by Cass, Laurie
Her strong voice wavered. Quavered. Fell apart into a choking sob. “What if it’s my fault?”
I wanted to say, That’s nuts, of course it’s not your fault. You didn’t have anything to do with Stan’s death and it’s ridiculous to think so.
But I didn’t know what was true anymore. So I took her hand. Held it tight between mine.
And didn’t let go.
• • •
Eddie and I sat on the houseboat’s front deck that night, watching the sun go down and the stars come out. At least I was watching the sun and the stars. Eddie was alternating between being a motionless cat statue and chasing the tip of his tail as if his life depended on it.
I’d turned off all the lights in the cabin to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and a sense of invisibility had enveloped me. No one could see me, and since I was lying quietly on the chaise lounge, no one could hear me. But I could hear them.
A few boats down, a new couple was welcoming friends to their boat. Wine corks and beer cans were popping open, toasts were being toasted, and a wild happiness was emanating from all.
Closer, a woman with small children was trying to convince her youngsters that, yes, it was bedtime, that just because they were still awake didn’t mean it wasn’t time for sleepy eyes and if they wanted to go to the beach tomorrow, they’d better get into bed right now, and don’t make me count to three. One, two . . .
Next door, Louisa and Ted were putting away the dinner dishes they’d just washed. Silverware rattled and plates tinked as they chatted in voices too low for me to hear. Not that I was trying to hear, of course. Eavesdropping was a nasty habit and those who indulged in it often heard things they didn’t want to hear. Take the time when I was five and had listened in on my older brother and his girlfriend when they—
“He got what he deserved,” Gunnar Olson said.
Eddie, whom I saw in silhouette against the lights of the dock, perked up his ears and turned his head to look at our other immediate neighbor, the one whose mere presence allowed me a discount rate on my boat slip. When I’d seen his lights on earlier that night, I’d wondered what he was doing up here a full two weeks before the Fourth of July, but had hoped I wouldn’t have to find out.
With Gunnar going full force, my quiet evening was done. I should go in, anyway. There were bills to pay and Eddie hair to vacuum. I swung my feet to the deck and started to stand when Gunnar’s voice boomed out through his open cabin windows. “Larabee lived about twenty years too long, if you ask me.”
Then again, listening in to someone else’s conversation could hardly be considered eavesdropping if you were sitting on your own boat enjoying the evening. I sat back down.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Gunnar said to the person on the other end of the phone. “You know, I was up here when he died.”
I bolted to my feet. I knew it! I knew I’d seen lights on his boat that night.
Eddie padded across the deck and wound around my ankles. “Mrr,” he said.
I put my finger to my lips and waved at him to keep quiet.
“Mrr.”
Why, why is it that cats only seem to understand English when it’s to their own benefit? I knelt on the deck and pulled Eddie to me. He allowed the snuggle for a second and a half, then slithered out of my grasp.
“Flew the Cessna up,” Gunnar said. “I got the itch to play a little blackjack. Good thing the cops don’t know I was in town. They’d slap me on the suspect list in a flash, with my history.” He chuckled. “The wife? Nah, she doesn’t know I came up that weekend. She thought I was in Chicago on business. . . . Sure, I told her I’d quit gambling, but this was the first time since Christmas and I won a couple hundred bucks, so it doesn’t count. Besides, she’ll never know. I didn’t get the car out of storage until today. When I was up before, I hired some local to drive me around for next to nothing.”
Which explained why there’d been no vehicle in their reserved parking spot.
“Not until tomorrow,” Gunnar said. “She’s flying up from Grosse Pointe with some friends. Corporate jet . . . yeah. We have some wedding we have to go to in Charlevoix. . . . That’s the one. At Castle Farms. Waste of a Saturday, if you ask me.”
I thought about what he’d said about Stan. The comment about being twenty years too long—was that important? And if so, how was it important?
“Yeah, I’ll be picking her up at the airport. Pain in the butt, it’ll break up my whole day. Makes me think I should hire that local yokel to drive her around. Get her to show some cleavage and bet it’ll be even cheaper.”
