Laurie Cass - Bookmobile Cat 02 - Tailing a Tabby (9 page)

He put his head deeper into the engine compartment. “We have too many kids who don’t have anything to do between the end of school and when their mom or dad gets home from work. I have a line on a volunteer and there’s a small grant available from the local foundation that’s the perfect target for buying some books. All I need is some direction.”

“Don’t you have English teachers who could do this?” I asked.

“It would have to go to a committee,” he said darkly. “And why mess with that if I can get you to do it?”

Why indeed? We instantly started a conversation about reading levels, the amount of fiction versus nonfiction, whether it made more sense to buy paperbacks or e-books, and what the plot of the next
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
book might be.

At some point I realized that Rafe hadn’t picked up a tool in fifteen minutes and that I hadn’t touched any of the windows I’d planned to wash. The windows could wait, but the repairs couldn’t. Maybe I’d take a walk up to Lakeview and see how Cade was doing.

I stood. “Okay, I’ll do it. And wipe that smirk off your face.” His grin was there because we both knew that I’d spend twice the time on the reading program that he would on my boat. “Let me know how much you spend on parts, but I’m not feeding you.”

“Not even pizza?”

“Well…” He was doing the boat just for me, and I’d be trying to encourage kids into a love of reading. “Maybe once.”

“Sweet! Any day I don’t have to cook is a good one.”

I eyed him. Every summer, away from easy access to the school’s cafeteria, he ended up skinnier than the skinniest rail. Even I wasn’t that bad about cooking. “What you really need is a wife,” I said.

He gave me a horrified look. “Bite your tongue, woman.” He grabbed a pair of pliers and dove back into the engine compartment. “A wife would try to take care of me,” his voice echoed up.

“Talk about thankless tasks.”

“What? Sorry—can’t hear you.”

He’d heard me; he just didn’t have a quick response. “I’ll see you later,” I said, and left him to his labors.

•   •   •

I stood in the open doorway of Cade’s room.

He sat in a chair facing the television, but he wasn’t watching the black-and-white movie on the screen. He also wasn’t reading the book flopped open on his lap. Instead he was staring out the window. What he was seeing, I had no idea, because I would have thought the pleasant view of an interior courtyard landscaped with flowers, bench, and a fountain would have been reason to smile, not to look as if the world was about to end.

I knocked on the doorframe. “Hey there.”

The bleak expression on his face disappeared instantly. “Minnie! What a treat. Sit down, young lady, sit down.”

As I dragged a chair over to him, the librarian in me sneaked a look at the book he wasn’t reading.

He caught my glance. “Can you believe I’ve never
read the Harry Potter books? The day after I was moved here, my agent sent me the entire series. Told me it might be the perfect time to think about moving my work in a different direction.”

That made sense. Sort of. “How will reading fantasy books set in England do that?”

“No idea,” he said. “I think she just wants me to read them so I’ll stop saying I never have.”

I nodded at the book, whose bookmark was maybe fifty pages in. “Is that the first one?”

He sighed. “Did you know they get longer the further in the series you go?”

“Did you know you can get them in audio version?”

He blinked at me. “Genius. Sheer genius.” He used his weak hand to flip the book shut and used both hands to toss it onto the bed. “I’ve never been much of a reader,” he said in a stage whisper. “No offense to the librarians in the room.”

“And I’ve never had a broad appreciation for art,” I said in the same level of whisper. “No offense to any nearby artists. Though I do love your pictures.”

He smiled. But then a big fat silence filled the room, broken only by the muted footsteps of people walking down the hallway and canned laughter from a television in the adjacent room.

This was, I realized, the first time I’d ever been alone with Cade. It was also the first time we’d been in the same room without an ongoing major life experience.

“How,” he asked, “did you manage to find me the most successful defense attorney in the state?”

“It was kind of an accident,” I said, passing on the opportunity to note that defense was an excellent
D
word.

