Cat With a Clue

by Laurie Cass

  All six of them greeted Otto with smiles and cheerful ‘nice to meet you’s. In short order, they were sliding chairs around and setting another place. Liz, who was at the buffet, getting out silverware, looked at me. “Minnie, are you eating?”

  I shook my head. “Thanks, but there’s no time. It’s a bookmobile day and Eddie’s in the car, ready to go forth and conquer new bookish territory.”

  My aunt wrapped a blueberry muffin in a paper napkin and put it into my hand. “Thank you,” she whispered, “for Otto.”

  But there was no need for her words. Seeing the happiness on her face was more than thanks enough.

  Chapter 11

  “It’s a shame your new young man couldn’t make it tonight.” Barb McCade looked at me over the top of her wineglass.

  “That’s right.” Barb’s husband, Russell, looked around as if Ash might be sitting somewhere else and waiting for an engraved invitation. “Where is that boy, anyway? Are we going to have to teach him manners?”

  The only people sitting anywhere close were a sixtyish couple who were arguing over the price of something in the six-figure range. It seemed to be real estate, but if they were summer people, it could be anything from new landscaping to a new car.

  “The boy,” I said, “is close to six feet tall, runs ten miles a day, has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, and is studying to be a detective.”

  Barb elbowed her husband. “And he’s a cop. Bet he could take you down, Cade.”

  “Of course he could,” Cade said calmly. “I channel my physical powers a different way.”

  “You do?” His wife frowned. “What powers are those? I didn’t know you had any.”

  “I’m pacing myself.” He grinned.

  “Possible,” Barb said. “But probable?” She held out her hand and tipped it back and forth.

  Smiling, I shook my head. They were at it again.

  I’d met these two clowns last summer when Barb had run in front of the bookmobile, waving me down because her husband was having a stroke. We’d raced him to the hospital, and it wasn’t until I was relaying information to the emergency room via my cell phone that I realized the sick man was none other than the painter Russell McCade, known as Cade to his thousands upon thousands of fans.

  Though his critics dismissed his work as sentimental schlock, his fans—which included me—defended it as accessible art. I’d loved his work from the time I’d received a birthday card illustrated with one of his paintings, but had never dreamed I’d actually meet the artist, let along become a friend of the family via a hospital visit and the letter D.

  For reasons lost in the mists of time, the McCades had a habit of randomly choosing a letter and then finding words starting with that letter to fit the ongoing conversation. When I’d joined in the game the first time, I’d gone to visit Cade in the hospital, and our acquaintanceship moved into firm friendship. Who cared if they were twenty years older than I was? Who cared if they spent six months out of the year in a place that was warm and sunny? As long as we had the letter D, we were good.

  “Pathetic,” Cade said, sighing.

  Or the letter P, which was also an excellent word starter.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” I asked. “What’s pathetic?”

  “A pound would be better. There are profound thoughts up here.” Cade tapped his head.

  I searched madly for an appropriate P word, but couldn’t find one anywhere.

  “He was talking about you, Minnie,” Barb said. “And you’re not pathetic. You’re preoccupied; that’s all, right?”

  Cade started studying me, and I felt myself squirming. Every time he looked at me like that, I was afraid he was thinking about how I’d look on canvas. Though I’d made it perfectly clear that I had no interest in being the subject of a portrait, I wasn’t certain he’d paid any attention to me.

  “There’s a lot going on right now. The bookmobile, the library director, not to mention . . . well . . .” I glanced around.

  We were in Petoskey, eating at the City Park Grill. One of its claims to fame was that it had once been the hangout of Ernest Hemingway, which was nice enough, especially if you were a Hemingway fan, but what I cared most about were the buttery garlic biscuits served as an appetizer. Warm, buttery garlic biscuits, moved with tongs from serving platter to your own individual biscuit plate by a server who would bring more; all you had to do was ask.

