Лори Касс - Borrowed Crime

I whistled. Or tried to. Whistling wasn’t one of my most developed skills. “That sounds serious.”

“Now, don’t go all wedding dress on me,” Kristen said. “My mother’s bad enough. Scruffy just hates the snow.” And that was all she’d say, no matter how sneaky I was about trying to get more information out of her.

The night before she left, we sat in her restaurant’s empty kitchen, eating the last crème brûlée in the place and drinking a bottle of her best champagne.

“Postcards,” she said suddenly.

Since we’d been guessing how long the new downtown gift shop would last—my estimate was less than a year—I blinked at her. “What?”

“Postcards. Key West is full of them.” She topped off our glasses with more bubbly. “I’ll send you a postcard every week.” She smiled, showing her white teeth, and for a moment she bore a striking resemblance to a great white shark.

“A Scruffy report?” I asked. We’d be e-mailing or texting practically every day, but the thought of getting a postcard in my mailbox was appealing.

“Maybe. But only if I get Tucker updates.”

The good-looking, blond, and tall (but not too tall) Dr. Tucker Kleinow and I had been dating since last summer. Though we’d hit a stumbling block when we discovered his allergic reaction to cats in general and Eddie in particular, our relationship was progressing nicely, thanks to Tucker’s willingness to take an allergy medication when he was Eddie-bound. “Deal.” I held up my glass, and we toasted our pact.

Now that I’d received two postcards, I was realizing what had lain beneath her sharklike smile. Postcard number one had been a picture of blue skies and sandy beaches. On the back she’d written Key West, a steady eighty-one degrees. Chilson, forty-five and dropping. Sucker.

Aunt Frances had stuck it up with a thumbtack on the doorframe to the living room, where, in a few weeks, it would be surrounded by Christmas cards. She was amused by the whole thing and had been wondering if Kristen would keep it up all winter.

Now I nodded toward my backpack, which was sitting on the end of the kitchen counter. “The new one’s in the outside pocket. Go ahead and take it out.”

Postcard number two had been a picture of blue skies and sandy beaches. On the back she’d written Key West, eighty degrees and sunny. Chilson, snow coming soon. Eww.

But Kristen knew that I didn’t mind winter. I actually liked it. Soft and white, it transformed the world into something completely different, something fresh and clean and unexpected.

I stood there, my hands in the soapy water, daydreaming ahead to skiing and skating and snowshoeing. All sorts of activities that started with the letter S were done on a substance that also started with an S , namely snow, and—

“Mrr!”

I jumped. “Right,” I said, nodding. “We need to get going, don’t we?”

From his perch on my chair, Eddie looked straight at me. I didn’t need a cat interpreter to know that he was saying, Well, duh.

Aunt Frances returned the last bowl to the glass-front cabinets. “Do you think Eddie would like a half wall? About so high”—she held her hand at waist level—“and about three feet long. I’ve been thinking about taking out this door between the dining room and the kitchen for some time. It’ll open up the space nicely. Maybe this is the year to do it.”

Smiling, I dried my hands on the blue-and-white hand towel. “You think?”

She eyed the area of interest. “It’s not a load-bearing wall. A sledge and a flat bar will take it down in no time. Then a little framing, a little drywall work, and a little trim. Shouldn’t take long.”

I snorted. “Have you ever heard that story about the shoemaker’s children—you know, the ones who didn’t have any shoes?”

My loving aunt whirled her drying towel into a tight spiral and popped me lightly with the end of it. “Out, you horrible child,” she said, laughing. “Out right now, or you’ll be late for work.”

“Mrr.”

And since they were both right, I grabbed my backpack, which was full of appropriate provisions for cat and human, and headed out.

* * *

I paused at the front closet to pull on my coat, boots, and gloves, and went outside into the dark of the predawn morning. But as I stepped off the wide front porch, empty of the summer swing that had been stored away, I saw that the world wasn’t completely dark.

The sky was gray and was forecast to stay that way for the foreseeable future, but the ground was covered with a light dusting of white.

My heart sang with pure pleasure. Maybe by February I’d be tired of the cold, and maybe come March I’d be tired of brushing snow off my car, but at this moment I was enchanted with the sprinkling of fairy dust.

Humming to myself, I started my car, set the defroster to high, and got the ice scraper from the floor of the backseat, where I’d put it at the end of September, because you just never knew.

The ice scraper had a long handle and a brush, and it had been a gift from my father when I’d bought my first car. He’d wrapped it himself, the bright yellow and red paper tight against the plastic, revealing the object’s shape so obviously that a five-year-old could have guessed what it was, and had handed it to me with gravitas. “Don’t ever take it out of your car,” he’d said solemnly. “Keep it in your trunk during the summer, on the floor of the backseat all winter.”

It wasn’t a bad idea—as a matter of fact, it was a pretty good one—and it had only taken me five years and one early snowstorm to start taking my dad’s advice.

As I brushed the snow off the car’s hood, I heard the sound of a door shutting. Which was odd, because it wasn’t even seven thirty, and the only year-round people in the neighborhood were retirees who tended to stay inside until the morning got as bright as it was going to get. The vast majority of homes in this part of Chilson belonged to summer people. They might come up at Thanksgiving, a week at Christmas, and perhaps Presidents’ Day weekend, but mostly the houses sat quiet and dark, waiting for the warmth of May to bring them back to life.

I turned and saw something completely unexpected.

Across the street, a figure was standing on the front porch, zipping up his coat and pulling on gloves. It was Otto Bingham, the house’s new owner. At least I assumed it was him; Aunt Frances had heard that a gentleman by that name had purchased the house a few weeks ago, but she’d never met him. Though she’d gone over to the white clapboard house two or three times to introduce herself, he’d never been home.

“Good morning!” I smiled and waved, thinking that I’d have to tell Aunt Frances that I’d had an Otto sighting. The light from the porch illuminated a man who looked, at this distance, like he was in his mid-sixties and on the bonus end of the Handsome bell curve.

“The snow’s pretty, isn’t it?” I asked.

He looked at me, squinting, then gave a curt nod and went back inside his house, shutting the door firmly behind him.

I stared after him, then shrugged. Maybe the guy hated snow, which would be silly for someone who’d just moved to this part of Michigan, but you never knew what made people do things.

Then I put thoughts of my aunt’s curmudgeonly neighbor out of my head, gave the car’s windshield one last brush, and headed back up the porch stairs for the cat carrier.

Because it was a bookmobile day, and no bookmobile day could be complete without the bookmobile cat.

* * *

“What I don’t understand,” Denise Slade said, “is why you feel the need to keep Eddie such a secret.”

I glanced over at my newest bookmobile volunteer, then went back to concentrating on my driving. When the road was wide and straight and dry, piloting the thirty-one-foot-long vehicle was a joy and a delight. However, most of the roads in Tonedagana County were narrow and curving, and today they were wet with slushy early snow. Then again, poor road conditions were part of life Up North, and I was mentally prepared to deal with whatever Mother Nature tossed my way. But I wasn’t so sure I was prepared to deal with Denise.