Hooked on a Feline

by Sofie Kelly

  I smiled back at him. “Guilty,” I said.

  “I know I’m going to sound like an overprotective parental figure, but Lachlan asked you to help him try to document the history of that building in Red Wing that Leitha was in the process of selling, didn’t he?”

  I hesitated. “Yes,” I finally said. “Is that a problem?”

  He shook his head. “Not for me. It’s something for him to focus on and right now I think it’s good for him.”

  “I’ll do a little digging on Monday and see what I can find.”

  “I appreciate that,” Jonas said. “He’s a tough kid, but he’s had more loss than most adults ever have to face. We’re lucky to have people like Johnny and Harry around us. They’ve become family.”

  “ ‘Families are like pieces of art,’ ” I said. “ ‘You can make them from almost anything.’ Mitch Albom.”

  Jonas nodded. “Smart man.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. I glanced sideways as the file folder on the chair between us opened. There was no breeze but I was pretty sure there was a small gray tabby cat sitting on the chair. Owen had gotten in the truck after all. Somehow he had darted back and jumped inside, probably because I’d left the driver’s door open when I’d gotten out to lift him off the hood. He was faster than I’d realized and for once he hadn’t given himself away on the drive out or at the flea market. The little furball was getting sneakier. Had he gotten out of the truck at the flea market? I didn’t want to think about that.

  What I needed to do was distract Jonas so he didn’t see the piece of paper that was now seemingly levitating above the flowered seat all by itself.

  I set my mug on the table. “Would you mind if I took a closer look at the flower beds?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Jonas said. He set his cup next to mine and got to his feet. I stood up as well and we walked over to the closest bed.

  Looking at the paint box of colors, I wished I had more of a green thumb. I pointed at the plant closest to me. “I would say that’s a black-eyed Susan with purple petals but I’m thinking I’d be wrong.”

  He smiled. “Those are Echinacea purpurea, purple coneflowers. They attract bees and butterflies and they’re easy to grow.”

  I smiled. “My kind of plant.” Behind us the piece of paper was moving, seemingly of its own volition, across the grass. I fervently hoped it and Owen were headed in the direction of my truck.

  Jonas and I spent about ten minutes walking around, looking at the various plants. “You’re welcome to come out again for another look anytime you’d like,” he said. “And if you describe pretty much any of these plants to Harry, he’ll know what they are.”

  “Thank you for the tour of the garden,” I said as we walked back to the truck. I had no idea where Owen was or what he’d done with that piece of paper. “When I get to the library on Monday, I’m going to be looking for some gardening books.”

  “Thank you for bringing out those papers,” Jonas said. “And thanks for offering to help Lachlan.”

  I opened the driver’s door, hoping Owen was close by and would hop in. I felt something move across my foot and looked down to see my shoelace was untied. I set my bag by my feet and bent down to fasten it and just under the edge of the truck spotted the piece of paper Owen had swiped.

  I didn’t want to leave it there covered in cat drool and I didn’t want Jonas to see me pick it up. Luckily he was checking out the truck and I managed to pick up my bag and the paper and set them on the front seat in one more or less smooth motion.

  “Kathleen, where did you get this truck?” he asked. There was something in his expression I couldn’t quite read, an almost wistfulness.

  “Harrison Taylor gave it to me. It’s old, but it’ll push through a fair amount of snow and pretty much anything else that gets in its way.”

  “Colin, my brother, had one just like it. It brings back a lot of good memories.” He laid his hand on the front fender for a moment and I thought how Lachlan wasn’t the only one who had lost way more than was fair.

  I drove away with my fingers crossed that I had a furry—and invisible—stowaway. Once I was down the road beyond the Quinn driveway, I pulled over to the side of the road.

  “Show yourself, Owen,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Right now. I’m not kidding.”

  Still nothing.

  Was I wrong? Was he still out prowling around Jonas’s yard? How on earth would I explain that I had left my cat behind?

  And then I felt the tiniest brush of something against my right arm. It felt like a piece of dandelion fluff grazing my skin. Or a cat’s tail. I stretched both arms over my head and then shifted sideways and brought my right hand down onto the seat. I had timed it perfectly. I had a handful of invisible cat.

  Owen winked into sight and there was something cocky about the look he gave me.

  “You’re in so much trouble,” I said, glaring at him. “Jonas almost saw you and you stole one of those pieces of paper.”

  He peered at the seat, spotted the piece of paper in question and set one paw on it, looking at me as though he was expecting some kind of praise. As usual, he wasn’t sorry. I reached over and picked the paper up, wondering what it was that had attracted the cat’s attention.

  The paper was half of a page from a lined yellow notepad. I’d seen Mike making notes on a similar pad at the library and it was his writing filling the lines.

  There were two Punnett squares drawn on the page. Like the notes I’d glanced at earlier, it seemed as though Mike had been trying to work out eye-color probabilities. His handwriting was hard to read. “Leitha” with a question mark was written just above the tear line. What had Mike been trying to figure out and why was Leitha’s name written on the page? I had no idea.

