by Sofie Kelly
Out in the hallway I looked around. Okay, so what was I going to do? I couldn’t exactly drop the rat in the metal garbage can in the corner.
Holding the shovel out in front of me, I cut through the empty store, opened the street door, and tossed the body of the rat out toward the street. It didn’t do any elegant somersaults this time. It hit the sidewalk with the same wet splat as when it had landed on Maggie’s foot. Except this time the rat rolled over, shook itself and scurried away. I said a word well-mannered librarians didn’t normally use, and then realized that Ruby Blackthorne was standing by the streetlight. The rat had gone whizzing right by her head.
Crap on toast! “Ruby, I’m sorry,” I said, holding the door for her as she came across the sidewalk.
She looked at me, still hanging on to the shovel. “Inventing a new sport?” she asked. “Because I don’t think it’s going to replace discus in the Olympics. And I’m pretty sure you just violated at least a couple of cruelty to animal laws.”
“It was floating in the basement.” I gestured behind me.
“And that was your version of rat CPR?”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking or serious. Then I noticed just a hint of a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. She was growing her usually spiked short hair and it stuck out from the sides of her head in two tiny pigtails, one pink and one turquoise, above her multipierced ears.
“I really thought it was dead,” I said. “It was on its back in the water. It didn’t move.” I went to swipe my hand across my sweatshirt, which is when I realized my thumb was still bleeding.
“Hey, are you okay?” Ruby asked. “It didn’t bite you, did it?”
I shook my head and felt in the pocket of my hoodie for a Kleenex. “No. I did that on the railing.”
Maggie came out through the store then, holding a length of old pipe like a club, scanning the space as though the rat might come walking by. It didn’t seem like a good plan to tell her it was possible it could.
“It’s okay, Mags,” I said. “It’s gone.” That much was true. “I put it outside.” Also true.
She looked around again, and then tucked the piece of pipe between her knees.
I shot Ruby a warning look, hoping she remembered how Maggie felt about small, furry things.
“Is Jaeger still here?” Maggie asked, glancing at the stairs.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I just saw him putting boxes in his car,” Ruby offered. She rolled her eyes at Maggie. “So what was it this time? The we-need-a-corporate-sponsor speech? Or the we-need-to-expand-our-horizons rant?”
“The first one,” Maggie said. “Plus he’s upset because of that leaking window. He said the cabinet where he keeps his tools got wet.”
“That’s funny,” Ruby said, “because that cabinet where he keeps his fancy Swedish power tools is across the room from the windows, by the door.”
Maggie pulled one hand back over her neck and grabbed the pipe again with the other. Then she noticed my thumb. “Did you do that on the railing?” She caught my wrist. “I think that needs stitches.”
“I don’t need stitches,” I said. “It isn’t even bleeding anymore. All I need is a Band-Aid.”
Maggie shook her head and mock-glared at me. “C’mon upstairs. I’ll fix it.”
Ruby and I followed her up the steps. Maggie knew I hated all things medical, especially hospitals. It went back to when I was a kid. Blame it on a weak stomach, a dark examining room, an artificial leg and way too many cheese curls.
“What exactly is this corporate sponsor idea Jaeger has?” I asked Ruby, while Maggie cleaned my cut.
Ruby made a face. “He thinks we should find some big business to subsidize the co-op, kind of like a patron of the arts.” Ruby painted huge abstracts and also taught art. She looked at Maggie. “We still have the co-op meeting tomorrow, don’t we?”
Maggie nodded. “Uh huh. And I have a meeting at city hall this afternoon.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “Maybe Jaeger will forget.”
“If you did have a sponsor, what’s in it for the business?” I asked. “I’m guessing something more than just goodwill.”
“The use of our artwork for commercial purposes, among other things,” Maggie said, fastening a big bandage around my thumb. “I’m not against that, necessarily. But I’m not about to give up the right to choose how my art is used. Jaeger thinks I’m wrong.” She looked at me. “How’s that?”
