No Offense: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 2)

“No, Miss Molly.”

Elijah leaned across Molly’s desk and pressed the receiver, ending her call to his mother before it had even connected. “Please. Please do not call my mom.”

Molly looked into his suddenly pale face and felt that she had no choice but to relent. He was her patron. More than that, he was a child.

“Fine, Elijah,” she said, slowly lowering her handset. “Then tell me the truth about where you got this camera . . . and why you don’t want your mother knowing about it.”

Elijah let out an exaggeratedly large sigh and slumped in the child-sized chair, which for him was not entirely too small. Like a puppy, his hands and feet were large, but the rest of him hadn’t quite caught up.

“Okay, look. I didn’t just find my dad’s camera. I found it a few days ago, and I got this idea: a lot of the girls in school—the Snappettes, especially—want headshots. Not selfies, but, like, real professional headshots. They have this cheer camp they all go to every summer, and there’s this parade in New York City. It happens around Thanksgiving—”

Molly tried to keep the impatience out of her tone. “The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. It’s this real big deal. They have to send in a headshot for it and also for the camp, or something. I don’t know. So when I found my dad’s camera, I thought, why not start my own business, offering to do headshots for the girls? I mean, I can do it way more cheaply than the regular guy they use. Plus, like, they know me. I’m not some creep—”

“Elijah. Is this story going anywhere?”

“Oh, yeah.” He reached into the pocket of his skinny jeans and pulled something from it. “Sorry. So, anyway, I started my own business. See?”

He passed Molly a stiff black business card that had the words ELIJAH TRUJOS, FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER embossed on it in elegant silver print. Beneath the words was his cell phone number.

“I handed those out at school, and you wouldn’t believe the number of Snappettes who started texting me, asking if I could do their headshots for the application thingie. So that’s where I was last night.”

“Where?” Molly was confused.

“At one of their houses,” he said, reaching for the Leica—but not to take it from her, only so that he could show her the photos he’d taken. There was a small display screen on the back of the camera. “Doing their headshots for the application. See?”

He switched some buttons, and photos began to appear on the tiny screen. Molly realized she was looking at the inside of a Little Bridge Island living room—she recognized the shiplap walls and nautical-themed décor—in which several girls wearing Snappette uniforms were posing for the camera, sometimes together, sometimes alone. She recognized John’s daughter, Katie Hartwell, right away. The other two girls were unfamiliar.

“See,” Elijah said, as he flicked through the photos. “It was hard to get the light right, because it was so dark in there.”

Molly could see that behind each girl was a bank of sliding glass doors—not unlike Mrs. Tifton’s French doors—leading to the backyard. Since the photos were taken at night (there was a digital date stamp on the top right-hand corner of the screen, indicating that the photos had been taken the evening before), the glass was dark, except for the girls’ reflection. Elijah had apparently realized this at some point and tried to get around it by having the girls pose in front of a white wall on the other side of the room.

“I really feel like I captured the essence of each girl’s personality,” he said as he showed Molly the photos of which he was most proud. “Like Katie, for instance? She’s really extroverted, so having her do that handstand was just a last-minute thing that I came up with, but I think works great.”

“Fine, Elijah,” Molly said. “But if this is all you were doing last night, why didn’t you want me calling your mom?”

“Oh, er, well, because I sort of lied about finding this camera in a box of junk my dad left behind.” Elijah had the grace to look embarrassed. “I mean, he did leave it behind—just like he left me, my mom, and everything else he should care about. But it turns out he wants the camera back. My mom’s been looking for it to send to him because he keeps asking for it. But I stole it and hid it in my room. I don’t feel like he deserves to have it back after leaving us like that.”

Molly frowned at him. “Elijah,” she said, in mock disapproval.

“I know. I know! But he doesn’t even send child-support payments. The guy’s a loser. I should get something from him. And, anyway, if my mom found out I had his camera and I was using it to take pictures of girls, she’d kill me.”

Molly actually thought that Mrs. Trujos would be relieved—at least about the girls—because it showed that Elijah was finally coming out of his shell and spending face time with people his own age.

But she didn’t say so because she sensed Elijah was getting a little bit of a thrill out of his disobedience. Instead, she kept looking at his photos, which weren’t bad—it would be difficult to take a bad photo with such a high-quality camera—until she saw something curious and cried, “Elijah! Stop!”

He stopped scrolling through the photos. “What? Why? What’s wrong?”

“Go back a photo or two. I thought I saw something—there!”

Molly took the camera from his hands. At first she thought she’d imagined it.

But as she looked more closely at one of his photos of the girls standing in front of the sliding doors, she saw precisely what she thought she’d seen.

And what she saw gave her goose bumps, even though she was wearing a cardigan, as usual, to guard against the chill of the library’s strong air-conditioning.

“Elijah, who is that man?” she asked, showing him the photo.

