Now my back was up. “You don’t recommend individuality? You’re saying I shouldn’t stay true to who I am as a person? That I should just roll over and do whatever it is that social norms say I should do? Is that what Boudicca did? And Elizabeth Cady Stanton? And what about Amelia Earhart?”

Trock blinked. “Um, dear one, I was merely—”

“Speaking of rolling over,” Scruffy said. “What’s this about the bookmobile running over someone?”

I looked at him, but he was still focused on the knives, so his facial expression didn’t tell me anything about the level of knowledge he may or may not have had about recent events at the sheriff’s office. “Yeah, about that.”

Kristen cursed.

Uh-oh. Cautiously, I turned to look at her.

“Not you,” she said. “This sauce. It tastes like carp.”

“Don’t you mean crap?”

“No, I do not. It tastes like it belongs on fish. And since it’s going over fish, that’s not the taste I want.”

That made no sense to me, but Trock nodded and suggested adding an herb I’d never heard of.

Kristen brightened. “Perfect! I’m so glad I married your son.”

Scruffy and I exchanged indulgent glances. “Anyway,” I said, “like I told Kristen on the phone the other night, we didn’t run over Brown Bernier.” It had been frighteningly close, of course, but I wasn’t going to dwell on that. “And anyway, he was dead before we got there.”

“Do they know how he died?” Scruffy eyed his shoulder, picked off an invisible piece of whatever, and deposited it into a nearby wastebasket.

“Well, yes. They do. Ash asked me to stop by because Hal Inwood wanted to tell me in person.”

Scruffy and Trock continued to look mildly interested in the tale. Kristen, however, had been down this road before. “Inwood’s the tall guy, right?” she asked. “That detective?” Her gaze fastened on me. “What would Detective Inwood need to tell you that Ash couldn’t?”

I shifted under the weight of her gaze. “Because, um . . . well . . .”

When I couldn’t manage to eke out a complete sentence, Kristen shook her head, which flicked her long blond ponytail from side to side, and spread her arms wide, including all the world in her gesture. “This, my friends, is the proud possessor of a high school diploma, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in library and information science. All that schooling, yet she cannot form an answer to a simple question.”

“It’s formed in my head just fine,” I said. “It’s the speaking-it-out-loud part I’m having a hard time with.”

“And now she’s ending a sentence with a preposition.” Trock tsked at me.

“Is something the matter, Minnie?” Scruffy was wiping down a long, very-sharp-looking chef’s knife. “You look a little pale.”