Лори Касс - Borrowed Crime

“Of course I do.” If it had been murder, I wanted the killer put in prison so he couldn’t kill ever again—not me, not Denise, not anyone.

The cat-oriented weight on my legs was starting to cut off the circulation to my feet. I shifted and though I tried not to move Eddie, the movement made him unhappy enough to stop purring and give me a look. “Sorry,” I said. I was pretty sure I’d made more apologies in the few months I’d been a cat caretaker than I had in the entire decade prior.

“So, what are you going to do?” my aunt asked. “About Roger?”

I thought about that and came to a fast conclusion. I was a librarian. Research was one of my favorite things in the whole wide world, so it only made sense to—

My cell phone, which I’d flopped on the table next to the cookies, started vibrating. I picked it up.

Aunt Frances gave me a quizzical look. “Tucker?” She made getting-up movements, but I waved her back down. Making her leave the comfort of her own couch was ridiculous.

“Give me a sign if it gets too personal,” I said, “and I’ll go upstairs.” I thumbed on the phone. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself,” Tucker said.

There was a long beat of silence. Another one. Two seconds later we were sliding deep into the uncomfortable-pause phase, because in spite of our exchange of text messages on Monday, I’d never heard back from his nonexistent secretary. We’d done more texting, but none of it had to do with his schedule, and I was getting a little annoyed.

Eddie purred.

“Are you still there?” Tucker asked.

“Still here,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Sorry about not getting back to you, but we’ve had a couple of staffing issues that made a huge hole.” He sighed. “We’re not even close to having December nailed down.”

I squinted at the fireplace. “But it’s almost Thanksgiving.”

“Thank you, Minnie,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

The starch in his voice made me stiffen. Eddie turned his head sideways and almost upside down to look at me. I started petting him, long, gentle strokes from head to tail, creating a small mound of loose Eddie hair at the end.

“Until we get this straightened out,” Tucker was saying, “I won’t be able to make any plans.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Look, Minnie, I’m sorry about this—I really am—but there’s nothing I can do. This is what being a doctor can be like. You know that.”

Not really, but I was learning. Fast. “So, you’ll let me know when you have some free time?” I asked.

“Sure. We’ll work it out, Minnie.”

If he’d sent me those words in a text I might have believed him; as it was, I could hear the doubt in his voice.

“Tucker . . .”

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

But it was hard not to. After we said limp good-byes, I pulled Eddie close and buried my face in his side.

“Minnie?” Aunt Frances asked. “Is everything all right?”

I rubbed my eyes against Eddie’s thick fur, which absorbed my half tears easily. Aunt Frances was a matchmaker of the first order; if she knew Tucker and I were having troubles, she’d be rolling up her sleeves and getting to work.

“I’m fine,” I said, looking up at her with a painted-on smile. “It’ll be fine.”

* * *

That night I didn’t sleep well. Every time I felt myself start spiraling down into the darkness, my thoughts would jerk me back awake.

Well, either my thoughts or Eddie. It was one of those nights he thought I should be awake and attending to his every need. The first hint I had of this was a wet nose on my cheek. That was my cue to roll onto my back so his front half could lie across my shoulder and his back half could cozy up into the inside of my elbow.

After a while, though, this position didn’t suit him. He stuck out a paw and pushed on my nose. This was my cue to turn onto my side so he could snuggle up against my chest with my arm around him.

But he didn’t stay that way very long. A few minutes later, he slid out from underneath my arm, stood, stretched, and walked down the length of me to flop on my feet. This, of course, kept me from moving the rest of the night, since it Just Doesn’t Do to disturb a sleeping cat. Cats have amazing powers, and if they ever decided to take over the world, it wouldn’t be long before they asserted their control over us.

The next morning, as I picked an Eddie hair off my pant leg, I again considered the possibility of cats controlling the world. “It’s possible,” I muttered to myself as I dropped the hair into a wastebasket, “that they already do.”

“Sorry?” The woman standing at the library’s checkout desk was eyeing me cautiously.

I considered gifting her with the Eddie Hair of the Day, but decided against it. Judging from the look of her winter-white jacket and pants, they were dry-clean only, which meant they were pet-hair magnets, and I knew I wouldn’t appreciate a gift of cat hair if I’d been wearing them. Not that I would have been. Dry-clean-only clothing wouldn’t be in my budget until I paid off my college loans.

“Just talking to myself,” I told the woman. She looked a little older than my thirty-three years and she also looked familiar, yet I could have sworn I’d never met her. “That’s a pretty necklace you’re wearing,” I said, nodding at the simple yet elegant pendant of fused glass in multiple colors.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “I designed it myself.”

It was noon, and I was covering the front desk while Kelsey took her lunch. It had been awhile since I’d done this, and I was remembering how much fun it was. On the bookmobile, I knew the likes and dislikes of the patrons inside and out, but here I typically didn’t know people’s preferences, which left me free to imagine why they checked out certain books. I also had a regrettable tendency to recommend the books they should be checking out, but I kept those recommendations in my head. Mostly, anyway.

I took her card and ran it under the reader. Allison Korthase. The name was familiar, but I couldn’t put her into any of my frames of reference. Mentally I zipped through all the places I was likely to run into people. The library, the sheriff’s office, downtown, grocery store, post office . . . but none of them jingled anything in my memory.

The only other place I went on a regular basis was on the bookmobile, and I was sure I’d never seen this woman on—

My brain took a big bounce and the answer came to me. Bingo!

I started beeping her checkouts through the computer. Every book in the pile was a biography of a prominent woman, with a concentration on women in politics. Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Emily Murphy, Indira Gandhi. It suddenly all made sense.

The checked-out books went back across the counter to her. “So, how’s it going at city hall?” I asked, smiling.

Because I’d finally remembered that Allison was newly elected to the Chilson City Council. Her political signs were among the signs Roger and I had wished gone from the landscape. I thought about recommending another book for her, The Wartville Wizard, but held back. “Righting all the wrongs? Forging a new path to a brighter future?”

I spoke in jest. She’d been elected barely two weeks earlier; I wasn’t sure there’d even been a council meeting since the election. And I knew many of the other council members; they were thoughtful, well-intentioned people who were doing their best for the city. How much could there possibly be to fix?

“There’s a lot of work to do,” she said earnestly, turning her stack of books to face her and aligning all the edges. “I have a number of items I’d like to see implemented as soon as possible. Changes need to be made, and if there’s a little pain involved, well, sometimes that’s what has to happen.”