Софи Келли - Final Catcall

“Point taken,” I said with a smile. “I’m going to ask her what’s going on. Thanks, Mags.”

She smiled back at me. “Anytime.”

We finished lunch without talking anymore about Abigail or Hugh. Maggie got a take-out cup of chai tea for Ruby, along with a cinnamon roll still warm from the oven.

“Why don’t you come for supper tomorrow night?” she said once we were outside on the sidewalk. “I feel like pizza.”

Maggie made wonderful pizza. Every pot, pan and dish in her apartment would be dirty, but the result would be delicious. “Umm, yes,” I said. “What can I bring?”

“I wouldn’t say no to brownies.”

“When have you ever said no to brownies?”

She grinned. “Consistency is the key to a happy life.”

I wiggled one finger at her. “Emerson said ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’”

Maggie laughed. “The man obviously wasn’t eating enough brownies.” She hugged me. “I’ll see you tomorrow night. I’ll call Roma too and see if she can come.”

Andrew’s red rental car was just circling the parking lot as I came up the sidewalk in front of the library. I walked over to my truck and he pulled into the empty space beside me and got out.

He was wearing jeans and a blue henley shirt with the sleeves pushed back. His hair was damp and he looked like a sheepish little boy. “Hi,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

“You found me,” I said, fishing out my keys. “What do you need?”

“To say I’m sorry for acting like a caveman last night.”

He really did look contrite, standing there with his feet apart and his hands jammed in his pockets. “You were more of a jerk than a caveman,” I said. “It’s not like you threw me over your shoulder and carried me back to your cave.”

“I thought about it for a minute,” he said, the start of a smile stretching across his face.

It was hard not to smile back. “I really can take care of myself, Andrew.”

“I do know that.” His expression grew serious again. “It’s just . . . someone shot that man, Hugh Davis. Shot him, Kath.”

“And I know that,” I said.

“Have you heard if the police have any suspects?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although it’s hard to think of this little place as being any kind of hotbed of criminal activity.”

I shifted my keys from one hand to the other. “Did you notice anything . . . odd last night?”

He kicked a rock and sent it skittering across the pavement. “Not really.”

Something in his voice made me frown at him. “What do you mean, not really?”

“I didn’t see anyone in the parking lot or up on the lookout.”

I pushed back the sleeves of my sweater. “But you did see someone somewhere else.”

“It wasn’t a person.” He shifted from one foot to the other. “But I did see a car, a navy blue SUV, with roof racks actually. It drove past out on the road a couple of times while we were unloading.”

I tried to picture the parking lot at the marina and the road that curved around the bluff just above it. It was well lit by streetlights all around the curve. “I don’t remember seeing any SUV,” I said. My heart was suddenly pounding in my chest, but I didn’t think Andrew could tell.

“That’s because you were in the bed of the truck pushing the staging out to me. Your back was to the road.” He narrowed his gaze. “C’mon, Kath, you don’t think that SUV had anything to do with that Davis guy, do you?”

“Most people use the highway if they’re heading east,” I said with a shrug. “But there’s still a fair amount of traffic on that road. People around here actually use it as a shortcut.”

“Whoever it was, she probably just forgot something at home and went back to get whatever it was,” Andrew said.

The laces on my left boot were untied and I bent down to fix them. “Probably,” I agreed, pulling the laces tight and knotting them carefully before I stood up again.

He smiled. “Have dinner with me tonight?”

I needed to make the bed in my spare bedroom, do some laundry and vacuum up the cat hair before my mother arrived. Not to mention find out exactly when she would be arriving. But mostly, I just needed to go. I needed to think.

I shook my head. “I can’t. My mother’s coming.”

“Seriously?” Andrew said. “Thea’s coming here?”

I nodded. “She’s going to step in for Hugh Davis.” I was glad to have the subject changed.

“I haven’t seen her for a while.” He shot me an inquiring look. “Does she know I’m here?”

“I was asking her to give up her time off to come here and step into a directing job at the last minute. I wasn’t sure how I could work in the fact that you were here trying to charm me back into your arms, so, no, she doesn’t.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ll remember to duck and move in a zigzag pattern when I see her.”

“C’mon, she always liked you,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” he said, with a slight eye roll. “I think she blames me a little for you coming here.” He gave me a sly sideways look. “Of course, if you came home with me I’d be back on her good side.”

I shook my head. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“When it comes to you, never.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Since you won’t have dinner with me, how about breakfast tomorrow morning?”

I hesitated.

“C’mon, Kathleen. It’s breakfast, not a lifetime commitment. At least not right now.”

I waffled for another half a minute. If we had breakfast maybe I’d be able to find out a little more about that SUV he’d seen, because I really needed to know how certain he was about it. We settled on a time and I didn’t even argue when he said he’d pick me up.

I got in the truck and drove up the hill. Andrew had said he noticed a navy blue SUV drive back and forth along the road above the marina. Navy blue with roof racks. Maybe he was wrong, although I didn’t see how he could be. Andrew was the kind of guy who noticed cars and that stretch of road was certainly lit well enough for him to be able to tell a navy SUV from a black one. Or whether the driver was a man or a woman. I’d noticed he’d used “she” when he talked about the driver.

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, but it didn’t make me feel any better. A lot of people in Mayville Heights drove half-ton trucks, like I did. There were actually a couple of trucks identical to mine in town—Ruby had one. They’d originally been part of a special order that had ended up being sold off by a local car dealer a few years ago. But I knew only one person in town who drove a navy blue SUV with roof racks.

Marcus.

Marcus, who had loaned his SUV to Hannah, who had made a point of telling me she’d been in Red Wing when Hugh Davis had been killed. But clearly hadn’t been.

• • •

“Tell me I’m wrong,” I said to Hercules. I was sitting in the big chair in the living room. He was sprawled on my lap, while Owen lay across my legs.

Hercules suddenly became very busy washing the splash of white fur on his chest. I looked at Owen. His golden eyes were closed and he was pretending to be asleep, although I knew from the way his whiskers were twitching that he was very much awake.

I scratched the top of Hercules’s head and he began to purr. “Maybe Andrew was mistaken,” I said. “Maybe the SUV was a different color. Or there weren’t any roof racks. And just because he said ‘she’ doesn’t mean the driver was a woman.”

He made a rumbly sound that made me think he didn’t agree. At least that’s what I decided it meant.

I sighed. “It’s possible he was wrong, but it’s not that likely. If I’d dyed my hair purple it would have taken a week for him to notice, but he could tell the difference between a gray car and a silver one from the opposite end of a parking lot. That’s just the way Andrew is.”