Cat Trick

by Sofie Kelly

  She looked so much like her father and had the same deep loyalty to the people she cared about as he had. And like Agatha, she seemed to inspire that in other people, too.

  “Somebody will figure out something,” I told her.

  What I didn’t say was maybe that somebody would turn out to be me.

  12

  There were no dismembered chicken parts strewn around the kitchen when I got home, although I did find what looked to me to be gray fur on the seat of the big chair in the living room. “Were you sleeping on my chair?” I asked Owen.

  His whiskers twitched, as though he were thinking about my question. Then he gave a sharp, short meow.

  I reached for the little clump of cat hair. “Okay, so you might not have been sleeping,” I said. “But I know you were up here.” I turned around and discovered I was talking to myself.

  Hercules kept me company while I made supper, and Owen prowled the backyard, poking around the flower beds and chasing the odd bird. While I ate, I told them what I’d learned from Marcus about the Scott brothers. “How are we going to figure out who killed Mike Glazer?” I asked them.

  Hercules meowed softly. I leaned sideways to see what he was looking at. I’d brought home two books and a DVD from the library. They were sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, which Hercules seemed to be staring at.

  “You think a book on Scottish history would help?” I asked.

  The look he shot me was clearly disdainful.

  I reached for the DVD. It was Young Sherlock Holmes. “You think we should play Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Merow,” he said.

  I leaned back in the chair. “So what do you think we should do? Round up the usual suspects?”

  Herc looked up at the ceiling. Could cats roll their eyes?

  “Oh, right,” I said. “That’s Casablanca, not Sherlock Holmes.”

  The cat brought his gaze back to me, not at all impressed with my sense of humor or my knowledge of old movies.

  I reached down to stroke the top of his head. “Okay, no more teasing,” I said. “So who are our suspects?”

  Owen chimed in then with a loud meow.

  I looked over at him trying to work something sticky off the side of a back paw. “Liam?” I asked.

  He meowed again and went back to his cleanup routine.

  I straightened up in the chair. “Okay, Liam,” I said to Hercules. “Maybe Abigail’s friend Georgia, and maybe even Burtis. Who else?” He looked at the books again. “Not Mary,” I said. “I know she threatened to launch Mike Glazer between two streetlights like she was kicking for three points in the Super Bowl, but I refuse to believe she’d kill anyone.”

  I laced my fingers together and rested my hands on the top of my head. “I know Marcus said the Scott brothers couldn’t have had anything to do with Mike Glazer’s death, but I’d still like to know more about them.”

  Hercules lifted one paw and looked at me. Feeling kind of silly, I leaned down and held out my hand. He put his paw on my palm. It looked like we had a plan.

  The phone rang just as I was starting the dishes. “Hello, Katydid,” my mother’s voice said, warm somehow against my ear.

  I dropped down onto the footstool. “Hi, Mom,” I said. “How’s LA?” My mother was in Los Angeles, reprising the role she’d created on a soap opera early in the year.

  “Warm and sunny,” she said. “At least I’m assuming it is. I’m at the studio.”

  “How’s everything going?”

  She laughed. I loved the sound. My mother had a great laugh—big and deep and warm. “Wonderful. I could very easily turn into a diva. I have a gorgeous suite. They send a car for me every morning. And my dressing room is bigger than our first apartment.” She paused. “Or our second apartment, or our third.”

  I laughed too. “I get the picture, Mom.”

  “I read in your paper that there was a dead body found in the downtown,” she said. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, sweetie, would you?”

  My mother read the Mayville Heights Chronicle online so she could keep up with what was happening in town.

  “How do you do that?” I asked.

  She laughed again. “Mother’s intuition. Did you find the body, or is the dead man connected to someone you know?”

  I stretched my feet out across the hardwood floor. “Actually, Hercules found the body.”

  “Your cat?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Most people just buy their cats a couple of rubber mice and a ball of yarn to entertain them, Katydid,” she said dryly.

  “It’s kind of complicated, Mom.”

  “The best stories always are.”

  I explained about Ruby’s paintings, Hercules bolting across the street, and Mike Glazer’s body being in the tent. I even filled her in on the proposal for Legacy Tours.

  “So what happens to the tour idea now?”

  “It’s still on,” I said, rolling my head from one side to the other. “One of the other partners is coming to town.”

  “My fingers and toes are crossed for all of you,” she said.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said. “Now, how about a couple of hints about your story line? Maggie’s going to ask me.”

  Mags had become a loyal Wild and Wonderful fan after she’d started watching to see my mother in action.

  “I could never give away story line secrets,” Mom said, and I pictured her with her hand over her heart. I waited. “But if I were to do it . . .” She went on to tell me a couple of surprises planned for her character that I knew would have Maggie glued to her DVR.

  “I have to go,” Mom said. “They’re going to be calling me to the set soon. I love you, and I sent you something in the mail.”

  “You sent me something? What?”

  “Now, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?” she said. “Call your father and your brother and sister. I’ll talk to you soon.” With that, she was gone.

