Lending a Paw(55)

“What did she do this time?” Josh shouldered past me. “Oh, great. Coffee. Nice. All sugared up, I bet. That’ll be nice to clean up. Who’s going to do it for you this time?”

“Josh,” I said sharply. “It’s just a cup of coffee.”

He snorted. “Cup of coffee today. The other day it was a whole pot. Bam! Coffee over the counters, over the floor, it even got in the refrigerator. Princess over there was too upset to clean it up, so guess who got volunteered?” He thumped his chest.

Holly started to say something, but stopped and crouched down to pick up the biggest shards of her former mug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It was an accident,” I said, trying to smile at them both. Not an easy task since they were on opposite sides of the room and neither one was looking at me, but I did my best. “These things happen.”

“Oh, yeah?” Josh smirked. “Last week Reva Shomin brought in a plate of cookies for everybody. Guess who let the full plate slip out of her hands? We didn’t get a single cookie, thanks to butterfingers over there. If we had a three-strike rule for breaking things, she’d be on her way out of here.”

I saw a tear trickle down Holly’s cheek. Enough.

“Josh!” My voice whipped his head around. “It was an accident. There’s no need to make her feel worse than she already does.”

“I don’t think—”

“What you think doesn’t matter right now. If you’re not going to help clean, why don’t you go do something more productive than mocking your coworkers?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. Though my assigned tasks in the library included personnel issues, I’d only once before had to cross over into being the disciplinarian. The experience had left me shaking, yet oddly elated. From that experience, I’d learned that it made no sense to put off tasks that you knew were going to make you uncomfortable. The delay only gave you time to worry, and what was the point of that?

“The printer in the bookmobile room is creasing the paper,” I said. “It would be great if you have time to take a look at it.”

He gave me a curt nod and stomped off.

I dropped my armloads of books onto a table. “Holly, sit down. If you don’t, you’re going to fall over into that sticky mess, then you’ll have to go home to shower and change, I won’t be able to send Mitchell over to you, and I don’t have time today to answer his questions about hurricanes.”

Her hands shook as she pulled out a coffee-free chair. “We don’t get hurricanes here, so why does he care?”

I grinned as I took the chair next to Holly. “Ask him. I dare you.”

Her smile was shaky. “No, thanks. I’ll leave him to you today, if you don’t mind. And I will clean this up, no matter what Josh says.” She cast a mournful eye at the mess. “And I would have cleaned up the other messes. I just need a minute, that’s all.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said, hesitated, then asked, “Is something wrong with Josh? He seems a little on edge.”

Holly nodded. “We all are, I think. The police are still asking questions, and now that thing with the will. Stephen’s hardly come out of his office in days. The rest of the clerks keep asking me what’s going on with him and I have to keep telling them I don’t know. Do you?”

“Going on?” Stephen himself came into the room. “Why should there be anything going on?”

I put on a smile. “Hello, Stephen. How are you today?”

He put his hands on his hips. “You never reported back to me about your talk with Caroline Grice. I’m now forced to come fetch information from you. Is she or is she not going to donate money to the library?”

My face froze. During Caroline’s revelations the other night, I’d decided that soliciting for a donation wasn’t that important. I still felt my decision was the right one, but coming up with a cover story would have been an excellent idea. “Our meeting was interrupted,” I said. “We didn’t have time to discuss anything except the—”

“Do you have another appointment with her?” he said, enunciating each consonant very, very clearly.

“Not yet, but—”

“See that you call her today,” he snapped. “More donations are imperative if we’re going to keep this library functioning at its present level.” He spun around and marched out.

“Well,” I said, turning to Holly. “That was—”

But she was gone, having slipped out the side door. I looked at the shards of former coffee mug. At the spatters of coffee.