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“THAT IS MY HUSBAND. What the heck? Why isn’t he at work?”
Donnie was seated at one of the reference workstations, the ones hooked right into our special subscription-only databases. He was facing away from the front entrance, his back to Emma and me, so he wasn’t aware of us until we were practically on top of him.
“Eh, Donnie.”
At the sound of Emma’s voice, Donnie leaped to his feet and logged out in a single, fluid motion.
“Donnie, what a nice surprise to see you. What are you doing in the library?”
“I was on my lunch break, and I thought I’d come over and look some things up.”
“Kinda late for lunch,” Emma pointed out.
“I take my lunch after the lunch rush at the restaurant.”
“Lucky they let you use this terminal, brah. It’s supposed to be just for faculty and students. One time, ah? Yoshi tried to use my login to look up places where he could sell his artwork, and the reference librarian wen’ kick ‘em out.”
Donnie turned to look at the terminal he’d just logged out of as if he had just been made aware of its presence (“What? A computer terminal? What’s that doing back there?”)
“Did you find everything you needed?” I asked. “You didn’t have to stop what you were doing.”
“No, I’m done. I should get back to the Drive-Inn.”
“Anything I can help with?” I asked. “I know my way around the databases pretty well.”
“No. See you at home.”
Donnie bent down to give me a quick kiss on the forehead and left. Emma and I exchanged a look, then watched him push through the turnstile and exit through the glass doors.
As soon as he was out of sight, I plunked down in the still-warm chair.
“What are you doing?” Emma asked.
“Browser history.”
She dragged another chair over from the adjacent workstation.
“Can you see anything?” she asked.
“No. He logged out. Darn.”
“He’s probably just looking up some population data or something,” Emma said. “Maybe he’s thinking about building another Donnie’s Drive-Inn location.”
“If he was looking for a new location, why wouldn’t he tell me? I mean, I teach a class in business planning.”
“Maybe it’s cause he thinks that those who can’t do, teach,” Emma said.
“Maybe he’s communicating with someone, and he doesn’t want me to know. He doesn’t want an incriminating electron trail. So he’s emailing whoever-she-is from an anonymous computer.”
“This is the reference workstation, Molly. Does it even have internet access?”
“It does. See, here’s the browser. With no history, of course, because he logged out, which wiped everything. What if it’s Jennifer Yamazaki?”
“Who’s Jennifer Yamazaki?”
“Sole proprietor of Yamazaki Sports Massage. She’s in Business Boosters. She’s an entrepreneur, like Donnie. And she’s young, skinny, and cute.”
“Oh, stop it, Molly. Donnie doesn’t want someone young, skinny, and cute. He wants you.”
“Thanks for the reassurance. Okay, I have to get to class.” I got up and for the second time, headed for the library exit.
Emma followed me. “Hey, are you going to yoga tonight?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to be knackered after teaching for three hours straight.”
Emma pushed in front of me and went through the turnstile. I followed her, lifting my hands out of the way, and turning to move the metal bar with my hip. I could only imagine how many hundreds of germy hands had been on the thing just today, and I doubted anyone disinfected it at night.
“I’ll come with you,” Emma said. “To yoga.”
“You’re going to do yoga?”
“I wanna find out more about Primo. Our murder victim. Maybe we can figure out what happened to him.”
“Emma, I don’t mind doing some research online, but I don’t think we should go around interrogating people. We don’t know who did it. If we go poking around asking questions, who knows what the murderer might do?”
“I can keep it low key.”
“You? Stop right there. Emma. Just leave it alone.”
“Molly, don’t you see? We’re stuck. We can’t really get our research going again, and we sure can’t publish anything from this until this murder is solved. The sooner the murderer’s caught, the sooner we’re back in business.”
The student worker behind the checkout counter, a boy with a spiky black anime hairdo and smudgy black eyeliner, wasn’t even trying to pretend he wasn’t staring at us. I hustled Emma outside.
“Solving murders was not in the RFP, Emma. We can work on the literature review for now, maybe do some online research from home. But we shouldn’t go around like, ‘Excuse me sir, did you happen to murder Primo Nordmann?’”
“Maybe I just want to do some yoga. You’re not gonna try stop me from taking one little yoga lesson, are you?”
I sighed.
“Fine. I’ll swing by your house and pick you up on the way over.”