Jaded (5 page)

She got the door locked, more out of habit than necessity, and set off down the sidewalk into the heart of the town. She knew nature existed, of course, but watching spring bloom in Walkers Ford continually amazed her. Trees bereft of buds a week ago now held a haze of that gorgeous spring green shade, full of promise and hope. Daffodils bobbed lazily in the planters lining Main Street, seeming to say good morning. She took a couple of pictures with her phone’s camera and sent them to Marissa Brooks’s e-mail address. Last fall the lifelong resident of Walkers Ford had left town to fulfill her dream of living aboard a sailboat, and she’d taken former Marine Adam Collins with her. They were sailing across vast expanses of open ocean, so Adam insisted on state-of-the-art communications technology. Even in Hawaii Marissa would enjoy seeing pictures of spring blooming on the prairie. As she typed up the email, Alana walked past the gas station and volunteer fire department to the Heirloom Café.

“Morning, Alana,” the waitress called. “The usual?”

“Please,” Alana said. She set her bags down at the end of the counter and scanned the national news on her phone while she waited for her morning oatmeal. The
New York Times
, then the
Trib
, then the political blogs all got a quick skim before the waitress set a to-go cup of oatmeal in front of her, the lid to the side. Alana handed over a five and poured syrup on the oatmeal, then fitted the lid to the container before shouldering her bags again.

“You could make that at home for a quarter,” the waitress said.

Alana took the change and left a dollar on the counter as a tip. “It’s a bad habit,” she said with a smile. “Besides, who would keep me up to date on the gossip?”

Her pace of life didn’t seem to allow for cooking. She perpetually ran late, often grabbing a bagel for breakfast, then a sandwich for dinner from the same deli that sat between her apartment building and her family’s offices.

“You’re the gossip today,” Peggy said.

Alana blinked. “I am?”

“People have opinions about the library, and no one knew Mayor Turner’d asked you to redo the proposal,” Peg confided, then hurried off with her coffeepot to the other end of the counter.

Neglecting to get buy-in from key stakeholders, Alana thought. This could be a problem.

Tote and purse back on her shoulder she walked through the chilly, damp spring air to the library. A hundred years of traffic had worn depressions into the marble steps leading up to the double doors, and they could be slick when wet. Today several plastic grocery sacks clung to the bottom step. Alana opened the doors, left her bags and breakfast on the circulation desk, hurriedly swallowed a couple of bites of her breakfast. Experience taught her that she’d be on her feet and running the moment the library opened, which meant eating on the run.

She turned to go back to the front door, intending to remove the old wooden book drop box from the door and sort the after-hours returns, but ran smack into a gray sweater. Startled, she gasped and stepped back, hand clasped to her chest.

Stereotypical librarian. You have to stop doing that if you want to go home different.

Behind her stood a boy she’d never seen before in her life. He was caught in that awkward phase somewhere between teen and man, his height exacerbated by a frankly skinny frame, with reddish brown hair and blue eyes. His gray sweater was misshapen from washing and wearing, and his jeans barely skimmed the tops of his sneakers. His face was white with cold.

One eyebrow lifted, and a mocking amusement filled his eyes. “Sorry,” he said.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” she said. “We’re not open yet.”

He looked around the building like he’d never seen it before. “I’m not here to check out books,” he said.

Alana composed herself. “How can I help you?”

“I’m here for community service.”

“What kind of community service?”

The mocking expression sharpened. “The kind of community service you do when you get busted for stealing. A hundred hours at the library. Ridgeway set it up.”

“
Chief
Ridgeway, and I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“I bet you don’t,” he said, his gaze skimming her.

Alana drew herself up to her full five feet nine inches in three-inch heels. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

His shoulders crept up toward his ears. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said.

She nodded at the wooden book drop attached to the unopened front door. “Remove that and set it on the table while I call Chief Ridgeway and find out what’s going on.”

He slouched off toward the front door. Watching him carefully, Alana picked up her cell phone and considered it. Lucas Ridgeway, her landlord, had given her a cell and a home number, but this was chief-of-police business. She dialed the department’s main number and got the station’s secretary.

