Pouncing on Murder

by Laurie Cass

  “And that was just as well, too,” I told Eddie. “If that had lasted, I might have gone with him when he moved out West after college, and then I wouldn’t have the bookmobile and I certainly wouldn’t have found you.”

  This loving statement also didn’t get any response from Eddie, which was slightly disappointing, but I soldiered on.

  “What do you think?” I asked. “About Henry and Adam, I mean. I still have no idea what really happened, and honestly don’t know how to go about finding out. But Irene’s getting to be a real mess and Adam’s not far behind, so I need to . . . Eddie, what are you doing?”

  My cat was rubbing his face against the wire door of his carrier. This not only made a very odd noise, but it also made his little kitty lips pull back so that I saw way too much of his gums.

  “And very healthy gums they are,” I said, “at least according to your doctor. But if you want the truth, they’re not your most attractive feature.”

  “Mrr!”

  Once again, we decided to agree to disagree, and I went back to thinking out loud. “What I really need to do is find out more about Neva. You know, the shotgun-toting senior citizen? From all accounts, she hardly ever leaves the house, so I’ll have to go to her and . . .”

  My outward musings tailed off, because if I took a single back-road shortcut, we were only a handful of miles from Chatham Road and Ms. Chatham herself.

  “No time like the present,” I said bravely, trying not to quail at the thought of confronting a woman who’d brandished a gun at me the one and only time we met. But the sheriff’s office didn’t seem to think she was threatening, and besides, I was in the bookmobile, which many people were convinced had a magical power to create happiness in everyone who came near.

  I planned out what I was going to say to Neva as I drove carefully down the bumpy Chatham Road and parked the bookmobile out of sight of her house.

  “There you go.” I released Eddie from his carrier. “I shouldn’t be long, but if I am, do you remember how to call 911? Oh, wait.” I sighed heavily. “You don’t have a phone, and even if you did you don’t have the thumb power to make the call. Poor Eddie,” I said, patting him on the head.

  He put his ears back and squinted at me with a dire expression. I gave him one more pat, slid my phone into my pocket, and headed down the stairs.

  I opened the door, but before I could turn around and shut it, a black-and-white blur shot past me. “Eddie!” I cried. “You get back here!”

  Ignoring me, he zoomed across the road and onto Neva Chatham’s property.

  There was really no point in calling him—he was a cat, after all—so I locked the bookmobile and hopped into a jog, muttering a monologue as I went.

  “Why can’t he stay on the bookmobile like a normal cat? Because normal cats have no interest in bookmobiles, that’s why. Normal cats don’t talk to you as if they understood what you said. Normal cats don’t—huh.”

  I’d passed through a line of trees and was on the edge of a wide-open field. Neva’s garden, I supposed, but there was no sign of my runaway cat. I looked around and down, trying to find his kitty footprints.

  “Ha!” I’d spotted the Eddie trail. It headed south, straight toward a trio of greenhouses. “I’ll get you, my pretty.” Jogging again, I followed the tracks, which, Eddie-like, didn’t go in a straight line, but zigged and zagged. “Cat, if you give me motion sickness,” I panted, “you’re not getting treats for hours, do you hear me, hours, and—”

  I stopped running and talking, because off in distance I’d heard a voice. A female voice. An elderly female voice.

  Neva.

  From a standstill, I leaped into a flat-out run. Through the far half of the garden, past two greenhouses, and around the end of the third, all the while following Eddie’s tracks, all the while hoping that Neva didn’t have her gun, that she wasn’t . . . that she wasn’t . . .

  I came around the corner of the last greenhouse and skidded to a stop. Neva was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with Eddie on her lap, petting him and talking to him as if she’d known him for years.

  “You are a shedder, aren’t you, my dear?” She shook her hand free of Eddie hair and I watched it twist away in the breeze. “But you’re well groomed and wherever you came from, I’m sure someone is looking for you.”

  “Um,” I said. “I’m afraid he’s mine.”

