by Karen Golden
The Cats That Chased the Storm
Karen Anne Golden
Copyright
This book or eBook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, persons or cats, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Edited by Vicki Braun.
Cover design by Christy Carlyle of Gilded Heart Design.
Copyright © 2014 Karen Anne Golden
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:978-1496078575
ISBN-10:1496078578
Dedication
To Jeff
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mom, Mildred Maffett Golden, who sits across the breakfast table from me and listens to my plot points.
My deepest appreciation goes to my sister, Linda Golden, who has been an integral part of this journey. There are not enough words to describe how much she’s helped me in this process.
I would like to thank my friends Sandy DeVault and Bryan Putnam for their advice and support.
Thanks to Vicki Braun, my editor, who painstakingly edited this book. Also, special thanks to Christy Carlyle, my book cover designer.
Finally, I want to express my appreciation to my family and friends. My brother, Bob Golden, who is a crack shot, helped me better understand ballistics. Thanks to Aunt Marjie who will be one of the first to read this book.
I am grateful to my rescued cats, without whose antics I wouldn’t have a story.
Prologue
Early May
As the storm raged, the young heiress to the Colfax fortune slowly descended the stairs to the dark basement. The Erie town tornado siren had pierced the night, wailing its ominous warning. With the power off, the stairwell was pitch-dark. Something heavy fell on the house; she could hear breaking window glass in the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs, she found a lantern flashlight, turned it on, and slowly moved to the center of the basement. She heard more loud noises above her.
Heavy, explosive sounds hit the windowed solarium that was above ground. The house seemed to expand and contract; it creaked and moaned. Something whizzed through the air and hit her on the back of the head. The lantern flew from her hand and landed upright several feet away. Katherine staggered and collapsed to the floor. A large, Siamese cat stood close by, swaying back and forth, emitting a morbid-sounding wail.
A shaft of light from the lantern shone through a gaping hole in the buckled outer wall of the foundation. Bricks were strewn everywhere. Dust rained down on her with each gust of wind from the departing storm. Scout slinked closer to the hole in the wall, doing her Halloween dance and shrieking at the top of her lungs. She was lurching up and down, her eyes glowing red. The Siamese seemed to be in a trance.
When Katherine regained consciousness, she frantically moved wood debris and bricks out of her way. She inched forward and snatched Scout around the middle. Scout squealed in protest, but Katherine held her tight. In the dim light, Katherine looked down and stifled a scream. There in the rubble was a human skull.
Chapter One
Sitting in a living room packed with Victorian furniture, Katherine curled up in a wingback chair. On the nearby marble-top coffee table sat a pot of steaming hazelnut coffee; several Scottish scones were arranged on a silver tray. She held a large mug in one hand and an e-reader in the other. Iris, her seal-point Siamese, was underneath the chair, busy pawing something inside the torn lining.
“Did you ask Abby if you could play with her stash?” Katherine asked, reaching down and petting the cat on its back. Iris and Abby were kleptomaniacs and hid their loot in the old chair.
“Yowl,” Iris said guiltily. She wriggled out with an aged piece of newspaper clutched in her teeth.
“Drop that!” Katherine commanded, placing her coffee mug on the table. She reached down to snatch the paper, but was too late. Iris had swallowed it. “Disgusting! Where are you getting this ancient stuff?”
Iris ran her pink tongue over her lips, and with slightly slanted blue eyes, answered with a sweet yowl.
Getting down on her knees, Katherine felt inside the chair’s torn lining for the possible source, but only found the usual stolen objects: her toothbrush, a tennis sock, several belled balls, and Lilac’s toy bear.
Abby and Lilac were perched on top of the carved window valance, watching the scene with feline indifference until the bear was found. In a single fluid movement, Lilac launched from the valance to the fireplace mantle to the floor. Trotting over to Katherine, she snatched her prized bear and sassed a loud me-yowl, which seemed to be directed at Iris and Scout. To Katherine it sounded like “gimme the bear and no one gets hurt!” With the stuffed toy in her teeth, Lilac used the fireplace mantle as a springboard to leap back on top of the window valance. Abby chirped, and then the two of them stood tall like the Egyptian goddess Bastet, the bear safely resting between them. Scout slowly entered the room with a small book clutched in her teeth. Straddling the book like a spider, Scout clamped her V-shaped jaw on the front cover, while the rest of the book grazed the floor.
“Bring it to Mommy,” Katherine coaxed. Recently Scout had learned to play fetch. The Siamese brought the book over and dropped it at Katherine’s feet.
“Good girl,” Katherine praised. “Okay, what do we have here?” Putting her e-reader in the fold of the chair’s cushion, she reached down and pulled up the book. The initials ‘W.E.C.’ were embossed on the leather cover.
Thumbing through the faded pages, Katherine noticed that individual pages were divided into rows, with numbers written in each cell. The book contained page after page of meticulous accounting – for what, she didn’t know. The spelling was atrocious, with common words misspelled. There were several doodled hearts with the name Amanda written beneath them. Inside the cover on the upper-right corner was the year: 1930. “Well, Scout, looks like you found my great uncle’s journal.”