He laughed. “Accidents happen.” He used his good hand to put his weak one in his lap. “There are accidents everywhere, every day. It was an accident that I started painting. A huge mysterious accident that I ever became successful. It was an accident that we bought a house up here. It was an accident that we ever met Carissa. And—” He stopped, then shook his head and went back to looking out the window.

I didn’t like it. Though I didn’t know Cade very well, when he’d been at the hospital, he seemed different. Cheerful, in spite of the stroke. Now he seemed to be sliding downward. No, I didn’t like it one bit. But I supposed that finding a dead body and then falling under suspicion for murder could do that to a person.

“How did you meet Carissa?” I asked.

“At the art gallery here in town. Barb and I were talking to the manager about displaying some of my paintings and Carissa walked in the door. We got to talking, and since it was close to lunchtime, we moved on to a nearby restaurant.”

“But you didn’t know her all that well.”

He shook his head. “I truly don’t understand why anyone would want to frame me for her murder.”

“Well, the police will figure it out, I’m sure.”

Cade’s left hand—the weak hand—started to twitch. He laced his fingers together and looked at me. “Has anyone ever told you that reputation is everything?”

“Yes.” My mother had, on and off for years when I was growing up, and a dear friend, not that long ago.

“It’s true. And it’s even more true when you’re talking about the creative world.” He edged forward in his chair. “My art, such as it is, isn’t just about the art. People buy it because of reputation. My artistic
reputation is squeaky clean. Long-term marriage, three successful grown children, quiet life, no parties, no drugs, not much alcohol, just me and the canvas and the paint.”

I had no idea where he was going with this. “So…”

“So if I become a serious suspect in a murder investigation, the reputation I’ve enjoyed for thirty years will disappear instantly and never return. I’ll be given a new one, but it won’t be the same.”

Nope. I still didn’t get it. “Um…”

“Don’t you see?” He perched on the edge of the chair. “If my reputation as the cleanest-cut popular artist in a generation is destroyed, the value of my paintings will drop substantially.”

Now I got it.

“All the people who have scraped and saved to buy a painting, not just because they love it, but also and probably primarily for investment purposes, all those people will be out of luck. Their hard-earned dollars will vanish.”

I squinted at him. “Any chance you’re exaggerating?”

He rattled off three names I’d never heard before. “Look them up, Minnie. All were rising stars in the art world. None of them are painting now, and why? They lost their reputations. Plus, there’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

He half smiled. “I really, really don’t like the idea of ending up in prison. There’s not a chance of getting decent light in there.”

I thought a moment. “Then what we need is to find the real killer.”

Cade nodded. “The sooner the better. I’d call the
sheriff’s office and ask how the investigation is going, but I doubt they’d tell me anything.”

“No,” I said, “I meant
we
need to find the real killer.”

He sat up, half straight. “Minnie, that’s a job for the police, not a job for… for…”

“A girl?” I sat up, too, only I was all the way straight.

“For an amateur,” he said gently. “The last thing I want is for you to get tangled up with a killer. This person murdered once. What makes you think he won’t do it again?”

“I have no intention of getting killed,” I said. “All I’m saying is that I poke around a little. Ask a few questions of a few people. We can make up a plausible story that I can go with. And I’m a librarian. I do great research. I might be able to dig up stuff the police would never be able to find.”

He rubbed his chin and studied me. “Just questions. No sneaking around in the dark of night, no tiptoeing into dank and dark basements?”

I crossed my heart. “And no climbing rickety stairs with only a single candle to light my way.”

“If you can do this, Minnie Hamilton, I will offer you anything you’d like.”

“If I actually do it, I’ll be happy with a thank-you letter.”

He held out his hand for me to shake, and I took it.

“Deal,” he
said.

I
went straight from Lakeview to the library.

“Hey, Minnie.” Donna, one of our part-time clerks, smiled, then frowned. “What are you doing here? I thought it was your day off.”

I smiled but kept walking, barely even slowing as I passed the front desk. “Silly me, I left something in my office. Don’t tell anyone I’m here, okay?”

She laughed. “Mum’s the word.”