  Neva looked up and squinted at me. “I know you. No, don’t say, I’ll remember.” She continued to pet Eddie as she squinted. “Ha! I got it. You were looking at my dad’s boat. Scared you off but good, didn’t I?” She grinned, and once again I wondered about her mental stability.

  “That’s right,” I said. “But this time I came in the Chilson Library’s bookmobile.”

  Neva’s grin dropped away and I tensed. Maybe she had a thing against libraries. Or bookmobiles. Or librarians. Or Chilson. Maybe that gun was behind her and she was going to pull it out and—

  The elderly woman placed Eddie on the grass and sprang to her feet twice as fast as I could have managed. She charged toward me, and I was stuck in place so tight that I might have been glued. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I’d have to defend myself as best I could and—

  Neva was holding out her hand. “I have to apologize,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “I do.” She clasped my hand between hers and pumped up and down. “There was no excuse for going after you like that. I’d tell you about how that afternoon I’d had to write a big fat check to my accountant and how that made me cranky as all get-out, but that doesn’t excuse me, so I apologize.”

  “Apology accepted,” I said, starting to smile. I was also starting to see why the sheriff’s office hadn’t considered Neva a threat.

  “Come on in.” She released my hand and started striding to her house. “I have to show you something. Better grab that cat of yours.” Neva opened the back door and ushered Eddie and me inside. “Here you go. What do you say about a drink? Tea? Water? Something stronger?” She winked.

  I opted for water and looked around the kitchen as she opened the door of a Hoosier cabinet and took out two jelly jars. One of the bookmobile folks had said that Neva lived in her parents’ house, and I was suddenly sure it had been her grandparents’ house, too. Either that or no owner had ever changed a thing since the day the house was hatched.

  There was a large porcelain sink underneath a set of two double-hung windows. There were wooden countertops. Open shelves and the Hoosier cabinet instead of cabinets. A single ceiling light fixture. Plaster walls that showed trowel marks. Pegs next to the back door that held jackets. A round wooden table so scarred I could hardly tell what kind of wood it had been made from.

  The entire room was squeaky clean and smelled of sunshine and outdoors. It also reminded of my aunt’s boardinghouse kitchen, which tempted me to put Neva on the side of Good.

  “Have a seat,” she said, putting the glasses on the table and pulling out a chair. “Him, too,” she added, nodding at Eddie.

  My show-off cat jumped up and sat in the middle of the chair’s seat, looking at Neva as if she might give him a treat.

  “You,” she said, “are a cat among cats, but I do not feed pets at the table.”

  He inched forward so his chin was almost on the edge of the said surface.

  Neva laughed and fuzzed up the fur on his head. “Like I said, no treats at the table. You’ll get yours later, mister.” She looked over at me. “What did you say his name was?”

  I introduced Eddie and myself and said I already knew her name.

  “Just bet you do.” She chuckled. “Probably talked to Kit Richardson, didn’t you, after that day? She’s a good sheriff, that girl.”

  I’d never thought of the tough, take-no-prisoners sheriff in terms of gender, let alone a term like “girl,” but I gave a vague nod.

  “Anyway,” Neva said, “I need to tell you about my dad’s boat. It was his dad’s before him and when Granddad got too o
ld to take it out, it sat in the barn for years. Dad wouldn’t dream of working on Granddad’s boat without permission, so it sat and sat.” She sighed.

  “That’s not good for a wooden boat, is it?”

  “True words.” She nodded. “Granddad lived till he was ninety-three, and Dad didn’t want to start on the boat right after he died, if you see what I mean, and then Dad got sick.” She petted Eddie absently. “Then it was Mom’s boat and then it was mine, and I don’t have the know-how to fix it up or the money to pay someone else to do it for me.”

  Eddie started purring and she kept petting. “But I can’t let it go,” she said. “Not that boat. Not now, not ever.” Her voice was soft, but determined, and I believed every word.

  Neva gave Eddie one last pet. “I should get a cat,” she murmured. “Been too long.”

