Cat With a Clue

by Laurie Cass

  * * *

  The next day dawned hot and humid. I debated leaving Eddie at home to nap the day away in the comfort of the cooler lakeside air, but he parked himself on the top of cat carrier and stared at me, unblinking, and it was easier to bring him along than to argue with him.

  “Good thing I don’t have children,” I said, lugging the Eddie-filled carrier out to my car. “I’m a pushover. They’d be spoiled rotten kids with no manners and a huge sense of entitlement.”

  “Mrr.”

  “You’re right.” I opened the car door, set the carrier inside, and buckled it in. “Cats are different from kids. There’d be no teaching you table manners.”

  Eddie opened his mouth to object, but I shut the door, for once getting in the last word.

  * * *

  Julia and Eddie and I spent the day trying to find the deepest shade in every parking lot where we were scheduled to stop. Worst was the asphalt lot of a newly constructed township hall whose only shade came from a spindly sapling that looked as if it could use a good watering. Best was the gravel lot of a rural church whose maple trees cast enough shade to cover the entire bookmobile.

  Even still, it was a long, hot, sweaty day, and the three of us were glad to return to Chilson, where the ice-cream cones we’d been talking about all afternoon awaited.

  I started my car and cranked the air-conditioning while Julia and I lugged crates of books into the library. By the time we were done, my car was cool enough to move Eddie from the bookmobile.

  “See you on Tuesday,” Julia said, and, for the first time since I’d met her, she looked limp and exhausted and every one of her sixty-some years.

  “Double scoop,” I recommended. “Mint chip.”

  She shook her head. “Waffle cone of Mackinac Island fudge.” Then she grinned. “With a vodka martini chaser.”

  The thought of drinking a martini made the inside of my throat go dry as overcooked toast. “I’d rather—” But before I could note my preference for a glass of chilled white wine, my cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket. Amelia Singer, the museum director.

  “See you Tuesday,” Julia said, waving, and off she went.

  I thumbed on the phone. “Hey, Amelia.”

  “Minnie, I’m so glad you answered.”

  Amelia’s usually expansive voice was tight.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Me?” She forced a chuckle. “Fine as cotton candy. It’s my granddaughter that’s the trouble. The thirteen-year-old. She was out skateboarding with friends, tried a fancy somersault, and didn’t quite make it all the way around.”

  My breath caught as I imagined the scene. “How badly was she hurt? Is she okay?”

  “No, no she’s not.” The words were spoken through sniffles. “Long-term she should be fine—her mother won’t let her go to the skate park unless she wears protective equipment—but she broke her femur.”

  “Oh no.” I touched my thigh. “Does she need surgery?”

  Amelia sniffed again. “They’re waiting for some fancy-pants orthopedic surgeon to get off the golf course and into the hospital.”

  “Are you on your way downstate?” I asked.

  “No, my daughter just called.” Sniff. “I had to talk to you first. We’d set up tonight for you to stop by the museum to look for your books.”

  She was worried about me? “Amelia,” I said, “go home and pack. This can wait.”

  “But you said—”

  I’d told her the book that might have been donated to the museum might be related to the murder of Andrea Vennard, but none of that mattered when a granddaughter was in the hospital. “It can wait,” I repeated.

  “Can you come down right now?” Amelia asked. “I’m still at the museum. I’m locking up, but I can wait until you get here.”

  I glanced at my car. “We’ll be there in two minutes.”

  * * *

  Five minutes later, I was walking down the creaky stairs to the museum’s basement. Amelia had asked if I was familiar with the museum’s layout—I was, thanks to time spent volunteering the summer after my high school graduation—and she’d asked me to cross my heart and hope to die if I didn’t make sure everything was locked up tight when I left.

  When I’d done the crossing and the hoping, she’d given me a long look, full of fear and anxiety. I’d set the cat carrier on the floor and given her a hug. “It’ll be okay,” I’d said. “They’ll take great care of her, and she’ll be up and around in no time.”

