Familiar Motives

by Delia James

  “Pppbbbttt,” she announced.

  I sighed. I would think about this later. Right now, we had other problems to take care of. “I think it’s time, big guy.”

  “Merow!”

  “No, seriously. Now.”

  Alistair twitched whiskers and tail at me in a curiously resigned gesture. But he also got up and trotted through the dining room toward the kitchen.

  Val and Kris pulled apart. Val furrowed her brow at me. “Anna, what are . . . ?”

  “Meow!”

  Kris jerked her head up and twisted around in the chair, just in time to see a long-haired black-and-white cat bound into the living room.

  “Ruby!” she shouted.

  “Meow!” Ruby launched herself into her owner’s lap.

  “I don’t believe it!” Kris gathered her cat up into her arms and cuddled her close. “Ruby! I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Maow!” Ruby licked her cheek delicately and batted at her braid. “Meep.”

  Alistair sat in the doorway of the dining room and washed his tail in a gesture of extreme nonchalance. Despite all our problems, I couldn’t help grinning.

  “Where did you find her?” asked Kris over her cat’s ears.

  “I didn’t. Lover boy over there did.” Alistair switched to washing a front paw.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh,” I agreed. “But all’s well that ends well.”

  “Definitely.” Kris kissed Ruby on top of her head. “Thank you, Alistair.”

  “Marow!” he declared loftily.

  I laughed. “He says you owe him a can of tuna.”

  “And you wonder why your cat won’t eat kibble,” said Val.

  “Well, he can have a whole case of albacore as far as I’m concerned.” Kris hugged Ruby again. “I’d just about given up. But she’s home now, and it’s all over.”

  “Except you know that’s not true,” said Val softly. “And it’s not going to be over until you tell the truth.”

  “I know.” Kris sighed and settled Ruby back down on her knees. Ruby turned around several times and curled up, draping her tail over her nose. “You’re right. I know you’re right. It’s just, it’s hard to talk about. I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Maybe I can help,” I said. “This is all about the Ultrapremium line, isn’t it? Best Petz was planning to sell cheap imported stuff and advertise it as organic and natural and all that.”

  “Oh-om-gah!” announced Melissa. Val tickled her baby’s tummy again and was rewarded with a big grin.

  “Merow!” agreed Alistair.

  Ruby climbed up out of Kristen’s arms and settled onto the back of the chair.

  “When did you find out?” Val asked Kristen.

  “I didn’t find out. Ramona did. She heard some rumors when she was working with some of the animal handlers on the set of the new commercials, and she told me.” Kristen gestured broadly, like she thought she could grab hold of some kind of answer. “She said she was going to report Best Petz to the FDA, and if the FDA wouldn’t listen, she’d take it straight to the media before the line had a chance to be released. She told me I should get out of the way before things hit the fan.” Kristen knotted her fingers around the end of her braid and tugged, hard. “That’s why I was going to New York. I was going to be huddling with a whole team of lawyers and PR people to try to figure out how to keep Ruby and Attitude Cat Enterprises out of the line of fire.” She snorted. “And you can see how well that worked out.”

  Val and I looked at each other blankly.

  “Okay,” said Val, holding up one hand like she was pleading for the world to stop for just a second. Melissa made a grab for her thumb and missed. “This is bad. But you told the police, right, Kristen? You explained.”

  “No,” said Kristen.

  Val stared at her friend blankly for a second while that single word sunk in. “Well, you can tell them now.” Val got to her feet, cradled Melissa against her shoulder and headed for the dining room and then the kitchen to get to the phone on the wall. “We’ll call Kenisha and she can . . .”

  “No!” shouted Kristen to her back.

  Val turned, and all the steel I knew waited in her spirit was shining in her eyes.

  “No, please, Val,” said Kris more softly. “If you tell the police about this, they’ll have everything they need to convict me.”

  “But how . . . ?”