I wiggled my thumb and opened and closed my fingers a few times. “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”
“He’s an asshat,” Ruby said.
“A what?” I asked.
“Asshat,” she repeated. “You know, someone whose head is so far up his…you know…he’s wearing it for a hat.”
“Sounds uncomfortable,” Maggie said.
“Does Jaeger look familiar to either of you?” Ruby asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Uh uh,” Maggie said. “Why?”
“I can’t shake the feeling I’ve seen him somewhere before, especially since he cut his hair.”
“Maybe a workshop or an exhibit,” I said.
“No, I don’t think that’s it.” Ruby shook her head and all the little hoops in her left ear danced. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I just came to see if you guys wanted to go get something to eat at Eric’s.”
I glanced at my watch.
“Is this a cat morning?” Maggie asked.
“Uh huh.” I was one of several volunteers who helped take care of a feral cat colony out at Wisteria Hill, the old, abandoned Henderson estate just outside town.
“Going by yourself?” She was all innocent sweetness.
“Maybe,” I said. I knew where the conversation was headed.
For months, Maggie had been trying to play matchmaker between Marcus Gordon and me. Marcus was a police detective and we’d gotten off on the wrong foot the previous summer when he thought it was possible that I had killed conductor Gregor Easton, or at the very least been involved in some intimate hanky-panky with the man who was twice my age and a … well … pretentious creep.
But last winter Marcus had rescued me when I was left dazed, wandering through the woods in the bitter cold after an explosion. And we’d gotten closer since then; though not close enough to suit Maggie. She was indirectly responsible for our friend Roma’s relationship with hockey player Eddie Sweeney and it had just made her worse where Marcus and I were concerned. Maggie believed in happily ever after and she had no problem in giving it a nudge, or even a big shove.
“Meeting anyone out there?” she continued.
“Don’t start,” I warned.
“Start what?”
Ruby grinned. She’d heard us do this before.
“Start on Marcus and I getting together. We’re friends. That’s all. He’s not my type. He doesn’t—”
“—even have a library card,” Maggie finished. “Is that the only thing you can find wrong with him?”
Okay, so I had probably used that excuse too much. I thought about Marcus for a moment. He was tall, with dark wavy hair, blue eyes and a gorgeous smile that he didn’t use nearly often enough. He was kind to animals, children and old people.
I caught myself and shook my head. I was supposed to be thinking of what was wrong with the man, not what was right. Maggie was smirking at me like she could read my mind. I stuck out my tongue at her.
“So how about breakfast?” Ruby said.
Maggie nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
“I have to get out to Wisteria Hill,” I said. “But I’ll drive you two over and get a cup of coffee to go.”
Maggie picked up the length of pipe again.
“Are you taking that with you?” I asked.
“Would it look stupid?”
“Well, not exactly stupid,” I said. “More like you’re about to start looting and pillaging.”
“You know, I really do believe every creature has a right to exist. It�
��s just”—she blew out a breath—“I don’t want some of them for roommates.” She set the piece of piping on the floor against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.
Maggie locked the building, and then we piled in the truck and headed for Eric’s Place farther up Old Main Street. Even though I knew the town pretty well now, I still found the whole Main Street versus Old Main Street thing kind of confusing.
“Is it ever going to stop raining?” Ruby asked, looking skyward as we got closer to the café.
“There’s more rain in the forecast,” I said.
“It could be wrong.”
“It could.” I rubbed my left wrist. It had been aching for days and not just from slinging sandbags. I’d broken it the previous summer and now it was pretty good at predicting bad weather. Maybe the fact that it didn’t hurt so much today meant the forecast was wrong.
The restaurant was warm and dry and smelled like coffee instead of wet feet. Eric’s wife, Susan, worked for me at the library and I knew he had a heavy-duty sump pump in the basement.
I crossed to the counter. “Hi Kathleen,” Eric said with a smile. “What can I get you?”
