Pouncing on Murder

by Laurie Cass

  I tried to remember exactly what he’d said, and, three bits of sandwich later, it came to me.

  Stanton has been trying to talk Henry into selling since last fall.

  Which meant that if Cole was telling the truth, Felix wasn’t. Conversely, if Felix was telling the truth, Cole was definitely not.

  One of them was lying.

  And that raised the big question: why?

  I sat there, staring at my sandwich, knowing that a possible answer was “To hide a murder.” A sudden wind gust made me grab for my napkin. I looked up at the sun and watched it disappear behind the leading edge of a massive bank of low clouds.

  Fifteen seconds ago I’d been happy to sit outside, but with the wind shifted and the sun gone, inside was suddenly much more appealing.

  I tossed the last of my meal into a nearby garbage can and headed back to the safest place in the world, where cold winds never blew, where people were friendly and polite, and where things were interesting but not scary.

  The library.

  Chapter 13

  Thursday, a bookmobile day, was a happy day of children who laughed, adults who smiled, and an Eddie who not only supervised the activity with aplomb, but who willingly participated in any event that seemed to need his assistance. Which, that day, was a toddler who wanted to clutch at the “’itty ’itty” with both hands and an elderly man who said he’d never liked a cat in his life until he’d met the bookmobile cat.

  I was a trifle concerned that all the attention might go to his head, but on the way to Chilson, Julia began a recitation of Mr. Mistoffelees from T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which I was pretty sure took the wind out of Eddie’s sails, especially when she finished the poem and described the onstage antics of the Mr. Mistoffelees from the Cats Broadway musical version.

  “Poor Eddie,” I said, laughing. “He’ll never be the dancer Mr. Mistoffelees has to be.”

  “Eddie has his own special charm.” Julia blew him a kiss. “Don’t you, my fuzzy little friend? We love you just the way you are.”

  “Mrr,” he said agreeably.

  “I think he said he loves us, too,” Julia said, laughing.

  Most likely he was saying that he wanted a treat, that he deserved a treat, and that if he didn’t get a treat he was going to sleep on my head that night, but I let Julia keep her anthropomorphic point of view. Why disillusion her? She’d realize soon enough that Eddie, charming though he might be, was just a cat and not a small furry human.

  “Mrr,” Eddie said again, this time a little louder.

  “Are, too, just a cat,” I muttered under my breath, quietly enough that Julia wouldn’t be able to hear. I flicked a glance over to Eddie, and saw him turn around inside his carrier and present his hind end to my direction.

  Mrr to you, too, pal, I thought, then grinned. Who was I to talk about treating Eddie like a human?

  After the fine Thursday, it was a little depressing to wake up to a Friday with the dim light of a day that promised little except low, heavy clouds and rain, with the added attraction of some thumping winds.

  “What do you think, Eddie?” We were sitting in the houseboat’s dining booth. “Looks like the last day of April is going to be decidedly dreary. What are you going to do with your time?”

  I set my cereal bowl on the floor, and Eddie jumped down to lick out the last of the milk. When he was finished, he sat and gave his face a swipe with his front paw; then he padded down the stairs and through the short hallway. There was a quiet squish of fabric, and I knew he’d jumped onto the bed.

  “Have a nice day,” I said as I pulled on my rain boots and raincoat. “Sleep well.” When I opened the door to let myself out, I could have sworn I heard the faintest whisper of a sleepy “Mrr.”

  Smiling, I headed out into the spattering rain. How I could find comfort in knowing that my cat was spending the entire day sleeping on my bed, I didn’t know. I only knew it was true, and that I was very, very glad Eddie had chosen to spend his life with me.

  A few short hours later, I desperately wanted to join Eddie. To pull the covers up over my head and sleep the rest of the day away. Or even better, to sleep away the next week and two days.

  “Did you hear me, Minerva?”

