A Midwinter's Tail

by Sofie Kelly

  “Kath, no,” she said quietly.

  Roma turned around again and looked down at us. “What is it?” she said.

  “You think that Dayna Chapman’s death wasn’t an accident,” Maggie continued, as if Roma hadn’t spoken.

  “What?” Roma said.

  “Why?” Maggie asked.

  “I could be wrong,” I said, looking from one to the other. “I probably am wrong.”

  Maggie made a face. “Sure, because you’re always wrong about this kind of thing.”

  “The police are still investigating and so is the medical examiner’s office.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill the woman?” Roma asked. “She hasn’t been here in more than twenty years.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, leaning over to put more paint on my roller. “And maybe no one did. It just seems like an awfully big coincidence that Dayna would show up and then eat the one thing that could kill her. And Olivia has been so insistent that there were no nuts of any kind in the chocolates she made. At least none that she put there.”

  “She could just be trying to cover herself,” Maggie said.

  “Why?” I said. “If she had put nuts of any kind in the chocolates she made for the fundraiser, why lie about it? She hadn’t made any promise that they would be nut free. And then she picked up that other chocolate from Dana’s box and ate it and had a reaction herself. Not very smart if she knew there were nuts in it. She could have died, too.”

  Maggie shook her head

  “Mags, it doesn’t mean I’m right,” I said. I turned back to the wall with my paint roller.

  Roma had come down the ladder and was moving it to the right. She didn’t look at me and I realized she hadn’t said a word. My stomach gave a little twist.

  “Roma, something’s wrong,” I said. “What is it?”

  She turned to look at me then, leaning against the side of the ladder. “It’s just, I was running a little late Thursday night. I stopped to check on that dog I told you about. So I was probably one of the last people to arrive at the Stratton.” She let out a breath. “When I came in I saw Dayna and . . . Burtis, just off to the side of the stage. They were . . . talking.”

  “Talking or arguing?” Maggie asked.

  Roma hesitated. “Arguing.”

  I saw Maggie swallow. She cared a lot more about Brady Chapman than she was admitting, probably even to herself.

  “But I saw them later,” Roma said, “just before the chocolates were handed out, and everything seemed fine between them then.”

  I stopped painting for a moment and looked from Roma to Maggie. “Look,” I said. “I know the kind of reputation Burtis has around town. I know that not everything he does is on the up-and-up, but he wouldn’t kill anyone, especially not the mother of his children. Seriously, would Lita be going out with him if there was any possibility Burtis was that kind of person?”

  “Lita?” Roma said.

  “And Burtis?” Maggie finished.

  So much for me not spreading Burtis’s business all over town. Although I’d had a feeling after they’d shown up at the fundraiser together that it was pretty obvious they were a couple, it was apparently not as clear to Roma or Maggie.

  “Lita and Burtis,” Roma said. “How long has that been going on?”

  “A while,” I said, working my way across the stretch of wall she’d just moved the ladder away from.

  “How did you know?” Maggie asked, hanging her head almost upside down once again as she worked her way along the bottom of the window.

  I put more paint on my roller and turned back to the wall. “I saw them together at the library, a while ago.”

  “Were they holding hands over by the DVDs?” Maggie asked. “I know Lita is a Clint Eastwood fan.”

  “No, they weren’t,” I said. “Although I did catch Everett giving Rebecca a kiss over by the magazines earlier this week.”

  I remembered how the two of them had smiled at each other a bit like two unrepentant teenagers when I walked around the shelves and surprised them. Neither one of them had seemed embarrassed at being caught in a public display of affection.

  “That’s what I want,” Maggie said.

  “You want someone to kiss you in the library?” Roma asked.

  I was glad the conversation had shifted away from Burtis and his ex-wife.

  “No,” Maggie said. “I want to be crazy about someone the way Rebecca and Everett are about each other when I’m their age. Or right now, for that matter.” She glanced over at me. “Your parents are that way, aren’t they?”

