Red Rum: A Rosie Casket Mystery R.M. Wild (inspirational books .txt) 📖

“I haven’t changed the bedsheets yet.”

“So?”

“So, I presume you don’t want to roll around in the dead skin and curly hairs left by my previous guests.”

“Uggh,” he muttered and took the pillow.

The truth was, I felt way more comfortable knowing an early morning trip to the bathroom wouldn’t result in an accidental pantsless encounter. The truth was, Matt Mettle was the kind of guy who slept in mesh shorts—and only mesh shorts—and there wouldn’t be enough fabric in twenty tents to conceal his excitement.

The truth was, I was sufficiently deprived of human touch that a groggy, vulnerable encounter in the dead of the night might lead to making the beast with two backs—and as much as the hippie in me told my nether regions that there was nothing wrong with having a bit of fun every now and then, the pragmatist in me knew that getting freaky would complicate our situation so irreversibly that we’d put the entire case in jeopardy.

Besides, we needed a lookout. If we were both upstairs, someone who could leave an envelope on our porch without being heard could easily slip through the backdoor and poison my chocolate.

I said goodnight and took the thumb drive upstairs with me and placed it on the antique vanity across from my bed. The night was dark and with no competition from the moon, the pink light from the lighthouse blasted through the porthole window, the muntin putting the thumb drive directly in its crosshairs.

I crawled into bed and pulled the comforter up to my chin. But the presence of that device on the other side of the room emanated some kind of spirit, some kind of digital aura, that kept me awake.

I had no idea what information was on it—if anything—and for the rest of the night, it taunted me like a demonic elf on a shelf.

Before I knew it, the pink light outside had turned orange. A WHACK, WHACK, was coming from outside.

Groggy, I slid out from underneath the heavy covers, crossed the room, and looked out the window. In the backyard, Mettle was wearing nothing but a wife beater and mesh shorts. He was wielding an axe and chopping wood.

I knocked on the window and he paused and looked up at me.

“Make the pieces bigger!” I said. “They burn longer.”

“What?”

“Make the pieces bigger!”

“I’m working out, Casket. We’ll head to your place of worship when I’m done.”

Our ancestors would have been appalled to see so many perfectly good calories go to waste. I watched him for a moment, marveling at how well-crafted his body was. He must have known I was watching—after all, there was an entire forest to chop wood and he didn’t have to do it right outside my window.

When he finished, he took out his Leatherman and practiced the art of being a man by whipping the blade at one of the trees like some kind of circus knife-thrower. The funny thing about a superhero body like Mettle’s was that maintaining that look took extreme diligence, a relentless pursuit that left little time for sexier things—like reading. The inordinate number of hours needed to maintain romance-cover abs was something they rarely mentioned in the Fabio books.

I left Mettle alone to look for his knife in the leaves each time he missed the tree and went down the hall to the bathroom. There, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and fantasized about what he would look like if he ever sat in my armchair and read a book by the fire without a shirt.

Even though Mettle was risking further disciplinary action, he insisted we take the cruiser.

“What? I can’t fit inside that little import of yours. My chest needs room to breathe.”

“I promise you my Honda is more luxurious than an eight-by-ten cell.”

“You know how often the state troopers actually come to Dark Haven? Never. At least not until you came back to town. I’m not worried about getting pulled over.”

We drove downtown and climbed the Maple Street hill to the library.

“Have you ever thought about what you might do if you had to spend time in jail?” I asked.

Mettle didn’t even have to think about it. “Lots of pushups. I’d get totally jacked. Actually, come to think of it, it wouldn’t be all that bad. The state would pay for my twaining,” he said with a horrible Austrian accent. “What about you?”

“I’d read a lot. But trust me, all the time in the world quickly becomes a burden. One day you’re working out, optimistic for the chance to improve yourself, but the next day you’re so bored all you want to do is sleep. And the day after that, you’re trying to figure out how to tie your bedsheets into a noose.”

He glanced at me. “And how would you know that?”

I thought of all those months I had spent with my head on the table in the NYCPS rubber room. “Never mind.”

We parked on the curb outside the library and went inside. Fitzgerald was in his usual spot behind the reference desk, his face green from the computer monitor and blue from the phone he was hiding below the keyboard. Basically, he was teal.

He put his phone away when he saw us approaching.

“Fewer hours at the bar?” I said.

He shrugged.

“Any word on Peter Hardgrave?”

He shook his head. Apparently, he was mute this morning.

“We were hoping to use the computers,” I said.

Fitzgerald glanced at Mettle and then back to me, his eyes becoming two little slits. “Do you need Internet access?”

“No.”

“That’ll be ten cents.”

“But we don’t need the Internet.”

“It still costs ten cents.”

“Ten cents to use the computer?” Mettle said. “Are we stuck in the 1950s? Where does all my tax money go?”

Fitzgerald looked at me as if to say, What’s with the meathead?

I shrugged as if to say, don’t ask me, and fished in my handbag for a dime. “It’s fine,” I explained. “It’s just the library’s way of placing a time limit on their machines.”

“But there’s nobody here,” Mettle