Wrong Side of the Paw

by Laurie Cass

  Where the Boggses now lived was an established neighborhood of large stately homes with tree-lined streets, and at eleven o’clock on a weekday morning, there wasn’t a single human being to be seen. There were, however, a multitude of Halloween decorations. Pumpkins sat on hay bales, scarecrows and witches perched on tree limbs, and ghosts peeked from behind shrubbery. It was a charming display and it gave the feel of a community with a real sense of place.

  I found the address and parked at the curb of the only place on the street without any Halloween ornamentation. The house of Bogg was Tudoresque, with steeply pitched roofs, big brick chimneys, and decorative half-timbering with stucco filling the space between the timbers. It looked substantial and prosperous and expensive.

  It also looked unoccupied.

  Well, maybe it just seemed that way. Maybe Gail and Ray were inside, planning their Halloween display. I got out of the car and walked up the brick path that led to the front door. I pushed the elaborate brass doorbell and listened to a deep bonging sound go through the house and fade away to silence. After waiting a bit, I pushed the doorbell again and got the same result.

  Nothing.

  There were no windows flanking the solid door, and in a neighborhood like this, traipsing around to the windows and peering in could easily trip a security alarm or send a watchful neighbor to the telephone to call 911.

  “Rats,” I muttered.

  But speaking of neighbors . . .

  Another advantage of being female and spatially efficient was that I didn’t tend to project a threatening presence. I returned to the main sidewalk, looked at the adjacent houses, and spotted a house across the street and one door down that had interior lights on. Bingo! I headed on over and knocked, using the lion’s head doorknocker provided for the purpose.

  The door was opened by a dark-skinned man who looked to be in his mid-forties. He had a coffee mug in one hand and a pile of papers in the other. “Hello,” he said in a polite, but cautious, tone.

  I smiled disarmingly. “Morning. I was looking for Gail and Ray Boggs, but they don’t seem to be home. Love your ghosts, by the way.” I nodded toward the front lawn, where a group of five gauzy figures stood around one of the largest pumpkins I’d ever seen. Each ghost held a different sketch of a plan for carving their pumpkin and they were clearly arguing about whose design would win.

  The guy grinned. “Reality becomes art. My wife, myself, and our three kids all wanted to do something different with the pumpkin we grew last summer in the backyard, so this is what we settled on.”

  I laughed. “Compromise can be funny.”

  “Well, the zombie versus ghost discussion was a little loud, but we worked it out,” he said, smiling.

  “It looks great,” I said, then before he could start wondering about the stranger on his doorstep, I told him my name, adding, “I’m from Chilson, where Gail and Ray had a place up until a couple of months ago. I thought I’d stop by to see them.”

  “Chilson?” he asked. “You live there?”

  “Fifty-two weeks a year. I’m assistant director for the library.”

  “No kidding. There’s this restaurant I saw on one of those cooking shows a while back. Do you know it?”

  I beamed. “Three Seasons. My friend Kristen owns it.”

  “That’s the place,” he said, nodding. “So you’d recommend eating there?”

  “If you like high-quality local ingredients cooked by a perfectionist, presented by people who obsess about the size of the garnishing sprigs, and served by staff who know how often the parsley was weeded, then absolutely you should eat there.”

  Laughing, the guy introduced himself as Tim Soane. “We’ll have to get up there next summer. But if you’re looking for Gail and Ray, you’re out of luck. They headed down to Florida last Friday.”

  “Oh.” I glanced at the vacant-looking house. “They weren’t here very long.”

  Tim shook his head. “Few weeks. Seems that’s the way those two operate. A month at this place, a month in Florida, a month in one of their other places. If they get bored or don’t like the weather forecast, they head out.”

  I blinked. “How many places do they have?”

  “Depends on the day.” He smiled briefly. “They build and buy and sell at the drop of a hat. From what Gail said, it ranges anywhere from three to six. Some of them are time-share condos, so you might count those differently.”

