Софи Келли - A Midwinter's Tail

I shook my head and tucked my hair back behind one ear. “Not really,” I said. “You’re many things, Burtis, but petty isn’t one of them.”

“I could say the same thing about you, Kathleen,” he said. He stretched and reached for his Minnesota Wild cap on the counter beside his plate.

“You and the detective come at things from two different ways. He follows the evidence.” Burtis put a hand on his chest. “It seems to me you follow this.”

He climbed down off his stool. “I get that you don’t want anything to get in the way of what you have with Detective Gordon. I wouldn’t take kindly to anyone getting between Lita and me.” He pulled on his cap. “You know, Kathleen. If that boy loves you—and a person only has to look at him when you’re around to know he does—he isn’t going to want you to stop being who you are.” He gestured at our plates. “Breakfast is on me.”

“Thank you,” I said. I’d said I wasn’t going to get involved and I meant it, but there was one question I still had to ask.

I put out my hand as Burtis moved past me and touched his arm. He turned to look at me. “Do you know why someone would want to kill your ex-wife?” I asked.

His gaze narrowed. “That’s the problem, Kathleen,” he said. “I don’t.”

7

Ruby’s truck was just pulling into the parking lot when I got to the library. I parked beside her and got out of my truck. “Good morning,” I said.

Ruby smiled. “Hey, Kathleen, isn’t it a beautiful day?”

The clouds were already retreating up the hill. The glimpses of sky I could see were blue, and even though it was cold, my left wrist told me there wasn’t going to be any snow for a while.

I smiled back at her. “Yes, it is,” I said. I gestured to the boxes on the front seat and the floor of the passenger side of the truck. “Give me something to carry.”

She slid a lidded banker’s box across the seat and handed it out to me. Then she grabbed another box and her overflowing canvas tote bag.

We headed for the front door. I was happy to see that Harry had been by and spread more sand in the parking lot.

I unlocked the front doors and disarmed the alarm system. Ruby set the carton she’d been carrying on the checkout desk and leaned her bag beside it. “I have one more box,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She was wearing a neon green quilted jacket with a red-and-white stocking cap. Her sherbet-colored hair poked out in two pigtails from under the edge of the knitted hat. Just looking at Ruby made me smile.

Once she came back with the last box of supplies, I relocked the main doors. I put my things in my office, started the coffee in the staff room for myself—and Susan, assuming she wasn’t still on her latest green smoothie kick—and set some water to boil so I could make Ruby some tea. Then I went back downstairs.

Ruby was already in the conference room setting up. Harry had put up three long tables in the inverted U shape Ruby had asked for, and she was already unpacking her boxes.

“What do you need?” I asked

Ruby looked around as she rolled up the sleeves of her denim shirt. “Mary said you have a portable corkboard somewhere that maybe I could use. It’s not a big deal if you’re using it somewhere else.”

“It’s in the closet next door,” I said. I pulled my keys out of the pocket of my sweater. “I’ll go get it for you.”

I opened the smaller meeting room, retrieved the bulletin board and wheeled it in to Ruby. Then I went upstairs. The coffee was ready, so I poured myself a cup and then made tea for Ruby. I’d brought a few of the tea bags I kept at home for Maggie—and my mother when she visited.

Ruby smiled when I handed her the tea. “Thank you, Kathleen,” she said, bending her head over the cup. “I was so caught up in loading the truck this morning I ended up leaving my tea on the table and I’d only had about half of it.”

I looked at the piles of paper, cardboard and fabric she’d arranged on the table in front of her. “This looks like it’s going to be fun.” I fingered a piece of translucent blue paper shot with what looked like some kind of plant fibers. “What is this?”

“Japanese paper,” she said, bending down to take what looked to me like her own handmade paper out of the box at her feet. “It reminds me of the river, late in the summer.”

“I wish I could stay for the workshop,” I said, leaning against one of the tables with my coffee.

“Bookmaking isn’t that complicated,” Ruby said. “I could teach you how to make a really simple journal sometime.” She held up a sheet of thick, creamy paper flecked with gold. “I could teach you how to make paper, for that matter.”

“Really?” I said.

She shrugged. “Sure. Take a look at your schedule and maybe we could do it some Saturday after Christmas.” She gave me a sly smile. “That’s assuming all your Saturdays aren’t taken up by a certain detective.”

I was happy to see the genuine warmth in her smile. Ruby and Marcus had been at odds after her mentor, Agatha Shepherd, was murdered last winter. It had taken some time for them to work their way back to a cordial relationship, but they had.

“I think Marcus is going to be playing hockey pretty much every Saturday between now and Winterfest,” I said. “They want to win this year.”

The police/fire department team had lost big-time to the boys’ high school hockey team in last year’s charity hockey game. Marcus and his teammates were—not surprisingly—very competitive. Even though the game had just been for fun, he didn’t like being on the losing side. He didn’t like losing period, I’d learned, when I bested him at the Puck Shoot, one of the games set up down by the marina during the February winter celebration.

Ruby pushed back the sleeves of the tie-dyed tee she was wearing under her denim shirt. “Is it sexist of me to say it’s a guy thing?”

“Um, yes,” I said, smiling at her over the top of my cup. “Hope Lind is coaching them this year.”

Ruby’s eyes widened. “No way!”

“Yes way,” I said. “Hope played hockey in high school and in college. She’s had the guys doing dry land training drills for a month. And she picked Eddie’s brain last time he was here.”

Ruby laughed and held her free hand up level with her ear. “Detective Lind is only about this high.”

She was exaggerating a little.

“She can skate faster than all of the guys,” I said, grinning back at her. “Forward and backward. She’s working them hard. I had to rub Tiger Balm on Marcus’s shoulders twice last week.”

“I’m sure that was a hardship,” Ruby teased, raising an eyebrow at me.

“No comment,” I said, ducking my head over my coffee.

“Who’s going to be their goalie?” she asked, straightening a stack of heavy cardboard that was about to tip sideways on the table.

“Brady Chapman.”

Ruby’s expression changed and she shook her head. “Do they know yet what happened to his mother? That was so awful.”

“I’m not sure,” I hedged.

“The police pretty much took Olivia’s kitchen apart yesterday. And now she’s telling everyone they didn’t find anything.” Ruby folded one arm across her chest. “I feel bad for Brady, though,” she said. “We were just a year apart in school and I think it was hard for him, not having a mother around.” She blew out a breath. “And then when she finally does come back, the last words he has with her are angry ones.”

I frowned. “You saw them fighting?” I’d almost said, “Too.”

Ruby nodded. “The other night at the fundraiser. Brady and Dana were off to the side in the wings having a pretty animated discussion about something. Half an hour later she was dead. I can’t imagine how he must feel.”