“Well, I’m not going.” Six-year-old Ethan kicked at the carpet. “I’ll run away. I’ll come back here and I’ll stay with Granny Engstrom.”
“Me, too,” said his twin, Emma. “She loves us. She won’t make us move.”
The last child to be heard from, nine-year-old Patrick, spread his arms wide. “We can’t leave the bookmobile. We just can’t!” He looked at my cat. “Right, Eddie?”
“Mrr,” said Eddie, right on cue.
Chad laughed, a great, loud, uproarious sound that turned his children’s worried expressions to smiles. “All right, Eddie, you’ve convinced me. We’ll stay. But only because you asked so nicely.”
I shook my head. Eddie as a chamber of commerce representative. The world was truly a strange, strange place.
* * *
When we got back to the library, I asked Donna to help me haul the returned books into the building, then said she could go.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I can help with the rest.”
I grinned. “Careful. If you keep showing this much interest in the bookmobile, I might ask you to volunteer again.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?” She cast a last look at the vehicle, hesitating. “See you tomorrow,” she said, still looking at the bookmobile, and shuffled off across the parking lot to her car.
I climbed back aboard, and the second I started doing all the closing-down chores, Eddie started pawing at his wire door.
“Mrr,” he said. “Mrr.”
“Oh, you want out, do you?” I sat on the console and looked down at him. “Well, you have been stuck in there for a while. Tell you what. I’ll let you out if you promise to go back in easy-peasy when it’s time to leave.”
He blinked. “Mrr,” he said quietly.
It was clearly a promise. Of course, what a cat’s promise was worth, I didn’t know, but there was only one way to find out. I opened the door. Eddie jumped up next to me and bumped his head against my shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah. Save it for your adoring fans.” I kissed the top of his head and stood. “I have a few chores, pal. Why don’t you do something productive while I take care of business?”
But instead of straightening the bookshelves or doing a little dusting or even working through the intellectual exercise of figuring out where to squeeze in a few more books, Eddie jumped to the small front desk, stretched out one paw, and snagged his new hat from where I’d stashed it behind the computer.
He pushed it off the edge of the desk, watched it drop to the floor, and promptly jumped down to flop on it.
“Fine,” I told him. “Just don’t think it’s yours forever.” Eddie ignored me, which was typical when I was telling him something he didn’t want to hear. It was the cat equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “La, la, la.”
“It’s not big enough for a cat mattress, for one thing,” I said, eyeing him. “Your back feet aren’t even on—”
The door to the bookmobile opened. Donna, no doubt, coming back to sign up for a lifetime of bookmobile volunteering. I turned, a big smile on my face.
Only it wasn’t Donna. Not even close.
“You,” Denise Slade said, pointing a shaking finger at me. “It’s your fault.”
My arms dropped to my sides. I swallowed. “Denise, I am so sorry about your husband. If there’s anything I can do—”
“Do?” she asked shrilly. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”
Gray sorrow raked at the inside of my chest. I wanted to protest, to say that I’d done all I could, to say that I’d done all anyone could, but how could I when I wasn’t sure that I had?
Denise’s hair was unkempt. She wore a perky spring coat of lime green over cropped pants, with short white socks and plastic clogs that looked like something she’d gardened in for decades. Never once had I seen Denise look anything but tidy and ready to take on the world’s to-do list.
“More than anything,” I said quietly, “I wish that your husband was still alive. I am so very sorry for your loss.”
“Sorry?” she shrieked. “What good does ‘sorry’ do me now? ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to shovel the driveway this winter. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix that leak under the kitchen sink. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to finish the landscaping that never got done last summer.”
She was right, but what else could I say? Nothing that would make any difference, so I stood there and took the abuse.
“Sorry!” She tossed her hair back out of her face. “‘Sorry’ isn’t going to keep me warm at night. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix my Sunday breakfast. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to help me rake the leaves next fall, and ‘sorry’ isn’t going to help me one little bit when the car breaks down.”
I wanted to ease her pain, to make her feel even a tiny bit better, but I had no idea how. Maybe there wasn’t a way. “Denise . . .”
“Don’t ‘Denise’ me!” She took a step forward, her face mottled red with fury. “All you had to do was drive the bookmobile around and bring my husband back home. Instead you got him killed. This is all your fault!”
I gasped, feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I tried to talk, but nothing came out.
“Rrrrr,” Eddie said from the floor—not exactly a growl, but not the friendly sound he usually made, either.
“And that cat!” Denise transferred her focus to Eddie. “How can—” She made a soft mewling sound and fell to her knees, her hands reaching out toward Eddie’s new mattress. “The hat,” she whimpered. “This is where he left it.”
“This is Roger’s hat?” I stared at one of the tasseled ends, the one Eddie had been chewing on.
“It was mine,” she whispered. “My sister made it for me, but I wanted him to take a hat on Saturday. All that snow—I thought he might need something, he just had surgery, and it was the first one I found. He laughed and said he’d wear it. He said . . .”
I crouched down, rolled Eddie off the hat, and handed it to Denise.
Slowly she stood, holding it to her cheek, stroking it. She stared at nothing, her lips moving, and though no sound came out, I knew what she was saying.
“Roger. Roger. Roger . . .”
Without another word to me, she turned and left the bookmobile, her footsteps on the gravel parking lot slowly fading away to nothing.
I sat down on the console. Eddie jumped up beside me.
“Mrr.”
“Yeah, pal,” I said absently, “I hear you.”
I would have bet money—and lots of it—that Roger wouldn’t have worn that feminine hat unless he’d been in danger of having frostbite take his ears off.
Then a flash of memory came back to me: Roger giving Eddie one last scratch, taking a couple of steps, then stopping and saying, “Almost forgot.” Had it been the hat? Had he been taking it out of his pocket so he could tell his wife he’d kept his promise to her and worn it out in the cold?
The bright design would have been visible to anyone with a scoped rifle.
A unique design made especially for Denise.
Had Denise been the killer’s real target?
I dug through my purse and found the business card Ash Wolverson had given me. “Hi. Minnie Hamilton here. Are you at the office? Because I have something you might want to hear.”
Chapter 8
Half an hour later, I was sitting in what I was coming to think of as My Chair. I even knew to avoid catching my pant leg in the tiny crack on its front right edge. But if I was going to keep spending so much time in here, something needed to be done about the ceiling tiles. Even if those stains had been from something as completely innocuous as a roof leak, they weren’t at all appealing. In some areas—right by the door, for instance—the pattern was downright scary.
Detective Inwood, tall and skinny like the letter I, walked in, followed closely by Ash. Deputy Wolverson, not at all shaped like the letter I, was in a tidy uniform of dark brown shirt and lighter brown dress pants that exactly matched his tie. The detective, with evidence of morning coffee on his white shirt and what might have been mustard stains on his gray pants, bore more resemblance to the ceiling tiles.