Cat With a Clue

by Laurie Cass

  “What do you wish?” I asked, oh, so gently.

  She shook her head. “Nothing. You know what they say about wishes.”

  “Beggars and horses?”

  “Bingo. And if everyone had a horse, how would all the manure ever get cleaned up?”

  I thought about Mackinac Island, where, outside of winter, the only motorized vehicles allowed were emergency types. There were lots of horses and the island cleanup crews took their jobs very seriously, but even still, pedestrians spent a fair amount of time watching where their feet went.

  Then again, if everyone had a horse, would there even be pedestrians?

  I started to puzzle out the problem to my aunt, but she was headed back into the shrubbery. “You sure I can’t help?” I asked.

  “Go play,” she said. “Have fun. Ride your bike along a road you haven’t been down all summer.”

  That sounded like an excellent idea, but still I hesitated. “I can stay.”

  “Go!”

  And so, grinning, I went.

  * * *

  It was a beautiful evening, and if I went home I would feel compelled to clean the bathroom, so I decided to take my aunt’s advice and ride aimlessly around town. Off in the distance, I heard the tower clock of the Catholic church chime once. Eight thirty, then. At this time of year there was another hour of daylight left, if not an hour and a half, so I had plenty of time to both bike and clean, if I wanted.

  Which I didn’t, but if the bathroom went uncleaned for much longer, the ghost of my maternal grandmother would haunt my dreams until I took care of what needed to be done.

  But it was hard to care about the cleanliness of bathrooms when the evening sun was golden, when backyards were full of children shrieking with laughter as they played the games children had always played, and when the warmth of summer felt as if it would last forever.

  A deep sense of contentment filled me as I cruised the streets of my adopted town. Life was good, would continue to be good, would always be—

  “Watch out!”

  I braked hard, skidding sideways with a shuddering screech of my tires, trying to avoid hitting the soccer ball that had rolled in front of me.

  “Sorry!” A young boy scurried out, snatched up the ball, and ran back to his house. “That wouldn’t have happened,” he called, “if you’d been paying attention!”

  Though this was undoubtedly true, his ire seemed a little harsh. After all, I’d never met him.

  “I told you I didn’t want to play.”

  Ah. The kid was yelling at a girl, who looked about seven years old. I hadn’t noticed her until now because she was standing in the middle of a lovely country flower garden. The garden almost filled the space between two Victorian-era homes and was bursting with blooms, none of which I could identify except for the daisies the girl was clutching in her hand.

  “Better not let Mom catch you picking stuff from there,” her brother said.

  The girl ignored him and plucked off another white-petaled flower. “It’s Mrs. Talia’s garden, and she told me I could pick any flower I wanted any time I wanted.”

  I blinked. Blinked again as I looked at the house next door. Yes, there was the L-shaped front porch. There were the ornamental cornices, fish-scale gable siding, stained-glass windows, and complicated brickwork foundation that Barb and Cade had mentioned. And, if I remembered correctly, Rianne and her family lived in the house now, keeping it in the family for at least another generation.

  It was a nice concept and one with a satisfying continuity, but I was glad my family didn’t own a house like that. After all, it was hard enough for me to find the time to clean a single bathroom; how on earth would I have managed a house that, when it had been built, had undoubtedly been maintained with the assistance of daily help?

  As I stood there, musing about the social changes in the past hundred years, a rattling pickup truck pulled into Rianne’s narrow driveway. A man with graying hair got out and gave me a hard look. “You got a problem?” he asked sharply.

  “What? No, I was just—”

  “Yo, Steve!” The front door opened and another man, one I assumed to be Rianne’s husband, came out. “It’s about time you showed up, Guilder. The beer’s going to get warm if you don’t get a move on.” He was carrying a cooler and tossed it into the back of the pickup. “There’s a bunch of guys who said they’re playing tonight. Hope you’re up for seven-card stud.”

