Ник Сайнт - Purrfect Advice. Purrfect Passion. A Purrfect Gnomeful

“What don’t you get, Max?” she asked sweetly as she cocked her head.

“All I wanted to know is if there’s a chance for Mia Gray to ever find love again, after her fiasco with Kirk Weaver. Surely that’s not an obnoxious question?”

Harriet’s smile faltered. “Well…”

“And all I wanted to know is why you haven’t been blessed with lots and lots of babies, Harriet, because with that gorgeous fur of yours, by all rights you should. That’s not a dumb question, is it?”

“Um…” said Harriet, and swallowed. “Look, you guys, I’d love to stay and chat, but I gotta run.”

“But, Harriet!” I cried.

But Harriet was already flitting through the pet flap, en route to who knows where.

Brutus gave me a sad look. “For what it’s worth—and I know I’m not Chloe—but I think there is a lid for every pot, even your pot, Max, and most definitely for this Mia person that I don’t know. And as far as your question is concerned, Dooley, static electricity can only do so much, and so can a gorgeous coat of fur. So I’m afraid the matter of a large litter for me and Harriet can best be put to bed. It’s not gonna happen.”

And with these sad words, he, too, was off.

Dooley looked at me, I looked at Dooley, and then we both heaved deep sighs and hunkered down on the couch.

What a strange day! And I was refreshing the screen again, hoping Chloe had printed a retraction of her ‘obnoxious’ and ‘dumb’ statements when a squeaky little voice sounded nearby.

“Hey, fellas!” the voice said. “Yeah, you fat cats on the couch!”

And when I looked in the direction of the voice, I saw a small furry face, attached to a small gray furry body. It was a mouse. And it was grinning widely. “I brought you guys a little present!” the tiny critter cried, and then dropped a little something on the top step of the stairs to the basement, and scurried away again.

“Was that… a mouse?” asked Dooley.

“Yeah, I guess it was,” I said.

“He left a present,” said Dooley, and we both jumped down from the couch to have a closer look, then stared down at the item the mouse had dropped.

“It’s droppings,” I finally determined.

“What, Max?” asked Dooley, as he reached out a tentative paw.

“Don’t touch that!” I warned him.

“Why? It looks like a piece of chocolate or a cookie. It’s brown and shiny and… Oh, my god it’s poop!” he said as he finally got a good whiff of the thing.

“Yeah, Dooley. That’s exactly what it is. Mouse poop.”

Our new neighbors had thrown down the gauntlet and pooped in our house.

This meant war.

Chapter 18

Gran and Scarlett sat down at the same table they’d deserted earlier, only this time they’d brought a friend in the form of Kirk’s widow. The woman didn’t look happy, which was only to be expected after the devastating news she’d just received: not her husband’s demise, presumably, but the fact that he’d died destitute.

“So we were at Allison Gray’s place yesterday when Kirk was killed,” Gran said, deciding to forge ahead without preamble, as was her habit. “And at first it looked like Mia Gray was the culprit, as she was covered in the man’s blood. Looking closer, though, it looked as if Allison herself might have done it, but once again we were wrong. And when my niece, who’s also working the investigation, questioned Allison, she actually thought you might have done it. So what do you have to say to that, Mrs. Weaver?”

“Yeah, what do you have to say to that?” said Scarlett, who’d clearly never heard of the concept of good cop, bad cop, and was bad copping right along with Vesta.

“I don’t know what to say, except that those charges are ludicrous. Ludicrous!” said Sandy Weaver, who seemed to have something of the drama queen in her. She was a handsome woman in her late thirties or early forties, with large almond-shaped eyes and skin the color of mocha. Her lips were unnaturally plumped, and her face suspiciously wrinkle-free, which led Vesta to surmise she needed Kirk’s money to keep her Botox treatments going, and those lip fillers didn’t pay for themselves either.

“So tell me, why were you and Kirk having a divorce?” asked Vesta.

“Yeah, why were you divorcing the guy?” Scarlett chimed in as she directed a critical look at the woman’s exposed cleavage, which was almost as stunning as her own.

“First tell me something—who are you people? And why are you investigating Kirk’s murder? Don’t you have cops in this town? Or are you two the cops?”

“Sure, you can think of us as cops,” said Vesta. “It’s much easier that way. In fact the chief of police in this town is my son, and I often help him out on his investigations.”

“Me, too,” said Scarlett. “I’m a natural-born sleuth, just like Vesta here.”

“And since the lead detective on the case is dating my granddaughter, you can see how this is pretty much a family affair.”

“Uh-huh,” said Sandy, clearly not fully convinced. “So if your son is chief of police, why isn’t he asking me these questions? Why leave it to his mother?”

It was a good question, and one for which Vesta didn’t have a ready answer.

“Alec is too busy with other stuff to bother with Kirk’s murder right now,” said Scarlett. “So he asked us to do some of the legwork. Happens all the time in small towns.”

Sandy shook her head. “It’s all a little weird to me, but I guess you’re right. I don’t know how the police operate in small towns like Hampton Cove. But you were asking me about why I decided to divorce Kirk. Well, mainly because he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants, I guess. I kept walking in on him with his secretaries, the kitchen maid, the housekeeper, the cook, the woman who does the cleaning and one time even with the gardener, though I think he made a mistake there and hadn’t noticed in the darkness of the garden shed that our gardener was actually a buff Mexican male named Pedro.”

“So you’re telling us that your husband was—”

“A horndog, yes. Of the very worst kind. He was addicted to sex and had to have sex at least six times a day, preferably with a different woman every time. When it first happened, on our honeymoon in Bali, and I walked in on him with the barmaid, he told me it would never happen again and I believed him, but when it kept happening, he promised me he’d go into therapy for his sex addiction and asked me to stand by his side and help him through what was obviously a very difficult time in his life. So I did, but when I discovered he’d been having sex with his therapist, his therapist’s secretary, and his therapist’s mother, I figured enough was enough and I filed for divorce. Which he refused to grant me.”

“He refused to divorce you?” asked Vesta, who’d been listening with rapt attention. She’d heard about people like Kirk Weaver but had never actually met one in the flesh.

“He claimed he still loved me and all those flings, as he called them, were meaningless in the grand scheme of our marriage, which he considered a holy bond that couldn’t be broken by man—or me. But now I understand how all this talk of great bonds only meant to hide the ugly truth.”

“Which was?” Scarlett prompted.

“That the man was flat broke! And the moment the divorce went through I’d have discovered his financial situation and so would the rest of the world.”

“And he didn’t want that to happen.”

“My husband was a well-known media personality. He didn’t want his failure as a businessman to be widely known.”

“So he denied you your divorce and yesterday morning you decided to end this marriage once and for all by stabbing him through the heart with a big knife,” said Scarlett, nodding. “Makes sense. I can see why you did it. But murder is not the way.”