“Hi, Mary,” she said. “It’s Alana Wentworth calling from the library. Is Chief Ridgeway available?”

“He just walked in. Hold on a second.”

At the bawled
Chief, it’s the librarian, line two,
Alana held her phone away from her ear.

“Ridgeway.”

“Chief Ridgeway, did you forget to tell me something yesterday?”

“Why are you calling me Chief Ridgeway?”

Heat flared in her cheeks. “Because this is an official call from the library director to the chief of police,” she explained.

“Said library director and chief of police were officially half-naked on your couch,” he said.

She was no good at this. Was he flirting, or making a simple statement of fact? He made it nearly impossible to tell, his tone of voice, deep, slightly raspy, and yet somehow emotionless. “Tell me you have your door closed,” she hissed, keeping one eye on the kid. After some fumbling, he’d managed to disengage the heavy box from the door and was now carrying it to the wooden table along the windows.

“Okay, but I don’t.”

She drew in her breath.

“I do have my door closed. You’re blushing again. I can hear it.”

“You can’t possibly hear me blush.”

“Sure I can,” he said.

The still unnamed teen dropped the heavy box on the table. The crash rattled the windows and made Alana jump. “There is a young man here who claims he was arrested for theft, and you sent him here to do community service,” she whispered into the phone.

A pause, then a muffled
dammit
. “I did forget to tell you something yesterday,” he said.

“Who is he?”

“That’s one Cody Burton, caught red-handed stealing from the market. Because it was his first arrest, the judge agreed to counseling and a hundred hours of community service.”

“Here?” she hissed.

“There.”

“What on earth am I supposed to do with him?”

She heard a door slam and the sound of something hitting the desk top. “Put him to work. You said at the town hall the library needed repairs.”

She looked around the building, at the cracked plaster, the windows in their original frames that either wouldn’t open or leaked cold air in the winter and hot air in the summer, at the worn marble floor, the tarnished signs indicating the bathrooms and meeting room, at the oak shelves in desperate need of refinishing. “He’s sixteen years old.”

“Seventeen. He’s lucky to get community service. He should have gone to jail.”

She blinked at that brusque assessment. “I don’t have any supplies. What could he possibly know about that kind of work?”

Lucas’s shrug was audible. “No idea. Might not be a bad thing for him to learn.”

“Who’s going to teach him? I can’t unstop my own drain.”

“I have to go,” Lucas said.

She stared at her phone, which was flashing a call time of just over a minute, then looked at her new assistant. Cody Burton was pulling books from the overnight returns box and stacking them on the table. He was tall and so painfully thin Alana could see the bones of his shoulders jutting through his sweater. She slipped her phone into her purse and walked over to the table.

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“Suspended,” he said.

“For?”

“Two weeks.”

“I meant, what did you do?”

Cody just shrugged and continued to stack books, his defensive demeanor shattered by the loud rumble of his stomach. He had cheekbones like cliffs to go with the prominent shoulder bones, but he didn’t stop removing books from the box. Alana considered him for a second, then went to the circulation desk and picked up her oatmeal. Without a word she set it on the table next to him.

The color in his cheekbones darkened along with his pale blue eyes. She thought he’d refuse the offering, so she spoke hurriedly.

“I wasn’t prepared for you, so give me a little while to think about what you’d be able to do for the library. Do you have a form to track your hours?”

He pulled two sheets of paper stapled together, folded into quarters, from the back pocket of his jeans and handed them to her. Alana walked once again to the circulation desk, sat down, and smoothed open the papers.

Cody Mitchell Burton
, she read just below the county court’s seal. Birth date. An address on a county road. A chart with columns for the date, start and end time, and her signature for each day. Easy enough, if she knew what to do with him.

She risked a glance at the table. Cody had his back to her, his shoulders hunched over. His hair curled into the fraying collar of his sweater.

The oatmeal was gone from beside the box.

