His heart beat hard enough to hurt in his belly. If he was lucky, the old man would still be asleep. He wasn’t lucky very often.
“Right there.” He pointed. “Where the white car is.”
“Looks like your dad is home now.”
“Yeah.”
Brody hoped Max was okay, still safely tucked in a shoe box under the bed. He should have brought him camping like usual, but the old man had already been drunk when school let out, and he’d been afraid to chance a return to the house.
“Was he really gone somewhere last night, Brody?”
She was hard to lie to. “He might have been.”
“I see.”
He sure hoped not. He tugged at the door handle and stepped out. No sign of his father. “Thank you, Miss Riley.”
“See you at the library.”
He slammed the door and hustled across the mowed grass, tension in his neck slowly easing. The old man was probably still sleeping it off. His relief was short-lived when Clint Thomson appeared in the doorway without his shirt, his black eyebrows pulled low in a frown of displeasure at the sight of his son. No big surprise there.
“Where you been?”
Brody heard Miss Riley’s car backing out of the driveway and hoped she’d leave quickly.
He searched for a lie that would appease his father but finding none, told the truth. “I went camping.”
“Why is someone driving you home?” His dad listed to one side, wobbly. He slapped the door to catch himself, and Brody jumped. “You’re not supposed to ride with strangers.”
“That’s Miss Carrie from the library.” Knowing a glance could be mistaken for defiance, he kept his eyes trained on the porch. “She’s not a stranger.”
His dad cuffed the back of his head. “Don’t get smart with me.”
Brody snuck a fast glance at the street and saw the blue Volkswagen turn the corner. Relieved, he ducked inside the house before his father could really get going.
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?
—Lily Tomlin
The library was always busy after the weekend.
The small one-story building in the middle of Honey Ridge was Carrie’s domain, her vocation and avocation. She loved the tidy rows, loved reading and sharing books and loved that the library sponsored adult literacy classes. In fact, she loved everything about the library, including her sometimes troublesome patrons.
Herman Peabody, bless his heart, couldn’t hear a freight train if it ran over his foot, but he forgot his hearing aids as often as he remembered them. Whenever that happened, his voice never dropped below bullhorn level.
Patrons of the library looked at him with either annoyance or resignation.
Wearing a jaunty tam angled on his semi-bald head and in blue overalls that could use a good scrub, Herman Peabody was one of the afternoon regulars.
“Am I talking too loud again?” he asked.
She leaned close, refusing to insult him by wrinkling her nose at his less-than-pleasant scent. “Did you forget your hearing aids?”
He slapped at his ears. A twinkly smile wrinkled an already-wrinkled cheek. “I guess I did.”
Carrie aimed an eye at his overalls. “Maybe in your pocket?”
He squinted and leaned closer. “What?”
She pointed. “Your pocket.”
Recognition dawned, and he patted the overall bib, coming up with a small pair of flesh-colored hearing aids. He popped them in, winced, made an adjustment and then said, “All better?”
Carrie smiled. Most people didn’t bother to know Mr. Peabody had been a Nashville studio musician back in the day when self-trained artists played by ear and before time took away his ability to do exactly that. Now he had nothing to fall back on and barely eked by on a meager Social Security check. She knew this because she volunteered at Interfaith Partnership, a social charity that collected and distributed food and clothing to the needy.
After Mr. Peabody settled onto one of the couches with a sigh and a groan, grabbing at his left knee, she handed him the Honey Ridge Register. “Do you need some aspirin for that knee?”
“Nah. Just an old man’s stiff joints. I must have sat too long with the good ol’ boys down at the café.”
The café was the coffee klatch of retired men who gathered at the Miniature Golf Café every morning without fail to shoot the breeze and resolve the political and social ills of the universe.
“Did you fellas come up with a solution to world peace?”
“Just about.” He nodded, chuckling. “Just about. Mr. B. says we’ll never get out of this world alive, so what difference does it make?”
Carrie laughed. Mr. B., short for Bastarache, a name few of them could pronounce, was the town undertaker. His fatalistic views were legendary.
“Well, that’s Mr. B. for you,” she said. “You tell me if you need some aspirin for that knee, okay? I have a bottle in my purse.”
He patted her hand. “You’re a good girl, Miss Carrie. Your mama raised you right.”
Carrie’s chest squeezed in affectionate sympathy for the man as she returned to the front desk.
“Why doesn’t he loiter somewhere else?” Tawny Brown, the other media specialist, ran the scanner gun across the bar code on the back of The Cat in the Hat. The computer beeped, and she crammed the book onto a roller cart for reshelving.
Carrie offered a sympathetic glance but said nothing. Tawny got all stirred up about the computer hogs and the regulars who hung out for lack of anything better to do. In Carrie’s opinion, everyone needed time in the safe haven of a library.
The thought of a safe haven brought Brody Thomson to mind, which brought Hayden Winters to mind, as well. The boy concerned her, but she didn’t know what to do about it. The man—well, he was a famous writer and she was a book person.
Beyond his incredible gift of words and the stormy night encounter at Peach Orchard Inn she didn’t know anything about him. He was an enigma even to book lovers.
Out of curiosity, she’d read his website bio, which was primarily about his novels and devoid of personal information. Because of his profession and hers, she also followed him, along with other popular authors, on Facebook and Twitter. Again, no personal information on Hayden Winters. Only book talk. A writer of his stature probably had an assistant handling social media anyway.
She’d had coffee, in her pajamas no less, with Hayden Winters.
Laughing at herself a little, she focused on work. The man had probably put her out of his mind the moment she’d driven away.
At noon, her sister Nikki came flying in, a swirl of energy and beauty. All the Riley siblings had dark hair, but Nikki took hers to a whole other dimension. Sleek as a mink and layer-cut in the latest style, Nikki’s hair gleamed. Today, the fashionista sister wore eggplant heels as high as the biography stacks. Carrie’s back hurt to look at them. No matter how hard she’d tried in high school, she’d never been able to pull off the beauty-queen look.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Taking me out to lunch or jumping off into the deep to actually read something besides Fashion