A Whisker of Trouble

by Sofie Ryan

  “Couple of weeks, probably.”

  I smiled up at him. “I’m glad.”

  He snaked an arm around my neck and pulled me against him. “That’s because you can’t feed yourself and you know I’ll cook for you.”

  “I can cook. Sort of.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said with a roll of his eyes as he let me go.

  “Rose is teaching me,” I said with an edge of self-righteousness to my voice.

  “How’s that going?” he asked dryly.

  “Merow!” Elvis proclaimed loudly.

  Liam looked at the cat, raising one eyebrow. “That’s pretty much what I thought.”

  “No one asked you,” I stage-whispered to the cat.

  “Mrrr,” he said, seemingly making a face at me before going back to washing behind one ear.

  “I talked to Gram this morning,” Liam said, “and she told me I can stay at her place. She said you have a key.”

  Strictly speaking, Liam was my stepbrother, and wasn’t related to Gram at all, but to her Mom was family even though my dad, Gram’s only child, had died when I was five. So when my mom had married Liam’s dad, they became family, too.

  I nodded.

  “Or I could just live with Rose for the next two weeks,” he said. He swung around and swooped Rose—who had been quietly sneaking up on him—into a hug.

  “It’s so good to see you,” Rose said, grinning from ear to ear.

  “It’s good to be seen.” Liam took both of her hands, took a step backward and looked at her. “You look as beautiful as ever.”

  “And you’re as full of it as ever,” she said sternly, but she was smiling even as she shook her head at him.

  Charlotte came downstairs then carrying a mug of coffee. She handed it to Liam.

  He turned his smile on her. “Thank you. I left early this morning and I’m down by at least three cups.” He took a long drink and Charlotte, just as Rose had, beamed at him.

  I pulled my keys out of my pocket, slid Gram’s off the ring and held them out to him. “The gold one is for the front door and the silver one is for the apartment.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He took another sip of the coffee.

  “There’s nothing to eat,” I warned him. “The fridge is empty and so are the cupboards.”

  “In other words it’s like staying at your place.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  Liam looked at his watch. “I have a meeting downtown and I need to get going or I’m going to be late.” He drained his mug and Charlotte took it from him.

  “How about dinner at Sam’s?” I asked.

  Liam shook his head. “Can’t,” he said. “But I shouldn’t be late, so I’ll talk to you later.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  He gave Rose and Charlotte that little boy grin that had been getting him out of trouble with women—and into some as well—since grade school. “It’s really good to see you both,” he said.

  “Come for dinner some night you’re here,” Charlotte said.

  He nodded. “Give me a day or two to get a schedule worked out and I’ll let you know what works.” He looked at me again. “Later.”

  Liam disappeared out the door and Rose and Charlotte exchanged smiles.

  “It’s good to have Liam here,” Charlotte said.

  Elvis murped his agreement and settled himself a little more comfortably in his chair.

  “I think he looked a little thin,” Rose offered, slipping off her jacket.

  Charlotte frowned. “Maybe a little,” she said. “I expect he’s as bad as Nicolas, working all the time. It would be nice if he could meet someone.”

  I took the empty cup she was holding and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be in my office if anyone needs me,” I said.

  Upstairs I set the empty cup in the sink and poured myself coffee, taking it back to my small office. Elvis was there, sitting on my desk chair.

  “I thought you were staying downstairs,” I said. He blinked his green eyes at me. I picked him up, sat down and settled him on my lap. That involved some grumbling and poking my legs on his part.

  It was good to have Liam in town for a while. We hadn’t lived in the same house for years and even though he knew how to drive me crazy better than anyone else, sometimes I missed seeing him every day.

  I knew how lucky we were to be so close. Most people who didn’t know assumed that we were biological siblings and were surprised to find out that we weren’t, a tribute to Mom and Dad—and Gram—who knew that family was more than biology. As far as Gram was concerned, Liam was just as much her grandchild as I was.

  And a bonus to having Liam around for the next couple of weeks was that Rose and Charlotte and Liz would have someone else’s love life to ask loaded questions about instead of mine and Nick’s.

  I wondered if Liam had let Nick know he was in town. Probably not, since he hadn’t let me know. I put a hand on Elvis to steady him and reached for the phone. The cat gave me the stink eye for disrupting his nap.

  “Hi, Sarah, what’s up?” Nick asked when he answered the phone.

  “Liam’s here,” I said, leaning back and carefully propping my feet on the edge of the desk. “I figure since he didn’t call me he probably didn’t call you, either.”

  “No, he didn’t, but it’s great he’s in town,” Nick said. “How long is he staying?”

  Elvis lifted his head, nudging my hand. I took the hint and began to stroke his fur. He closed his eyes and purred. “He could be here for a couple of weeks. He’s consulting on the new development proposal.”

  “Good. That must mean it’s a go.”

  “According to Liz, it is,” I said. “After the North by West deal fell apart, she got involved with the group that was looking for another developer.”

  “Why do you know that and I don’t?” he asked.

  “Probably because I make it to dinner at your mom’s more than you do.”

  Nick laughed. “Speaking of dinner, can you and Liam meet me at Sam’s tonight?”