It was a breakfast perfectly suited to a sedentary librarian a little worried about weight gain as she approached thirty, but probably a drop in the empty stomach of a reed-thin teenage boy. As she watched, he bent over to place the container at the bottom of the plastic-lined trash can next to the table, taking care not to make a single sound, no mean feat in the empty, echoing library. Alana glanced back down at the paperwork in front of her and waited until Cody lifted another handful of books from the box.

“Looks simple enough,” she said as she approached the table.

This banality didn’t even get a shrug. She held the sheet out to him.

“You’re not going to keep it?”

“Your hours, your responsibility,” she said.

His long, thin fingers closed around the paper while his eyes dared her to say anything about the oatmeal. She prayed her own stomach would stay quiet, then added a second prayer that Mrs. Battle hadn’t eaten all the cereal bars stored under the microwave in her office.

Give him something to do. Anything. “You can start by reshelving those books,” she said. “After that, please sweep the entry, run the sweeper along the runner protecting the hardwood floors, and water the plants.”

He looked at her, mocking challenge twisting his lip. “How do I know where they go?”

“I know the librarian at the high school teaches you how to use the Dewey decimal system,” she countered.

“I must have missed that day.”

“I’ll give you a quick tour,” she said, and led him away from the large paneled front doors. The interior didn’t lack for light, as big triptych windows, framed in oak with smaller windows above, opened to the main room. A small fireplace framed in brick with a charmingly carved mantel above set off the reading space by the windows. “Periodicals,” she said, gesturing at the oak magazine racks and the spindles holding the weekly newspapers from Brookings and Sioux Falls. “Children’s section, then hardback fiction on the shelves, with paperbacks in the racks. Nonfiction is housed at the back,” she said, pointing at the taller stacks in the darker rear of the building, then widened the sweep of her arm to include the balcony running along the side of the building. An oak railing theoretically kept people from falling to the main floor, but the wood had weakened over the years, and now Alana brought down reference materials herself. “Our reference section.”

He looked around, taking in the green paint that probably looked fresh and inviting when it was originally applied decades earlier but had faded to something not out of place in a hospital. Air huffed derisively from his nostrils.

“This
is
your library,” she said, tightening her grip on her temper. “The town funds it for everyone in the community to use.”

“This is the first time I’ve set foot in this building since the tour we took in fourth grade.”

Inspiration struck. A nonuser from Generation Z required to spend time in the library was the perfect focus group. “No time like the present,” she said. “After you’ve finished with the morning tasks, I’d like you to sit down and make a list of the things you could do for the library during your community service time.”

He looked at her. “You’re not going to tell me what to do?”

Only if I have to, she thought. “I might, but I’d like to know what you think we need and what you can offer. After you shelve the books. And clean the bathrooms.”

As she watched, he examined the books’ spines and sorted them into the appropriate stacks. Through the front window Alana watched Carmody Phillips park her minivan. She moved slowly up the steps, a plastic laundry basket full of picture books braced against one hip, her baby girl on the other, and her toddler holding on to the laundry basket as they made their way up the steps.

Alana held open the front door. “I remember when she was just a newborn,” she said with a smile.

“Eight months old yesterday,” Carmody said. “And growing fast.”

“She certainly is. Let me get that for you,” Alana said, and reached for the basket.

 • • • 

THE SIGHT OF
Alana, dreamy-eyed and wearing a nearly sheer cotton nightie as she drank her tea and talked on the phone was a good way to start Lucas’s morning. The phone call reminding him that he’d flat-out forgotten to tell Alana about Cody Burton prompted him to consider exactly how much he’d changed since his days with the DPD. When he started out with DPD a kid like Cody would have been on his mind constantly.

Not anymore.

The call from dispatch about a break-in ended all thoughts about Cody Burton.

He braked the Blazer to a stop in front of the weathered farmhouse and slid out of the truck. Gravel crunched underfoot as he shifted his jacket back from his right hip and approached the front door. The screen door, worn gray by years of wind and snow and summer heat, was closed, but the interior door stood open. His hand tightened reflexively when a gnarled hand appeared, then pushed open the door.