  “Mrr,” Eddie said.

  The three of us chatted a little while longer, and then Eddie and I returned to the bookmobile.

  I wanted to like Neva, wanted to very much. Okay, I did like her. But I still wondered about her temper. It could obviously run high, and if Henry had stoked it high enough, could she have been angry enough to kill him if she thought he was after her father’s boat?

  “What do you think, pal?” I asked.

  But for once, Eddie didn’t have a single thing to say.

  • • •

  “Sorry about bugging you,” I said, recording my third voice mail for Bob, Gordon’s cousin, “but I’m still trying to find out the weekend in April that Cole Duvall was up here.” I paused, then said, “It’s very important, and I need to find out as soon as possible.”

  I tried to think of something to say that might get him to call back quickly but couldn’t come up with anything other than shrieking at him like a harridan. And though that might move him to action, it likely wouldn’t be the action I wanted, so I just said thanks and hung up my cell phone.

  “Are we taking bets?” Julia leaned forward to unlatch Eddie’s door. “Fly and be free, little one.”

  “Bets on what?” I tossed the phone onto the console and flipped the driver’s seat around in preparation for the bookmobile stop.

  “Whether your plaintive bleat will encourage Bob to call you back.”

  I debated getting out the five-dollar bill that I always had in my wallet for bets with Rafe, but decided to let it stay there. “No bet. We wouldn’t be able to get a definitive answer.”

  Julia smiled one of her stage smiles, the sultry temptress version. “Do you really think so?” she asked in a low, husky voice.

  “It’s not me you have to convince,” I said, laughing.

  “Good morning, ladies,” a voice said.

  We turned around and saw a man coming up the stairs. “Good morning,” Julia said.

  I would have said the same thing, but I was busy being puzzled. Though I was pretty sure I’d never seen this middle-aged man before, something about him seemed very familiar.

  “Minnie?” he asked, looking from one of us to the other.

  I held up my hand. “That would be me. And you are?”

  “Bob,” he said. “Gordon’s my cousin.”

  Light dawned with a sudden, illuminating flash. “You’re Bob!” Which was a stupid thing to say, but it wasn’t the first time I’d said something stupid to a stranger and I was sure it wasn’t going to be the last. “I’ve been calling you.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve seen your bookmobile out here before, so I figured I’d just stop and talk to you instead of calling.”

  That would have made perfect sense to another man, I was sure. “So you pinned down the date Cole was here in April?”

  “Hey, there’s that cat I heard about. Here, kitty, kitty.” Bob crouched down and rubbed his fingertips. Eddie, the ham, came trotting over. “You’re a friendly little cuss, aren’t you?” He chucked Eddie under the chin. “Got a good purr machine there.”

  Eddie bumped his head against Bob’s knee hard enough that the resulting crack echoed around the bookmobile.

  “When was Cole Duvall here?” I asked a little louder.

  “What’s that?” Bob looked up. “Oh, right. Duvall came north that first weekend in April.”

  He went on about what he’d done for Cole, how he’d had to haul in logs for the fireplace, how he’d scraped ice off the driveway, and how he’d even been asked to go for groceries.

  I tried to listen politely, but all I could think was one thing.

  Cole Duvall had been here the weekend Henry died.

  Chapter 18

  I woke up the next morning, which was Friday morning, which was also the day before the book fair, knowing that my day was going to be packed full of things that had to get done. It was unlikely I’d have time to stop for lunch, so I slapped together my typical bookmobile lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a little baggie of potato chips.

  Eddie, lying on the back of the dining booth, watched this preparation with great interest.

  “It’s not a bookmobile day,” I told him, trying to stuff the plastic bag of potato chips to that perfect limit: full enough so the chips didn’t slide around, but not so full as to have the chips break from internal pressure. “I’m going to the library and you’re staying here.”

  “Mrr.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, don’t believe me. But you’re not going anywhere. Not today and not tomorrow, either.”

  “Mrr.”

