No Offense Page 3

  “A what situation?” he asked, more confused than ever.

  “From the Mixed-Up Files of—oh.” She flushed a little when she realized he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Nevermind. It’s a children’s book about a girl and her brother who run away and hide in—it doesn’t matter. The box wasn’t here, but the cleaners had come overnight. So far, since I’ve been here, they’ve never missed a night.”

  This was his chance to find out why he’d never seen her around before. “And how long have you been in this position?”

  “Oh, not long.” She shook her head, the ends of her black hair—some of which were coated in white cookie frosting—swaying. “I only got this job at the end of December.”

  “And before that you were?”

  He told himself he wasn’t asking out of personal interest. He definitely needed to know for the investigation. Due to her accent—flat and inflectionless—he suspected she was from somewhere in the Midwest, and so he wasn’t surprised when she replied, “Denver. I’ve known Phyllis—Mrs. Robinette, the former children’s librarian—for ages. We met at ALA.” She said it as if she expected him to know what it was, but he had no idea. American Lung Association? Alaska Airlines? “When Phyllis told me that she wanted to retire but was having trouble finding a replacement due to Hurricane Marilyn—you of all people must know about the housing shortage here since the storm—well, I just jumped at the chance to apply, especially since my mother’s best friend, Joanne Larson, owns the Lazy Parrot Inn. Her husband, Carl, hasn’t been doing so well lately, and they’ve really needed an extra hand. They’ve got a spare room since the night manager quit, and, well, everything just fell into place. Who wouldn’t want to live and work in paradise? Especially now, with the new library opening up soon.”

  “Yes,” he said, again nodding as if he’d understood a word of what she’d just said. “Completely.” Except for the part about the Lazy Parrot—it was true Joanne and Carl Larson had lost their night manager a while back. John himself had arrested him for petit theft in the second degree—and about Mrs. Robinette. She was the type to stay on volunteering long after her “retirement,” to make sure everything continued to run smoothly, which explained why she’d been at the reception desk to greet him.

  The darkness of Molly Montgomery’s huge eyes made sense now, too. It wasn’t only the result of makeup, but the purple shadows that came from a lack of sleep, working as a children’s librarian and the live-in night manager at a popular local hotel.

  Still, there was more to her slightly-too-chipper story than she was admitting. That faint white line on her left ring finger attested to that. He’d noticed it, especially because it matched the one on his own exactly.

  Although he was very curious, he wasn’t going to bring it up. It wasn’t pertinent to his investigation.

  “Well, Ms. Montgomery,” he began, but she interrupted quickly.

  “Oh, please, call me Molly. Or Miss Molly. Everybody here does.”

  “Okay, well, Molly, then—”

  “What’s going to happen to her?” Her gaze was worriedly following the baby, whom Max was carrying out to the ambulance. “Where are they taking her?”

  “To the hospital. They’ll check her out, and if she’s okay—which the EMTs seem to think she is—she’ll go to Child Protective Services, and then into foster care.”

  The librarian looked troubled. “But what about her mother?”

  “Well, obviously, we’re going to try to find her so we can question her.”

  This was clearly the wrong thing to say, since those large dark eyes grew even larger, and she visibly tensed. “Question her? About what?”

  “Well, for starters, about why she abandoned her baby in an empty trash-bag box in the bathroom of your library.”

  “But you don’t know that she did. That baby could have been kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped?” John had thought he’d heard everything in his line of work, but this beat all. “And the kidnappers just happened to forget her in the bathroom of your library?”

  She glared at him. “Stranger things have happened in this town, from what I’ve heard.”

  He wasn’t going to argue, since that was perfectly true. It was Florida, after all. “Well, if that’s what happened, we’ll find out—after we find the mother and question her.”

  “But even if she did leave her baby here, I’m sure it was for a very good reason—clearly she doesn’t feel able to care for her right now. I know I haven’t worked here all that long, but maybe this library is a place where she’s always felt safe, and so she thought her baby would be safe here, too.”

