Curiosity Thrilled the Cat (26 page)

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.

H
ercules 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 patronizing.

“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.”

He shook his head. “I threw a blanket over him, which seemed to help a little. Then I hightailed it for the clinic—lights and sirens blazing.”

“You saved Desmond,” I said, unbuckling the seat belt and reaching for my bag. “Because you rescued Desmond, Roma found out about the cats at Wisteria Hill. So in a way you saved all of them, too.”

He fiddled with the collar of his shirt. “Roma is the one who saved the cats and she does the lion’s share of the work.”

“Even so . . .” This time I was the one not finishing a sentence.

I remembered the brownies again. They’d made it to Oren’s and back pretty much intact. “Here,” I said, handing him the foil-wrapped package. “And thank you for the ride home.”

I got out of the car, holding Hercules against my body with one arm.

Detective Gordon leaned across the seat again. “Thank you for the brownies,” he said.

I watched him back out, then walked around the house and let myself into the porch. As soon as I was inside I opened the messenger bag. Hercules was curled comfortably in the bottom. “We’re home,” I said.

He opened one eye.

“C’mon, I have some of those stinky crackers left.” That got him out of the bag. “Don’t think this means you’re off the hook for what you did at Oren’s,” I said, shaking a finger at him.

I flipped on the kitchen light and Owen blinked at us from beside the sink. I laughed. “You heard me, didn’t you?” I said, leaning down to pet him. “You heard me say ‘stinky crackers.’”

He made a soft “murp” in the back of his throat.

I got a glass of milk and gave each cat a small pile of cheese-and-sardine crackers. Then I sat at the table and pulled out the piece of paper Hercules had found. The fact that Owen and Hercules seemed to be trying to help me figure out what had happened to Gregor Easton made no sense. No sense. On the other hand, neither did their other abilities. I decided, for now at least, to forget about logic and reason and just roll with what was happening.

I smoothed the piece of paper out flat on the table. Now that I could clearly see the markings and numbers I hoped they’d make some kind of sense.

They didn’t. And, realistically, what were the chances that Hercules would find the one clue that would help me make sense of how Oren was connected to Gregor Easton? Just because I talked to the cats like they understood what I was saying didn’t mean they did. They were cats. Smart cats with some unbelievable skills, but cats nonetheless. At the moment one had cracker crumbs on his face and the other had a dust ball at the end of his tail.

Nothing made any sense. I was tired and frustrated and the only thing I wanted to do was sink into a tub full of bubbles and then into cool, crisp sheets.

So I did.

I woke up a bit later than usual on Sunday morning, after a night filled with bizarre dreams. In one of them Oren was playing the piano for an audience of cats.

I was in the kitchen in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, cutting up fruit, when Rebecca tapped on the back door. She looked tired and pale without her usual deep-rose lipstick.

“Kathleen, I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I was just about to make crepes. Is everything all right?”

“No,” she said. “Well, yes.” She rubbed the side of her face with her fingers. “I’m sorry. I’m not making a lot of sense. Ami is in the hospital. She’s all right, but she’s all alone. I hate to bother you, but would you be able to drive me there?” She held up her bandaged arm. “I can’t drive—not safely—with this arm.”

“Of course I’ll drive you,” I said. “You said Ami’s all right, but what happened to her?” I asked.

“She had some kind of allergic reaction. Her throat swelled and she couldn’t breathe. She was at Eric’s with some of the others from the festival. There was a doctor, a tourist, having dessert with his wife. What are the chances a doctor would . . .” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and gave a soft sigh. “But he was,” she said in a stronger voice. “And Ami’s all right.”