I shut my office door behind me and fired up the computer. Leaving the overhead lights off would mask my presence to most passersby, but if any curious eyes happened to look in through the door’s window, I was toast. Someone would see me, stop to talk, and then I’d get sucked into library tasks that needed doing.

So I got up to do something I’d never done before—pull down the window shade. I reached up as high as I could, but the shade’s edge was just out of my reach. I jumped. Missed. For the second jump I crouched a bit, tried a little harder, and was rewarded for my efforts with the sound of the roller shade descending.

“Gotcha,” I murmured. Snug in my office cave with
a much faster Internet connection than I could get at the marina, I started researching the life of Carissa Radle.

First off, of course, was to take a look at the most accurate information at hand, that of the Chilson District Library. I typed in her name, typed in every possible spelling of her last name that I could come up with, and still came up with nothing.

“No library card,” I said, sighing and shaking my head. It never failed to amaze me how many people didn’t have a library card. They were free and they gave you access to thousands of books. Maybe someday I’d understand people who weren’t interested in reading, but probably not.

Next, I used the library’s access code to log in to the archives of the
Chilson Gazette,
the local newspaper. Carissa’s name came up fast, but there was only one entry. Her obituary.

I closed my eyes for a moment, wanting to reject the sight. She shouldn’t have died so young. She shouldn’t have died that way. I opened my eyes and found that my hands were balled up into fists.

I stretched out my fingers, releasing the tension, and looked at Carissa’s obituary picture. She had been blond and pretty with a happy, wide smile, one of those smiles that made you want to smile in return.

Sighing, I started reading. Carissa Marie Radle, age thirty-nine, had died unexpectedly at her home in Chilson. She’d graduated from Wayne State University and Dearborn High School and had been employed by Talcott Motors. She was survived by her parents and two sisters. A memorial service was being planned for Labor Day weekend.

Hang on. Had that really said… ? I looked back. Why, yes, indeedy, it had said Dearborn High School. The very same high school that had given me a diploma. Me and my brother, Matt, who was only two years older than Carissa. What were the odds that out of the eighteen hundred or so students who attended Dearborn High, my brother had known her?

Probably low, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

I unzipped my backpack, dug around for my cell, and scrolled down to my brother’s number. Matt, his wife, Jennifer, and their three children lived in Florida and I didn’t see nearly enough of them. Hardly a week passed all winter that I didn’t get a call or an e-mail or a text from one of the five telling me how nice the weather was down in the greater Orlando area, so why didn’t I abandon the snow and cold and come down for a visit?

Then again, hardly a week passed all summer that I didn’t call or send an e-mail or a text down to Florida telling them how nice the weather was up here and why didn’t they abandon the heat and humidity and come up for a visit?

Matt’s phone rang once, twice. “Can’t come this month,” he said. “Ben has soccer camp.”

“It’s too hot,” I said.

“They practice inside.”

“Oh.” I’m sure it made sense for the Florida heat, but playing an outdoor sport inside in the summer seemed weird to me. “That wasn’t why I called.”

“Yeah?”

From the way he spoke, I knew he wasn’t paying attention to me, which served me right for calling in the middle of the day. My brother was a work-hard,
play-hard kind of guy and on weekends he was always busy doing something. If not soccer, then softball, and if not softball, then swimming.

During the week, Matt worked as an Imagineer at Disney World, designing all sorts of things he could never talk about until they became reality. It was an extremely cool job, and if I hadn’t been a bookmobile librarian, I might have been the teensiest bit jealous. “Can you talk for a second?”

“Mom and Dad okay?”

“They’re fine. So is Aunt Frances and every other relative, as far as I know.”

“So what’s up? No, let me guess. You’re finally getting married. Who’s the poor sucker? Let me call and warn him about what you’re really like.”

I made a rude gesture in the direction of Florida. “I have a question about your dim, dark past. Did you know a Carissa Radle in high school? She was two years younger than you.”