  “Uh,” John said, struggling to come up with a reply to this. “Well, now—”

  “And she was. We found her and made sure that she got the help she needed. People don’t come to the library simply to check out books anymore, you know, Sheriff. People come to the library for all sorts of reasons—to use our computers, to look for jobs, to take classes, to socialize, and even as a place to get help when they’re hurting or feel as if they’re in danger. Helping them in that way isn’t exactly what we’ve been trained for, but it’s still our job. I’m sure wherever that baby’s mother is now, she’s feeling very frightened and alone. So I hope, if you do find her, that you won’t file charges against her. I personally feel very sorry for her.”

  John cleared his throat. That had been quite a speech, and it had certainly put him in his place.

  What was worse, he realized with dismay, was that she looked even more attractive when she was angry.

  “Well, I do, too,” he said, finally. “And of course I’ll pursue all lines of investigation, including that this baby might have been kidnapped from her mother and then abandoned here in your library”—even though nothing like that had ever happened before in all of John’s many years working in law enforcement—“But no matter how frightened or unable to care for her child she felt, the mother could easily have left her at the hospital or my office or even the fire station right down the street from here. All of those places are designated safe havens for anyone who feels overwhelmed with a newborn, no questions asked. The library isn’t.”

  “But—”

  “But she didn’t do any of those things, did she? She—or someone—put that baby in an empty trash-bag box and abandoned her in a chilly library bathroom. That is a crime. And it’s my job to investigate when a crime has been committed, and that’s what I intend to do, if that’s all right with you, Miss Montgomery.”

  The librarian’s mouth pressed into a thin, straight line, as if she were willing herself not to say something she might regret. “Of course that’s all right with me.”

  “Well,” he said. “Great.”

  “Great,” she said. “I hope you have better luck solving this mystery than you’ve had solving the mystery of the High School Thief.”

  He felt his jaw tighten. Of all the blows she could have delivered, this was the lowest, and he doubted she even knew it.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sure we will, considering the high school thief hasn’t left a single shred of DNA evidence.”

  “Great.” She swept out from behind her desk with a queenliness that reminded John of her allegedly retired boss, Phyllis Robinette. She’d probably learned it from her. “Let me know if there’s anything else I or the staff here can do to help. In the meantime, if you’re through with your questions, I really need to get back to my patrons.”

  John knew he’d made a mess of things with the pretty librarian. He wasn’t sure how, exactly, except by saying that he intended to do his job.

  But since she was a woman, and he seemed always to make a mess of things with women, he wasn’t surprised.

  John had no idea what to do about the situation, so he simply unfolded himself from the tiny child’s chair—too late, since Molly had already marched from her own chair to where her patrons were being questioned by his most competent deputy, Ryan Martinez.

  Well, this wo
uldn’t be the last time he’d see her, he supposed. He could come back and bring her an update on the case. No one could abandon a baby on an island as small as Little Bridge and get away with it. He’d be seeing Molly Montgomery again, and next time, he’d be more careful not to say the wrong thing.

  Whatever that was.

  Chapter Three

  Molly

  News of the baby abandoned at the library spread across the island quicker than word of a tasty new taco truck. By the time Molly left work that day, everyone seemed to know about it, even the tourists staying at the bed-and-breakfast where she was living (and working part-time) until she could find an apartment that was semi-affordable.

  “Is it true?” one of the guests asked from a chaise lounge as Molly passed the pool on her way to the kitchen, where she was headed to help Mrs. Larson assemble the hors d’oeuvres for happy hour. “Did the mother really leave the baby in a toilet?”

  Molly nearly dropped the tote bag of groceries she was carrying from Frank’s Food Emporium.

  “No, that’s not true,” she said. “She was on a toilet in an empty box.”

  The tourist—Mrs. Filmore, a regular who’d been coming to the inn the same week for years—gave her husband a triumphant look. “I told you! That’s why they’re calling him Baby Boy Sacks—as in garbage sacks. It was an empty box of trash bags.”