  I had, in fact, heard what my boss had just told me over the phone, but I didn’t want to believe it. If it had been anyone else, I would have laughed and told him to quit the kidding, that he’d almost scared me with his bad joke, and to try harder next time.

  “Yes, Stephen, I heard you.” Bizarrely, my voice sounded normal. “But I was hoping . . .”

  Stephen snorted. “That I was joking, perhaps? I would have thought you’d know me better than that. No, when I told you that Ross Weaver is having to cancel his appearance at next week’s book fair, I was being completely truthful.”

  “That’s what I figured,” I said faintly.

  “Yes,” Stephen said. “Ross has had a family medical emergency involving his mother, and he won’t be able to attend the book fair.”

  “I hope she’ll be all right,” I murmured.

  “What? Yes, yes, she’s getting the best of care, and it’s likely that she’ll be fine, but Ross is canceling all appearances for the time being. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Well, then.” Stephen cleared his throat. “I just wanted you to know the circumstances so you can take appropriate action.”

  Appropriate action? I held down my laughter, which would undoubtedly end up as slightly hysterical.

  “Minerva,” Stephen said sternly. “If you have the least desire to take over as director, you’ll need to learn to take charge during emergencies of this kind. You’ll need to prioritize and to quickly decide which items you can delegate. You’ll need to . . . Minnie, are you listening?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, scribbling another name onto my notepad. “I need to decide what I can delegate.”

  “Exactly. Now, do you need help with this or can I rely on you?”

  I sat up straight, turned to the left, and gave the ceiling a smart salute. You can rely on me, sir! “I’m all set, Stephen.”

  “Let me know if you need anything,” he said, and the phone went silent.

  I hung up the phone, looked at my list, then picked it up again. If the book fair had any chance of success, I had to get busy fast.

  • • •

  At the end of the day, the muscles around my jaw were tense from too much talking. I’d called the McCades, I’d called Carolyn Grice, a wealthy woman I’d met last year. I’d called Julia. I’d called the bookstore and the schools and the museum and the chamber of commerce, begging for the name of any author who might be willing to drop everything and come to Chilson.

  “When?” they’d all asked. “Well,” I’d said, “next Saturday. For the book fair.” After they realized I was serious, they said they’d try, but the doubt in their tones revealed how unlikely it was that their efforts would be successful.

  I thumped my head onto my desk and wondered if I’d have less stress in my life if I switched careers and became an air traffic controller.

  • • •

  I worked late that night, trying to tidy up the Book Fair Fiasco. After calling the newspaper and asking them to print a change-of-plans advertisement, I posted notices about Ross Weaver’s cancellation on the library’s Web site, on the library’s Facebook page, and tweeted the sad news far and wide. Mr. Weaver, if he’d known, would have been pleased at the widespread return concern for his family emergency, and I said I’d pass on all the notes to him. Which I did by bundling them all into one big e-mail and tossing it over to Stephen.

  By the time I dragged myself home it was long past dark, and only the knowledge that if I didn’t eat something, I might faint dead away on the sidewalk and become an object at which people pointed and murmured vague comments about “How sad, she had so much potential” sent me into Fat Boys Pizza for the sustenance of a su
b sandwich. Heavy on the protein, ma’am.

  Eddie and I and a fresh copy of Alan Bradley’s latest Flavia de Luce mystery went to bed early, and we woke up to a bookmobile day of stiff winds and fast-moving clouds.

  When I lifted the cat carrier out of my car for transportation to the bookmobile, a sharp wind gust filled the carrier and twisted me around.

  “MrrrRRRrrr!”

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “It’s just that kind of a day.”

  But it wasn’t, not really. Because as soon as Julia came aboard and we were rolling deep into the eastern part of Tonedagana County, the clouds parted and the sun came out.

  Julia, though she was a Tony award–winning actress, was not on anyone’s list of quality singers. That, however, didn’t keep her from singing the song from the musical Annie, the one where the little girl is betting her last dollar that the sun will shine the next day.

