by Sofie Kelly
After supper, once again I sat at the table with my laptop. I checked my e-mail. Susan had scanned the documents she’d found that referred to John Finnamore’s eye color and e-mailed them to me. I also had an e-mail from Roma with a fairly large attachment. The subject line was THE BURLESQUE SHOW.
I opened Susan’s e-mail first. Two different society-page articles mentioned John Finnamore’s blue eyes and dark hair. I had the feeling I’d gotten way off on a tangent. I hadn’t learned anything that put me closer to figuring out who had killed Mike.
“Does any of this really matter?” I asked Hercules, who was sitting at my feet, carefully washing his chest.
He looked up and meowed loudly and enthusiastically. He seemed to think it did. I wasn’t so sure anymore.
I heard the washer shut off. I went down to the basement and discovered Owen sitting in the empty laundry basket on top of the dryer, both paws up on the end of the basket.
When Ethan and Sarah were very small, I would take the two of them sledding in a park close to where we lived. I’d stick them in our laundry basket—leaving behind a pile of dirty clothes on the floor—tie the basket to an old metal toboggan we had and then I’d jump on the back and we’d go like stink down the steepest hills there.
Ethan was always in the front of the basket, two little mittened hands holding on to the end, a huge grin on his face, with Sarah behind him with an equally big smile on her face. Dad insisted that that was the reason they both had lead feet.
The cat reminded me of Ethan. For all I knew, maybe Owen was imagining himself hurtling down a snowy hill.
I moved the wet towels into the dryer. Owen leaned his head over the side of the laundry basket and watched. “You know, if you could just learn how to set the timer, I could get you to do this and save me a trip up and down the stairs.”
He looked at me and yawned. Cat for Not happening.
When I got back upstairs, I found Hercules standing up on my chair, looking at something on the laptop. Somehow, he’d managed to open Roma’s e-mail and get into the photos from the burlesque show.
“How did you do that?” I said.
He ducked his head as though modestly trying to say, Oh, it was nothing.
A photo of Zorro strutting his stuff on the middle of the stage out at The Brick filled the screen. I smiled, then leaned over and closed the image. I thought of Roma’s frustration with trying to organize another show. I wished there was a way to convince Mary to at least plead Roma’s case to whoever Zorro was.
I scooped up Hercules, sat down and settled him on my lap. He immediately reached a paw toward the computer and Zorro filled the computer screen again.
“I don’t have time for this right now,” I said.
He gave an insistent meow that I knew meant he wanted me to look at the photo.
I yawned and stretched. “You’re so stubborn,” I said.
His whiskers twitched. A pair of green eyes was locked on my face. I glared back at him, which was a waste of time because he never lost a staring contest. Neither did Owen. “Fine,” I said. “I will look at the picture.”
I pulled the laptop a bit closer, centered the photo of Zorro and studied it. His fencing foil was thrust forward, his cape swirled behind him and he was giving the crowd a wicked grin as he swiveled his hips from side to side. I couldn’t see what Hercules thought was so important about the image. Maybe he’d just been poking at the touch pad because it was fun. Maybe the photograph didn’t matter at all.
And then I noticed something on Zorro’s left hip. I used the magnifying feature to get a close look. The image was blurry but I could just make out the tops of two tiny fingers, spaced apart like they were part of some hand gesture tattooed on the man’s hip.
I zoomed out again and looked at the man carefully: his body type, his smile. And suddenly I got it. I slumped against the chair back. “Mike Bishop was Zorro,” I said aloud.
Hercules had already jumped down to the floor and was washing his face. He meowed his agreement without looking up from his ablutions.
Mike was Zorro. Suddenly it all made sense. That was why both Mary and Sandra had refused to put Roma in touch with the mystery dancer. They couldn’t. “Take me at my word when I tell you that there is no way Zorro will ride again,” Mary had said to me. I looked at the photo one more time. It seemed so obvious now. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before? Mike had the soul of a performer and a huge, kind heart. Getting up on that stage to help the no-kill shelter was exactly the kind of thing he would have done.
