Лори Касс - Borrowed Crime

I would have bet money—and lots of it—that Roger wouldn’t have worn that feminine hat unless he’d been in danger of having frostbite take his ears off.

Then a flash of memory came back to me: Roger giving Eddie one last scratch, taking a couple of steps, then stopping and saying, “Almost forgot.” Had it been the hat? Had he been taking it out of his pocket so he could tell his wife he’d kept his promise to her and worn it out in the cold?

The bright design would have been visible to anyone with a scoped rifle.

A unique design made especially for Denise.

Had Denise been the killer’s real target?

I dug through my purse and found the business card Ash Wolverson had given me. “Hi. Minnie Hamilton here. Are you at the office? Because I have something you might want to hear.”

Chapter 8

Half an hour later, I was sitting in what I was coming to think of as My Chair. I even knew to avoid catching my pant leg in the tiny crack on its front right edge. But if I was going to keep spending so much time in here, something needed to be done about the ceiling tiles. Even if those stains had been from something as completely innocuous as a roof leak, they weren’t at all appealing. In some areas—right by the door, for instance—the pattern was downright scary.

Detective Inwood, tall and skinny like the letter I , walked in, followed closely by Ash. Deputy Wolverson, not at all shaped like the letter I , was in a tidy uniform of dark brown shirt and lighter brown dress pants that exactly matched his tie. The detective, with evidence of morning coffee on his white shirt and what might have been mustard stains on his gray pants, bore more resemblance to the ceiling tiles.

“Something amusing, Ms. Hamilton?” Detective Inwood asked, sitting in the chair directly across from me. Ash, who was being as quiet as a detective in training should probably be, sat to the detective’s right.

I brushed the back of my hand across my face, getting rid of the smile. “Just trying to be pleasant, Detective.” I looked at him brightly. “How was your day?”

He sat back, crossed one of his legs over the other, and clasped his hands around his raised knee. “The usual mix of miscreants and troublemakers. How about you?”

Over in Ash’s direction, I sensed a small movement that might have been a smirk, but I kept my gaze focused on Inwood. “I convinced a nine-year-old boy that reading wasn’t a complete waste of time and might even be fun, given the right book.”

The detective smiled. “Then I think you had a much more productive day than I did.”

For a moment I considered what the daily life of a law-enforcement officer must be like. Putting bad people in jail had to be rewarding, but, after a while, it must feel like most of the people in the world are, well, bad. Coworkers and family members would be the only ones you could assume were on the side of the angels, and on dark days, maybe not all of them.

I felt an unexpected wave of sympathy for the two men. “If there’s an opening at the library, I’ll let you know.”

They shared a glance, which I interpreted as a mutual expression of Is she insane? , and my sympathy dried up.

“Let me tell you what I found,” I said in an exquisitely polite tone. From there I launched into the Tale of the Hat, starring Eddie and the bookmobile, costarring me, and featuring the supporting character of the bereaved widow.

“So, I’m thinking that maybe it was really a murder attempt,” I concluded. “And that Denise was the real target.”

The detective released his hands from around his knee and reclasped them. “The hat is in the possession of Mrs. Slade?”

I nodded. Maybe it was evidence, and maybe I should have told her to take it to the police, but after seeing her put it against her cheek like that, there was no way I’d suggest such a thing.

Detective Inwood made a noise that wasn’t quite a grunt. “And where at the convenience store did your . . . cat find the . . . hat?”

I studied him, but he didn’t appear to be laughing, even on the inside. Then again, if anyone could conceal laughter, it had to be the man sitting in front of me. “Just past the northeast corner.”

“Hmm.” The detective squinted at the ceiling tiles. He had to be looking straight at the stains, and I wondered what pattern he saw. Probably not the fire-breathing dragon with the big talons that I kept seeing, but you never knew.

“Wolverson,” Inwood finally said, “why don’t you drive out there? When you come back, you can let me know why you didn’t find that hat on Saturday.” He gave Ash a straight look that made me sit back flat in my chair.

“There was a lot of snow,” I said. “Anyone could have missed it.”

The detective’s gaze slashed at me. “The average person, yes. But what would you say about a deputy who is training to be a detective? You’d say that if the snow was six inches deep, if it was sixty inches deep, he shouldn’t have missed it.” Detective Inwood stood and almost shouted right Ash’s face. “And you’d be right!”

He banged the table with his fist, glared at both of us, and stomped out. I winced in anticipation of the door being slammed, but he shut it in a surprisingly gentle fashion.

I looked at Ash. “Sorry about that,” I said. “If I’d known . . .”

He shook his head. “You did the right thing. I should have found the hat the other day, no matter what.”

“Well, I’m still sorry. He didn’t have to yell at you like that.”

Ash shrugged. “It’s just Hal. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

Which made no sense to me, but whatever. I stood, made good-bye noises, and started to leave.

“Hey, Minnie?” Ash asked.

When I stopped and turned back to face him, he started to say something, then stopped. Started again. “Thanks for bringing the hat.” He grinned, revealing his extreme good looks once again. “Even if it did get me in trouble.”

I smiled back. “Anytime.”

* * *

That night, I told Aunt Frances about the cat, the hat, and the detective. The phrase didn’t quite scan, but I couldn’t think of a rhyming word that would fit Detective Inwood. Brat? Drat? Mat?

“So you think Denise was really the target?” Aunt Frances asked. “That it really was murder?”

I didn’t want it to be. Though tragic accidents are a hard thing to make sense of, at least you could do your best to make sure they didn’t happen again. But murder? An uncomfortable prickle went up the back of my neck. I shivered, which made the cat on my lap twist his head around to look up at me.

“Sorry about that,” I murmured, scratching the tip of Eddie’s nose.

Murder made everything different. In a general sort of way, people are pretty nice to each other, at least when they’re face-to-face. Sure, there’s the occasional incident, but on a daily basis our lives are made up of coworkers saying “Good morning,” and things like the person heading into the post office three steps ahead holding the door open for you. If people started being nasty to each other as a matter of habit, where would we be?

“Minnie?” Aunt Frances asked.

I blinked out of my dark reverie. My aunt was sitting on the couch across from me, a crocheted blanket covering her legs. A cheerful fire burned in the fieldstone fireplace, and there was a mostly empty plate of cookies on the low table between us. Two empty mugs that had formerly held hot chocolate stood nearby.

“If it was really murder, the police will find out.” I’d meant the words to sound confident, but they came out as almost a question.

“Hmm.” Aunt Frances leaned forward and took the last peanut butter cookie, leaving the chocolate chip for me. “You don’t have any inclination to find out for yourself?”