A happy ending

Since last weekend I've been listening to A King's Random, by James Grippando, in the car. It started off kind of slow, but I've really gotten into it and have been enjoying it. It's about a new attorney whose father, a part owner of a fishing company, is kidnapped in Colombia. The story alternates between the father's first-person account and the son's story, mostly set in Miami, as he struggles to figure out a way to save his father.

When I'm listening to a book on CD, I just stack six of them in the CD changer and listen until I run out, then switch them out. When I got home on Sunday from the grocery store, I popped the trunk and brought in the groceries, then went back out to reload the CD changer, but I couldn't find the CD case. I took everything out of the trunk, and it just wasn't there. I looked in the house, thinking maybe I had brought it in with the library books on Saturday, but it wasn't there, either.

I thought, oh, great, now what? How could I have lost it? It would have to either be in the house or in the garage or the trunk . . . or, wait a second -- I returned books to the library on Saturday, could I have returned it?

I finally decided that must have been what had happened. I specifically remember returning a book on CD, but I thought it was a different one. But thinking about it, I had already returned that one, because I had to take it in in person and pay a fine ($.30) on it because I couldn't renew it when it was due, and I hadn't finished it yet. I couldn't renew it because someone had a hold on it, but I couldn't return it because I didn't know how it ended . . .

Anyway, I was confident that was what had happened, and I called the library this morning, and it was there. I was relieved, first, because those things are expensive, and I didn't want to have to pay for one that I didn't even have, and second, because I wanted to know how it ended!

The guy at the library was funny when I called -- he went and found it, and when he came back to the phone, he said, "Oh, there are still two CDs here--you don't know how it turns out!"