Kelly Sofie - Curiosity Thrilled The Cat

Something was up. I headed down the stairs. “Excuse me,” I called, walking quickly over to them. “Are you setting up staging?”

The man spreading out the tarp turned at the sound of my voice. I recognized him as Eddie, a cousin I wasn’t sure how many times removed, of Abigail’s. He was a big, barrel-chested man with a great, booming laugh, but as Abigail had observed wryly, he wasn’t very “work brittle.”

“Yes, ma’am, we are settin’ up stagin’,” Eddie said. “We brought this ’cause we didn’t know if we could get into the storage room to get the other stagin’.”

The other worker set the pieces he’d carried down on the tarpaulin. I knew from watching Eddie work, or, more correctly, not work, who’d be assembling that staging.

“What’s the staging for?” I asked.

“Well, we need to reach something up to the ceilin’ and the ladder don’t go that high.”

Talking to Eddie could be maddeningly slow. I wasn’t sure if he doled out information so slowly just because he truly was literal-minded or whether he secretly enjoyed playing people.

I blew out a breath and rubbed the knot that was forming between my shoulders. “Why do you need to reach the ceiling?” I asked.

Eddie scratched his stubbled chin. His hands were huge. One of them could have covered my entire head. “Well, ma’am, the ceilin’s where that big, old plaster medallion goes.”

Plaster medallion?

I looked up. The front entry of the library ran up two floors. I could see where a ceiling medallion could fit, but I hadn’t signed anything to order one and it wasn’t part of the original renovation plans.

The knot at the base of my neck tightened.

“Where’s your boss, Eddie?” I asked.

He scratched his ear and frowned. “Well, I can’t exactly say,” he said. I noticed he hadn’t said he didn’t know.

His cell was tucked in his T-shirt pocket. “Give me your phone,” I said. I knew if I called from the library phone Will Redfern wouldn’t answer.

Eddie hesitated. “This is a work phone,” he said.

“Good.” I grabbed the cell from his pocket and flipped it open. “Because this is a work conversation.” I stepped away from Eddie and punched in Will’s number. He answered on the third ring. “Hey, Eddie boy,” he said, all macho good humor.

“Hello, Will,” I said. “It’s Kathleen Paulson. Eddie very kindly let me use his phone.” I looked back over my shoulder and smiled at Eddie, who looked as if he were still trying to figure out how I’d managed to get his cell.

There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Will, are you still there?” I said.

“Umm, yes, Miss Paulson, I’m here. What can I do for you?”

“According to Eddie there’s a ceiling medallion to be installed in the front entry of the library.”

“That’s right.”

Like Eddie, Will could stonewall. “There were no ceiling medallions on the renovation plan.” I was certain of that. I’d gone over the list of renovations, as well as the actual plan, before the work started. And I knew how to read a floor plan.

“Well, you see, the medallion is from before.”

“Before what?” I asked, struggling to keep the growing aggravation out of my voice.

“Before you got here,” Will said. “Roof leaked, right after Thanksgiving last year.”

“I know,” I said.

“Caused quite a bit of damage to the medallion that was up there—part of it came down. Made a helluva mess. So the boys took the whole thing down and we sent it away to be repaired. No one around here can do that fine work. Took a long time to get it back.”

What didn’t, if Will were involved? I cleared my throat. “Thanks for explaining,” I said. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No problem,” Will said. He was full of that good-humored machismo again. “When you’re from away, how could you know what happened last year?”

From away. It wasn’t the first time Will had pointed that out. The words stung and I suspected sometimes they were meant to. Did the person who had used me to lure Easton to the library set me up because I was from away?

“Tell the boys I’ll be over there shortly,” Will said, and hung up.

I closed the phone and handed it back to Eddie.

“That wasn’t a long-distance call, was it?” he asked suspiciously. “You weren’t callin’ Taiwan, were you?”

“Not unless your boss was in Taiwan,” I said with a smile. “He said to tell you he’ll be here soon.”

I started for the stairs. “Call me when Will Redfern gets here, please, Mary,” I said as I passed the desk.

“Will do,” she said.

I closed the workroom door, slumped against it and threw back my head in a silent, head-shaking scream. I opened my eyes to find Abigail watching me with amusement.

“Feel better?” she asked. She was sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor.

I thought for a moment. “Actually, yes,” I said. I also felt more than a little embarrassed.

“Let me guess.” She made a show of closing her eyes and pressing her fingertips to her temples. “I’m getting an image,” she said in a singsong voice. “I see workmen. I see wood and tools. But I don’t see any work being done. I see . . . I see . . .” She opened her eyes and dropped her hands. “Let me guess: You were talking to Will Redfern.”

“Very good.”

Abigail grinned and set four paperback books into the open box in front of her. “It was an easy guess,” she said. “Will hasn’t exactly made the renovations run smoothly—especially lately.” She closed the flaps of the carton, fastening them down with a strip of clear tape. There were a dozen boxes behind her, all labeled in Abigail’s slanted printing: MYSTERY, MYSTERY, ROMANCE, ROMANCE, ROMANCE, FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION. There were more, but I couldn’t see the writing on all of them.

“Maybe my expectations were too high,” I said with a sigh. “I’m used to a big city where things go at double speed.” I snapped my fingers rapidly several times.

Abigail shook her head. “Don’t let Will pull that small-town slash country-boy routine on you. No, we’re not Boston, but we do know how to do a job properly and on time.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “You’re doing a great job, by the way.” I gestured at the stacked boxes. “Is there anything you need?”

She sat back on her heels and looked around. “More boxes would be a help.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “There’s maybe a dozen flattened behind the door of the lunchroom.”

“Then I’m good,” Abigail said.

I left her sorting books and went back downstairs. Will’s workmen had the first lift of staging assembled. Mary was checking someone out at the new desk. Jason was pushing a cart full of books over to the shelves.

For the moment, everything was running the way it was supposed to.

I went back to my office, turned on my computer and pulled up the budget spreadsheets. I spent the next hour going over the numbers, stopping only once to give Mary the key to the back loading dock for Larry, so he could bring in his supplies. I didn’t realize how dark the sky had gotten until I finished the last column of numbers, leaned back in my chair and swung around to look outside. Heavy gray clouds seemed to be pressing on the lake. Spits of rain began hitting the window. Harry was a lot more accurate a forecaster than the weatherman on this morning’s news.

The rain was beating steadily on the window now. I got up to turn on the overhead light and put paper in the printer.

The last copy of the budget was coming out of the printer when Larry knocked on my open door. “Sorry to bother you, Kathleen,” he said. “But it looks like you’ve got a leak in the computer room.”