Hercules had stopped washing his face and was looking up at me as though he wanted something.
“Thank you for pointing out the photo,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously at first.”
And then, in case he hadn’t been looking for a little vindication, I got him a couple of sardine crackers.
* * *
It was raining when I got to the library the next morning. I was unlocking the main doors and juggling my messenger bag, my coffee mug and my umbrella when Mary came up the steps and grabbed my cup just before I dropped it. I didn’t have a good record with coffee mugs.
“Thank you,” I said as we stepped inside.
I shut off the alarm and unlocked the second set of doors. Mary handed me my coffee. Then she flipped on the lights and pushed down the hood of her yellow slicker.
“It’s not fit for man nor beast,” she said, patting her hair.
I looked at her, thinking it must have been hard to keep her emotions in check when Roma and I were pressuring her to tell us Zorro’s real name. She’d known Mike forever.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Mary was patting the pockets of her raincoat, looking for her keys or her phone probably. “I don’t think you’re responsible for this weather, Kathleen,” she said without looking up.
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, I’m sorry Roma and I pushed you so hard yesterday.”
She did look up then. Something she saw in my expression made her shake her head. “Sometimes I think you can look right into people’s heads,” she said. “You figured it out, didn’t you?”
“That Mike was Zorro? Yeah, I did.”
“How the hell did you do that?”
I explained about the tattoos he and Johnny had gotten. “Roma sent me some photos from the show. It was really just chance that I spotted it.” Chance and a small tuxedo cat, to be specific.
She laughed. “Shows how much attention I paid. I didn’t even notice he had a tattoo.”
We headed for the stairs. “It really was a last-minute thing, Mike getting up there as Zorro?” I said.
“Very last minute,” Mary said. “We needed to get people’s attention and I knew Mike was comfortable onstage.”
“How did you come up with the costume?”
She laughed. “A little ingenuity and a lot of luck. The pants were his bike pants. His gym bag was in the backseat of his car. We made the mask out of one of my scarves.”
I unlocked my office door and dropped my things on my desk chair, stopping to hang up my damp jacket. Mary waited in the doorway.
“What about the cape?” I asked.
“Remember I said it took a lot of luck? The cape was one of those lucky things. Sandra made it for a vampire routine and then decided the rest of the costume probably crossed a line. The hat was something we had in our costume stash and the fencing foil was another piece of luck. It came from the high school. It was used in a play they put on last year. One of the history teachers drove down and grabbed it for me. She’s a cat person.”
“How did you manage to keep Mike’s identity a secret?”
We went down to the staff room and I started the coffee while Mary hung up her things.
“We were using the office as a dressing room, but there was a small bathroom back there as well for staff. I basica
lly waited until no one was looking and pushed Mike inside.” She made a shoving motion with one hand.
“I thought if we could keep Zorro’s identity a secret that would keep people talking and keep the fund-raiser on people’s minds. Mike was game.” Mary pressed her lips together for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life as when I was trying to get all of his hair under that scarf. I knew if people saw those curls, the jig would be up.” She looked at me. “The reason we kept the secret for so long was that Mike wanted to bring back Zorro for another fund-raiser—ironically just the thing Roma wants to do. In fact, he’d been getting together with Sandra on Wednesday nights to work on a new routine.”
Wednesday nights. Now I knew what Mike had been doing. Now I understood why he’d kept it a secret. I also knew that secret had had nothing to do with his death.
I glanced at Mary, who seemed lost in thought. “I don’t think he’d mind you telling Roma,” I said as I got the cream out of the small refrigerator.
Mary nodded. “It was such a good night. To tell the truth, I was looking forward to doing it all over again.”
She swallowed a couple of times and I had to blink away the unexpected sting of tears.
