Nine Deadly Lives

by Livia J. Washburn

  He put his cigarette out just as we made it to Monica’s office and jumped on her desk.

  “Scatter them everywhere,” I yelled to Watts as he threw bills every which way. “Remember, Robby said the unpaid bills were on the top of her desk. Somewhere in there should be the vet bills.”

  It would have been more fun, if we didn’t have such a serious purpose. We had papers flying to the floor in all directions. “Keep going!” I cried.

  Susan heard the ruckus and came running in.

  “Shurl and Watts? Up to your old tricks I see. I’ll get you. You two are not as fast as you think you are.”

  She had the dogcatcher’s net ready to fling over us, but we were too fast.

  I thought, “Bet we are!” and signaled for Watts to follow when I heard Susan say, after picking up one of the vet bills, “What’s this? Samoa never even went to the vet.”

  Susan put the net down to look closely at that one bill that remained on Monica’s desk. We hid behind the open door as we watched her pick up bills from the floor. She picked them up, one by one.

  “Electric bill, water bill, but look at all of these vet bills. I’m going to separate them and while Monica’s out sick, I’m going to compare them with my computer records of which animals I ordered sent to the vet. Something strange is going on here, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

  Susan raced out of the office with armloads of papers. She called Amy into her office.

  Amy saw us but she was so happy to see us, she didn’t report us. Susan didn’t miss a trick. She caught Amy looking at us.

  “Never mind finding those two trouble makers. I’ll deal with them later. Besides, if they didn’t have a party on Monica’s desk, I never would have seen these bills. Did Robby mention any concerns he had about the vet to you?”

  Amy paused. “Not so much about the vet, but he did say he saw a bill for a cat he never took there. He confronted Monica, but she told him not to worry about it, she would take care of it. Didn’t she contact you about it?”

  “No. she didn’t. There are thousand s of dollars here being paid out for nothing. Her actions constitute fraud. I’m going to call Deputy Rooney right now and report this. Those two smarty cats wanted me to see these.”

  Susan picked up the phone. We heard her dial out as Amy came and picked us up.

  “No worries my two little buddies. I won’t let anybody hurt you. You two are heroes in my book.”

  We overheard Susan tell Rooney about the phony bills and how she believed the vet and Monica were in cahoots to cash in on thousands of dollars. “Don’t know how long this has been going on. I believe Robby went to the vet before he went missing. We may have more than fraud on our hands. You’re on your way? Great. I’ll be in my office.”

  Susan then came over and petted us. We heard a car screech in the parking lot. Amy put us down. As we all walked outside, we saw Bruiser walk out of the bushes with the bag under his chin. He dropped it at Rooney’s feet, danced around it in a playful fashion, and barked. Rooney looked at it.

  “What’s this boy?”

  Bruiser gave a loud bark in response.

  “You want something. Want me to look inside?”

  Bruiser went ballistic. The deputy took some clear plastic gloves from his pocket and put them on. He carefully picked up the bag.

  “Potato chips. Want some? Looks like you haven’t had a good meal in a while. Looking a little thin, there, boy.”

  Bruiser danced back some more. He nudged Rooney’s hand until the officer looked inside the can.

  “Well, lookee here. A needle. I’m taking this back to the crime lab. We’ll test the can for prints as well as the contents of the needle. Robby may not have had heart problems after all.”

  Rooney took the bag back to his car and took out a large evidence bag. He put the can and bag inside and marked it “Robby.”

  He then looked at Bruiser. “Got a home, lad? Doesn’t look like you do by how thin you are. Hop in. You were brave to come to the shelter and bring the evidence even though you risked getting caught.

  “I always wanted a police dog of my own. I’m going to ask the captain if I can take you in for training. After I tell him what you did to help crack the case, I’m sure he’ll approve.” Bruiser put his chest out like he was about to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Rooney walked over to Susan to take the invoices and a photo copy of her records.