“Carissa Radle, Carissa Radle…” He made some humming noises that almost, but not quite, turned into an instrumental version of “Stairway to Heaven.” “Carissa. You mean Chrissy?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah, Chrissy Radle. One of my friends dated her for a while. Or was it a friend of a friend?” His voice drifted backward twenty-odd years. “Chrissy. Yeah, I remember. Blond, legs up to here, but not a lot of fun. One of those kids who took everything seriously. She had opinions on everything from pesticides to the World Trade Organization.”

I tipped back in my chair. That didn’t sound at all like the Carissa described by Barb and Cade and
Kristen. Then again, people did change. Not that I could think of anyone who had done so right this second, but I was sure I could, given time.

“Chrissy Radle,” Matt was saying. “Huh. I hadn’t thought about her since high school. Why are you asking?”

“Ah. Well.” I cleared my throat. Somehow I hadn’t thought this conversation through to its inevitable conclusion. “Turns out she’d been living up here.”

He caught the past tense. “She’s moved?”

“Not moved, exactly,” I said. “Matt, I’m afraid she’s dead. Someone killed her.” He was silent, so I kept going. “The police don’t know who, but I’m sure they’ll find out soon.”

“Murdered?” Matt sounded far away again. “People I know don’t get murdered. Are you sure?”

I read him the obituary. “So you haven’t seen her since high school?”

“No,” he said. “And my friend Bruce—they broke up even before we graduated. He went to MIT, then to Silicon Valley right afterward. He’s hardly been back to Dearborn since.”

I remembered Bruce. Far too good-looking to be an engineer, if anyone asked me, but no one ever had. “Sorry to be giving you bad news, but when I saw she was from Dearborn, I had to call.”

“Chrissy Radle,” he mused. “It’s weird to know someone who’s been murdered. It’s not… right.”

We were quiet for a moment. Since I agreed with him completely, there wasn’t much else to say.

“Hey,” my big brother said. “There’s not a serial killer running around Chilson, is there? You’re not in any danger, right? You’d be the perfect target, out on
that bookmobile half the week. You even publish your route online. It’d be easy to…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose you’d consider carrying a handgun.”

“Firearms are against every library rule ever,” I said. “And do you know how unlikely serial killer deaths are? Statistically, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning twice than be killed by a nutso wack job like that.”

“Did you make up that statistic?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“That’s my girl,” he said.

After we hung up, I poked around the computer for a while longer. Since I didn’t find anything else about Carissa, I popped my head outside the office door to check for a clear exit and tiptoed out.

•   •   •

Monday was rainy and cool and windy, which made it an excellent library day. From opening to close, we were busy providing all the things that libraries do, from finding the perfect book for an eleven-year-old boy to tracking down a copy of a decade-old magazine to recommending materials on how to start your own worm farm.

Tuesday was a bookmobile day. “Which makes it a good day,” I told Eddie as I gave him a cuddle before putting him into the cat carrier. “And since we’re headed southwest instead of southeast, Thessie is meeting us at the library this morning. What do you think of that?”

If he thought anything of it, he didn’t say. He was too busy rearranging the towel on the bottom of the carrier to his satisfaction.

Thessie arrived just as I was backing the bookmobile
out of the detached garage. I stopped and opened the door for her. “Good morning, sunshine.”

“Morning!” She bounded up the stairs and into her seat. “Hey there, Eddie.”

“Speaking of Eddie,” I said, “we need to make a quick stop on the way out of town. Aunt Frances called this morning. One of her boarders has knitted a blanket for him.”

“You hear that, Mr. Ed?” Thessie looked down. “You’re going to get an upgrade from that ratty old towel.”

It hadn’t been ratty a few weeks ago. Back in my pre-Eddie days it had been my second-best bath towel. Now it had threads pulled out of it, and the corners were chewed to shreds. Eddie was almost as hard on towels as he was on paper products. What he was going to do to Paulette’s handmade blanket I didn’t want to think.

We drove through the back streets of Chilson and stopped at the curb in front of the boardinghouse. My aunt was waiting on the porch. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

Aunt Frances met me on the sidewalk. “Here it is. Sorry about the color, but Paulette wanted that particular type of yarn for Eddie’s blanket and the yarn store didn’t have enough of anything else.”

