Leann Sweeney - The Cat, The Professor and the Poison

“Hey there,” I said, after opening the door. I saw right away that dark circles under her eyes marred her complexion. Her shiny brunette hair drooped over her right shoulder in a braid. Although Kara looked tired, she was still one of the most attractive young women I’d ever met. I opened my arms for a hug.

She embraced me briefly and then rolled her suitcase past me and into the foyer. “Hope you don’t mind, but I need a place to crash.” Her tone was brusque, and her brown eyes avoided mine.

“Um, no problem. Sure,” I said. “Been a long time.” I swallowed hard. Gosh, she looked like her father-that is, when John had been dog tired.

Kara dropped her shoulder bag, released her hold on her suitcase and glanced in the direction of the living room. She put her hands on her slim blue-jeaned hips. “So this is the house that Daddy built.”

The house your daddy and I built, I thought. But this was Kara. I’d so wanted her to warm to me, but that had never happened. She was here now, and no matter what, she was part of John and that made her special.

“Are you thirsty? Hungry?” I said.

“Nope. Why don’t you show me the house? I’ve been driving for hours and would rather walk off the stiffness.” She started down the hall that led to my office, the sewing room and the bedrooms.

I noticed that all three cats were gone. A cold wind will make a cat run for cover. Kara was out of sight now, and I rolled her suitcase behind me down the hallway toward my bedroom. When I caught up, I said, “Let’s drop this off, and then I’ll give you the tour.” We walked on to the last room on the right, and while I put her suitcase in the guest room closet, she stopped at the four-poster bed and rested a hand on the quilt. It was one of my favorites, a monkey-wrench pattern in pinks and browns.

“Nice,” Kara said.

I mumbled a thank-you. Did she realize I’d made the quilt? Surely she must. I pointed out the bathroom before we walked back down the hall. We stopped in my office, and her gaze settled on the bookshelves. I noticed her swallow and close her eyes briefly. She recognized many of those books. They’d belonged to her father.

She blinked several times and said, “What else is in this hall?”

I led her to my sewing room.

Though I went in, Kara stood in the entry. “This is where you run your little business, huh? How’s that going?”

She did remember what I do, and her tone hinted at interest rather than the indifference she’d shown in the past.

I said, “Better than I ever imagined. I can hardly keep up with the orders.”

“I suppose all that publicity after you became the hometown hero didn’t hurt,” she said.

“I wasn’t a hero,” I said quietly. “But I guess that means you read about what happened here.”

“Duh. I worked for a newspaper.”

She’d gone snarky on me, something I was familiar with since the day we’d first met. She’d been a freshman at the University of Texas. Her mother had died of cancer a decade before. At that first meeting, it seemed obvious to me that she still hadn’t gotten over her mother’s death. Sullen didn’t begin to describe her attitude back then. And nothing much changed over the ten years John and I were married.

I hadn’t missed her use of the past tense when she’d said worked. “Newspapers are going through tough times,” I said. “I don’t want to pry, but I do care, and-”

“Yes, I lost my job. And no, I don’t want to talk about it. Show me the rest of this place. Daddy talked so much about the plans, the lake, and… you. Since I have nothing but free time now, I thought I’d find out about his life before he died.”

I heard the catch in her voice, and it dawned on me that though my grief over losing John had begun to ease, hers might only now be kicking in.

She turned and pointed across the hall. “Is this your bedroom?”

“Yes,” I said.

In the master bedroom, all three cats lay on the king-size bed. This time, they didn’t run off.

Kara stopped a few steps into the room and whispered, “How Daddy loved those cats.” She approached them and held out her hand. Merlot stood and arched his back to stretch and then sniffed her fingers. He rubbed his head along the side of her hand. Cats know when a person needs comfort, and Merlot was great at offering affection whenever I was upset or troubled. He was doing the same for Kara now.

She petted him for a few seconds, but then the photograph on my bureau caught her eye-the last picture of John and me, taken on one wedding anniversary when we’d visited Ireland.

She walked around the bed and picked up the photo. Though her back was to me, I heard her say, “I don’t have this picture.”

She lowered her head, and her shoulders began to shake with sobs.

I went over and rested a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened and continued to hold the framed picture tightly. At least she didn’t step away from my touch.

My search for information concerning the professor was forgotten. For the first time since I’d married John, Kara and I talked about him-for two solid hours. But she was still as standoffish as she’d been during every holiday or vacation we’d shared together while she was in college and after. Plus I was stuck with my original assessment that she had only begun to grieve her enormous loss. She’d worshipped John and had trouble with my marrying him from the beginning. I tried over and over again to befriend her, made her gifts, called her, sent her cards, but I could never break through the wall she’d built between us. But that didn’t mean I stopped trying. Oops. Except for the last year and a half. Yes, I’d allowed my own grief to consume me, had cut myself off from the world.

During our conversation, I’d managed to get Kara to eat a tuna sandwich. I didn’t ask, just made us both one and put hers in front of her. When she would come home for college semester breaks, usually with two or three friends, I could put anything to eat in front of her and it would be gone in fifteen minutes.

Now, between bites, words poured out of her like a stream that had been dammed up since her father’s death. But she never made eye contact with me. That wall remained between us.

When she finally seemed to be finished talking, at least for the time being, I asked whether she’d like to visit my new foster children. One thing I was certain about Kara-she did love animals. She’d had a little mutt for a while but had to find him a home when she moved to a place where pets weren’t allowed.

Soon we were down in the basement sitting next to where Dame Wiggins and her brood lay on the quilt I’d brought down last night. And since I left the door open, Chablis joined us. Her wish to visit these strangers had finally come true.

I told Kara about the suspicious death and what had led up to it, but she was so taken with the kittens, I wasn’t sure she heard a word. And though I expected a hissing face-off between Wiggins and Chablis, it didn’t happen. Chablis took her time getting close, and just as I finished my story about the events of the last three days, my cat did something that totally amazed me. She curled up on a corner of the quilt near Wiggins’s tail and began to groom her new-found friend.

“This shouldn’t happen,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Kara stroked Wiggins’s head.

“Not so much as a hint of a catfight-but then Dame Wiggins is probably the most unusual cat I’ve encountered, and Chablis is as gentle as Mercy Lake at dawn. Dame Wiggins did lead me to her litter, while most cats would have done just the opposite. This pretty calico seems to have a keen sense of what’s safe and what’s not.”

“Dame Wiggins? What a funny name. She obviously understands that Chablis is no threat,” Kara said. “But I could have told her that right away. Chablis is a sweetheart.”