  “Think it’s all right to take the dog or do you have to keep him first?”

  She smiled. “Fine with me, as long as he gets a good home.”

  “He’ll come home with me every night. My wife’ll love him.”

  Good for Bruiser. He had a tough break in life, but that’s about to change.

  Susan then turned to us. “Now for you two outlaws. Amy’s gonna clean you up and give you a good meal. Tomorrow, we’re having an open house for adoptions and celebrate the fact that the county commissioners voted unanimously to make us a no-kill shelter

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you two stay together. I’ll even invite Rooney and his new German Shepherd. Now, go get yourselves presentable for tomorrow.”

  Amy took us and did just that. She unmatted my snarls and towel dried Watts. It felt so good. Then she fed us fresh cans of cat food like we used to get.

  The next morning, from our cage, we could see balloons and party signs go up. There were donuts and coffee and pet items for new pet parents donated by local merchants. Humans poured in to see the pets. Susan put us up front as the pets of the day. We hoped somebody would take us home, but if not, we knew we were safe and loved here.

  Then, we heard a familiar bark. We looked over to see Rooney and Bruiser enter the shelter. Bruiser looked clean and happy. He was wearing a blue police collar.

  Rooney thanked Susan.

  “He is one great dog. Molly loves him and the captain gave him his blue training collar today. We couldn’t have begun to solve Robby’s murder without him. He starts tomorrow, because I wanted to bring him to the shelter today to show people how great homeless pets can be.”

  Susan asked, “Did you name him?”

  “Yep. Caesar. He’s strong and regal-looking.”

  We’d all helped the shelter and the police to start investigating Robby’s murder. And the three of us were happy to be safe again. We meowed for Caesar to come over, and the three of us celebrated together.

  About the Author—Mariah Lynne

  Ever dream of traveling through time? Mariah Lynne does. She takes her readers along on exciting journeys to distant times and beautiful places with strong-willed independent heroines whose memorable tales entertain with twisted plots dabbling in the paranormal and sometimes even murder— Shadows Across Time, The Love Gypsy, The Duchess’ Necklace, and short story, Love At First Flight. Mariah lives on a beautiful Florida Gulf Coast Island; Southwest Florida takes center stage in all her stories. When she is not writing, she enjoys swimming, traveling and spending time with her husband and dolphin hunting dog, Max.

  Website: www.MariahLynne.com

  Twitter:@mariahlynne1 https://www.facebook.com/pages/MariahLynne/295721153858612

  Who Let the Cats Out?

  Faye Rapoport DesPres

  No one messes with the Jane S. Dooley Cat Shelter.

  There are two things I’ve never told anyone. But before I can tell those two things to you, I must tell you the rest of the story. Then, maybe there’s a chance you’ll believe me. Let me back up a few months so I can start with what happened on the day right after the fire.

  I was standing alone in the old Victorian house that had once belonged to Jane S. Dooley. It was hard to remember what the living room looked like before the fire had engulfed it the previous night. The morning sun streamed in through the bay window, which looked out over the front yard and the neatly trimmed bushes that separated the yard from the sidewalk. But everything inside–the mantel above the fireplace, the wallpaper patterned with delicate flowers, the wood flo
ors, the furniture, the shattered flower vase–was charred and stained, blackened and peeling, covered with ashes.

  I had no idea if I would be able to recover the key, and for reasons I couldn’t have understood at the time, this thought inspired a feeling of panic. The floor-to-ceiling bookcase had fallen over during the fire and cracked into several pieces. Dozens of sodden books, wet from the hoses of the firefighters, were scattered across the floor. Some had lost their covers and were partially burned; others had singed pages that curled toward the bindings.

  I spotted one edge of the old hardcover beneath what remained of the wooden coffee table. The cover of the book had been a prominent red, making it easy to spot in the sunlight. I kneeled on the floor, pulled the book from underneath one of the table’s legs, and brushed a light layer of ashes off the cover. The book was the only thing in the room that had been mine: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I opened it and saw that the key was still there, taped inside the front cover. I sighed with relief. Then, I loosened the tape, removed the key, and slipped it into my pocket.

