Lending a Paw(53)

“Not as far as I know,” I said. My aunt put her silverware and napkin on her plate and stood to take the dishes to the kitchen. “Aunt Frances,” I asked, “have you heard anything?”

She stopped. “No, I haven’t. But then, why would I?”

Zofia chuckled. “You know everyone in this town. How could you not know the richest man in Chilson?”

“Well, I didn’t,” Aunt Frances said, a little too quickly. “There are lots of people I don’t know. And there are some I know far too well.” Abandoning her plate, she took quick steps to the back door and left the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.

After a short silence, Harris was the first to speak. “Wow, I’ve never seen her like that. She sure seems mad about something.”

“Oh, dear.” Zofia fiddled with her spoon. “I hope I didn’t offend her.”

Paulette poured Leo another cup of coffee. “What do you think, Leo?”

He smiled at her. “I think this is a beautiful day. How do you feel about a drive up to Cross Village and lunch at Legs?”

Dena glanced around the table, ending with me. “Shouldn’t somebody go after her? She sounded pretty upset.”

“Not to worry.” Quincy patted her shoulder, his touch lingering a beat too long. “Give her some time to work it out herself. If she’s still upset this afternoon, I’ll talk to her.”

Through it all, I said nothing.

But the worries in my brain were starting to run in tiny little circles, around and around and around.

• • •

Chris Ballou sat cross-legged on my boat’s front deck, a bilge pump in each hand. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

I was sitting on the deck, too, looking at him across the open engine hatch. “I hate questions like that.”

He grinned. “The good news is that your problem isn’t the bilge pump. I can put the old one back in and sell this to some other poor slob.”

Since I wasn’t completely ignorant of boat maintenance issues, I could see where this was going. “It’s electrical, isn’t it?”

“Got to be,” Chris said cheerfully.

“How much is it going to cost?”

“Well, that’s the bad news.”

I squinched my eyes shut and slapped my hands over my ears. “Don’t want to hear it, don’t want to hear it—”

Chris spoke loudly. “I got another set of good and bad newses.” I uncovered my ears and waited. “Bad first. Job like this on a boat like this, we’re looking at five hours if it’s easy, double that, or more, if it’s not.”

My chest went tight. Five hours of a boat mechanic’s time was equivalent to slightly less than a week of the Chilson District Library assistant director’s take-home pay. Ten hours was an amount that would require payments on my credit card for longer than I wanted to think about. My student loans were far from being paid off, my car wouldn’t be paid off for almost two years, and the houseboat loan was—

“Hey, don’t look like that,” Chris said. “You haven’t heard my good news.” He lowered his top half deeper into the engine compartment and his voice came out echoey, in a disembodied sort of way. “Rafe Niswander could do the work for you a lot cheaper.” His right hand extended up into the air. “Hand me those wire cutters, will you, Min Pin? Thanks. Yeah, Rafe used to work here, summers. He’s got those long skinny fingers that fit into tight corners no one else could reach without pulling the freaking engine.”

I’d never noticed that Rafe had long skinny fingers. I would now, though.

“But you know Rafe,” Chris said. “You’d have to work with his schedule. And he’s got that thing going with his arm right now. He says it’s good, but if it’s that good, why is he still wearing that ratty old bandage?”

Rafe. I grumped a grumpy noise to myself. Anyone with half an ounce of sense would have changed the bandage daily. Not Rafe. Oh, no, not oh-it’ll-be-fine-quit-worrying Rafe. The man needed a wife something fierce, but I couldn’t think of any woman I disliked enough.

Another couple minutes, and Chris pushed himself out into the sunlight. “There you go. All shipshape and seaworthy.”

Seaworthy I didn’t care about. “Is it lakeworthy?”

“Well.” Chris scratched his bristly chin with the end of a Phillips screwdriver. “I wouldn’t take her out on the big lake, but she’s probably okay for a one-cocktail cruise out there.” He pointed the screwdriver out at Janay Lake.

“How about tied up to the dock?”