My breath caught somewhere in the middle of my throat. I swallowed it, where it settled in my stomach like a rock. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “But, just to be sure I know what we’re talking about, what is it you can’t keep doing?”

She laughed. “Tell me it’ll work out and then ask me specifics? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

“For someone who isn’t as good at problem solving as we are, maybe. The two of us, though? Sorry, Eddie, the three of us? There’s nothing we can’t do. Now. Details, please.”

“It’s the new schedule,” Julia said, looking at her hands twisting together in her lap. “I can’t keep this pace. I’m tired. Plus my husband is getting cranky, and—”

I held out a hand in the manner of a traffic cop stopping traffic. “Say no more. One last question before I let the hordes in. Are you okay with the old schedule, or do you need to leave the bookmobile altogether?”

“What? No! I mean, yes!” She sent me a look of horror that was, in many ways, rewarding. “Of course I want to stay! I just can’t work so many hours.”

“Then we’ll figure it out,” I said, and got up to let in the first patrons of the day. But how, exactly, we’d figure it out was the big question, and Julia knew this as well as I did.

The board and my then boss, along with the library’s attorney, had long ago decreed that no volunteers would ride on the bookmobile. I’d never been convinced the presence of volunteers would increase the library’s liability in any real way, but my vote didn’t count, and so I couldn’t ask any Friends of the Library to help out.

“Did you hear?” Abe Begley, a regular bookmobiler, came up the steps, his long gray hair bouncing off his shoulders. Abe and his wife spent winters in their studio blowing glass of surpassing beauty and spent their summers selling their wares across the Midwest, and were expanding into online sales. “Well, good morning, Mr. Eduardo.”

Eddie had perched himself on the console and was giving Abe a hard stare.

“Put it there, pal,” Abe said, holding out his hand.

I laughed. “He’s a cat, not a dog. He’s never going to—”

“Mrr,” Eddie said, and patted Abe’s hand with his paw.

“You were saying?” He grinned.

“Just when you think you know a cat,” I said. “But what have we heard?”

“Or not heard,” Julia murmured.

“Which is far more likely,” I agreed, “because I can’t think of any big news.”

Abe pointed to the open doorway. “Out there,” he said, “in Mitchell State Forest. Early this morning, a couple of hikers found a woman.”