“Something amusing, Ms. Hamilton?” Detective Inwood asked, sitting in the chair directly across from me. Ash, who was being as quiet as a detective in training should probably be, sat to the detective’s right.
I brushed the back of my hand across my face, getting rid of the smile. “Just trying to be pleasant, Detective.” I looked at him brightly. “How was your day?”
He sat back, crossed one of his legs over the other, and clasped his hands around his raised knee. “The usual mix of miscreants and troublemakers. How about you?”
Over in Ash’s direction, I sensed a small movement that might have been a smirk, but I kept my gaze focused on Inwood. “I convinced a nine-year-old boy that reading wasn’t a complete waste of time and might even be fun, given the right book.”
The detective smiled. “Then I think you had a much more productive day than I did.”
For a moment I considered what the daily life of a law-enforcement officer must be like. Putting bad people in jail had to be rewarding, but, after a while, it must feel like most of the people in the world are, well, bad. Coworkers and family members would be the only ones you could assume were on the side of the angels, and on dark days, maybe not all of them.
I felt an unexpected wave of sympathy for the two men. “If there’s an opening at the library, I’ll let you know.”
They shared a glance, which I interpreted as a mutual expression of Is she insane?, and my sympathy dried up.
“Let me tell you what I found,” I said in an exquisitely polite tone. From there I launched into the Tale of the Hat, starring Eddie and the bookmobile, costarring me, and featuring the supporting character of the bereaved widow.
“So, I’m thinking that maybe it was really a murder attempt,” I concluded. “And that Denise was the real target.”
The detective released his hands from around his knee and reclasped them. “The hat is in the possession of Mrs. Slade?”
I nodded. Maybe it was evidence, and maybe I should have told her to take it to the police, but after seeing her put it against her cheek like that, there was no way I’d suggest such a thing.
Detective Inwood made a noise that wasn’t quite a grunt. “And where at the convenience store did your . . . cat find the . . . hat?”
I studied him, but he didn’t appear to be laughing, even on the inside. Then again, if anyone could conceal laughter, it had to be the man sitting in front of me. “Just past the northeast corner.”
“Hmm.” The detective squinted at the ceiling tiles. He had to be looking straight at the stains, and I wondered what pattern he saw. Probably not the fire-breathing dragon with the big talons that I kept seeing, but you never knew.
“Wolverson,” Inwood finally said, “why don’t you drive out there? When you come back, you can let me know why you didn’t find that hat on Saturday.” He gave Ash a straight look that made me sit back flat in my chair.
“There was a lot of snow,” I said. “Anyone could have missed it.”
The detective’s gaze slashed at me. “The average person, yes. But what would you say about a deputy who is training to be a detective? You’d say that if the snow was six inches deep, if it was sixty inches deep, he shouldn’t have missed it.” Detective Inwood stood and almost shouted right Ash’s face. “And you’d be right!”
He banged the table with his fist, glared at both of us, and stomped out. I winced in anticipation of the door being slammed, but he shut it in a surprisingly gentle fashion.
I looked at Ash. “Sorry about that,” I said. “If I’d known . . .”
He shook his head. “You did the right thing. I should have found the hat the other day, no matter what.”
“Well, I’m still sorry. He didn’t have to yell at you like that.”
Ash shrugged. “It’s just Hal. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
Which made no sense to me, but whatever. I stood, made good-bye noises, and started to leave.
“Hey, Minnie?” Ash asked.
When I stopped and turned back to face him, he started to say something, then stopped. Started again. “Thanks for bringing the hat.” He grinned, revealing his extreme good looks once again. “Even if it did get me in trouble.”
I smiled back. “Anytime.”
* * *
That night, I told Aunt Frances about the cat, the hat, and the detective. The phrase didn’t quite scan, but I couldn’t think of a rhyming word that would fit Detective Inwood. Brat? Drat? Mat?
“So you think Denise was really the target?” Aunt Frances asked. “That it really was murder?”
I didn’t want it to be. Though tragic accidents are a hard thing to make sense of, at least you could do your best to make sure they didn’t happen again. But murder? An uncomfortable prickle went up the back of my neck. I shivered, which made the cat on my lap twist his head around to look up at me.
“Sorry about that,” I murmured, scratching the tip of Eddie’s nose.
Murder made everything different. In a general sort of way, people are pretty nice to each other, at least when they’re face-to-face. Sure, there’s the occasional incident, but on a daily basis our lives are made up of coworkers saying “Good morning,” and things like the person heading into the post office three steps ahead holding the door open for you. If people started being nasty to each other as a matter of habit, where would we be?
“Minnie?” Aunt Frances asked.
I blinked out of my dark reverie. My aunt was sitting on the couch across from me, a crocheted blanket covering her legs. A cheerful fire burned in the fieldstone fireplace, and there was a mostly empty plate of cookies on the low table between us. Two empty mugs that had formerly held hot chocolate stood nearby.
“If it was really murder, the police will find out.” I’d meant the words to sound confident, but they came out as almost a question.
“Hmm.” Aunt Frances leaned forward and took the last peanut butter cookie, leaving the chocolate chip for me. “You don’t have any inclination to find out for yourself?”
“Of course I do.” If it had been murder, I wanted the killer put in prison so he couldn’t kill ever again—not me, not Denise, not anyone.
The cat-oriented weight on my legs was starting to cut off the circulation to my feet. I shifted and though I tried not to move Eddie, the movement made him unhappy enough to stop purring and give me a look. “Sorry,” I said. I was pretty sure I’d made more apologies in the few months I’d been a cat caretaker than I had in the entire decade prior.
“So, what are you going to do?” my aunt asked. “About Roger?”
I thought about that and came to a fast conclusion. I was a librarian. Research was one of my favorite things in the whole wide world, so it only made sense to—
My cell phone, which I’d flopped on the table next to the cookies, started vibrating. I picked it up.
Aunt Frances gave me a quizzical look. “Tucker?” She made getting-up movements, but I waved her back down. Making her leave the comfort of her own couch was ridiculous.
“Give me a sign if it gets too personal,” I said, “and I’ll go upstairs.” I thumbed on the phone. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself,” Tucker said.
There was a long beat of silence. Another one. Two seconds later we were sliding deep into the uncomfortable-pause phase, because in spite of our exchange of text messages on Monday, I’d never heard back from his nonexistent secretary. We’d done more texting, but none of it had to do with his schedule, and I was getting a little annoyed.