He tried to kick me again, so I hurried behind the desk.
“Look for anything connected to the mayor,” I told Keme. “Or the library budget. Or the fundraiser auction. Or the book. Oh, and see if you can find my patron record, because IknowI returnedFat Catz 3on time, and I’m not going to pay another fine—”
A tea bag hit me in the face.
(Keep your mind out of the gutter.)
I decided to choose love and embrace forgiveness and walk the higher path. Then, when Keme wasn’t looking, I threw the tea bag back at him. I missed, but only because those things are totally not aerodynamic.
While Keme worked his way through the filing cabinets, I attacked the mounds of papers on the desk. Mrs. Shufflebottom was obviously an amazing librarian. She probably had a medal somewhere. And a plaque. And a trophy. So I was sure there was some kind of method to her madness. But since I didn’t know what that was, instead, it looked like she was super stressed and overwhelmed and might have, maybe, let things slide.
Some of the papers were clearly important—invoices from book vendors, packing slips, utility bills, payroll reports. Others were…less so. There was a flyer for the library’s beachcombers’ club. There was a page of notes that must have been from a few years ago, because it was Mrs. Shufflebottom’s introduction for Vivienne Carver at a library reading. And there was a child’s craft—a paper plate meant to look like a face, with strips of paper glued on for hair. I was guessing it was supposed to be Mrs. Shufflebottom. I also guessed that if a child made a craft of my face and it turned out like that, I would have taken a bottle of gin to the back of the stacks and screamed into a dictionary for, say, an hour.
A soft metallic noise made me look up. Keme was leaning against one of the filing cabinets, tapping on an open drawer. It was stuffed full of documents.
“Good job, buddy,” I said in the tone I knew would annoy Keme the most. “That’s a filing cabinet. You’re doing so well!”
Do you know how with cats, sometimes you know when they’re about to pounce?
Yeah, Keme’s like that.
He chose to restrain himself, though, and wiggled one of the folders free from the drawer. Then he turned it so I could see it.
LIBRARY BUDGET was printed on the folder’s tab. And then FY 2017.
Because I was a genius (according to my parents), I immediately understood that FY stood for fiscal year. I was less clear on what a fiscal year actually was, but it sounded promising.
Keme made a gesture to indicate the rest of the drawer, which I took to mean the other files were also budgets. I nodded and said, “Better start reading.”
Outrage flooded his expression.
Just to be safe, I turned my face down and pretended to look at the papers again. If he saw me grinning, it would probably start World War III.
As Keme dug into the budget files—hey, better him than me—I continued to search Mrs. Shufflebottom’s desk. I struck gold by pure, dumb luck: I grabbed the stack of papers that were still in the printer tray, and then I stared at the printout of an email that, according to the timestamp, had been sent that morning. (Remember what I said about librarians wanting hard copies ofeverything?)
The email had been sent by Mrs. Shufflebottom to [email protected]. The text was terse—This is the third email I’ve sent this morning, in addition to eight phone calls. No one answers when I call, and I have yet to receive a response to my messages. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.(Side note: I was starting to understand why Millie was her favorite.)I EXPECT AN IMMEDIATE REPLY. I AM DOCUMENTING THESE ATTEMPTS TO CONTACT YOU.
The next page in the stack was a printout of the previous email. And then the email before that. (Apparently, she hadn’t been kidding about documenting this stuff.) I took out my phoneand tried to go to www.heritageguard.com, but I got one of those dumb pages where they tell you someone else already owns the domain name, but they’ll be happy to sell it to you for thousands of dollars.
That definitely wasn’t good—whoever Heritage Guard was supposed to be, they didn’t seem to exist. It didn’t take me long to figure out why Mrs. Shufflebottom was freaking out. A little farther down in the printout tray, I found an insurance policy issued by Heritage Guard. The only thing covered by the policy appeared to be Nathaniel Blackwood’s diary, and it looked like it had cost Mrs. Shufflebottom ten thousand dollars.
There was no way that was right.
But on the next page, there was a copy of a check, drawing on the Hastings Rock Public Library’s account. The check was for ten thousand dollars, and it was written to be paid to George Chin. In the memo, it said,Heritage Guard.
I took a moment to let my mind be fully blown.
Mrs. Shufflebottom had paid George Chin ten thousand dollars for an insurance policy that, I was guessing, was a total fake. And if the insurance policy was bogus, what did that say about the diary?
Flipping through the rest of the pages was like moving backward through a snapshot sequence of the events that had brought us here. George Chin’s offer to broker the appropriate insurance—Mrs. Shufflebottom could write the check directly to him, he assured her. And before that, Colleen Worman’s message stating that she was thrilled the library would accept her donation, but on the advice of her attorney, could they insure the diary until the auction was complete?
I wasn’t exactly a financial wizard (this coming from the guy whose electricity had been shut off), but I didn’t think even I would have fallen for it.
On the other hand, though, maybe I was being too harsh. Mrs. Shufflebottom had been desperate to save the library. And desperate people did desperate things.
How far did that desperation go? If Mrs. Shufflebottom had believed that the mayor had stolen the diary, would she have killed to get it back? I wanted to say no. But people had killed for less.
I finished reading through the emails and assembled my best approximation of a timeline. From what I gathered, it looked like Colleen Worman had contacted Mrs. Shufflebottom out of the blue in early June. The timing seemed significant; by that point, Mrs. Shufflebottom must have known that the city council was planning on defunding the library. Under any other circumstance, she probably would have been suspicious of an unexpected—and unsolicited—offer, especially one as generous as Colleen’s. In hindsight, Colleen’s explanation that she was a widow, her husband had been a collector of rare books, she wondered if she might donate a book of local interest, perhaps the library could use it to raise funds if they weren’t interested in keeping it permanently in their collection, looked way too convenient. To Mrs. Shufflebottom, in her hour of need, it must have felt like the heavens had opened.
