by Sofie Kelly
14
Snake Creeps Down
Oren knew Gregor Easton’s real name. How? Did he know Easton?
I sank onto the edge of the desk. Oren knew Gregor Easton. There was no other explanation. I could feel my stomach tying itself into a knot. Was it Oren that Easton had met here at the library? Did Oren have anything to do with Easton’s death? No. No. No. I couldn’t believe Oren had hurt Easton. I wouldn’t believe it.
The stiffness in my shoulder had turned into a throbbing pain all the way down that side of my back. I fished in my top drawer for a couple of ibuprofen.
It was almost time to leave for the clinic. What was I going to do about Oren? Call Detective Gordon? No. Talk to Oren? I wasn’t sure. I just couldn’t fit the idea of Oren hurting anyone—even by accident—into my mind. There had to be some logical explanation for Oren knowing Gregor Easton’s real name. I’d just have to figure out what that was.
I went to my clinic appointment. My shoulder was bruised, not broken. The doctor suggested ice; the same advice Roma had given me, which just proved to me that she was a pretty good people doctor, too.
I stopped at Eric’s for Chinese chicken salad to go and a giant brownie, because it had been an I-deservea-giant-brownie kind of day. When I got back to the library Abigail had given up sorting books for the yard sale and was at the desk. The staging was gone.
I looked up at the foyer ceiling. No medallion, so I was pretty sure neither Will nor Eddie and the crew had been back. But what the heck, I asked Abigail, anyway.
She gave a snort of laughter. “Friday afternoon? Not likely.”
“I didn’t think so.” I set my take-out bag on the desk.
“How’s your shoulder?” she asked.
“Nothing broken, just a big bruise.”
“Glad to hear it,” she said, smiling. “Oh”—she snagged the notepad at her left elbow—“the electrician said to tell you he’s finished, except for one plug by the window and that’ll have to wait until Oren has fixed the leak. He’ll be back Monday.”
Upside down, Abigail’s handwriting looked like a cross between cave-wall drawings and the Cyrillic alphabet. I leaned over the desk to look at it right side up. It looked the same. “How do you read that?” I asked.
“It’s code,” she said, flipping her braid over her shoulder.
“Seriously, is it some type of shorthand?”
“Seriously, it’s code.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“That’s the point.” She set the pad on the desk and spun it around so I could see it. “I have five older brothers, Kathleen.” She held up five fingers. “Five. They gave Malibu Barbie a Mohawk and a Sharpie tattoo when I was eight.” She shook her head. “A tattoo that says ‘Bite Me’ is not a good look for Barbie.”
“Not really,” I said sympathetically.
“I had zero privacy, so I came up with the code. I was reading Pippi Longstocking and a book about pirates at the time.” She laughed at the memory. “It was so complicated in the beginning I couldn’t remember all the rules, but over time I made up something that was a cross between shorthand and my own private language” She shot me a sideways look. “It does make me seem like a nutcase, doesn’t it?”
“Not even close,” I said. I pushed the notepad back to her. “Abigail, my parents are actors. When they get into a part they become entirely different people—twenty-four hours a day. Creating your own language seems pretty tame to me.” I picked up my food. “I’ll be in my office,” I said.
The rest of the evening went by quietly. The walk home up Mountain Road seemed longer than usual. My shoulder ached, and while I’d managed to push Oren out of my mind for a while, what to do with what I knew was niggling in my brain again.
The cats were waiting just inside the kitchen door. “Hi, guys,” I said. “My day was pretty crappy. How was yours?” Hercules meowed but was immediately drowned out by Owen, who yowled louder. “Okay, okay, it’s not a competition,” I said.
I made us toast and peanut butter, propped a bag of ice between my shoulder and the back of the chair, and told the cats all about the leak, my shoulder, Lise’s e-mail and Oren. They listened intently—although that may have been because I was the one with the toast—but they didn’t offer any insights.
I had a shower and went to bed.
