A Tale of Two Kitties

by Sofie Kelly

  “I love you, too,” I whispered.

  At that moment Micah appeared on the empty chair beside me. Not launched herself from the floor or jumped from another chair. Appeared, as in the opposite of disappeared.

  For a moment the air almost seemed electric, the way it did before a thunderstorm. Micah cocked her head to one side and meowed at me.

  “Does Marcus know you can do this?” I asked the cat and immediately felt foolish. Did I really think she was going to answer me?

  The cat wrinkled her whiskers and meowed again almost as though she were saying, “Maybe.” And given what I’d just seen her do, who was I to say that she wasn’t?

  I thought about all the times lately that Marcus had told me the little cat had “snuck” unseen into his SUV. “I’m going to have to tell him,” I said. “As soon as this case is over I’m going to have to tell him.”

  I left Micah with some sardine crackers and a promise to bring an actual tin of sardines next time I came out. She licked her whiskers and I had the feeling that the ability to disappear wasn’t the only skill she shared with Owen.

  When I got home there was no sign of Owen, but one of my hats was in the middle of the kitchen floor. I bent down to pick it up and discovered that there was a funky chicken head inside. I sat back on my heels. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?” I said to Hercules, who had just come in from the living room.

  “Mrr,” he said, blinking his green eyes at me. In other words, he didn’t know, either.

  Hercules had gotten his name from Roman mythology. At least that was what I told people. For the most part it was the truth. He had been named after Hercules, the son of Zeus. As portrayed by the very yummy Kevin Sorbo. Or as Maggie liked to teasingly describe him, Mr. Six-Pack-in-a-Loincloth.

  Owen, on the other hand, was named because of the book A Prayer For Owen Meany—John Irving—which I’d been reading when I brought the boys home. Whenever I put the book down Owen sat on it. His name was either going to be Owen or Irving and to me he didn’t look like an Irving.

  I dumped the soggy chicken head in the trash and shook my hat over the can to get the bits of catnip out. I went upstairs to change, trailed by Hercules. I told him about my day and he murped at intervals as though he was actually listening.

  About twenty minutes later, I was peering in the refrigerator to see if I had any Parmesan cheese to top a plate of spaghetti when Owen came up from the basement. He walked past me, stopped in the middle of the floor and looked all around the kitchen. Roma had been keeping an eye on his ear ever since the collar had come off. It seemed to be healing well.

  Owen looked at me. It was hard to miss the accusatory glare in his golden eyes. “Merow!” he said loudly.

  “It wasn’t your hat, it was my hat,” I said, setting a Mason jar of spaghetti sauce on the counter. “And hats don’t belong in the middle of the kitchen floor.”

  He looked around the room again and then seemed to zero in on the trash can. He stalked over to it and meowed again, turning back to look at me over his shoulder.

  “Yes, I threw out your chicken head,” I said. “It was wet, it was disgusting and it was inside my hat.”

  I saw his muscles tense and I knew he was about to launch himself at the can.

  “Knock that can over and I will vacuum up every chicken part in this house.” It was an empty threat. My best guess was that I knew where maybe half of his stash was, but Owen didn’t know that. He glared at me. I folded my arms over my chest and glared back at him. Hercules suddenly became engrossed in checking out something on the floor under the chair next to where he’d been sitting. Who knows how long the standoff would have gone on except Hercules sneezed . . . which scared him the way it always did. Startled, he jumped, the way he always did. Except he was under the chair. His head banged the underside of the seat. He yowled in indignation and flattened himself against the floor, turning from side to side as though he thought someone had hit him over the head.

  Owen sat up and took a few steps toward his brother. I immediately moved the chair and bent down to Hercules. “Let me see,” I said. He was still looking around suspiciously.

  “You banged your head on the chair,” I said. “Let me take a look.”

  He made grumbling noises in the back of his throat but he let me feel the top of his head. He didn’t pull away from my carefully probing fingers and didn’t even wince as I examined the top of his head. “I think you’re going to be okay,” I said. Could cats get concussions? I wondered. Hercules seemed all right; annoyed and a little embarrassed but otherwise fine.

  I got him a couple of bites of cooked chicken from the fridge and gave one piece to Owen as well. I noticed Hercules gave the offending chair a wide berth as he made his way over to his water dish, shooting it a green-eyed glare as he passed.

  Owen disappeared after supper, probably checking his various stashes of funky chicken parts to make sure they were still hidden. Hercules was still a bit out of sorts. He followed me around the kitchen as I cleaned up and did the dishes and twice I almost tripped over him. Once the dishes were put away I set my laptop on the table. “Want to help me look up a couple of things?” I asked the cat.

  “Mrr,” he said after a moment’s thought. It sounded like a yes to me. I picked him up and settled him on my lap. He put one paw on the edge of the table as I pulled the computer closer and turned it on.