  Amelia had returned the hug, muttering, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  I couldn’t help it; I’d laughed, and, after a moment, Amelia had actually smiled.

  Now it was just me and Eddie in the museum, a building that had originally housed a dry goods store. When the owner had moved to Traverse City, about seventy years ago, a hardware store had taken its place. That had gone out of business when the owner had passed away, and a pharmacy had come in next. The pharmacy had lasted until its history-buff owner had retired, and he’d sold it to the museum for far less than it could have brought on the open market.

  It was a lovely building. Upstairs were wooden floorboards, hand-plastered walls, and oak trim, but downstairs was a cavernous basement that, for reasons now lost in the mists of time, had a nine-foot ceiling.

  “There could be lots of reasons,” I told Eddie, hefting the carrier onto a handy chair. “Some people say this building is where the first-ever city council meetings were held. And while that might be true, that doesn’t explain why the basement was built so big in the first place.”

  “Mrr.”

  “Well, sure, it’s possible that the first owner wanted a massive basement for his cats to play around in, but how likely is that, really?”

  “Mrr!”

  I considered the current Eddie situation. If Chastain’s book happened to be in the first box I opened, we’d be out of here in a flash. If it was in the last box I opened, we’d be here for days. The most probable reality was that we’d be here somewhere between those two possibilities. Hours, anyway.

  “Promise to come when you’re called?” I peered into the carrier through the wire door. Not that he ever had in the past, but maybe today would be different.

  “Mrr,” he said quietly.

  “Okay, then.” I unlatched the door and let Eddie roam free. “The door to upstairs is closed,” I told him, “so all you can do is wander around down here. And don’t even think of asking if you can go up, because you can’t. There are too many exhibits that aren’t cat toys.” A bear rug for one, a native American headdress for another. And then there were the lace dresses, the carved pew from Chilson’s first church, and the dugout canoe. “Claw marks in any of that stuff wouldn’t be good.”

  “Mrr.” Eddie leaped out of the carrier and onto the concrete floor.

  “I agree with you, pal,” I said, blatantly lying. “Claw marks make everything look better. It’s just some of that stuff hasn’t had any claw marks in it for a hundred years or more, and Amelia prefers it that way.”

  As I talked, I studied the boxes that were strewn about. Some were labeled; some were not. Some were taped shut; some were not. There were boxes on chairs, boxes on tables, boxes on shelves, boxes in the maze of storerooms that some said had once housed alcohol during the Prohibition years.

  I turned around in a small circle, trying to make sense of the arrangement. Amelia had started to explain the sorting system, but I’d shooed her out the door, telling her that I’d figure it out. And I would.

  Eventually.

  “How about this one?” I asked, but Eddie was nowhere to be seen. When he wanted to, he could make himself smaller than a cat hair–covered washcloth. So, without Eddie’s assistance, I flapped open the first box and peered in.

  I hadn’t honestly expected to find Wil
dflowers in the first box, but when I saw a collection of linens, I was still disappointed. “Rats,” I said, after reaching inside and making sure there were no books tucked into the folds of aprons and tea towels. “So much for serendipity.”

  I put my hands on my hips and looked around. “It would have been helpful,” I told my invisible cat, “if the date of the donation had been written on the box.” Amelia had said they kept a log of the donations, who they were from, general contents, dates, and so on, but they hadn’t written any of that nice data on the boxes, since the moment the donations were taken out of the box, it didn’t matter.

  This made sense, but it wasn’t very helpful for someone like me, who was looking for something larger than a needle in something that was bigger than a haystack. Then again . . .

  “How big is a haystack, exactly?” I asked.

  Eddie didn’t answer, of course. I was tempted to whip out my phone and ask my favorite search engine the question, but no. I was here to find a book. A very valuable book. A book that someone had been killed over.

  I rubbed my arms, trying to smooth down the goose pimples. “It’s chilly down here. Good thing you have a fur coat, Eddie.”