  I hung up the receiver, wondering what she was sending me. Knowing my mother, it could be anything. I looked at the phone. Now that I’d talked to my mom, I wanted to talk to the rest of the family.

  Ethan answered the phone. “Hey, Kath,” he said.

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked. “Do you have Mom’s ESP?” Our mother had this spooky ability to somehow know when it was one of her kids on the phone.

  “No,” he said. “We have this little invention called caller ID here in the big city. I know you probably don’t have that kind of thing out there in the sticks.”

  “Yeah, we just make do with tin cans and string.”

  “I figured,” he said. “And for the record, when I talked to Mom earlier, she did say you’d call around now.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “So what are you up to, baby brother?”

  “Still working on the video. And now Sara’s got this idea of making a video about making the video. Oh, yeah, and I cut my hair.”

  “You cut your hair?” I said.

  “Well, technically it was cut by a redhead with—”

  I cleared my throat.

  “—a very nice smile,” he finished. I could hear the laugher in his voice.

  He spent a few minutes telling me more about the video. Then he said, “Sara wants to talk to you. She keeps poking me in the back of the head with her bony old-woman fingers.”

  There were sounds of a scuffle and then Sara came on the line. “Hi, Kathleen,” she said. “Ignore Ethan. He’s a wuss.”

  “Hi,” I said. “How’s the video going?”

  “Good. Ethan doesn’t pay attention to what I tell him to do, but everyone else is pretty easy to work with.” I heard something in the background. “Just a sec,” Sara said.

  “Sorry,” she said more clearly a moment later. “We shot some of the scenes at the warehouse today. I’m e-mailing you photos.”

  The band’s song was called “In a Hundred Other Worlds.” Sara’s idea for the video had different versions of
the band singing the song—the bands in the hundred other worlds. They were doing most of the filming in an old warehouse that Ethan had been able to rent for almost nothing.

  “I can’t wait to see them,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, if you’d been here, you would have seen way more of the guys than you ever wanted to, because I certainly did.”

  “Do I want to know what you mean?” I asked. Hercules came in from the kitchen and leaned his black-and-white head against my leg. I reached down and lifted him onto my lap.

  “I mean Milo, Devon, Jake and our baby brother without their shirts on.” Sara was older than Ethan by close to four minutes and never let him forget it.

  “Why?” I said.

  She laughed. She sounded so much like Mom. “Because I had to airbrush them from the waist up. Well, not Ethan. I got a friend of mine to come do him.”

  “Airbrush?” I said.

  “Makeup.” Sara worked as a makeup artist to support her filmmaking. “I needed the tattoos and the piercings gone for one of the scenes in the video. They’re supposed to look like seventeenth-century pirates in frilly shirts open to the waist. The piercings were easy; they just had to take out all their hardware. Best way to cover up all their ink was to airbrush. It did a great job, but none of those guys were on my list of men I wanted to see without their shirts.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. I got a mental picture of Sara airbrushing makeup onto Ethan’s band mates while they stood around bare-chested, cringing. It’s not that they weren’t all exhibitionists to some degree, but I knew each one of the guys had a bit of a crush on her, and as for Ethan, the only thing that would have been more embarrassing was if it had been Sara spraying him with makeup instead of her friend. It still made him squirrelly when I reminded him that I’d changed his diapers.

  “I don’t know whether to be glad I wasn’t there, or sorry I missed it,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sending you pictures of them in their frilly shirts,” she said.

  In the background, Ethan yelled, “No, you’re not.”

  I talked to Sara for a few more minutes. She promised she’d tell Dad I’d called, and I promised to turn the most embarrassing shot of Ethan in his ruffled shirt into my screensaver.

  I put the phone back on the table. I missed them. And I couldn’t stall much longer on giving Everett my decision on whether or not I was going to stay in Mayville Heights. The whole thing had gotten a lot more complicated since I’d gone back to Boston to see everyone during the summer.

  “They were different,” I said to Hercules. “I didn’t feel like I had to take care of everybody and everything.” He walked his front paws up my chest and licked my chin. “Okay, maybe it was me that was different.”

  I picked him up and went out to the kitchen. I’d miss my little house and my friends if I went back to Boston, and I had no idea how Owen and Hercules would adjust to being in the city. And if I stayed, then I was always going to be a little homesick to see Sara and Ethan and Mom and Dad. There wasn’t any easy answer.

  I scratched Hercules’s chin and he made a contented sigh. “When I was in Boston, no one ever asked me to figure out why someone got killed,” I said.

  Herc turned his head to look at the volunteer schedule for feeding the cats at Wisteria Hill. Marcus and I were up on Friday morning. I laid my cheek against the top of the cat’s soft, furry head. There was no playing Sherlock Holmes in Boston, but there was no Marcus, either.

  13

  Maggie called first thing in the morning while I was standing bleary-eyed in front of my closet, trying to decide what I was going to wear. “Did I wake you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Owen did that. He seemed to think that if he was awake then everyone should be awake. He sat by the bed and he was either meowing the ‘Toreador Song’ from Carmen or ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm.’ I’m not sure which.”

