Лори Касс - Gone With The Whisker

“So someone . . .” I didn’t want to finish the sentence.

“Yes.” Hal nodded. “Someone picked up that air conditioner and intentionally pushed it out the window. The contractor said he’d unlocked the back door this morning as he’d hoped for an early delivery of plumbing fixtures, which did not happen.” He tapped the notebook with his pen. “Do you often walk past this building?”

Predictable Minnie. “This summer, when I’m at the library, I’ve walked this way almost every day, right after lunch. I like to see the construction.”

He reopened the notebook and made new notes. “And the bookmobile schedule is posted on the library’s website, correct?”

“Well, sure.” Even to my own ears, I sounded defensive. “Why wouldn’t we?”

Hal tucked his notebook into his shirt pocket. “Ms. Hamilton, it seems clear that this was a direct attempt on your life. I urge you to take steps to ensure your safety.”

I looked at the heap of metal. Looked at him. “What do you suggest, exactly? Hide out for the rest of my life?”

“You should tell everyone who cares about you. The more people who know, the safer you’ll be.”

But I didn’t see it that way. “The more people I tell, the faster word will spread and whoever did this will hear about it and try even harder to . . . to do whatever.”

“At least tell Mr. Niswander,” he said.

I wavered on that one. “I’ll think about it.”

And I did. Over and over. Most of me shrank from the idea, but by the end of the day I’d decided Hal was right, that I should tell Rafe. If our positions had been reversed, I’d certainly want to know. And I’d be furious if he didn’t tell me.

“You win, Detective,” I said out loud to an invisible Hal Inwood as I left the library that evening. “I’ll tell Rafe tonight.”

Since I was mostly thinking about how to frame the story, my feet went in the same direction they always did and I ended up walking past the old hotel. By now someone had been by to clear away the scattered bits of former air conditioner. The only thing indicating I’d almost died was a hand-size chip out of the sidewalk.

Dragging my toe over the chip, I eyed the windows—all now closed—and wondered about the whos and whys.

Was I really a target?

Who would do such a thing?

If so, why?

I kicked away a tiny piece of former sidewalk and then saw I’d managed to get my shoe covered with concrete dust. “Bad as being at the house,” I muttered. “Construction can be murder.” The common phrase caught at me, and I wished I hadn’t said it out loud. Or even thought it. But suddenly, the jumble of ideas circling around in my brain coalesced into something new.

My feet started moving, then moved faster and faster. Because what I suddenly needed, what I wanted more than anything else in the world, was to talk to Rafe.

* * *

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said.

“In what way?” Rafe unscrewed the cap from a water bottle and offered it to me. “Can’t believe we’re being so proactive?” he asked. “Can’t believe we abandoned our plans to paint the upstairs bathroom? Or you can’t believe we’re doing something so incredibly cool?”

I squinted at him. “How is sitting in your truck doing nothing a cool thing?”

“Clearly, you have no idea what’s cool and what isn’t.”

This was true, and had always been. My career choice alone made that obvious, but there was also significant backup evidence: my preferred entertainment (reading), preferred beverage (lemonade made by my aunt), and preferred method of travel (tie between a bookmobile and walking).

“Let me guess,” I said. “You are the arbiter of coolness in Chilson.”

“No, but I’m good friends with who is. And so are you.”

Ah. Kristen. He was right, she was very cool. “Should I text her and ask her to rate our current activity?”

“No, no,” Rafe said, yawning. “I’m confident she’d agree with me.”

I made a mental note to ask next time I saw her. But I hadn’t seen much of her this summer due to her restaurant’s surging success, and I wasn’t sure I’d remember to ask in September, when things would slow down. Then again, Rafe was probably counting on that, so I pulled out my phone and added a reminder to my calendar.

“Are you really texting Kristen?” Rafe asked, leaning over.

“Nope.” I saved the reminder and tucked the phone away. “Do you really think we’re going to learn anything doing this?”

Two hours earlier, after I’d gone back to the houseboat, given Eddie a snuggle and a treat, and read on the whiteboard that Kate was working until close at Benton’s and would be going out afterward to eat at Fat Boys with the store’s staff, I’d headed up to the house and told Rafe the air conditioner story. And how my dusty toe had led me to, if not direct dot connection, the coalescing of old facts into new arrangements. Pink bumper stickers. Courtney Drew. Home health aide. Access to medications. Nicole’s back pain.

He’d hugged me tight, then called Ash. “Hey, buddy. I hear Minnie almost got squished by an AC unit.”

I started to sputter indignantly, saying that if he didn’t believe me he could just say so instead of calling the cops, but he rolled his eyes and slung his free arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. “Shh,” he whispered, and said into the phone, “What’s the deal?”

Due to having one ear against Rafe’s chest and the other ear covered by his arm, I couldn’t hear Ash, and heard Rafe’s voice mostly as a deep rumbling vibration. What I could hear, though, was along the lines of “Any idea who did it?” and “Any chance of catching whoever it was?” and “Don’t worry. I’ll keep her safe.”

I burrowed deeper into his warmth. Not that I needed to be any warmer, really, but being so close to him felt good. Discounting the winter months I spent with Aunt Frances, I’d lived more or less on my own since college. I’d grown accustomed to it. Had even enjoyed the solitude and the time spent learning to be myself. But now it seemed I was entering another phase in my life, one including that I would, every so often, be taken care of by a man named Rafe Niswander.

And it was turning out that I didn’t mind the feeling. As long as he didn’t get too carried away.

“Safe,” I’d murmured into Rafe’s shoulder. “You really think you can do that?”

“Yes.” He’d kissed the top of my head and I’d closed my eyes against a rush of emotions that made my throat swell.

“It’d be easier, though,” he’d added, “if you’d be okay with being encased from head to toe with bubble wrap.”

I hadn’t been, of course, and now the two of us were whiling away the evening sitting in his truck and watching the front door of an apartment building from half a block away. More specifically, the apartment building where Courtney Drew lived.

We’d been parked on the street outside Chilson’s take-out Chinese restaurant for more than an hour, watching cars drive past, watching cars pull into the building’s parking lot, watching people walk up to the building, watching people walk out of the building. It was remarkably boring.

“Let’s do a list,” I said.

Rafe squinted at me. “A bucket list, you mean? Number one is all the pro football fields in the country. We’d start with the current ones, but to do it right, we’d need to visit the sites of the previous fields, too. And while we’re at it, we should visit all the major league baseball fields and hockey arenas. Maybe that’s where we’d start, with the original six national hockey league teams. Yeah, I like that a lot.”

He would go on for hours if I didn’t stop him, so when he took a breath, I cut in. “A list of murder suspects.”