  “I’ve told you why,” I said. “Tomorrow’s not a bookmobile day because it’s the book fair.”

  “Mrr.”

  “No, you can’t go to the book fair. It’s not for cats and”—I tried to head off any pending argument—“while I know that any place a cat wants to be is a proper place for cats, please trust me when I say that you won’t enjoy a book fair. Too much noise, too many people, too many feet that might accidentally step on your tail. It’s not a good place for Eddies.”

  “Mrr.”

  This kind of conversation could go on all day, so I shoved my lunch into my backpack and kissed the top of Eddie’s head. “See you later, pal. Be good.”

  “Mrr.”

  • • •

  The morning zoomed by. Then lunchtime went roaring past and I remembered to eat my sandwich and chips only when the emptiness in my middle told me it was past time to fill ’er up or bear the consequences.

  Since I tended to get either light-headed or cranky when I was really hungry, and sadly, sometimes both, I wolfed down my lunch between the last few phone calls I needed to make.

  All went well until I called Pam Fazio. “Hey, Pam, it’s Minnie. Do you—”

  “Pickle!”

  “Bread and butter or dill?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Don’t deserve either. I was going to bring up those cookbooks, but I haven’t had a minute to get away. You wouldn’t believe how busy we’ve been.”

  Pam, upon hearing that the famed Trock Farrand was appearing at the book fair, had not only volunteered to redo the book fair flyer for use in every e-publication I could come up with, but she’d also volunteered to lend the library a number of antique cookbooks for a tie-in display.

  “Tell you what,” I said, thinking fast. I’d walked to work, but Pam’s store was only a few blocks away. It wouldn’t be too much of a chore to take the library’s handcart for a short jaunt. “If you can get them in a box in the next half hour, I’ll come and take them away.”

  “You will? That would be wonderful!”

  “I should have done this in the first place,” I said. “You’re the one doing us the favor.”

  “Silly Minnie!” She laughed. “See you in half an hour. And thank you!”

  I didn’t understand why she was thanking me, but shrugged and went back to the phone calls.

  In slightly less than half an hour, I was trundling down the sidewalk, trying to determine whether it was easier to push or to pull the ancient handcart, when I looked up and saw a sign I’d walked past hundreds of times before but had never h
ad any reason to bring into my frame of reference.

  Northern Development.

  Hmm. I tucked the handcart next to the office’s window box and went in the front door.

  An extremely blond young woman was sitting behind a desk. “Hi,” she said.

  She couldn’t have been thirty—might not have been twenty-five—and from what I could see of her above the desk, she was taking to heart the idea of dressing for the job you’d like to have. Assuming that she wanted to be a real estate developer, that is. Her blazer was trim and tailored, her hair was neat and tidy, the only jewelry she wore was a simple gold chain, and I didn’t see a single tattoo.

  “I’m Janine, Felix’s new assistant,” she said, smiling. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hi.” I smiled in return but didn’t give my name. “I have some friends who inherited some property and they’re not quite sure what they’re going to do with it.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but surely Henry’s sons hadn’t planned out everything. “I was walking past, so I thought I’d ask a few questions about development.”

  “You’ve come to the right place.” She nodded. “Have a seat and ask away.”

  I sat on the edge of one of the two chairs in front of her desk. “I suppose timing is the first thing. How long does it take to develop a property?”

  Janine nodded again. “Great question. The only thing is, it depends.” Her expression was one of sympathy and understanding. If she kept on in real estate, she was bound to make a fortune. “Depends on the property, on what you want to do with it, on the existing infrastructure, on the market, and on dozens of other things.”

  “Let’s use a for instance, then,” I said. “Are you familiar with Henry Gill’s property?”

  Her smile dipped a little. “Actually yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

  Uh-oh. “My friends say the property they inherited is a lot like that one.” So similar, as a matter of fact, that you’d think they were the same. “How long do you think it might take to, well . . .” I ducked my head in faux embarrassment. “Not to be crass, but how long do you think it might take to get money out of it.”