Софи Келли - A Case Of Cat And Mouse

I drove home and found Hercules upstairs, seemingly rearranging the shoes in my closet. “I’m not even going to ask,” I said, bending down to scoop him up. “Want to come and spend the afternoon at the library?”

He squirmed in my arms. His green eyes narrowed and one ear turned sideways. He was rightly suspicious. “You can sit in my chair. You can shed cat hair all over my desk.”

He seemed to think about it for a moment. Then he stopped squirming. I wondered if it was the chair or the shedding that had won him over.

Hercules climbed in the cat carrier bag without complaint. I felt a little guilty because I knew he would feel I’d tricked him when we ended up at Roma’s clinic after work. I also knew I was attributing a lot of human emotions to a small black-and-white cat.

When we got to my office I set the carrier bag on my desk and unzipped the top. Hercules climbed out, stretched and then jumped down onto my chair, which sent it slowly spinning in a circle.

“You’re going to make yourself dizzy,” I warned.

He gave me a slightly loopy look as the chair swung past me. Hercules may not have cared for catnip the way his brother did, but he did like going around in circles in my chair.

The next time an arm of the chair passed me I grabbed it. I leaned my face close to his and he licked my chin. “I love you, too,” I said. “Please stay in here. The last thing I need is to have to explain what you’re doing here. I don’t think anyone is going to believe you came to borrow a book.”

He gave an indignant murp as though the idea that he couldn’t read was insulting. For all I knew maybe he could. Both Hercules and Owen were far from ordinary.

I gave him one last scratch under his chin and headed downstairs.

“Would you give Lita a call when you have a chance, please?” Abigail asked. “She called about half an hour ago.” She reached over and plucked a clump of black cat hair from my shirt.

“Hercules is in my office,” I blurted.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “He waved a paw at me as you skulked past the desk.”

“I did not skulk.” I wasn’t going to argue about the waving.

“Please,” Abigail said with an eye roll. “If Hercules was a Great Dane instead of a cat, it would have been an episode of Scooby-Doo .” She glanced in the direction of the stairs. “Does he have to go see R-O-M-A?”

I laughed. “I don’t think he can hear you all the way in my office. And yes, he does. She just wants to check his leg one more time.”

“You know, Kathleen, Hercules is a pretty smart cat. Pretty soon he’s going to figure out that every time he gets to come to the library he ends up you-know-where.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.

Hercules stayed in my office—or at least, if he went roaming around, he didn’t get caught. When I went up for my break he was sitting in the middle of my desk. It looked like he was reading something.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Mrrr,” he said, putting a paw on the page in front of him. It was Ray Nightingale’s CV.

I hadn’t had much time to look for more information on the connection between Ray and Kassie.

“I need that,” I said to Hercules. I tried to pull the sheet of paper away from him but he kept his paw in place and there was a stubborn jut to his chin.

“Mrrr,” he said again.

I looked down at the page. The cat’s paw was resting just below the listing of the artists Ray had studied under. Tim Dougall.

“Why does that name seem familiar?”

Hercules didn’t seem to know.

I reached for my computer. I wasn’t sure why that name mattered, but it did. A quick search told me that Timothy Dougall was an artist who had done the illustrations for more than two dozen children’s books.

“Maybe Abigail mentioned his name to me,” I said.

Hercules wasn’t interested anymore. Now he was sitting in the middle of the paper, carefully washing his tail.

I went back downstairs. Abigail was shelving books. “Are you familiar with an illustrator named Tim Dougall?” I asked.

She smiled. “Of course. Do you remember when you worked a shift for me so I could go see that documentary in Minneapolis? That’s who it was about. Tim Dougall.”

“That’s why the name seemed familiar,” I said. I remembered how much Abigail had looked forward to seeing that documentary.

“Where on earth did you see Tim’s name?” she asked. “He’s been dead for close to seventeen years now.”

“Seventeen years? Are you sure?”

Abigail nodded. “Give or take a year, yes. You can google it if you need the exact date.”

“There’s something I need to do,” I said. “Can you cover for me for about ten minutes?”

“Sure,” she said. “Take your time.”

I went back up to my office.

Hercules was lying on his back now, jabbing the air with one paw as though he was boxing but not putting much effort into it.

I picked up Ray’s CV. If he had taken a class with Tim Dougall, the last possible time he could have done it would have been when he was about sixteen—pretty much the age he looked in that photo of him with Kassie.

“As Alice would say, ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’”

Hercules looked a little confused. If he did read, it seemed he hadn’t read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland .

I checked the CV again and found the name of the art program where Ray claimed to have studied with Dougall. It only took me a minute to get the exact year of the illustrator’s death and then I did the math in my head. Ray would have been sixteen. Had he spent a summer studying with the artist? It wasn’t impossible. Maybe there was a way to find out.

I looked up the phone number of the art school online, took a deep breath and called. I was rerouted three times before I reached the right department. I explained to the woman on the other end of the phone that I was a researcher for The Great Northern Baking Showdown and that I was trying to clarify the background of one of our contestants.

“His name is Ray Nightingale and he was supposed to have taken a summer art course there seventeen years ago. I’m trying to verify the date.”

“I’m sorry,” she said in a slightly bored monotone. “I can’t give out any personal information about any of our students.”

Hercules had given up on his quasi-workout and was nosing around the telephone receiver. I nudged him back, which just made him all the more determined to get in the way.

“But I’m not certain Mr. Nightingale was a student,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to confirm.”

“And as I told you, I can’t give out any personal information about students.”

This wasn’t going to work. Hercules butted the receiver again and I moved him back again. He gave a loud meow in protest.

“Was that a cat?” the woman asked.

I glared at Hercules, who glared back at me.

“Yes, that was Hercules. I apologize. He thinks he’s a person when it comes to phones. Anyway, thank you for talking to me.”

“Not Hercules from the calendar?”

“Umm . . . yes.”

“The little tuxedo cat?”

“That’s right.” The conversation had taken a very strange turn.

“I have that calendar right here in my office,” she said. Her voice was suddenly a lot warmer. “My name is Dena, by the way.”

“Hello, Dena,” I said. “I have that calendar and, as you can hear, that cat right here in my office at the moment.” The subject of the conversation had turned his back on me in annoyance and was washing his face.

“The calendar makes me smile every time I look at it. I think my favorite photo is the one of them on the circulation desk in the library.”