by Sofie Kelly
I was about to say they’d talked to me more than once when I remembered I was also a suspect of sorts.
“That’s not the only thing,” Roma said. “He wasn’t at Fern’s for meat loaf.”
“You’re going to have to explain,” I said.
“Have you ever been to Fern’s diner?” she asked. “It’s a little place down near the marina.”
“Like a fifties diner?”
Roma nodded. “That’s Fern’s. Every Tuesday night is meat loaf night. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans in the summer, carrots the rest of the time, brown gravy and apple pie.”
“Sounds good.”
“It is. I haven’t missed a meat loaf Tuesday since I came back to Mayville. Oren probably hasn’t missed one in twenty-five years.” She kicked a rock on the ground and sent it skittering along the sidewalk.
“Oren wasn’t there Tuesday night,” I said.
“No.” We started walking again. “And he wasn’t at the theater when you got there the next morning, was he?”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Kathleen, Oren didn’t come home at all Tuesday night,” Roma said, her voice low and troubled.
I brushed away a small cloud of midges fluttering just in front of my face. “How do you know that?” I asked.
“The Kings bought a horse for their daughter. They thought they were getting a deal when they heard the price. What they got was a sick animal. I was out at their place from about one until close to five a.m. The back of their property meets the back of Oren’s.” She tipped her head back to study the sky. “It was a full moon Monday night. I could see Oren’s yard and house almost as clearly as if it were daytime. His truck wasn’t there. He wasn’t there.”
“It doesn’t mean Oren had anything to do with what happened to Gregor Easton.” My shoulder ached, but I didn’t want to rub it in front of Roma.
“If there was nothing off about Easton’s death, the police wouldn’t still be investigating. And it’s not like they have a huge pool of suspects. Did you know that pretty much everyone in the choir was at a birthday party at Eric’s Place that night?”
“I didn’t.”
“I know Marcus. He’s good at what he does.”
She was right. From what I’d seen Detective Gordon was thorough and persistent.
“Easton was at your library. Why does that matter if he died from natural causes? They’re not going to keep looking at a case that wasn’t criminal just so they won’t look incompetent if Access Hollywood shows up.”
She held out both her hands. “And they haven’t.”
“You think the police are investigating because there’s something to investigate,” I said.
“Kathleen, Oren is family. Our moms were cousins. I don’t believe for a moment that he’d hurt anyone, but this looks bad.”
I thought about Oren recognizing Gregor Easton’s real name. And how beautifully he’d played the piano. Those things weren’t coincidences. Oren knew Gregor Easton. How and why he was keeping it a secret, I didn’t know. But I didn’t believe he could have killed the man.
“Roma,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to Mr. Easton, but I don’t believe Oren had anything to do with it.” I held up a finger before she could interrupt. “I may have only been here a few months, but I know Oren well enough to know he wouldn’t deliberately hurt Gregor Easton or anyone else, for that matter. He had no reason. And if there was some kind of accident at the library or the theater he’d get help, not leave someone to die.”
Roma looked away and I waited until she looked back.
“Whatever reason Oren had for being gone all night, it had nothing to do with Easton’s death. I know that.”
Roma looked at me and I met her gaze steadily, because I did believe what I had said. Then she reached out and gave my arm a squeeze. “I’m glad Everett hired you, Kathleen,” she said. “Have a safe walk home.”
She turned left and I headed up the hill. I meant what I’d said. Oren didn’t have it in him to hurt anyone, but he was tied up in this mess somehow. And so was I.
I let myself in the back door and stood in the darkness of the porch for a moment. I needed to talk to Oren before I did anything else. And this was the kind of conversation that had to be had in person—not that I was exactly sure what I was going to say. What would I do? Knock on the door and say, “Hi, Oren. I just came by to ask if you did anything to Gregor Easton”?
Well, maybe not that.
