by Delia James
“I would prefer to consult with you directly. I have another appointment now, but if you could call . . . as soon as it’s quite convenient.” Mrs. Maitland shot me a sideways glance.
And she froze. Her tight, polite smile faded into a deep frown.
Martine looked from me to the blond woman uneasily. “Elizabeth Maitland, this is Anna Britton, a friend of mine from Boston.”
“How do you do?” I held out my hand and gave her my own special smile, the one I reserve for tricky clients and reluctant gallery owners.
She did not take my hand. Instead, she leaned forward, like she was trying to make out a blurred face in an old photograph.
“What is your full name?”
I pulled back. “Annabelle Amelia Blessingsound Britton.”
“I knew it,” Mrs. Maitland breathed. “You have that Blessingsound look. You’re her granddaughter, aren’t you?”
“Umm . . . which her?”
“Annabelle Mercy. Did she send you here?”
“You know my grandmother?” It was only Martine’s slightly panicked look that kept me from asking what the heck was going on with this woman, and what business it was of hers whom I was related to. It was, however, pretty obvious that Mrs. Maitland was an important client for the restaurant, so now was not the time to pull out the Boston attitude, or too many questions. “What a nice surprise,” I made myself say, very politely. “I’ll be sure to tell her we talked. She’s living in Sedona these days, you know.”
“I did not know.” Mrs. Maitland pressed her mouth into a hard, straight line, which made me think she was disappointed to hear Grandma was still aboveground, wherever that ground was. “Well, welcome to Portsmouth, Miss Blessingsound Britton. I trust you will enjoy your brief stay. Chef Devereux, I will be expecting to hear from you shortly.”
With that, Mrs. Maitland marched out, a little faster than she’d come in. It almost looked like a retreat, except that Mrs. Maitland was clearly not the retreating kind.
Martine was staring at me. I didn’t blame her. “Who in the heck was that?” I asked.
“That was Elizabeth Maitland, daughter of one of the oldest and richest families New Hampshire ever saw. Her son’s heading up this lunch we’re catering.” She held up the menu, with all its circles and X’s. “And she’s got opinions about it.”
“I can tell. But is she usually that . . . pleasant?”
“No. Not that I’ve seen a lot of her.” My friend turned the menu over in her hands. “I didn’t know your grandma B.B. lived in Portsmouth. I thought her people were from Massachusetts.”
“They are, or they were. But Grandma was born here.” And she’d lived here until she met her husband, Charlie, the man I knew as Grandpa C. After that, they lived just about everywhere except here. “I didn’t know she still had any friends left in town.”
“If that’s your idea of her friends, I’d hate to meet your idea of her enemies,” said Martine.
“Yeah. Probably not a good idea to start that family history project with Mrs. Maitland there.”
“Seriously?”
I shrugged. “Not my idea. Ginger’s.” Ginger was my sister-in-law and genealogy was the love of her life, after my brother Bob and their son, Bobby III. She was constantly on the hunt for new tidbits for her scrapbooks and family trees. “When she heard I was coming up to visit, she practically gave me a take-home quiz.”
“And she can’t just call up Grandma because . . . ?”
“Sensitive subject. Grandma’s always been a little fuzzy about why they left Portsmouth and didn’t come back. Dad thinks it might be because he was going to show up a little, ah, early, and they didn’t want people doing too much math.” But considering Mrs. Maitland’s little display, I couldn’t help wondering if there might be something more to that story. Like maybe Grandma stole Grandpa out from under her cosmetically straightened nose?
“Well, if you’re going to get into all that, you should look up Julia Parris, too,” Martine said. “She runs the Midnight Reads bookstore, and she’s an expert on local history. If there’s a Blessingsound branch in Portsmouth, she’ll know all about it.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will.”
“One thing, though,” said Martine hesitantly. “Julia Parris and Mrs. Maitland don’t exactly get along . . .”
“Either?”
“Either. So you might want to take anything she tells you with a grain of salt.”