  The McCades and I were sitting in the back of the restaurant. Cade wasn’t exactly a recluse, but he didn’t make any efforts to be a noted celebrity, either—much to the dismay of his agent—and I was happy enough to sit in the back corner, where it was a little darker and far quieter. From the six-figure couple, we were hearing an occasional tone of frustration from the man and a sporadic “Bob!” from the woman, but other than that, all was peace and calm. She looked vaguely familiar, and I surreptitiously studied her for a few moments, trying to figure out where I’d seen her before.

  “The break-ins,” Barb said.

  “And the murder of Andrea Vennard, a former resident of Chilson,” Cade added. “There is indeed a lot going on.”

  “You two were out of town when most of that happened.” In Chicago at a show of Cade’s work, specifically. “How did you know?”

  “The newspaper,” Cade said. “It’s a marvelous invention. You should try it someday.”

  Barb shook her head, making her ponytail of graying brown hair flick around the sides of her neck. “Don’t believe a word he says. He heard it from the neighbors first, then dug through the papers afterward.”

  “Corroboration.” Cade sipped at his beer, a draft from Short’s Brewing Company that was so hoppy I could smell it from across the table. “One must have corroboration.”

  Suddenly I remembered where I’d seen the six-figure woman. She’d been the woman at the used-book store, haggling with the clerk over books she was trying to sell.

  “Does that detective have any ideas?” Barb asked.

  “All avenues . . .” I said, then stopped.

  Cade set his beer on the table with a sharp bang. “All avenues of investigation will be explored, especially wide-open and freshly paved avenues that could easily lead to the wrong person.”

  “Sorry,” I murmured. Cade had been the lead suspect in a murder investigation last summer. “I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

  “Not bad,” he said, “so much as annoying.”

  I glanced at Barb and, judging from the tight expression on her face, I wasn’t sure she agreed with him. “Anyway,” I went on, “Detective Inwood and Ash aren’t telling me much. It is an active investigation.”

  “Ah, but you have some ideas, don’t you?” Cade eyed me. “You are full of the things. Ideas ooze out of you.”

  I made a face. “Ooze? You make me sound like a mud puddle.”

  “Flow? Gush? Emanate?” Cade asked. “Exude. Escape. Discharge.”

  “Oh, ew.”

  “Percolate,” Barb said.

  “Excellent!” Cade exclaimed. “And a P word to boot. You win this round, my darling.” He toasted his wife. “And now,” he said, turning to me, “your idea. No denials; I can see it in the set of your shoulders, and slumping like that will not change the facts.”

  I sighed and straightened. It wasn’t fair that a man who’d grown famous painting landscapes could see into my head by looking at my posture.

  “And now, young lady, it’s time to share.” Cade made a come-along gesture. “What’s your idea?”

  “It’s about books.”

  The McCades frowned, exchanged a quick glance, then looked back at me.

  “What’s about books?” Barb asked. “The break-ins or the murder?”

  “Both.”

  “How do you figure that?” Cade asked.

  I looked at him closely, but saw no t
race of the Patient Look, the expression that meant I was being humored and coddled and been found amusing in a condescending way. My previous boyfriend had used that expression too often, and I was still sensitive to its use.

  “There were three break-ins,” I said, holding up the requisite number of fingers. “The Friends’ book-sale room, the bookmobile, and Pam’s antiques store. During each incident, every book was tossed onto the floor, but according to the records of both Pam and the bookmobile, no book was stolen.”

  “And the book-sale room?” Barb asked.

  I shrugged. “No way of knowing. They don’t need to track books the way we do. But someone was clearly looking for something, and since the bookmobile and Pam’s store were both broken into after the sale room was, I figure he didn’t find whatever it was.”

  “Or she,” Cade murmured.

  “Or she,” I agreed, a little chagrined that a male had had to correct my gender usage.

  Barb frowned. “But what about Andrea Vennard? How does she fit in?”

