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chanted.
    The redhead dropped the coffee pot. It shattered, and hot black liquid splashed onto the legs of her jeans. She stood there, staring down at the mess as if she didn’t quite know what it was.
    Vince and the chief were on their feet instantly, the chief coming around the desk to grip the woman’s shoulders. “Damn, Holly, you could’ve scalded yourself!” He pushed her backward a couple of steps, out of the mess. “You okay? Hmm?”
    Pounding feet brought two other men to the open door. The officers must have arrived since Vince had been in the chief’s office. One was tall and blond, the other stockier, dark. Both wore uniforms and shields.
    “What happened?”
    “You all right, Holly?”
    She looked up at them and nodded, but she still seemed rather dazed. “I ... don’t know. I guess my hand slipped.”
    The frowns those two men sent to one another and then to the chief said they flat out didn’t believe that.
    The redhead gave a shrug that pretended to be casual, and pushed past them to head to the restroom beyond the door. When she came back, she was using a mop’s handle to push a rolling pail along, and she looked as if nothing unusual had happened.
    “Okay, clear out, boys. Let me get this mess cleaned up.”
    The two officers backed out of the way, and Holly mopped up the spilled coffee and pushed all the broken pieces of the pot into a pile. “Too bad about my timing,” she said. “I didn’t even get a cup yet.”
    “I’m sorry,” Vince said, watching her more closely than before. Because now he’d stopped doubting his twisted-up gut. She had just confirmed his hunch. She knew something.
    “Don’t be silly. You were nowhere near me.” She pulled a whisk broom and a dustpan from the basket attached behind the mop pail, and briskly swept up the traces of the accident, dumping them neatly into the chief’s wastebasket.
    “I got the feeling it was something I said,” Vince said, watching her face.
    She brushed off her hands, “You weren’t the one speaking.”
    It was not, he realized, any kind of an answer. “Maybe it’s just that I haven’t had my coffee,” she added with another carefully casual shrug, and she backed out of the room, pulling the mop, pail, broom, and dustpan with her into the hall, and then reached back to close the door.
    Vince stared at the door for a long time after she closed it. “She’s a jumpy little thing, isn’t she?” he asked.
    “No, as a matter of fact, Holly is the steadiest, calmest person who’s ever worked for me,” Chief Mallory admitted, and there was real concern in his tone.
    Vince turned slowly toward the chief. “Was it me, do you think?”
    The chief’s worry lines didn’t ease much with his smile. “Nah. She must just be having an off day. It happens to all of us once in a while ... I suppose.”
    He frowned at the door in a way that told Vince it didn’t—at least not to Holly Newman. It told him something else, too. Holly was a fragile sort of woman. Or at least that was how the men in this office perceived her. Weak and fragile.
    “I’ll ... uh ... I’ll check in with her mother, all the same. Just to make sure nothing’s going on.”
    It was an odd thing to hear a police chief say. A personal thing. It crossed Vince’s mind that there were more differences between Dilmun and Syracuse than the 60 miles on routes 81 and 13.
    A lot more.

    C HIEF MALLORY WAITED UNTIL HE’D watched the stranger go. Then he picked up the phone and dialed Maddie Baker over at the library. She answered crisply, but her tone softened when he said, “Maddie, hon? I need a favor.”
    He could almost see her smiling at him, perfect false teeth looking a size too big for her mouth. Maddie could seem as mean as tar to outsiders. Only the locals knew what a sweetheart she was. “What can I do for you, Chief?”
    “There was a fella over there askin’ about an overdue library book last night, as I understand it.”
    “Why, yes. Yes, there