Elijah squinted at the screen. “What man?”

“The man standing outside in the yard, looking in from behind the sliding glass doors.”

Elijah squinted some more. “Oh, wow. I never noticed that before. You’re right, there is a man out there.” He scrolled through a couple more photos as Molly looked on. “He’s in a few of them. Ugh, what a creeper. He’s just standing out there looking at us.”

“So you don’t know that man?” Molly asked carefully. “He wasn’t a guest last night?”

“What?” Elijah’s eyes were still glued to the camera’s display screen. “No! It was just me and the girls. Sharmaine’s parents weren’t even home. They were at some party, or something. Ew, look at him here. He must have known we couldn’t see him because of how dark it was outside and how bright it was inside. But he’s giving us the peace sign anyway!”

Elijah showed her the photo. It was true. The man—a white man about Elijah’s same size, but ten or so years older, and with a well-groomed goatee—stood in the darkened glass behind the three Snappettes mugging for the camera, two fingers of one hand raised to give the peace sign, a smirk on his face.

He was dressed in dark jeans and a black sweatshirt—a black hooded sweatshirt, the hoodie pulled up just enough to cover his hair but not his large ear gauges or vine neck tattoos.

And certainly not enough to keep Molly’s chills from increasing tenfold. She knew they were looking at a photo of the High School Thief . . . and also that the High School Thief was Dylan Dakota. There’d been a picture of him in one of the articles Meschelle Davies had shown her.

“Elijah,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t notice her wildly beating heart. “Where does Sharmaine live?”

Elijah told her an address she knew well. It was only a block or two from Mrs. Tifton’s house. While she and John had been kissing on Jasmine Key, Dylan Dakota—aka the High School Thief—had been creeping through the backyard of the house in which sweet, cheerful Katie had been having a sleepover, spying on her as she playfully posed for photos with her friends.

“Could you text me copies of these photos?” Molly asked, trying to keep calm. If she felt this freaked out, she could only imagine how John was going to feel when he saw how close his daughter had come to the most wanted man in Little Bridge without even being aware of it. “I need to send them to someone.”

Elijah shook his head. “No, I can’t. This is a camera, not a phone. I can’t send photos from it.”

“Oh, right.” How could she have forgotten? “Well, how could you get copies of these photos to me to show someone?”

“Well, I’d have to go home and download them onto my mom’s laptop—it’s a special memory card, see, that only fits into really old computers. There used to be a cable, but it got lost. Then I guess I could either email them to you, and then you could email them to the person, or I could print them out and bring copies over to you. I invested in some really nice—”

Molly thought her brain was going to melt. “Listen, Elijah,” she said, her fingers curling around the camera. “Why don’t you just give it to me, and I’ll—”

“Excuse me.”

Molly looked up to see the father who’d previously brought the bourbon and coffee into the library looming over her desk. She gave him a tight smile. Of course. Of course someone was interrupting her right now during this crucial conversation. She worked at a service desk. She was there to help people with their book-related problems, not solve crimes. “Yes, may I help you?”

“I just wanted to say sorry again about the book.” The dad looked shamefaced over what had happened. “If you want me to pay for the damage, I’d be happy to.”

Molly glanced at Six-Dinner Sid, which was sitting, sodden and sticky, on her desk. “Okay,” she said. “Great! That will be twenty-five dollars.”

The man looked shocked. “Twenty-five dollars! For a kid’s book? You have to be kidding me.”

“Well, it’s a hardcover picture book.” Molly was impatient to be rid of him so she could get back to her conversation with Elijah. “In full color, and also a library edition with special binding. So actually, twenty-five dollars is a bargain. They’re really—”

“Used!” The father stooped to scoop up his child, who was standing with one finger up her nose and another in her mouth. “I’m not paying twenty-five dollars to replace a used book! That should come out of all the money we taxpayers shell out for this place. Come on, Juniper. We’re never coming back here again!”

Then he stormed off, not seeming to care that everyone could see the pint bottle of bourbon he had tucked into his back pocket.

Molly sighed and turned back to Elijah.

“I need to borrow this,” she said, taking the camera from him. “I have to show these photos to someone right away, and I don’t have time to wait for you to go home and print them out or email them. I’ll give it back just as soon as I can.”

“Sure, no problem.” Elijah didn’t seem to be paying attention. “Wow, Miss Molly, does that kind of thing happen to you a lot?”

“What kind of thing?” Molly was busy scrolling through her phone for John’s number, which she’d thankfully added to her contacts list the first day she’d met him and he’d given her his card.

“People like that guy,” Elijah said, “being so rude.”

“All the time.” Molly found John’s number and began writing him a text.

Elijah shook his head in disgust. “Why do you put up with it?”

She glanced at him in surprise. “Because, Elijah, this is my dream job. I love it. I’m a librarian.”