  “That’s when it all started,” I said in a low voice, leaning forward. “Andrea was killed. Then the library was broken into, then the bookmobile, then Pam’s store. In a town this size, it’s hard to believe that all those crimes aren’t connected somehow. My guess is that someone is looking for a book worth a lot of money, and Andrea got in the way. Maybe,” I said slowly, thinking of a new possibility, “a book that’s been in a family for a long time and no one realizes its value.”

  “Isn’t there a new used-book store?” Cade asked. “Have they had a burglary?”

  Ash had told me that they’d been incident free, and I told the McCades so.

  Cade sipped his beer. “You think Andrea’s murder was committed by the same person who’s responsible for the break-ins.”

  I nodded.

  “Does anyone know,” Barb asked, “why Andrea was in Chilson?”

  “Oh, we know why.”

  “We do?”

  “Well, sure,” I said. “She came up for her great-aunt’s funeral. Talia DeKeyser.”

  It was as if I’d tossed a restrictive force field over them just after they’d witnessed a shocking sight. Both stared at me, unblinking and unmoving. Just at the point where I was beginning to wonder if time had indeed stopped, Barb turned to her husband.

  “You’re going to have to tell her.”

  “Yes,” he said, breaking the spell I’d unwittingly cast.

  “Tell me what?”

  Cade pulled in a long breath. Then, instead of doing the expected thing and letting it out in a long, gusting sigh, he picked up his beer. When the only thing left on the inside of the glass was a sticky foam, he returned it to the table. “Sorry,” he said to his wife, “but I do believe I needed that.”

  “Wanted, not needed.” She patted his arm and half smiled. “It’s all right. I have the car keys.”

  There was a long pause. I tried to be patient, but was on the verge of using my foot to whack at someone under the table in the hopes of kick-starting the conversation, when Cade started telling the story.

  “This was when Cal, Talia’s husband, was still alive. About five years ago, I’d guess.” He turned to Barb, who nodded confirmation. “Barb and I had bought our lake house the year before, and we were still getting to know the area and the town. Still meeting people and getting to know the neighbors.”

  It was a familiar story. Newcomers, if they didn’t use some sort of method to establish a social network—volunteer work, church activities, whatever—took a long time to develop friendships.

  “We were in Benton’s,” Barb said. “Mr. Smart Alec here was at the candy counter, trying to guess how many jawbreakers he could fit into his mouth before his jaw actually broke, when this tall, old guy spoke up and said he could take in fifteen.”

  Cade laughed. “And then an elderly woman, who was standing next to him, said his mouth was much bigger than that, he’d be better off guessing twenty, and did he want to try an experiment?”

  I smiled. “That was Talia and Cal?” All the stories I’d heard about them, I’d never once heard they were funny.

  Barb nodded. “We were instant friends, despite the age difference.” She smiled at me. “One of these days we’re going to have to get some friends our own age.”

  “Age is nothing,” Cade said, waving off the issue. “What matters is that you laugh at the same things.”

  “I laugh at you every day,” his loving wife told him.

  He ignored her and said, “We went out to dinner with Talia and Deke a few times—”

  Barb saw my puzzled look and interrupted. “Deke was Cal’s nickname. From DeKeyser, and from his playing pond hockey into his sixties.”

  Cade barely slowed down. “One day they invited us to dinner at their home. Barb insisted on bringing salad and bread, so when we arrived, she and Talia went back to the kitchen, while Deke and I mixed drinks in the dining room.”

  It was an easy picture to summon; women and men in separate rooms, all four chatting easily and comfortably. Of course, the picture I was bringing to mind was incomplete, since I had no idea where the DeKeysers had lived, so I asked.

  “Just a few blocks from downtown,” Barb said. “In the historic district.” She described a house I had seen many times, a Victorian home of gingerbread trim, lace curtains, and creaking wooden floors, the kind of house where grandmothers grew up, the kind of house that could almost make you smell lilacs and taste homemade ice cream.