  So. Not only was Steve Guilder back in Chilson, but he was a friend of Rianne’s husband. Did that mean . . .

  No. The police were taking care of this end of things. There was no need for me to get involved. None whatsoever.

  I hopped on my bike and pedaled away from the DeKeysers and back toward the marina, where my houseboat and my cat waited for me.

  * * *

  “Mrr!” my cat said.

  I looked at him. “You know, when I was riding back through town just now, I was thinking how nice it was going to be to walk in and be greeted by my loving, furry friend, who was longing to be snuggled and petted and perhaps even kissed by his favorite human. Instead, I walk in and find you there.”

  Eddie, who was sitting on the kitchen counter, sat up even straighter as I finished walking through the door.

  “Get down,” I said firmly. “There aren’t many rules in this house, but No Cats on the Kitchen Counter is one of them and it’s at the top of the list.”

  “Mrr.”

  “Down,” I said, raising my voice.

  Eddie blinked at me.

  “Down!” I dropped my backpack and clapped my hands. It was a noise Eddie hated. He glared at me and jumped down with a loud thump!

  “How do you do that?” I asked. “That was a louder noise than I would have made and I weigh . . .” I tried to do some quick math in my head, failed, felt a little embarrassed about the failure, then remembered that I was a librarian and mental math wasn’t a required duty. “And I weigh a lot more than you do.”

  “Mrr.”

  “Talkative tonight, are you?”

  Eddie, who had been walking toward me in a straight line, suddenly swerved and went around my feet in a wide arc, and returned to his straight path, the end of which was to jump on the pilot’s seat and sit on top of my backpack. “Mrr,” he said, settling in.

  “Thanks. A little more Eddie hair on my stuff is exactly what I needed. Because, really, can you ever have enough of—”

  From deep inside the backpack, my cell phone rang.

  Eddie jumped and scrambled onto the dashboard. When he arrived safely, he turned and gave my pack the evil eye. If the world had been a just place, the backpack would have spontaneously combusted. But since the world was unfair, even for Eddies, I patted him on the head and reached for the phone.

  The number wasn’t one I recognized, but it was local, so I thumbed it on. “Hello?”

  “Is this Minnie Hamilton?”

  “Yes,” I said. The voice was female and elderly, but it wasn’t one I recognized. “This is. How are you this evening?”

  “Well, isn’t it nice of you to ask,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her words. “I’m so glad I decided to call. I knew it was a cellular phone, and in general I don’t like to talk to the things—that time lag is wretched if you want to have a meaningful talk.”

  “I know what you mean.” I’d made a strategic error in starting a conversation before I knew who was on the other end of the phone, and it was too late to ask her name. Nicely done, Minnie. Very nicely done.

  “Anyway,” she said. “My Thomas said you’d rung the other day when I was downstate visiting our daughter. He said it sounded important and that I should call you as soon as I got home.”

  And then I knew who was on the other end of the phone. I stood by the dashboard and gave Eddie a few absent pets, watching stray hairs fly up into
the air. “Thank you for calling, Mrs. Panik. It is important.”

  “Well, then. What can I do for you?”

  Lillian Panik was the longest-serving Friend of the Library. She’d volunteered under more presidents than . . . well, not more presidents than Eddie had hairs, but probably more than he had whiskers. I made a mental note to count them later and said, “It’s about the break-in in the book-sale room.”

  Mrs. Panik sighed. “That was so sad. I’ve never seen anything like it. Such a mess, and for what?”

  I had a pretty good idea for what, but said, “I was just wondering if you’d noticed anything unusual in the days just before it happened. Odd phone calls, strange questions, someone in there you’d never noticed before—anything, really, that was different.”

  “You’re sleuthing!” Mrs. Panik exclaimed. “How wonderful! You young girls nowadays will turn your hand to anything.”

  I didn’t think I had a thing on Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. “Can you think of anything?”