I’d left the light on over the stove in the kitchen. No cats. The laundry basket was on one of the chairs. I’d folded everything before I left, but I hadn’t had time to put anything away. It wasn’t that late. Maybe I’d go for a walk to clear my head. And if I happened to end up near Oren’s place, well, that wouldn’t be so bad. I found a pair of socks in the clean laundry so I could change from sandals to sneaks.
I wrapped up half a dozen brownies to take with me—in case I did happen to see Oren. If I was going to accuse him of hiding something the least I could do was give him a brownie. I got my messenger bag to carry the brownies so they didn’t get too warm in my hand. Then I ran upstairs to change from my skirt to a pair of capris.
When I came back down Hercules was looking in the bag. I shook a finger at him. “Oh, no. No, no. We’re not doing this again.”
He put one paw inside the bag.
“No,” I repeated more insistently.
He lifted his other front paw, studied the bottom of it for a moment, gave it a couple of quick licks and then got into the tote and sat down. I loomed over him.
“I’m going to Oren’s. You can’t come. Get out,” I said. I knew he wasn’t going to move. I tipped the bag forward, very carefully, intending to tip him out. He lay down and snagged the front mesh panel of the bag with his claws. I gave it a small shake. It didn’t work.
I bent down. “Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Stay in the bag. I’ll take something else.”
I put the brownies in a cloth grocery bag, grabbed my keys and went out into the porch for my sneakers. Hercules came through the door behind me. Literally through the door. I rubbed the side of my head with the heel of my hand.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cat’s ears twitch. I could put him back in the kitchen, but all he’d do was walk through the door again. It seemed that Owen and Hercules were determined to help me play detective, each in their own way. There was no way to make Herc stay in the house. And he knew it.
But I wasn’t going to fold right away. I put on one shoe, slowly tied the laces and then did the same with the other shoe. Hercules didn’t look at me. I didn’t look at him. I straightened and brushed off my pants. “All right, you can come,” I said. “Get in the bag.”
This time he waited for me to open the kitchen door. Then he climbed in the messenger bag, lay down and looked at me, all innocent green eyes.
“Don’t be smug,” I said, closing the top zipper. I looked at him through the mesh. “And please be quiet.”
I swung the bag over my shoulder, locked up and started up the hill. The closer I got to Oren’s house the more foolish the idea of going to see him began to seem. Hercules scratched at the top of the bag just as Oren’s house came in sight.
“Stop it,” I hissed. That just made him dig harder at the nylon fabric.
I didn’t know why I thought the cat would listen to me. He was a cat, not a dog that had been to obedience school, or a trained monkey in the circus. He was an independent, stubborn cat. Who was about to destroy my favorite bag.
I opened the zipper a couple of inches. Hercules immediately stuck a paw out. “No, no, no! Don’t do that,” I said.
He raked the inside of the bag with his other front paw. Great. Someone was going to drive by and see me talking to my purse at nine o’clock on a Saturday night in front of Oren’s house.
“Fine,” I whispered. “You can have a look around, but then you go back in the bag because we’re going home. And I’m not drinking any mor
e of Ruby’s wine. It puts the ‘stupid’ in ‘stupid ideas.’”
I pulled the zipper open a bit more. I knew mice and cockroaches could squeeze through incredibly small spaces. So can cats, I discovered. Hercules pushed through the small opening, coming out of the bag like water pouring to the ground. He took off across Oren’s yard, disappearing into the darkness.
Crap on toast!
I scrambled across Oren’s lawn and tripped over the bottom step of the verandah. I caught a glimpse of fur heading around the side of the porch. I felt for the railing and followed, hoping I was chasing Herc and not a nosy raccoon or a sidetracked skunk.
“Hercules,” I called in a stage whisper, knowing I was wasting my breath.
Oren’s house was a renovated farmhouse, like mine, with the same steeply pitched roof and bay window. His house had an addition on one side, set back from the front of the main house, with a covered verandah that ran along part of the main house, down the side and all the way across the front of the extension. Hercules paused by the wooden screen door that led into the extension.