“Listen to you, already the expert on all the local gossip.”
Martine chuckled. “It’s a small town, and you’d be amazed what people will say in front of their waiter. Now, I hate to shoo you out, but there’s less than an hour before we open for dinner . . .”
“I’m going, I’m going.” I took another swallow of my ginger mocktail and grabbed my purse.
“Call when you’re settled at McDermott’s, okay? The restaurant’s closed Monday. We can make it a girls’ day after we get your stuff moved over to my place.”
Martine had one of her minions wrap up the rest of my tacos in a take-out bag, and we hugged one more time. I got myself out of everybody’s way and started across the parking lot, my head full of random thoughts of friends and families and old towns and grudges, and how many things could get lost in the cracks of time. I had the taco bag in one hand and fished around in my purse for my keys to open the Jeep.
“Merow?”
Merow?
I froze. I blinked and I stared.
A cat crouched on the driver’s seat and stared right back at me.
2
“MEROW?”
The cat on my driver’s seat tucked all four of its paws underneath its belly. He (or she) was a solid smoky gray color, with a surprisingly delicate face and bright blue eyes. Somebody had given him (or her) a matching blue collar with a silver bell, but I couldn’t see any tags. I also couldn’t see any sign that she (he?) planned to get out of my car anytime soon.
I looked back at the inn and half expected to see Martine laughing at me. After my comment about getting a cat, this had to be a joke. I mean, the Jeep’s doors were locked, the windows were up and the top was on. How could a cat get inside unless somebody deliberately put her (him?) there?
But our table at the window was empty and the inn door was still closed.
I looked at the cat. The cat looked at me. We both blinked.
“Shoo?” I suggested.
The gray cat yawned, displaying a curling pink tongue and a whole lot of very white teeth.
I folded my arms. “All right. What do you want?”
The cat blinked his (her?) slanting blue eyes at me again. It looked uncomfortably like he/she was waiting for me to say something sensible.
“Okay. We’re gonna do this the hard way.”
I lunged forward as if to make a grab. With a rolling growl of feline contempt, the cat flowed away from my hands. Victory! Or so I thought, until I realized the cat was now pressed against the pavement, under the Jeep, and right beside my front tire.
I swore. The cat hugged asphalt and put his/her ears back.
“Hey. Everything okay out here?” called a man’s voice from behind me.
It was Sean the bartender. He was strolling out from the Pale Ale, wiping his hands on a side towel.
I sighed and sat back on my heels. “I seem to have a cat.”
“Yeah, you sure do.” Sean bent down to peer under the Jeep. “Hey, you know what? That might be Alistair under there. Alistair?” He held out his hand and spoke in that gentle, coaxing tone used by people who were comfortable around animals. “Hello, big guy. You got half the town looking for you, you know that?”
Alistair, if that was the cat’s name, was not impressed. He just pressed his belly closer to the asphalt and glowered at the impertinent human.
“Who’s Alistair?”
�
��Oh, he’s a local legend.” Sean rested his elbows on his thighs. “Alistair, the ghost cat of Portsmouth.”
“Seriously?” I thought about how he’d been inside my locked Jeep just a minute before and felt a small shiver creep across my neck.
“Seriously,” answered Sean. “His owner died, maybe six months ago, and nobody’s been able to lay hands on him since. Whenever anybody gets close, he just”—Sean made a hocus-pocus gesture—“disappears!”
“Well, I’m seeing him now, and he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. How come nobody took him to a shelter or anything when he lost his owner?” I knew, of course, that cats were famous for self-reliance. I also knew this was New England. It was only a matter of time before the weather turned too hot, or too cold, or too wet, for anybody’s comfort.
“I told you, it’s like he disappears.” Sean straightened himself up, and it was a long way up. “But we can try. See if you can keep him here. I’ll go round up a box and some towels.” Sean trotted back toward the inn, leaving me to stare at the cat.
