A Midwinter's Tail

by Sofie Kelly

  Finally, she reached the little pile of food. She grabbed two pieces of kibble in her mouth and backed away several steps. She ate them, watching him all the time. When he did nothing, she came back for the rest of the food, eating quickly, her small furry body tensed, ready to run if she needed to.

  I didn’t even see Marcus reach into the bag again. He slowly extended his hand and there were a few more bits of kibble on it. The cat’s whiskers twitched. Her eyes narrowed. I was certain she was going to run for the shelter of the bushes and the blackberry canes. Instead she took a step toward Marcus. He kept his hand out, holding it steady, and she took another step closer. One more and she was close enough to reach the food. She did the same thing with the first bite that she’d done before; she grabbed it and backed away. Then she crept forward and ate the rest from Marcus’s hand. It was the closest any of us had gotten to the little stray and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

  When the few pieces of cat food had been eaten, I saw Micah hesitate. Then she licked Marcus’s hand. She looked up into his face and he reached out with two fingers to stroke her fur. To my complete surprise she didn’t run; instead she nuzzled his hand.

  “You’re a beautiful cat,” I heard Marcus say. Oh so slowly he reached out his other hand. He had a chunk of kibble between his fingers and he fed it to her as his other hand continued to stroke her fur.

  “Would you like another piece?” he said.

  The cat made a soft murping sound, for all the world like what Owen and Hercules did when they were looking for a treat.

  Slowly and carefully Marcus moved his hand back to his pocket. This time while Micah was eating he picked her up and got to his feet.

  I expected the cat to turn into the same kind of Tasmanian devil—all claws and teeth—that Desmond, the clinic cat, had become when Marcus rescued him out here. Instead Micah licked his fingers again, then looked up at him and meowed.

  He laughed. “Oh, you want more, do you? He reached into his pocket yet again and pulled out another bite. Then he walked over to me.

  My foot had gone to sleep, I discovered when I tried to stand up. I wobbled and managed to catch my balance. The cat narrowed her eyes at me as she ate. She was probably wondering about the crazy dance I was doing.

  “Hello, puss,” I said.

  Micah continued to stare at me, but she made no move to get away from Marcus.

  “How did you do that?” I said to him.

  He gave me a half shrug. “I don’t know.”

  I gestured at the cat cage. “I’m going to get the sardines.” I ran across to the cage, took out the plate of little fish, closed the trapdoor and raced back to Marcus. I held up the plate and the cat ate both fish, eyeing me curiously the entire time.

  “Can you drive?” Marcus asked. “I’m not sure I should put her down.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I retrieved the cage and stowed it in the back of the SUV. Marcus got in the passenger side and managed to get his seat belt fastened. Micah walked her way up his chest and looked over his shoulder. I kept waiting for her to panic, but she didn’t.

  “She likes you,” I said as we started down the driveway.

  He smiled. “I don’t really know why.”

  “I do,” I said, grinning at him.

  Roma was at the clinic when we walked in.

  “Hi,” I said. “I thought you weren’t back until tonight.”

  “Eddie had a team meeting and an extra practice, so I decided to come back early.” She yawned. “I didn’t plan for it to be this early, though.”

  She caught sight of Marcus then. She gestured at him with one hand. “What . . . ?”

  I held up both hands. “She couldn’t resist his charm,” I said.

  Roma smiled. “Good job, Marcus,” she said. “I see your charm worked a lot faster on the cat than it did on Kathleen.”

  “Maybe I should have scratched under her chin and given her a treat,” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.

  Roma laughed. “Bring her into the examining room,” she said. Then she grinned. “I mean the cat.”

  Roma checked Micah out carefully. I kept waiting for the little ginger tabby to panic and claws to start flying, but that didn’t happen.

  When Roma finished her examination, the cat walked to the end of the examining table and looked around. She was even nosier than Owen.

  “Well, she’s malnourished, she’s missing the tip of her tail and something bigger than she is bit the back of her head, probably a couple of weeks ago,” Roma said as she pulled off her blue gloves.

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “Otherwise she seems to be healthy. And she’s definitely not feral.”

  “How do you know?” Marcus asked.

  Micah was sitting down now, washing her face.

  Roma reached for her tablet to make notes on her examination. “She’s been spayed. She was probably a dump.”

  Marcus’s face tightened and I felt a knot of anger in my own stomach. This wasn’t the first time someone had dumped a cat out to fend for itself at Wisteria Hill.

  “So, what happens now?” I asked.

  Roma brushed her hair back off her face. “I’ll get her up to date on all her shots. We’ll make sure she doesn’t have worms or fleas, and then she can, hopefully, find a new home.” She eyed me. “Any chance you’d take her?”

  I looked at the small orange cat carefully washing her face. “I don’t think Owen and Hercules would take to having another cat around,” I said.

  She nodded. “I want to take Desmond out to Wisteria Hill when I move out there permanently. I don’t think he’d handle that and another cat around very well.”

  “Maybe we could talk Maggie into taking her,” I said with a grin.

  Roma smiled back at me. “We could try.”

  I looked over at Marcus, who was deep in conversation with the cat. “Marcus, we should get going,” I said.