I took the small, cat-sized blanket from her. It was soft and cuddly and warm… and so pink that every other color in the world would look washed out next to it. “Aren’t cats color-blind?” I asked. “Tell Paulette thanks very much. Is she here? I have a couple of minutes. I can tell her myself.”

Aunt Frances sighed. “Gone up to Mackinac Island
with Leo.” She rubbed at her eyes, and that’s when I noticed how red they were.

“You’re not getting sick, are you?” I asked. Which was unthinkable, because my aunt never got sick.

“Not sleeping for beans,” she said. “It’s all… that.” She tipped her head at the boardinghouse. “I need help.”

I heard Thessie come down the steps. “Aunt Frances, have you met Thessie Dyer? Thessie, this is Frances Pixley, my aunt.”

They exchanged nice-to-meet-yous; then Thessie asked, “What do you need help with? We’re great at helping people find what they need on the bookmobile.”

Aunt Frances smiled. “You’re a sweet girl, but I’m afraid the solution to my problem isn’t on the bookmobile. Unless…” She looked at me. “Unless, my dearest niece, my smart niece, my perceptive niece can find an answer.”

My aunt was one of the most capable people I knew. She changed her own oil, was comfortable with power tools, and dealt with noisy neighbors herself instead of calling the police. To see her doubting herself was like the ground falling away from underneath my feet. “With Deena and Quincy?”

She nodded. “And Paulette and Leo.” Her voice strung out the words tight. “This is all wrong and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Who’s Deena?” Thessie asked. “And those other people?”

Aunt Frances and I looked at her, then at each other. The matchmaking efforts were all done undercover; no one except the two of us had ever known about them. I lowered my voice. “She can keep a secret.”

“So young?” Aunt Frances murmured.

“I’m not that young,” Thessie protested. “I’m seventeen. I’ll be a senior in high school.”

Aunt Frances nodded. “And I’m going to guess that not only are you smart, but you have all sorts of ideas about how to fix the world.”

“Well…” Thessie scuffed her toe on the sidewalk.

“She does,” I told Aunt Frances. “Maybe she can help.” Which would be a good thing, because I didn’t have any advice regarding other people’s love lives. Managing my own was often more than I could handle.

So Aunt Frances told Thessie about the summer boarders, about the secret matchmaking, about her years of success, and about this year’s impending doom. Thessie started to grin a little when she heard the ages of some of the players, but when Aunt Frances said, “We all need love, no matter how old we are,” the girl stopped smiling and started nodding.

“I just don’t know what to do.” Aunt Frances gripped and ungripped her hands. “It’s a ghastly mess and I’m afraid it’s going to end badly for everyone.”

Thessie looked concerned. “So Deena should have been with Harris, but instead she’s with Quincy. And Quincy’s match was Paulette, but instead she’s with Leo. This leaves Zofia, who was Leo’s match, with Harris, who is young enough to be her grandson.”

“In a nutshell,” Aunt Frances said sadly. “Nothing I’ve tried has worked. Do you have any ideas? Anything at all?”

“Hmmm.”

Thessie was going into think mode. I could tell from the small vertical crease between her eyebrows that the problem was getting the full force of her concentration.
“I’ll let you know,” I said, “if she gets any ideas. Sorry, Aunt Frances, but we have to leave right now if we’re going to keep to the schedule.”

I gave her a quick hug, tugged on Thessie’s elbow, and escorted her back to the bookmobile. Through the window I gave my pensive-looking aunt Frances a cheery wave and we were off.

Thessie was silent for a few miles. Then she smiled and said, “I know. What she needs to do is have a party. We’ll invite all the boarders and anyone who has met them. Then we’ll get people to say how good Deena and Harris look together, how Paulette and Quincy look like they’d make the perfect couple, and how Zofia and Leo already seem as if they’re married. If we can get those ideas into their heads, maybe that will help.” She rattled on with idea after idea, each one more bizarre than the last.

I sighed. It had been accidental and with the best of intentions, but I’d created a monster.

•   •   •