  “Adalyn?”

  Slamming the book shut, I stood up so quickly that I slipped on the debris that covered the damp floor. My assistant, Billy, stepped through the doorway and caught my arm before I fell. I thanked him with embarrassment, clutching the book to my chest with one hand while I used the other to wipe the soot off the knees of my cargo pants.

  “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” I said, looking up at Billy, who was eight inches taller than me.

  Billy smiled sadly. The apartment had been his home for nearly a year, since he’d accepted the job of Assistant Director of the Jane S. Dooley Sheltering Home for Cats. A rent-free apartment came with the job. The shelter’s office was at the other end of a hallway outside the living room door, and three upstairs rooms served as living space for ten cats waiting for homes with local families. Another twenty cats, the ones who got along well in a larger group, were housed cage-free inside a spacious cement Cat House that had been built behind the old Victorian at the end of the driveway.

  Loose jeans and a black T-shirt hung on Billy’s slim frame, and his short hair, dyed jet black, was messy or spiked with some kind of hair product, I could never tell which. One of his eyebrows was pierced, and he had somehow found the time–even on a morning like this–to apply the touch of dark eyeliner that always made his blue eyes stand out. When people first met Billy, especially people who lived in a small Vermont town like Pineville, they usually raised their eyebrows and assumed all the wrong things. They never suspected that Billy had a heart of gold and also was a musical genius. He could play Mozart as well as he belted out the grunge rock tunes he performed with his band, “Black Buzzard,” on Friday and Saturday nights. The job at the shelter was just a way for Billy to make money and have a free place to live while he finished his master’s thesis in music education.

  Now that free place to live, the apartment inside the house that Jane S. Dooley had left to the town as a cat shelter a hundred-and-fifty years before, had been torched.

  Billy glanced around the room. I knew that he’d weathered times worse than this; his mother had died when Billy was young, leaving his father to raise Billy and run their horse ranch on his own. It was one of the things Billy and I had in common even though, at thirty-four, I was ten years older. We were both raised by single fathers. I had returned to town two years before to be with my dad before he died, thinking I’d only stay long enough after he was gone to close up the house and sell it. My life had been at a crossroads at the time; I’d been living in Colorado and the software company I worked for as an office manager had been sold to a larger company. When the director of the Jane S. Dooley Cat Shelter announced that she was getting married and moving out of town, I decided to stay and apply for the job.

  “You’re taking this pretty well,” I told Billy, trying to convince myself that I also spoke for me. At exactly the same time, our eyes strayed toward the piano that Billy had moved into the apartment with the rest of his things. It had been a shiny brown upright with gleaming black and white keys, but now it was covered with soot. It had visible water damage, and a large dark spot was burned into the side that stood closest to the window. The burning rag soaked in gasoline had landed next to the piano when it crashed through the window, which the firemen had temporarily boarded up.

  “It’s insured,” Billy said with a shrug. “I’m safe, the cats are safe, Michelle is safe. That’s all that matters.” Michelle, a local nursing student whose smile lit up the shelter whenever she came by, was Billy’s girlfriend.

  o0o

  It’s not as if we didn’t know that a certain element in town had been grumbling about the shelter. That element consisted mostly of Doris Nelson, the woman who had moved into the house next door five years before. She was joined in her disapproval by the town’s mayor, Henry Carbunkle. Mayor Henry, as I called him, because he hated what he referred to as my “unbelievable impertinence,” had, over the previous year, made it his personal mission to shut the shelter down. I had no idea why; Henry, who is in his mid-forties, had lived in Pineville all his life and had been mayor for the last ten years. He’d never had a problem with the shelter before. We suspected that it had something to do with Doris, who complained about everything from Billy’s piano playing, which she claimed she could hear from inside her house, to what time we rolled the garbage bins out to the curb every Sunday and whether or not our driveway was plowed in the winter. She had installed a tall wooden fence between her driveway and the shelter’s, and that was fine with us. The less we saw of Doris Nelson, the better.