  “Aww, I bet he was adorable.” Maggie thought everything Owen did was sweet or adorable. Mr. Adorable himself was coming across the floor to me with that uncanny radar he had that always told him when it was Maggie on the phone.

  “If by adorable you mean annoying, then yes,” I said.

  She laughed. “I need your truck, Kath, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I could pick you up on my way to the library and then you could bring the truck over whenever you’re finished with it.” Owen’s back end was twitching, but before I could lean over and scoop him up, he jumped onto my lap.

  “Don’t you want to know why I want your truck?” she asked.

  “I’m guessing you need to move something.”

  I heard her breathe out and guessed that she was stretching while she talked to me. “I need to get a couple of collage panels over to the community center, and Ruby’s gone to Minneapolis for the day, so I can’t use her truck.”

  Owen was trying to worm his way to the telephone receiver. He almost succeeded in bumping it out of my hand. “Sorry,” I said to Maggie. “Owen’s here.”

  “Hold the phone up to his ear.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t talk to Owen and Hercules like they can understand you,” she said. “Kath, put the phone by his ear.”

  “All right.” I looked at Owen. “Maggie wants to talk to you,” I said, realizing as the words came out of my mouth that I had just proved Maggie’s point.

  I held the receiver next to the cat’s furry, gray ear. A moment passed. He meowed and then he started to purr. Clearly he recognized Maggie’s voice.

  I waited. Owen turned to look at me, and then he jumped down to the floor and headed out of the room. I put the phone back to my own ear.

  “Owen’s gone,” I said.

  “I know. I told him to go finish his breakfast,” Maggie said. “And I told him I’d see him on Friday.” I’d invited Mags and Roma for supper on Friday night.

  “He was purring.”

  “The little fur ball is a charmer,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

  “I’ll come pick you up,” I said. “I just have to have some breakfast and get my things together. I should be there in about half an hour.”

  “Thanks, Kath,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  I went back to the kitchen to make myself a bowl of oatmeal. Owen was happily moving food from his dish to the floor. Hercules had already finished eating and gone somewhere to do cat stuff.

  Maggie was waiting out front when I got to her place. “Hi,” she said as she slid onto the front seat. “Did Fuzz Face finish his breakfast?”

  I nodded. “He did. He’s probably rolling around on the footstool or the chair right now, trying to get as much cat hair on it as possible.”

  She laughed. “That’s one of the things I like about Owen; he has that rebel cat streak.”

  I shook a finger at her as I pulled away from the curb. “That’s because you don’t have to vacuum the cat hair off the footstool.”

  That just made her laugh harder.

  “I talked to my mother last night,” I said.

  Maggie immediately sat up straighter. “And?” she prompted.

  “And she’s having a good time in Los Angeles. She said her dressing room is huge and the network sends a car for her each morning.”

  “Did she at least tell you who she’s sleeping with?”

  I shot her a quick look.

  Mags waved a hand in the air. “I don’t mean your mother. I mean her character.”

  “Sorry.” I shrugged. “She didn’t.”

  She slumped back against the seat. “I was kind of hoping she’d go for Billy. They had great chemistry the last time on the show.”

  I stopped at the corner and looked both ways before heading through the intersection. “She did tell me who Jack’s going to sleep with,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road. That got her attention.

  “Who?” she asked.

  I told her what my mother had said.

&
nbsp; “On Victor’s desk?” I nodded, and she chortled with laughter and all but squirmed in her seat.

  She badgered me with questions the rest of the way to the River Arts building. “Next time I talk to Mom, I’ll put you on the phone,” I said as I backed the truck into Maggie’s parking spot behind the building.

  “Seriously?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Could we call her tomorrow night?”

  The look on her face reminded me of Owen when he was trying to wheedle a stinky cracker out of me. “Maybe,” I said, and she gave me a goofy grin of happiness. Maggie’s newly discovered love for the Wild and Wonderful was a lot like her undying affection for Matt Lauer—one of those things that I was never quite going to understand.

  I took the truck keys off my key ring. “Here,” I said. “Bring the truck back when you’re finished. I’m at the library all day.”

  She hugged me. “Thanks. I should have it back to you by lunchtime.”

  I grabbed my briefcase and got out of the truck. “I’ll see you later,” I said with a wave.

  I walked down to Main Street and stopped at the corner to look out over the water. It was a gorgeous fall day. The white tents on the green grass against the backdrop of the deep blue water looked like a painting. If I didn’t stay in Mayville Heights, this was one of the many, many things I was going to miss. I wondered if Mike Glazer had missed Mayville. Was that one of the reasons he’d agreed to come and hear Liam’s tour proposal?

  I was about to head down the street to the library when the end flap of the closest tent lifted and Oren Kenyon stepped out. I raised a hand in greeting, and he started toward me. There were no cars coming, so I crossed the street and met him on the sidewalk.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  He gave me a small smile. “Hello, Kathleen,” he said. Oren was tall and rangy with sun-bleached blond hair. His large hands had long, slender fingers, and he was an accomplished pianist as well as a talented carpenter. He turned and looked back over his shoulder at the tent.