  “My parents are crazy, period,” I said. “And yes, they’re still crazy about each other.”

  We spent the next hour painting and talking about great love affairs and thankfully nothing more was said about Burtis or Dayna Chapman. I tried not to think about what Roma had said, that she’d seen the two of them arguing. I’d meant what I’d said. Burtis was many things, but he never would have deliberately hurt his ex-wife. And he wouldn’t have asked me to look into her death if he’d had anything to do with it. Would he?

  With three of us working, it didn’t take long to get the walls finished. Then we sat around the kitchen table and Roma showed us the rough sketches she and Oren had made for the work she wanted to do outside in the spring.

  The sun was low in the sky when I looked at my watch. “I should get going,” I said. “Who knows what Owen and Hercules have been doing?”

  Roma hugged us both. “Thank you,” she said. “It would have taken me the next two weeks to get this all done if I’d had to do it by myself.”

  “Anytime,” I said.

  Maggie nodded her agreement. “When you decide what you want to do upstairs, we’ll come back.”

  “Let me know about Smokey,” I said as I pulled on my boots at the back door.

  “I will,” Roma promised.

  She waved as we started down the long driveway.

  I headed for Maggie’s apartment. “I like Brady,” I said as we drove down the hill.

  “I hope you’re wrong,” she said.

  I knew she didn’t mean about liking Brady.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Could you imagine you and Marcus and Brady and me on a double date?” she said after another silence.

  Marcus, the straight-arrow police detective, and Brady Chapman, defense attorney and son of the alleged town bootlegger, breaking bread together?

  “That could be . . . interesting,” I said.

  She laughed. “Uh-huh.”

  The idea kept us laughing the rest of the way to her apartment.

  “Thanks for the drive, Kath,” Maggie said. “Give my love to my furry boyfriend.”

  “I will,” I said.

  My cell phone rang just as I pulled into my own driveway. I put the truck in park and looked at the screen. It was Marcus.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m running a little late, but supper is in the slow cooker.”

  “I’m sorry, Kathleen,” he said. “I’m not going to get there.”

  I knew what he was going to say before the words came out.

  “It looks like Dayna Chapman was murdered.”

  9

  Marcus told me he’d stop by later just to say good night if he could. Then we ended the call and I tucked my phone back in my pocket. At least I had Owen and Hercules for dinner companions.

  Except neither cat was anywhere to be seen. They weren’t in the kitchen. They weren’t in the living room. I went upstairs to change my paint-spattered clothes, and there weren’t any cats nosing around in the closet or sitting in the big chair by the window, either.

  The bulb had burned out in the ceiling light at the top of the stairs. As I padded down the steps in my sock feet in the dark, I made a mental note to ask Marcus to put in a new bulb for me.

  Three-quarters of the way down the stairs, I saw movement just inside the living room doorway next to the bookcases. There was enough illumination from the streetlight outside that
I could catch a glimpse of gray fur.

  Owen was so focused on what he was doing that he didn’t notice me come behind him until I flicked on the light. He started and looked up at me, guilt written all over his gray tabby face.

  He was standing on his back legs, one paw on the first shelf up from the bottom of the bookcase. I’d seen him drop whatever he’d been carrying in his mouth on the shelf and put one paw on it. Now he tried to casually rest his other front paw next to the first one. If he’d been able to lean against the side of the bookcase and whistle, I think he would have done that, too.

  I looked down at him. “Hello,” I said.

  “Murr,” he said softly, his golden eyes not quite meeting mine.

  “What’s that?” I asked, nodding my head at whatever he was trying to hide with his front paws.

  “Merow?” he said, blinking at me as though what I’d said made no sense at all to him.

  I wasn’t fooled. “Nice try,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “What’s under your paws?”

  He lifted a paw, giving me his confused-kitty expression. At the same time he seemed to be surreptitiously trying to bat whatever he was hiding toward the back of the shelf. Sometimes I thought that if Owen hadn’t been a cat he could have been some kind of criminal mastermind—Lex Luthor or the Joker, maybe.