  On my lap Elvis stretched, yawned and then looked expectantly at me. He made an exhalation that sounded a lot like a sigh of contentment.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Liam had plans.” I realized my brother hadn’t told me what his plans were.

  “So just you and me?” Nick said.

  I couldn’t keep mooching meals from Rose—well, maybe as far as she was concerned, I could—and I didn’t feel like going grocery-shopping after work. “Sure,” I said. “But there’s something I need to tell you first. You might want to rescind that invitation.”

  “Mom already told me that they’ve started their investigation.”

  “And you’re surprisingly calm about that,” I teased.

  I heard him exhale slowly. “I give up,” he said.

  I had a metal image of Nick holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “They just ignore me,” he continued. “They smile sweetly, pat my cheek and do what they damn well want.”

  I laughed. “Welcome to my life,” I said. “And by the way, what took you so long?”

  He started to laugh as well. “I don’t know. I guess I’m a slow learner.”

  I heard other voices in the background. “I have to go,” Nick said. “How’s six work for you?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Do you want me to pick you up?”

  “I’ll meet you there,” I said.

  We said good-bye and I ended the call. “Time to get up,” I said to Elvis. I gave him one last scratch behind his left ear and then I picked him up and set him on the floor. “Go see if we have any customers.”

  He shook himself, took a quick pass at his face with a paw and disappeared around the half-open door. Elvis knew customers generally meant lots of attention f
or him, especially if he did his Sad Kitty face and made sure the long scar that cut diagonally across his nose was in the right light.

  I stood up and brushed cat hair off my pants. Seeing Liam and talking to Nick had distracted me, albeit briefly, from dealing with what we’d learned from Paul Duvall and his adorable daughter.

  It was easy for people to feel a little uncertain about trash pickers like Teresa. Both Teresa and Cleveland, the other picker I bought from regularly, lived pretty much outside the conventional work world. They bartered, traded, scavenged and Dumpster-dived for everything from furniture and car parts to clothes and food. They were both quick to make a deal if it would make them a profit and equally quick to share whatever they had with anyone who needed it. Cleveland and Teresa had always been fair with me and I’d tried to do the same with them.

  I thought about Teresa. She was quiet and serious, but she had a good eye for small things like clocks, jewelry and old general store fixtures. I ran my hand over the cigarette case on my desk that I used to hold pencil leads and paper clips. I’d bought it from Teresa because it had reminded me of a similar box my dad had used to hold guitar picks and extra strings.

  I couldn’t put Rose and Mr. P. off forever. They were going to talk to Teresa sooner rather than later and I hadn’t exactly been straight with them. It wasn’t that I was afraid she’d get railroaded, because I knew there was no way she would have been sneaking around Edison Hall’s house looking for something to take. It was because I knew there was at least a possibility that she had been.

  Chapter 6

  When I went downstairs Elvis and Charlotte were with two women who looked to be interested in an old card file cabinet that Avery had found in a Dumpster behind the library. Mac was in the workroom with the parts of . . . something spread across the workbench.

  “I take it you saw Liam,” I said.

  He held a small metal gear up to the light and frowned at it. “I did. He’s going to give me a hand with the rest of the drywall out in the workshop, probably on Sunday.”

  I’d had plans to turn the old garage into a workshop from the very beginning. Aaron Ellison, who plowed the parking lot in the winter, also owned a roofing company and he’d given me a good deal on a new roof after Mac got his mother’s old grandfather clock working again. We had a woodstove for heat and several massive shelving units that had come from an old warehouse Liam had been renovating for storage.

  Mac and I had insulated and drywalled three of the walls. All that was left was the fourth and part of the ceiling and now it looked as though that would be finished soon as well.

  “How did the detecting go?” Mac asked, settling the gear on a piece of cloth by his left elbow and turning to give me his full attention.

  “All right,” I said with an offhand shrug.

  He studied my face for a moment without speaking.

  “Do you remember that gray Cape Cod diagonally across the street from Edison Hall’s house?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It turns out a friend of Josh Evans’s just bought it a few weeks ago.”

  “Someone you know.”

  I nodded. “Paul Duvall.” I was taking way too long to get to the point, but I knew Mac wouldn’t rush me. “He saw Teresa at the house a couple of times and she was around last week as well.”

  “A lot of people would have been around last week,” Mac said. “We were all over town. It was the spring pickup.”

  “I know,” I said, fidgeting with a button on my shirt. “The thing is, it looks like Teresa might have been at the house the morning we found Ronan Quinn’s body.” I blew out a breath. “And she might have been trying to avoid being seen.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes and no.”

  Mac reached for a rag on the bench and wiped his hands. “Tell me the yes,” he said.

  “Paul saw Teresa’s van driving down the street sometime before six in the morning.”

  “And the part that makes you not so sure?”

  “The person who thinks Teresa was hiding by the garage is four.” I folded my arms over my midsection.

  Mac tossed the rag back onto the bench.

  “You know some of Teresa’s background,” I said. “You know she was arrested more than once when she was a teenager. And you’ve seen what a black-and-white person she is.”