“Okay.” I sighed and rubbed the back of my neck. Alistair gave another little growl and extended his claws like he meant to dig in. How was I supposed to keep him there if he decided to take off? Then I remembered my bag of tacos. I pulled one out, tore it in half, and held it toward the recalcitrant feline.
“Here, kitty.” I inched forward. “Puss, puss, kitty, kitty, kitty?”
Alistair twitched his ears and shrank backward, clearly unimpressed. I reminded myself that this cat had lost home and owner. He’d been out in the cold for months. Of course he was nervous around strangers.
“Come on, Alistair.” I leaned forward, bracing myself with one hand against the fender. “You’re not going to turn down free food, are you? I warn you, Martine won’t like it.”
This time Alistair stretched his neck out to sniff my offering. He sniffed again. He took a tentative lick of taco. This was followed by a much more enthusiastic lick and a nibble. I found myself smiling. I reached out and rubbed him between his ears. As Alistair nibbled and licked at the brisket taco, I noticed the smoke and silver color of his fur, the delicacy of his face and the way it contrasted with his rounded belly and hindquarters. If I’d had to guess, I would have said he weighed in at fifteen pounds of surprisingly sleek feline, maybe more. What breed was he? And how was he keeping himself fed? He didn’t have any of that ragged, desperate air of an abandoned pet.
“So what’s the answer, big guy?” I held out my fingers so he could lick off the last of the taco sauce. “Huh, Alistair? What’s been keeping you out in the cold?”
Alistair lifted his face and gazed at me with those slanting baby blues.
And he vanished.
I am not being metaphorical. He really vanished, as in there one second, gone the next. There was no trace of tail or whisker left behind, just me toppling back onto the asphalt and the remaining half a taco flying away to land splat! on the pavement.
“Ah, shoot,” said Sean, who must have come back out at some point while the cat was giving me a heart attack. He carried an empty cardboard box in one hand and a white bar towel in the other. “Did you see where he . . . hey, are you all right?”
No. No. I really was not all right. My hands were shaking and my mind was doing that running-around-in-circles thing that happens when you don’t want to believe what you’ve just seen. So I did what anybody would do under the circumstances.
I lied.
“Yeah, sure, fine. Just . . . startled.”
I don’t know if Sean believed me or not, but he did put the box down so he could pull me to my feet. I needed his help way more than I cared to admit.
“Oh, well.” He shrugged. “We tried, right? I’ll let Chef know Alistair’s hanging around the parking lot. Maybe we can call Critter Control to bring a humane trap out.” He stopped and put one broad hand on my trembling shoulder. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. Fine,” I said again, and this time I tried to really mean it. “I . . . You . . . you said something about the cat, Alistair . . . being a ghost?”
Sean chuckled. “That’s just something the local kids have started. They say Alistair died with his owner and now he’s some kind of vengeful feline spirit.”
“Vengeful? Why vengeful?” I thought about that delicate face, the plump belly and the way he fastidiously nibbled on his taco. “Vengeful spirit” was not the description I’d have picked, even after he vanished . . .
No. I wasn’t going to think about how Alistair vanished. Because that didn’t happen. It was impossible. Like getting into a locked car.
Sean glanced behind him, and the good humor faded from his expression, as if he was suddenly sorry he’d said anything about Alistair’s former owner, let alone tried to make a joke out of it. I, uncharacteristically, kept my mouth shut and waited.
“Alistair belonged to Dorothy Hawthorne,” Sean said softly. “She was one of those fixtures a town like this gets. You know, the ones who are involved in everything and seem like they’ll just live forever? When she died, there was some talk that she’d, well, maybe been helped out of the world before her time.”
“You mean she might have been murdered?”
“Some people thought so, but you know.” Sean shrugged. “It’s a reality-show world. Nobody believes in the normal anymore.” He sounded almost angry as he said it.
“Did you know her?”