  Once again, none of this made sense.

  chapter 16

  Owen sat next to me all the way home, eyes fixed on the road.

  “You’re in trouble,” I said.

  “Mrr,” he said.

  We both knew I was wasting my breath. First of all, how did you punish a cat with klepto tendencies and the ability to disappear whenever he felt like it? It’s not as though I could put him in a time-out or take away his cell phone. I couldn’t even take away his supply of catnip chickens because they were stashed all over the house in hiding places I hadn’t discovered yet.

  I glanced over at him again. He definitely looked cocky.

  I spent a good chunk of the evening trying to figure out the Punnett squares that Mike had drawn. It had been a long time since I’d had a biology class, but I remembered more than I’d expected about genetics and I found a couple of texts in the library’s online catalogue.

  “ ‘A Punnett square is used to predict which traits offspring will have based on the traits of the parent,’ ” I read to Owen. “ ‘It’s a visual representation of the principle—put forth by Gregor Mendel by the way—that certain traits are dominant over others. It’s not infallible because there can be other factors at work, but the results are a lot better than just making a wild guess.’ ”

  Working out eye color wasn’t as simple as we’d once thought it was. At one time geneticists had believed it was controlled by a single gene, which meant, for instance, that blue-eyed parents could never have a brown-eyed child.

  “Except they can,” I told the cat. “It’s rare, but it does happen. The idea of just one gene controlling eye color was too simplistic.” I remembered my professor explaining that eye color is an example of a polygenic trait. In other words, it’s controlled by several different genes.

  Owen wasn’t the slightest bit interested in genetics. “Did you know that cats with white in their fur are believed to have a mutant gene?” I asked him as he washed his face.

  Hercules had just walked into the kitchen and Owen immediately t
urned to look at him with an inquiring murp.

  “Yes, like your brother. And you.”

  Hercules gave me a blank look as though he was wondering what he’d just missed. Or not.

  Owen disappeared and a moment later the basement door opened a little wider.

  I turned back to the computer. Maybe if I could find out what color Leitha’s eyes were, I could sort out what Mike had been doing.

  All of a sudden I had a lap of cat.

  “Hello,” I said to Hercules. “Would you like to help?”

  “Mrr,” he said, shifting around on my legs. Finally he was settled, eyes fixed on the screen, one paw next to the touch pad. I sometimes got the weird feeling that when I wasn’t home Hercules was on the computer watching Netflix. He pretty much had the skills for it.

  It took some digging, but I finally managed to find two photos of Leitha that were close enough for me to see her eyes.

  “They were green,” I said. I was remembering correctly.

  Hercules murped his agreement. It took more poking around but I managed to learn that Leitha’s mother had blue eyes. I couldn’t find any photos or any references to the color of John Finnamore Senior’s eyes.

  I looked at the tables Mike had drawn. There were a couple of reference sources I could check at the library in the morning.

  I shut off the laptop. What had he been trying to work out? And did it even have any connection to his and Leitha’s deaths? Maybe this was just a waste of time. I slumped in my chair and stared up at the ceiling. There weren’t any answers up there, either.

  * * *

  It was busy at the library in the morning. A couple of teachers came in to look around our reference section and get a jump on planning for fall assignments. Two boxes of new books were delivered, and Patricia Queen sent me a detailed plan for the proposed quilting workshops. I pulled one genetics reference, hoping I’d have a chance to look at it during my lunch break. Then I moved over to the local-history section. I was hoping to find an article about some event that John Finnamore Senior had attended. Many of them were written with a lot of extraneous detail, like the style of shoe a man had been wearing, the cut of his suit or the color of his eyes.

  “Looking for something?” Susan asked as she came around the shelving unit. I was twisted sideways, reading the call numbers on the spines of the books.

  I straightened up. My left shoulder had kinked and I rubbed it with my other hand. “We have a book about the so-called upper echelon of Mayville Heights’ society in the late 1800s. I can’t find it.”

  “I think I saw it on one of the carts,” she said. Today there was one thin knitting needle and one black lacquered chopstick stuck in her hair. “Do you want me to set it aside for you?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Are you finishing Mike’s research for his family?”

  “Just trying to tie up a couple of loose ends.” That was true as far as it went.

  “It’s quiet right now,” Susan said, pushing a collection of bracelets up her arm. “I could look something up if that would help.”

  I hesitated. “All right. I’m looking for some reference to John Finnamore Senior’s eye color. I remember Mike saying he usually went by Jack.”

  I waited for her to ask me why I wanted that information. She just smiled and said, “No problem. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  “And will you keep an eye out for any notes Mike might have left behind. Keith King found some papers that belonged to Mike in a book Keith had borrowed. I just want to make sure we haven’t missed anything else.”

  “Will do,” Susan said.

  * * *

  Roma came by midmorning with four large zucchini. She handed them to me. “This is partly a thank-you for feeding the cats and partly a ‘please take these’ because I have so many.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “I’m thinking chocolate zucchini bread sounds good.”

