An attractive woman came into the room and put her arm possessively around Mitchell’s waist. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Bianca.”