  “If Best Petz goes down, the Attitude Cat brand is finished. Kaput. The second the cops find that out, what are they going to think?”

  But we all knew.

  What the police had been missing to convict Kris of murder was a genuinely plausible motive. When the scandal about the pet food came out, they’d have that motive. In spades. They would think that Kristen killed Ramona to keep her quiet. Then they’d think she stole the laptop to get rid of the evidence. Kristen could also have easily broken into the apartment during Ramona’s funeral to plant the Aldina beads under the bed to frame Cheryl.

  “Kris,” said Val. “I know this is scary, especially because you’re right in the middle of it. But it’s really not that bad in the scheme of things. It’s just false advertising, right? And nothing’s even been released yet. So there might be a fine, and Best Petz will have to issue an apology, but companies recover from stuff like this all the time. It’s not a matter of life and death!”

  “Except it is,” said Kris.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ramona told me . . . she told me that the reason the food was so cheap was that they were using ground-up peach pits as one of the fillers.”

  There is a feeling you get sometimes, like there’s something very big and very bad looming behind you. That feeling closed in on me now.

  “I don’t understand,” said Val. “I mean, peach pits can’t be any good for a cat, but . . .”

  “Ramona said peach pits can be poisonous,” Kris told her. “They’ve got trace amounts of cyanide in them. It probably wouldn’t be enough to make a grown cat sick, right away, but still . . .”

  The world froze. Kris was still talking, but I couldn’t hear any of it properly.

  “Wait, wait! Stop!” I held up both hands. “Say that all again.”

  Kris frowned. “Ramona told me the food they were importing had—”

  “No. Not that. The part about cyanide.”

  “Peach pits have cyanide in them. Not a lot. But still, it isn’t . . .”

  I was off the window seat, in the foyer and pulling my phone out of my purse before Kristen finished her sentence.

  “Merow!” announced Alistair from the stairwell. “Merow!”

  “I know, I know!” My hands shook as I punched up Rachael’s number.

  “Anna, what on earth . . . ?” began Val, but I waved her away. The phone was ringing.

  “Hello?” said Rachael on the other end.

  “Hello, Rachael? It’s Anna.”

  “What’s happened? You sound like you’ve been running a marathon.”

  “Listen, Rachael, is there any chance, any at all, that the kitten who was brought in today ate some of the Best Petz Ultrapremium food?”

  “That hasn’t been released yet.” I heard the frown in her words.

  “I know, I know, but you know, maybe she got hold of a special or a prerelease deal or a sample package or something like that . . . ?”

  “I don’t see how. Why are you asking?”

  I looked toward my living room, toward Kris, who hunched in her chair, pale and angry and miserable.

  “Merow!” Alistair reminded me.

  “Because your mother found out that the new Ultrapremium line wasn’t just cheap. It was tainted.” And I told her what Kris had told us. Kris and Val, with Melissa in her arms, came to stand on the threshold and listen.

  On the o
ther end of the phone, Rachael was quiet for a very long time. “I’ll check,” she said. “I’ll call back as soon as I hear something.”

  “I’ll keep the phone on.”

  We said good-bye and we hung up.

  “Start talking, Anna.” Val hoisted Melissa a little higher on her shoulder. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “Me too,” said Kris.

  “Maow!” Alistair snaked past them and circled my ankles. “Maow!”

  I took a deep breath and smoothed my hair back with both hands. “Okay. Yes. Right.”

  I told them all about going to see Rachael at the clinic. I told them about her reaction to the news that Kristen had been arrested, despite, or maybe because of, the Aldina beads Kenisha and I had found.

  Then I told them about Mittens.

  “But . . . ,” stammered Kris. “It’s not possible. The line hasn’t been released yet. The only reason we were even waiting was because there were at least three weeks left! How could Mittens’s owner have gotten hold of any of the food?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s a pretty huge coincidence otherwise. I mean, Ramona was investigating the possibility of tainted food, and a kitten turned up, poisoned, right here in Portsmouth. There has to be a connection.”