“C’mon, puss,” I called. He looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes huge and unblinking. Then he walked through the door and disappeared.
I sagged against the railing and said a word that wellbred librarians didn’t generally say. Now what was I going to do? If Oren came home before Hercules came out, I was, to put it crassly, screwed. There was no way I could explain to Oren how Hercules had gotten into his house. There was no logical, reasonable explanation.
Not that I had a logical, reasonable explanation for why I was at Oren’s house in the first place. Or why I’d brought my cat along. I was going to come off as very peculiar at best, and deranged at worst.
I looked around. No people. No cars. No lights. So far it looked like I hadn’t been seen. I was very grateful that Oren didn’t have motion-sensor lights.
I dropped to my knees by the door. My head hurt, my shoulder ached and Violet’s blueberry tart was rolling in my stomach like the English Channel ferry in a rainstorm.
I called the cat again. Of course he didn’t come. I lifted the strap of my bag over my shoulder and set the bag next to the railing. There was nothing to do but wait and cross my fingers that things didn’t get any worse. I leaned back against the railing, knees pulled up to my chest, and watched the white wooden screen door.
I thought about Gregor Easton. What did I know so far? Easton had been in my library after hours, meeting someone who’d used my name to lure him there. Someone who had a key or access to a key. He’d had a gash on the side of his head. There was blood at the library. Easton had probably been hurt there, but was it deliberate or accidental?
Oren knew Easton. Oren hadn’t been at the Stratton the morning I’d found the body and hadn’t been at meat loaf night the night before. The most obvious inference was that Oren had something to do with Easton’s death.
Tying Oren to Easton’s death was the part that didn’t work for me. I thought about the beautiful sunburst Oren had created. So much care had gone into making that, and so much caring into the idea to create it in the first place.
It didn’t matter how things looked. I knew how they felt—to me.
Just then I felt something else, the same thickening of the air I’d noticed at the library just before Hercules had come out of the storage area. I leaned forward, eyes on the bottom panel of the door. The screen and the thick wooden door behind it seemed to ripple and go out of focus just a little. I held my breath, hoping, hoping it was the cat and not an earthquake or some part of my brain short-circuiting.
One moment the surface of the door seemed almost fluid and the next there was Hercules. He walked across the verandah and climbed onto my lap. “Bad, bad kitty,” I said. I might have been more believable if I hadn’t had both arms wrapped around him.
“You have to stop doing that,” I said. “What if Oren had come home? What if Oren had been in there? What if he had some huge, slobbery, pointy-toothed attack dog in there?”
Herc lifted his head and fixed his green eyes on me.
“Okay, I’m exaggerating a little,” I said. “But there could have been a dog in there who thought it would be fun to play a game of catch with you as the ball.”
He put a paw on my wrist and butted my hand with his head.
“So, what did you take this time?” I asked, holding out my hand, palm up. He spat out a crumpled ball of paper, damp with cat spit. Gingerly I pulled the edges apart and flattened the paper against my leg.
It seemed to be the top half of something. The page was torn along one short edge. I held the sheet up close to my face, trying to read what was on the paper. It didn’t make any sense. Someone had drawn a row of blocks—actually they looked more like little teeth. There seemed to be dots on some of the teeth and the dots were numbered, but some had more numbers than others.
There was another row of little boxes under the first with dots and numbers in a different pattern.
“What the heck is this?” I asked the cat. “Is it some kind of plan for something?”
Of all the things that were probably inside Oren’s house, why had Hercules brought me this? It didn’t look like any building plan I’d ever seen. In the dim light the handwriting looked like Oren’s, but I couldn’t be sure. “I don’t get it.” The cat’s response was to climb down and sniff around the verandah.
I folded the paper and stuffed it in my pants pocket. “We have to go,” I said. I unzipped the top of the messenger bag and tapped the bottom with a finger. “Hop in.”
He stretched. He yawned. He took a couple of passes at his face with a paw. And then finally he walked over and climbed in the bag.
