Саманта Сильвер: Busy As A Beaver

Sophie and I spent another twenty minutes in the house, just making sure we hadn’t missed anything, before we gave up and decided it was fruitless; the crime scene wasn’t going to give us any more information.

However, even though we had some more questions, I felt like it was a promising step. The more we discovered about the incident, the more we might be able to glean about the culprit.

When I got back home, exhaustion finally overtook me, and I fell into a deep sleep from which I was finally roused by Bee deciding she wanted breakfast twenty minutes before my alarm went off.

“We’re hungry, wake up,” Bee murmured, pawing at my face.

“Can you not wait twenty minutes?” I groaned, rolling over and covering my face with the pillow. Bee replied by jumping on my back and sticking her face under the pillow.

“No, we’re hungry now. If we were your human children, you wouldn’t let us starve.”

“Neither one of you is starving,” I muttered as I got out of bed. It was hopeless; now that Bee knew I was awake, nothing was going to stop her until I finally got out of bed.

“Text me if you find out anything juicy about your case,” Jason muttered sleepily as he turned over.

I grumbled at him and his ability to sleep in past six in the morning as I threw on some clothes and made my way into the kitchen, putting on a pot of coffee as I stifled a yawn. I definitely had not gotten enough sleep last night; this was going to be a long day.

Bee and Buster both sat in front of Bee’s food bowl and the extra bowl I had put out next to it for Buster. He was holding up his injured foot, looking up at me like a huge bowl of premium cat food was the only thing standing between him and unimaginable pain.

Right.

I managed to hide another tablet of painkillers in Buster’s food, this time sticking with the NSAID only. I watched with satisfaction as he and Bee both munched away, the pill eaten without being noticed. Thank goodness. There was nothing harder than trying to get a cat to eat a pill it knew you were trying to feed it, even if the pill was going to help.

“Are the two of you coming to the clinic today?” I asked. “Buster, you have to come, since Gloria’s going to come in at some point and take you home, but what about you, Bee?”

“Of course,” Bee replied, as if I should have known the entire time. “After all, Buster and I have to try and find out who did this to him and to Gloria.”

“Oh, the two of you are investigating, are you?” I asked, my eyebrows rising.

“Absolutely,” Bee bristled. “After all, a cat’s dignity is our most important feature. When Buster attempted to save Gloria’s life and didn’t manage to take down the criminal, well, we can’t let that kind of action stand. We’re going to find the man who did this, and we’re going to make him pay.”

“I assume your version of making him pay doesn’t involve simply calling the cops and letting them take care of it?”

“Cat justice is far more efficient than your silly method with trials and stuff,” Bee replied, showing me her claws.

“Alright, well, just make sure you don’t murder him if you find him,” I warned the two of them. “And let me know if the two of you actually come away with any decent information. We’re trying to find him as well, because unlike you, we can talk to humans, and we want to know if Gloria’s in any more danger or not.”

“Wait, you think Gloria might be in more danger?” Buster piped up.

“Well, we don’t know,” I replied. “It might be exactly what it looks like on the face of it—a home invasion gone wrong. But it might not be, either.”

I didn’t want to let the cats know that quite frankly, Sophie and I didn’t really have a clue what was going on with this.

“Alright, we’ll tell you what we find out,” Buster said, earning himself a glare from Bee. “What? I know it goes against Cat Law, but this is important. This is my mom we’re talking about. If telling them what we find out helps keep her safe, then I’m going to do it.”

“You’re betraying your species,” Bee muttered.

“And you know just as well as I do that Cat Law has an exception when it comes to helping save the life of your human.”

I had never heard of Cat Law before, and a part of me suspected it was something Bee and Buster had come up with on their own. I sort of wanted to know what the other “cat laws” were, but at the same time, I also just wanted to veer as far away from that ship as possible.

An hour later, after eating a quick bagel for breakfast, I drove down to the vet clinic along with the two cats, who insisted on being let out straightaway. I told them they could go out, so long as they came back to check in every hour in case Gloria came by to get Buster.

After barely acknowledging my orders they headed off, and I made my way to the back, where Sophie was getting everything ready for the day.

The bags under her eyes told me she’d slept just as little as I had.

“Do you mind going to Betty’s and grabbing me something with caffeine in it? Literally anything,” Sophie said, and I laughed.

“Sure. Want any food?”

“Always,” Sophie replied with a wink. I headed out, checking my watch—there were still about thirty-five minutes to go before our first patient of the day was due, which gave me plenty of time to grab Sophie and myself a couple of coffees and a breakfast burrito for her as well.

The instant I stepped into Betty’s café and the warm aroma of roasting coffee reached my nostrils, I felt reinvigorated, like the caffeine had seeped straight into me already. Betty McMahon waved at me from behind the coffee machine as she frothed some milk, the slight squeal of the steam wand adding to the atmosphere in the shop.

Even though it was just after seven-thirty in the morning, most of the tables were already taken up by people huddled around enjoying a morning delicacy before going to work, or simply retirees huddled together and having a chat.

I made my way up to the counter, my eyes falling on the slices of fresh pumpkin pie in the fridge. That would go perfectly with my lunch, after all.

“Did you hear about Gloria?” Betty said to me after she finished making the coffee and took my order.

“I did,” I replied. “I saw her yesterday. Buster got a bit banged up.”

“Oh, the poor dear,” Betty tutted, shaking her head. “I’m so glad she’s going to be alright. It’s terrifying, thinking about this sort of thing happening in Willow Bay.”

“I know,” I nodded. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“That poor woman’s had a string of bad luck. What with her husband dying a couple of years ago, and now this?”

“Oh, I didn’t realize she was married.”

“Yes, I knew her husband. He grew up here, actually. They were both teachers up in Portland, although they worked at different schools. He taught high school and she taught middle school. I think that’s one of the reasons why Gloria retired here; when Francis Romano died she gave her notice at the school she worked at and moved here, because it reminded her of him.”

“Aww,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt. For as much as Buster spent a ton of time in the vet clinic and with Bee, I realized I didn’t really know all that much about Gloria herself. I really only saw her when she came to drop Buster off in the morning.

“I do hope the police find who did this to her soon,” Betty continued. “I’d hate to think this could become a regular thing. I can’t remember the last time we had a home invasion that put someone in the hospital here. The closest I can think of was back in the eighties when a couple of kids got drunk and tried to steal an ATV, and the owner came out in the middle of the night and chased them off. But that was quite a few years ago now, and no one got hurt then. This is just something else. I mean, Oregon has had its share of major crimes. There was the I-5 killer in the eighties, the Leather’s Oil Company murders in the nineties, that huge robbery at a credit union in Portland about a dozen years ago, the husband who ordered a hit on his wife and she killed the hitman around the same time, and that shooting at the community college three years back, in 2015. But nothing like that has ever happened here in Willow Bay.”