“Out Route 46,” Peggy said.
The same road listed as Cody Burton’s address on his community-service paperwork. While she could find nearly any address in Chicago using the house numbers as her only reference, she was lost when it came to the numbering systems used on hundreds of miles of county roads. But if Cody lived anywhere in the vicinity of Gunther Jensen, that explained Lucas’s visit to the library, and the tension in his shoulders last night.
Alana paid Peggy, accepted her change and left a tip, then set off for the library. Cody was waiting for her, sitting with his back to the door at the top of the steps, forearms dangling over his knees. He wore jeans, worn sneakers, a gray hoodie and a jacket unzipped over the hoodie. His nose was red with cold, but more telling, the nail beds of his long, thin fingers were purple.
“Good morning,” she said pleasantly as she climbed the stairs.
He peered up at her when she reached the top stair. “You don’t know that,” he said.
“I’m an optimist,” she replied. “Scoot over.”
He did her one better, scrambling to his feet to loom beside her while she juggled her bags and unlocked the front door. Once inside, she went straight to the office and shed bags, coat, and scarf. Cody lifted the wooden return bin from the back of the door, stacked the books on the circulation desk, then stood outside the office door, silent and brooding. The boy could brood like nobody’s business, she thought. I’m not prepared to deal with a teenage boy. Teenage girls she understood. Grown men were mysterious enough. Adolescent boys might as well be from another planet.
While her laptop booted out of sleep mode, she pulled the Heirloom Café bag to her and removed her oatmeal, then the skillet platter. Cody’s shoulders straightened and a dull red heat suffused his cheekbones.
“I need to run antivirus updates on the computers,” she said, without looking at him. “Remember the boxes I showed you in the basement? I need those unpacked and stacked. Thank you.”
With that she slid past him and headed for the row of computers. For a long moment Cody didn’t move, something she knew only because all she could hear was her heart thumping in her ears and the whir of a computer’s hard drive coming to life. Then, a rustle of denim and the rasp of the leather and wool of his letter jacket. The squeak of Styrofoam. The sound of the basement door opening, and closing.
Good.
In between booting up the computers and running the antivirus software updates, she finished off her oatmeal. Just before the library opened, she walked down the stairs into the basement. Cody had five of the boxes unpacked.
“I didn’t know how you wanted the books organized, so I grouped them together like they were in the original boxes.”
She walked over to the table. “This is fine. I need to go through them and see which ones have any value in the resale market.”
“Resale value?”
“There are people who make a decent living going around to sales and auctions finding books that are rare or desirable,” she said. “There’s no reason why the library can’t do the same.”
He eyed the books stacked on the table, then the boxes in the room. “How do you know which ones are worth something?”
She showed him the app on her phone that allowed her to enter the ISBN and see what the prices were on various online sites. “Forty dollars,” she said after she scanned a book. “It’s not much when you need to repair the roof and add a sewer line, but it’s more than we had. The buyer pays for the shipping, too.”
Cody hefted a copy of a book containing Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing and sketchbooks. “How much is this one worth?”
His voice was too casual to be casual. She entered the ISBN and waited for the data network to crawl along the Interwebs and produce an answer. “Oh, not much,” she said. “Just a few dollars. Why?”
“Can I buy it?”
This from a boy who didn’t have the money to buy breakfast. “Just take it,” she said gently.
“Thanks,” he said, as if the word didn’t sit easily in his mouth.
“How about if I leave you my phone and you check them for me?”
He hefted the phone, then slid her a look. “How do you know I won’t download a bunch of porn and spend the day watching it?”
“Because my data network is so slow that you’d die of boredom,” she said with a smile. “And this conversation is inappropriate.”
Another flush. “Sorry, Miss Wentworth.”
She turned to leave.
“You don’t have to buy me breakfast. I eat before I leave home.”
Pride rather than truthfulness motivated the words. “Of course, but I don’t like to eat in front of someone who isn’t,” she said simply.
“I don’t care,” he said.