He laughed. My fists clenched. This guy was really getting on my nerves. Maybe next year I’d chin up to the expense and pay full price for a slip in another spot. It would mess up my student loan repayment schedule, but it might be worth it to move away from this yahoo.
“Some guy I met at the bar,” Gunnar said. His voice faded and was replaced by the clinking of ice cubes and the pouring of liquid. “Yeah, he’s . . .”
But I couldn’t hear what he said. Chilson wasn’t exactly a huge metropolis, so odds were good that I knew whom he’d hired to drive him around. That, or I knew someone who knew him.
And when I did track down the driver, a few pointed questions would be in order. Question number one—did you drop Gunnar off at the farmhouse where Stan died? Two. Did you pick him up later? Three. Had he been carrying anything? Say, a rifle?
In the name of trying to keep my head literally down, I got down onto the deck in case Gunnar looked out a window, and crawled on my hands and knees to the very front of my boat’s bow. I always docked nose out to take best advantage of the lake view, and the tip of my boat matched the midship region of Olson’s vessel. Luckily, that was its galley area and was where Gunnar was pouring himself a drink.
Closer, closer . . . I poked my head outside the railing. Heard snippets of words, but nothing clear. Close, but not close enough. I rose to a crouch and slid outside my boat’s railing, put my toes on the deck’s edge, grabbed the top railing with one hand, and leaned out as far as I could.
“Nah,” Gunnar was saying. “That’s the last thing I’m worried about. This guy isn’t any mental giant. Says he reads a lot. Comic books, maybe.” He laughed.
“Say his name,” I murmured. “Say his name.”
“Mrr.”
There I was, ninety-eight percent of me precariously over the water, and my cat was walking along the top railing as if he’d been doing it all his life.
“Eddie!” I whispered. “Get down! You’re going to—”
One of his back paws slipped off the railing. His tail went down, a front paw slipped, and without thinking, without breathing, I released my single-handed hold on the rail and pushed him boatward. He gave a howling yowl and, twisting, fell to the deck feetfirst.
I windmilled for a grip on the rail, on the boat, on anything. Failed completely, and hit the water with a monstrous splash!
My feet hit the lake’s sandy bottom. I let my legs collapse and pushed myself back up. When I surfaced, spluttering out icky marina water, Gunnar Olson was stomping out onto his deck.
“Who’s that? Who’s there?”
I flung my hair around to get it out of my eyes. “Just me, Mr. Olson.”
“Who?”
“Minnie,” I said, treading water. “Your next-door neighbor.” I swam toward the end of the floating wooden dock that ran between my boat and Louisa’s.
“What were you doing out there?” he demanded. “Hey, don’t leave when I’m talking to you! You get back here right now!”
I climbed up the ladder fastened to the dock’s end, clambered over my boat’s railing, and, dripping, went to look for my cat while Gunnar Olson continued to shout at me. I found Eddie under the chaise lounge where he’d compressed himself into the smallest Eddie-ball I’d ever seen.
“Hey, bud,” I said softly. “Come on out. I’m sorry I scared you, but I didn’t want you falling in the water, see? You would have gotten all
wet like I did and you’d hate that.”
“Who are you talking to?” Gunnar shouted. “You were listening to me, weren’t you? What did you hear? Invasion of privacy, that’s what you were doing. That’s against the law, you know. I could call the cops and have you arrested.”
Oh, please. I stood tall and faced the man. A difficult task, since his six feet of height combined with the height of his boat’s deck made his face roughly fourteen feet above mine, but when there’s a will, there’s a way.
“Privacy?” I asked. “Expectation of privacy is quite low in a marina, Mr. Olson. And are those open windows I see on your boat? That lowers the expectation even further. Almost like being in a public campground, I’d say.”
He paid no attention to me. “The only reason you’d fall off that little tug of yours is if you were outside the railing. And there’s no reason for you to do that unless you were trying to listen to my conversation!”
