Софи Келли - A Case Of Cat And Mouse

“Why didn’t you just make coffee?”

“Because there wasn’t any to make.” I lowered the heat on the meatballs just a little. “Abigail had taken money from petty cash to get a bag. I sent a text to Susan and because she is a kind and good person she got me the largest take-out cup of coffee Eric has. She was just coming up the steps with it when Harry came out the front door carrying the stepladder.”

“I’m sensing a theme here.” His lips twitched.

“Apparently the cup hit every one of the steps on the way down and then went top over bottom all the way to the parking lot.” I held my hand up once more. “ But , the lid stayed on.”

“So the coffee was okay?”

“You’d have to ask the two squirrels that dragged the cup away.”

“Hold on a second,” he said, holding up a hand. “Squirrels?”

“Uh-huh. To be fair, it was hazelnut flavored. And for the record, Harry and Susan did try to stop them. There was a broom and one, possibly two, knitting needles involved. It did provide a fair amount of entertainment for the Seniors’ Book Club when they arrived. It seemed the smart money was on the squirrels.”

Marcus was shaking with laughter. “So did you ever actually get a cup of coffee this morning?” he asked when he got himself under control again.

“About half an hour after all that Harry arrived back at the library with another take-out cup from Eric’s, a new travel mug and a pound of ground coffee from that micro-roaster in Red Wing.”

“Poor Harry,” Marcus said, still grinning.

“There’s a small postscript to the story,” I said.

“I love postscripts.”

“When I went out to the truck at lunchtime I found the empty take-out cup sitting on the hood.”

Marcus held up both hands. “So to sum up your morning, Harry destroyed your coffee not once but twice and you were flipped off by two squirrels.”

“Don’t forget there was a road grader tire in the gazebo.”

“And there was a road grader tire in the gazebo.” He started to laugh again. “And to think some people believe the library is boring!”

I pointed my spoon at him. “Go wash your hands because we’re almost ready to eat.” I shifted my attention to Owen. “And you move out of the way or you’re going to end up with a heap of spaghetti on your head.”

They shared a look and then Marcus went to wash his hands and Owen moved back to where he’d been sitting before he felt the need to defend the meatballs. No arguing, no adorable cute faces from either of them.

How did I do that? I asked myself.

I was setting our plates on the table when Marcus returned. Both cats were enjoying one meatball each. I rationalized that one wasn’t going to cause them any harm, and given their other “attributes” it was quite likely they didn’t have ordinary digestive systems, either.

“So are you mine for the evening?” I asked.

Marcus smiled across the table. “I am. There’s a group playing in the bar down at the hotel—just a couple of guys with guitars—but they’re supposed to be pretty good. Do you want to go down later for a listen?”

“I’d like that,” I said. “It’s been a crazy week. I’d like to just put my brain on idle.”

“I’ll second that.” He picked up his fork and speared a meatball, rolling it through the sauce before he popped it in his mouth. “Oh, that is good,” he said after a moment.

He leaned sideways and held up his hand to Owen as though they were going to high-five. The cat, who had finally finished checking out his own meatball and now was starting to eat it, lifted his head and gave Marcus a blank look. Marcus straightened up again, a grin on his face.

“One of these days you’re going to do something like that and Owen is going to actually high-five you with one paw.”

Marcus shrugged. “Hey, it’s not impossible. He can just become invisible anytime he wants to. How hard could a high five be?”

I had kept the cats’ abilities secret for such a long time that it felt weird now that Marcus knew. He had taken the news a lot better than I had expected. I’d requested several physics textbooks for him via interlibrary loan. He was trying to find an explanation for both Owen’s ability to disappear and Hercules’s trick of walking through walls that depended on science, not woo-woo magic.

“Have you seen my black pen?” he asked. “You know, the skinny one I bought at the bookstore?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t seen it. Where did you last have it?”

He made a face as he twirled spaghetti around his fork. “That’s the problem. I don’t remember.”

“It’ll turn up,” I said. It was probably buried on his desk at work.

I told him about the meeting while we ate.

“I think Peggy will be a great judge,” Marcus said.

“That seems to be the general consensus.”

“From what I’ve heard so far, Kassie Tremayne wasn’t that popular.” He leaned back in his chair. All that was left on his plate was a smear of sauce.

“You know that expression that Burtis uses about someone being like the cow that gives a bucket of milk and then kicks it over?”

“You’re saying Kassie was like that?”

There was a lone strand of pasta in the middle of my plate. I picked it up with my fingers and popped it into my mouth. “I don’t like to speak ill of someone who isn’t here to defend herself, but yes, from what I saw she was.”

“Some people are hard to warm up to.”

I shook my head. “I think it was more than that. To me it was like she was . . . mean-spirited. She seemed to be happy when things went wrong for other people.”

Marcus laced his fingers and rested his hands on top of his head. “That sounds like a pretty crappy way to go through life.”

“Did you get the autopsy report?” I asked. It didn’t seem like dinner conversation but it wasn’t the first time we had talked about a case at that table. The day we’d met we’d sat across from each other in the library’s staff room and talked about the death of Gregor Easton over mugs of coffee. Of course, Marcus had thought I had been having a torrid affair with the temperamental composer and conductor. And I had thought Marcus was, well, a jerk.

We’d both been wrong.

“Just some preliminary results,” he said. “There are some tests that will take a few days.”

“She died from asphyxiation, didn’t she?” I said. It seemed to be the most logical cause of death given what I had seen.

He nodded slowly.

“I take it you don’t know exactly how it happened.”

One hand rearranged the knife and fork on his plate. “No. We don’t. Not yet. You know I can’t get into a lot of details with you.”

“I know that,” I said. “But hypothetically speaking, you—or anyone for that matter—would have to ask how Kassie ended up facedown in a bowl of food. Did she pass out? And if she did, what caused that to happen? The only injury I saw was that scrape on her lower lip.”

Marcus nodded but didn’t say anything.

I leaned back in my chair and pulled one leg up underneath me. “Continuing in this hypothetical world for a minute, you—”

“—or anyone for that matter,” he interjected with a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“Or anyone,” I continued, smiling back at him, “would be looking for some indication that she passed out. Did she have a stroke or a seizure? Did she fall and hit her head? Did she choke on something? The answer to all of those questions has to be no.”

“Because?”

“Because you”—I held up my hand before he could interrupt me again—“hypothetical you, would have had both the cause of death and the manner of it if the answer to any of those questions was yes. So the manner of death isn’t obvious. That’s why you’re waiting for those test results.”