In the morning my shoulder actually felt a little better. On the other hand, it looked worse. I felt a bit like a circus contortionist, trying to look at my back in the bathroom mirror. There was a black-and-purple bruise, about the size of a slice of bread, on my right shoulder blade. Seeing it made me angry with Will Redfern all over again, and at myself for being nice a lot longer than I should have been.
The cats followed me around while I dressed, dried my hair and then sighed at my reflection, regretting, the way I did every morning, my ill-advised haircut. I fed Owen and Hercules, and when I was ready to head out to meet Maggie they were both waiting by the back door.
“I’m not going to be that long,” I told them. “Stay in the yard. No going over to Rebecca’s to mooch treats.” I glowered at Owen. “Or anything else.”
Maggie was already at Eric’s at a table by the window. Our waitress appeared with coffee before I’d even settled into my seat. Eric waved from behind the counter. I waved back.
“How’s your shoulder and why didn’t you call me?” Maggie demanded.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said. “I’m fine. Thank you. And, yes, it’s a lovely morning.” I put cream and sugar in my coffee, stirred and took a long sip.
Maggie waved her hand as though shooing away a fly. “Okay. Good morning. Nice day. I’m fine. Is your shoulder all right?”
I set the cup on the table. “I’m fine. I have a bruise but nothing’s broken. Roma checked me over and I went to the clinic and I had X-rays. I’m fine.” I stage-whispered the last two words.
Mags twisted her teacup in its saucer. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because all I wanted to do was go to bed.” I took another sip of my coffee. “How did you know, anyway?”
“Mary told Susan. Susan told Eric. Eric told me.”
“Ah yes, the information superhighway,” I said wryly.
The waitress came back to take our orders. While Maggie changed her mind half a dozen times about what she wanted in her omelet, I looked around the café. It was mostly families stopping for breakfast before or after a trip to the farmers’ market. So much for questioning people involved with the festival. Not that it was a really practical idea. What was I going to do? Go from table to table saying, “Good morning. Did you kill Mr. Easton?”
Maggie finally settled on tomatoes and asparagus. While we waited for the food I brought her up-to-date on what had been happening at the library.
“I’m glad you’re going to talk to Everett,” she said.
“I should have done it before now.”
“Will’s always been the type to start late and finish early. If I didn’t know better I’d say he doesn’t want the job to get finished.”
“Susan said the same thing,” I said. “But there’s no reason for Will to want this job to go badly. In the end, the only person that’s going to be hurt is him.”
Maggie edged her chair sideways into a patch of sunlight. “Will’s always been the kind of person who takes the easy way, but he wasn’t always so careless. A little lazy, but not irresponsible.”
“Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.” I looked around for our waitress so I could get more coffee.
“You could be right about that,” Maggie said. “He’s dyeing his mustache.”
“What?”
She nodded.
“How do you know?”
Eric came over with the coffeepot before she could answer. He was a much more serious person than his wife. Eric and Susan seemed to prove the old adage that opposites attract. “Hi, Kathleen. How are you?” he said, filling my cup.
“I’m good, Eric,” I said. “I
owe you for the breakfast you sent to the hotel for Mr. Easton.”
Eric shook his head. He’d cut his salt-and-pepper hair very short and it suited him. “I never sent it. I called over there to get Easton’s room number—we do their continental breakfast, so I thought I’d send everything at once—and they said he’d gone out the night before and hadn’t come back. The next thing I heard, he was dead.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Your order will be out in a minute,” Eric said, heading for another table with the coffee.
So, after Easton had been at the library he hadn’t gone back to his hotel room. Did that mean he’d gone directly to the theater? And had he been alone? More questions to add to my list.
I turned my attention back to Maggie. “How do you know Will dyes his mustache?”
She took a sip of her tea. “Ruby saw him buying a box of L’Oréal Excellence number forty-six at Walgreens.”
“It could have been for his wife,” I said, adding cream to my coffee.
“Forty-six is Copper Red, and Will’s wife is a blonde,” Maggie said. “He dyes his mustache, Kath. It’s not even the same color as his hair. And he traded his old truck for that huge thing he drives now—long bed and extended cab. How Freudian is that?” She held out both hands. “Midlife crisis,” she said, lightly banging the table to make her point.