  When she paused for breath, I asked, “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “This is northwest lower Michigan. Are you sure you want to bet any money, let alone your last dollar, that the weather forecasters are accurate?”

  Julia grinned. “Now, Ms. Hamilton, you know perfectly well the song is a metaphor. It’s about being optimistic, about looking on the bright side of life. What’s so funny?”

  I shook my head, trying to get rid of the image from the last scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. “Metaphor, shmetphor. All I care about right now is finding a Ross Weaver replacement. How can the book fair possibly be a success if—” I blinked at the sight in front of me.

  “Minnie?” Julia asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Um, sure.” I gave my eyes a quick rub but was still seeing what I thought I’d seen. We were approaching Peebles. With a population of less than a thousand, Peebles had a retail district of a block and a half and was primarily known for its outstanding diner-style restaurant.

  And right in front of my eyes was Mitchell Koyne, walking into the restaurant next to the same woman I’d seen him with on my trip back from Alpena.

  “Do you see that?” I asked Julia, tipping my head Mitchell-ward. “Do you know who that is?”

  Julia squinted. “It looks like Bianca Sims. She’s a real estate agent. Out of Petoskey, I think. Don’t know the gentleman. He’s a tall one, isn’t he? Do you know him?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, grinning inside and out. “I do indeed.”

  And the last of my mostly self-induced stress about the book fair vanished. How could I ever have thought, even in jest, about changing jobs? Everything would work out, one way or another. Either people would show up or people wouldn’t, and all I could do was my best.

  Plus, out here on the bookmobile, I came across things like this, seeing Mitchell Koyne, of all people, holding hands with a real-live successful professional woman. How could life get any better?

  • • •

  The second half of the day took us close to the area where I’d followed Mitchell’s truck, which meant we were nearing Neva Chatham territory. I told Julia about the incident, and she made sympathetic noises, reassuring me that my reaction to a gun pointed in my general direction hadn’t been over-the-top. However, she didn’t know anything about the eccentric Ms. Chatham and wasn’t sure she knew anyone who did.

  “We’re in the opposite corner of the county from Chilson,” she said, a little apologetically. “I don’t know many people over here.”

  So when the first group of bookmobilers came on board that afternoon, I started asking around, in a sideways sort of way. The first person I asked was a tailored elderly gentleman whom I might have wanted to introduce to my aunt if she hadn’t already been seeing Otto.

  “Neva Chatham,” he said, smoothing his white mustache. “John Chatham’s daughter?”

  I had no idea, but there couldn’t be many people walking around with the first name of Neva. “She lives in an old farmhouse out on Chatham Road.”

  “That’s right,” my gentleman said. “John and Marie’s daughter. Only child, if I recall correctly.” He got a faraway look in his pale blue eyes. “They were good people. Sad, really, what happened.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  He shook his head, clearing away the memories. “What happens to all of us. We get old, we get sick, and we die.” He smiled, taking away the brutishness of his statements. “Don’t mind me, I can get a little maudlin in April. It’s the weather, you know.”

  I blinked at him. It was the first of May, and the weather had turned sunny and bright and close to downright warm. But April can hang on inside you, so I knew what he meant.

  At the next stop, I asked Mrs. Dugan, a patron I knew to be chatty, about Neva.

  Mrs. Dugan sighed and shook her head, her white curls staying in place with steadfast firmness. “I worry about her, I really do. All alone in that big house with no one to talk to. She doesn’t even have cable television.”

  “I heard she was an only child.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. Doted on her father. Not sure she ever left home, especially after he got sick. Then he died and her mother just faded away, if you know what I mean.”

  “How old was Neva?” I asked.

  “When her dad got sick? Goodness, I really don’t know. I was just a little girl at the time, so she was probably somewhere in her twenties. And the poor man lingered so.” Mrs. Dugan sighed. “Probably lasted twenty-five years. Thinking back on it, he probably had multiple sclerosis. So little they can do about it now, and back then there was nothing.”

