Chandra nodded.
“Do I have to say it?” Once again, sir almost popped out.
I wanted to sigh. “I see. You’re overdue, and afraid I’ll blow the whistle. I won’t. Not now, and not if I ever get back to my shelf.”
Chandra said, “She’s been here for almost two years. Mother told me to say we’d lost her, so I did. Then Mother had to pay up—surrender her deposit is what they call it. So she did. So now Mrs. Heuse belongs to us. We like it that way, and so does she.”
“They’ll never burn me here,” Mrs. Heuse told me. “Mrs. Fevre has promised me that, and she’s a good woman. She’ll keep her promise.”
Of course I agreed, even though I felt a whole lot less certain than I sounded. Certainty and sincerity can be awfully hard to fake, but now and then I manage.
“They’ll reclaim me if they find me in the library, sir.” (She had given up the fight.) “You must know what kind of people they are down there.”
I admitted I didn’t, and tried to explain that I was on interlibrary loan and had only just arrived.
“They will. That Ms. Prentice would brand me noncirculating and give back Mrs. Fevre’s money, and there would be nothing Mrs. Fevre could do short of suing.”
“Which she wouldn’t undertake.” I nodded. “I get it. Mrs. Heuse, I’m looking into several matters at Mrs. Fevre’s request.”
“I know that, sir.”
“You can help me with one of them easily and quickly, and I feel quite certain that you will. When the lights go out, something black gets into Mrs. Fevre’s bedchamber—how, I don’t know. It flattens itself on the floor and crawls toward Mrs. Fevre, crying—or at least Chandra calls it crying. Since she’s heard it, I believe at least twice, I think it wise to trust her terminology. Whimpering, whining, and sobbing, I believe. Speaking a few short words. I know you know more about it than she and I do, and I want you to tell us now. Tell us, and I’ll guarantee that you won’t be punished for whatever you may have done.”
Mrs. Heuse stared, her lower lip trembling. Chandra hugged her and tried to comfort her, motioning urgently for me to leave.
I nodded and said, “Explain that I’m not going to harm your mother’s dog.” Soon after that, I walked back to the library alone.
Lunch was over by the time I got there, and it would be hours before dinner. When I’d finished looking at maps on one of the screens, I stood up, rubbed my eyes, and thought things over. I was hungry, but then I was always hungry, just as somebody had told me once. I knew that reading cookbooks would make me even hungrier, but duty is duty; so I trudged off to page through a dozen, mostly on a screen but a few on yellowing paper.
Elizabeth Heuse had written One Hour Company Dinners, Luncheon for Two in Fifteen Minutes, and Fifty-four Truly Delicious Snacks Your Family Has Never Tasted. I was just starting on a chapter of that last one when Millie caught up with me.
“Don’t tell me you’re taking up cooking, Ern!” She made it mock-serious.
“Nope,” I told her, “I’ve taken up starving. Some of this stuff looks wonderful.”
“Quite a few of them really are if you can find the ingredients. That book has a habit of calling for cheeses most nutrition services have never heard of.”
“I see. What was she like in person, Millie? You must have known her.”
“Not very well.” Millie paused thoughtfully. “Are you going to tell me why you want to find out about her?”
I shook my head. “Please don’t try to guess.”
“I already have, but I won’t fuss and stamp to make you tell me whether I’m right. She seemed withdrawn and a little bit sad when I knew her. Have you noticed how rarely she mentions beef and chicken?”
I shook my head again.
“Eating fish doesn’t seem to trouble her, but birds and animals? Those did, both of them.”
“Birds and mammals.”
Millie’s shoulders rose and fell. “I stand corrected. She was an animal lover. I was in the audience one time when some man asked her how to roast a dog. He was trying to be funny, but she froze. Absolutely froze. Finally the woman who’d introduced her stepped in and told the man how to grill a hot dog. After that somebody else announced a ten-minute break. The stage went dark and just about all the audience filed out, I think mostly to the restrooms. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, when almost everybody had come back, Betty Heuse was in control of herself again. Do you want to hear more about that?”
I nodded.
“You never sit down, do you?”
We went over to a table, where I held her chair until she sat. I took the one next to hers.
“You do know how to operate these four-legged chair things. I was beginning to wonder.”
“I wonder about a lot of things,” I told her. “Particularly my patron.”
“You haven’t been returned?”
“No. I came back hoping for lunch, but I was too late.”
“Your patron wasn’t going to feed you?”
I shook my head. “She was asleep. Her cook was going to feed us—that’s my patron’s daughter and me—but I had upset her and the near future didn’t look good. I came back to have a look at dog books and cookbooks, but I haven’t gotten anywhere with the dog books yet.”
“You’ve had an interesting time of it, Ern. I’m no detective, but I know the signs.”
“Yes, I have. Very.”
Millie glanced around before speaking again. “Talking it over with me might help.”
“All right, here goes. Do you know a lot about dogs?”
Silently, she shook her head.
“Neither do I.” I stopped to think, sort of hoping that Millie would go away. “Once I told a lady I knew more about dogs than I do about kids, and that’s not exactly a lie.”
“But you still don’t know much.”
“Correct, because my knowledge is out of date. I looked through a couple of dog books before I started on the cookbooks. They told me that there are at least two dozen breeds I’ve never heard of, and which breeds are the best talkers; but they didn’t tell me the kind of thing I need to find out.”
“What is it your patron wants you to find out? Maybe I can help.”
I took a good, deep breath and let go of it in a sigh. “What she really wants is a detective, but why pay a lot of money for one when you can borrow a reclone resource from the library for nothing?”
“You’re saying that fully human detectives are expensive?”
I nodded. “The good ones are. Very.”
“She may not have the money. Besides, I doubt that there are any detectives we could hire here. This is just a village, Ern.”
“I know. A private investigator might be as ignorant of Polly’s Cove—and the sea—as I am. But the author of Sherlock Holmes might really help, and so might the guys who wrote Ellery Queen, or even the one who wrote about Long John Silver and Jim.…”
“You’ve hit on something. What is it?”
“Jim Hawkins.” I took a good deep breath. “Do you know that book?”
“Treasure Island? Yes, I do. My father read it to us, and I read it to my grandchildren. It seemed terribly dated to me, but that didn’t bother my grandchildren.” Millie was getting out a handkerchief.