There, that didn’t sound too nosy.
It was his daughter who answered.
“It’s for the Snappettes,” Katie said proudly. “I’m a Snappette, and my dad’s agreed to dance with us at the next mother-daughter performance because he and my mom are divorced and she lives in Miami. It’s sexist, anyway, not to let men perform. But first he needs to learn to dance, so that’s why we’re here.”
Molly wasn’t certain she’d heard all this correctly, because it sounded so incredible, so she glanced up at the sheriff for confirmation and knew the second her eyes met his, and she saw the sheepish look on his face, that it was all true.
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “I’m gonna be an honorary Snappette.”
Molly was just as astonished as she’d been when she’d learned that Carolyn Keene, the author of her favorite book series from childhood, Nancy Drew, was not one person, but a whole team of authors, all writing under a single pen name.
Only that discovery had been disappointing. The one she’d just made about Sheriff John Hartwell was pleasant. So pleasant that she was too stunned to speak. It was as if every preconceived notion and prejudice she’d had against the sheriff had been blown away in a second, and she was seeing him in an entirely new light.
As she just stood there, staring, Henry came popping up from where he’d been hiding behind the reception desk, having heard every word. He said, matter-of-factly, “Okay, then, you need one library card and some how-to books and videos on dancing. I can help you with that.”
Later, when Katie and the sheriff were gone, Henry allowed himself to guffaw.
“Oh my God. Your face. Your face, Molly, when he said he was going to be a Snappette!”
“Stop it.” Molly took a sip from her water bottle. She’d been carefully hydrating ever since lunch, but now she felt as if she needed more water than ever. “It isn’t funny. Men can dance, too, you know.”
“Um, I think I know that more than you. I’m the gay man with season tickets to the Little Bridge Theater, where they routinely put on Naked Boys Singing! What I’m saying is, our sheriff is going to dance onstage with a bunch of teenage girls and yoga moms. I’m going to post this all over the Little Bridge Facebook community page tonight and love every minute of peoples’ reactions.”
Molly banged her water bottle onto the desk. “Henry, no. Don’t.”
“Why not? It’s going to be public knowledge soon enough.”
“The man has a hard enough job. Let him have his dignity.”
“He already dressed in an evening gown on a float in last year’s pride parade, Molly. I don’t think his dignity is something he worries about too much—unless . . .” Henry grinned at her. “It’s not his ‘dignity’ you’re interested in.”
She felt herself blushing. “Stop it.”
“I knew it! Librarian’s got a crush on the sheriff.”
“Which librarian’s got a crush on the sheriff?” Elijah demanded, appearing at the end of the desk, his copy of It in his hands.
“No one,” Molly said quickly. “It was a joke.”
“Phew.” Elijah wiped his brow in mock relief. “Because if it was you, Miss Molly, I’d be real disappointed, you fraternizing with the enemy and all.”
“Law enforcement officers are not our enemies, Elijah.”
“The po-po? Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not kidding you. Not all of them are—”
“Wrong. Plenty of them’ll pull a brown brother like me over and shoot him, especially when they find out I’m the guy who’s been robbing all those houses down by the new library. They’ll fry my brown—”
“Elijah,” Henry interrupted. “There is no way you are the High School Thief.”
Elijah rolled his eyes. “How do you know? Imagine how dumb you’re gonna feel when you find out it’s me, and all those girls back in school like Katie Hartwell, who won’t even give me the time of day, realize that the great High School Thief they can’t stop talking about was me all along.”
Molly was starting to feel annoyed. In the brief time she’d lived in Little Bridge, she’d come to love Elijah, despite how irritating he could be at times—and how much cologne he doused himself in—much in the way she’d come to love Fluffy the Cat, who constantly hung out at the hotel, even though he clearly belonged to someone else. Both Elijah and Fluffy were equally exasperating and yet adorably vulnerable, each in their own way.
“Elijah,” Molly said, in her best strict librarian voice. “You spend all of your time when you’re not in school here. And you spend the rest of the time playing video games or sleeping. When would you possibly have time to go around robbing houses?”
