Page 4 of No Offense

And suddenly, for the first time in her career, she found herself calling the police because of a child.

Chapter Two

John

Sheriff John Hartwell was having lunch at the Mermaid Café when the call came through.

Specifically, he had been trying to decide between a Harpooner—a half pound of Grade A ground beef with bacon, grilled onions, and your choice of cheese—or a Mermaid chopped salad.

Obviously the salad was the healthier option, though he wasn’t entirely sure about the blue cheese and bacon.

What he really wanted was the signature bone-in rib eye over at Island Steak House, but they weren’t open for lunch, and besides, Doctor Alvarez had warned him that he needed to start eating cleaner. His weight was fine, but his cholesterol wasn’t, and if it continued on this trajectory, the doctor had said, he’d soon have to go on medication.

What John hadn’t mentioned to the doctor was his suspicion that it wasn’t his eating habits that were causing his cholesterol levels to go up, but stress. Like the recent spate of home burglaries over by the old high school—not so unusual given that half the island’s residents neglected to lock their doors at night (or at any other time).

Even his living situation was stressful—more stressful, in fact, than being the youngest sheriff in the history of Little Bridge, or the bar fights he frequently had to break up over at Ron’s Place. John would happily take a drunken brawl over being a single parent to a teenage daughter any day.

“Hi, Sheriff.” Bree Beckham, the Mermaid’s most popular waitress—thanks to her bright pink hair and even brighter smile—came up to the counter to wait on him. “What’ll it be today? Burger?”

John looked down at the menu and sighed. Who was he kidding? He was never going to eat a salad, not even one with locally caught shrimp.

Bree seemed to sense his dilemma. “How about the fish sandwich?”

Well, that was a nice compromise, just in case the doctor was right. “What’s the fish today?” John asked.

“Yellowtail,” Bree said, with an approving nod at John’s caution. “Caught fresh this morning. We can fry, blacken, or grill it for you.”

John was saved from having to grapple with this decision—obviously he’d prefer it fried, but neither his daughter, Katie, nor his doctor would like this—when his radio crackled.

“Chief,” Marguerite, over at the station, said. “You at the Mermaid?”

“’Scuse me, Bree,” John murmured, and lifted the hand radio on his shoulder to his mouth. “Yes, I am, Marg. And stop calling me Chief. What’ve you got?”

“Sorry, Sheriff. Craziest thing. We just got a call about a baby being abandoned in one of the bathrooms over at the library. EMTs are already on their way, but—”

“I’ll be right over,” John said, and gave Bree an apologetic smile as he refastened his radio. “Have to take a rain check on that fish sandwich.”

“Ababy?” Bree shook her head, not even trying to pretend she hadn’t been eavesdropping. That wasn’t the Little Bridge way. On an island with a population of nearly five thousand, everyone knew everyone else’s business. “Who leaves a baby in a library? Must be a tourist.”

John didn’t want to ruffle anyone’s feathers by mentioning that in his experience, the incidents of child neglect in Little Bridge were spread evenly across the board, tourists and locals alike. So he only murmured a laconic, “Yep,” then laid down a five-dollar bill to cover the cost of the café con leche he’d consumed while perusing the menu.

“Oh, Sheriff.” Bree pushed the bill back toward him. “You know your money’s no good here.”

John smiled as he put on his wide-brimmed hat. “Put it in the donation jar for all those animals you like to save, then. And give my regards to Drew.”

Bree grinned happily at the mention of her boyfriend’s name and pocketed the bill. “I will. Thanks, Sheriff.”

The library was only one block away, but John drove, lights and siren blaring, because a lost baby was an emergency. So it was less than a minute before he was pulling up before the squat, office-style building that looked so out of place beside its statelier neighbors. Through some fluke in city planning, the town library had ended up in the middle of one of Little Bridge Island’s oldest and most expensive residential neighborhoods, each house built in the Victorian style, with wraparound, veranda-style front porches trimmed with gingerbread and dotted with comfortable-looking rattan sofas and chairs (about which his daughter, who’d spent her formative years on the mainland, had once asked, “Why doesn’t anyone steal them, Daddy?”).

The owners of these homes weren’t bothering to contain their excitement that the library—an architectural horror built in the 1960s—was scheduled for demolition in a few short months. Thanks to the generosity of a single, very wealthy donor, the eccentric but universally beloved widow Dorothy Tifton, the books were soon to be moved to the old high school, which was being renovated to accommodate them, and a center for Floridian history was to be constructed in the old building’s place.

As he pulled on the glass-and-metal doors and heard the familiar squeak of protest, then smelled the even more familiar scent of mildew, paper, and dust, John wondered if the librarians were as wistful about this move as he was. It’s true that the old library was small and cramped, and the new one was going to be a vast improvement.

But it sometimes seemed to John as if too many things were changing too fast... and not necessarily for the better.

“Hey, there,” he said to the extremely old woman sitting at the reception desk. John thought he recognized her as the librarian who’d worked in the building when he’d been a boy. But that woman had been so old then, she must surely be dead by now. “I’m Sheriff Hartwell. We got a call about a—”

The old woman nodded.