  He straightened up. “Are you going to put her in one of those cages?” he asked Roma.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s for her own safety.” She held out her hands several feet apart. “They’re big cages. You’ve seen them.”

  “I don’t think she’ll like it, locked up with all the other cats.”

  “Do you want to take her down to the police station for the day?” Roma asked. She kept a completely straight face.

  “Could she at least stay in your office?” he said. “She’s been wandering around Wisteria Hill alone for months. She’s not going to like being in a cage.”

  I walked over to the window and looked out into the parking lot so I wouldn’t laugh. I did like seeing this side of Marcus.

  He could also be charming—and very persistent—when he put his mind to it and he quickly convinced Roma to keep Micah—in a cage—in her office. While he was talking he’d set his gloves and scarf down on the table and Micah had immediately stretched out on the scarf.

  “She seems to like that,” Roma said. “Okay if we keep it?”

  “I have a scarf at home you can use,” I said to Marcus, turning back around.

  Marcus looked at Micah, who was kneading the soft wool with her paws. “All right,” he said.

  Roma, with his help, got the cat settled in her office.

  “She’s already got a home,” she said softly to me as we watched Marcus put his folded scarf inside the cage for the cat to lie down on.

  “I know,” I said. “Marcus just doesn’t know it yet.”

  20

  I beat Maggie to Eric’s Place for lunch by about five minutes.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said as she shed her coat, hat and scarf and dropped into the chair opposite me. “We had a pile of last-minute Christmas orders at the shop this morning.”

  She put a hand flat on her chest, closed her eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. When she opened her eyes again, Claire was coming from the other side of the restaurant with everything for her tea.

  “Than
k you,” Maggie said with a smile.

  “Have you decided what you want?” Claire asked as she set a pot of hot water on the table.

  I nodded. “I’ll have the Wednesday soup and the Wednesday bread.”

  Claire nodded approvingly. “Good choice.”

  “I’ll have the same,” Maggie said.

  “It should just be a few minutes,” Claire said. She headed back to the kitchen

  Maggie started making her tea. “What did I just order?” she asked.

  “Chicken noodle soup and honey sunflower bread.”

  She smiled. “Oh, good.”

  Once the tea was ready she leaned back in her chair and folded her hands around her cup. “How was your morning?” she asked.

  “Good,” I said. “Remember the little cat out at Wisteria Hill that Roma was worried about?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Marcus caught her.”

  “You’re kidding,” Maggie said, eyes widening. “I thought you were Dr. Dolittle.”

  I shook my head as I took a sip of my coffee. “I guess I’m not the Cat Whisperer after all.” I tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Oh, and Roma got back this morning.”

  Maggie added a tiny dab of honey to her cup and stirred. “If I’d known, I would have asked her to join us.”

  “I did and she couldn’t,” I said. “So, how was your morning aside from the extra orders?”

  Maggie picked up her cup again. “Good, actually. Oren brought over some preliminary drawings. He thinks we should move the cash register over to the other wall and then we could make the demo space a little longer.”

  I tried to picture the inside of the co-op store. “That might work.”

  Maggie ran a hand back through her hair. “Kath, do you think when we finally get the work done in the store that it might be possible to work out something between the library and the co-op?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “I don’t know exactly. Maybe a demonstration of a technique at the shop and then a talk at the library?”

  I nodded. “That has potential,” I said.

  Claire arrived then with our soup and bread. We ate in silence for a couple of minutes.

  “You said Vincent Starr offered to come back,” Maggie said as she buttered a piece of the thick bread.

  My mouth was full, so I just nodded.

  “Maybe we could do something with him,” she said. “Rare books can be worth a lot of money, can’t they?”

  “Depending on the book, yes,” I said.

  She dipped the end of her bread in her soup. “Maybe we could get Starr back at the library to talk about what makes one book more valuable than another, and then he could do some kind of appraisal. You know, like Antiques Roadshow, at the co-op.” She’d dunked her bread two more times while she was talking and most of it was just a soggy lump in her bowl now.

  “We could do that,” I agreed. I set my spoon down.

  Maggie was talking too much and had barely touched her tea. Something was up. “Or you could just tell me what the heck is going on.”

  She looked at me and sighed. “What’s going on is I’m not very good at lying.”

  I nodded. “I noticed. And that’s not a bad thing, by the way.”

  “It’s Brady. I know I said we were just friends, but we’re sort of turning into more than friends.”

  “Okay,” I said carefully.

  She looked at me a bit uncertainly. “You’re not surprised.”

  I reached for a piece of bread from the basket between us. “I might have been just a little bit,” I said. “When I saw the two of you like this”—I held up my thumb and index finger pressed together—“last night, walking down here, not toward River Arts. It looked like more than two people who are just casual friends.”

  She dropped her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really was going over to my studio. Brady sent me a text right after you walked out to get your coat.” She slumped against the back of her chair. “Oh, Kath, I don’t exactly know what happened. He’s not my type.”

  “I don’t think you can say that anymore,” I said with a smile.

  Her cheeks flooded with color.

  “You never really said how the two of you got to be friends.”

