Page 7 of The Wrong Track

“I don’t know. I just don’t have it.” I sat down at a computer because, no, I wasn’t a Luddite, but Kilian hadn’t wanted me to communicate with very many people and since I’d been on my own, I hadn’t had anyone to contact, anyway.

Beth Ellen went back to her desk and I decided to study transportation options to get me out of this place. Destination? I looked through the window at the grey clouds skittering across the cold, blue sky. It was probably going to snow again, and my destination was wherever that didn’t happen. Somewhere it was always warm, somewhere that was empty, as in not a lot of people or even buildings where people could be hiding. The desert, like in my dream? But there had been something blocking the sun, coming at me from above.

That was just a dream. I searched “North American deserts” and studied the page. The heat hissed quietly and the computers hummed, a comforting backdrop. I read, but I blinked very slowly. I was so tired.

“Geography project?”

I jumped up and out of the chair fast, fast enough that it fell and turned over onto the ground again. Damn, I hadn’t been ready.

But it was only Tobin, Officer Whitaker. Yes, Whitaker, the same as the Willa Whitaker Botanical Gardens where I worked, because Hazel had been able to get me that job by calling on his family connections. They had their name plastered all over this town, like, it might have been called Whitakertropolis. Which didn’t really roll off the tongue.

“Why are you back here?” I asked him. “Is that guy causing more problems?” I looked toward the circulation desk but Beth Ellen was quietly checking in books from the return box. I did see her gaze also slip towards Tobin to check him out, too. He was still in his uniform but just a regular hat like the kind I pulled down over my ears, and he had on a different coat that covered his badge and maybe where his gun was. I didn’t know if he took that home or not, and I tried to see if there was a bulge at his hip.

“No, Ed is fine,” he answered. “We bought him dinner and gave him a ride home and by the time we got there, he was back to himself. He lives with his brother and we checked to make sure that they’re ok, furnace is working and all that.”

I remembered him checking my heat, too, making sure that it was working. Maybe that was standard procedure up here where we were living on a glacier. Almost.

“Sometimes, if people are running low on money, they’ll leave the heat off,” he continued. “Which isn’t healthy. You know, Ed’s elderly. But people can have other conditions that mean they need to take better care of themselves.” He bent and picked up the chair that I’d knocked down and then pulled off his hat, exposing his blonde hair.

I knew what he was talking about, that he was trying to send me some kind of message about my cold house and my medical issue. “Beth Ellen was scared by what happened here,” I said, although she’d looked actually more annoyed at the clean-up she’d had to do. She just hadn’t realized the potential for danger, so I pressed ahead. “That guy shouldn’t be allowed to come into the library and bully her,” I told Tobin Whitaker.

“It’s a public place so he can come in, get out of the weather. But no, we won’t let him bully anybody.”

Then we just stood there for a moment in a weird silence with only the heat hissing and the computers buzzing quietly. Tobin looked at the screen at the desk where I’d been sitting. “The Sonoran Desert,” he slowly read aloud.

“They don’t have cold winters.” I also looked at the map. “It goes down into Mexico.”

“You want to leave the country?”

I shrugged. There wasn’t as much need, now. I’d also been researching Kilian’s death today. I believed that he was really dead, unless it was a very elaborate hoax with the government’s participation—which could have been true, if they’d wanted him as a witness to bring down someone even bigger. He’d been involved in a lot of stuff, bad stuff, and even I didn’t know all of it. He might have had connections in gangs and cartels and maybe the federal government, FBI or something, had stepped in to fake his death so that they could pump him for information.

That actually made more sense than Kilian getting stabbed and not defending himself, because if anyone would have had an improvised weapon to fight back, it would have been him. And I’d just talked myself into being scared all over again. He might still have been out there. Anywhere.

I opened my eyes and found Tobin watching me. “I could go anywhere,” I told him.

“What about the baby?”

I was done with the computer so I bent to pick up my bag to leave, but I did want to know something from him. “Why did you come back to the library?”

“I thought I’d say hello.”

“To me?”

He grinned and then I really, really understood why Beth Ellen would have called him a cutie and wanted to eat him up, even if she was a little older and already married. He really was, I thought, he really was that handsome—and even more, he looked friendly. Nice. I remembered him as very, very somber, but not anymore.

“You certainly seem happier now,” I said.

Both of us were startled. Him, because why in the hell would someone announce that? And me, because I spent most of my time not saying a whole hell of a lot. Definitely not comments analyzing a stranger’s feelings.

“I’m not too bad,” he said. “Things haven’t been great for the past few months, but I guess you know about that.”

About him? I nodded a little, as if his statement were true, but I would only have gotten information about him from Hazel and she wasn’t talking much about Tobin anymore. She would only say, “He’s awesome,” or, “Tobin is wonderful. He’s my best friend,” but she hadn’t shared any details of how things hadn’t been great in his life lately.

What I knew about him was guesswork, based on what Hazel was saying now compared to all the things she’d shared before. I’d spent the last few years studying people pretty closely, trying to infer what their next move would be, and it had taught me a lot about human nature. Formerly, she’d told long stories about Tobin and his girlfriend, about how good he was at his job, about how sweet he’d always been in their friendship. There had been no shortage of things to recount about the wonderful Tobin—but that had dried up. She had clammed up. Her new attitude had given me ideas about what might have happened between them.

“Are you leaving now? You’re done here?” he asked, and he reached for the strap of the bag on my shoulder and lifted it with his fingers. “This is heavy. How many books are you taking home?”

“Not too many. It’s allowed.”

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