  Unfortunately for Doris and Mayor Henry, most of Pineville’s small population loved and supported the shelter. Many local families found beloved pets at Dooley, or turned to us for help when an elderly relative passed away and left a cat in need, or when someone found a hungry stray by the side of the road.

  “Should you be in here, Addy?”

  Billy and I both turned at the sound of the familiar voice. Mayor Henry was standing in the doorway from the hall into the living room. I wondered why he felt he had the right to walk into my office, never mind down the hall to the apartment.

  “Tom said we could come in,” I said, referring to the local fire chief. I stood up a little straighter and made sure my voice was firm. “Why are you here?” I asked.

  He ignored my question. “I imagine this place is a goner,” he said, raising his eyebrows as he looked around the room. He was six foot four and, in my opinion, an overgrown bully. He wore a cowboy hat and boots as if he thought he lived in Texas and was a sheriff instead of a mayor.

  “Actually,” I said, “only this room was damaged by the fire. There’s just water damage in the kitchen and bedroom. The office is fine, and the upstairs is fine.” He shrugged. Getting angry, I added, “And I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that Billy saved all of the cats who live upstairs. You do realize that Billy was in here last night, when someone threw a flaming rag soaked in gasoline through the window. He could have been killed.”

  I noticed a flash of surprise in the mayor’s eyes. “I thought you played with your band on Saturday nights,” he said.

  “Oh, you did?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. I took a step toward the mayor and Billy put a cautioning hand on my arm. “Why were you keeping track of Billy’s nights out, Mayor Henry?”

  I might stand five-foot-two and weigh all of a hundred-and-fifteen pounds, and my mane of brown curls might make me appear somewhat childish, but everyone in Pineville knows I’m no pushover. Once, in the tenth grade, I punched a kid in the face when he made a snide remark about a boy who didn’t have a lot of friends. My father promised the principal I would be punished, but when we got in the car so my dad could drive me home, he held up a hand and gave me a “high five.”

  “I’m only saying I had no idea Billy was home last night,” the mayor said, involuntarily taking a step backward. He had recovered from his surprise and was back on the offensive.
“Had I known, I would have asked if he was alright.”

  “Right, just like you asked about the cats,” I said. “Whoever did this, even if they thought they were doing it when Billy was out, must have known they were going to kill ten innocent cats.”

  The mayor’s face turned to stone. “Well, whoever did this might not have even known this place is a cat shelter,” he replied smoothly.

  “And where were you last night, Mayor Henry?” I asked. “Your life’s mission for the past year has been to shut down the shelter.”

  “You have to be kidding me!” he said, furious now. “I’m the mayor of this town and I have better things to do than to try to burn down someone’s house or a cat shelter. I spent the entire evening with my wife, in fact, at Buddy’s Grill and the cinema center in Layton.”

  “Will the police be able to find out who did do this?” Billy asked, interrupting our heated exchange. He gestured toward the piano. “There’s been a lot of damage, and the truth is, sir, that I could have been killed, and the cats could have been, too.”

  The mayor shrugged again. “It was probably some teenager on a dare,” he said. “I’m sure Sam will do his best to find out.” Sam Reynolds was the local police chief. Sam and Henry were thick as thieves; I had no doubt that if Henry Carbunkle was behind this fire, his buddy Sam wouldn’t do anything about it.

  “Well, good luck to you,” Mayor Henry said before turning on his boot heel. He walked back down the hall and out of the house. The office door slammed.

  Billy turned to look at me. “Look, Addy,” he said, his voice sounding tired, “I appreciate the invitation to stay at your house while this gets sorted out, but I’m perfectly happy to sleep on the floor of the office.”