“Just a large coffee to go, thanks,” I said.
He reached for a take-out cup, poured the coffee and added just the right amount of cream and sugar. He noticed Maggie’s overly large bandage on my left thumb as he passed over the cup. “That doesn’t look good,” he said. “How did you do that?”
“She was scooping up dead things with a shovel and throwing them at me,” Maggie said, behind me.
“New hobby?” Eric asked dryly.
“More like side job,” Ruby said with a grin. “Rodent wrangler.”
Eric nodded. “Yeah, the rain’s driving them out of their hiding places.”
Maggie put her hands over her ears and started humming off-key.
“Maggie has a hear no rodents, see no rodents, speak of no rodents policy,” I said.
“We tried that with the twins when they went through their streaker stage,” Eric said.
I handed him the money for my coffee.
“How’d that work?” Ruby asked.
“About as well as you’d expect. They may be four, but they have the tactical skills of Hannibal getting those elephants across the Alps. They always managed to be stark naked at the most embarrassing moment.”
He handed me my change. “Thanks, Eric,” I said.
Maggie dropped her hands. “Have fun with…the cats,” she said. Her lips were twitching as she tried not to smirk at me.
“Nothing’s going to happen out there,” I hissed at her. “Nothing.”
Of course I was wrong.
2
I made it out to Wisteria Hill before Marcus did. I drank the last of my coffee, got out of the truck and stretched, bracing my hands against the left front fender.
I had felt kind of strange about accepting the truck from Old Harry just for saving a few papers. Then a couple of weeks ago his son, Harry Junior, aka Young Harry, had come into the library to tell me they’d found the old man’s daughter. I think I’d been almost as happy as he was.
I heard Marcus before I saw his SUV. The runoff from all the rain had left the driveway looking more like two trenches in the gravel and mud, and he eased his way slowly around the last curve. I patted the side of the old, brown Ford, grateful for its big, thick-treaded tires and good springs.
Marcus had brought two jugs of clean water and I had the food for the cats. “Hi,” he said with a smile as he got out of the car. “Can I really see a tiny bit of blue sky or is that just an optical illusion?”
I smiled back at him. “I’m not sure about the blue sky, but my wrist feels pretty good so it’s a possibility. I should tell you, though, the forecast I saw this morning was for more rain.”
“I have more faith in your wrist’s forecasting ability than I do in any weather report,” he said. We started up the path to the old carriage house where Wisteria Hill’s feral cat colony slept and ate. “Have you been downtown this morning?” he asked.
I nodded. “There’s still a lot of water everywhere. We did get everything moved up out of the store into the tai chi studio, but there’s at least four feet of water in the co-op basement, and I sort of threw a rat at Maggie.”
“You were aiming at somebody else?” he asked, completely straight-faced.
“No,” I said. “It was floating in the basement. I thought it was dead.”
Marcus stopped and looked over his shoulder at me. “You thought it was dead? So you picked up a live rat and threw it at Maggie?”
“No…well…sort of.” I could feel my face getting red. “It was more like I dropped it on her.”
He was looking at me with what I thought of as his policeman look, basically no expression at all, barely even a blink. Then a lock of his dark, wavy hair fell into his eyes and broke his concentration.
“There was more to it than that.”
He turned and started up the path again. “I’m listening.”
I explained about scooping up the rat with the snow shovel, how it accidentally landed on Maggie’s foot and then came to life when I flung it out onto the sidewalk. I left out the part about it whizzing by Ruby’s head.
Marcus stopped in front of the side door to the old building. “That was littering,” he said, pulling the wooden door open. The wood had swollen with all the rain and it would come open only about halfway.
“I wasn’t going to leave it on the sidewalk,” I said, starting to feel defensive. “I just wanted to get the thing out of the building. If it hadn’t walked away, I would have done…something.”
Then he laughed. “It’s okay, Kathleen. I’m kidding,” he said, reaching out to touch my shoulder.