  Which meant Neva was around fifty when her father died. She’d spent the most productive years of her life caretaking her father, then her mother, and never had a life of her own. No husband, no children, and now no grandchildren.

  Mrs. Dugan was still talking, so I tuned back in. “How Neva managed to take care of her parents and run that farm I’ll never know. The place has been in her family since homestead days, so I doubt there’s a mortgage, but the property taxes alone must eat her alive.”

  Property taxes. Yet another reason to put off buying a house. “It’s a working farm?” I asked.

  “If you want to call it that.” Mrs. Dugan half laughed. “She has a few dairy cows and runs a summer farm stand, selling fruits and vegetables. Raises quite a variety, Neva does, with that greenhouse her granddad made. Gets strawberries before anyone else in the county.”

  “She does this all by herself?”

  Mrs. Dugan shrugged. “Must be. Makes jams and jellies, too. Gets a pretty penny for them, I’ll say that for her.”

  But I was stuck back on the idea that Neva was all alone in her endeavors. “What about her other family, and her friends? What about neighbors? Do they help her? Farming is hard work, and . . .”

  Mrs. Dugan was shaking her head. “Help Neva Chatham? I wouldn’t risk offering, not if my life depended on it. And honestly I’m not sure she has friends, not to speak of.”

  There was a tug at my pant leg. I looked down and saw a small child looking up at me. He was maybe four years old with jet-black hair, big brown eyes, and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a human. “Hi,” I said. “May I help you?”

  He nodded. “Miss Neva is my friend.”

  “She is?”

  Again he nodded. “My mommy takes me to get raspberries. Miss Neva helps me pick the best ones.”

  I smiled. “You like raspberries?”

  He nodded vigorously. “Lots and lots. With cream. And just a little sugar, not too much, Miss Neva says, or you won’t taste the berries.”

  Mrs. Dugan make a tsking noise and glanced down the aisle to someone who I assumed was the child’s mother. “His mother,” Mrs. Dugan said, “is perhaps a trifle lackadaisical in her childrearing efforts.”

  “What’s lack-a-daisy?” the child asked.

  “Something you’ll learn when you grow up,” Mrs. Dugan said, patting him on the head.

  The kid glared at her, then spun
on his heel and went to his mother’s side.

  “Miss Minnie?”

  I turned to see a middle-aged man looking at me. “Excuse me,” I said to Mrs. Dugan, and went to help him.

  He looked past me, then said in a soft voice, “I heard what Mrs. Nosy-Toes over there was saying and I wanted to make sure you got the whole story about Neva.”

  “Okay,” I said, quietly and cautiously.

  “No one,” he whispered, “but no one, has been inside the Chatham house in twenty years, not since her mother died.”

  I blinked at him. “That can’t be right.”

  “Ask around,” he said. “No one has been allowed past the porch since her mother’s coffin left the house. More than a little weird, don’t you think?” He tapped his temple, shook his head, and went back to perusing the bookmobile’s small selection of travel books.

  So, according to the adults, Neva Chatham was an eccentric recluse who shouldn’t be allowed near children. According to the child, Neva was a friend. What I needed to do was talk to the boy’s mother and get another adult point of view.

  But when I turned around, they were both gone.

  • • •

  “You have reached the Carters’ landline. Please leave a message at the tone.” Beep.

  “Hi, Rachel,” I said. “This is Minnie Hamilton from the bookmobile.” I’d asked Mrs. Dugan the name of the young woman with the little boy and she’d told me all about Rachel and her husband and Rachel’s mother and father. She would have gone on, I’d been sure, to share decades-old gossip about Rachel’s grandparents, but I’d cut in as politely as I could and thanked her for the information.

  But this was the second time I was leaving a message and I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to hear back. I left a brief message, gave my number, and asked her to call, then hung up.

  “Well,” I said, “what do you think?”