Our breakfast arrived then, which meant, thankfully, that we didn’t have to talk about Will Redfern’s midlife crisis—real or not.
After breakfast we walked down to the farmers’ market, one street up from the hotel. The market was actually open all week. Like the artist’s co-op that Maggie was part of, the farmers’ market was a cooperative—vegetables, fruit, a small bakery, a butcher and a tiny cheese shop. But on Saturday morning the market expanded out into the parking lot, weather permitting. Farmers sold directly to customers from the backs of their trucks. Maggie was looking for Swiss chard and new potatoes. I wanted carrots for salad and maybe muffins.
“I think I see potatoes over there,” Maggie said, pointing to the far end of the lot.
“Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.” I’d caught sight of what I hoped was rhubarb jam being sold from the tailgate of a dusty old Ford.
I was trying to decide between plain rhubarb jam and rhubarb-strawberry jam when someone said, “Good morning, Ms. Paulson,” by my left ear.
I turned and looked up. Way up. “Good morning, Detective Gordon,” I said.
He looked different in jeans and a gray T-shirt. He had a flat stomach and wider shoulders than I’d noticed before, and . . . What the heck was I thinking?
“Looking for something for your sweet tooth?” he asked.
I flashed back to Andrew teasing me about my habit of putting jam on everything. Andrew, who’d married someone he’d only known two weeks. I wondered what Detective Gordon would think if he knew how many nights I’d sat in the dark in the living room and eaten jam right out of the jar.
I pulled my hand away from the bottles. “Umm, no.” I cleared my throat and caught sight of several dozen bunches of fat, red radishes, farther back in the truck bed. “I was looking for radishes.” Why had I said that?
“Oh, well, let me reach a bunch for you,” he said. He stretched over the side of the bed and handed me a clump of plump radishes, each about the size of a jawbreaker.
“Well, thank you,” I said.
“My pleasure.” I waited for him to walk away so I could put the radishes back, but he just stood there, smiling at me. “I think you can pay right there,” he said, pointing to the other side of the truck.
“Ah, great.” I handed over the money for the radishes, tucking them in my bag next to a bunch of carrots and some peas. Then I turned. “Have a nice day, Detective,” I said, with a not exactly genuine smile.
“You too, Ms. Paulson.”
I threaded my way across the parking lot. He didn’t follow me. I found Maggie, who’d found her potatoes.
“Did you get your jam?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I . . . I changed my mind.” I pulled the radishes out of my cloth bag. “Here,” I said to Maggie, thrusting the bunch at her.
“You bought radishes instead of jam?” she said. “Why? You know how they make you burp.”
“Just take them,” I said.
Maggie shrugged. “Okay.”
We walked around a while longer. We both bought a couple of loaves of crusty French bread from the bakery inside, and Mags had a long conversation with one of the vendors about the upcoming fall harvest of Honeycrisp apples, which, she assured me, I was going to love. We parted company on the sidewalk.
I headed up the hill with the delicious smell of bread coming from the bag over my shoulder. Mentally I kicked myself for not buying the jam. Andrew had a new life, and so did I.
There was no sign of the cats in the yard. I stood on the back stoop for a moment. No sign of them in Rebecca’s yard, either. It was awfully quiet. I went inside and put everything away, after tearing the end off one of the baguettes. The crisp brown crust left crumbs down the front of my shirt. While brushing them off, I found a smear of marmalade from breakfast on my shirt. I went upstairs to change and gathered the laundry. I put in the first load and went back up to the kitchen.
Hercules was waiting at the top of the stairs. I bent down and picked him up. “Hey, fur ball,” I said. “Where were you?” He leaned in and licked my chin. “What?” I laughed. I’d had marmalade on my shirt. Did I have omelet on my chin?
I carried the cat out to the porch, set him on the bench and sat down beside him, rubbing at my chin, just in case there were remnants of my breakfast stuck to it. I reached over to scratch the side of Herc’s face.