Scout uttered a barrage of frustrated mutterings, then jumped on Katherine’s lap. The Siamese tried to knock the journal out of her hands.
“Hey, stop that,” Katherine scolded. As she tried to turn the page, Scout hooked her hand with a curled, brown paw, then catapulted off the chair.
Katherine got up hurriedly, thinking Scout would lead her to the source of the journal, but the house phone rang in the next room. Scout beat her to the phone. With a single bound, she knocked the phone off the cradle, and onto the floor.
“Really, Scout? You need to learn a new trick!” Katherine said to the rowdy cat. Opening a drawer in the marble-topped curio cabinet, she tossed the journal inside.
“Waugh,” Scout sassed, sauntering out of the room.
Retrieving the receiver, Katherine said, “Hello.”
“Katz, its Monica.”
“How are you?” Katherine asked. She was surprised to hear from her former boss in Manhattan and the sister of her deceased boyfriend.
“I’m not doing very well. I just miss my brother so much,” Monica said tearfully on the other end.
“I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“I just got a call from an insurance company. It seems Gary bought a life insurance policy a few days before he was murdered in your house.”
Katherine thought, Why did she have to mention the murder in my hous
e part? “Well, that’s a good thing, right?” she asked.
“The primary and only beneficiary is you, Katz.”
“Oh, no,” Katherine said dejectedly. “We had broken up. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. But the policy is in the sum of $100 thousand dollars.”
“Okay, Monica, I’m meeting with my attorney in a few minutes. I’m going to tell him what you just told me. And I’m going to fix this. I do not want this money,” Katherine emphasized.
“I’d really appreciate it. I’ll let you go now.”
“Oh, before you hang up, anytime you want to talk about Gary, don’t hesitate to call me.”
“Okay,” Monica said sadly and hung up.
“Waugh,” Scout said in an unfriendly tone. She was back on the curio cabinet, nuzzling the phone.
“I know you don’t like her, my sweet Siamese, but she’s really going through a hard time right now.” Monica was Scout’s former owner, who gave her up because of behavioral problems, which mysteriously stopped when Katherine took Scout in.
Katherine went back into the living room to retrieve her now-cold coffee when the phone rang again.
“Why do these people not call me on my cell?” she complained, sprinting back into the other room. “Hello,” she answered.
“Top of the mornin',” Colleen exaggerated her Irish accent, then laughed on the other end.
“Oh, that’s so corny. What’s up, carrot top?” Katherine kidded.
Colleen snickered, “Corny? Did you really just say that?”
“I live in Indiana now. There’s corn everywhere!”
“Did you book your flight?” Colleen asked excitedly. “We miss you. St. Patrick’s Day was a blast, but we want an instant replay!”
“I had fun, too! Yes, I booked it. But I can only stay for a few days, though. I’ll be flying into LaGuardia this Friday. I can’t wait. I’m suffering from small-town culture shock.”
“What’s that?”
“No place to shop! For the entire months of March and April, it snowed and sleeted, then torrential rain. The roads were either covered with ice or flooded with water. I didn’t drive into the city because my car is not so good in this kind of weather.”
“I can vouch for that,” Colleen agreed. “I’ll never forget riding shotgun while you drove from Manhattan to Indiana, with three feisty Siamese, in the worst of winter conditions.”
“Me, either,” Katherine remembered. “Things are starting to green up, but the weather has turned most foul.”
With the sound of the word foul, Iris strutted into the room with a look of tasty expectation on her brown face.
“Not fowl, honey,” Katherine said to the Siamese.
“Got to watch those word choices,” Colleen kidded. “It’s raining in Manhattan. It’s been raining for days. On the way to work, my umbrella blew up, so I had to buy another one off the street. Two bucks,” Colleen said proudly. “So, what’s the weather doing in Erie?”
“Yesterday the town tornado siren went off.”
“Shut the door! What did you do?”
“It was super loud and the cats went crazy. The only cat I could find to take to the basement was Abby. The Siamese ran and hid.”
“That’s not good. Maybe you need some kind of emergency plan to entice them down there.”
“In light of the awful things that happened there, I’d don’t think the cats will ever want to go there again.”
“So the siren went off? What happened? See the girl with the ruby slippers?” Colleen teased.
“The tornado was a no show, but guess what page was on my computer screen after the storm?”
“No, they didn’t . . .” she said in surprised disbelief. “Let me guess? Something about the Wizard of Oz?”
“Straight from Wikipedia, but not the picture of a tornado picking up a house, but the flying monkeys,” Katherine giggled. “One of the cats surfed up that page.”
Colleen laughed. “But, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does if you’re a cat,” Katherine joked.
“You’ve really got to find out which one is doing it. Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Why not install a webcam in your office?”
“I pretty much think they’re all doing it!” Katherine admitted.
