For a brief, eternal second, I didn’t move. Didn’t think. Didn’t breathe. Because Eddie was standing next to something completely unexpected—the figure of a man. He was lying on his back, one arm flung across his chest, his face turned away from me, so all I got was the impression of age, frailty, and the absence of any life. But maybe . . . maybe there was breath. Maybe there was a chance.
I rushed forward. “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Do you need help?” I was kneeling, checking for a pulse, feeling the cool skin, knowing I was far too late, but looking for life anyway. “Can you hear me? Can you—”
My hand, which had been on the man’s wrist, came away slightly red and wet. Blood. What on . . . ?
I swallowed. The blood had come from a small hole in his shirt, right where his heart was. A small, bullet-sized hole. My gaze went from the wound upward to his face. Which was looking familiar, even in the slackness of death, even in this strange place.
Recognition clicked and on its heels came an instinctive reaction that, later, I would never be able to explain. But I’d had to try, couldn’t not try.
“Stan! Can you hear me? I’m calling 911 right now.” I reached into my pocket for my phone. The instant I heard the dial tone, I pushed the three numbers. “The EMT guys will be here before you know it. They’ll take care of you, okay?”
I pushed the SEND button hard and leapt up to straddle Stan Larabee’s midsection. My CPR class hadn’t been that long ago. I could bring him back. I could. I had to.
“Nine-one-one,” the dispatcher said. “What is your emergency?”
Chapter 4
An infinitely long time later, Eddie and I were sitting in the bookmobile driver’s seat, waiting for a deputy from the county sheriff’s office to give us the okay to go home. Though my tears had dried up half an hour ago, sniffles remained.
“I couldn’t save him, Eddie. I tried and tried but nothing I did mattered.” I hugged Eddie tight and he didn’t make even a squeak of protest. “I did everything they told me to in that class, but it wasn’t enough.” Sniff.
The EMT crew had arrived seventeen minutes after I made the 911 call. Amazing, really, considering the distances in this part of the county, but it hadn’t been soon enough to bring Stan Larabee back.
“He’s gone, Eddie, he’s really gone.” Sniff. “It seems so wrong. He was so full of life. There were so many things he wanted to do.” During the planning phase of the bookmobile purchase, Stan and I had met on an almost daily basis. I’d learned enough about him to know that he deeply regretted some of the things he’d done while a wheeling and dealing real estate developer. I also knew that he’d divested himself of his third wife a decade earlier, had never had any children, and was working almost as hard at giving away his money as he had at making it.
“But no handouts,” he’d told me. “I’m attaching strings to the checks I write. And no money for poor planning. If you can’t use the money you have in a sensible way, why should I give, or even loan, you some of mine?”
Eddie bumped my chin with the top of his head.
Absently, I started petting him. “I don’t even know who to call. I mean, sure, the police will notify the next of kin, but I feel that I should say something to one of his relatives.” As far as I knew, though, there wasn’t anyone. He lived alone in a great big house on a great big hill that had been designed to take advantage of the views of both Lake Michigan and Janay Lake.
A big fat raindrop splattered on the bookmobile’s wide windshield. Then another, and another. The blue skies that had accompanied us through the morning and halfway through the afternoon were gone. A thick layer of low clouds, heavy with rain, had moved across the sun and now the bookmobile was getting its first shower.
“Hope it doesn’t shrink,” I murmured.
Eddie settled back down into my lap and turned on his purr.
“You’re not so bad for an Eddie.” I laid my hand on his back. His body heat seeped into my skin, warming me in more ways than one.
It had been my Florida-based brother who had made me aware of Stan’s existence. Matt, a Disney Imagineer, had run into “this older guy who said he’d just built a place in Chilson. He was down here to tidy up some business, sounded like. Anyway, I told him my sister was a librarian up there and he said for you to give him a call.”
I’d demurred, but Matt had pressed me with all the pressure a big brother can bear. “Do it, Min. This guy is a big deal down here.”
So I’d called. Stan invited me to lunch at the local diner and before we’d finished our burgers, it was clear that we were going to be friends. Despite the disparity in our ages, backgrounds, and life experiences, there was an instant rapport between us that defied all understanding.