A Troubling Tail, page 9
“As real as it gets.” I explained about the book bike. “You,” I said, nodding at him, “have a unique way of thinking. If anyone can come up with an idea that works, it’ll be you.”
“Huh.” He rubbed his chin. “Guess that’s a compliment. Give me a couple of days. If I come up with anything, I’ll let you know. Say, I went past the boardinghouse yesterday. That new color is pretty sharp, don’t you think?”
I gave a vague answer, then asked, “Do you know what’s going to happen to the candy store? Is Whippy’s family going to reopen it?”
Mitchell’s face had been open and sunny; now a cloud fell over it.
“No one knows for sure,” he said. “But someone put up a sign on the front door. A big one you can see from the street. It has one word: ‘Closed.’ ”
* * *
* * *
Mitchell’s mention of the boardinghouse had forced me to remember the paint. Up until that second, I’d thought I was being adult enough to accept the twin realities of ownership change and property rights, but his offhand mention resurrected memories of childhood summers that lasted forever, summers when Kristen and Rafe and I swam at the city beach, when I’d climbed backyard trees, book in hand, and read until called in for dinner. All of those memories included a white boardinghouse, and now Mitchell had slapped peach paint in my face.
It was wrong of me to hold that against him. I knew that, of course I did. And someday the rational part of my brain would catch up with the emotional part, and I’d forgive him.
“Until then,” I said to Eddie, “I think it’s best if I avoid going by the boardinghouse. Celeste keeps texting me to stop by, but I can put her off for a while. Maybe until Aunt Frances gets home?”
It was also wrong of me to keep news of the Peach Paint from my aunt. “Coward,” I said. “That’s what I am. A yellow-bellied coward who doesn’t like change and is afraid of confrontation.”
“Mrr!”
By this time we were back at the house. I glared at Eddie. “You didn’t have to agree so quickly. I thought we had a bond.” I opened the wire door. Eddie trotted out, across the wood kitchen floor, and out of sight.
Rafe was sitting on a kitchen stool reading the newspaper. “Agree about what?” he asked, turning the page of the sports section. In the Chilson Gazette, the sports section was one hundred percent about school sports. Rafe said it was part of his job to keep up with the sports news, and for all I knew, he was right.
“That I’m the coward of Tonedagana County.”
“Old news. Everybody knows.”
Happily, he didn’t ask why I was a coward. “Are you done with the paper?” I asked, because he was now perusing the “Items for Sale” section of the classifieds, a dangerous thing because we needed absolutely nothing. “I have a question for you.”
“Forty-two,” he said.
I looked over his shoulder. I was pretty sure he was reading the ad for an upcoming auction and made a mental note to make sure we were busy that day. “Fun answer, but not applicable. Do you know Kurt Wasson?”
As a homegrown local, Rafe was one of my go-to sources for information. It wasn’t one of the many reasons I’d fallen in love with him, but it was a handy bonus.
He put the paper down and looked at me. “Sort of. Why?”
I put my backpack on the kitchen counter and unzipped it, pulling out the detritus from my lunch of peanut butter and jelly, potato chips, and apple. “Leah Wasson, the elementary school teacher who I’ve been working with for bookmobile stops, told me she used to be married to him. She said he isn’t dealing with the divorce very well.”
Rafe watched me pitch the apple core and wash the plastic containers. “And you’re worried he might, what? Be a stalker or something?”
“Hope not. But you never know. Forewarned is forearmed, and all that.”
“Is Leah worried about him hurting her?”
“Didn’t sound like it.”
Rafe nodded. “Okay. I knew there was a divorce. Principals talk about their teachers. Hard to believe, right? I know Kurt from a softball tournament a few years back and because he’s a plumber. Used to have his own company, but a couple years ago he started working for North Lakes Plumbing. Got tired of the paperwork is what I heard.”
