Collared For Murder

by Annie Knox

  “Wow. I didn’t know it was that bad, Pris.”

  “That was sort of the point. We had to try to keep up the impression that we were fine financially to prevent our creditors from swooping in like a bunch of vultures.”

  I didn’t bother to tell her that everyone in town knew they were struggling.

  “The ruling from the DNR was right there, so close we could taste it, but we couldn’t hold out another day. Phillip offered to buy out Hal’s shares in the project for pennies on the dollar. It would have stopped us from hemorrhaging cash and it would have paid the month’s mortgage, but it would have cut Hal off from any of the profits from the project.”

  “Denford really was a snake.”

  “Snake doesn’t begin to cover it. He’d structured the original deal with Hal to leave open this possibility, and Hal had been so eager for the cash he hadn’t thought about all the consequences. He thought that we were all friends, the Denfords and the Olsons. They had us over to their house for dinner. We drove three hours just to get there. We toasted with champagne. Hal never considered that for Phillip the whole deal was straight business.”

  “But how did Denford dying help?”

  “Denford never started the purchase process. He’d drafted papers, shown them to Hal, but he hadn’t taken any steps to execute the agreement. When he died, everything froze. His personal assets will be held until his estate goes through probate, and he played everything so close to the vest that he never informed his business manager of the deal. Hal was able to point to Phillip’s death to buy us a little time with our creditors, and the DNR announced its decision to let us continue construction yesterday. Basically, we’re saved.”

  I wondered if I was saved, too. Had Phillip already signed contracts to produce the knockoffs of my clothes? He’d said the cat pj’s he brought in were just prototypes. Maybe his death would put an end to his plan to destroy my business.

  “Anyway, the night before Phillip was killed, we had a fight about his plans to force Hal out. Crazy me, I thought I could talk him into being a human being. The whole situation gave me reason to kill Phillip and reason to steal the jewels from the collar ornament.”

  I shook my head. “I thought Sean told you not to talk to the police. Did Marsha tell them about your deal?”

  “Absolutely not,” Pris said with a vehement shake of her head. She pulled the rubber gloves on and squared off against Jinx, who still sat content in the sink. “Like I said, Marsha’s a perfectly lovely woman. It was my oaf of a husband. Hal keeps secrets all the time, but this time, when it was my behind on the line, he sang like a freakin’ lark. So helpful.”

  Pris had confided in me long ago that her marriage with Hal was a sham. They’d long since lost interest in each other, and half the town knew that Hal had had affairs with anyone he could get his hands on—from members of the Methodist Ladies’ Auxiliary to strippers from a trucker joint a few counties over. The problem was a prenuptial agreement. Pris walked away with very little if she started divorce proceedings. She had two outs. First, if Hal filed the papers, it would break the agreement, but Hal was happily holding on to his cake while eating it, too; he had no incentive to file for divorce and risk his fortune. The second out was if Pris had proof of Hal’s infidelity. His skirt chasing was one of the most poorly kept secrets in Merryville, but it remained undocumented.

  I wondered if there was some clause in that agreement about what would happen if Pris went to prison. Either way, Hal had no real reason to be loyal to his wife and try to protect her good name, especially if protecting her meant her problem cast shade on his own ambitions.

  “But there’s no way you would have known that killing Phillip would resolve your business problems.”

  She laughed. “If you could just convince your boyfriend of that fact, I’d be in good shape. Now, let me get down to work and wash this cat.”

  At that point, the water came on and the claws came out. I just stood back and watched the fun. I watched as Pris expertly held Jinx in place, foreclosing the opportunity to leap out of the tub or even to gain some leverage against the tub’s sides. Jinx swatted at Pris, but the gloves Pris wore rendered Jinx’s claws useless.

  When Pris turned on the sprayer to get Jinx’s head wet, my cat turned a baleful eye on me.

  J’accuse.

  I had to look away from the combination of anger and fear in Jinx’s eyes. We had a pact, she and I. I could dress her up without being clawed to ribbons so long as we didn’t use the tub. I felt a pang of remorse that I was putting poor Jinx through this just to enter her in the pageant. After all, the show cats had been raised being handled and bathed, so they didn’t mind it, but Jinx was another story.

  She let out a full-throated cry, and I came this close to snatching her out of her bath right then and there. But unforgiving, brittle, cold Pris Olson did the most amazing thing. She cooed softly to my cat and applied pressure to some magic place on the back of her neck so she calmed down.

  Jinx settled in for the rest of the bath, not putting up any fuss at all—even when Pris set her in the dryer box—but she continued to give me the hairy eyeball. No doubt about it. Sometime, someplace where I least expected it, Jinx would get me back for this indignity. We’d had an understanding, and I’d broken it . . . and I was going to pay.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  I had hemmed and hawed about entering Jinx in the household-pet division of the cat show, but in the end I was glad I did it.

  After Pris had finished shampooing and fluffing and combing my beautiful girl, I combed through Jinxie’s fur some fuller’s earth I’d borrowed from Ruth before she passed. The fuller’s earth did what Ducky White had done for Ruth’s Ranger by absorbing extra oil in Jinx’s coat, but it didn’t have the same whitening properties. By the time I was done, my Jinx looked nearly twice her usual gigantic size.

