Софи Келли - Faux Paw

“You don’t think she killed Margo,” I said.

He shook his head. “How do you do that?”

“That was Hope on the phone and she told you something that convinced you that Rena isn’t the killer.” I was only guessing, but his expression told me I was correct.

He pulled a hand over his mouth. “Rena is left-handed,” he said.

I glanced over at her. “I noticed that, too.”

He didn’t say anything.

I turned back to him. “The killer wasn’t,” I said slowly. Then I gave my head a slight shake before he could speak. “I know. You can’t tell me that.”

He shrugged. “I’m sorry.” He looked around. “There was no computer chip on that drawing,” he began.

“But you want to search again.”

“I do.”

Another thought had just occurred to me. “Marcus, if Rena didn’t kill Margo, that means someone else got in here and did.”

He nodded.

“But if it wasn’t about the drawing, if she didn’t walk in on the thief, on Rena, then why would anyone want to kill her?”

Marcus shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I took Rena’s painting up to my office. While I was gone Marcus opened the cabinet and checked to make sure the drawing wasn’t inside.

It wasn’t.

“Is it all right if I let Lita and Everett know we’re going to be closed a bit longer?” I asked as we headed for the front door.

“It’s all right,” he said. “But for now, everything else stays between us.”

I nodded, then reached for his hand to give it a squeeze. He smiled and the gleam that flashed in his blue eyes sent a warm feeling flooding through my chest.

I turned and walked back to Rena. “Think about a lawyer,” I said softly.

All she did was smile at me.

Curtis Holt was at the front doors. I realized Marcus had worked out the timing of that in advance. He and Rena headed for the police station and I walked over to Henderson Holdings and brought Lita up to date on what was going on. Then I headed home.

Hercules was sitting in the blue Adirondack chair in the backyard when I got home. I scooped him onto my lap and sat down. “What are you doing out here?” I asked.

He looked over at the big maple tree and meowed. Hercules had a love-hate relationship with a grackle that spent a lot of time in that tree. I thought of their perverse connection as love-hate because while Hercules had managed to snag one of the bird’s feathers, he’d never come any closer to the bird—something he was quite capable of doing. And the grackle, in turn, had dive-bombed the cat, but never, as far as I had seen, touched a single strand of fur on his head.

“Where’s your friend?” I said, stroking his fur. It was warm from the morning sun.

He responded with a sharp meow.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant your archnemesis.”

Hercules made a grumbling sound low in his throat, shook off my hand, then jumped to the grass and headed for the house. He didn’t bother waiting for me; he just walked through the door into the porch.

I watched him, thinking how much easier it would be if I could do that instead of stopping to fish out my keys all the time and unlock things. I couldn’t help laughing as I let myself into the porch the normal way. When had I gotten so blasé about the cats’ abilities?

I spent the afternoon catching up on what work I could from home. Lita called with a message from Everett that in essence promised any resources I needed to get things back to normal at the library as quickly as possible. I called Maggie to let her know we’d need her space for a few more days if that was okay. I told her that Rena was answering some questions for the police, but it didn’t look like she’d killed Margo. I didn’t think that violated Marcus’s request not to talk about what had happened at the library. Gavin didn’t call and I didn’t call him, either.

I couldn’t get Rena’s story out of my head. Margo had hired her to break in to the library and take the Weston drawing out of its case and hide it? That made no sense. The case we kept the rare books in would make a good temporary hiding place, but I couldn’t believe that Margo would do anything that might put the fragile piece of artwork at risk of damage. This whole thing was so out of character for the person I’d gotten to know.

But why would Rena make up a story like that? Even though Margo was dead, there were parts of her tale Marcus and Hope would be able to check on.

When I got to tai chi, Maggie took me aside to tell me that Rena was out on bail and had to stay in town, but she didn’t seem concerned about the time she’d spent at the police station. “Did Marcus say anything?” she asked.

“I haven’t talked to him,” I said, wondering if he hadn’t called so I wouldn’t have to be evasive with Maggie—or anyone else.

I was restless when I got home. Roma had an early surgery at the clinic so I was driving out to Wisteria Hill to feed the cats in the morning. Now that Roma lived in the old farmhouse full-time, I fed the feral cats only when she was out of town or tied up with a patient. I hung my old jacket on the doorknob and went down to the basement for my heavy rubber boots. Roma had warned me that the path around the side of the old carriage house was wet and muddy.

While I was down there I decided to try to figure out why Owen was spending so much time in the basement. A waist-high workbench took up almost half of the back wall of the cellar. Harry Taylor had told me it had been built by the previous owner of the little farmhouse. Owen had taken over part of the knee-level shelf. It looked like the stash of a hoarder. He’d dragged down the old sweatshirt I’d told Maggie he’d swiped from me. There was a mitten that I recognized as belonging to her, several catnip chicken body parts and three black feathers. They looked like they might have come from a grackle.

I leaned against the bench holding the feathers, trying to make sense of how and why Owen had them. The little “war” between Hercules and the large bird was exactly that: between the two of them only. The bird hadn’t so much as lifted a wingtip in Owen’s direction, probably because it was Hercules who liked to hang around the maple tree the grackle considered to be its territory. Owen was generally prowling the yard or rooting in Rebecca’s recycling bin.

So how had Owen gotten those feathers? From another bird? I didn’t think so. From what I’d seen, the big black grackle kept all other similar birds at bay.

Could Owen have taken a run at the bird? I thought about the various squabbles he and Hercules had been having the past several months. There was an element of tit for tat in all of it.

I blew out a breath. No, it was just too preposterous to think Owen and Hercules were fighting because Owen had gone after the bird Hercules had been jousting with for the past year. They were cats, after all, not people.

I took my boots and the three feathers and went upstairs.

Owen wandered into the kitchen from somewhere carrying the disembodied head of a yellow funky chicken. He dropped it next to his water dish.

“Why do you have these?” I asked, holding out the black feathers.

He blinked at me.

I leaned forward, one hand on my knee. “If you’ve been after that bird, you have to stop.”

“Mrr,” he said, dropping his head to study a spot on the floor.

“Hercules and the bird are like . . . like Austin Powers and Dr. Evil.”

I shook my head. What was I doing? Trying to explain to one cat that he had to stay away from the so-called archenemy of another cat by referencing a movie from the 1990s, albeit one both cats had watched with Maggie and me.

I straightened up. No, this was crazy. I held up the feathers. “Bad,” I said sternly. “Very bad.” Then I dropped them in the garbage can.