All good information. I wasn’t sure any of it was useful, but you had to start somewhere. “You hear a lot of things,” I said. “Which makes me wonder where you hear them. It’s not like the middle school has a water cooler.”
He gave me a look of disbelief. “You want me to reveal all my secrets before we’re married? Are you nuts?”
“Nuts about you.” I made my voice all sweet and syrupy.
The love of my life made a rude snorting noise. “You’re just trying to butter me up so I’ll feed you.”
I didn’t see any problem with that. Then, since I did see a problem with something else, I said, “Got another question for you. An ethical one.”
“Is this a bookmobile thing or something about Whippy?”
Both, but I couldn’t tell him that. At least not yet. “What if, to fulfill a promise, I had to look into someone’s past, a secret past. Should I or shouldn’t I? What if I found out something I didn’t want to know?” And couldn’t forget.
Rafe’s gaze sharpened. “Minnie, what are you talking about?”
I hesitated. “I can’t tell you. Like I said, this isn’t my secret to tell.” I thought about what I could and couldn’t say. “To right a current wrong, I think I need to find out an old secret that someone wants to stay hidden.”
After a moment, Rafe’s arms went around me, holding me tight. “Whatever it is you’re talking about,” he said, “I know you’ll do the right thing. But you have to make me one promise.”
“What?” I asked, comforted by his warmth, his love.
“That you’ll be careful.”
“Promise,” I said.
And I meant it. At the time anyway.
* * *
* * *
I was constantly making minor tweaks to the bookmobile’s schedule, trying to see what worked best for the people we were hoping to reach and what the staff could sustain long term. In addition to the weekdays, Hunter, Julia, and I had committed to staffing the bookmobile six months of an every-other-Saturday schedule just to see what happened.
“It’s all about the metrics,” I said to Hunter.
He braked to avoid coming up too close behind an SUV towing a boat and said, “Metrics. That’s what people with lots of college degrees call numbers, right?”
I ignored the jibe. “It’s a balancing act to find the sweet spot that lets us serve the highest possible number of people and not work ourselves to the bone.”
“Then just when we find it,” he said, “something changes, and we have to figure it out all over again.”
“Life in a nutshell.” It made me tired if I thought about it too much, so I moved on to thinking about Leah and Whippy. About Whippy’s murder and who his killer might be. And just as Hunter parked us at the first stop of the day, the unused parking lot of a shuttered gas station, I came to an obvious conclusion.
I needed to find out more about the circumstances of Whippy’s murder.
“What do you think?” I murmured as I unlatched Eddie’s door. I didn’t hear or see any indication of cat movement, so I leaned down and peered inside.
He was sitting sphinxlike, staring at me with unblinking eyes.
“Stop,” I said. “You know how that creeps me out.”
Hunter, already setting up the back computer, said, “Is he giving you that look? The one that says you are so stupid, why couldn’t I have adopted someone who was at least half as smart as the average cat?”
“That’s the one.” I reached into the carrier and patted Eddie on the head. Not a single purr. “He’s in a mood today,” I said.
“Maybe it’s the weather.” Hunter pointed at the front windshield.
A cold front had moved in, bringing with it thick low clouds, spatters of rain, and a chill breeze that, if you looked at the thermometer and not the calendar, had you reaching for knit hats and mittens on the way out the door. It was far more like March than May, and no one, but no one, was going to be happy about it.
“The bookmobile is a refuge,” I said. “Which means no weather talk today. It’s wretched and mean and we all know it, but none of us has the power to make it better, so let’s focus on something else, yes?”
“Mrr!”
“Always good to have the Eddie seal of approval.” I nodded. “Now what we need is a diversion topic, something to catch people’s attention and steer them away from”—I glanced outside, my own attention caught by what I could have sworn were snowflakes drifting down, and determinedly averted my eyes—“from any outside unpleasantness. We live Up North, and these things happen. We need to deal with it in a positive way.”
Hunter sat at the back computer and took the mouse out of the drawer. “Who are you trying to convince?”