  “Mrr,” came the muffled noise.

  And I started opening boxes.

  * * *

  A while later, I was tired of opening boxes. The day had been long and hot, and I was tired and hungry and in need of a shower. “Can we go home now?”

  Eddie had climbed onto a set of shelving in a back room and fit himself between the top box and the ceiling. “Mrr.”

  I sighed. “You’re right. This is important, and I shouldn’t give up so easily.”

  “Mrr,” he said, and started purring.

  “Easy for you to say,” I said, but I went back to the boxes and, as I should have expected, I grew fascinated with things I was finding. It didn’t take long, and I soon lost track of time, forgetting about food and water and sleep and even ice cream.

  “Look at this!” I held out a framed photo so Eddie could see. “It’s Abraham Lincoln—I’m sure of it!” The image was a crowd scene, but President Lincoln was front and center, stovepipe hat and all. “I wonder where it was taken?” I looked closely but couldn’t see any identifiers in the photo. “But that guy sitting next to him looks familiar, doesn’t he? If I could figure out who he is, I might be able to figure out when and where this was taken and—”

  “Mrr!”

  I sighed. He was right. We were here to look for Wildflowers. President Lincoln had waited this long; he could wait a little longer.

  “Don’t you get tired of being right all the time?” I asked, reaching for the 1974 newspaper in which the photo had been wrapped. “I mean, being perfect must be exhausting. No wonder you sleep so much.”

  I cocked my head, waiting for his response.

  Thud.

  I frowned in the direction of the noise I’d just heard, which had sounded a lot like someone stepping onto the bottom creaky step. Amelia had said she’d lock the doors, that I just had to let myself out the side door, which would lock behind me. I hadn’t bothered to make sure she’d locked up, and given her state of anxiety, I now realized I should have.

  “Hello?” I called out. “The museum is closed.” I carefully set Lincoln back into his box and headed for the storeroom’s narrow door. “Sorry, but the door must have—”

  There was a small click.

  The basement went black.

  I stopped. If given a few minutes, I might be able to think of a dozen reasons why all the lights had suddenly gone out. A power outage, for one.

  But combined with that footstep, there was only one reason; whoever was after Wildflowers had figured out what I was doing and had followed me.

  “This is so not good,” I whispered to myself.

  Because I was now alone with Andrea’s killer.

  In the basement of an empty building.

  Chapter 18

  I edged backward, deeper into the dark, trying to get as far away from the killer as possible, but stopped almost immediately, because the stupidity of that particular action was apparent even to me.

  Retreat to a smaller space? One that had a single door and zero windows? Only the dumbest potential victim in the lowest-budget movie would do something like that, and, since I liked to think of myself as smart and resourceful, now would be a good time for that to actually be true.

  “You can come out now, Minnie,” said a male voice. “I know you’re in there.”

  My last hope, that I’d been mistaken about the killer being in here with me and that the museum’s electricity had been shut off because someone had neglected to pay the electric bill, fizzled away into nothing.

  “Who else is down here?” he asked. “I know you’re not alone; I heard you talking to someone.”

  Eddie, in a bizarre act of appropriate behavior, remained quiet.

  So did I.

  “There’s no point in hiding.” A flashlight beam started dancing around the room. I moved quickly and quietly, and crouched behind a stack of boxes.

  What I needed was a plan, and I needed it fast. Ten minutes ago would have been best, so that Eddie and I could have left the basement before the killer even arrived, the killer being . . . who? Shane, aka Angry Guy? Paul Utley? Jared, the used-book store guy? Steve Guilder? Bob Parmalee? Of the five, I hadn’t even met Bob, and I didn’t know the other four well enough to recognize their voices.

  “Come on, Minnie, there’s no need to be scared.”

  If I hadn’t been so scared, I would have snorted derisively. No one who barges into a closed museum, tiptoes down to the basement, and turns the lights off on the unsuspecting occupants of said basement had good intentions.

  “All I want to do is talk.”