“What am I going to do about Oren?” I asked him. He rubbed his head against my hand. “You’re no help,” I said. He shook his head, jumped down and went over to the porch door, where he turned and looked back at me. “Are you going somewhere?”
Hercules scratched the bottom of the screen. “Hey!” I said. His green eyes firmly on my face, he lifted one paw and raked his claws across the door’s kick panel. I opened my mouth to snap at him again and it occurred to me that he was trying to tell me something. “What?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
He smacked the screen with his paw and it came unlatched. Herc almost tumbled out the open door. Shaking himself, he stalked out, flipping his tail at me.
It would have been a lot easier if his superpower was talking instead of walking through walls.
I rubbed the space between my eyes with the heel of my hand. I was afraid Oren could be tied up in Gregor Easton’s death somehow, and I wasn’t completely convinced I’d dropped off Detective Gordon’s suspect list. Plus the cats were acting strangely. Well, more strangely than walking through walls and becoming invisible.
I stepped into the kitchen just as the phone rang. I headed into the living room, thinking for the hundredth time that I probably should get a cordless phone.
“Hello, Kathleen. It’s Roma.”
“Hi, Roma,” I said.
“How’s your shoulder?”
I hadn’t thought much about my shoulder since breakfast. I rotated it slowly forward and backward. It was stiff and a bit sore, but otherwise okay. “A lot better,” I said. “I have an ugly bruise, but nothing’s broken.”
“Glad to hear it,” Roma said. “I realize it’s short notice, but are you available to come out to Wisteria Hill with me this afternoon? My helper had to cancel.”
Stay home, clean house and obsess, or help Roma and maybe learn a little more about the cats?
“Yes,” I said.
“Wonderful. I can pick you up at two o’clock.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“I know it’s warm, Kathleen, but you’ll need long pants and long sleeves,” she warned.
“That’s okay. I can find something.”
“I’ll see you at two, then,” Roma said, and hung up.
I had laundry to fini
sh. I needed to find some clothes to change into, and I had to have lunch.
I took the clean clothes out of the washer, threw in another load and headed for the clothesline, using the basket heaped with sheets and towels to bump my way out of the porch door. Which is why I almost tripped over Owen coming up the steps, carrying a paper bag in his mouth.
15
Slant Flying
“Owen! Not again,” I said, dropping the laundry basket on the stoop.
He held his ground and glared at me, the little brown bag clamped between his teeth.
Is there a twelve-step program for klepto cats? I wondered. Then I caught sight of the logo on the bag: GRAINERY FEEDS & NEEDS.
“Owen, do you have a Fred the Funky Chicken in that bag?” I asked.
His furry gray face was unreadable.
I crouched down. “Let me see,” I said.
He sat down but didn’t let go of the bag.
“I’ll give it back, I swear.” I held out my hand.
After a long moment Owen dropped the bag in my outstretched palm. I unfolded the top. I’d guessed correctly. Inside the paper sack was a little yellow catnip chicken. Owen shoved his nose down into the top of the bag.
“Hey, hang on a second,” I said. I pulled the bag away from him, which got me a sharp meow in return. “I’m not taking it. I’m trying to get it out of the bag for you.”
I finally managed to fish out Fred the Funky Chicken despite Owen crowding me. I held it out to the cat, who immediately snatched the chicken from my fingers. I stood up and held the porch door open for him. “Please don’t leave fuzzy chicken parts all over the kitchen,” I said. Owen already had that glazed/gleeful look in his eye as he brushed past me. I was pretty sure he wasn’t listening.
I picked up the laundry basket again. As I pegged the last bath towel on the line Rebecca came through the hedge with Violet. I folded my arms across my chest. “Rebecca. You’re spoiling my cat,” I said, smiling to show I really wasn’t mad.
“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” she said, matching my smile with one of her own. “But it wasn’t me. It was Ami. She loves animals and she’s taken a great liking to Owen.” She pushed her glasses back on her nose. “And I think he likes her. He follows her around the yard.”