“Everyone,” I said promptly.
He laughed. “You’re probably right. And I have an idea for a non-weather topic. How about—”
The door opened, and Rene Kinney came up the steps.
I exchanged glances with Hunter. Rene was not the cheeriest of patrons at the best of times, and now we were going to try and keep her from complaining about the weather?
“Good morning, Rene,” I said cheerfully.
She was tall, somewhere in her fifties, with brown hair cut in a straggly way that looked a little like an expensive haircut but more like she cut it herself with a pair of dull scissors. Today, she had on jeans worn at the knees and a coat with fraying knit cuffs and was stuffing one blue glove and one black glove into the coat’s pockets.
“What’s so good about it?” Rene asked.
I kept smiling and tried to think of a reply. Rene was a bookmobile patron, and we were here to help her.
“We’re not dead yet,” Hunter said. “Which is better than a lot of people.”
Still smiling, I said, “Kind of a low bar, but I suppose you have to start somewhere.” I took the stack of books Rene had ordered and gave them to Hunter to check out: nonfiction mostly, woodworking and gardening books, with two Maeve Binchy novels.
Rene shrugged. “Not sure why you have to start at all.”
Literally minded people could certainly make conversation difficult. I was about to give up when Hunter said, “Well, I’d sure rather be here than dead, and I bet Whippy Henika would say the same thing if he could.”
Rene’s face twisted into a grimace. “Henika. Everybody’s saying what a nice guy he was.” She made “nice guy” sound like cursing. “And everybody’s going on and on like it’s the worst thing in the world for him to be murdered.” She puffed out a spiff of air. “For some people, it’s the living that’s hard, not the dying.” And she was gone before Hunter or I could come up with a response.
“Um . . .” Hunter scratched his ear. “Is it just me, or did she sound like someone who might be a danger to herself?”
I’d been thinking the same thing and was also thinking about responsibilities and overreach and duty. And when I was done with all that thinking, I used the twenty-year rule: Twenty years from now, what will I wish I’d done today? “I have a psychologist friend. I’ll talk to her and see what she recommends.”
Hunter nodded, and I went back to thinking.
Why had Rene been so unsympathetic about Whippy’s murder? That was not a normal reaction. She’d sounded almost hateful. Rene often came across cranky, but not to that extent. Could she have had something to do with Whippy’s death?
I watched her battered sedan—primarily silver but with a hood and trunk lid that came from a whole different part of the color wheel—lurch onto the road and realized something else.
Rene was the right age to be Leah’s birth mother.
Chapter 8
When the bookmobile route was over, I took Eddie back home, where he continued to sleep in the carrier even after I opened the door.
“You are so weird,” I said. “Adorable but weird.”
Though his ears twitched at “adorable,” he didn’t move.
“Okay, then.” I got up off my hands and knees. “Rafe and I will be back later. Not sure when, so don’t stay up worrying about us. We’ll be fine. I’m sure of it.”
You’d think that cats, out of the entire animal kingdom, would grasp sarcasm, but either Eddie didn’t get it, or he did and chose not to let on.
Ten minutes later, I posed the question to Rafe. “What do you think?”
“Abouts cats and sarcasm? No idea.”
We were now in his pickup truck driving to a residential construction site. Soon after our discussion of Kurt Wasson, Rafe had snapped his fingers and said, “You know what? I have a buddy who’s building a house out in Wicklow Township. After getting builder estimates, he decided to do most of the work himself.”
I’d hoped the guy was single or had a very patient significant other. The process Rafe had described was how he’d done the renovations on our house. Yes, he’d saved a tremendous amount of money, but it had also taken years. And if you counted basement and attic work, it still wasn’t done.
Rafe had pulled out his phone and started texting. “Anyway,” he’d said to me, hitting the Send button, “my buddy is hiring out the electrical and plumbing, and if I’m right . . .” His phone had gone ping and he’d peered at the message. “And his plumber is Kurt Wasson.”
