“Are you kidding me?”
“You’ve known him since you were a child, Dashiell. He just wants to ask a few questions.”
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about—what do you mean the doctor was useless? Did you get a second opinion? Do you need to see a specialist?”
She glanced down at her phone again. “Oh, Phil wants to know if you’re using Dane or you want to go with a pen name—”
“I don’t want to talk about Phil right now. I’m not even going to use Phil. And I don’t care if the project is commercially viable or if he thinks it’s got series potential or if it would be better if he were a werewolf detective who can only solve cases during the full moon.” (Okay, not to get sidetracked, but that was actually an incredible idea.) “I’m trying to have a conversation with you!”
“And I’ve been trying to have a conversation with you for the last ten years of your life,” my mom snapped. “It’s frustrating when the other person won’t play along, isn’t it?”
It might have been my imagination, but in the silence, I thought I could hear the faint hum of the old light fixtures.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I grabbed it, planning to silence it, but when I saw Millie’s name on the screen, I answered.
“Dash, you have to get over here RIGHT NOW!”
By some miracle, she didn’t blow out the speaker on the phone—but she might have gotten my ear drum.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Where are you?”
“I’m at the library, and they’re ARRESTING MRS. SHUFFLEBOTTOM!”
I got to my feet. And then I stood there, staring at my mom. All the different things I wanted to say got caught in my throat.
She stared back at me, her mouth an uncompromising line. She must have heard—I mean, we’re talking about Millie here—but nothing had changed in her expression. And then, clearly and distinctly, she said, “Sit down and get back to work. You can’t go running off to play detective every time the writing gets hard.”
For someone who cared so much about words, I still couldn’t seem to say anything. So I left.
Chapter 8
Tourist season was one of the few times I was grateful for the bike Bobby had given me (it was powder blue and actually super cute, with the minor downside that it required me to, you know, use my legs). Besides, with the Jeep totaled, it was also my only means of independent transportation. August was the busiest time of year for our small town, and tourists thronged the streets. Understandably so, of course. The town was postcard perfect, built right on the water, with a charming mixture of old Victorians and timber beach bungalows and even the occasional concrete-and-glass coastal modern monstrosity that, somehow, seemed to work. Today, the glorious weather only brought out more people, with the sun clear in the sky, and the air perfectly warm and sweet with balsam and the crepes from Crepe You Very Much and the smell of the candied nuts at Seafoam Sweets (they used a fan to blow the aroma into the street, and let me tell you, my knees went weak).
I zipped past cars caught in stop-and-go traffic, grateful for the cool breeze in my face. Happy couples and families spilled out of the shops and galleries, often crossing willy-nilly, which meant cars had to lurch to a stop to avoid a fun little summer bout of vehicular manslaughter. Outside Ancient Mariner Antiques, an eight-year-old boy was trying to look through a telescope he’d obviously just bought (and which was clearly not an antique). A couple of middle-aged women were sharing a funnel cake and an enormous lemonade under the canopy of a sidewalk table. The line for Two Girls and a Scoop (the best ice cream in the world, plus it was a food truck, so in my fantasies, the ice cream came to me) ran almost a fullblock. It was such a beautiful day, and everyone looked like they were having so much fun, and all that biking was making me a little, uh, flushed, that I was sorely tempted to forget this mess I’d gotten myself into. (Also, that funnel-cake-and-lemonade combo looked seriously good, and I’d used up all my glucose in that weird kind-of-fight with my mom.)
Because I’m a responsible adult, though, I didn’t.
The Hastings Rock Public Library was a long, low building, and it had come from the glorious architectural tradition of “build it cheap and build it fast”—hardboard siding (brown), asphalt shingle roof (brown-ish), small windows, and an extremely uninspiring bulletin board. It had all the aesthetic appeal of a cardboard box. (Actually, that’s not entirely fair to cardboard boxes, because have you seen the ones Crate and Barrel uses to ship their stuff?)
One of the things I’d wondered when I’d moved here was why a charming town like Hastings Rock, which worked so hard to be picturesque, had such a dumpy little library. At the time, I’d assumed it had something to do with limited public funds. Now, I wasn’t so sure. The library took up a lot of land—it had been built, I guessed, before the town had become a tourist destination, and before property had become valuable. It even had its own private parking lot, with signs posted all over warning tourists not to park there. (Incidentally, it was such a temptingly convenient spot that tourists inevitablydidpark there anyway, and Bobby and the other deputies came through about every quarter hour to ticket and, eventually, tow. Bobby was too kind to use the phrase “fish in a barrel,” but he did have a surprisingly wicked grin when he talked about it sometimes.)
In the light of what I’d learned in the last day, I saw the library differently. It was prime real estate. And to people like the mayor, who thought about the town in terms of seasonality and tourist dollars and—shudder—revenue streams, it probablylooked like a waste of space. I mean, on either side of the library, businesses were clumped together, squeezed next to each other as closely as people could manage without a code violation. When a developer did get permission to tear down a building, what went up in its place was usually a multi-storefront structure—basically a tiny strip mall. Because the more stores, the more dollars. If the library did close, the land alone would be worth millions—I wondered, if I’d been at the city council meeting when they’d finally defunded the library, if you could see the dollar signs roll up in the mayor’s eyes.
I locked up my bike and headed toward the library. Then I stopped.
A car was idling at the curb, and behind the wheel, a woman was watching me. Staring at me, actually, and not making any attempt to hide it. She was sitting in a sedan, apparently unconcerned that she was holding up traffic. It took me a moment to recognize her as the woman I’d made accidental eye contact with the night before—solidly built, a crew-neck sweatshirt, a bob of graying hair. And then I realized the sedan was a Chevy Malibu, just like the car that had followed Bobby and me to the mayor’s house.
I turned toward the car with the vague idea of confronting her—at the very least, asking who she was—but she accelerated and cut down the next street. Her license plate was conveniently splashed with mud.
I thought about calling Bobby. But Chevy Malibus were common cars. And even if it wasn’t a coincidence, what was he going to do? She was long gone. So, I headed into the library.
Inside, you could see the same signs of years of neglect—cheap carpeting, even cheaper furniture, fluorescent lights that were simultaneously harsh and dim. It smelled the way old buildings do near the water—when the salt air has engrained itself in the structure—as well as the more familiar, comfortinglibrary smells of old paper and hot toner and coffee. Mrs. Shufflebottom had tried to gussy it up. There was a cute back-to-school display near the entrance, and a pennant banner farther back said BOOK IT TO THE BEACH, complete with a little bucket and shovel and beach ball. But it was obvious she was doing the best she could with what she had—which, I now realized, must have been almost nothing.
There hadn’t been a cruiser in the parking lot, and I didn’t see any sign of the sheriff or her deputies. For that matter, I didn’t see Millie either. I had a brief vision of some sort of hostage-style situation, with Mrs. Shufflebottom holding Millie at gunpoint and demanding that the library funding be restored. (Millie would be the world’s worst hostage, of course, and Bobby would rescue her. In the process, his shirt would probably fall off.) But I didn’t see a single SWAT team in action. A steady beep-beep-beep drew my attention to the circulation desk where Stewart was scanning books. He looked tired. Beaten down, even. I thought about slithering away before he could—
“DASH!”
I mean, in Millie’s defense, she probablythoughtshe was whispering.
