Лори Касс - Borrowed Crime

Slowly, I returned my own receiver back to its cradle.

“What?” Holly demanded. “What did they say?”

The small tent calendar on my desk was on November. I flipped it over to December and counted the days until the second Wednesday of the month. “Two weeks,” I murmured. “I have two weeks.”

“For what?”

I looked at her, looked at the calendar, then looked back at her. There was only one real answer to her question. “To figure out who killed Roger Slade.”

* * *

Thanksgiving came and went with a flurry of cooking (Aunt Frances), a massive amount of dishwashing (me), and a stunning show of eating ability on the part of everyone who came for dinner.

Our ten guests included two former boarders who were now married to each other, an elderly couple that Aunt Frances and her long-dead husband had been friends with, a husband and wife and their two children from one street over, and two strays.

My stray was the widowed Lloyd Goodwin, one of my favorite library patrons, whose children couldn’t make the trip north this year, and Aunt Frances had invited a man whose name I never did get right. It was Brett, Brent, or Brant, and since he seemed to answer to any of the three, I gave up figuring it out before dinner was ready.

“Where did your stray come from?” I asked Aunt Frances when I popped into the kitchen to check on turkey timing. “He’s hot, for an older guy.”

And he was, in a white-haired, sturdy-shouldered sort of way. He was also a bit on the pompous side, but since he’d laughed at my jokes, I was trying to forgive that.

“Hardware store,” my aunt said. “He kindly helped me see the difference between wood screws and metal screws.”

I laughed. “And that turned into an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Minnie,” my aunt said severely. “No one should have to eat Thanksgiving dinner alone.”

An undeniable fact. I grinned at her. “You’re a nice person. Did you know?”

“The salt of the earth. Now get out of my kitchen unless you want to carve the turkey.”

I couldn’t think of much I wanted to do less, so I skedaddled back to our guests until I was summoned for plating duty. At first, Eddie stayed on the stairs, observing through cautious eyes, but he eventually came down to join the fun and shed on everyone that he could.

The rest of the afternoon and evening zoomed past with good food and fine friendship, and I tumbled into bed glad to have been able to forget the library board’s dictate, at least for a day.

The next morning I wasn’t scheduled to work until afternoon. Tucker had just come off the night shift and finally had some free time, so he picked me up and took me to the Round Table for breakfast, which I hoped would be a place free of cat allergens.

Sabrina, the diner’s waitress extraordinaire, sat us in a booth, gave us menus, and poured coffee. “Her,” she said, nodding at me. “She’ll want cinnamon French toast with real maple syrup and sausage links. What’ll you have?”

Tucker opted for coffee and a look at the menu.

“Gotcha.” Sabrina wrote down the order and started to tuck her pencil into her bun of graying brown hair.

“Hey!” I pointed to one particular finger on her left hand. “Is that what I think it is?”

The cool, collected, and seen-everything-at-least-once-and-probably-twice Sabrina blushed. “No one else has noticed,” she said.

We both looked to the back of the restaurant, where Bill D’Arcy sat hunched over a computer, as per usual. But there was one difference. His left hand, which was busy with typing away at the financial transactions that made him scads of money, caught the restaurant’s light and displayed a shiny wide gold band on his ring finger.

“Had all the paperwork set,” she said. “We were at my sister’s for dinner yesterday, and the only thing I had to do was make sure the minister showed up at halftime.”

I laughed, and Tucker congratulated her.

“Thanks, hon,” she said, beaming. “Now, how long do you think it’ll take me to get rid of those awful brown curtains he has?”

Fifteen minutes was my guess, which pleased her, and she headed off with a smile on her face.

Tucker was giving me a quizzical look. “What?” I asked.

“Just now,” he said. “That’s the first time you laughed since I picked you up. You usually laugh a lot more often. Is something wrong?”

His expression of caring concern made my throat close up tight. I swallowed some coffee to loosen it up, then said, “The library board met yesterday. I was called upstairs half an hour after they started.” My throat felt weird again, so I preempted its closing by sipping more coffee. When in doubt, add caffeine.

“What did they want?” Tucker asked. “Is there some problem?”

“The board is worried about a negligence lawsuit.” I swallowed again. “Some of them think they might have a better case if they fire their assistant dir—”

A man walked past and a slight breeze blew over my arm and lifted a cat hair off my sleeve. The black-and-white piece of former Eddie wafted up into the air, where it turned lazily about, as if it were searching for the perfect new home.

“Umm . . .” Tucker flattened himself against the back of the booth.

The breeze faded as quickly as it had come, and the hair dropped like a rock, heading straight for my boyfriend’s lap. Sliding fast, Tucker zipped to the booth’s far end, and the Eddie hair fell to the floor.

“Safe,” I said, smiling. But there was no answering grin on Tucker’s face. On the contrary, he was frowning in the direction of the stray hair. “And this,” I said, “was supposed to be a cat hair–free zone. It’s this fleecy material.” I poked at my sleeve. “It’s a pet-hair magnet. I promise I’ll never wear anything like this around you again.”

Tucker nodded. “Probably a good idea.”

That was unfortunate, because I’d been joking. Fleece sweatshirts were the primary component of my wintertime casual wardrobe. If I couldn’t wear fleece around the allergic Tucker, I’d have to go out and buy new clothes, which wasn’t part of my budget.

I wrapped my hands around my coffee mug. “Our relationship was a lot easier in the summer, back when I wasn’t wearing clothes that attract so much Eddie hair.” I laughed.

Tucker didn’t. His attention was still on the threat that had come so near. “Yeah,” he said, “it was, wasn’t it?” Then he shook his head and sat up. “But you were talking about the library board. Someone was negligent?”

He hadn’t been listening to me. Or listening, but not hearing. A sinking sensation manifested itself somewhere in my insides, halfway between my heart and my stomach. It was a feeling I’d had a few times before in my life: the one that came just before heartbreak.

“Minnie?” Tucker asked.

I gave him a quick smile and returned to the saga of the library board. But as I talked, all I was really thinking was one thing.

The end is near.

Chapter 12

Tucker didn’t break up with me during breakfast, but when he dropped me off at the boardinghouse, there wasn’t any happy hug, either, even though the offensive fleece was covered up by my winter coat.

I dawdled away the rest of the morning by doing some online Christmas shopping, concluding that my engineer father might actually like the three-dimensional map of Janay Lake, and that even though my nieces and nephew might want the newest version of the latest video game (So real, you get motion sickness!) , they weren’t going to get it from me.

After a lunch of leftovers and a short game of Bounce the Ball in the Bathtub with Eddie, I changed into library clothes and headed out.