“Toby Guinn,” Rafe said. “Wish I could say I’m surprised.”

  “You know him?” Chelsea asked.

  “Had him when I was a student teacher.”

  I remembered what Rafe had said that day we’d seen Toby, that Toby had never understood that life can be hard work.

  Rafe toyed with a potato chip. “No matter what I did, I couldn’t get him interested in anything. Back then I thought it was because I was a crap teacher.”

  “And now?” Chelsea asked. “Now what do you think?”

  Rafe grinned. “That I was a crappy teacher. Why do you think I went into administration?”

  We laughed, and turned the talk to other things, but the rest of the night, Rafe wasn’t quite himself, and I knew he was thinking that he’d failed Toby Guinn.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning, peering up at the dark clouds and in spite of the forecasted rain, I decided to walk to the library. After all, I was wearing a raincoat and carrying an umbrella. And it wasn’t that far, so how wet could I get?

  So I set off, and ten minutes later, the skies opened up. Thirty seconds after that, from the knees down, I was wet to the skin.

  “Should have worn the rain boots,” I grumbled, but had I? No, I had not. Instead, I’d decided to be like Rafe and assume everything would be fine. Why that always worked for him but not for me was another of life’s great mysteries, right up there with why we always got snow the day after swapping the car’s snow tires for summer tires.

  “Minnie Hamilton, you get in here right now!”

  It was Pam Fazio summoning me from her store’s front entrance. I splashed over and stood in the covered space dripping. Before I could say a word, she towed me inside.

  “You’re soaked. Keep standing on the entry mat, and take off those shoes and socks. Now come on back and take off those sopping pants. I’ll get you a blanket to wrap around yourself while your clothes roll around in the dryer. Yes, I have a dryer. It’s how I fluff up the linens before displaying. I’m not about to iron them all.”

  In short order, I was sitting in one of Pam’s back room chairs, my lower half covered with a red-and-black plaid blanket, sipping coffee and accepting her friendly abuse.

  “What were you thinking,” she demanded, “walking on a day like this?”

  I shrugged, having already decided that I was not going to admit I’d been trying to be more like Rafe. “Didn’t see the weather forecast.” A blatant lie, but self-preservation was important.

  “Well, I wanted to talk to you anyway. Have you and Rafe announced where you’re going to have your wedding?”

  I slid down into the chair, a red velvet slipper chair that was waiting for an empty spot out front. “Memorial Day,” I said into my coffee. “I’ll send you an invite if you want to be there for the reveal.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll be working. Everyone’s looking forward to the wedding, though,” Pam said. “It’s going to be the social event of the year.”

  “Oh, sure.” I rolled my eyes. “Of the decade, even. Say, not to switch subjects”—although I desperately wanted to switch the subject—“do you know what’s happening with Whippy’s store? I saw the police tape is gone.”

  Pam’s face turned down in unaccustomed lines of sadness. “They took it down yesterday, Ash Wolverson and that Detective Inwood. They were in there half the day, and when they left, they took the tape off.”

  Huh. Ash hadn’t mentioned anything about that last night. But then, he wouldn’t have. “Is the store going to reopen?”

  “No one knows,” Pam said. “Do you want to hear the rumors?”

  Not in the least. “The sheriff’s office is following a lead that it was a burglary gone wrong.”

  “You heard about the robbery at the jewelry store, right? So, they think Toby Guinn is the killer?”

  “Yes, I heard about the jewelry store,” I said. “Murder investigations take a long time, though. We might not hear anything for weeks or even months.”

  But last night, when he was leaving the restaurant, Ash had a look of being on the hunt and closing in on his prey.

  And I wasn’t at all sure he was on the right track.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Minnie, can I talk to you?”

  I looked up from the reference desk’s computer screen slowly, because I was deep into reading the strategic plan from another library—as Tom Lehrer said, it’s not plagiarism, it’s research—and focused on the woman in front of me.

