“Thank God,” Bernie said as Libby helped her up. Every muscle in her body was shrieking in pain.
Libby pointed to Bernie’s jaw. “It’s swollen. What happened?”
Bernie rubbed her wrists and ankles to get the circulation going. “Travis punched me.”
“That wasn’t very sporting,” Libby observed.
“No, it certainly wasn’t,” Bernie agreed as she hobbled over to Ralph.
“I thought we were goners,” he confessed, looking up at her.
“Naw,” Bernie said, although she’d thought that, too.
Grace stood up. “I’m going to get a sheet from the bedroom,” she announced. “We can use that as a stretcher.”
“And I’ll call nine-one-one,” Bernie said as she went to get her phone.
“Are you nuts?” Libby asked, aghast. “And blow us up? Wait till we get outside.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Bernie told her.
“The going outside part?”
“No. The blowing up part.”
“Then why are there signs all over gas stations, telling you to turn off your cell before you fill up?” Libby demanded.
“Okay. It could happen,” Bernie allowed. “But it’s a long shot. As a rule, cells don’t spark.”
“There was one that caught fire,” Libby pointed out. She was about to add the phrase “Better safe than sorry” when she heard a noise. She turned. Travis was standing in the open doorway, and he had a gun in his hand.
“Please don’t,” Bernie yelled.
Travis grinned. “But I want to.”
“Travis, please put the gun down,” Bernie begged. “You shoot that thing and you’ll kill yourself, as well as all of us.”
Travis shrugged. “That’s fine by me. I’m dead, anyway.” And he disengaged the safety.
Bernie and Libby watched in horror as Travis aimed the gun at the stove. They both shut their eyes and waited for the inevitable. A few seconds later there was a crash. Libby and Bernie opened their eyes. Travis was lying on the floor, and Marvin was sitting on top of him, his face red from running.
“Get the gun,” Marvin managed to gasp out.
Libby ran to get the gun as Travis began to wiggle out from under Marvin.
“What are you going to do, Libby?” Travis mocked as he shook Marvin off and got to his feet. “Shoot me?”
As Travis took a step toward Libby, Marvin spied a metal doorstop in the shape of a cat by the wall. He ran over, got it, and brought it down on the back of Travis’s head.
“Thank God,” Libby said as Travis crumpled to the floor.
Marvin’s hands were trembling. “Do you think I killed him?” he asked Libby.
“No. His chest is moving. But he’s going to have a very bad headache when he wakes up,” she replied. “We should leave him here,” Libby added as she started to drag Travis outside.
“Yes, we should,” Marvin agreed as he ran to help her.
“Thank God for Marvin,” Grace said as she came down the steps, carrying a bedcover she’d found in one of the bedrooms.
“He’s definitely moved to hero status in my book,” Bernie noted as she and Grace maneuvered Ralph onto the bedcover. Then they dragged him out to the front yard.
By now Travis had come to, but before he did, Libby and Marvin had found zip ties in Travis’s pockets, had used them to secure his wrists and ankles, and had propped him up against a tree.
“My head, my head,” Travis cried as he rocked from side to side. He pointed to Marvin with his chin. “You tried to kill me.”
“I was trying to get you to stop killing everyone else,” Marvin explained in a shaky voice. The adrenaline surge was leaving him, and he felt so exhausted, he was having trouble standing.
“No, Marvin,” Travis said. “You were trying to kill me, and that’s what I’m going to tell the police.”
“You do that, Travis,” Libby snapped at him. “I’m sure they’ll believe that coming from someone who killed one person and tried to kill two—no, five—others.”
Grace had been kneeling over Ralph. She got up and went over to Travis. “You almost killed my brother,” she shouted at him as she kicked his leg.
“He was blackmailing me,” Travis protested.
Grace kicked him again. Harder. “You are a despicable man. And to think that I actually loved you, that I thought we had something going.”
Travis tried to smile through his pain. “We did. We do.”
“So, Travis, does Marie think that about you and her, too?” Bernie asked. “Just curious.”
Grace turned toward her. “What do you mean?”
“You mean you don’t know about Marie?” Bernie asked Grace, all pretend innocence. “Libby and I saw Travis coming out of her house.”
“Is that true?” Grace demanded after facing Travis.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” Travis told her.
“Marie looked pretty happy,” Bernie observed.
