“At this hour?” Michael said, looking up from the cutting board.
I glanced at the clock. 7 A.M.
“Keep cutting,” I said. “I’ll take care of our visitor.”
“Good idea.” He waved the knife in the air. “I could easily be tempted to use this on someone who shows up at this hour.”
I dried my hands and headed for the door. The doorbell rang again before I reached it.
“This had better be important,” I muttered. There was a time when all our friends knew Michael and me better than to ring our doorbell at this hour. The arrival of children had changed things—especially since, to their parents’ great dismay, both boys appeared to be more lark than night owl. But even though we were up—just barely—7 A.M. was frightfully early for anyone to be ringing and pounding with such insistence.
I opened the door and found Kate Blake, the reporter from the Star-Tribune, raising her hand toward the doorbell.
“Finally,” she said. “I need to get into your library.”
“Around back,” I said, pointing to the brick path, clearly marked with a sign, that led to the library entrance. “And it doesn’t open till ten.”
“But I need to get in there now!” she said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you.”
I started to close the door. She stuck her foot in the opening.
“Listen, lady,” she said, putting her hands on her almost nonexistent hips. “I’m on deadline. If you don’t let me into your wretched little library this instant I’ll be forced to mention you by name as one of the benighted denizens of this backwater town who have been misleading and stonewalling the press ever since we got here!”
“If you do that, then your editor will get a call from my attorney,” I said, in my most pleasant tone. “Or perhaps I’ll make the first call myself, and suggest to your editor that if he employed reporters who could ask civil questions, instead of whiny, entitled little brats, he might see more news and fewer defamation of character suits. Now move your foot, or you’ll be sorry when I slam this door.”
“Now see here—” she began.
“Look, kid,” I said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that anyone capable of calling me a benighted denizen has some rudimentary grasp of the English language. Did you happen to notice that I didn’t say ‘I won’t help you’? I said ‘I can’t help you.’ I don’t have a key to the library.”
“But it’s in your house,” she said.
“And when the library moved in, we had the doors rekeyed. Ms. Ellie Draper has a set of keys, and I assume the other librarians who open do. But I don’t, nor does anyone else living here. So stop taking your impatience out on me.”
Her shoulders slumped.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have tried to browbeat you. It’s just that I’m under such stress because of this deadline.”
“Maybe you’re in the wrong business, then,” I said. “Your deadline can’t be all that pressing. Today’s Star-Trib is still being delivered. You must have at least a few hours before you have to turn in your story for tomorrow morning’s issue.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The paper’s deadline isn’t until about ten p.m. My deadline’s a lot shorter. My editor only sent me down here because he thought it would be a silly human interest story. He’s sending one of his crime reporters down to cover the murder. So unless I can prove I’ve got some kind of inside track or hot lead, I go back to D.C. as soon as the crime reporter gets here. My editor said something about sending me to a cat show. That’ll make the fourth one this year.”
She glanced at her watch again.
“Ten o’clock,” she said in a flat voice.
Hard to tell if her change of mood was sincere. But even if it was only another attempt to wangle information—two could play at that game.
“Ten o’clock,” I repeated. “Would you like to come in and have some coffee? And you can wait inside in the air-conditioning. I can’t promise any hot leads, but at least it will save you going all the way back to town and then coming out here again at ten.”
“Thank you!”
From her tone, I suspected she was hoping to weasel some information out of us. Well, she was welcome to try. She stepped in briskly, waited while I closed the door, and then followed me down the hall to the kitchen. Her heels tapped on the polished oak of the hallway. I glanced down at her shoes. They were more worn than Colleen Brown’s, with a lower heel, and I suspected they would inspire an indulgent smile, not envy, in Mother.