He looked around, taking in the green paint that probably looked fresh and inviting when it was originally applied decades earlier but had faded to something not out of place in a hospital. Air huffed derisively from his nostrils.
“This is your library,” she said, tightening her grip on her temper. “The town funds it for everyone in the community to use.”
“This is the first time I’ve set foot in this building since the tour we took in fourth grade.”
Inspiration struck. A nonuser from Generation Z required to spend time in the library was the perfect focus group. “No time like the present,” she said. “After you’ve finished with the morning tasks, I’d like you to sit down and make a list of the things you could do for the library during your community service time.”
He looked at her. “You’re not going to tell me what to do?”
Only if I have to, she thought. “I might, but I’d like to know what you think we need and what you can offer. After you shelve the books. And clean the bathrooms.”
As she watched, he examined the books’ spines and sorted them into the appropriate stacks. Through the front window Alana watched Carmody Phillips park her minivan. She moved slowly up the steps, a plastic laundry basket full of picture books braced against one hip, her baby girl on the other, and her toddler holding on to the laundry basket as they made their way up the steps.
Alana held open the front door. “I remember when she was just a newborn,” she said with a smile.
“Eight months old yesterday,” Carmody said. “And growing fast.”
“She certainly is. Let me get that for you,” Alana said, and reached for the basket.
? ? ?
THE SIGHT OF Alana, dreamy-eyed and wearing a nearly sheer cotton nightie as she drank her tea and talked on the phone was a good way to start Lucas’s morning. The phone call reminding him that he’d flat-out forgotten to tell Alana about Cody Burton prompted him to consider exactly how much he’d changed since his days with the DPD. When he started out with DPD a kid like Cody would have been on his mind constantly.
Not anymore.
The call from dispatch about a break-in ended all thoughts about Cody Burton.
He braked the Blazer to a stop in front of the weathered farmhouse and slid out of the truck. Gravel crunched underfoot as he shifted his jacket back from his right hip and approached the front door. The screen door, worn gray by years of wind and snow and summer heat, was closed, but the interior door stood open. His hand tightened reflexively when a gnarled hand appeared, then pushed open the door.
“They’re gone,” Gunther Jensen said.
Hand still on his weapon, Lucas stepped through the opened door and scanned the wreckage of the old man’s living room. “You check the cellar?”
“No,” Gunther said, white-knuckling the railing on the porch. “The stairs bother me some.”
Lucas could see a twin mattress stripped of its sheets and shoved awkwardly into the corner. Gunther probably moved downstairs after his last fall. “Sit down. I’ll take a look around,” Lucas said. “Stay here. Don’t touch anything.”
Old habits died hard, so he released the snap and kept his hand on the Glock’s grip as he climbed the stairs. The board creaked under his feet, alerting anyone upstairs to his presence, but something in the house’s shocked stillness told him whoever had trashed the seventy-nine-year-old widower’s house while he was visiting his sister in the county home was long gone.
He checked the four equally wrecked bedrooms, closets, and bathroom, then opened the narrow door to the sharply pitched stairs leading to the attic. A thick layer of undisturbed dust covered each riser. No one, including Gunther, had gone up there for some time, but Lucas still put his back to the wall and edged up the narrow stairs. He peered cautiously over the landing and found nothing more threatening than an ancient dressmaker’s dummy and a hundred years of Jensen family history crammed into boxes, crates, and trunks. Cobwebs covered the dust. No one had been in the attic in decades.
Sneezing once, he retraced his steps and did a quick check of the cellar, which was in much the same condition as the attic, except it smelled of damp and mildew. “Whoever did this is gone,” he said to Gunther.