My fondness went a bit stiff. “If we were having a small wedding, that would be great, but—” I took a deep breath and felt myself calming down. “But,” I said easily, “what we should do first is come up with a guest list. That way we’ll know the kind of numbers we’re looking at.”

Because he wasn’t stupid, no matter how much he sometimes pretended to be, Rafe agreed, and we spent the rest of the evening typing names into a spreadsheet.

The next morning, as I walked to the library, I mentally added a few more names to the list. My first librarian boss would love to have an excuse to come Up North and see my library, and my college roommate and her husband had been talking about coming up for years.

I started a pot of coffee and watched the brown liquid trickle down, shying away from the feeling that the proposed guest list was becoming far too long for our as-yet-undetermined budget.

“Leave it for later,” I told myself. I filled my Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services mug as close to the top as I dared, and headed to my office for a half hour of research. Abiding by the library’s newly revised employee policy regarding personal use of library computers, I used my phone to access the public Wi-Fi and started trolling social media for possible suspect alibis.

This was a limited effort, since John Pinnock had no visible electronic presence, and I still didn’t know enough about Charlie Seller to be sure I’d actually found him, but I did learn two things: that there were a lot of cat pictures on Facebook and I had no idea what I was doing.

I put my phone on my desk and spun it around.

Pug had been found by his mail carrier just over three weeks ago, and they’d estimated he’d been killed the night before he’d been found. So, he’d been killed on a Monday night. The first Monday in April.

Hmm.

Were there any community meetings that night? City council, county board of commissioners, township boards, planning commissions, anything? Meeting minutes sometimes named the members of the public who attended . . . but even if a suspect had attended a meeting, he (or she) could still have driven to Pug’s cottage afterward.

And then there was Ryan.

What Hunter had said on the bookmobile was still pinging around in my brain. Best-ever solution would be to prove Ryan’s innocence. But how could I do that, other than asking all my suspects if they’d killed Pug, and there wasn’t much point in doing that. The guilty one would just lie, and I wasn’t confident that I could detect an accomplished liar. Even bad liars had an excellent chance of getting away with their lies with me, especially if they had a good story about—

“A story,” I breathed.