  I had a hard enough time moving twice a year. I couldn’t imagine the logistical difficulties of having multiple homes and having to fill them with multiple sets of belongings. I’d constantly be wanting something in another house. “Sounds like a complicated way to live,” I said.

  “Well, when you win one of the biggest lotteries in the history of lotteries, you can afford complications.”

  My eyes bugged out, then I remembered that, though I hadn’t specifically said I was a friend of the Boggses’, I’d certainly implied so and brought my eyeballs under control. “Well,” I said, “thanks for your time. If I get to Florida this winter, I’ll try to track them down there.”

  “Good luck with that.” Tim laughed. “By that time they’ll probably have moved on to Hawaii.”

  I nodded, thanked him again, and headed back to my car.

  • • •

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Eddie, sitting next to his food bowl, was staring at the kitchen counter and not paying any attention to me.

  “Hey.” I snapped my fingers. “Over here. There is nothing on that counter of any interest to you.” This was a blatant lie, as he clearly was interested in the empty glass dishes that had held leftovers I’d scrounged out of the refrigerator for dinner, but he knew full well he wasn’t allowed on the counter, so I stood by my statement.

  I tapped my fingertips on the round oak kitchen table and he turned his head. “Right. Now that I have your complete and undivided attention, I have some things to discuss with you.”

  “Mrr.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble for anything.” As far as I knew. There was always a possibility that he’d done something horrible that hadn’t yet entered my awareness, but since I was currently in blissful ignorance of any particular Eddie transgression, he had no reason to worry about punishment. Not that he would take punishment as a recommendation to modify behavior. His response would be more along the lines of a sullen teenager’s shrug and a muttered “Whatever.”

  Eddie rotated his head, owl-like, to look at me.

  “Right,” I said. “Things to discuss. Sorry to say, they’re not about you. Yes, the world revolves around cats in general and you specifically, as it should, but in this particular case I’d like you to just listen.”

  My fuzzy feline friend rotated himself a hundred and eighty degrees and settled his unblinking gaze upon me.

  “Can you stop that?” I asked. “Please? When you look at me like that, I always feel like you’re trying to tell me something and I’m too stupid to understand.”

  His stare hardened. “Mrr!” he yelled, his whole body twitching with the effort.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice to know that you think I’m stupid. Anyway, I wanted to discuss my recent findings about people who had dealings with Dale Lacombe.”

  Until Eddie, I’d never known how talking out loud to a four-legged companion could help straighten out your thoughts. It helped that Eddie seemed to pay attention to what I was saying and inserted the occasional contribution, but I was under no illusions that he actually understood the one-sided conversations. He was just a cat, after all. A lovable and personality-laden dork of a cat, but there was no way that any cat’s brain power could match that of a human.

  “Mrr,” Eddie said agreeably.

  “Right.” I nodded. “So here’s the thing. Dale Lacombe was a jerk of the first order and it was a surprise to basically
no one except his wife that he wound up murdered by person or persons unknown.”

  The phrase, one I’d heard on television dramas and seen in print numerous times, rang oddly in my ears.

  “You know,” I said, frowning, “why am I working on the assumption that it was one person who killed Dale and is trying to frame Leese? Why couldn’t it be two people? A whole host of people, like the Orient Express?” Drumming my fingers on the table, I considered, then rejected the idea.

  “Nope. Too complicated, especially for a small town. Someone would have talked or confessed or acted weird enough that eyebrows would have gone up and next thing you know it would have been on Facebook or tweeted all over the place.”

  “Mrr,” Eddie said.

  “Glad you agree.” I got up and opened the cupboard door that housed his treats. “But let’s keep in mind that two people might have had a small conspiracy going. I know, I know, there’s that proverb that two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead. Still, it’s a possibility.”

  Eddie swiped a paw at the air and made a chirpy sort of noise in the back of his throat.