  “Well, now.” She hummed a tune that sounded a lot, but not quite, like the theme song to Dragnet. “I don’t see how this could have anything to do with it, but I know that Monica had someone substitute for her.”

  Monica? Who was Monica? Denise kept recruiting new volunteers, which was fantastic, but she didn’t always bring them around to meet the library staff. I asked for Monica’s last name, but Mrs. Panik didn’t know it.

  “Tell you what,” she said, lowering her voice. “I’ll make a few inquiries. If I discover anything, I’ll call you right back.”

  I stood straight. “Mrs. Panik, please don’t—”

  “No trouble at all,” she said. “Good-bye, Minnie.” And she was gone.

  For no good reason, I was uneasy at the thought of the petite, white-haired, and very proper Mrs. Panik playing Bess Marvin to my Nancy Drew. All those stories turned out okay in the end, but there was a time or two in every installment where you weren’t sure.

  “Well, rats,” I muttered. There was no help for it. I’d have to go clean the bathroom.

  The shower was almost clean when the phone I’d shoved into my pocket rang. I dropped my sponge and pulled it out. It was Mrs. Panik. I thumbed it on fast. “How are you?” I asked.

  “Just fine, Minnie. But how are you? You sound a touch breathless.” She paused. “And a little hollow.”

  I stepped out of the tiny shower stall. “Is this better?”

  “Much. Now, I have something to tell you, and it’s a little disturbing. I hope you’re sitting.”

  Anyone who’d reached the age she had undoubtedly knew the best way to deliver bad news. I walked the few steps to my bed and slowly sat down. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Monica Utley,” Mrs. Panik said. “I don’t know if this is against the rules or not, but she asked someone to substitute for her the Saturday before the disturbance at the sale room. Someone who wasn’t a Friend of the Library.”

  “Denise would know,” I said. “About the rules, I mean.” Not that I was going to ask her. “Do you know who Monica asked to substitute?”

  “Yes, I do. Now, mind you, I didn’t talk to Monica about this. I learned it from Stella, who heard it from Peggy, who talked to Edith about it.”

  I’d had high hopes at first, but with each degree of separation, my hopes went lower. “I see.”

  She took in a deep breath. “From what I hear, you have a nice relationship with that fine young Ash Wolverson, so I will assume that you’ll take any pertinent information straight to him.”

  “Yes,” I said cautiously. “Of course I will.”

  “Then that’s all right. Now, here’s the difficult part.” Her words, which had been measured, began to run into each other. “The person who substituted for Monica was Andrea Vennard, that poor woman who was killed in the library, and I know you know all about that, you poor thing, and I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it’s best that you know. You have a good night, and now that I’ve passed on this information, I’ll be able to sleep easier.”

  I held the phone to my ear long after Mrs. Panik had hung up, thinking about what she’d said. Then I pulled out my laptop and did something a thinking person would have done days ago: used a search engine to look up Andrea Vennard’s obituary. It didn’t take long, and a paragraph in, I found the name of the business Andrea had owned downstate: VM and Associates. Which didn’t tell me much, so I looked that up, too.

  “No kidding,” I murmured, reading the screen. Andrea and her business partner, Jayna Molina, owned a company that provided personal assistants and housekeeping staff. E-mail addresses were provided for the partners and key personnel, so I sent a short one to Jayna, telling her I was sorry about her partner’s death, that I had been the one to find her, and that if there was anything I could do, to just call.

  When the phone rang an hour later, Eddie and I had been about to turn in for the night. “Is this Minnie Hamilton?” a woman asked. “This is Jayna Molina. I wanted to thank you for your kind e-mail. It meant a lot to me.”

  “Oh. Sure.” What, exactly, would Emily Post have recommended in a situation like this? Since I had no idea, I forged ahead on my own. “I’m sure Andrea’s death was a shock.”

  “To all of us.” Her voice was a little shaky. “The police told me they’re doing everything they can to find her killer, but I thought I’d ask if you knew how that was going.”