“Any-who, the reason I called, do you want Jacky to pick you up at the airport?”
“Give Jacky a hug for offering, but I’ll take the bus. I should be at your – well, my – old apartment by the time you get off work.”
“Just use your key. We didn’t change the locks.”
“Listen, got to go. Talk to you later,” Katherine said, hanging up.
As Katherine made her way back to the cozy wingback chair, the doorbell rang noisily. Scout and Iris raced up the stairs three at a time. Katherine opened the door. Mark Dunn stood outside the pink mansion, handsomely dressed in a navy-blue business suit.
“You’re looking very dapper today,” she admired.
“Got to look the part,” Mark said brightly. “I’m a little bit early.”
“No problem. Please come in. Can I get you something to drink – water, coffee, tea, milk?” she offered. “I’ve got a pot of flavored coffee in the living room.”
“I’ll have a large glass of milk, please,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Oh, can I super-size that? Just kidding. No, thanks,” he said, removing his suit jacket. “How did the cats react to the tornado siren?”
“They scattered to parts unknown and I had a heart attack. Colleen said I need an emergency plan.”
“Not a bad idea. Indiana is famous for tornadoes.”
“Well, since this is an official meeting,” Katherine began, changing the subject, “do you want to go to the dining room and use the table to organize your lawyer stuff?”
“The living room is fine. I can use that marble-top table.”
“Which one? There are like four of them in there,” she joked.
Mark headed for the mauve velvet loveseat and sat down. Setting his briefcase on the floor, he opened it and pulled out an envelope. “Let’s start with the coroner’s report,” he said, handing it to her. The envelope was already slit open. “Vivian’s lawyer sent me a copy.”
Taking the document, she sat down next to him. “Please, give me the doom-and-gloom ditty before we do.”
“The official conclusion is that Vivian Marston died of acute poisoning, which induced cardiac arrest,” Mark said solemnly. “It’s really too early to say whether there’ll be an additional charge against Patricia. She didn’t confess to killing her mother, but confessed to killing Gary.”
“When do you think it will go to trial?” Katherine asked.
“Well,” he said, “she lawyered up, and if her attorneys challenge the admissibility of her confession, it could be thrown out. And only if that happened would there be a trial.”
“Would I have to testify?” she asked nervously.
“If there’s a trial, I’m afraid so. You’d have to testify to finding Gary’s body. If Patricia is charged with her mother’s murder, you’d have to testify how and where you found Vivian.”
Katherine sighed and slowly extracted the official page. Scanning it, she said, “I guess I should be relieved that I’m no longer suspected of foul play.”
Iris trotted into the room and threw herself on Katherine’s legs. Katherine smirked and said, “I’ve got to stop using that word.”
“Oh, fowl,” Mark snickered.
“Now it’s my turn,” Katherine said, handing Mark a stapled, two-page document.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“This is my proposal for my new computer classroom. Cokey has scribbled out some plans.”
Mark examined the pages, then said, smiling, “This looks great. But, it’s not clear where the classroom is going to be.”
“We decided on the basement room in the back of the house. My great aunt Orvenia called it the solarium because of all the windows. It’s a
walk-out, so my students can park in the back.”
“Not to blow your bubble, but I need to run it by the zoning commission. Orvenia’s house is cited as residential, but I believe you can have small business operating inside the home. No problem. I’ll let you know.” Mark looked at the plans again. “Judging from Cokey’s chicken scratches, it looks like five workstations,” he noted.
“There will be four computer desks positioned along the wall where the windows are.”
“Won’t that be too much light?”
“No, Cokey is taking out the existing windows and installing smaller ones higher up.”
“Where’s your desk going to be?”
“My desk will be in the corner. Cool, huh?” Katherine grinned.
Mark read more. “A new HVAC system for the room . . .”
“It’s freezing in there with no heat.”
“Okay, looks good. I’ll get back to you,” Mark said, putting the proposal in his briefcase. He asked, “If I’m going to take care of your cats while you’re in NYC, I’ll need a key.”
“I’ll make sure you have one. Thanks again. I hope it won’t be too much of a hassle.”
With the mention of cats, Scout strolled in. Mark reached down and gave her chin scritches. “Where’s the other guys?” he asked.
Katherine pointed up to the window valance.
“I see you little monkeys,” Mark said. The Siamese and Abyssinian squeezed their eyes. “Hey, what’s with your great uncle’s portrait? It’s crooked.”
“Lilac keeps batting it when she jumps up to the valance. I’m tired of setting it straight! If I leave it like that, she won’t bother it anymore. Sort of reverse psychology,” she giggled.
Mark laughed. “I couldn’t imagine my Maine Coon even being able to leap up there, let alone mess with a portrait. What day are you leaving?”
“The day after tomorrow. It’s an early morning flight.”
“Do you need a lift to the airport?” he asked.
“I’m good,” she smiled. “Thanks, but I think my vintage Toyota will make it. I’ll park in the long-term parking lot.”