  “In the dining room,” Cade said, bringing me out of my historical fog, “the bottles and glasses were on a sideboard. Also on the sideboard was a stack of books.”

  Books?

  Cade gave me a crinkly smile. “You are suddenly a little more interested in this story, I see. Yes, there was a stack of books. Picture books was what I noticed. Books to read to the grandchildren on a rainy day. Blueberries for Sal, Stellaluna, Make Way for Ducklings, The Little Engine That Could.”

  I nodded at the names, all as familiar to me as the back side of my teeth.

  “At that moment,” Cade continued, “I just glanced at the pile. But then Talia called for Deke’s help to reach a dish on a high shelf, and I was left alone.”

  “You looked at the books.”

  “Exactly,” he said, nodding. “I was in the home of an acquaintance and didn’t feel free to finish mixing the drinks, and I didn’t want to sit uninvited. Yes, I could have stood there and been bored, but why do that when there are picture books at hand? An artist can always learn something from other artists. Our research never ends.”

  Barb coughed into her fist, but it was a multisyllabic cough that sounded a lot like the word “Plagiarism.”

  Once again, her loving husband ignored her. “So, of course I looked at the books. And there, at the bottom of that small stack, underneath the mass-produced copies of children’s books that are in half the houses in the country, was a first edition of . . .”

  He stopped for a moment, shook his head, then said, “Right there on the sideboard, well within the reach of grubby-fingered five-year-olds, was a first-edition copy of Chastain’s Native Wildflowers of North America.”

  * * *

  Eddie, who was doing his best to sprawl across the full length of the dining booth’s seat back, and doing a very good job, didn’t look impressed at my story.

  Clearly, he hadn’t been listening.

  “You must not have been listening,” I said. “Chastain’s Wildflowers is, well, it doesn’t have anything close to the value of Audubon’s book, but a complete copy in good condition is worth upward of half a million dollars.” And possibly much more. Cade, a fan of Chastain’s work, had said no first-edition copy had gone up for public auction in years.

  That night at the DeKeyser’s, Cade had told Deke about the worth of the book that was casually lying underneath a copy of t
he Cat in the Hat. Cade had also advised Talia and Deke to move the book to a climate-controlled environment, but, he’d told me wryly, “It’s hard to communicate the value of a book that’s been sitting on the same piece of furniture for close to a hundred years.”

  Over dinner, Deke had told the McCades that the book had been given by Robert Chastain himself to the then-matriarch of the family for her kindness in showing him a variety of wildflower he’d never seen. The family story was that Robert Chastain had been a nice gentleman who was a little nuts about flowers. The DeKeysers smiled at Cade’s story of the book’s value, and Cade had said it was obvious they didn’t believe him.

  “Thus, the sideboard,” I said.

  Eddie, unblinking, looked at me and flicked the tip of his tail up and down, up and down.

  “Cade,” I told my uncaring cat, “had even confessed that he was a hugely successful artist himself, and that he knew what he was talking about when it came to a first edition of Chastain’s, but Deke and Talia just smiled and said they were fine with things the way they were.”

  And, I realized, maybe they were right. What did a happy elderly couple need with the headache of a valuable volume like Wildflowers? Let the next generation worry about it.

  Which was exactly what was happening.

  I’d driven home from Petoskey, thinking about it, and to me there was no doubt that Chastain’s Wildflowers was why the book-sale room, the bookmobile, and Pam’s store had all been broken into and tossed around into a huge mess. Someone out there knew about Wildflowers and was looking for it in all the places that Talia might have been expected to gift a book.

  That someone had also killed Andrea.

  “You know what else?” I asked the question of Eddie, but I was looking at the last two flowers from Ash’s bouquet that hadn’t dropped all their petals or been turned into cat toys. “I bet I know why that X-Acto knife was at the murder scene.”

  Either Andrea or her killer had expected to find the book in the library, and one of them had planned to slice out individual pages of the stunningly gorgeous flower paintings and sell them one by one.