I looked at her in the dim light. Something hadn’t sounded quite right. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised if Barb was saying things that didn’t sound right on a night that her sick husband had almost been arrested for murder.
“At least the police released him,” she said. “I don’t even want to think about the media attention if Cade was arrested. And I don’t think the police even know who he is, which is a blessing.”
I wasn’t so sure she was right on that account, so I didn’t say anything. Not that long ago, I’d made a serious error in judgment about Detective Inwood and his partner, Detective Devereaux.
This time, I wasn’t going to assume anything.
Chapter 6
By the time I got home it was practically time to get up, but I crawled into bed anyway. Eddie, who’d been sleeping in the exact center of the bed, murmured an objection, then rearranged himself at the small of my back. I was sound asleep in seconds.
Too soon, the alarm clock went off. I smacked the snooze button and went back to sleep. The fourth time the alarm rang, I realized it was going to keep waking me up every six minutes until I either got up or turned the thing off altogether.
Yawning, I slid out of bed and headed for the shower. Halfway there, my brain woke up and panic set in. It was Saturday. A bookmobile day.
“Eddie!” I shrieked. “We’re going to be late!”
My startled cat scrambled off the bed and leapt to the floor. Side by side, we raced up the short hallway, me on the way to the shower, Eddie on the way to the door, where he sat, voicing criticisms, until we were ready to go.
• • •
In an amazingly short period of time, we were in the bookmobile and driving down the road. “I know I forgot something,” I said.
Thessie reached through the wires of the cat carrier door to scratch Eddie’s face. “You? Forget something? Doubt it.”
“D word,” I murmured.
“Sorry?”
“Did you ever think how many fun words there are that start with the letter D?” I asked.
“You mean like death, destruction, and dystopia?” She said the last word with relish, rolling it around in her mouth and enunciating the consonants cleanly and clearly.
There couldn’t be many seventeen-year-old girls who knew what that meant. “Dystopia?”
“You know what it means, right?” Thessie asked. “It’s, like, a world where everything is horrible, so bad that it can’t get any worse.”
“A world without books,” I said.
Thessie grinned. “Or a world with only e-books that your reader won’t open.”
I laughed. What was I going to do when Thessie went back to school in September? She was the perfect bookmobile companion. Smart, funny, and, as a volunteer, not on the library’s payroll. The odds of finding anyone close to her caliber were nil to none. But since I didn’t have to worry about that for a few weeks, I decided not to. Why ruin the present with worry about the future?
“This contest is going to be so much fun,” Thessie said. “That was so nice of your friend Kristen to donate the candies.”
In reflex, I almost looked back at our latest acquisition, which was safely bungee-corded on a bookshelf. The road, however, was winding and narrow and I kept my gaze forward.
“It’s really too bad I can’t enter the contest,” Thessie was saying.
“Sure is,” I said cheerfully. “Anyone connected to the library is out of luck. Besides, you know how many candies are in there. You helped me count.”
I didn’t remember the number, but then I didn’t have to because I had that information in the spreadsheet I was using to track the names of the entrants and their guesses. We had blank slips to write down guesses for the number of candies in the jar, and the guess that was closest would win the candies, the jar, and the ultimate prize of the bookmobile coming to her or his house. Everyone would get one slip per visit and may the best guess win. The local paper had agreed to write up the contest-winning personal bookmobile stop and I was already planning to have the bookmobile’s carpet steam-cleaned of all Eddie hair before any reporter set foot inside.
“Maybe I forgot?”
Unlikely. Thessie’s sharp brain wouldn’t forget anything it didn’t want to, let alone the number of Kristen-made maple-flavored hard candies, individually wrapped and placed in a large, clear, thick plastic jar I’d found in my aunt’s attic.
“You know,” I said, “even if nobody’s close to guessing right, you still won’t get it.”
“Not even if everyone’s really far off?” she asked hopefully.
“If everyone is that far off, I’ll suspect someone was priming them with wrong numbers.”
“Hey!” she protested. “I wouldn’t do that!” But she turned back to look at the jar with a contemplative look on her face.
Shaking my head, I flicked on the blinker and made a wide-sweeping right turn into the parking lot of a former gas station, now a gardening supply store. By the time we were set up, half a dozen people were milling about, waiting for someone to open the door.
“Good morning,” I said, smiling wide. “Welcome to the Chilson District Library Bookmobile. Come on—”
But they were already up the stairs and in, no further invitation necessary. And there, kicking up dust as she walked across the gravel parking lot, was the exact person I’d hoped to see at this stop.
“Good morning, Faye,” I said as she came up the steps. “Did you remember to bring those cookbooks?”
Her face, which had been smiling, instantly transformed into a horrified—and very guilty—look. She tucked her short graying hair behind her ears with hands that held no books, not even the overdue cookbooks that I’d found for her through the interlibrary loan system. “Oh, wow, Minnie. I forgot all about them. They’re at home, but…” She glanced over her shoulder. “But you’d be gone by the time I got back. Um…”
I crossed my arms, put on my firm librarian face, and looked her in the eye. Which was only possible because she was standing one step down. “You know the library’s policy is to refuse lending privileges until any and all overdue books are returned.”
She hung her head and sighed. “I know. It’s my own fault.” With drooping shoulders, she retreated down the stairs.
Uh-oh. I must have carried the Firm Librarian Face a little too far. “Faye!” I called. “Come on back. I know how much you were looking forward to reading the new Nicholas Sparks. It’d be unusual punishment to make you wait.”
“You mean… ?”
“We’ll bend the rules just this once.” I put my finger to my lips and looked left and right. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
She nodded toward the front of the bookmobile where a black-and-white feline was perched on the headrest of the passenger’s seat. “Not even Eddie?”
“Especially Eddie.” I rolled my eyes. “Cats are horrible gossips, didn’t you know?”
Laughing, she headed straight for the Special Orders shelf.
“Um, Minnie?” Thessie stood at my elbow. “We have a little problem. You know how the guessing game was supposed to be for kids? Well…” She held out six slips of folded paper.
At this particular moment, the youngest human on the bookmobile was Thessie. I glanced at our patrons, all of whom had their noses deep in books, just as it should be. “Didn’t you tell them it was for kids only?”
“By the time I noticed, it was too late. They’d made their guesses.”
Yet another thing no one had taught me while I was getting my library science degree. Clearly, there should have been at least one lecture on how to run contests.