• • •
I decided to walk home not along the waterfront but through downtown. Now that school was done, the summer tourists were out in force even on a weeknight, and a walk by the water would be punctuated by baby-stroller dodging and small-child evasion.
The crowds were part of summer, just like the smell of suntan lotion and cut grass, but I didn’t want to mingle tonight. I wanted to get home quickly and quietly and have Eddie purr at me until I fell asleep.
So I walked east through the downtown blocks, head down, hands in my pockets, not seeing much, not thinking much, trying not to feel sorry for myself because I was such an idiot, trying not to see the look on Stephen’s face when I told him that it’d be a cold day in you-know-what before Caroline Grice gave the library any money.
My efforts weren’t working very well, so I was easily distracted by the sight of a man sitting on the bench outside the Round Table. A familiar-looking man. I’d seen him at the library . . . yes. It was Bill D’Arcy. He’d checked out a monstrous pile of books. He was on Rafe’s list of suspects. And he was sitting there, typing away on his laptop, catching the Round Table’s free Wi-Fi.
Was using free Wi-Fi provided by a restaurant when you weren’t inside the restaurant itself weenie-like behavior? I wasn’t sure, and made a mental note to ask my mother next time we talked. Mom was always good for making sure my moral compass pointed straight north.
I crossed the street and sat down on the bench. “Bill D’Arcy, right?”
The look he gave me was guarded, but not overtly hostile. “I am.”
“Hi.” I smiled wide and held out my hand. “Minnie Hamilton. I’m assistant director at the library. We met the other day when you were checking out a bunch of books.”
He glanced at my hand. Hesitated. Shook it briefly. “Nice to meet you,” he muttered, going back to his computer.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked. He grunted, but I couldn’t tell if it was one of agreement or disagreement. Still, it was a reply of sorts, so I kept going. “Not that it matters, of course. I’m not from here, either. Turns out that spending your childhood summers up here doesn’t count at all. If you didn’t graduate high school here, you’re not from here. Actually”—I made a
hmm
sort of noise—“you have to be born here. A friend of mine, his parents moved up here when he was starting middle school, and he’s not considered a local.” Which annoyed Josh to no end, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
He hunched away from me and typed rapidly.
“I don’t care, really,” I said. “Just curious. It’s a standard question. I bet a lot of people have asked you already, right?”
“Too many,” he muttered, whacking at the keyboard keys.
“Sounds familiar,” I said, laughing. “I tell people I’m from Dearborn, and next thing they want to know is, what high school did I go to? Then it’s what year did I graduate? After that, we’re talking restaurants and what street I lived on. Conversations like that can go on forever.”
He gave me a pointed look. I smiled. “But lately all anyone wants to talk about is Stan Larabee. You know, the man who was killed? Well, not so much talking about him, but who killed him. I’ve heard all sorts of theories, from my boss to his sisters to some guy named Chris. Some people even think I did it.” I laughed heartily. “Since you’re not from here, I bet your theory has less baggage than anyone else’s.”
Either he’d managed to turn off his ears, or he was intentionally ignoring me. I talked louder.
“Outside points of view can be very helpful. If you know anything about Stan, anything at all, you should tell the police. You look like an observant man; I bet there’s something you know. I bet—”
He slapped his laptop shut, stood, and walked away without even the courtesy of a backward glare.
There were two ways to interpret that little scene, I thought, watching him stalk off, his legs stiff and his shoulders set. One, that he was trying to become a hermit and was well on his way to success. Two, that he knew something about Stan’s death that he didn’t want to share.
I stood and walked the rest of the way home, thinking that I wasn’t ready to cross Bill D’Arcy off the suspect list. Not by a long shot.
Five seconds after I walked in the door, I walked back out again. Rafe. I needed to ask Rafe about working on my electrical stuff.