  “Brady and I started talking at the reception after the opening night of the New Horizons Theatre Festival in the fall. I guess that’s when we really started getting friendly.”

  She smiled when she said his name. Just the way I used to do with Marcus. In the almost two years I’d known Maggie, I’d never seen her do that.

  “I don’t remember seeing you with Brady at that reception,” I said.

  Maggie laughed. “That’s because you and Marcus had finally realized that I and everyone else was right about the two of you. I could have been dancing with a gorilla in a tutu and you wouldn’t have noticed.”

  I felt my own face get warm and I reached for my mug and took a drink. “Why were you asking me about Vincent Starr? This has something to do with Dayna, doesn’t it?”

  Maggie nodded. “Brady talked to his mother before the fundraiser.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “She told him she came back to town to see him and his brothers.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “You don’t think so.”

  She shook her head and there was a touch of sadness in her green eyes. “I had Brady’s ticket for the party and I stopped by his office to drop it off to him because I was going to meet him there. I wanted to get to the Stratton early and double-check the table arrangement.”

  I nodded without speaking.

  “Brady was out by the reception desk talking to his mother when I got there. She took a pen and a piece of paper out of her bag and wrote down her cell phone number for him.” Maggie took a deep breath and let it out. “She had a ticket for the Vincent Starr lecture in her bag.” Her eyes met mine. “You told me it was sold out more than a week in advance.”

  I felt something tighten in my chest. “It was.”

  “You sent some tickets out by mail,” Maggie said.

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Dayna Chapman didn’t come here to see her sons. She came here because Vincent Starr was here. That’s what Brady thinks.”

  “Do you think she had some kind of rare book?” I asked. I’d reduced half a piece of bread to a pile of crumbs on the plate in front of me without realizing it.

  Maggie shrugged. “Maybe. Brady said she told him that his grandfather had died not long ago. Maybe . . . maybe she ended up with a book that belonged to him and wanted to sell it quietly so her sister wouldn’t find out.”

  “Does Brady know if his grandfather was a collector?” I asked.

  Maggie shook her head. She picked up her teapot and then set it down again, realizing that she hadn’t put any more hot water in it. “There’s one more thing that happened when Dayna was at Brady’s office. He said his mother dropped a piece of paper with an address on it and when he picked it up and asked her about it she grabbed it from him and told him it was none of his business.”

  I caught Claire’s eye across the room and pointed at Maggie’s little hot water pot. The contents were probably cold by now. I waited until she’d brought a new one and topped up my coffee as well before I spoke. “Mags, did Brady see the address?”

  “He did,” she said as she started the tea-making process again. “Tamera Lane. There’s no street with that name anywhere around here or in Minneapolis.” She stopped and looked at me across the table. “Kath, I don’t want to do anything to cause problems with you and Marcus. But you’re good at this. Please, could you ask a few questions? Brady’s a good guy.”

  It felt as though the entire town wanted me to figure out what had happened to Dayna Chapman. I nodded across the table at her. “Okay,” I said.

  21

  I was having dinner with Marcus, so it was easy to stop at Roma’s clinic on the way out to hi
s house to check on both Micah and Smokey again.

  The old tomcat was doing much better. “I think he’s out of the woods,” Roma said. “But keep your fingers crossed.” She smiled at me. “Aren’t you going to be late for your dinner date?”

  “How did you know I have a date?” I asked.

  She gestured to Micah. The tiny ginger tabby cat was asleep in her cage on top of Marcus’s scarf. “Marcus stopped by to check on her on his way home.”

  “He says he doesn’t have time for a cat,” I said.

  Roma laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think she knows that.”

  * * *

  Marcus was tasting something from a pot on the stove when I got to his house.

  “I don’t care what that is,” I said, unwinding my scarf from around my neck. “I haven’t eaten since lunch and I’m hungry.”

  “So if it’s roadkill in cream sauce you’ll eat it,” he said with a smile.

  I smiled back, unzipped my coat and tucked my gloves in one sleeve as I took it off. “If it’s gum rubber boot in sauce I’ll eat it.”

  He gave an elaborate eye roll. “Well, I wish you’d told me that before I made meat loaf.”

  “You made meat loaf?” I said. “I love meat loaf.”

  He smiled. “I know,” he said, “and Hannah says hi.”

  I dropped onto a chair. “Hi back at her. When did you talk to Hannah?”

  He ducked his head over the large pot that smelled a little like nutmeg. “This morning when I called her for her meat loaf recipe.”

  I laughed.

  “She says she’s going to write out some of her recipes and e-mail them to me.”

  “I’m looking forward to that,” I said. I tucked one leg up under me. “How was your day?” I asked. “Have you figured out who killed Dayna Chapman yet?”

  “No.” He looked back over his shoulder at me. “Have you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you know something.”

  “Kind of.”

  “Kind of yes or kind of no?” He got a wire rack out of the cupboard and set it on the counter.

  “Could I wait to answer that until we eat?” I asked.

  He turned his head to look at me again. “Why?”

  I stretched my arms over my head. “Because if we have a fight, then I’m going to have to go home and have a peanut butter sandwich instead of meat loaf and I don’t want to do that.”