“You are amazing,” I’d murmured, and given him a kiss. The kiss had led to other interesting things, and all else had faded away.
Now I looked at Rafe and asked, “Who is this buddy that we’re going to meet? Am I supposed to know him? Because at this point I don’t even know his name.”
My beloved launched into a story about his buddy Bob Schroeder that I sort of listened to but sort of didn’t. I’d heard enough Rafe stories to know that all I really had to do was listen at the beginning for the pertinent facts and then pay just enough attention to realize when the story was about to reach its conclusion.
When Rafe stopped talking, I summarized. “Bob is a friend of your buddy Jeff, and you met him when both of you were helping Jeff rip drywall out of his basement after an unfortunate incident with a leaking faucet.”
“If you want to skip what happened when we hauled the old drywall to the landfill, then, yeah, I guess that’s about it.”
“Do we know what Bob does for a living?”
Rafe slowed his truck, turning onto a rutted gravel driveway. “Hasn’t come up.”
It occurred to me, once again, that men and women were not the same. Sometimes it was hard to believe we were even the same species. I opened my mouth, then shut it. What was there to say?
The house in front of us, Bob’s future home, was two stories with a full front porch and an attached garage. The shingles were on, the house wrap installed, and maybe half the gray clapboard had been put in place.
Two pickups were parked in front: one shiny and black, the other white with north lakes plumbing painted on the doors.
Rafe parked behind the white truck, and we climbed out. The theoretical point for the visit was to talk to Kurt about doing a project at our house, and I said, “Did we ever decide what kind of plumbing project we’re thinking about?”
“Thought you knew,” he said as, hand in hand, we stepped onto the wide porch.
The front door was opened by a stocky man in his mid-forties who wasn’t much taller than I was. Rafe said, “Hey, Bob. What’s up?”
They shook hands, and introductions were made as we entered the foyer.
“Kurt’s upstairs,” Bob said. “Go on up. I’m in here fussing with the office built-ins.” He tipped his head to the right.
Rafe’s attention deserted me and went straight in that direction. An active woodworking project was something he had little power to resist. I understood; I was the same way with a bookstore.
“After,” I said, tugging on his hand. “Promise.”
Upstairs, we followed muffled plumbing-type noises and found, in what I assumed would be the future master bathroom, a man wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap sitting on an upturned bucket, pulling a faucet set out of a cardboard box. He looked about forty, Leah’s age, and wore jeans, work boots, and a dark blue long-sleeved T-shirt that buttoned at the neck.
He looked up as we came in. “Niswander, right? Bob said you might stop by. How you doing?”
Kurt Wasson’s voice was deep, like one of those radio guys who did late-night shows for romantic music requests, and as he talked, he put down the faucet and stood. Discounting the thick-soled work boots, he couldn’t have been more than five foot six, which was probably an advantage for a plumber since they often had to fit themselves into small spaces.
Rafe shook his hand. “This is Minnie Hamilton, my fiancée. Our house is about a hundred years old, and we’re thinking about getting some additional plumbing work done.” He nodded at me, and I detected a small smirk.
Hah. As if I couldn’t dream up a construction project at the drop of a hat. “That’s right,” I said. “Rafe is doing the basement finishing work, but plumbing isn’t his thing. We were wondering what it might take to get a utility sink installed next to the washer and dryer.” Ideas were suddenly coming thick and fast. “And it would be great to have a sauna, but we’re not sure where we could fit one in. And do you install water conditioners?”
“Hang on there, Tex.” Rafe put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s not get carried away.”
“Carried Away” was my middle name, but I nodded. “Sure. We can start with the utility sink.”
Kurt asked Rafe a few questions, then said, “That’s not a very big job. Even if you approved a quote, it’s going to be low on the priority list for my boss. Can’t promise it’ll get done before the end of the summer. We’re doing those new condos in Chilson, and they’re taking longer than anyone figured.”
