She put her fists on her hips. “Who else would I be talking about? If you have another director hiding around here, I’d love to know about it, because this guy has to go.”

“But the Friends are getting along with Graydon just fine.” At the last meeting, they’d been all sunshine and kittens.

Denise sighed heavily. “What do they know?”

I suddenly remembered that she’d been out of town during the last meeting of the Friends. “Is something wrong?”

“Wrong?” She rolled her eyes. “The only thing that’s right is I just talked to everyone on the library board, and they were happy to listen, believe you me. Now I’ll tell you what’s wrong with Graydon, and you can agree or not, but it doesn’t matter, because I know what I know.”

She launched into a detailed list of slights and complaints, starting with Graydon’s recommendation to change insurance companies, moving on to the way he’d quoted a native of Ohio in the last library newsletter, and continuing with the fact that he got his hair cut in a neighboring county.

I listened, but as her list went on and on, the insides of my stomach started to clench. Everything on her list was ridiculous, of course, but Denise was a forceful personality, and her opinion mattered to more than one board member.

“There is no way,” she said, “that his contract will be renewed. Not if I have anything to do with it. The way I see things—and my vision is better than twenty-twenty—the board should get rid of him.” She nodded sharply. “Soon.”

*   *   *

The rest of the day, I did my best to push Denise’s threats from my mind. Mostly, I succeeded, and that afternoon I stood in the back parking lot, trying to find a location that was in the sun and out of the wind. This was impossible, because it was a parking lot and there was no such thing as out of the wind, but searching for a sheltered spot had to be the reason I kept walking from one side of the lot to the other, because it couldn’t be that I was nervous about an Eddie-laden bookmobile being out there in the wild without me, right? No, it couldn’t be, not at all. No way was I nervous that I hadn’t had a single text from Julia since they left the last bookmobile stop. They were fine and—

“There they are!” I sang out to absolutely no one, waving madly, and smiled wide when Julia waved back.

Hunter parked in the exact spot where they’d been that morning, and turned off the engine. With great restraint, I stayed where I was and didn’t run around the vehicle, checking for dings, scratches, or scuffs. Everyone was back, safe and sound, and that was the only thing that really mattered.