  “Leah,” I said, surprised to see her outside her elementary school during the week. “But it’s only Thursday. The kids learn all there is to learn for the year, and you get to start summer early?”

  She smiled. “I’ll have to suggest that to the principal next time I see her. Talk about a motivation technique. But no, it’s an in-service day and I finished early. I was hoping to talk to you,” she said, glancing around.

  Though most of the tables were empty, a few were occupied. Jim Kittle had his genealogy research spread out in front of him. Amanda Bell was studying books on tying fishing flies, and off in the corner, Mrs. Noss was reading books in her attempt to make a travel decision. She and her husband were touring the world alphabetically, and they’d made it to the letter J. “One country per letter,” she’d told me years ago, then whispered, “although we had to cheat with the letter I. There are just too many.”

  I was getting the idea that Leah meant a talk in private. “How about my office? And I’m going to top off my coffee. Would you like a cup?”

  Leah demurred, saying it was too late in the day for her, so I carried only one mug down the hall. I gestured for her to sit, settled behind my desk, and asked, “What’s up?”

  She nodded at the door. “Is it okay if I shut this? Great. Thanks.” She did the deed and sat down. “It’s just . . . after the other day, when I told you about Whippy, I’ve been thinking.”

  “I haven’t told anyone,” I said as reassuringly as I could. Was she having regrets about telling me her secret? If so, that was understandable but also a little late. “And I won’t, not unless you say it’s okay.”

  “Oh. No, that’s not it.” Leah rubbed her face with her hands. “I trust you.” She closed her eyes. “I just need to think how to say this out loud.”

  I waited. Took a sip of coffee. Waited some more. Drank more coffee. Then, when I was about to get up and make sure she was still awake, her eyes opened.

  “A few months ago, my husband and I got divorced.” She gave a small sigh. “We’d been married for eighteen years. Dated all through high school, got married right after I graduated from college.”

  It wasn’t an unusual story. I nodded, encouraging her to go on.

  “But the last few years hadn’t been that great. We were never able to have kids—combination of factors on both our sides, the doctors said—and we drifted away from each other. We’d been living more like roommates than a couple, doing more things separately than apart. I looked around one day, asked myself why we were still married, and couldn’t come up with any answer other than habit.”

  “So sorry,” I murmured.

  “Thanks.” She blinked rapidly a few times. “Kurt didn’t get it. He didn’t see anything wrong with the way things were. But I didn’t want that any longer. And he . . .”

  She trailed off and showed no signs of starting up again.

  “And?” I prompted gently.

  “When I told him I wanted a divorce, he didn’t take it well. I figured he’d get used to the idea soon enough, but he . . . didn’t. He wouldn’t even talk about what to do with the house, so I packed up my things and left. Anyway . . .”

  She tipped her head back, looked at the ceiling, then back at me. “There are two things I wanted to tell you. First is that Kurt is the only person other than you who knows that Whippy was my birth father. We were still together, just barely, when I found out.”

  “The second thing?” I asked.

  “Right. The second thing.” Her hands went up again, rubbing her eyes, rubbing her cheeks, pushing on the muscles in front of her ears. “The second thing is that, when I stopped at the house the last time, to drop off my keys, Kurt was there. He wasn’t supposed to be, he was supposed to be out at a job. All I wanted was to drop the keys in the toolbox in the garage—that’s where we always put an extra key. But he was there, and . . .”

  Leah looked at me, her eyes red and raw. “And he came into the garage. Watched me, not saying a word. It was creepy and weird and awful. Then when I was walking away, he yelled after me. He said . . . he said he’d make me pay for what I’d done to him.”

  She took a deep breath. “Minnie, what if that wasn’t just one of those things people say when they’re mad? What if he meant it? What if he’s the one who killed Whippy?”

  * * *

  * * *

  That evening, Rafe had to attend a school board meeting, so he picked up something to go from Fat Boys Pizza, leaving Eddie and me to fend for ourselves dinnerwise.