How did I miss that? Maybe because I was tired. Maybe because he made me crazy.
I pictured a red balloon coming out of the top of my head—an acting exercise my mother liked to use. Then I imagined it getting bigger and bigger, inflating with all my frustration and exhaustion. Marcus squeezed through the doorway and I followed him, sliding a hand over the top of my head and sending that imaginary balloon up into the cloudy, gray sky. It was better than whacking him with a bag of cat food.
We set out the food and water and retreated back to the door again. The cats made their way out to eat, one by one, led by Lucy, the little calico cat who was the matriarch of the group. Both Marcus and I looked them over for any signs of illness or injury.
“They all look okay,” Marcus said quietly by my ear. He was close behind me, warm and smelling like soap and coffee.
I tipped my head back, studying the weathered boards over my head. “I don’t see any leaks anywhere in here,” I said, “except for that one in the corner we already knew about.” I pointed to the front left corner of the old building where the boards were watermarked.
“I’ll take a look outside when we’re done,” he said. “If there’s no more rain, we should be okay.”
Big if.
When the cats had finished eating and moved away, we gathered the dishes and cleaned up the feeding station. Marcus refilled the water bowls and then took a look at the leak in the corner. There was no water coming in now and the wet areas on the floor and wall were actually starting to dry out.
Once we were outside he handed me the empty jugs. “I just want to walk around and see how the roof looks from the outside,” he said. “Wait for me?”
“Sure,” I said. He started around the back of the carriage house and I went to the truck and stowed everything on the floor on the passenger side.
I could hear the sound of rushing water. There was a stream back behind the carriage house, skirting a rise where the trees began. With all this rain it had to be swollen with water. If it overflowed, it could flood the carriage house, I realized.
I looked around for Marcus, but he still must have been on the other side of the building. I locked the truck again and started across the grass toward the trees. The ground was so soaked with w
ater I left a small puddle with each step I took and I was glad I’d worn my rubber boots.
Climbing up the bank my feet slid, trying to get a grip on the wet ground. The water sounded even louder at the top of the bank. I eased my way through the dripping trees, trying not to skid on the leaves and mud under my boots.
The stream cut through a gully on the far side of the woods. The water was several feet higher than usual, maybe halfway up the side of the gully, splashing up onto the bank on either side. It looked cold and angry. The carriage house wasn’t in any danger for now. But if we got more rain…
I headed back, sliding from one tree to the next. The mix of leaves, pine needles and mud underfoot was as slick as ice and I wasn’t very good on ice. At the base of an old oak tree, near the edge of the embankment, I caught sight of a bit of purple, out of place in the old leaves and needles. I worked my way over, hooked one arm around the tree trunk and bent down to pick the thing up.
It looked like a tiny purple Afro wig, maybe an inch across, with a metal centerpiece. I exhaled in frustration. It wasn’t the first time I’d found someone’s trash thrown out here.
I could hear Marcus calling me. I stuffed the purple puff in the front pocket of my sweatshirt and took a step closer to the edge of the terraced hill. He was by the back of the carriage house.
I waved an arm. “I’m here,” I yelled. At the same moment I felt something shift under my feet. It was as though a giant hand had grabbed the ground and was trying to pull it out from beneath me.
I put out a hand and then the entire slope dropped out from underneath me. One moment I was on the slick, grass-covered hill and the next there was nothing. I reached out, but all I caught was handfuls of air.
The momentum threw me forward. I went down, down, down, thrown forward and sideways at the same time so I couldn’t get a sense of which way was up. There was a shower of earth and rocks around me and I folded my arms over my head on instinct.
My left foot twisted underneath me and caught on something—a tree root maybe—and for a second it felt as though my whole leg would come out of its socket. Then whatever part of the ground that had grabbed me let go. I pitched forward, or maybe it was backward, I don’t know, ending up finally against solid ground, on my right side in the wet earth, under the sheared side of the embankment.