Elijah opened his mouth to protest, but Molly cut him off. “Look, I get that you want to be famous, and you’re going to be. I believe that in my heart. You’re smart, funny, and very, very intelligent. But give it some time. You don’t have to be famous at sixteen. And you should never want to be famous for doing something that hurts other people—especially something I know you’re not doing.”
Elijah looked a little sulky, lowering his head toward his copy of It, but didn’t seem quite ready to give up yet. “Okay, fine, Miss Molly, you might have a point. Touché. I get it. So how about if it turns out I’m not really the High School Thief, but I help the po-po catch him, like the kids in this book you gave me are helping to catch this evil guy? Then I could be on the news, like you were for finding Baby Aphrodite. That’d get me some cred with the popular kids for sure, right?”
Now Molly felt a different kind of emotion toward Elijah: anxiety.
Was this why the sheriff kept asking her not to get involved in his cases—because he worried for her safety?
No, certainly not. He hardly knew her.
He simply didn’t want his hard work compromised by an amateur sleuth, a literary know-it-all who was new to the island but still full of ideas about how she could do his job—the job he’d been doing for years—better than he could.
Now she understood how idiotic she must seem to him. As idiotic as Elijah—Lord love him—seemed to her now, declaring that he was going to help catch the High School Thief.
Of course, Elijah was only a child, and Molly was a full-grown woman with a master’s degree. And of course she had seen every single episode of Forensic Files and read just about every mystery that existed, both children’s and adult, except the truly gory ones, because who needed that in their life?
But still.
She’d never stopped to consider that the sheriff might actually be concerned about her stepping into danger, as she was for Elijah. Was that why he had stopped by on the flimsy pretext of getting his daughter a library card (and some how-to-dance books and DVDs, which he hadn’t really needed)? To check up on her?
If so, how cringeworthy. A part of her wanted to go home and never show her face in town again.
Another part of her, of course, wanted to solve the crime and show the sheriff just how wrong he was about her.
“Elijah,” she said in her most serious tone, “leave the crime solving to the professionals. You work on what you’re best at.”
Elijah was still sulking. The encounter with Katie Hartwell seemed to have really thrown him. Molly had never seen him like this. “Oh, yeah? And what’s that?”
Henry laid a friendly hand upon his shoulder. “Comedy, man. You’re the funniest guy I know.”
Elijah lifted his head, looking slightly less disconsolate. “You mean that?”
“Yeah, man,” Henry said. “That cookie porn you did the other day was comedy gold.”
Elijah cracked a smile. “It was pretty good. I should do it again, only, you know, at home, and film it, and put it up on YouTube.”
“Totally,” Henry said. “Get some subscribers.”
“And advertisers,” Elijah said. “What I need is a brand.”
Satisfied that her favorite patron had been warned off any attempts at amateur crime solving, Molly went back to her own desk, telling herself that she would do the same. No more looking into the Sunshine Kids, no more combing social media for possible updates on the case. She was going to be a good, law-abiding citizen from now on and stay out of the sheriff’s business. In fact, she was going to avoid him completely. The sheriff was dead to her. She was never even going to glance his way again.
This resolve lasted until Saturday night when she attended the Red Cross Ball and saw how mouthwateringly good Sheriff John Hartwell looked in his dress uniform.
Chapter Ten
John
As John dressed for the Red Cross Ball—an annual Little Bridge tradition that had gone on for as long as he could remember—he was surprised to realize that things were looking up.
His dress uniform fit, for one thing. The dry cleaner really had delivered the wrong trousers, an error he’d been too preoccupied to notice himself.
Even better, the tech crew had found the fingerprints of Lawrence Beckwith III, aka Dylan Dakota, all over one of the pizza boxes and several of the beer bottles found in the media room of the new library. Nothing had been discovered yet on any of the CCTV footage—Beckwith and his crew somehow always managed to figure out where any security cameras were hidden and stay far away from them—or from the DNA swabs, but that, at least, would show up eventually. On television crime shows, of course, DNA results always came back within hours. In reality, it took weeks or often months before they got answers.