“For your information,” I said with exquisite politeness, “I was trying to keep my cat from falling in the water.”
Gunnar scoffed. “You don’t have a cat. You were intentionally eavesdropping. Admit it.”
A low rrrrrrr noise came from underneath the chaise.
“What was that?” Gunnar slapped his big, meaty hands on his railing and loomed over me. “No more of your little-girl games. Tell me the truth and there’s an outside chance I’ll let this episode—”
Eddie hissed, a long indrawn breath that raised the hair on the back of my neck. I’d never heard him make a noise like that. Not ever.
Gunnar drew back. “But you don’t have a cat.”
“I didn’t.” I smiled up at him. “But I do now.”
“You can’t,” Gunnar said. “Not a cat, not right next door to me.”
Eddie spat. Hissed again. Gave a long, low growl.
I hunched down. “You okay, pal?” Even in the dim light I could see that he was puffed up to half again his normal size. “Shhh, it’ll be all right. No one’s going to hurt you, okay? Shhh.”
Eddie subsided and let me scratch the back of his ears. He came out from under the chair and I scooped him up for a snuggle. With a sigh, I decided the right thing to do was introduce cat to human and human to cat. “Eddie,” I said, turning to face my irate neighbor, “this is . . .”
But Gunnar was gone.
• • •
When I got out of the shower, my skin was a splotchy pink from the heat. Swimming in Janay Lake was one of my favorite summer things to do, but swimming in yucky marina water had never been on any of my mental lists.
“List of things to avoid, maybe,” I told Eddie.
He was lying on the narrow shelf that ran above the bed. In former summers, I’d decorated the shelf with vases of dried flowers, Petoskey stones, and bits of driftwood. Early on in my life with Eddie I’d discovered that these things are all cat toys. Of course, when you got down to it, everything was a cat toy if a cat chose to make it one.
Eddie stretched out a front paw and rearranged himself on the shelf. He was a teensy bit too wide to fit comfortably, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Apparently he didn’t care if his back leg hung over the edge. At times it seemed he even liked it.
“Wonder how you’re going to like it at the boardinghouse?” I asked him.
He didn’t say anything.
“Well, we won’t move until October, so—” The floor under my bare feet crinkled. I peeked out from underneath the towel I’d been rubbing my hair with and saw that I was standing on Eddie’s papers. Or what had become Eddie’s papers after he’d decided to shred my Grice-Hamilton genealogy research. “Done with these, I take it?”
Since he didn’t say no, I herded the bits into a pile and dumped them into the wastebasket. “I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t mistake those for your litter box.”
Eddie gave me a look that was obviously meant to say I should be grateful for a lot more than that.
I slid on undergarments, shorts, and a T-shirt and chucked him under the chin. “I’m always grateful for your presence, pal, but especially tonight. Did you see Gunnar’s face?” I giggled. “Mr. Big Shot Consultant Don’t Mess with Me or I’ll Sic My Lawyers on You is scared of cats.”
Eddie yawned, showing his sharp teeth. I grinned. If Gunnar had seen those, he would have run for his life.
“And that’s his style,” I said, pulling my fingers through my wet and unruly hair. “Lawyers. If someone gets in his way, he’d hire a battalion of attorneys to fight for him. He wouldn’t do any fighting himself.” My fingers caught on a snarl and I yelped as I tugged through. “Still, did you hear what he said about Stan?”
Another yawn came from the Eddie quarter. He jumped down, made a beeline to the wastebasket, and started rubbing the side of his face against it.
“Cut that out,” I said. “I just filled that. With your mess.”
He rubbed harder and the wastebasket tipped over, sending small bits of paper halfway across the carpet.
“Oh, good job.” I knelt down to clean it up a second time. Eddie sat tall as an Egyptian cat statue and watched me work. “I’m spending twice as much time cleaning up this research as I did doing it.”
“Mrr.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for your comments, but the suggestion box is closed. Try again next . . .” My voice tailed off as I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. It was the only piece still intact and it was kind of a flowchart I’d made of names. I’d added circles and arrows and scrawled questions that had led to no answers whatsoever.