  I brought her—stripped naked—from her large kennel on the Trendy Tails table to the judging ring in her normal-sized cat carrier and then stood back as the clerk for the ring placed her in one of the wire holding pens. The process of unloading the cats into their pens for judging took longer than I expected. Apparently, it was critical to get the right cat in the right pen. Even though household pets could only compete if they were spayed or neutered, there was still a policy of keeping the boys separated by at least one pen so they didn’t get into turf wars with one another.

  Finally, I stood back and watched the judging.

  At first I was terrified that Jinx would do something to get us both thrown out, but the very first cat up for judging, a lithe black cat that looked like she had some Siamese in her, piddled on the judging table. The judge, an older woman who wore her glasses on a chain around her neck, chuckled good-naturedly and continued to hold the cat while the clerk scurried in to clean up the mess. I was pretty sure that Jinx wasn’t going to do anything more inappropriate than that.

  And she didn’t. In fact, my girl was a perfect little lady.

  “Who’s this big girl?” the judge asked when the clerk brought her to the table.

  “That’s Jinx,” I called back from the circle of onlookers.

  “Well, hello, Jinx. Aren’t you a fine cat? Looks like Jinx has a good amount of Norwegian forest cat in her, though she might have a little Maine coon, too. Certainly from the big breeds, that’s for sure. Nice color.” The judge ran her hands down Jinx’s side. “Mmm-hmm. Good body type, but Mama out there might want to go a little easier on the kibble. Miss Jinx is carrying a few extra pounds.”

  While her words should perhaps have embarrassed me, I found myself laughing along with the rest of the small crowd.

  When she picked Jinx up to display her Uzi-style to the crowd, I held my breath. If Jinx was going to pitch a fit, this was when she’d do it. But my good girl just hung limp in the judge’s hands.

  She got a big round of app
lause, and I swear I saw a little sparkle in her eye when the judge set her down and ruffled her ears playfully.

  “You did not see a sparkle in her eye,” Rena said when we got back to the table. “Now you’re going to be like one of those pageant moms who says their three-month-old loves to compete.”

  “I am not.”

  “You absolutely are. You’re saying Jinx actually enjoyed being shown off in front of all those people.”

  “Fine. Maybe she didn’t enjoy it, but she didn’t hate it.”

  I was in the process of pulling Jinx’s apparel du jour—a hot-pink hoodie with a faux-fur-trimmed hood—back onto her body, when T. J. Leuzinger wandered up to the table.

  “I hear you took second place in household.”

  I felt like my kid had just won the spelling bee. “Yes. Jinx here did the hard part.”

  “Right,” Rena said. “The hard part of being beautiful.”

  T.J. grinned and patted her own teased-out hair. “Being beautiful isn’t exactly a walk in the park.”

  Rena and I laughed. T.J. was a whole lot of personality, but she was growing on me.

  “Have you given any more thought to what Ruth might have meant the other day about it being in the blood?” I asked.

  “It haunts me. It truly does. But I just don’t know what she was talking about.”

  “We were thinking that she might have meant something to do with breeding.”

  “Ah.” T.J. nodded sagely. “The whole Pamela Rawlins fiasco. Could be. But why would she have suddenly wanted to tell you about that? You already knew about the breeding scandal. What could Ruth have seen on her trip up to her room that made her so urgent to talk to you?”

  At least the connection to Pamela came naturally to T.J. I had thought maybe I was forcing a round peg into a square hole, but when T.J. thought “breeding,” she thought of Pamela and Tonga, too.

  I lifted a shoulder in response to T.J.’s question, and suddenly my limp cat became as stiff as a board in my hands, using her back feet to launch off my body and out into the mayhem of the show.

  T.J. and Rena both looked at me with eyes as big and as round as moonflowers. I had just committed the cardinal sin of cat shows: I’d lost control of my animal.

  * * *

  I dashed into the fray, searching for Jinx, hoping to find her before she got stepped on or got into a scuffle with another cat. I’d never known her to put up a fuss around other animals, even at the parties we’d held at Trendy Tails, but she’d never been loose in such a raucous environment. I had no idea how she would react.

  “Jinx,” I hissed, as though she might hear me above the din of nearly five hundred people all talking simultaneously.

  T.J., who was helping me, crossed from one row to the next ahead of me, and so I skipped a row and began sweeping down a new line of tables. I was walking bent at the waist and didn’t see trouble coming until I barreled into it.

  Pamela Rawlins.

  As always, she stood straight as a birch, her pale body encased in somber black clothes. She wore her hair up, exposing the long expanse of her neck, and were it not for the carnelian lipstick she wore and the gold locket around her neck, she could have passed for a corpse.

  “Ms. McHale? What on earth are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I replied too quickly. Over Pamela’s shoulder, I caught sight of T.J., and our gazes latched for a second. As soon as she saw whom I was talking to, she dashed away.

  “You’ll forgive me if I have a hard time swallowing that. I’ve heard from my sources that you’ve been carrying on your own private investigation of our unfortunate events. I’d ask you to leave those matters to the police.”