“Everybody knew Miss Hawthorne, and she loved that cat. Her nephew, Frank, put the word out after the funeral that he’d gone missing, so . . .” Sean stopped and reclaimed the box. He tossed the towel into the bottom. “Listen, I’ve got to get back to work or I’ll be the ghost bartender of Portsmouth. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I told him, and this time I was telling the truth—mostly, anyway.
“Okay. See you around maybe?”
There was a hopeful note in his voice. I smiled back in what I hoped was a friendly but noncommittal fashion. “Maybe. It’s a small town.”
“That it is.” Sean smiled back. “And you never know what’s going to happen next.”
3
YOU MIGHT THINK somebody with a Vibe like mine would be open to all sorts of . . . let’s call them “alternative perspectives” when it comes to the nature of reality. That’s not how it works, though. What really happens is you get very good at talking yourself out of having seen or experienced anything the least bit, well, weird.
By the time I turned the corner onto Summer Street I had pretty much managed to convince myself that Alistair the cat had not, in fact, vanished into thin air. He had just done the regular cat thing and whisked away, really fast. I’d blinked. I’d looked around. I’d missed it. That was all.
As for how he got into the Jeep in the first place . . . well, I must have left the window down and not realized it. Or maybe the top wasn’t on quite right, or it had gotten jiggled when I went over a particularly impressive Boston pothole and there was a gap someplace. It didn’t matter. What mattered was there would be some kind of simple explanation, and it’d show up soon. There was nothing more to think about here. Move along, Anna.
• • •
PORTSMOUTH, LIKE A lot of harbor towns, had grown outward in rough rings from its center by the river. The oldest buildings were the ones closest to downtown and the Piscataqua. After that, it was like a tour through the timeline of American architecture. I went from the 1700s and 1800s, with their brick-and-clapboard farmhouses, into the Victorian era, with its cozy cottages or elaborate gingerbreaded homes, to bungalows from the 1920s and ranch houses from the 1950s, with the newest homes and the strip malls curving like a shell between the town and the highways.
Summer Street and McDermott’s Bed & Breakfast turned out to be squarely in the 1800s ring. The B and B was a beautiful Georgian house, doubtlessly the former residence of some prospero
us sailor, merchant or smuggler. A tangle of ivy and rambler roses climbed the orange brick walls. As with a lot of older Portsmouth homes, there was only a narrow strip of lawn between the front of the house and the sidewalk. Here, the yards and gardens were mostly at the back or sides of a home.
“Good morning!” A gate in the privacy fence swung open and a pale woman wearing a denim skirt and loose pink T-shirt waved as she walked down the drive. “You must be Annabelle. Martine phoned and told us you were on your way over. I’m Valerie McDermott. Welcome to Portsmouth.”
We shook hands. Family vacations had left me with the idea that B and Bs were all run by white-haired grandmotherly types. Valerie McDermott, though, looked to be about my age, maybe a little younger. The bandanna tied over her strawberry blond hair matched her pink T-shirt, and her heart-shaped freckled face was as cheerful as her greeting. She also had a spherical bulge under her shirt, which signaled the imminent arrival of yet another McDermott to the Portsmouth area.
“Your room’s all set.” Valerie smiled as I heaved the massive red suitcases I dubbed Thing One and Thing Two out of the Jeep.
“Ummm . . . ,” she said. “Martine didn’t say you needed a room for the whole summer . . .”
I laughed. “Oh, no. I’m only with you for a couple of days. I’ve been living out of my brother’s spare bedroom for the past few months, and it just seemed easier to toss everything in the backseat instead of sorting out a third bag.” Yes, I’ve heard of traveling light. It is one of those things that other people do.
Valerie was doing her best not to look relieved. “Well, let’s go in. Normally I’d help you with those, but”—she gestured toward her belly—“Roger would throw a fit.”
“When are you due?”
“September.” Valerie sighed. “Really, really ready for the debutante here to make her appearance. Aching ankles and . . .” She stopped. “I am not going to start in on pregnant-woman whining while you’re standing out here. Let me show you to your room.”