  “Owen!” I said, sharply.

  To his credit he knew when he was caught. He dropped down onto all fours and dejectedly hung his head. I leaned over to see what he had been trying to hide from me. Sometimes he liked to swipe things from Rebecca’s recycling bin, although I was fairly sure there was too much snow on the ground for him to do that now.

  A tiny purple mouse lay on its side on the dark wooden shelf.

  “What are you doing with that?” I asked sternly, narrowing my eyes and glaring at him.

  He kept his head down, and his shoulders seemed to sink just a little more.

  The little purple mouse belonged to Hercules. It had been a gift from Rebecca, who loved to spoil the boys no matter what I said to her. She kept Owen in yellow catnip chickens, but Hercules was pretty much indifferent to catnip. He wasn’t the only cat who felt that way, I’d learned. Rebecca had found the little mouse at the Grainery where she bought Owen’s chickens and other cat treats. Once it was wound up, all you had to do was press down on it and the mouse would run in a circle on the floor, randomly changing direction and occasionally doing a loop or a figure eight.

  Roma thought the toy was a wonderful idea, the feline equivalent of a person doing the New York Times crossword puzzle or a Sudoku puzzle to keep their mind sharp.

  I crouched down on the floor beside Owen. “This is not yours,” I said. “You did a very, very bad thing.”

  He muttered almost under his breath, like a child making excuses for his behavior.

  “Were you trying to hide this from your brother?” I asked.

  He turned his head sideways a little and one half-lidded eye looked at me.

  I sighed in exasperation. It had become pretty clear to me from the beginning that Owen and his brother weren’t ordinary cats, even without taking into account their extraordinary abilities. Among other things they seemed to have a nose for, well, crime solving, as preposterous as that seemed. And Owen, at least, seemed to have a bit of a larcenous streak.

  I tried to imagine how Marcus would react if I told him that the cats seemed to have helped me every time I’d been connected with one of his cases. Oh no, that wouldn’t make me seem crazy.

  The problem in front of me at the moment, thankfully, had to do with a lesser crime.

  “Owen, you must have five or six funky chickens—or parts from them—hidden in this house,” I said. “This belongs to Hercules. You can’t have it.”

  I said each word slowly and clearly and shook the purple mouse for emphasis. His eyes followed my hand.

  Maybe I was crazy. Maybe Owen didn’t understand one word I said. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I could have been speaking Italian or pig Latin. His eyes moved to my face and he gave me his best innocent/repentant look. I thought of it as his “I didn’t do it and I’ll never do it again” expression.

  “How the heck am I supposed to discipline you?” I asked, sinking down onto my knees. Owen put a paw on my leg. I couldn’t exactly stick him in the corner or tell him he couldn’t go out in the yard. That wouldn’t work with a normal cat, let alone one who could disappear whenever he felt like it. I knew some animal training experts advocated using a spray from a bottle of water to discourage bad behavior. Maybe I was treating Owen and Hercules too much like people, because my first thought when I’d read that advice was that I wouldn’t shoot water from a spray bottle at Susan or Abigail at the library, so why would I do it to Owen or Herc?

  “Don’t do this again,” I said, shaking a finger at him. I was very glad there was no one around to hear what I was saying. “If you do, those sardines in the refrigerator will magically disappear faster than you do.”

  Owen’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, and he turned and looked toward the kitchen. I used to threaten to give Owen’s kitty treats to the Taylors’ German shepherd, Boris, but I’d made that threat one time too many without following through, and it had lost its effectiveness.

  I reached over and stroked the top of Owen’s head. “I love you,” I said, “but sometimes you make me crazy.”

  “Merow,” he said, wrinkling his nose at me. For all I knew, that was his way of saying, “You make me crazy sometimes, too.”

  I got to my feet, putting the little purple mouse in my pocket. “Are you hungry?” I asked as we went into the kitchen.

  “Murp.”

  Cat for “I could eat.”