  “They’re working on it,” I said, which was weak, but it was all I had. “They told me they were looking into her business. Was there anything you could tell them?”

  “Nothing useful.” She sighed. “Our clients are wealthy and they value their privacy. Everything we do for them is confidential. If we breached confidentiality, we wouldn’t have their business any longer. Andrea knew that better than anyone.”

  “I’m sure she did.” I thought a moment, then asked, “Did you have any new clients? Someone who might have wound up with the wrong idea about Andrea?”

  “That’s funny,” Jayna said. “Your nice detective asked that, too.”

  Nice? Detective Inwood? That wasn’t a descriptor I would have used.

  “I can’t divulge our client list,” she was saying, “but I can say we had two new clients last month. One is a very nice lady who spends a lot of time in Europe, and I’m not sure Andrea ever talked to her outside of the time she called to hire us. The other is an elderly man who was an executive at one of the car companies. Andrea went out to meet him because he’s not very mobile. She said he was very interesting.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “Did she say why?”

  “Well, he collected books,” she said. “Old and rare ones. She said his house was more library than house. But it was his cars that interested Andrea.” Jayna had a smile in her voice as she talked about the Duesenbergs the man owned.

  I listened and made the right noises in the right places, but I was quietly working the keyboard. A few links later, I was reading about the retired Ford Motor Company executive who had turned from collecting old cars to collecting books, and who had been the last person to purchase a copy of Chastain’s Wildflowers.

  I sat back. Finally, I’d established how Andrea could have learned about the value of her great-aunt’s book.

  But what was I going to do about it?

  Chapter 15

  The next morning, after kissing Eddie on the head and getting a sleepy “Mrr” in return, I stopped by the sheriff’s office before heading to the library.

  “Let me guess,” the deputy in the front office said. “You’re here to see Inwood or Wolverson.”

  I eyed him, not sure if he was trying to be funny, if he was trying to be a smart alec, or if he was merely being factual. “That’s right,” I said. “Is either one of them here?”

  “You’re that librarian, right? The one going out with Wolverson?”

  It wa
s only natural that Ash’s coworkers knew whom he was dating. A little creepy, but natural in a small town. “Correct.”

  The guy’s grim visage lightened, changing him from an intimidating uniformed officer you knew was carrying a handgun to a friendly neighborhood cop. “Okay, yeah. He’s talked about you.”

  Even creepier. Sure, I talked about Ash to my coworkers, but that was different. They were library people. “He has?”

  “Sure.” The guy leaned forward, putting his elbows on the high counter. “He says he thinks you’ll be doing buoys by August.”

  “I will?”

  “Not with a short rope of course. That’ll take a while. But as soon as you’re up to speed, he’ll take you through the course. Wolverson figures you’ll take to it easy.” He grinned.

  Ah. Water-skiing. That’s what he was talking about.

  “Got a competitive streak in you, Wolfie said. Comes from being so short, I bet.”

  I smiled politely. “Sorry, but I have to get to work. Is either one of them here?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “Both out on calls. You want to leave a message or anything? I can get you into their voice mails.”

  “Even though I’m not very tall,” I said, “I don’t think I’ll fit. But thank you.” I told him to have a nice day and had my hand on the door handle when he started laughing.

  “You won’t fit,” he said, chuckling. “That’s a good one. No wonder Ash likes hanging around you.”

  Once I was out on the sidewalk and moving along, I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled through the phone list until I found Detective Hal Inwood. As the phone rang, I wondered if he was a Henry kind of a Hal, or if his given name was Hal. Of course, I’d never figured out how Hal had become a diminutive of Henry in the first place, same as Bill from William, or—

  “This is Detective Inwood,” said the recording.

  I made a face and left a message, which, according to what I’d just heard, would be answered promptly, then called Ash. The same thing happened there.

  I’d done what I could, so I went to work.