  “Sorry.” I opened the canister of treats and tossed one onto the floor. “We’re going to skip the remote possibility that Dale’s death was an accident. If it was, why bother moving the body to Leese’s truck? If it had been an accident and someone had been afraid of being found guilty of negligence or something, it would have been far easier to drop the body in a lake.”

  By this time, the treat had long since disappeared down Eddie’s throat, and the only sign that a treat had ever existed was a wet spot on the floor in the shape of a cat tongue.

  I tossed down another moist tidbit.

  “So we have the Boggses and Daphne Raab. As the people who Dale sued to get payment, they should be high on the suspect list. Daphne certainly didn’t have a good word to say about him.” I watched Eddie snuffle up the treat. Ms. Raab had been an unpleasant woman, but unpleasantness didn’t equate to being a killer. Which was a good thing, because I’d met a number of unpleasant people in my life, and if they were all killers, it wouldn’t be long before the human species would murder its way to extinction.

  “And then there are the Boggses.” The lottery winners. The couple who skipped from one house to another at the drop of a hat. I made a mental note to see if I could find out how long ago they’d won their pile of cash.

  “Plus, there’s Rob Driskell. You know, the building official. The guy with the temper.”

  I saw again Driskell’s reddening face and clenched fists. If his anger could flare up so fast against a man who was dead, what could have happened if he and Dale had met face-to-face? A burst of violence seemed possible and even likely.

  Eddie bumped the top of his head against my shin.

  “And there’s the guy from the car accident.” I needed to call Leese and ask his name. I still couldn’t think of a reason for a twenty-some-year gap between incident and revenge, but anything was possible, I supposed, and—

  “Mrr!”

  “One more treat,” I said, “and that’s it. Winter’s coming. You don’t get out as much when it’s cold in spite of that fur coat and we don’t need you getting any fatter or especially any sassier.” I dropped a third treat to the floor and remembered what Daphne had said. “And I can’t forget about Carmen. Remember? She and Dale separated not long before he was killed.”

  I knew there were statistics about the number of murders committed by spouses, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in search of them. After all, what did statistics mean for any given for-instance? Well, a lot, really, because they provided odds for any given event happening, but it was hard to think in those terms.

  “Everybody thinks they’re going to beat the odds, right?” I looked down, but the only thing that remained of Eddie’s presence was a tiny piece of cat treat on the floor. I looked up and saw the tip end of his tail vanishing through the doorway to the dining room.

  “Once again,” I told him, “you were no help at all.”

  “Mrr,” he called back, which could only have been cat language for “Whatever.”

  “Thanks,” I called. “If I ever have kids, it’s good to know that I’ve had training for dealing with teenagers.”

  “Mrr.”

  The next day, since I’d scheduled myself to work a stint at the reference desk from midafternoon until the library closed at eight, I slept late and didn’t leave the boardinghouse until almost ten o’clock.

  It was one of those picture-perfect autumn mornings that you long for during the sweltering days of August. The air had a fall tang and the leaves still hanging tight to their trees were so brilliantly colored, they almost hurt my eyes at the same time that I couldn’t bear to look away.

  The sidewalks were long emptied of the summer tourist traffic, and I knew most of the few people out and about by name. Yes, winter wasn’t too far away, but Chilson once again belonged to its year-round residents. We had our town back. Life was good.

  I could practically see the aura of contentment that surrounded me as I walked into the toy store. Before the bells had even stopped jingling, Mitchell popped out of the back room. “Good morning, sorry I was—oh, hey, Minnie.” He grinned. “You back for Sally’s birthday present?”

  Someday I’d get used to the hatless, shaven, and socially presentable Mitchell, but today wasn’t that day. It was a good thing that he’d found full-time employment, and an even better thing that he seemed to be enjoying it so much; it was the sudden change that I was having a hard time adjusting to. Who would ever have guessed that the perennially underemployed Mitchell would ever have found a career passion and true love in the same year?

