Софи Келли - Cat Trick

“I don’t suppose you could figure out who killed Mike Glazer and prove that it was no one from Mayville Heights in, say, the next forty-eight hours?” I asked.

He shot me an amused look. “Sorry,” he said, pouring a small dish of sauce over the chicken and vegetables in the wok. “It doesn’t quite work that way. The investigation’s just getting started.”

“Owen already found a clue for you,” I teased. “That button.”

“I didn’t say that was a clue,” he countered. “I didn’t even say it was a button.”

“But it was.” The conversation was beginning to feel a little like a volleyball match. Every time I spiked, Marcus managed a return.

“Okay, let’s say it was a button your cat found—for the sake of argument. That doesn’t mean it came from something the killer was wearing. Half the town has been down on the Riverwalk in the past few days, including both of us.” He drained a pot of noodles with one smooth, fast motion and used a long pair of chopsticks to divide them between two blue china bowls before moving back to the stove.

“I didn’t lose a button,” I said. “You’re welcome to check my jacket. And there’s a pretty good chance the one Owen found is either vintage or handmade. It definitely wasn’t mass-produced plastic.”

Marcus’s eyebrows went up. “Owen told you that?”

Orange and spices tickled my nose as he set one of the blue bowls in front of me. I picked up the set of black lacquer chopsticks at my place. “Didn’t you know? I speak cat.”

He slid into the chair opposite me and reached for his own chopsticks. “You know, I half believe you,” he said. “I’ve always wondered why you seem to be able to communicate with Lucy. She has some kind of rapport with you that she doesn’t have with any of the other volunteers who feed the cats out there.”

“Out there” was Wisteria Hill. There was a colony of feral cats that called the old carriage house on the estate home. Lucy, a little calico, was the undisputed leader of the group, and we did have some kind of connection I couldn’t explain. When I’d asked Roma what she thought the reason was, she’d just shrugged and said simply, “She likes you.”

“That rapport might just be because she thinks I smell like sardines,” I said. “I do make a lot of stinky crackers for the boys.”

“Somehow, I don’t think it’s the sardines,” Marcus said.

I didn’t think it was the sardines, either. I couldn’t say it to Marcus or Roma, but I sometimes wondered if Lucy, like Herc and Owen, had some kind of “unique” ability that I just hadn’t seen yet and that was why she responded to me. I’d always felt that the boys had chosen me, not the other way around, and like Lucy, they were Wisteria Hill cats. Maybe I was some kind of magnet for cats with paranormal abilities.

Okay, that definitely wasn’t the kind of thought I could share with Roma or Marcus. “This is good,” I said, gesturing to my dish.

“Thank you,” he said.

Dang, he was cute when he smiled. Plus he could cook and fix rocking chairs and he had his own mini library in the spare bedroom. All of a sudden I couldn’t remember any of the reasons I’d always insisted to Maggie and Roma that Marcus and I were completely wrong for each other.

This was either a very good thing or a very bad one.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, his tone just a tad too casual. “Why do you think that button is either old or was handmade?”

I shook my head and refocused my attention. “The hypothetical button?” I asked.

A bit of color flushed his cheeks. “Okay, you got me,” he said. “It was a button Owen found, but that stays between us.”

I nodded and scooped more noodles from my bowl. “I only got a quick look at it, but from what I saw, it didn’t look like a plastic button. I think it might have been metal, probably brass, which suggests something old or at least something not mass-produced. And the design—square center and sloped sides—is very old-style.”

Marcus looked at me, clearly skeptical. “You got all that from a ‘quick look’?”

I felt my own face warming now. “You said I was observant. I guess I am. It probably comes from living with two actors. My mother and father notice everything, every detail, every nuance about people and situations. That’s why they’ve both always been good at creating characters and it’s probably why my mother is developing a reputation as an excellent director.” I didn’t add that my parents’ keen powers of observation meant that at any given time they might be “living” their characters as well.

I snared a half-moon of zucchini with my chopsticks. “And I know a little about a lot of things. That’s just part of being a librarian.”

“Why did you decide to be a librarian and not an actor?” Marcus asked. “Or something else artistic? Your brother’s a musician, right?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh, and Sara is a filmmaker and a makeup artist. She’s shooting and directing Ethan’s band’s first video.”

“So why aren’t you on stage or behind a camera?”

“Short answer: I have no talent.”

He slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so. What’s the long answer?”

The conversation had taken a sharp detour away from the Glazer case, but that was okay. There wasn’t anything else I wanted to know. At least, right now there wasn’t.

“The long answer.” I frowned at the ceiling, trying to find the right words to explain. “Well, I didn’t exactly have the white-picket-fence childhood. My mother and father performed in theaters all up and down the East Coast when I was a kid and even for a while when Ethan and Sara were little. Big elaborate theaters with live orchestras and balcony boxes and little rinky-dink places that seated only fifty people above a bakery where everyone went for sticky buns during intermission.”

“You’re kidding.”

I laughed. “No, I’m not. And I’m not saying it was a terrible childhood, because it wasn’t, but it sure wasn’t conventional.”

Marcus pushed his empty bowl away and leaned back in his chair. “So you wanted ‘conventional’?” he said.

“I wanted normal. Or what I thought of as normal.”

“Mayville Heights is your idea of normal?” he said, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.

“Compared to how I grew up? Oh, yeah.” I twisted the last three noodles in my dish around one chopstick and ate them. “Except for the fifteen months my parents were divorced, I always had both of them in the same house. But sometimes I was living with Lady Macbeth and Banquo, and sometimes it was Adelaide and Nathan Detroit. I wanted parents who went to the office and came home and made meat loaf and mashed potatoes for dinner, not a mother and father who staged Act One of Les Misérables in the dining room.” I gave a half shrug. “The acoustics were better than the living room.”

“Of course,” he said as he got up and collected our dishes.

“Everywhere we lived, I always managed to find a library and my favorite books. When I found out I could actually work in one, well, I never thought of doing anything else.” I tucked one leg up under me as Marcus took the pudding cake out of the oven. “And there probably was a little rebelliousness in the decision.”

“Instead of running off to join the circus, you ran off to join the library.”

“Pretty much.” I watched him spoon dessert into two more blue bowls. He set one in front of me, and I closed my eyes for a moment and inhaled the rich chocolate scent. When I opened them again, he was watching me and smiling.

“So what about you?” I asked, picking up my spoon.

“What do you mean?”

I had to make a little moan of pleasure at the taste of the first mouthful before I could answer. “Why did you become a police officer?” I waved my spoon at him. “And I want to hear the long answer.”