  Owen looked at the back door and meowed inquiringly. I’d told him Marcus was joining us for supper. Had he remembered?

  “Marcus isn’t coming,” I said. I checked the slow cooker. It had just switched over from “cook” to “keep warm.”

  I turned back to Owen, who was sitting by the table looking at me. “He has a case,” I said. I got a bowl down from the cupboard. It was all I needed. I’d set the table before I left. “Dayna Chapman’s death wasn’t an accident. It looks like someone might have killed her on purpose.”

  I heard a meow from the other side of the room. Hercules was poking his black-and-white head around the basement door.

  “Hello,” I said. “One, supper is almost ready. Two, Marcus isn’t coming. Three, it looks like Dayna Chapman’s death wasn’t an accident. And four”—I pulled the purple mouse out of my pocket and set it on the floor, sending Owen a warning look that I hoped was sufficiently intimidating enough that he wouldn’t so much as twitch a whisker in the direction of the toy—“this is yours.”

  Herc nudged the basement door open a little more and started across the kitchen floor toward Owen and me.

  “You know, Boris closes the door for Harrison,” I said, taking the lid off the slow cooker. I liked Harry’s big German shepherd, and I’d been impressed the first time I saw him close the back kitchen door in Harry Senior’s small house.

  Hercules made a face as though he’d just caught the scent of something bad, even though the aroma from the stew was filling the kitchen. Both he and Owen were smart enough to close any door in the house—although for Hercules it was easier to walk directly through a door—but being cats, they just didn’t.

  Herc picked up his mouse and set it next to his food dish. Then he came back over, sat down beside his brother and looked expectantly at me.

  “Okay, you can both have a little chicken,” I said. “But just a little.”

  The little black tuxedo cat licked his lips.

  “Oh, and I almost forgot, Maggie sends her love,” I said to Owen.

  I swear he smiled.

  I put a little chicken in each of their dishes and then filled a bowl with stew for myself. Since my only dinner companions were furry and were eating without using forks, I had no problem propping my feet on the chair opposite me a
nd leaning an elbow on the table.

  I wished Marcus was sitting in the chair opposite me. Things had been so good for the past three months. But we had a history of his cases coming between us. I didn’t want that to happen with Dayna Chapman’s death.

  Hercules had finished his chicken. He came over, sat next to my chair and began to wash his face.

  “Everyone is going to think it was Burtis,” I said thoughtfully.

  He paused for a moment, seemingly considering the idea. Then he resumed washing his face.

  “I know his reputation,” I said.

  Burtis was the town bootlegger and as a younger man he’d worked for Idris Blackthorne, Ruby’s grandfather, a hard and ruthless man who ran pretty much every illegal enterprise in a hundred-mile radius around Mayville Heights.

  “Just because he could squash someone like a bug doesn’t mean that he would,” I said, as much to myself as the cats.

  Owen lifted his head and looked around when I said the word “bug.”

  I exchanged a glance with Hercules.

  “There are no bugs in here, Owen,” I said. He looked over at me. “No bugs,” I repeated. “It’s just an expression.”

  He dropped his head over his food again.

  Burtis had to have known that he’d be the main suspect if Dayna’s death wasn’t an accident. Maybe that was why he’d been encouraging me to get involved. I thought about what he’d said about the times I’d gotten mixed up in Marcus’s cases. “He isn’t going to want you to stop being who you are.”

  Owen had joined his brother and was carefully washing his face, too.

  “Okay, so we’re eliminating Burtis. Who else would want to kill Dayna Chapman? She hadn’t even been in town for twenty-four hours.”

  They didn’t have any more idea than I did. Aside from what I’d learned from Burtis, I really knew nothing about his ex-wife.

  “Maybe it’s time we learned a little more about the former Mrs. Chapman,” I said to the boys.

  “Merow,” Owen said.

  Okay, so he was in.

  I looked at Hercules. “What do you think?” I asked. He was washing the white fur on his chest. He raised his head and looked in the direction of the hooks by the back door where I hung my jacket and briefcase.