“Okay,” Travis conceded. “So maybe we did do it a couple of times.”
Grace kicked him for the third time.
“Stop.” Travis pleaded. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?” Grace asked, the words coming out through gritted teeth.
“You know I love you, baby. I was just helping her out. . . .”
Grace turned to Ralph. “Did you know about Marie?”
Ralph turned his head away.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t think you’d believe me.”
“Because you’re a liar,” Travis yelled at Ralph. “And you know that no one will believe anything you say.” He nodded in Ralph’s direction. “He’s the one who killed Susie,” Travis told Bernie. “All that stuff I said to you before about the stuff I did . . . I was just kidding around. I was pretending.”
“Sure you were,” Bernie said. She could hear sirens in the distance.
The ambulance and the police were going to be here any minute. Bernie smiled. She was going to enjoy seeing the look on Lucy’s face when she told him what had happened.
Chapter 46
Six weeks later . . .
“It could be worse,” Bernie said as she handed Ralph a slice of peach and apricot pie. She was referring to the ugly scars on his body that Ralph was left with after Travis had knifed him. “It’s not as if you’re entering a bodybuilding competition.”
“It could always be worse,” Ralph noted.
“Yeah,” Libby told him. “You could be in prison for blackmail.”
“Well, there is that,” Ralph allowed.
“There certainly is,” Grace said as she shooed Natasha off the table. She was still pissed at her brother for doing what he’d done.
She, Bernie, Libby, and Ralph were sitting in the dining room of the main house on the Connor estate, surrounded by Boris, Natasha, and two other cats, all of which were eyeing the bowl of whipped cream sitting next to the pie.
“Maybe we should give them some,” Bernie suggested as Boris jumped on the table.
“It’s not good for their stomachs,” Grace said as she sat Boris on her lap. “It’ll give them the runs.”
“By the way, congratulations on winning,” Libby said to Grace and Ralph. Boris had won best in show at a major cat show down in New York.
Grace nodded. “Susie would have been pleased.”
“She would have been ecstatic,” Bernie said.
“So now what?” Libby asked as she tasted the pie. She’d tried something new with it. She’d used dried apricots and fresh peaches, and it had turned out better than expected. The trick had been to give the apricots a good long soak and to add a touch of ginger to spice things up.
“I guess we carry on carrying on,” Grace said. “Although we’re going to change some things around. We’re building a large covered outdoor area so the cats can go outside. Allison is helping.”
“She must be happy about that,” Lib
by noted.
“Oh. She definitely is,” Grace agreed. “And I think the cats will be, too. She’s actually very nice when you get to know her. Just a little intense.”
“And we’re rehoming some of the kitties,” Ralph said. “The trustee said we could.”
“Of course, we’re doing home visits first,” Grace said. “Just to make sure they go to good families.” She ate a bite of pie. “This really is delicious. I wish I could bake.”
“Libby and I could teach you if you want,” Bernie offered as Natasha jumped up on her lap.
Grace smiled. “That would be wonderful.”
Bernie couldn’t help it. She dipped her finger in the whipped cream and let Natasha lick it off. “It’s just a little,” she said apologetically. “She’s hard to resist,” she added.
“I know,” Grace said as Ralph gave Olga a taste.
“It’s not going to kill them,” Ralph said to Grace, even though Grace hadn’t said anything to him. “Speaking of kill,” he said, “I can’t believe that Travis said that Marie was behind the whole thing.”
Bernie nodded. The story had been in the local paper. “Yeah, but not even Lucy bought it.”
Grace shook her head. “The man is such a weasel.”
“Just be glad he didn’t name you as his accomplice,” Libby said.
Grace shook her head. “I can’t believe I didn’t see what he was.”
Bernie fed Natasha another tiny dab of cream. “Well, he’s going to be in jail for a long time. My dad said he pled down to second-degree murder—that’s twenty-five to life.”
Grace shook her head. “Such a stupid thing to do. Why didn’t he just leave?”
“Because he thought that Susie owed him,” Libby said. “Because he was really angry about the way Susie treated him, and he wanted to get her back.”
“I hated her, too, but I didn’t kill her,” Grace said. She sighed and looked sad. “I guess I need to work on making better choices in men.”
“I know how you feel,” Bernie said, thinking of some of her mistakes.
Grace rubbed Boris’s ears. “I think I’m going to concentrate on Boris for a while.”