  As if to emphasize my point, my phone rang. I hit the Accept button and put it to my ear.

  “Anna? It’s Rachael. You were right.” Her voice was shaking and raw. I wondered if she was crying. “I called Lisa Lewis. She said she had a sample pack of kitten treats from Best Petz. Mittens had gotten into the bag and eaten most of them.” She gulped. “She’s bringing me what’s left. I’m calling a lab I know so we can get them tested as quickly as possible. But . . . oh, my God, if this is true, there’s no time to waste . . .”

  “But did she say where she got the sample?”

  “Pam Abernathy,” said Rachael. “Lisa’s a client of theirs.” She paused again. “I’ve got to call Pam right now, find out if Pam’s given samples out to anybody else . . . Oh, God, Anna. I’ve got to get this going. I’ll . . . We’ll talk later, right?”

  “Yes. Right. Go.”

  Rachael hung up without saying good-bye. I slid my phone back into my purse, but it was a long time before I could look up at my friends and our cats.

  “Merow?” Alistair head butted my shins.

  “I take it that was Rachael,” said Val. “What did she say?”

  “She says that kitten did get hold of some of the Ultrapremium food. She’s calling a lab to get some tests, and then they’ll be able to report it. So, hopefully, nobody else will get hurt.”

  I said this to Kris. She swallowed and walked back into the living room. She sat on the sofa and softly petted Ruby’s back.

  “How long have I got?”

  “Don’t worry, Kris,” said Val. “You’re not going to face this alone. Right, Anna?”

  “Right,” I said as firmly as I could. My mind was racing, trying to grab up all the separate bits of information that had been dropped in the past few days. It felt very full. “But we are going to have to take it all to the police.”

  “There has to be something else we can do before then,” said Val. “Some way to keep Kristen in the clear. And”—she caught my gaze and held it—“there’s still Julia. And Kenisha.”

  Kristen looked confused, but neither Val nor I elaborated. I understood her. Kenisha still thought Julia had been involved with whatever happened at Ramona’s apartment. If we weren’t able to answer that question along with all the others surrounding Ramona’s death, we risked breaking apart the coven.

  “You know there’s one more possibility here, don’t you?” said Val softly.

  “Only one more?” I answered, and if I was a little grumpy about it, I think I get a pass on that one.

  “You said Cheryl might be covering for someone.”

  “Maybe. I mean, we know she lies.” In fact, she’d offered to lie for Blanchard. I’d heard her do it.

  “But not for free,” said Kris. “There’s got to be something in it for her.”

  “Well, what if it wasn’t Ramona who offered to sell her Ruby?” said Val. “There was someone else who wanted the money, and had access to the apartment, and was in town at the time, and who Rachael might feel like she needs to cover.”

  My mind shuffled through its basketload of facts and slowly brought up the relevant pieces. “You can’t mean Wendy Forsythe?” I said.

  Val nodded slowly. “I mean Wendy Forsythe. What if she’s the one who offered to sell Ruby?”

  Wendy. It would explain the broken wards. She could have gotten her sister out of the apartment somehow and gone in to meet Cheryl herself. But maybe Ramona came back too soon, or maybe she never left like she was supposed to . . . and there was a fight, or an accident.

  “How would we prove it?” said Kris. “If Wendy hasn’t come forward yet . . .”

  “She’s not likely to,” Val finished for her. “And none of us will get her to.”

  “But there’s still something missing,” I said. “Even if Cheryl had planned to do something like meet Wendy at the apartment, she never actually got there. I’m sure of it. Something stopped her. But she still feels the need to cover up what really happened. That means she thinks there’s still something in it for her.”

  “Maybe she thinks Wendy still has Ruby?”

  I shook my head. “You think Cheryl would let herself be strung along like this without proof? Besides, if Wendy did get her hands on Ruby, she’d be better off trying to claim the reward than selling her to Cheryl.”