  And all I wanted was to get out of that basement, cat in hand, but I didn’t say so out loud.

  The flashlight’s beam played over the stacks of boxes, sending long, complicated shadows around the room as it went. “I hear,” he said, “that you’ve figured out that Chastain’s Wildflowers is down here somewhere.” He sighed. “All these boxes! I hope I gave you enough time to find the book. The last thing I want to do is spend my Saturday night digging through a bunch of old dusty crap that should have been thrown away generations ago.”

  The cone of light came to an abrupt halt. “For crying out loud. Would you look at that? It’s one of those hair wreaths. What did some woman do, cut off all her hair to make this thing? Must have taken weeks to make something this complicated, but at the end of the day, it’s just creepy to have some dead chick’s hair hanging on your wall, don’t you think?”

  I wanted to ask him if he thought the DeKeysers should have thrown away Wildflowers a generation or two back, but managed to keep my mouth shut. He was trying to get me to talk, and I wasn’t going to play his game.

  Think, I told myself. Figure this out. Come up with a plan A, have a plan B for backup, then start working on implementation. Shouldn’t be that hard.

  In theory.

  “Why on earth do people hang on to old crap like this?” The flashlight played over a box I’d opened early on. I saw a hand reach down to flip through the contents. “And then donate it to a museum?” He made a rude noise. “You must have some kind of ego if you think strangers would be interested in your old family photos.”

  Clearly, the man had no sense of history. I continued to keep my mouth shut and silently vowed one more time to keep Wildflowers from this guy. Not that I’d found the book yet, but that wasn’t the point.

  “So, where is it?” he asked. “You’ve been down here for hours—you must have found it by now. And I must say, I’m pleased you never noticed me following you the past week. I kept hearing you were asking all sorts of questions. I didn’t worry too much about that, but once I found out you’re dating Ash Wolverson, I had to mak
e sure you didn’t cause me any trouble.” He laughed. “On the contrary, I’d say you led me straight to the book.”

  He moved around the room, but slow enough that I was able to back away, undetected, by hiding behind boxes, old countertops from the pharmacy, and old shelving units from the hardware store. Once again, being under-tall was working to my advantage, since it didn’t take much to hide me. Hooray for getting the short end of the genetic stick!

  Short end?

  My inane thought was suddenly so funny I almost laughed out loud. I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep my nervous laughter inside, and the small noise must have alerted him.

  “Heard that,” he said casually. His flashlight speared the darkness, and I tried to make myself smaller than I’d been since I was twelve years old. “Look,” he said. “We both know you’re down here, so why are you bothering to hide?”

  I figured the answer to that was obvious, so this time it was easy to keep my mouth shut.

  “Come on, Minnie,” he said. “All I want is that book. Sure, it was donated to the museum, but they don’t even know what they have, so clearly they don’t deserve it. We’re the only ones who know the value of Chastain’s book, so let’s talk about this.”

  I watched the flashlight shift away from me. If I ran now, he wouldn’t see the movement. The open stairway was about fifteen feet to my left and it was . . . too far. He was bigger, faster, and stronger than I was, and he’d be on me before I got three steps up the stairs. I had to get closer before I ran.

  A lot closer.

  Slowly, so very slowly, I stood and wedged myself behind a set of freestanding shelves; old wooden ones with a solid back. If I could inch behind it all the way to the other end, I’d be close enough to the stairs to make a run for it.

  “So, here’s the deal,” my enemy said. “Let’s work on two assumptions. One, that the book is here. Two, that we both want the money it will bring if we sell it to the right person.”

  I almost yelled at him then and there. Any money the book might bring didn’t belong to him and it didn’t belong to me. It belonged to . . . well, I wasn’t sure who it belonged to, considering that Talia DeKeyser had given it away while in the grips of Alzheimer’s, that Chandra Wunsch had given it away without knowing what she had, and that the museum hadn’t a clue about its value, but that was for the attorneys to figure out.