“I will call Roma,” Mary said, her voice suddenly hoarse. “Make sure you tell that man of yours that someone needs to be held accountable.”
* * *
Despite the rain—or maybe because of it—it was a very busy day at the library. It was close to two o’clock before I got to have lunch and I got only half my sandwich eaten before Abigail came up to tell me that the door to the loading dock was leaking. I called Harry, who was able to do a temporary fix that stopped the water coming in.
“It might—might—be possible to order a new seal for that door,” he said. “Otherwise you’re going to need a new door. Water’s coming in now. It’s going to be a lot worse this winter.” He made a face. “Let’s hope this is the last bit of substandard work from Will Redfern.”
Will Redfern was the original contractor for the library renovations. He and his crew had done some quality work and some that was outright shoddy. Harry and Oren Kenyon—with some help from Harry’s brother, Larry, who was an electrician—had fixed most of the problems. Luckily there had been nothing major until now. A new loading dock door wasn’t in the budget.
“Let me see if I can track down a door seal,” Harry said. “We might get lucky.”
“Fingers crossed,” I said.
When I got home, I found both cats in the living room. Owen was on the chair by the phone and Hercules sat on the footstool next to the calendar Ruby had given me. It had somehow been flipped open to April and it almost seemed like they had been admiring themselves.
“Get down,” I said.
Hercules looked at Owen. Owen looked at me. Neither one of them moved. I didn’t have time to argue with them. I started for the stairs.
“I could have gotten some nice, well-behaved goldfish,” I said. “Or a cute little hamster.” We’d had this one-sided conversation before.
I looked back at them in time to see Owen exchange a look with his brother. I’m pretty sure he was rolling his eyes.
Since I’d had just part of a sandwich for lunch, I was hungry. The refrigerator and cupboards weren’t quite in the realm of Old Mother Hubbard, but they were close. I found an onion, a rubbery carrot and two suspiciously soft tomatoes. I cut them all up and added half of one of the zucchini Roma had given me. I stir-fried the veggies with hot sauce and added a fried egg on top. It was filling and healthy, but I needed to get groceries soon.
It was still raining, so I drove down to tai chi and was lucky to snag a parking spot not too far away. I opened my umbrella and ran through the puddles to the studio door, where I shook the umbrella before I darted inside.
Ruby was sitting on the bench at the top of the stairs, changing her shoes.
“The calendar definitely gets two paws of approval,” I said. I told her how I’d found Owen and Hercules when I got home. “I think fame is going to their heads.”
Ruby smiled. “ ‘In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.’ ”
I smiled. “Terry Pratchett.”
Maggie worked us hard and I was sticky and warm by the time we finished the whole form at the end of the class. And I was hungry again. I drove over to Eric’s for something to eat, promising myself I’d make a grocery list in the morning.
I ordered a turkey sandwich to go, which I knew Eric would make with Swiss cheese, tomato, sunflower sprouts and cranberry mayo. Because it was raining, I also got a cup of coffee.
“It should be only about five minutes,” Claire said.
I sat on a stool at the counter. My cell phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I pulled it out and checked the screen. It was Roma.
“I need a favor,” she said.
“Name it,” I said.
“Could you and Marcus feed the Wisteria Hill cats in the morning?”
I wasn’t sure about Marcus but I could. “Of course.”
“I’m sorry it’s such short notice. I have to go to Red Wing to assist on an emergency surgery on a police dog. Eddie’s gone to Minneapolis. His plan was to drive back early in the morning and go right to the rink.”
“It’s not a problem,” I said. “I love any chance I get to see Lucy and the other cats.”
I heard her exhale with relief. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a lifesaver.”
I wished her good luck with the surgery, we said good-bye and I put my phone back in my pocket.
The diner was quiet. Maybe because it was raining. There was a man standing in front of me at the counter in a dark blue slicker. It was Jonas Quinn, I realized. I touched his shoulder and he turned, smiling when he saw it was me.