  “Fewer moving parts, less chance of a double cross,” said Kris. “You’d make a good hustler, Anna.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “So, what do we do?” she asked.

  I bit my lip. The clock was ticking. If Ramona had been killed because she could prove Best Petz was going to release tainted food, we not only had to find her killer; we had to re-create her evidence trail, and do it quickly. Otherwise . . .

  I really didn’t want to think about what would happen otherwise.

  And now there was this. The very real possibility that Aunt Wendy had been in her sister’s apartment and had broken the wards, not to get the books of shadow, but to try to cat-nap Ruby and sell her to Cheryl Bell.

  On top of that, every day Pete thought Kenisha was hiding something to protect the “book group” was another day Kenisha risked getting into severe trouble and maybe even losing her job. We had to find some way to let everybody know what had really happened. Without accidentally getting the wrong person arrested.

  We had to line the pieces up. All of them, and we had to do it fast. But despite everything, there were still too many pieces. And at least two different puzzles, with at least two sets of corners (sorry, Grandma McNally). And at least two sets of motivations.

  Well, no, not really. There was only one motive here. Greed. There were just a lot of people who shared it.

  Slowly, a plan began to take shape in my mind. I had no way to tell if it was actually a good plan, but it was all I had.

  “I think I know what we can do, Val. But I’m going to need help, from both of you,” I added to Kristen.

  “What is it?” Val asked. “I mean, it seems like we’ve already talked to everybody who’s going to talk to us.”

  I met my friend’s worried eyes. “This is not going to involve talking.”

  42

  NINE O’CLOCK THE next morning found me sitting in my Jeep within view of the door to Abernathy & Walsh. I had a portfolio on the passenger seat beside me and a coffee to keep me company. Alistair, still sulking over the loss of his latest girlfriend, had declined to put in an appearance. I’d tried turning on the radio for some background noise but quickly switched it off. The story of Kristen’s arrest, and her release on bail, was all ove
r the news. Practically all I heard were exclamations like “Another strange twist in the case of America’s most famous cat . . .” and “We’ve got an update in the Attitude Cat murder . . .”

  The good news was that the mobs of media personnel who had been filling Market Square had all decamped for the courthouse and police headquarters. For the first time in days, the narrow downtown streets were as close to navigable as they ever got. Of course, that might change as soon as they heard that Attitude Cat had been found. But Kris was holding on to that particular bit of news for at least another five minutes.

  So now I waited on the narrow side street in peaceful silence and tried hard not to look like I was lurking. Which, to be honest, I kind of was.

  Everything we’d found out so far said that Ramona was killed to keep her quiet about the tainted food Best Petz was getting ready to release as its Ultrapremium brand. So the question became, how many of the people involved—the “corners,” as Sean had called them—knew about that?

  Kristen knew, obviously. It had driven her to sneak to New York to try to get out of her contract with Pam and Best Petz.

  Did Cheryl know? She was counting on Attitude Cat being a valuable brand for years to come.

  Did Pam know? She had the alibi, sure, but that was shaky now that the time of Ramona’s death was in question. Plus, she might easily have spilled the beans to somebody, like Cheryl. They might have worked together to come up with a plan. Those anonymous calls could have been meant as a distraction. That scene in Ramona’s office could have been window dressing.

  And then came the newest question. Did Wendy know? She was quickly becoming a “corner” person in the puzzles. Wendy was already worried about Ramona’s money, or lack of money. Val might have gotten it right. Wendy might have planned to sell Ruby to Cheryl to recoup the money her sister owed her. But, she also might have found out that her sister was planning on blowing the whistle. She might have gotten angry because that would mean the end of those consulting fees from Best Petz.

  There might have been an argument, and an accident.

  The problem was, Wendy wasn’t going to talk to me again. Not after that scene in Julia’s office.