Лори Касс - Booking The Crook

“Land Aprelle?” I asked. But it had to be. There weren’t many men named Land wandering around the world. For decades he’d been a contractor, putting up houses and pole barns and anything else people hired him to build. Now that he was in his sixties and had had a knee and a shoulder replacement, he’d shifted to handyman and caretaking services. He was a longtime library patron and had happily taken advantage of the bookmobile the first week it was on the road. People who used the library and bookmobile weren’t guaranteed to be upright and honest citizens, but in my mind the odds were better.

“Rowan hired him to do chores after I started working downstate,” Neil said. “She wanted me to have real weekends, not weekends working on the house. She said we could afford it, that it would give us more time together, that—”

He stopped. Swallowed. “If I hadn’t taken that job, I would have been home. She never would have hired him. She wouldn’t be . . .” His voice trailed off and a vast silence filled the booth.

My heart ached for him. I wanted to give him a hug, or at least hold his hand, but we were barely more than acquaintances and I didn’t want to weird him out. “I’m so sorry,” I said softly, because there wasn’t much else I could do.

“Thanks,” he said. “Rowan really liked you. Both of you,” he said, finally looking up at us. “She didn’t like everyone, but she liked you two.”

“And I liked her. Her sense of humor was just like my dad’s.” I swung around to face Pam. “And yours, too, come to think of it.”

Pam laughed. “So that’s why the three of us got along so well. A warped worldview.”

“Lots of folks didn’t get when she was making a joke,” Neil said. “She got on the wrong side of people for that.”

The back of my neck tingled. “Anyone in particular?”

“Besides half of her own family?” Neil almost smiled, then stared off into space. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “Hugh Novak couldn’t stand her. Hated everything she stood for and believed in, politically speaking.” His face hardened. “I wonder where he was that day.”

Mike showed up with our food, and as we ate, we talked of other things. As soon as the sandwiches were gone, Neil left and I moved around to the other side of the booth. “I don’t see Land Aprelle as a killer,” I said.

“Me, either.” Pam picked at her potato chips. “Who’s Hugh Novak?”

I knew the name, but couldn’t summon a memory of what he looked like. “If I remember right, he’s from Chilson. An insurance adjuster, but I hear he’s getting into developing real estate.”

Pam looked in the direction Neil had gone. “It’s weird knowing someone who was murdered.”

It certainly was. “I don’t think Neil has any idea who killed Rowan,” I said. “Do you?”

Pam shook her head, but in agreement. “He just wants her killer found.”

It was what we all wanted. And I was going to do everything I could to make it happen.

• • •

When I got back to the library, I went straight to my office. I sat down, fired up my computer, strong-mindedly avoided looking at my e-mail in-box, and focused completely on updating the bookmobile policy.

After ten years in the workforce, I’d come to the conclusion that there were two types of tasks. The kind that took longer than you expected and the kind that didn’t take nearly as long as you expected. Tasks that took exactly as long as you anticipated were as rare as a pair of my pants that didn’t have any Eddie hair.

As it turned out, revising the bookmobile policy took only a couple of hours as opposed to the full day I’d anticipated. “Maybe I’m getting better at this,” I said happily as I e-mailed it off to Graydon. For half a second, I toyed with the idea of diving straight into checklists and core competencies, but decided after two solid hours of sitting that what I needed was to stand up for a few minutes.

I sent a group text to all the staff who were working that I was about to brew a fresh pot of coffee—half caffeine in light of the fact that it was three in the afternoon—and headed to the break room. Three minutes later, Holly came in, followed by Josh, Kelsey, and two library patrons, Stewart Funston and the elderly Mr. Goodwin, who’d repeatedly told me to call him Lloyd.

Today I cheated and said a blanket hello to everyone. First to the coffeepot was Stewart. “Just so you know,” I said, “it’s half caffeine and half decaf.”

He smiled. “Exactly what I wanted. How did you guess?”

Stewart was one of our library regulars. Just shy of six feet tall and on the edge between sturdy and stocky, and with graying brown hair in dire need of a haircut, he was in his late forties and worked for a local manufacturer designing electronic doohickeys of some sort. He telecommuted from home and from the library on a regular basis. I’d once asked him for details on what, exactly, it was that he designed, but then he’d told me and at the end I was no wiser than I’d been before the explanation started.

“Working today?” Josh asked Stewart.

Feeling like a mother robin putting worms into upturned baby bird beaks, I poured coffee into the mugs held out in front of me.

“The plant isn’t open,” he said. “But here’s the problem when you can telecommute; there’s never a time when you can’t work.”

We all laughed. Stewart was a personable guy, and he’d also been an early supporter of the bookmobile, so I was automatically inclined to like him. I would always remember the people who’d spoken up back when I was trying to convince the library board that a bookmobile was needed in an age of digital everything.

“Thanks for brewing an afternoon pot, Minnie.” He set his mug on the table and reached for his wallet. “For the fund,” he said, pulling out a five-dollar bill.

I stuffed it into the mug Holly’s kids had decorated with stickers and glitter that tended to get on everything within a five-foot radius. “Thanks, Stewart. We really appreciate it.”

“Can’t have my library staff going without coffee,” he said. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Kelsey made a face at her mug. “You call this stuff coffee?”

“Better than the sludge you make,” Josh said. “Do you even care that no one else drinks the pots you make?”

“You can always add water,” Kelsey said.

It was an old argument and winning was impossible due to the subjective nature of the topic. In spite of the no-win reality, it felt like both Kelsey and Josh were gearing up for another round. I tried to think fast for a less divisive topic—politics? religion?—but Holly spoke first.

“Stewart, how is your family doing?” she asked. “It was all so sad. I hear there’s going to be a memorial service in summer.”

“Late May,” he said. “Neil wants to wait until the kids are done with school, but not wait so long that hotel rooms will be expensive for the people who have to travel.”

“You’re related to the Bennethums?” I asked. Just when I thought I was used to running across connections in a small town, up popped a family tie that surprised me.

Stewart sighed. “Rowan and I were first cousins. Her dad and my mom are siblings. She was the first grandchild, but I was the first grandson, the first one born to carry on the name,” he said, sounding proud.

For some reason, I’d never once considered that Rowan’s parents would still be alive, but I should have. Rowan was in her late forties, so her parents were likely around seventy, an age that used to sound ancient to me, but I now knew numerous people in their eighties who put my energy and activity level to shame, so I’d revised seventy in my head as nothing to fear.