  “Hey, look at what you get tonight.” I rattled the bucket of dry cat food. “Cat kibble, fresh from the source. Yum, yum!”

  Eddie, perched on the one kitchen windowsill that wasn’t quite wide enough for him, gave the bucket a disdainful look, then transferred that same look to me.

  “You think my dinner is going to be any better?” I raised my eyebrows. “This is a reversal of fortune, going backward to the bad old days, when I had to feed myself all the time.” A number of those feedings had included meals at the boardinghouse, meals at Chilson’s lower-end restaurants, and occasional recipe trials from Kristen, but still.

  I filled Eddie’s bowl, made sure it was mounded the way he liked it, or at least the way he’d liked it that morning, and opened the refrigerator door to consider my options.

  “There’s chicken,” I said, “but that’s for the stir-fry Rafe said he was going to make tomorrow. There’s stuff to make a salad, and cheese to make a grilled cheese sandwich, but that sounds almost like cooking.”

  I poked through the fridge’s other contents. Pretty much anything in there would require cooking more than three ingredients, with accompanying utensils and cookware. Bleah. “Then again, if this is throwback night, why not take advantage?”

  “Mrr.”

  “Glad you agree.” I grabbed the milk jug, shut the fridge door, and opened a cabinet. “Toasted Oats or Raisin Bran? Let’s go with the box that has more in it . . . Toasted Oats it is. We can always have popcorn later if we get hungry.”

  “Mrr.”

  “Well, there you go.” I pulled out a bowl and utensil, poured cereal and just the right amount of milk, and sat at the kitchen island. Too late I realized I’d made the tragic error of sitting down to a solo meal without a book.

  “Looks like we get to talk,” I said, angling myself so I could see Eddie. “But not very much, because I don’t want the cereal to get soggy.”

  Eddie gave an excellent impression of being frozen in place.

  “Right. So the big question is, what do you think about what Leah said?”

  After the Kurt-as-killer theory had been put out there, Leah had given me some facts. Both Leah and her ex-husband were forty years old, and both had gone to high school in Petoskey. She’d done two years of community college before going off to Central Michigan University and had come home every weekend because Kurt hated her being away so much.

  “He sounds like the worst kind of control freak,” I said to Eddie, slurping a little on the milk, “but no matter what Leah said, it feels like a big stretch to think he killed Whippy to get back at her. Still, I promised her I’d find out what I could about what Kurt was doing on the night of Whippy’s murder, and—”

  “Mrr!!”

  “Not your turn yet.” I scooped up the last O’s of cereal, chewed, and swallowed them down, then put the bowl on the floor. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Eddie gave me a glare, sat on the windowsill long enough to demonstrate that I was not in his good graces, then jumped down and sauntered to the bowl.

  As I listened to the lap-lap-lap, I watched him spatter tiny drops of milk on the floor. “I thought cats were supposed to be neat and tidy.” He didn’t reply, so I continued thinking out loud.

  “What do we know about the murder itself? Since Ash hasn’t been willing to share, basically nothing.”

  Eddie continued to spatter.

  “That forces me to move on to sheer speculation.” Luckily, that was something I was completely comfortable doing. “We know that Whippy was Leah’s birth father, but that’s been true for as long as Leah has been alive, so how could that have anything to do with his murder?”

  Eddie polished off the last of the milk, then sat and stared at me.

  “No, I’m not giving you more. The vet says milk is bad for cats.” What he’d actually said was a lot of milk was bad and that giving Eddie a little was fine, but Eddie didn’t need to know that.

  Good and bad, I thought. Subjective concepts. Good for one person could be bad for another. “Bad things can happen when old secrets come out,” I said. “Whippy seemed okay enough with acknowledging Leah, though. Who else could be hurt by a revelation of Leah’s adoption?”

  I stopped. The answer was suddenly obvious, but I didn’t want to say it out loud, so I whispered the words: “Her birth mother.” To solve Whippy’s murder, would I have to find Leah’s birth mother?