• • •
The lights were on in his house, which, when he was done restoring it to its original status as an early-nineteen-hundreds Shingle-style cottage, would be a showpiece. Now, however, it was a cobbled-together mess of tiny apartments on the inside and was covered on the outside with the widest variety of siding seen anywhere but a lumberyard. The former owners hadn’t exactly been concerned with aesthetics.
I knocked on the front door. “Rafe? It’s Minnie. I know you’re in there—I can hear that horrible music you play.”
“No one’s here.”
Uh-oh. Rafe always defended his music. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing. Go away.”
I banged on the door with my fist. “Let me in or I’m coming in anyway.”
The door swung open slowly, making a creepy screeching noise. Rafe stood in the doorway. “Has anyone ever told you what a pain in the heinie you can be?”
“Daily. What’s the matter with your arm?”
He was holding it away from his side at an awkward angle. “Nothing.”
I stepped inside. “Let me see.”
“Aw, Minnie, don’t—”
“Let. Me. See.”
Once again, the Librarian Voice did the trick. His shoulders slumped and he let me pull him into the brightness cast by the halogen work lights scattered around the entryway. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “It just needs a little more time.”
I pulled at a corner of the first aid tape and started tugging. “This might hurt a little.”
“Jeez, Min, that stings like a you-know-what. Do you have to?”
With one quick rip, I yanked off the tape.
“Ow!”
“Quit being such a baby,” I said. “Now let me see your stitches. Come on. Show me.”
“Don’t want to,” he muttered, but held out his arm.
I took hold of his wrist, pulled off the gauze, and turned the wound to the light. I sucked in a quick breath. “We’re going to the hospital. Now.”
“Aw, Min—”
“Rafe Niswander, your arm is red and puffy with infection. Next thing is you’ll get those red streaks and then you’ll get a staph infection and then they’ll cut off your arm, but by then the infection will have gone too far and you’ll spend two weeks in the hospital sliding toward an early death, all because you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Can’t die, I got too many things to do.”
“Rafe.” I swallowed. “Come to the hospital with me. Please.”
He looked at my face. I don’t know what he saw there, but for once he didn’t argue.
• • •
Forty-five minutes later, we were back in Charlevoix’s emergency room. The attractive Dr. Tucker Kleinow came in as I was helping Rafe up onto the hospital bed.
“Back again?” he asked. “Another problem with your saw?”
“Nah,” Rafe said. “Minnie here is all worried about that cut you sewed up a while back. Tell her it’s okay, will you? She’s getting on my case something fierce.”
I crossed my arms. “Only because you’re not taking care of yourself. If you had, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Dr. Kleinow snapped on gloves and examined Rafe’s arm carefully. “You definitely have some infection going on. Did you fill the prescription for antibiotics that I gave you?”
“Sure did,” Rafe said.
I glared at him. “But did you take them?”
“Well, yeah.”
“
All
of them?”
“Not all in a row, like,” he said. “I forgot a couple of days and it looked good, so what was the point, right?”
I drew in a long breath, the better to yell at him with, but the doctor stepped in between us. “I’ll clean this up again, if you two don’t mind putting a pause on your argument. You can yell at your husband on the way home.”
“My . . . what?” Surely he hadn’t said what I thought he’d said.
Rafe chuckled. “Don’t know what’s funnier, thinking that she’d marry me, or that I’d be dumb enough to ask her.”
I frowned. “Was I just insulted? Because it sure sounded like it.”
Dr. Kleinow looked from one of us to the other. “Siblings?” He looked a little closer, undoubtedly noting the complete lack of family resemblance. “Adopted, maybe?”
Rafe and I shook our heads. “We’re just friends,” I said. “Neighbors.”
“Only relatives are allowed with the patient in the examination room,” the doctor said.
Rafe and I looked at each other. We shrugged simultaneously. “Everybody must have thought we were married,” Rafe said. “I can see it. Did you hear how she was ragging me for not taking those pills?”
“She was right,” Dr. Kleinow said.