  She smiled. “I’m thinking I need to bring you more zucchini.”

  “Rebecca would probably take some. She makes a wonderful vegetarian lasagna.”

  “I’ll call her,” Roma said. “Or maybe I’ll just leave a bag on the front step, ring the doorbell and run.”

  I laughed. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “Oh, but it is. They’re taking over my garden. I get up in the morning and I swear there are twice as many of the things as there were the night before.” She looked around. “Is Mary here?” she asked.

  “She is,” I said. “She’s putting out new magazines. Do you have zucchini for her as well?”

  Roma smoothed a hand over her dark hair, tucking it behind one ear. “No. I need to talk to her. After I had lunch with you and Maggie, I called Sandra to talk more about doing another burlesque show. It looks like the shelter is going to need a new heating system.”

  I made a face. “That’s not good.”

  “The reality is that they need a new building, which means a major fund-raising push. I asked Sandra if she would talk to whoever Zorro was and see if he’d do another show as a way of launching a fund-raiser for a new home for the shelter. She refused.”

  “Did she say why?” I asked. Working with Sandra on the library board, I’d found her to be a very reasonable, easy-to-get-along-with person.

  Roma shook her head. “That’s the thing. All she said was no and that Zorro’s performance was a onetime thing. There’s no point in putting on the show without him, not if we want to generate a lot of attention for the fund-raising campaign, but Sandra won’t budge. I want to try to appeal to the person myself if Mary will tell me who he is. Sandra wouldn’t. It’s not just the heating system. When they were working on the roof, they uncovered some structural problems with the building. The shelter can probably get through this winter but beyond that they need a new home. As it is they’re going to have to close one room, which means they’re going to have to turn animals away.”

  “C’mon,” I said. “I’ll walk you over to her.”

  Mary listened to what Roma had to say but she wouldn’t budge.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll help you in any way I can, but as far as Zorro is concerned, that was something that isn’t going to be repeated.”

  “If I could just talk to him,” Roma said.

  Mary just shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  I walked Roma back to the front entrance. “I really thought she’d tell me who he is,” she said. “I don’t understand why they’re both being so secretive.”

  “I can’t promise anything,” I said, “but give me some time. I’ll talk to Mary again.”

  Roma hugged me. “Thanks, Kath,” she said.

  I stood outside on the steps, trying to figure out who had played Zorro and why, after dancing onstage bare chested in a cape and tights, he did not want anyone to know who he was. I tried to think of who would bring out such unequivocal loyalty from both Sandra and Mary. The two most likely candidates were Everett and Burtis, and from what I’d seen of Zorro’s performance, it wasn’t either of them.

  When I went back inside, Susan waved me over to the desk. “Blue,” she said with a smile.

  “I thought we settled on gray,” I said. It had taken a month for us to come to a consensus on a paint color for the walls of the staff room, and now she was changing her vote?

  She frowned at me for a moment and then the frown cleared. “I’m not talking about the staff room. I’m talking about John Finnamore. His eyes were blue. Light blue by all accounts. I read three of them.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She smiled again. “You’re welcome. I hope it helps.”

  I nodded. “So do I.”

  I went up to my office. There was a slim chance that Leitha’s blue-eyed parents could have had a green-eyed child. So what had Mike been trying to work out? Once again it seemed I
was left with nothing but a handful of straw.

  When I went back downstairs about an hour later, I spotted Mary shelving in the children’s department. I walked over to her.

  “I know what you want and you’re wasting your time,” she said without preamble as she straightened a row of picture books. “If it were possible to help Roma, believe me, I would, but it’s not.”

  “Could you at least ask Zorro if he’d talk to Roma?” I said.

  She looked at me. “Do you think I like the idea of cats being put down because there’s no shelter for them to go to?”

  “I know you don’t,” I said.

  Mary might have been able to take someone down with just one well-placed kick, but she was very much a mushball inside.

  “Then take me at my word when I tell you that there is no way Zorro will ride again and you just need to accept it.”

  * * *

  Lachlan showed up around two o’clock. He was dressed all in black again. “If it’s okay, I thought maybe I would see what I can find about the old music school in Red Wing after all. I mean, I wasn’t doing anything else.”

  “Of course it’s okay,” I said. “I’m thinking the best place to start would be with the newspaper. The only problem is, the older issues haven’t been digitized, so you’ll have to use the microfilm reader.”

  “Okay,” he said with a shrug.

  I got him set up at the machine and showed him how to scroll through the pages. “Try looking for references to the school in articles and photographs but keep an eye out for any ads for classes or recitals.”

  He nodded. “I can do that.”

  “If you have any problems, I’m around and Susan is at the desk.”

  I left him to it, thinking how much he reminded me of Mike, who had also spent some time going through back issues of newspapers. It wasn’t that they looked alike, but Lachlan seemed to be capable of the same level of concentration and the ability to tune out everything else that Mike had had. Right now Lachlan was leaning forward, watching the screen, just the way Mike had, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown in exactly the same fashion.