“Thank you,” I said, before I closed the top.
I got to my feet, slid the bag over my shoulder and felt my way back along the porch. A moth—at least I hoped that was what it was—fluttered by my face. I waved it away. Hercules shifted against my hip.
I started down the walkway to the street and couldn’t help letting out a sigh of relief. We’d made it. No one had seen us. I hadn’t had to explain about Hercules or what I was doing crawling around Oren’s deck in the dark on a Saturday night. We were free and clear.
A car came along the street and stopped in front of the house. The passenger’s window lowered and Detective Gordon leaned over from the driver’s side. “Good evening, Ms. Paulson,” he said.
Free and clear? Maybe not.
18
Slap Face with Palm
Hercules stopped squirming. I put a hand around the bag as a warning for him to stay very still and very quiet. Walking around on a Saturday night with one’s cat in one’s bag didn’t exactly make one look like a criminal, but it didn’t exactly make one look all that stable, either. I put on what I hoped was an innocent-looking smile.
“Hello, Detective Gordon,” I said, walking over to the side of his car.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” he asked.
“Thank you, no,” I said. “I was out for a walk and stopped in to see Oren, but he isn’t home.” The brownies. I was still holding the cloth grocery bag with the brownies inside. “I wanted to drop some brownies off to Oren as a thank-you for fixing a leak at the library yesterday.”
There—a perfectly good explanation for why I was standing in Oren’s yard. I was in the clear after all.
“Get in,” Detective Gordon said.
Or not. “Excuse me?” I said.
He leaned over a little farther and opened the passenger’s door. “I’ll drive you home. It’s not a good idea to be walking around alone this late.”
This late? I didn’t want to do something as obvious as look at my watch, but by my calculation it wasn’t more than nine o’clock. Plus, I had my big flashlight, my pepper spray, a cat, and six brownies.
“I’m fine, really,” I said.
“I’d feel better if I saw you home safely.” I couldn’t decide if he was being charmingly old-fashioned or just a bit patron
izing.
“I don’t generally accept rides from strangers,” I said. That made him smile.
“We’re not exactly strangers, Ms. Paulson.”
He was right. My feet were tired, not to mention my shoulder. And I had no idea how much longer Hercules would stay quiet, which could open a whole new can of worms, or at least a bag of cat. “You’re right,” I said.
I got into the car, setting Hercules between my feet. Detective Gordon turned in Oren’s driveway and headed back along the street. “What are you doing out on a Saturday night?” I asked.
“Police business,” he said.
“Gregor Easton.”
He didn’t answer and he kept his eyes on the road. But he did smile just a little.
It occurred to me that maybe the detective had been on his way to see Oren. Time to talk about something innocuous. “I didn’t know you were a cat person, Detective,” I said.
That got me a quizzical look. Then the light came on. “Roma drafted you to help her this afternoon,” he said.
“She did.”
“Did you have any luck catching Lucy?” He stopped at the corner, checked for traffic and then turned down Mountain Road.
“We got her,” I said. “And you were right. Her leg is broken. Roma’s scheduled surgery for tomorrow.”
“That’s good.” He slowed to a stop behind a truck that was waiting to turn left. “I’d hate for Lucy to have to be . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew what he was thinking. “Roma told me you were the one who found Desmond,” I said, fighting the urge to lean down and check on Hercules.
“Yeah. He’d been in a fight with some other animal. He was by the edge of the road. I wasn’t sure at first if it was some kind of animal or someone’s coat that had been thrown out of a car.”
“How on earth did you get him to Roma? How did you get him into your car?”
“Well, it wasn’t easy.” He slowed down, put on his turn signal and pulled into my driveway. “I didn’t know he was feral.” He turned sideways toward me in his seat. “I didn’t know anything at all about feral cats. Desmond went crazy when I picked him up. He howled, he hissed, he scratched both of my hands. Luckily I was driving a department car with the divider between the front and back seats. I managed somehow to get him into the back.”