  Molly was appalled but bit back a retort. The guest was always right—even guests like Mrs. Filmore, who used the white washcloths in her room to wipe off her copious layers of makeup instead of the black washcloths and hypoallergenic makeup-removing towelettes that the Larsons provided for this purpose. Molly knew, because she found Mrs. Filmore’s bright red lipstick and black mascara-stained washcloths in the laundry every morning. They reminded her of the scary clown from Stephen King’s It (a problematic but still highly popular, if slightly dated, read. She had to remember to show it to Elijah. It might appeal to him, since it was both humorous and gory, but also featured young people finding their true calling through helping others).

  “Moses,” boomed Mr. Filmore, from the other end of the pool.

  Molly had been heading back toward the kitchen, but now she paused. Mr. Filmore rarely spoke, perhaps because it was easier to allow his gossipy wife to do all the talking for him. So when he did open his mouth to say anything, it was usually worth listening to.

  “I beg your pardon?” Molly said.

  “Moses.” Mr. Filmore brought his frozen drink to his lips—Molly couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but it had a festive umbrella and also a slice of lime clinging to the side, so possibly a margarita. “They oughta call the baby Moses, on account of him being found on the water.”

  “Oh, Mel.” Mrs. Filmore playfully splashed a spray of pool water at him. “Didn’t you hear? He was found on a toilet, not on the water.”

  “Don’t toilets have water in ’em? Oughta call ’im Moses. Better’n Baby Boy Sacks. Sacks ain’t even a proper name.”

  Mrs. Filmore shook her head, clearly disgusted by her husband’s joke. But as Molly made her way back into the kitchen, where Joanne was busily assembling canapés, she wondered if Mr. Filmore’s joke didn’t have a ring of truth to it. Except, of course, the baby was a girl, not a boy.

  “Oh, thank goodness you’re here.” Joanne was an elfin woman in a hot-pink beach cover-up and matching leggings who had spent enough time tanning in the sun to make her age indeterminable. She could be anywhere from forty to seventy, though her cigarette-roughened voice and leathery-looking chest suggested the latter. “Did you get them?”

  “I did.” Molly swung her grocery tote onto the counter where Joanne had already laid out several trays of tantalizing-looking cheeses and crudité. “But do you even need them? Surely what you have there is enough.”

  Joanne snorted. “Are you kidding me? When that group that was on the sunset sail comes in from being out on the water, they’re going to be famished. Not to mention the Walters family. They went out on a deep-sea fishing charter.”

  Molly drew one of the cucumbers she’d bought for Mrs. Larson from the tote. “But they all have dinner reservations. I know—I helped some of them make them last night.”

  “Of course, but we don’t want to send them to dinner hangry. I like to keep them well-fed and happy so they’ll behave themselves when they go out into town. That way I won’t get any complaints from my fellow business owners that I haven’t been taking care of my guests.”

  “That makes sense.” Molly had been at the Lazy Parrot—whose owners were far from lazy—long enough to know how to pitch in when needed. She threw on an apron over her work clothes and began peeling one of the cucumbers—on which dabs of homemade fish dip would later be spread—as Joanne opened the oven to check on a tray of goat cheese tarts. “So I guess you’ve probably heard what happened at the library today.”

  Molly didn’t really want to talk about it, but then again, she was dying to talk about it—especially with someone who might understand how disturbed the incident had left her. If she’d been back in Denver, she’d have processed the incident over drinks with her colleagues at her old job. They’d have gone to the Cruise Room in LoDo and gotten nicely toasted.

  But she wasn’t in Denver anymore.

  And though both Henry and Phyllis Robinette (bless her!) had asked if she was all right, and invited her to go to Uva, the nearby wine bar they often frequented after work, Molly had said no, not only because she had to get back to the inn to help the Larsons, but also because she had a walk-through in the morning at the new library with both the architect and the donor who was making the new library possible, Mrs. Dorothy Tifton herself (as well as her miniature poodle, Daisy, who followed her owner everywhere). Molly wanted a drink, but she also wanted to stay in and prepare herself for this important meeting.