Ralph leaned forward. “Maybe you could meet someone at my Gamblers Anonymous meeting,” he suggested. “There are a lot of guys there.”
“Unclear on the concept,” Libby and Bernie both blurted out at the same time.
Everyone looked at each other and started laughing. Then they went back to eating the pie. Everything had turned out well, Bernie reflected. Or at least it had for the people in this room. She and her sister had solved Susie’s murder with two days to spare, Ralph was attending Gamblers Anonymous, and Grace had gained back some of the weight she’d lost, a condition that Bernie suspected was related to her relationship with Travis.
Of course, things hadn’t worked out so well for Travis. But then, he hadn’t behaved so well, either.
Or Susie. Especially, things hadn’t worked out for her. But then maybe if she’d been a little kinder, none of this would have happened at all.
Recipes
Since this book deals with a breed of cat that supposedly comes from Russia, and since my grandmother came from someplace in Russia and loved cats, I thought it would be nice to offer up two of the recipes my grandmother made, but then I realized that like many cooks of her generation, my grandmother didn’t use recipes. She cooked by smell, taste, and touch. If you wanted to learn how she made something, you had to be in the kitchen with her. Sometimes even that didn’t help.
Take strudel. I don’t know how many times I watched my grandmother clear the kitchen table, spread out newspaper, and roll out the strudel dough until it was so thin you could read the print through it. Unfortunately, watching didn’t help. I could never do it. I did learn to make beet borscht, however. We ate it cold in the summer and hot in the winter. Not only does it taste good, but the soup is a beautiful shade of red, which becomes a lovely pink when you add a dollop of sour cream.
I made my grandmother’s borscht for years, and then, for some reason, I stopped making it, and when I went to find the recipe, I couldn’t. So, I went on the Internet to look for the very same recipe because not only did I want to make it, but I also wanted to include it in this book. But I couldn’t find it there. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, I did what I should have done to begin with. I turned to my dear friend, and a fantastic cook, Linda Kleinman. Of course, she had the recipe I was looking for. She always does, so here’s Linda Kleinman’s recipe for borscht. I should also add that this soup tastes best when the beets are really fresh.
LINDA KLEINMAN’S BORSCHT
6 large red beets
½ cup fresh lemon juice
¼ cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 Idaho potato, peeled and cubed (optional)
Sour cream, for serving (optional)
Peel the beets and grate them in a food processor. Transfer the grated beets to a large pot and add 6 to 7 cups of water. Next, add the lemon juice, sugar, and salt.
Bring the beets to a boil over medium-high heat, and then turn down the heat and simmer for 40 minutes. (If you want a soup with more substance, throw in a cubed potato, although I like it better without it.)
Taste and adjust seasonings. Serve the borscht hot or cold, with or without a dollop of sour cream.
The recipe makes four generous servings.
My grandmother also made something she called blini, which were thin pancakes she served for dessert with apricot or strawberry jam. Only they weren’t actual blini, because blini are made with buckwheat flour and yeast, while hers were made with regular flour and butter. They are closer to French crepes or Hungarian palacsinta, which are crepes by another name, but whatever you want to call them, they are delicious and, like the borscht, easy to make.
MY GRANDMOTHER’S PANCAKES
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
2 cups whole milk
3 large eggs
3 tablespoons melted sweet butter
Oil for cooking the pancakes
Good-quality apricot or strawberry jam, for serving
Sift together the dry ingredients in a medium bowl and set aside.
In a large bowl combine the milk and the eggs and then beat with a whisk. Slowly add the reserved flour mixture and beat until smooth. Then whisk in the melted butter. Cover the bowl the batter is in, and let the batter rest in the refrigerator for at least one hour, although it can stay in there for as long as twenty-four.
Lightly coat a small frying pan with oil and heat the pan over medium heat. Ladle ¼ cup of batter (or less if you want smaller pancakes) into the pan and tilt and rotate the pan immediately until the batter covers the entire bottom surface. Cook the pancake for 30 seconds, or until lightly golden brown on the bottom. Then flip the pancake and cook the other side for 15 seconds, or until lightly golden brown. Remove the pancake to a large plate and repeat the process until all the pancakes are made.
Spoon about a tablespoon of jam in the middle of each pancake, fold each one over, and serve at once.
The recipe serves four to six.
A Catered Cat Wedding Page 27