I remembered how I’d stared at it, thinking of previous generations and families and long-ago loves and hates and deaths and motivations.
“You know,” I said slowly. “Gunnar looks guilty as all get-out, but maybe . . . maybe the reason behind Stan’s death isn’t a recent reason. Maybe it came from a long time ago. Maybe . . . I wonder . . .” All those sisters. What were the chances that one of them had murder lurking in her heart? Were the police looking into their alibis? Then again, Stan had been seventy. How likely was it that his sisters were still hale and hearty?
“You know what?” I mused out loud. “I need to know more about Stan’s past.”
My cat catapulted himself onto my shoulder and clonked his forehead against the side of my skull. “Ow! Eddie, jeez, what’s with you?” He started purring loud enough to rattle my teeth. I reached up to pet him. “You are such an Eddie.”
“Mrr,” he said, and purred some more.
Chapter 14
I rolled out of bed early the next morning and trotted up to the library as the sun was creaking over the hilltops. No one else would be in for at least two hours, so I had a nice slice of time to start my research into Stan’s past.
Though many of the old local newspapers had been microfilmed, microfiched, or scanned, many had not. The grant I’d obtained had paid for archiving about half of the library’s newspapers. After long debate, we’d decided to start with the most recent issues and work our way backward. It was a decision I now regretted. Deeply.
We’d shoehorned the unarchived papers into the local history room. I turned on the overhead lights, shocking the sleeping books, and went straight to the narrow drawers that held seventy-year-old copies of the Chilson Gazette.
There were a lot of newspapers.
A lot.
“Well,” I said out loud. This project could possibly take longer than I’d hoped it would. But was there any other way to get the information I needed? Any easier way?
I couldn’t think of one. So I scraped out a chair, sat down, and got to work.
• • •
In the end, it didn’t take as long as I thought it might. I knew the year Stan was born, so all I had to do was find the page of the newspaper where the births were typically printed and hunt through the papers until I found the right announcement.
“Stanley Warren Larabee,” it read, “born at home to Silas and Belinda Larabee. Seven pounds, ten ounces. Mother, infant,
and his six older sisters are doing well.”
“Onward and upward,” I said, and put that newspaper away. Next was high school. Back in Stan’s day, Chilson was the location of the only high school in the county. The library didn’t have a complete set of old yearbooks, so the paper was the next best source. I had no idea if Stan had played any sports, been a member of any clubs, or excelled at anything that might have been considered newsworthy fifty-odd years ago, but I had to look. Who knew what I’d find?
What I found, after an hour and a half, was nothing. Maybe Stan had been too busy on the family farm. Maybe he didn’t care about sports, maybe he hadn’t wanted to join the debate club. Maybe—
“Oh, my,” I breathed. “My, my, my.” I’d found the edition of the newspaper with pictures of the graduating seniors from Chilson High School. There, in black and white and gray, was a photo of a young Stanley W. Larabee. I could see no resemblance between the Stan I’d known and this young man, but there was his name, and there was the picture right above it. And since there were only thirty-seven kids graduating, it wasn’t likely that the paper had gotten the names mixed up.
“Wow,” I said. “Stan was gorgeous.” Saying the words out loud made me cringe. Somehow, admiring the youthful looks of a murdered elderly man felt downright weird. And a little creepy, to boot.
For a moment, I wondered if I was being disrespectful. I couldn’t see it, but maybe it was another moral question for my mother. One of these days I should write them all down and actually ask her.
Idly, I paged through a few more editions. What I’d hoped for hadn’t materialized. I’d hoped to find evidence of sport-or activity-oriented friendships, hoped that I could find some of the friends, hoped to ask a few questions that would lead me to something that would lead me to—
And there it was. Black and white and no gray, this time, because it was a short text-only announcement. Extremely short. Like one sentence short.
“Marriage license to Stanley W. Larabee, 18, and Audry M. Noss, 17.”