Borrowed Crime: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

around and poked my head back inside. “You know,” I said, “one or two treats would be okay.”
    She grinned and, from the pocket of her oversized fleece sweatshirt, pulled out a small canister of cat treats. “Three at the most.”
    I left my enabling aunt and my cranky cat to their mutual devices and started my morning commute across town. Bookmobile days, due to the Eddie element, necessitated that I take my car to work, but on library days when it wasn’t pouring down rain or howling with snowy winds, I walked.
    My route first took me through streets lined with trees and filled with late-nineteenth-century houses built as summer cottages. People from Chicago had steamed up Lake Michigan to spend the hot city months in the coolness provided by lake breezes. More than a few of the houses were still owned by descendants of the families who’d built them, the walls decorated with the same pictures that had been hung a hundred years earlier.
    I walked west, facing the rising wind, and fought the urge to tiptoe as I passed the sleeping houses, shut up tight until spring. A few blocks later, I was out of the historical district and into the section of town where normal people lived.
    This was a neighborhood of narrow two-story houses, an occasional ranch house, and large old housesdivided up into apartments; these homes had lights on in the kitchens and cars in the driveways. No sleeping here; there was school to attend and jobs to drive to.
    Out on a tiny front porch, a woman was bundled up in a long puffy coat and was drinking from a steaming travel mug.
    “Morning, Pam,” I said. “Can I have some of your coffee?”
    Pam Fazio, a fiftyish woman with smooth, short black hair, top-notch fashion sense, and an infectious laugh, clutched her mug to her chest. “Mine, mine—every drop is mine,” she growled.
    I smiled. Pam, owner of a new downtown antiques store, had an uncanny ability to match product to customer. It could have made entering her shop dangerous to the wallet, but she also had an amazing knack for sensing budgets.
    “Are you going to drink morning coffee on your porch all winter?” I asked. Pam had moved to town from Ohio that spring; her long-term tolerance for cold and snow was still a question mark to many.
    She took a noisy sip. “Every morning that I went to work in a windowless cubicle at a large company that shall remain nameless, I vowed that I would spend an equal number of mornings on my front porch, drinking my first cup of coffee in the fresh air.”
    “No matter how cold?”
    “Cold?” she scoffed. “I’m not afraid of the cold. Not when I have coffee.” She put her face into the rising steam. “Ahhh.”
    I laughed, waved, and started walking again. From here, downtown was only two blocks away. A left turn and then a right, and I was there: downtown Chilson in all its haphazard glory, an oddly comfortable blend ofold and new architecture that attracted tourists and small-town urban planners from all across the region. But now it was the off-season, which lasted roughly eight months of the year, and business was not exactly bustling.
    The only cars on the street were in front of the Round Table, the local diner. All the other storefronts were dark; many had signs taped to their front doors. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. SEE YOU IN THE SPRING
.
Some of the shuttered stores were run by managers for absentee owners; others were owned by people who worked hard all summer long for the pleasure of heading to warmer climes over the winter.
    My boots echoed on the empty sidewalks, which weren’t nearly wide enough in summer when all the tourists were in town. I breathed in the fresh air, drank in the view of Janay Lake, looked around at the odd mix of old and new downtown buildings that should not have complemented each other but somehow did, and thought, as I almost always did when walking to work, that I was the luckiest person alive.
    I was still thinking that when I let myself into the