  “I’m kind of curious about Simon and his family,” I told Hercules. “Let’s see what we can find.” Simon Janes had no Facebook or Twitter accounts but there was still a fair amount of information about him online. He’d started his development company in college when he rented a room in a run-down house about fifteen minutes from campus. On the weekends he went home to see baby Mia, who stayed with Leo. Simon persuaded the landlord to let him fix up the old house instead of paying rent. He did the same thing in another place the next year. In his third year he used the money he hadn’t spent on rent as a down payment on a tiny two-bedroom house, renovated it and then rented out rooms to his friends. By then Mia was living with him full-time.

  I tried to imagine what Simon’s days had been like, going to class, going home to see Mia every weekend and then having her with him all the time, trying to make time to study and working on whichever old house he was living in. It had been all I could do to manage my classes and a very early breakfast shift at an off-campus diner that catered to early risers, hunters and people just getting off the night shift. “Simon wasn’t afraid of hard work, as my mother would say,” I said to Hercules.

  The cat seemed less impressed. He pawed at the keyboard and somehow I found myself looking at a newspaper article about the death of Meredith Janes outside Chicago. Hercules leaned in toward the screen as if he was reading the copy. He paused for a moment, looked back at me and meowed. Clearly he thought this was important somehow. So was it?

  “Fine, I’ll read it, too,” I said.

  The piece was the second of a three-part series on accidents along a stretch of twisty road. The police had spent a lot of time investigating Meredith Janes’s accident. There was some question at the time that another car had been involved, possibly forcing her off the road, but in the end police found no evidence at the scene or on the car and the investigation was closed, the accident blamed on road conditions and excess speed.

  But what caught my attention as much as the article was the photo of Meredith Janes. It was the photo I’d seen lying on the side table when I’d found Leo Janes’s body. Something had been bothering me about that picture, or more specifically, the frame. There had been one other photo on the table—of Simon and Mia. It had been professionally matted and framed in an expensive metal frame. The old photograph in the inexpensive plastic department-store frame had seemed oddly out of place next to the professionally presented image of Simon and Mia. I remembered Rebecca saying that Leo never forgave his brother or his
wife. I wondered why he had a photo of her in a place he was only staying at for a few weeks if he felt that way. Did it have anything to do with Leo’s decision to give his brother a second chance?

  I remembered what Marcus had said when I’d suggested the animosity between the two brothers gave Victor a motive to kill his brother: “He had nothing to gain.” Was that actually true?

  Hercules seemed to finish reading before I did. He sat patiently on my lap and I could see him watching me out of the corner of my eye. When I finished I reached over and scratched the place above his nose where his black fur turned to white.

  “Fine, you win, smarty pants,” I said.

  He licked my chin, cat for “I told you so.”

  I looked at the computer screen again. Marcus had said once that I had the mind-set of a detective. I wanted to know the what and the why about everything. I found myself wondering those things about the photo of Meredith Janes in her ex-husband’s apartment. What was it doing there and why did he have it? And was Victor Janes connected in any way?

  Maybe I needed to find out.

  chapter 7

  Marcus called Sunday morning to tell me the trip to Minneapolis had been a success. Eddie had learned a lot about setting up a hockey school from his former teammate and they’d split a huge platter of wings. I was curled up in the overstuffed chair next to my bed with a book and a certain gray tabby cat sprawled half on my lap, half on my chest.

  I thanked him for the bread and the marshmallows. I’d toasted some of the bread at breakfast and there were four marshmallows in the cup of hot chocolate at my left elbow.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “Do you want to check out the flea market down at the community center this afternoon? I’m looking for a bench to set by the back door. And no, I didn’t forget that I’m cooking dinner for you.”

  Somehow Owen heard the word “dinner,” probably because he had exceptional hearing—when it suited him. He lifted his head and meowed loudly.

  “Is that Owen?” Marcus asked.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “He seems to think you should make him supper, too.”

  Marcus laughed. “He can have cat food, cat food or cat food. Roma threatened to ban me from ever getting another slice of her apple pie if I don’t watch how much people food he and Hercules are getting. So no more pizza for Owen—at least until pie season is over.”

  Owen and Hercules clearly weren’t “ordinary cats” and I suspected they didn’t have ordinary digestive systems, either, but that didn’t mean they should eat like a pair of frat boys on spring break.

  “I agree with her, at least on the pizza,” I said. “How would you like to be woken up by a cat with morning pizza breath licking your chin?”

  “I’d much rather be woken up by you licking my chin,” he said, and it seemed that I could feel his breath warm against my ear even though that was impossible.

  • • •

  He picked me up at twelve thirty and we headed downtown to the flea market, which was being held in the community center parking lot. There were a lot more people there than I’d expected. We’d been walking around less than five minutes when I caught sight of Maggie and Brady. I waved but she didn’t see us, so we made our way over to them through the crowd.

  “Isn’t this fantastic?” Maggie asked. She was carrying a string bag over one shoulder and I could see a stack of postcards and a child’s Spirograph inside.

  “Everything and the kitchen sink,” Brady said, gesturing at a huge stainless-steel sink at a nearby stall. “There’s a guy here from upstate with a PAC-MAN arcade machine.”

