Leann Sweeney - The Cat, the Quilt and the Corpse

The conversation finally came back to the murder, and I decided to show Tom what I’d done with the shredded paper from the Wilkerson house. Three cats knew what was up and followed us, hoping to get into that darn closed-up sewing room. But they were shut out again.

I flipped on the lights and Tom stared at the pinned-up pieces on the design wall. Finally he said, “All the talking in the world couldn’t tell me this much about you.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

He waved at the wall. “You are a persistent, precise woman. Actually, you should work in a crime lab. They have to do stuff like this all the time. Put pieces of paper back together, look at bugs and dirt and all sorts of crap people never think is important. You’ve gone above and beyond here, Jillian.”

“Funny. Ed said how we throw stuff away before we even know how important it might be,” I replied. “I guess this is an example of how what Flake Wilkerson saved might be important.”

“Good old Ed. He is one cool dude and the best thing that ever happened to my mom—even though he looks like the Unabomber.”

“I’m fond of Ed myself. But back to this.” I waved at my work. “You’ve been inside plenty of Mercy houses these last few years. Do you recognize this gray cat?” I said.

He tilted his head one way and another, looking at the half-constructed pictures. “Doesn’t look like any of the cats Wilkerson had. But why are you even doing this?”

“Because . . . This may sound silly, but I know this is important to finding out what happened last Sunday. And I may not be a policeperson, but I do know how to piece things together. Here, check this out.” I pointed at the photo I’d printed of Sophie that was pinned next to the piecing project.

He stepped closer to the board, and since they were stuck up there at my eye level, he had to bend to compare them. “Similar,” he said. He rotated a finger around where I’d pieced the cat’s front left leg together. “This looks different than the printed-out picture, though. Or is there some trivia about cats changing their spots that I’m unaware of?”

I laughed. “You’re just confirming what I thought. Two different cats.” I pointed at Sophie. “This is the cat Mr. Wilkerson stole from his own daughter. Does it look like any cat you’ve seen, say, in the last year?”

“Cats hide when I work in someone’s house, so I’m not a source of useful information, I’m sorry to say. I might have seen this cat, but that’s like asking me to pick out a specific banana I saw in a bowl on someone’s counter two weeks ago. No can do.”

“Okay,” I said. “It was worth a shot.” I glanced at my watch. It was past midnight.

“Time for me to go?” he said.

“Yeah. But thanks for being so open with me. And for understanding about, well—”

“You hoping to get information from me?” he said. “Anytime.”

His smile was so infectious, so honest, I grinned back. But the major blush burning my cheeks? I had no control over that.

I’d been energized by our evening together, and after he left I returned to finish the gray-cat puzzle. This may not be Sophie, but my gut told me it was important.

Obviously Wilkerson was using every available resource—newspapers, the Internet, postings of lost animals, shelter visits. And no doubt he bought cats at shows if someone had sent him a picture looking for a cat to replace one they’d lost or that had died. This gray cat could belong to someone way under anyone’s radar. Finding a name or phone number connected to this particular cat, or one I hadn’t pieced together yet, could provide an important lead.

Returning to the project at hand, I clicked my gooseneck quilting lamp on so I’d have plenty of light and began the search for the right puzzle pieces to finish this picture.

Two hours later I’d put together enough to know it was definitely not Sophie—even though there were even more similarities than I had seen initially.

Not about to let a little fatigue keep me from smiling, I stood back and admired my work. This was indeed a flyer for a lost cat. And I’d put together every shred. I had the name and phone number I’d been hoping to find.

This lovely, long-haired gray cat was a Mercy-ite—a cat that had once, or perhaps still, belonged to one of the few people in town I knew.

The next morning, still in my pajamas, I snapped off several photos of my design wall creation while Merlot, Chablis and Syrah sat in a row staring at my work like patrons at an art gallery show.

“It’s fantastic, isn’t it?” I turned to smile at them and saw that Syrah had disappeared. I get no props around here , I thought. But I saw one of the garbage bags filled with paper move, and then a brown nose appeared at the very opening of the bag. Syrah was probably thinking, Just let those other two try and share my new playground.

I ran down the hall with the camera, ready to print pictures. Chablis thought this was great fun. She raced after me, and when I bent to dock the camera, she jumped on my back.

Even with claws digging into me, I managed to press the right buttons. While the pictures printed, I carefully removed my cat from my skin. Then I lifted Chablis so we were face-to-face and said, “Someone else had a missing cat last year. I need to see about this.”

She began to resist our conversation, so I put her down. She sat by the computer table, watched the pictures appear in the tray and lifted a tentative paw. But I snatched them up before she could further explore the magic of the amazing paper so I could examine my work.

I nodded. “Good job, Jillian.”

An hour later I was in the minivan and off to Marian Mae Temple’s house. I got her name and phone number off the flyer and found her address in the telephone book, but she hadn’t answered her phone. Maybe she was in the shower; maybe she wasn’t even awake yet. Strange, because it was well past nine a.m. and everyone in this town seemed to be early risers, judging by the line to get inside Belle’s Beans when I drove past.

The pictures of the pieced-together shredded flyer lying on the seat next to me told me that Marian Mae had lost a gray long-haired cat last year, if the date at the top of the computer-generated flyer was correct. Since I’d mentioned my plight to her and she probably knew about this whole Wilkerson investigation via her boyfriend, Mike Baca, why hadn’t she said anything?

I had a guess. She’d done business with Flake Wilkerson, maybe paid a pretty penny for Sophie as a replacement for her lost cat, a cat named Diamond, as I’d learned from the once-shredded flyer.

And then, before I made it to Marian Mae’s house, the commonsense button clicked on. Hadn’t I speculated that whoever had Sophie didn’t want to give her up and might have killed Wilkerson? Duh, yeah.

But Marian Mae? She didn’t fit my image of a knife-wielding killer. She struck me as someone who would be annoyed if she got dirt on her shoes. All that blood? Nope. Couldn’t be her. There had to be a different explanation.

Maybe she and her boyfriend were getting coffee together this morning? Her boyfriend . That was who I needed to talk to, not her. But did Baca even work on Saturday? Candace could tell me. Besides, she would want to know what I’d found out.

She sounded tired when she answered her phone. “Carson here.”

“Is Baca at the office today?” I said.

“Huh? Only a few of us work on the Saturday day shift. And one of the ‘us’ would be me. What do you need?”

“I need to show him something. Can you give me his number or tell me where he lives?” I said.

“You can’t go to his house.” She sounded mortified that I would even consider this.