“Kathleen, how are you?” he said.
“A little damp. Otherwise I’m fine. How are you?”
“I’m on my way to what I expect will be a very boring meeting. Otherwise I’m fine. And by the way, thanks for the help you gave Lachlan the other day.”
“It was no trouble,” I said. “He’s a great kid.”
Jonas’s smile got wider. “Yes, he is.”
His fingers were tapping out a rhythm on the edge of the counter and it struck me that he seemed to have the same musical bent as his nephew. Claire came out then with four take-out cups in a cardboard tray plus a paper take-out bag. She ran down the contents—three were coffees, each with a different permutation of cream and sugar, and the fourth container was tea.
“Would you like milk and sugar for the tea?” Claire asked.
“Just some milk, please,” Jonas said. “The tea is mine and I don’t like my drinks sweet.”
She smiled. “My grandfather says the same thing. He says, ‘I’m sweet enough already.’ ” She leaned sideways and looked at me. “Your food will be ready in just a minute, Kathleen,” she said.
Jonas picked up the tray of drinks and the take-out bag. “It was good to see you, Kathleen,” he said.
“You too,” I said. “I hope your meeting is short and interesting.”
He raised both eyebrows and smiled. “Me too.”
* * *
I was restless when I got home. Marcus hadn’t called, probably because he was working on one or both cases. I thought about what he’d said: “The problem is, no one had a reason to want Mike dead. . . . No one had a motive to kill Leitha, either. She was difficult, no question, but she was an annoyance . . . not a threat to anyone.”
I kept coming back to those Punnett squares Mike had drawn. Even though I’d told Hercules they didn’t matter, I couldn’t seem to let go of the idea that somehow they did. I thought about all the times I’d seen Mike working at the library, all the times he’d waved me over. I couldn’t think of a single time when he’d been drawing one of those squares.
I looked at the half sheet of yellow paper again. Something about it seemed wrong. I could think of only one occasion when I’d seen Mike with his head bent over a sheet of yellow paper. He’d mostly used wide-ruled white paper. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I’d seen. Jonas and Lachlan had come in to take Mike to lunch. I had taken them upstairs because Mike was in our workroom. As he looked up, I remembered him jamming several pages into a book and closing the cover. Several yellow sheets of paper. I’d thought he had been marking his place but now it struck me that maybe he had been hiding them instead. But from whom? From me? From Jonas and Lachlan? I didn’t know. Was I seeing something that hadn’t really happened?
I found a marker and pulled a flattened cardboard box out of the recycling bin. I spread the cardboard out on the table and drew out the Finnamore family tree starting with John Finnamore Senior. Below Finnamore Senior I added his two children, Leitha and John Junior. The next generation, Eloise Anderson-Hill, Elizabeth Bishop and Mary-Margaret Quinn followed. Underneath, I wrote in Mike, Jonas and his brother, Colin, along with Eloise’s daughters, Min and Nari. Lachlan had the last row to himself. I added spouses where I knew their names.
The diagram looked a little lopsided. Because there had been so many years between Leitha and her brother, Eloise was actually closer in age to Mike, Jonas and Colin—than she was to their mothers, her first cousins.
Plotting everyone’s eye color was just too complicated, so I decided to try doing hair texture instead. It was simpler.
Leitha Finnamore Anderson had had curly hair. I wrote CC beside her name. I remembered that Susan had included a photo of Leitha and her parents when she’d sent me the information about John Senior’s eye color. I got my laptop and looked at it again. Leitha’s father had had curly hair. CC went next to his name as well.
I studied the photo carefully. Leitha’s mother had had wavy hair I realized, not curly. It was a distinction some people had trouble making. That meant she had one curly-hair gene and one straight-hair gene. I put Cs by her name. So Leitha could easily have been their child. Eloise had the same hair as her mother. Min and Nari were adopted, so they had no Finnamore DNA.