  As if she’d known what Molly was thinking, Joanne whipped around, pulled a bottle of red from the wine fridge, and expertly cracked it open.

  “Poor dear,” she said, pouring two generous glasses before sliding one toward Molly. “I completely forgot. What a terrible thing. Here, drink up. Was he really found in a trash bag?”

  Molly accepted the glass gratefully. “She. And it was a box. A trash-bag box. Where is everyone hearing that it was a trash bag?”

  “Facebook community page,” Joanne said, simply.

  Of course. Molly nodded, then took a sip of wine before turning her attention back to her cucumbers. She knew all about this page. It was supposed to be private, run by the former mayor’s wife and restricted to residents of Little Bridge only, but anyone could get on it. It tended, like most of social media, to be a little more gossipy than Molly thought healthy. This was why she both hated and loved it, though she’d managed to cut down the amount of time she spent visiting the page, just as she’d managed to cut down the amount of time she spent cyber-stalking her ex and his new fiancée.

  Except that she hated to call it stalking. The people on those true crime shows she liked did actual stalking. All she had was a healthy curiosity about the motives behind her ex’s very sudden engagement to this woman he’d met only two months ago, who probably had no idea what she was getting herself into.

  “Well,” Molly said, giving her cucumber skin a particularly vicious swipe, “you shouldn’t believe everything you read.”

  “No.” Joanne was enjoying her own deep swigs of wine. “Of course not. Ah! Now, that hits the spot. I knew that wine rep wouldn’t do me wrong.”

  Molly nodded toward the bottle. “It’s very good.”

  Joanne grinned. “That’s why I save it for myself—and the staff, of course. I wouldn’t waste it on guests, unless of course they asked for it, which none of them ever do. All they ever want is margaritas and rum and Cokes. Which, I don’t blame ’em, being on vacation. Anyway, I heard you met the sheriff. What’d you think of him?”

  “Excuse me?” The sudden change of subject had Molly blinking.

  “Our new sheriff. What’d you
think of him? Well, now that I think of it, I guess he’s not that new. But he’s very young, and a lot better than Sheriff Wagner, the last fella we had. He turned out to have a whole other secret family living up in Tallahassee.”

  “What?” This was so much like something that could have been on one of the crime shows she liked to watch that Molly accidentally dropped the scraper.

  “Oh, yes. It turns out Wagner was siphoning department funds to support ’em. County asked John Hartwell to leave his fancy detective job up in Miami and run as sheriff just because everyone here had lost faith in the old sheriff’s entire department. John grew up here. He’s only been in the job a couple of years, but I have to say I think he’s doing all right. That’s why I was wondering what you thought of him when you met him today.”

  Molly couldn’t help scowling at the memory of the too tall, too full-of-himself man she’d encountered. “Do you want my honest opinion?” she asked, as she ran the scraper under the faucet.

  “Well, of course I do. I wouldn’t’ve asked if I didn’t, would I?”

  Molly didn’t hold back. With her mother’s old friend, she didn’t have to. “I don’t think too much of him. He seems pretty arrogant.”

  “Really?” Joanne sounded surprised. “I’ve met him several times, and he’s always seemed real nice.”

  Molly snorted. Although she’d been shy around the Larsons at first, as she didn’t know them that well—Joanne had grown up living next door to Molly’s mother, then moved away after college and had been out to Denver only a handful of times to visit since—in the few months she’d lived with them in Little Bridge, she’d quickly grown to think of them as family.

  “Do you know he thinks that baby’s mother, whoever she was, abandoned it there in that bathroom?”

  Joanne took a sip of her wine before answering, her gaze not meeting Molly’s. “Well, he’s probably right. I read that, before the safe haven law, there was something like ten thousand babies abandoned a year up in New York—”