Лори Касс - Borrowed Crime

“Changes?” I didn’t know—or care—much about politics, but I did know that making changes, even in a small town like Chilson, could be fraught with the kinds of things that would make even the strongest want to whimper.

Allison smiled wide. “If we keep on doing things the same way here in Chilson, at the state level, and in Washington, we can only expect to get the same results. Improving our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren is worth working toward, don’t you think?”

It was a question that guaranteed a positive response, the kind of manipulative question that I found annoying. I gave her a polite smile. “Good luck,” I said.

Watching her go, I marveled at her enthusiasm for her new position. Working with Stephen and the library board was as much politics as I ever wanted to deal with. I tried to remember what she did for a living. A council member’s job wasn’t anywhere near full-time, at least not in Chilson. Meeting pay and a small annual stipend were the extent of the compensation. Not even the mayor got much more than that.

Realtor? No, I would have recognized her name a lot faster. Attorney? Maybe. Or a—

“Hey, Minnie. Are you in there? I been standing here half an hour.”

I looked up. Mitchell was standing at the desk, flapping some papers in my direction. “Half an hour?” I asked.

“Well, it felt that long.”

He grinned, and I found myself smiling in return. A large part of what charm Mitchell possessed lay in the fact that he didn’t take himself seriously. Of course, he didn’t take much seriously, so maybe there wasn’t much virtue in it.

“What do you have?” I nodded at the papers.

“Oh yeah.” He pushed the small stack over to me, then readjusted his baseball hat. “This is what I been working on the last few days. What do you think?”

The pages were a long listing of names, phone numbers, and addresses. It was a nice list, and I was proud of Mitchell for such a professional presentation. Clean white paper, alphabetical by last name, correctly formatted; it was very well done. The only thing was, it lacked a title, and I had no idea what it was all about.

I looked through the names, many of which I recognized. Men, women; young, old. Mostly local addresses, but not all. No pattern to it, as far as I could tell, but there had to be a reason Mitchell had gone to the trouble. There was always a reason for something, even if we didn’t know what it might be. Even if we thought the reason was dumb.

“You must have spent a lot of time on this.” I was fishing for an explanation, but Mitchell was oblivious. “Okay, I give up. What is this?”

He grinned. “The start of my investigation. You wouldn’t believe how many people I talked to in the past couple of days. I started with the easy ones, like the neighbors all down that short road he lived on. Then I did the guys he worked with—you know, that construction company.”

The lightbulb over my head went on with a loud click . Mitchell kept talking, but I pretty much stopped listening to him. What he had so laboriously—and probably unnecessarily—done was assemble a list of everyone Roger Slade had ever known. Mitchell was describing his efforts to track down the names of Roger’s fifth-grade classmates when I rudely interrupted him.

“You know what you should do with this?” I tapped the papers and internally smiled a small, evil smile. “Take it down to the sheriff’s office.”

“Yeah? You think so?” Mitchell’s eyebrows went up, disappearing into brown hair that badly needed cutting. “Because last time I tried to help, when that woman was killed last summer, they didn’t seem real happy to see me coming.”

I tapped the papers again. “But this time you have something concrete, something they really might be able to use.”

Mitchell was nodding. “You mean I got something to bring to the table this time.”

“Exactly.” Beaming, I returned the papers. “Make sure you deliver these to Detective Inwood. Tell him I sent you.”

“Sweet.” Mitchell tidied up the small stack. “You’re all right, Minnie, no matter what Chris Ballou says.” He saluted me with the papers and made his long-limbed way toward the front door.

Smiling, I leaned back and put my hands behind my head, laughing inside, knowing that Detective Inwood would soon be getting a Mitchell-sized surprise. It was a lovely day, and I didn’t see a single cloud on the horizon. Yes, I needed to figure out the whys and wherefores of Roger’s death, but for the moment, everything was—

“Hey.”

I turned around. Josh was standing in the doorway between the back offices. Lurking, almost. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Well.” He fiddled with the doorjamb. Not that it needed fiddling with; it was relatively new woodwork, having been put in place barely three years prior, when the old school was converted into our present library facility, but whatever.

“It’s about, well, you know,” he said.

“Not a clue,” I said cheerfully. “Give me three guesses?”

Josh ran a hand through his dark curly hair and kept not looking at me. Clearly he wasn’t going to play my game. “It’s that stuff we talked about earlier,” he said. “About, you know.” He glanced up and sideways.

I looked in the same direction Josh was gazing and realized he was looking toward Stephen’s office.

My second mental lightbulb of the day went click and I remembered that Holly and Josh were trying to help me work out if Stephen knew about Eddie.

“When I went up to do those software updates on Stephen’s computer,” Josh said, “he left for a meeting with some software vendor down in Traverse City. Said he wouldn’t be back until late afternoon.”

Riiiight. I knew for a fact that there was no software vendor. Stephen never met with vendors until I’d vetted the sales reps first. What was far more likely was that he wanted to see what was going on at the Traverse City library. I made a mental note to check their programming schedule.

“You think he knows about Eddie?” I asked, and was embarrassed to hear a catch in my voice.

“Nah,” Josh said. “The other way around. I bet he doesn’t know at all. If he did know, he would have thumped you for keeping things from him. He hates it when that happens.”

Which was true. Stephen was always talking about the need for more communication. However, I’d long since figured out that what he really meant was that we needed to tell him more things, not that he needed to share things with us.

“Thanks for trying,” I finally said.

Josh nodded. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, but I can go back in a couple of days. I’ll ask him how the upgrade is doing, then sneak in a couple of questions about the bookmobile.”

I eyed him. He hated going up to Stephen’s office. He’d said more than once it was like going up to the principal’s office after you’d been caught sneaking a look through the window of the girl’s locker room.

“You’re okay,” I said, “for a geeky IT guy.”

His smile flashed bright. “And you’re okay for a nerdy library girl.”

We bumped fists and went back to work.

* * *

That evening, my loving cat greeted me when I walked in the front door.

“Mrr,” he said, then yawned to demonstrate the enthusiasm he so deeply felt upon my return.

“You don’t fool me.” I picked him up from the back of the couch and gave him a good snuggle. Since I was still wearing my winter coat, my library clothes were relatively safe from a new influx of Eddie hair, which was the main reason I was still wearing it. I loved an Eddie snuggle when I got home, but the subsequent half hour of picking the cat hair off my clothing wasn’t how I preferred to spend my time.