Лори Касс - Booking The Crook

“Know what?” This time my question came out a little loud. “If you don’t tell me now, I’ll keep bugging you until you do, so you might as well save us both some serious time and energy and talk.”

“Don’t tell Holly I told, okay?”

I kept my eye roll internal. Sometimes those two acted more like sister and brother than coworkers. “Promise.”

“When you’ve been out on bookmobile runs, Trent has been in here asking questions. He’s been talking to staff, members of the Friends of the Library, people in the reading room. Everybody.”

It was a little weird, but maybe he was just trying to learn about the library, about the community, about the wants, needs, and desires of the staff. If you looked at it that way, Trent’s actions were commendable, and I told Josh so.

“Yeah? Would you say that if almost all his questions were about the bookmobile?”

“About . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t, really.

“You heard me. Our bookmobile.” He sounded angry, but I knew he wasn’t mad at me. “It doesn’t sound good.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Trent’s new. He’s asking questions to understand, that’s all.”

But Josh wasn’t reassured, and neither was I.

• • •

“He said what ?”

On the computer screen, Kristen’s eyes went wide. My best friend spent April through October in Chilson, as owner and manager of Three Seasons, one of the best restaurants in the region, but in November she lit out for Key West, where she divided her time between lying in a hammock and tending bar. Well, that used to be her schedule. This winter she’d flown up to New York City a few times for the same reason her Key West days had been occasionally interrupted, a reason otherwise known as Scruffy Gronkowski.

The ironic label of Scruffy had been bestowed upon him in his clean-cut childhood by his father, the well-known Manhattan-based television chef Trock Farrand (not his real name). The expansive and larger-than-life Trock owned a summer place near Chilson, and due to an odd set of circumstances, we’d become good friends. A spin-off of this was the engagement of his son and my best friend, and every time Trock and I got together, we congratulated ourselves on the match. Not that we’d really done anything, but that didn’t seem to matter when Trock got on a roll.

“Rafe said,” I repeated, “that I need to make a decision about kitchen cabinet hardware.”

Kristen shook her head in disgust, flipping her long blond ponytail from side to side. “The unmitigated gall! He knows not what he asks. He cannot.”

He did actually, and Kristen knew that he knew one of my secrets, which was that I had an abject fear of hardware stores. There were many things in them that I didn’t understand, and I always felt small, uncertain, and inadequate when hardware store guys—who always seemed to be judging me—asked if I had everything I needed. Rafe said my parents had woefully neglected to provide me with a basic life skill, and my counterargument that I’d often shopped at home improvement centers carried no weight with him whatsoever. “Apples and oranges, Minnie,” he’d said. “Maybe even apples and car tires.”

“I can’t put him off much longer,” I told Kristen now.

“You might enjoy it,” she said.

“Not the point.” I sighed, and she peered at me through the miles of electronic connectivity.

“What’s wrong? And don’t say it’s the idea of walking into hardware land. You don’t really care about that. What’s up? Is it your new library director, what’s-his-name? Talk, Minnie Hamilton.”

Sometimes having a best friend you’d known since childhood and who understood the motivations behind every twitch in your face had its drawbacks. “Can I say I don’t want to talk about it?”

“You can, but it won’t get you anywhere. Spill.”

I made one last effort. “We’re supposed to be talking about your wedding. Making plans and . . . stuff. We need to figure out what weekend you’re going to come up here, because some decisions need to be made sooner rather than later and—”

Kristen leaned forward, her face filling my screen in an alarming manner. “Talk!” she ordered.

Since I was left with little choice, I talked.

I told her about finding Rowan in the snow, about doing CPR and calling 911, about the ambulance showing up, about the shared glances of the EMTs who took over from Julia and me, and about watching the ambulance’s taillights fading from view as they took Rowan away.

“There’s something else.” Kristen’s voice was gentle, but I knew if I didn’t tell her everything, she would keep at me until I did. “Yeah.” I sighed. “Rowan was murdered.”

“She . . . what?”

“Murdered,” I repeated. “Hal Inwood told me. She was poisoned. Given something that triggered her heart condition, a medication she hadn’t been prescribed and wasn’t in her house.”

Instead of murmuring a familiar platitude, Kristen said nothing. I was grateful for her noncomfort, which from her was more soothing than an “I’m so sorry, but there was nothing you could have done.” I had Aunt Frances for that; what I needed from Kristen was something exceedingly different.

“That stinks,” she said.

I almost smiled at the immensity of her understatement, but I knew she was doing her best. There were no appropriate responses to this kind of situation. “Yeah. Big time.”

“Do they know who killed her?”

“No.” I replayed the conversation with the detective in my head. “They’re just starting the investigation.”

“What are you doing to help?”

“I told Hal everything I could remember,” I said. “Other than that, there’s not much I can do.”

Kristen scoffed. “Says the woman who’s helped the cops more than once. I assume they’re still understaffed? I assume they’re overworked, even in January when only insane people live in Chilson?”

“Hard as it is for you to believe, some people like winter.”

She passed over that comment. “No matter what your aunt Frances or I or anyone else says, you’re going to feel guilty about Rowan’s death. That if you’d shown up earlier, she might have recovered. Which, from what you’ve said, is ridiculous, but I know how your brain works. To keep yourself from drowning in guilt and self-loathing, you need to help find the killer. So, like I said, what are you doing?”

“Hal and Ash are professional law enforcement officers,” I said. “The last thing they need is for me to butt into an official police investigation.” Before she could launch into a recitation of the times I had, in fact, helped with a police investigation, I firmly turned the conversation to wedding planning.

After a few attempts to circle the conversation back to murder, Kristen rolled her eyes, sighed heavily, and let me talk about photographers. When the last item on my list of wedding plans had been crossed off, I said, “Sorry, I really have to get going. Things to do and places to go,” and before she could point out how little there was to do in Chilson during winter, I gave her a cheery wave and closed down the call.

I felt a little bad about cutting her off, but not that bad. Resisting Kristen’s will was exhausting even when she was almost two thousand miles away. If I got exhausted, I’d be far more likely to get sick, and getting sick was nowhere in my future plans since I had no alternative driver for the bookmobile.

Every so often I tried to talk Julia into taking a course to get a commercial driver’s license, but to date, she’d resisted. Though the state didn’t require a CDL to drive a vehicle the size of the bookmobile, the library’s policy did require one. I’d added it myself, partly to placate my then-boss, and partly because I thought it was a good idea. Which it was, but the difficulty of finding a backup driver hadn’t been one of my considerations, and it probably should have been.