  “Tabletop or upright?” Marcus asked.

  “Upright. I’m thinking about maybe buying it.”

  Marcus raised an eyebrow and grinned. “I may have to hit the bank for some rolls of quarters.”

  “I haven’t played PAC-MAN in years,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you liked arcade games,” Maggie said.

  “One year my parents were doing summer stock and there was an arcade next to the theater.” I smiled. “I got pretty good at a couple of games. I have excellent hand-eye coordination.”

  Marcus looked at me. “You may have beaten me the first time we played road hockey but there is no way you’re better at PAC-MAN than I am.”

  I’d beaten him at our most recent game of road hockey, too, but I didn’t point that out. I shrugged. “Well, if Brady buys the game maybe we’ll find out.”

  “Want to go take a look?” Brady asked. Both he and Maggie seemed to be getting a kick out of the conversation.

  “Absolutely,” Marcus said, his blue eyes never leaving my face. He had a competitive streak I’d learned about when I’d played road hockey against him at my first Winterfest. And won. When it came to road hockey games with Marcus, I was undefeated.

  “I’ll come find you in a little while,” I said, smiling sweetly at him.

  Marcus and Brady headed toward the back corner of the lot. “It’s going to be Winterfest all over again, isn’t it?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re really good at that game, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  Maggie slipped the strap of her bag up onto her shoulder. “I take it your mother never told you to let the boys win so they’d like you.”

  That made me laugh. “Mags, you’ve met my mother,” I said. “Do you really think she’d ever give advice like that?”

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  We started walking. “She told me to do my best, play fair and never throw a game for a guy. She said, ‘The only person you might annoy is your first ex-husband.’”

  Maggie laughed. “That sounds like your mom.”

  She led me to a stall along the street side of the parking lot. “Take a look at these,” she said, indicating several large cardboard cartons sitting on the ground in front of the booth.

  I took a few steps closer. “Picture frames?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I can get one of those boxes for twenty dollars—maybe less. I was thinking I could get everyone at the co-op to take two or three and paint them or whatever and we could use them to frame those photos. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and handed her two twenties. Maggie crouched down and began looking through the boxes, deciding which ones she wanted to buy.

  I looked around. I knew it would take a while for Maggie to make up her mind. I couldn’t see Marcus and Brady anywhere but as I turned in a slow circle I did see someone I recognized: the woman I had seen walking in the rain the night Leo Janes was killed, the same woman I’d seen coming out of the building the time I’d gone to pick up Rebecca for tai chi. The scarf I’d found the night of Leo’s murder hadn’t belonged to Rebecca. Maybe it belonged to this woman.

  “Mags, I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, fluttering one hand over her shoulder at me. I knew she’d be busy for a while.

  I made my way over to the woman, who was looking at a collection of vintage cookie jars. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I said. “Did you by any chance lose a yellow tie-dyed silk scarf on Hawthorne Street? The night we had all the rain?”

  She turned. “I did,” she said. “Don’t tell me you found it?”

  “I did,” I said. “It was lying on the ground and I picked it up.” I realized then that I hadn’t introduced myself. “I’m Kathleen Paulson.”

  “Celia Hunter.” She was maybe five feet tall without the chunky-heeled, low, brown boots she was wearing. She was a little older than I had guessed when I’d seen her walking. There were fine lines around her eyes and her hair, cut in a sleek, asymmetrical bob was completely gray.

  “I’m the head librarian at the library here in town,” I said. “I could leave your scarf at the
front desk for you.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. It’s not expensive but it was a gift, so it has a lot of sentimental value for me.” Her hazel eyes narrowed. “You were at Leo Janes’s funeral,” she said.

  I nodded. “Yes, I was.”

  “Leo’s wife, Meredith, was my best friend.”

  Meredith Janes. Her name seemed to keep coming up.

  “So you grew up in Mayville Heights?” I took a step to the right to get out of the way of a woman pushing a chubby-cheeked baby in an umbrella stroller.

  Celia’s smile returned. “Yes. I haven’t been back in years. So much has changed and yet so much is the same. I heard that the library has been restored.”

  “For the building’s centennial, yes,” I said. “You can see it when you come to get your scarf.”

  “I’ll try to get there tomorrow,” she said. “I’m staying at the St. James so I’m close by. I plan on being here another week.” She hesitated, brushing a bit of lint off the sleeve of her caramel-colored jacket. “I actually came to see Leo. Did you hear about the mail that was found behind the wall at the post office?”

  I nodded.

  “One of those pieces of mail was addressed to me. It was sent by Meredith the day she died. I came here to show it to Leo.”

  I looked around, hoping I could spot Marcus. This had to mean something.

  Something flashed across her face for a moment, like a cloud passing over the sun. “Kathleen, excuse me if I’m being, well, too presumptuous, but you’re friends with Leo’s son, Simon, aren’t you? I mean, I saw you sitting with him and his daughter at the service.”

  I was picking at the cuff of my sweater, I realized. I put my hand in my pocket. “Yes, I am.”