  “I’m guessing Rose wants to talk to her.”

  I nodded. “She does.” Through Jess I knew that Teresa had had several run-ins with the police when she was younger, all stemming from Teresa taking things that she believed were rightly hers. I also knew something a lot of people didn’t, that she’d spent some time in a psychiatric hospital after the death of her mother when she was twelve. Maybe it was because we’d both lost parents when we were young that I felt a kinship, a connection with her. Maybe if I hadn’t had Rose and Charlotte and Liz to wrap their arms around me—and my mother and Gram—when my father died, the same thing might have happened to me.

  “I don’t know how much they know about Teresa’s background and it’s not really my story to tell,” I said. I raked my hand back through my hair and watched a few strands fall to the floor. Why did it seem as if that happened a lot more when the Angels had a case?

  “So tell Rose that,” Mac said. He picked up a small spring between his thumb and forefinger, studied it for a moment and then set it down again. He looked at me and just a glimpse of a smile played across his face.

  “Tell me what?”

  Rose was standing at the far end of the workroom. She always claimed she had ears like a wolf, and I was inclined to believe her.

  I smiled at Mac. “Thanks,” I said softly. I’d told Nick more than once that sometimes he underestimated his mother and her friends. Mac had just (nicely) pointed out that I was doing the same thing.

  I walked over to Rose.

  “What is it?” Rose asked. “It’s something to do with Teresa Reynard, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She looked up at me, her head tipped to one side. And then she smiled. “You’re a kind person, Sarah,” she said.

  She must have seen the confusion on my face.

  “I called Liz when we got back. When she was a girl she went steady with Teresa’s grandfather. She went steady with half the male population of North Harbor, but that’s not really relevant.”

  Rose knew about Teresa’s background.

  Why was I surprised about that? Between the three of them, she and Liz and Charlotte had gone to school with, taught—in the case of Rose and Charlotte, or dated—in the case of Liz, most of the male population of North Harbor over the age of twenty-one.

  “I’m not saying I think you’d ambush Teresa—” I began.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” she interrupted. “I can be a bit of a pit bull when we’re working on a case. But I promise I’ll be a pussycat with Teresa.”

  I swallowed back a smile, leaned over and gave her a hug. “How about I get in touch with Teresa and get her to stop by?”

  Rose nodded. “That’ll be fine.” She looked at her watch. “Heavens! It’s almost time for me to get to work. What do you need me to do?”

  “There are two boxes of grade school readers that I’d like to put out on display,” I said. I looked back over my shoulder and frowned. “I’m just not sure where they should go.”

  Rose looked thoughtful, her tongue caught between her teeth. “What if I rearranged things in the hutch?” she asked, referring to one of my first purchases for the store, a monstrosity we hadn’t been able to sell in almost a year. At the moment its shelves were showcasing everything from Avery’s trophy candleholders to a collection of Depression glass plates. “I can spread everything else around the store.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. Rose had a good eye for displaying things in unexpected ways like a colle
ction of cocktail glasses on a tray next to a vintage rubber ice pack and several patent medicine bottles.

  “I’ll just get Alfred a cup of tea and then I’ll get started,” she said, bustling past me.

  I walked slowly back to Mac, wondering if there were any other private investigators who drank so much tea. “I’m going to grab some lunch and do some paperwork. Would you get Avery started cleaning that silver service I bought from Helen Craig?”

  “Will do,” he said, rooting through the bits of metal strewn in front of him. “Did you talk to Rose about Teresa?”

  I nodded. “She agreed not to go pit bull on Teresa. And I agreed to ask Teresa to stop in.”

  He grinned. “That’s good.”

  I found myself smiling in spite of myself. “Well, not to overkill the metaphor, but you know what she can be like when she sinks her teeth into a case.”

  Mac groaned and shook his head. “Go eat, Sarah,” he said. “I think you’re suffering from low blood sugar.”

  I laughed and headed for the shop.

  A black paw appeared around the side of my office door as I settled on the love seat and began to unwrap my roast beef sandwich from McNamara’s. Elvis had impeccable kitty radar when it came to lunch. He stopped for a drink from his water bowl but ignored the kitty kibble in his dish, jumping up instead to sit next to me on the love seat. He leaned forward and sniffed in the direction of the sandwich on my lap, then looked expectantly at me.

  I pulled a small bit of roast beef from between the slices of French bread and offered it to the cat. “You’re so spoiled,” I said as he ate.

  He made a low, contented sound in the back of his throat. After he’d had a taste of my sandwich, Elvis was happy to sit next to me on the love seat and wash his face while I had my lunch. When I finished eating I moved behind the desk. I’d sent a text to Teresa and I knew I had about an hour before she showed up.

  When I went downstairs just before one thirty, I found Rose standing in the middle of the store, head cocked to one side, hands on her hips, frowning at something.

  I walked over to join her. She’d brought out an old wooden dressmaker’s dummy that Mac had trash-picked. Avery had named it Francine. Rose had attached a small globe to the top of Francine’s neck, topped it with an oversize hat swathed in lavender tulle and hung about half of our collection of costume jewelry necklaces around the dummy’s neck.