  I stood straight and met her eyes. “Why?” I asked boldly. My promise to Sean had vanished like morning fog. “Are you worried I might find something?”

  “Of all the rude . . . Of course not. Why would I have anything to hide?”

  “Well, Phillip did ruin your breeding business by banning Tonga from shows.”

  “That’s true,” Pamela conceded, “but that turns out to have been a blessing in disguise. When the breeding contracts started drying up, I began looking for another way to supplement my alimony income. I’d always been a quilter, but lately I’ve been doing it in earnest. Selling my goods on Peter Denford’s site, theartisanway.com. I’ve been making money like I never dreamed was possible.”

  I felt something brush my leg and resisted the urge to look down. If it was Jinx, I could hardly scoop her up right in front of Pamela Rawlins.

  “So you’re telling me that you suddenly have no interest in showing cats?”

  “Of course not. I still have Tonga, and I’ll probably buy another show cat once my quilting business stabilizes, but right now I’m content with what I’ve done.”

  It didn’t seem possible that the woman who had fought so hard to coordinate the M-CFO silver anniversary could be so cavalier about leaving the world of cat shows. “What about planning the shows?” I asked. “You’ve been so adamant about being in charge of this, yet Phillip’s ill will meant you weren’t going to be able to plan next year’s show.”

  She laughed. “If my goal was to keep my finger in the show, killing Phillip was really the wrong way to go about it. It’s true Phillip and I weren’t on the best of terms, and he was planning on cutting me from the planning committee in the future, but at least he had some soft spot for me.”

  To the extent you can blackmail someone into a soft spot, I thought.

  “With Phillip dead, Marsha is in charge. And, if you haven’t noticed, the two of us don’t really get along. If I were interested, Marsha would give me the boot for certain. But I’m not. One of the other wonderful changes that has come my way because of my shift in focus to quilting is that I’ve met a wonderful man. He lives in Dallas, and I’m going to be moving down this winter to be with him. When I rejoin the cat-show circuit, and I do anticipate doing so someday, I won’t be part of the Midwest region. My interest in the M-CFO ends with this show.”

  I decided I had little to lose. Pamela seemed to be in a talkative mood, so I pushed my luck. Pamela might have a new love interest, but from the way Mari had acted around Jack, she was very, very single. I wanted to learn what I could about the romantic entanglements in this group, and now that she didn’t have any skin in the game, I thought maybe I’d get Pamela to talk about her relationship with Phillip.

  “The animosity between you and Marsha Denford is hard to miss. Is that because of your affair with Phillip Denford?”

  “What?” She threw back her head and howled. “Oh dear. Ms. McHale. How little you know.” She let her laughter run its course, while I stood there, feeling like an idiot and the rest of the cat fanciers looked on in curiosity.

  “No, no, no,” she said when she’d regained her composure. “First, I admit to a little fling with Phillip, but it was more than a year ago and strictly utilitarian. Second, Marsha is well aware of Phillip’s infidelities and is, I think, almost grateful for them. Phillip is—was—a rich and powerful man, but hardly worth squabbling over. I harbor no illusions that Phillip and I were a love match, and if he ever decided to trade in Marsha, it would have been for a newer model . . . not an older woman. If Marsha had any real competition for Phillip’s affections, it was from Mari. That child is young both physically and emotionally. Right up Phillip’s alley.”

  “Do you think Mari and Phillip were that serious?”

  Pamela pursed her lips in thought. “No. Something tells me that Mari was simply convenient for Phillip. Lord knows, he never shows anything but contempt for her in public. Maybe things are different in private, but I have a hard time imagining that. I think Marsha’s role as Mrs. Denford was safe.”

  “So if you weren’t fighting over Phillip, what’s the beef between you and Marsha about?”

  “From my end, I have no patience
with her loopy personality. I come from a line of straight-talking women.” This did not surprise me. “It’s in my blood to distrust people who won’t give you a straight answer when you ask for one. From her side, maybe she’s just reacting to my impatience. Or, I suppose . . .”

  “You suppose what?”

  “Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Peter lately, providing input on the launch of theartisanway.com. Peter and Marsha are quite close. She may be angry that I’m monopolizing so much of his time.”

  “Sounds like she’s quite a clingy mother.”

  Pamela laughed, a low, throaty sound. “Mother? Peter didn’t even meet Marsha until he was a grown man. They’ve just become so close because they both live in the frigid shadow of Phillip Denford.” She brushed a piece of imaginary lint from her sleeve. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I still have a closing ceremony to put on tonight. I hope I’ll see you at the masquerade.”

  With that, she melted back into the crowd.

  I immediately dropped to my knees to look around for Jinx, but still saw no sign of her. When I stood, I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Rena, my diminutive friend, jumping up and down and waving her arms to snag my attention.

  I hustled my bustle muscle back to the Trendy Tails station, hoping that she’d found Jinx. It seemed, instead, that Jinx had found her.

  My big fluffy cat sat smack in the middle of the aisle, as calm as she could be, holding Gandhi the guinea pig by the scruff of his neck, just like a mama cat would with a wayward kitten.