Софи Келли - Cat Trick

He pulled a hand back through his dark hair. “I don’t know if there is a long answer. A police officer is what I always wanted to be except for the summer I was five when I wanted to drive the ice cream truck.”

“Who wouldn’t?” I mumbled around a mouthful of cake and sauce.

“I have been told I have an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong,” he said. “Maybe that’s part of it.”

“I don’t think I used the word ‘overdeveloped,’” I said.

“It was implied,” he said dryly.

We ate in silence for another minute or so. Then Marcus spoke again. “Probably my father had something to do with it as well.”

“Was your father a police officer?”

He shook his head. “No. But he was a very black-and-white kind of person.” He made a chopping motion in the air with one hand to emphasize the words. “And very focused on the facts. Not really a people person.”

“You’re a people person,” I said, trying to decide if it would be rude to lick sauce off the back of my spoon.

Marcus was already on his feet to get me a second helping, which I thought about turning down for maybe a millisecond. “You’re just saying that so you can have seconds,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I said, smiling a thank-you at him. “Yes, I sometimes think you get too caught up in the facts and forget about the feelings involved, but people like you. Maggie, Roma, Rebecca, Oren—they like you and they respect what you do.” I ate another bite of pudding. “And the cats like you—not just my two; look at Desmond over at Roma’s clinic. Even Lucy will come closer to you than she does to anyone else besides me.”

He grinned. “Kathleen, cats are not people.”

“I wouldn’t say that out loud around Owen or Hercules,” I warned. “They think they’re people.”

His grin just got wider.

He pointed in the direction of the living room then. “Don’t let me forget. I have something I want to show you.”

“Do I get a hint?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

I couldn’t coax even the tiniest clue out of him. He sat there with just the ghost of a smile on his face, slowly—on purpose, I was certain—finishing his dessert and sipping his coffee.

Finally, he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Are you finished?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

He led me down to the living room. A small cardboard box was sitting on the coffee table.

“Go ahead,” he urged. “Take a look.”

I lifted one flap of the carton and peeked inside. Then I turned my head to grin at him. “Where did you get these?” The box was about two-thirds filled with vintage Batman comic books from the early 1970s.

“One of the guys at the station found them in the attic of the house he just bought. He was going to toss them.”

I shook my head. “These are pop culture. These are art. I’m so glad you saved them.” I pointed to the comic on top of the pile. “That’s Wail of the Ghost Bride, and it looks to be in decent shape. Who knows what else is in there?”

“Why don’t you go through them and find out?”

“You don’t mind?”

He was sitting on the edge of the blue corduroy sofa, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. “Kathleen, they’re yours.”

For a moment I’m sure my mouth gaped like a fish that had jumped too high and to its surprise ended up on the shoreline instead of in the water again. “Mine?” I finally said.

“You’re the Batman fan,” he said.

I was. In fact, Owen and I had been watching episodes of the old TV show online. I’d discovered Batman comics—it was still hard for me to think of them as graphic novels—the summer I was twelve and my parents were performing in a partially converted theater in New Hampshire. Emphasis on “partially.”

One of the stagehands had found a pile of Batman comic books mixed in with a stash of old National Geographics and some girlie magazines. In its previous incarnations, the theater had been a dentist’s office and a funeral parlor, and sometimes I wondered just whose waiting room the magazines had come from.

“I can’t take these,” I said, putting one hand on the top of the box. “Some of these issues could be worth money.”

“I told Kevin that, but he didn’t care, probably because he was getting the barbecue.”

I waved a hand in his face. “Wait a second. What barbecue?”

“The barbecue I got from Eric,” he said. “It was one of the ones he used at the party to celebrate the library’s centennial. Remember?”

I sank down onto the opposite end of the couch from where Marcus was sitting. “No,” I said. I shook my head. “I mean, yes, I remember the party, but I didn’t know you ended up with a barbecue.”

Marcus nodded. “Uh-huh. Eric wanted a utility trailer that he could tow with his van, so we traded.”

“But there’s a barbecue out on your deck,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the backyard.

“I know.”

We were already way off track, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from asking. “Why did you trade for a barbecue with Eric when you didn’t need a barbecue?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t need a utility trailer, either.”

I knew where this was going. “Because you already had one.”

“Right.”

Since I was already deeply confused, I decided to go for broke. “How did you end up with two utility trailers?”

“I had one that I’d built. The second one came from Burtis. It was smaller.”

I pushed a stray piece of hair off my face. “And Burtis got?”

“The blue bench that I got from you.”

The blue bench was something I’d trash picked and painted. And then discovered it was an inch too long for the space under the coat hooks in the kitchen.

Marcus gestured at the box. “So Batman is all yours.”

It was Let’s Make a Deal , Mayville Heights style.

I reached over and gave his arm a squeeze. “Thank you,” I said. “I can’t believe you did this. I can’t believe you even remembered that I’d told you I was a Batman fan.” I reached over and took the top comic out of the carton. “I haven’t read any of these vintage Batman in . . . in a long time. They take me back to my geeky girl days.”

He leaned back against the cushions and crossed his arms over his chest. “I can’t picture you as ever having been geeky,” he said

“You’ll just have to use your imagination,” I told him, pulling the comic books a little closer.

“I can do that,” he said.

I ducked my head over the open box. I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear exactly what he might be imagining.

I spent maybe another five or ten minutes exclaiming over the stack of comics, holding up issues and giving Marcus a summary of their story lines. Then he poured us each another cup of coffee, and we went out onto the deck in the fading light. He sat in a slat-back wooden chair and propped his feet up on the railing while I took the swing, kicking off my shoes so I could curl my feet underneath me.

“This is so beautiful,” I said, looking out over the backyard, rimmed with trees. The leaves were already turning, and even in the half-light of dusk I could still see colors from amber to scarlet. “How long have you been here?”

“Three years this winter,” he said. “I liked the place the moment I saw it.” He sank a little lower in his chair. “You know, it’s kind of because of Desmond that I’m here.”

“Roma’s Desmond?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Desmond was another Wisteria Hill cat. Marcus had found the cat, injured, by the side of the road and taken him to Roma’s clinic. She’d ended up having to treat both of them. Desmond wasn’t exactly social.