Лори Касс - Lending А Paw

Holly started to say something, but stopped and crouched down to pick up the biggest shards of her former mug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It was an accident,” I said, trying to smile at them both. Not an easy task since they were on opposite sides of the room and neither one was looking at me, but I did my best. “These things happen.”

“Oh, yeah?” Josh smirked. “Last week Reva Shomin brought in a plate of cookies for everybody. Guess who let the full plate slip out of her hands? We didn’t get a single cookie, thanks to butterfingers over there. If we had a three-strike rule for breaking things, she’d be on her way out of here.”

I saw a tear trickle down Holly’s cheek. Enough.

“Josh!” My voice whipped his head around. “It was an accident. There’s no need to make her feel worse than she already does.”

“I don’t think—”

“What you think doesn’t matter right now. If you’re not going to help clean, why don’t you go do something more productive than mocking your coworkers?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. Though my assigned tasks in the library included personnel issues, I’d only once before had to cross over into being the disciplinarian. The experience had left me shaking, yet oddly elated. From that experience, I’d learned that it made no sense to put off tasks that you knew were going to make you uncomfortable. The delay only gave you time to worry, and what was the point of that?

“The printer in the bookmobile room is creasing the paper,” I said. “It would be great if you have time to take a look at it.”

He gave me a curt nod and stomped off.

I dropped my armloads of books onto a table. “Holly, sit down. If you don’t, you’re going to fall over into that sticky mess, then you’ll have to go home to shower and change, I won’t be able to send Mitchell over to you, and I don’t have time today to answer his questions about hurricanes.”

Her hands shook as she pulled out a coffee-free chair. “We don’t get hurricanes here, so why does he care?”

I grinned as I took the chair next to Holly. “Ask him. I dare you.”

Her smile was shaky. “No, thanks. I’ll leave him to you today, if you don’t mind. And I will clean this up, no matter what Josh says.” She cast a mournful eye at the mess. “And I would have cleaned up the other messes. I just need a minute, that’s all.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said, hesitated, then asked, “Is something wrong with Josh? He seems a little on edge.”

Holly nodded. “We all are, I think. The police are still asking questions, and now that thing with the will. Stephen’s hardly come out of his office in days. The rest of the clerks keep asking me what’s going on with him and I have to keep telling them I don’t know. Do you?”

“Going on?” Stephen himself came into the room. “Why should there be anything going on?”

I put on a smile. “Hello, Stephen. How are you today?”

He put his hands on his hips. “You never reported back to me about your talk with Caroline Grice. I’m now forced to come fetch information from you. Is she or is she not going to donate money to the library?”

My face froze. During Caroline’s revelations the other night, I’d decided that soliciting for a donation wasn’t that important. I still felt my decision was the right one, but coming up with a cover story would have been an excellent idea. “Our meeting was interrupted,” I said. “We didn’t have time to discuss anything except the—”

“Do you have another appointment with her?” he said, enunciating each consonant very, very clearly.

“Not yet, but—”

“See that you call her today,” he snapped. “More donations are imperative if we’re going to keep this library functioning at its present level.” He spun around and marched out.

“Well,” I said, turning to Holly. “That was—”

But she was gone, having slipped out the side door. I looked at the shards of former coffee mug. At the spatters of coffee.

Shards and splatters and splinters and sarcasm, and it was only Monday.

I sighed and got up to hunt down the mop and vacuum cleaner. My happy library world was falling apart and I had no idea what to do about it.

• • •

When I left work at six, light rain was still coming down. I stood in the front doorway, backpack in hand, staring out at the sodden world.

“Want a ride?” Mitchell appeared at my side, jingling a set of keys. “I’m parked right over there.” He pointed to a maroon pickup that had a beige driver’s door and a yellow hood.

“No, thanks.” I smiled. “I have a couple of errands to do on the way home.” In my youth, I’d owned cars that had looked worse than Mitchell’s, but mine had never had stacks of empty pizza boxes piled so high on the passenger’s seat that you could read “Fat Boys Pizza” from fifty feet away.

“You sure?” Mitchell squinted out into the rain. “It’s coming down pretty good.”

“Thanks, anyway.” I pushed the door open and went out into the wet.

To make good on my statement of having errands to run, I stopped at the grocery store for cheese and fresh lettuce and at the fudge store for a slab of chocolate with walnuts. Both got shoved unceremoniously into my backpack at the point of purchase, and both were slightly dented when I got home and put them on the kitchen counter. Sugar and salad. The ideal dinner to soften the edges of a cranky day.

I cut open the cheese and nicked off a small corner. “Hey, Eddie, I have a treat for you.”

No padding of cat feet, no sleepy mrr s.

“Hey. Ed.”

Silence.

I picked up the cheese and started the Eddie hunt. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”

No Eddie under the kitchen table, no Eddie behind the bench seat’s two small throw pillows. No Eddie under the kitchen sink, no Eddie under the bathroom sink.

I trod down the three steps to the bedroom . . . and found pieces of paper strewn everywhere. White bits on the floor, white bits on the bunks, white bits magically stuck to the walls.

“Eddie!” I shrieked. “What have you done?”

I crouched down to pick up two crumpled sheets of paper that looked largely intact. Underneath was Eddie, sleeping in a meat loaf shape. When the light hit his face, he blinked, yawned, and rolled over onto his side, purring.

“You are a horrible cat,” I said, scratching him behind the ears. “And as soon as I think up a suitable punishment, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Mrr,” he said, opening his eyes and looking at me intently.

“Oh. Right.” I placed the piece of cheese directly under his chin. “This is for you.”

He didn’t even sniff at it. Instead, he continued to look at me with an unpleasantly direct gaze.

“Cut that out.” I put my hand over his eyes. “You know I can’t think when you do that.”

“Mrr.” He jerked his head away.

“Yeah, to you, too.” I knelt and started gathering up his mess. “What did you destroy, anyway?” Since the boat didn’t have a second cabin, I used the second bunk as office space. Laptop in the middle, printer on a bed tray behind the laptop, papers for filing on the right, bills to pay on the left. But what Eddie had shredded was neither.

“Huh. I thought I’d thrown these away.” It was the papers I’d printed when I was trying to find a genealogical link between me and Caroline Grice. “Wasted effort,” I told a recumbent Eddie. “I found a better way to talk to her.”

Of course, that way had ended up with her accusing Aunt Frances of Stan’s murder.

He flopped down onto the two intact sheets of paper. “Mrrrrowww!”

“Chill a little, will you? No need to scare the neighbors.” I reached to gather in the biggest bits of Eddified paper. Mr. Ed scrambled to his feet, stalked to a small pile of clawed-up paper, turned to face me, and sat in the middle of it.