“Oh, sure, take her side,” Rafe said. “The cute girl’s always right, is that it?”
“There are worse reasons to take sides.” The doctor grinned. “Now, let’s get a closer look at that arm.”
• • •
After another forty-five minutes, Rafe was cleansed, rebandaged, and more or less beaten into submission about taking the newer and much stronger prescription. His post-emergency-room care, however, was being more problematic.
Rafe looked at the doctor mournfully. “Don’t tell me Minster here was right, that I could lose my arm. Taking these new freaking horse pills will be enough, right? You’re not going to cut my arm off, are you?”
“It’s been known to happen.” The doctor handed Rafe a handful of papers, all of it with teeny tiny print. “Here’s what you need to do.”
“Man.” Rafe hefted the paperwork. “This is a lot of reading. I really need to look at all of it?”
Dr. Kleinow started to say something. Stopped. Eyed Rafe. Eyed me. “Well . . .”
I grinned. He couldn’t have transmitted what he was thinking more clearly if he’d written it on a chalkboard. “Though Mr. Niswander here is a born and bred northern redneck wannabe, he not only graduated from high school, but he earned a bachelor’s degree from Northern Michigan University and a master’s degree from Michigan State.”
“A Spartan?” The doctor frowned. “Yet you’re certain he can read?”
“Hey!” Rafe sat up.
I pushed him back down. “He’ll read it. And he’ll follow the directions this time.” I thumped a gentle fist on his leg. “Won’t you?”
“Yeah, but jeez . . .” Rafe was scanning the instructions.
“Just think of the story you’ll have for the kids in September.”
Dr. Kleinow gathered up the empty gauze packets and dropped them into a wastebasket. “You’re a teacher?”
“Nah. Worse.”
I snorted. “He’s principal of the middle school, if you can believe it.”
Rafe flipped a sheet. “Lucky for me they didn’t have any other applicants.”
An outright lie. There had been dozens, and Rafe had been the school board’s unanimous choice for the job.
“We done here?” Rafe kicked his feet over the side of the bed and slid to the floor. “There’s a little boys’ room that’s calling my name.”
Dr. Kleinow watched him go. “I’d guess he’s an excellent principal.”
“He is, actually.” I picked up the papers Rafe had left behind. “And will be for a long time, assuming I don’t kill him first.”
“What are friends for?”
I smiled at him. He smiled back and the moment became something that made my heart beat a little faster.
“So you two are just friends?” Dr. Tucker Kleinow asked.
I nodded. “All we’ll ever be.” Or want to be. Rafe was a wonderful friend, but it was a brother-sister kind of friendship. The thought of a life spent with him made the inside of my mouth pucker.
“And is there anyone who would be angry if I asked you out to dinner?”
“Not a soul.”
He moved a half step closer. “I find that hard to believe.”
My smile went wider and I moved half a step toward him.
“Hey, Min!” Rafe stuck his head inside the doorway. “Are you ready to go, or what? Back home I got slow glue setting up something fierce.”
“See why we’re just friends?” I asked Tucker.
He nodded. “Of course, it’s good to have friends.”
“And even better to make new—”
Rafe slung his arm around my shoulders and marched me away, yelling my phone number to Tucker.
• • •
Later that evening I thumbed off my cell phone. “Looks like I have a date,” I told Eddie. “What do you think about that?”
He yawned and gave the impression of settling even deeper into the scraps of paper he’d decided were his new home. I wasn’t sure he’d moved at all in the last twenty-four hours. Well, there was litter-box evidence that he’d engaged in some physical activity, but that could have been a trick.
My intention had been to clean up the mess he’d made, but every time I touched the papers, he’d started such a horrendous howling that I was afraid the neighbors would call the police. Not Louisa, since she and Eddie were good friends and she understood how odd he could be, but some of the newer arrivals were blithely ignorant of Eddie’s presence and could easily interpret certain events erroneously.