  “That’s right.” I leaned against the glass counter. “It’s on Halloween and I’ve promised not to buy her anything black or orange.”

  “Gotcha.” Mitchell smoothed back his hair, a gesture similar to the way he’d formerly rearranged his hat. “She’s into horses, right? Does she collect Breyers?”

  I frowned. “Isn’t that ice cream?”

  He ushered me over to a display of blue and yellow boxes. “And horses,” he said, pointing.

  “Huh.” I studied the array of plastic horses, horse-type equipment, horse barns, and other horse-oriented paraphernalia that, since the closest I’d ever come to a horse was the carousel ride at the Ohio amusement park Cedar Point, I hadn’t the least chance of identifying. “I have no idea if she’s into these or not. Let me text my sister-in-law and I’ll let you know.”

  “Isn’t your brother an engineer?”

  “Sort of.” Matt thought he had the best job in the world, and since he was an Imagineer for Disney, it was possible he was correct. If you were an engineer.

  “If that kind of thing runs in the family, how about this?” Mitchell stepped over to another area of the store, the one that displayed models of cars, boats, planes, and tanks, and held up the perfect present for Sally.

  “A Visible Horse,” I said softly, struck by the minimalist beauty of the skeletal model. “Mitchell, you’re a genius.”

  “All part of the service.” He grinned. “Want me to wrap it? I can ship it for you, too, if you want. I’m pretty sure we have the address on file.”

  I grinned back. If Mitchell 2.0 could provide this kind of service, I wasn’t going to mourn the old version another minute. “I like the way you work.”

  “Yeah?” He flicked a glance my way. “Seems like you always thought I wasn’t worth much.”

  There was enough truth in the statement to make it sting. But it wasn’t the entire truth. “I’ve always thought you are a very intelligent person,” I said honestly. “What I never understood is why you didn’t care about using it.”

  Mitchell peeled the price tag off the box and stuck it to the counter. “I guess I can see why you’d think that.” He leaned down and unrolled wrapping paper fro
m a metal rod, giving it a yank to rip it off the roll. “But my dad, he used to work so hard he didn’t have any time for anything else and then he died of a heart attack, sitting in his office chair before he turned forty-five. I didn’t want to be like him, not that way.”

  So there it was. The reason why Mitchell had been a slacker most of his adult life. “And it’s different now?” I asked.

  “Bianca showed me,” he said. “She works hard, but she leaves time for fun, too.”

  The fact that it had taken him this long to figure that out made me question my earlier assessment of his intelligence, but I let it go. “Well, you seem to fit in well here. The owners made a great decision when they hired you.”

  He didn’t say anything, but the tips of his ears turned bright red. “Wish I could say the same about your library board,” he muttered as he wrapped the brightly colored paper around the box. “That Jennifer doesn’t fit at all. And don’t ask about me going back to the library, because I’m not going to as long as she’s there.”

  When he’d first told me he was boycotting the library, I hadn’t believed it would last more than a couple of days, but he hadn’t set foot inside for more than a week. “What about the bookmobile?” I asked.

  His hands hesitated as he folded the last flap of paper, but only for a moment. He shook his head. “Nope. Can’t do it.”

  Uneasily, I wondered if Jennifer’s demeanor was driving other people away from the library. I toyed with the idea of talking to the board chair, then rejected the plan. If I had a problem with Jennifer, I would discuss it with her first. And right then and there, I vowed to do so that very day. If she pooh-poohed my concerns, I might be driven to speak to the board, but I wouldn’t go over her head without telling her what I was doing.

  “Sorry you feel that way,” I said to Mitchell. “But I understand.”

  I wrote, To Sally, From Auntie Minnie with oodles of love, on the small birthday-themed tag Mitchell offered, pushed it back across the counter, and asked, “Have you heard anything else about the murder of Dale Lacombe?”