His eyebrows went up. “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t say for sure when that will be, but—” Again he waited. “Yes, ma’am. I will quote you exactly, you can count on it. Now, the reason I called is a friend of mine happened past your house a while back and saw a wooden boat out front. I’m a huge wooden boat fan”—he rolled his eyes at me—“and I was just wondering if your boat was for sale. I’d be—”
Even from halfway across the room, I could hear Neva’s voice coming through the receiver.
“You leave that boat alone! I have a shotgun, young man, and I know how to use it, so keep your distance or I’ll be after you next.”
Rafe hung up the phone and looked at me. “I don’t think she’s interested in selling.” Then his straight face broke up and he started laughing. “Did you hear that? ‘I have a shotgun and I know how to use it.’” He slapped his paper-filled desk with the flat of his hand. “Where’s a pen? I need to write that down. Hey, what’s the matter?”
“I am so sorry,” I said. “She knows who you are, and she can probably figure out where you live.”
“What?” Rafe stared at me, then started laughing again. “You think she’s going to come after me? The woman must be seventy-five years old and might weigh a hundred pounds, dripping wet. What’s she going to do, have a heart attack on me?”
I stood and gave him my Librarian Look. “She is obviously unbalanced. Who knows what she might do? I am very sorry I asked you to call her, and please be careful.”
Rafe snorted. “Right. Okay, I promise to look both ways before crossing the street, although since it’s only the first week of May I really don’t need to look even one way, but if it would make you feel better . . .”
“It would.” I apologized again, got another eye roll, and headed back to the library with Neva’s words ringing in my ears.
• • •
I walked down the hill, thinking about the phone call I’d persuaded Rafe to make and about what Neva had said.
“I’ll be after you next.”
I pulled my cell phone out of my coat pocket and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to push the appropriate buttons. Some people could practically do data entry with their phones while walking, but every time I tried to do that I started feeling as if I were on the teacup ride at Disney World and wishing for an emergency stop button.
“Adam?” I asked. “It’s Minnie. Got a question for you. When you and Henry stopped to look at Neva Chatham’s boat, did you take a close look at it?” I’d asked him earlier about it, and he’d said Henry had looked closely at the boat, but that he hadn’t. Now I wanted to know exactly what that meant.
“Got close enough to see that it was too big a project for me,” Adam said.
“Sure, but how close was that?”
There was a pause. “I didn’t crawl around on the ground, if that’s what you mean. What are you getting at?”
“Well . . .” I wasn’t exactly sure how to say what I was thinking—excellent preparation, Minnie!—so I didn’t say anything for a moment. Adam, however, was happy to fill the conversational gap.
“But if I had the skills, I’d pick up that boat in a heartbeat. Did you see what it was? It’s a 1934 Hacker, triple cockpit. Hardly any of those are left and it’s a crime it’s in such rough shape. This baby is twenty feet long, and I looked it up, it has a six-foot, seven-inch beam. Too small for the big lake, but it’d be perfect for Janay.”
“It would?” I asked vaguely.
“Nothing better. Now, it’ll probably need a new engine, but if it were me, I’d put in a Chevy MerCruiser, a two-hundred-and-sixty-horse. It’d probably top out around thirty-five miles an hour, and that’s a nice speed for a twenty-footer.”
He started to go on about the kind of varnish he’d use when I interrupted. “I think Neva might have been the one who almost ran you over.”
Dead silence. “You . . . what?”
I repeated what I’d said. “Are you laughing?” I asked suspiciously.
“A little,” he said, sputtering. “Thanks for your concern, Minnie, but I’m pretty sure I could handle Neva Chatham. I mean, do you really think that frail little old lady could have cut down the tree that hit Henry? She’s not even five foot tall!”
“Size doesn’t matter,” I said, “when it comes to murder.”
Adam was quiet for a moment. “You’re right,” he said, sighing. “And I suppose it could have been her driving that car, easy enough. It’s just so weird, to think someone I’ve actually met might have tried to kill me.”
There were oodles of statistics out there that informed us that the vast majority of murders are committed by someone who knows their victim very well indeed, but I didn’t say anything. Adam probably knew it anyway.
I felt basically useless. “Take care of yourself,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “You, too.”
The phone went silent, but I continued to stand there for some time, just thinking.
If size didn’t matter when it came to murder, what did?
What was I missing?
Chapter 15
Thanks to being suddenly short-staffed because of illness and my continued and fruitless phone calls in pursuit of another big-name author, my lunch hour was reduced to the time it took to eat the sandwich I’d made that morning and the time it took to make a few phone calls to more downtown businesses, telling my tale of the man who might have left a nice leather notebook at the library, a man who was short and had bright red hair.
I heard the same thing that everyone else had said, that though the man sounded like someone familiar, no one had seen anyone like that, not that they could remember.
In the evening, I went downtown and asked a few more questions about a red-haired man, but heard nothing that would confirm the presence of Seth Wartella. The closest I got was the owner of the jewelry store, who squinted at the ceiling. “Red hair? A while back there was a guy in here, looking for a present for his wife, but that was around Valentine’s Day. And he was tall, not short.”
Just because I couldn’t find anyone who remembered seeing Seth didn’t mean that he hadn’t been in Chilson, but I’d run out of time Monday for asking around, and Tuesday would also be out because it was a bookmobile day.
“But this is our favorite kind of day, isn’t it, Eddie?” I nudged my feline friend, who was sitting on the carpeted step. It ran the length of the bookmobile on both sides, making a handy seat and an even handier step for those on the bookmobile who needed an extra few inches to reach the top shelf. This included me and almost all the children under the age of seven and a few of our elderly patrons who’d started doing the shrinking thing.
Eddie and I were sitting on the step, doing our combined best to encourage a number of small children to come on over to the picture book section. We were parked at a new stop, which had been squeezed in because how could I turn down a request from a day care provider who said she wanted, more than anything, to show kids how wonderful books could be?
The only problem was, the kids seemed more interested in climbing up and down and up and down the bookmobile steps than in books.
“Emily,” coaxed the beleaguered day care lady. “Don’t you want to see the books? Yesterday, you couldn’t wait for the bookmobile. And here’s the bookmobile kitty. Remember? There’s a kitty just over there.”
“His name is Eddie,” I said. “And he’d love to meet you.”
Emily didn’t seem interested, but one of her companions did. “Where’s the kitty?” he asked, abandoning the stairs and looking all around. “I want to see the kitty cat.”
“Right here.” I put Eddie on my lap and gently arranged him into a lying-down position. “He’s purring,” I said as the kid came closer. “Do you hear it?”