Софи Келли - Cat Trick

“He can’t hurt anything in the house.”

I gave Marcus a half smile because I already knew I’d lost. I’d been bested by a small gray cat. And not for the first time.

Marcus put a hand on my back and leaned around me. “Do you want to come inside?” he asked.

Owen looked up all long-faced and meowed softly again.

“See?” Marcus said. “He doesn’t want to stay out here by himself.”

I reached over and picked up the little tabby, who immediately nuzzled my neck, a self-satisfied gleam in his eye.

I followed Marcus back around the side of the house. Watching his long legs move made up—a little—for the fact that I was now going to be sharing the rest of my visit with a devious, sardine-loving cat. “This is not over,” I hissed at Owen as we stepped into the kitchen.

“It’s okay,” Marcus said. “You can put him down. I’m serious. He can’t hurt anything in this house.”

“You have no idea what he could do if he set his mind to it,” I warned. I set the cat on the floor and whispered, “Behave yourself,” in his ear, not that I really thought the warning would do any good.

Owen made a show of looking around as though he hadn’t been in the room a few minutes earlier.

“You want some sardines?” Marcus asked the cat, who licked his whiskers again at the word “sardines.”

I sat back down at the table. Marcus gave me a small plate with more crackers and some sliced mozzarella.

Owen waited patiently while Marcus got a bowl of the little fish ready and set it on the floor. He was careful not to touch the cat. Owen and Hercules had been feral kittens when I’d found them over a year and a half ago at Wisteria Hill, the abandoned Henderson estate. I’d come to town to be the new head librarian at the Mayville Heights Free Public Library and supervise its renovation. The cats happily draped themselves all over me, but it was hands-off with almost everyone else. Just last winter Owen had had a run-in with a police officer who had tried to pick him up. It hadn’t gone well—for the officer. Luckily Marcus had been there to rescue the cat.

Owen did his suspicious sniffing routine; then he picked up a chunk of one sardine, set it on the floor and started eating.

“Does he do that with everything?” Marcus asked, dropping into the chair opposite me.

“Ever since he was a kitten,” I said. “You’re probably going to want to wash that floor. He’s not good at staying in one place.” I could hear Owen nudging the bowl closer to the table, closer to us. He might not have liked to be touched, but he did like people.

Marcus rolled back the sleeves of his blue shirt. “I should be able to get at that chair tomorrow,” he said, dipping his head toward the back door and reaching for a cracker at the same time.

The chair he was referring to actually looked more like a pile of firewood sitting on the floor. It was an old rocking chair—or would have been if it hadn’t been in so many pieces. It had come from Wisteria Hill. Businessman Everett Henderson had sold the place to Roma at the start of the summer. Everett’s fiancée—and my backyard neighbor—Rebecca, had been supervising clearing out the old house before the property officially became Roma’s in a few days. I’d gone over to help a couple of times and rescued the old rocker from the discard pile.

“I’m not in a hurry,” I said, picking a tiny clump of gray cat hair from the front of my tangerine-colored sweater. “I just hated to see it thrown away. The wood is beautiful. It’s a good chair, or it would be if it hadn’t come apart.”

When I’d put the pieces of the rocking chair in the back of my truck I’d thought it would be easy to reassemble. And it had been. Except the rocker leaned about thirty degrees to the left. Marcus had heard me venting my frustration to my friend Maggie, and he’d offered to put the chair together for me. With Maggie grinning and poking me in the ribs with a finger, it had been impossible to turn down his offer.

Marcus looked from the pile of wooden pieces to me, and his eyebrows went up. “If you say so,” he said, sounding like he wasn’t exactly convinced.

I gave him a sheepish smile. “I like things that have a story.”

He washed down another cracker with his lemonade. “This table probably has a story,” he said, rapping on the top with his fingers.

“Where did you get it?” I glanced down at Owen, who was under my side of the table, enthusiastically licking hot sauce off the tail end of a sardine.

“Burtis Chapman.”

I laughed. “If this table belonged to Burtis, it has more than one story.” Burtis Chapman had a number of small businesses on the go in Mayville Heights. Some of them were even legal.

Marcus laughed, too. He had a great laugh. Maggie, who was my closest friend in town, had been trying to get Marcus and me together for the past year. She loved that we were “dating”—her word, not mine. I wasn’t sure what we were doing. About a week after the library’s centennial celebration, Marcus had made me dinner and let me prowl through his extensive book collection. Then he’d been gone on a computer forensics course for most of the summer.

I put another piece of mozzarella on top of a cracker and took a bite. That got Owen’s attention. He shot me an inquiring look. “This is mine,” I said. He wrinkled his nose and bent over his bowl again. I turned back to Marcus. “Burtis and a couple of his sons were starting to put up the tents down on the Riverwalk when I left the library.”

“Are you going to the food tasting?” he asked, leaning sideways a little so he could see what Owen was doing.

I nodded. “I think so.” I was about to ask if he’d like to go with me when Marcus knocked a cheese-topped cracker onto the floor and made a face. Owen’s head came up again. The cat eyed the piece of cheese and then narrowed his gaze questioningly at Marcus.

“Okay if I let him have that?” Marcus asked. “It’s already on the floor.” He reached for my empty glass.

“Go ahead,” I said, propping my feet on the blue vinyl seat of the chrome chair at the end of the table. “Although you do need to work on your whoops-I-knocked-the-cheese-on-the-floor routine.”

He turned to look at me, lemonade pitcher in one hand. He looked guilty. Owen, waiting at my feet, was all wide-eyed innocence. He could give his coconspirator lessons. “Are you saying I dropped that cracker on purpose?”

“Are you saying you didn’t?” I countered, struggling to keep the corners of my lips from twitching.

“Where’s your evidence?”

The cat had scooted under the table while we were talking, grabbed the bit of mozzarella and retreated back to my side.

“Owen’s eating it, Detective,” I said.

Marcus held out both hands, palms up. “Sorry. Without the evidence you don’t have a case.”

I shook a warning finger at him. “If Roma gets after me about his cholesterol levels, I’m sending her to you.”

His smile got wider, and he refilled my glass, his fingers brushing mine for a moment as he handed it to me.

Owen finished eating, took a couple of passes at his face with a paw and looked around. I knew what he really wanted to do was nose all over Marcus’s house. I patted my legs. “C’mon up.” He started washing his tail instead. “Owen,” I said, a little more insistently.

“Kathleen, there’s nothing he can hurt in this house,” Marcus said, threading his fingers around his own glass. “Let him look around if he wants to.”

“He sheds,” I warned.

He ruffled his hair with one hand. “So do I.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “I’m serious.”

“Sadly, so am I,” he said with a grin. “Let him go.”