  That was a can of potential worms I didn’t want to open.

  Not one little bit.

  Chapter 7

  Predictably, Julia thought the idea of a book bike was hilarious. Primarily because of the area’s terrain but also because of its creator.

  “Trent Ross.” She squinched her face shut in a clear effort to demonstrate deep thought. “Nope,” she said in a tightly strained voice. “Can’t see it.” Her face and voice smoothed out. “You’re kidding, right? You have to tell me you’re kidding. There is no way Mr. Buffed Fingernails has ever fired up a TIG welder.”

  I almost asked, “A what?” but kept quiet. If I asked what a TIG welder was, she’d either tell me or make something up, and there was no way I’d know which. And I almost asked why she had such a poor opinion of Trent’s mechanical aptitude. After all, just because he dressed like an attorney even though he was retired didn’t mean that he didn’t mind getting dirt under his fingernails. But instead of either of those questions, I asked, “Buffed fingernails? Is that a real thing?”

  Since I was driving the bookmobile around a curve, I couldn’t look over, but I knew in my bones that she was rolling her eyes. Dramatically.

  “Puuh-leeeese,” she said, drawing out the word into two extremely long syllables. “How is it you got to your age without knowing anything about fingernails?”

  By which I understood that she didn’t know exactly what the buffing thing meant, either. I smirked, having scored a small point (not that anyone was keeping score, but I was winning), and said, “Cody at the bike shop has it now and is making sure it’s roadworthy. That’s not the problem.”

  “Then what is? No, wait, let me guess. The problem is Mr. Ross wants to hold a press conference to announce the generosity of his gift.”

  “What is it with you and Trent?” I flicked on the turn signal and slowed to pull into a township hall parking lot, our first stop of the day. She didn’t answer, so I said, “At the next board meeting, I need to present a report on how the book bike is going to be incorporated into the library’s outreach effort. I’m looking for ideas on making that work. Solid ideas,” I added quickly before she could get going, Carolyn Mathews–style, on ridiculous ones.

  “Solid ideas.” Julia popped her seat belt buckle and leaned forward to open Eddie’s door. He didn’t move an inch, as he was snuggled up with his pink blanket in the back of the carrier, emitting Eddie-size snores. “Solid,” she said again. “Hmm.”

  She hummed tuneless songs as we readied the bookmobile, but she didn’t say anything until I went to open the door. “I have an idea,” she declared in the accent of English royalty, rolling consonants that had never been rolled before. “Let us ask our patrons for ideas.”

  The first visitor of the day, seventy-ish Mrs. Dugan, was already climbing the bookmobile steps. “Ideas for what?” Her eyes were bright with anticipation.

  On the inside I was shrieking at Julia something along the lines of What were you thinking? People have no clue what it takes to run an outreach program! If we ask their opinions and don’t implement them, we’ll end up with hurt feelings all over the place! But since I couldn’t say that out loud, I pasted on a smile and explained.

  Mrs. Dugan’s eyes went even brighter. “A book bike? And you want our ideas? How wonderful!” She beamed and clapped her hands.

  Throughout the day, we saw the same reaction over and over. “There wasn’t any idea I haven’t already considered,” I told Eddie as I put him in the car that afternoon. “Not that you heard any of them. Or were you faking those snores?”

  “Mrr,” he said sleepily.

  A daylong Eddie nap did not bode well for a full night of human rest, and I was really hoping some quality sleep would let me wake up with a resolution to the dilemma of whether or not to find Leah’s birth mother. “How about a long walk around the block when we get home?” I asked, pulling out of the library parking lot. “Or an hour-long game of catch? How about . . . hang on.”

  I parked outside the toy store, told Eddie I’d be back in a flash, and hurried inside. “Hey, Mitchell,” I said. “I need some help.”

  Mitchell, who was standing in front of a shelving array and holding a computer tablet, gave me that same beaming smile I’d seen all day long. “You’re asking me for help? For real?”

 

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