Софи Келли - Cat Trick

“Hi, Kath. What’s up?” she said when she answered.

“I was wondering if you know where Liam is,” I said. If I was going to stop what Wren had planned, it would help to have support for her. “Is he working or is he in town?”

“He was working. I’m waiting for him now. He’s meeting Alex Scott over at the tents later for a walk-through, but we’re going to get some supper first.”

“Mags, could you and Liam meet me at Eric’s?” I asked.

“Something’s going on,” she said.

I explained what I’d figured out, hoping that somehow in telling her I’d find a flaw in my logic. I didn’t.

“Good goddess,” she said softly. “I’ll make sure Liam’s there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Kath, if Wren didn’t kill Mike, who did?”

I sighed. “That’s the problem,” I said. “I still don’t know.”

I ended the call and stood there, staring at the phone. I couldn’t leave Marcus in the dark on this.

All I got was his voice mail. I tried his house. Same thing. I left another message.

Hercules hadn’t moved the entire time I’d been on the phone. “I have to go,” I told him.

Wren thought she’d killed someone and she couldn’t live with that.

I couldn’t do nothing.

I couldn’t do nothing .

21

Elizabeth and Wren were sitting at one of the tables in the window at Eric’s Place. Elizabeth saw me coming up the sidewalk and waved. I stepped inside the restaurant and walked over to them.

“Hi, Kathleen,” she said. “Are you by yourself? Would you like to join us?”

“Thank you. I would,” I said. I grabbed a chair from a nearby empty table. Claire came over with coffee. I added cream and sugar and folded my fingers around the cup.

“Wren’s leaving in the morning,” Elizabeth said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was. I was sorry that so many things hurt her and sorry that I was about to add to them.

“There’re some things I have to do,” Wren said, tucking a strand of her fine blond hair behind her ear. “And it’s just too sad here right now.” She looked even thinner, somehow, than the last time I’d seen her, with dark smudges like bruises under her eyes.

“And it must have been hard pretending you felt bad because Mike Glazer was dead when really you didn’t,” I said. “At least at first.”

She swallowed, and a little color came into her pale face. “I do feel bad,” she said. She set her fork down and dropped her hands into her lap.

Elizabeth leaned forward, a frown creasing her forehead. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

Maggie and Liam came in then. She nodded at me and caught Liam’s sleeve, and they walked over to us.

Liam looked at Wren and frowned. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“It’s all right,” Wren said in her soft voice.

“No, it isn’t,” Elizabeth said. I could see Harrison in the way she held herself and the assurance in her voice. She turned to me. “I think you should go sit somewhere else, Kathleen.”

I kept my eyes on Wren. “I know that you hated Mike. I know you wanted him dead,” I said. “And I know why. But you didn’t kill him. You just knocked him out. So . . . so I think you should stay here.” I looked back over my shoulder. Eric was at the counter. He raised his eyebrows at me. I gave my head a little shake and he nodded.

Liam held up both hands. “Hold on,” he said. “Everyone knows Wren didn’t have anything to do with Glazer’s death. She didn’t knock him out. She wasn’t even in town that night. She had a flat tire out on the highway. I stopped to help her.” He shrugged. “Anyway, he died of a heart attack or something like it. So this doesn’t even matter.”

“Mike Glazer didn’t die from a heart attack,” I said. I kept watching Wren. Her left hand was covering her right one in her lap. That bottom hand was tightly clenched in a fist.

Elizabeth stood up and grabbed her purse from the back of her chair. “Let’s go, Wren,” she said. She glared at me. “You’re crazy.”

“No, she isn’t,” Harry Taylor said behind me. I hadn’t even noticed him come in. He must have broken every speed limit driving down from Wild Rose Bluff.

“You don’t know what she’s saying, Harry. It’s all crazy,” she said.

He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket. “You have time to listen.”

Liam turned to Harry. He gestured at me. “It is crazy,” he said. “Kathleen thinks Wren hit Glazer over the head or something. I already told her Wren was miles away from here.”

Maggie touched his arm and smiled. “Liam, loyalty is one of your very best qualities,” she said. “But you need to stop talking right now, because you aren’t helping.”

“You found out the truth about how Mike’s brother, Gavin, died, didn’t you?” I asked Wren. “You found out that Mike was partially responsible for the death of the man you thought of as your stepfather.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny muscle in Liam’s cheek begin to twitch.

Elizabeth was still standing. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Why would she say what a great guy he was if she thought he had something to do with that?”

“Because you didn’t want anyone to know how much you hated him, did you?” I said gently.

Wren gave her head a tiny shake, the movement almost imperceptible. “No, I didn’t.”

Elizabeth stiffened and swallowed a couple of times before she could speak. “Why?” The one word came out in a whisper.

Wren turned from me to look at her friend. “Because I didn’t want anyone to know I killed him,” she said.

Liam ducked his head and stared at the floor. Maggie pressed her lips together. Harry moved around the table and put his arm around his sister’s shoulders. She stood there rigidly, but she didn’t shrug him off.

“Except you didn’t,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” Wren repeated, pushing back the strand of hair that had fallen in her face again.

I leaned forward and laid my hand on her arm. “I know you think you did. But you didn’t. You didn’t . Tell me what happened.”

“I read my mother’s journals,” she said. “The first week I got here after classes ended. They were in this old leather trunk. It was out in a storage unit she had. I just picked out random ones and started reading. One of them was from the time when Gavin died.

“Some people were saying that Mike had bought beer that night and that he’d kept telling Gavin that my mother had him whipped.” She swiped at a tear that had started to slide down her face. “My mother . . . confronted Mike, the morning of the . . . the funeral. She found out the stories were true. That was . . . that was why she never had anything to do with any of that family again.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I decided I was going to drive to Chicago and confront him. I didn’t even get out of town before my crappy car broke down. It took a while before I had the money to get it fixed.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Elizabeth was listening, although she was looking down at the floor.

“Then I found out he was here, in Mayville Heights,” Wren continued. “I couldn’t believe it, but I saw him crossing the street and it just seemed like a sign, you know?”

I nodded. “Why did you wait a day and a half to go see him?”

She folded one arm across her middle as though she were hugging herself. “I didn’t,” she said. “Not exactly. I went to the St. James—that’s where he was staying—the first night Mike got here. I don’t know what I planned to do. I was just so angry. I watched him in the bar and I realized that hurting him wasn’t going to make anything different. So I just left.”