Лори Касс - Gone With The Whisker

* * *

My text to Ash went unanswered for hours. It wasn’t until I was thinking about what to pick up for dinner—and that at some point I’d have to actually cook something, but today wasn’t the day to start that kind of habit—that he sent a reply.

Ash: Looking at Vannett. Thx.

Me: No problem. Glad to help.

Ash: Glad you are. Just stay away from snowstorms.

He’d added a winking emoji at the end. “Funny,” I said to my phone, and turned it off. Eddie and I had endured a few bad hours last January at the hands of a killer, and it had taken me months to feel truly warm. Though Eddie had seemed to recover faster, he did seem to be shedding more than usual this summer. Maybe he’d grown extra fur, post-incident.

I picked an unusually long black-and-white hair off my sleeve and put it in my office wastebasket. One down, forty-two zillion to go. And then there were the hairs still on him. Life with Eddie was full of surprises, and one was where I’d find Eddie hairs. I also got the fun of leaving them in interesting places. My current favorite was the state capitol. A few months ago, I’d gone down to Lansing for a library conference, and when I’d had time to drive over to the historic building, I’d surreptitiously set free half a dozen tiny pieces of Eddie.

Smiling, I remembered the hair I’d dropped from an upper balcony and let waft down, down, down to the rotunda’s glass floor. I’d also let one loose on the capitol’s front lawn, right next to a group of protestors. What they’d been protesting, I couldn’t remember, but it had something to do with agriculture.

Agriculture? My brain twitched. Hadn’t Jeremy’s wife quoted Barry Vannett as saying that Rex’s trail would never cross his farm? Hmm.

I reached for my keyboard—librarians, start your search engines!—and went to the county’s website. After a few clicks, I found that Vannett’s property was indeed zoned as agricultural.

But so was a lot of other land. What could be different about Vannett’s farm? What could incite conflict? What could . . . “You are so stupid,” I said out loud, meaning me. Going back to the website, I found the phone number I wanted and dialed.

“Tonedagana County Planning Office, this is Trish,” said a cheerful voice. “How can I help you?”

“Hi, Trish.” I sat and studied the computer. “If I give you an address, can you tell me if anyone has applied for zoning permits on that property?”

“Sure,” she said. “That’s public information. I’ll need a foya application, though.”

“A what?”

She laughed. “It’s an acronym for the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA, see?”

I did. And with a little direction from her, I also saw where to fill out the appropriate form, how to sign it, how much it might cost to get my request fulfilled, and where to send it. “This can all be done electronically?”

“Just started this year,” she said. “Easy, right?”

It was. I thanked her and she said if I sent the FOIA application right away, she might be able to get to it before five o’clock. This meant I spent the rest of the day checking my e-mail repeatedly, but at two minutes to five, there it was.

I clicked it open and blinked. “Huh,” I said out loud.

Barry Vannett was applying for a recreational marijuana growing license.

Chapter 5

Rafe aimed the yellow mustard bottle at his opened hamburger and gave a healthy squirt. “Okay, but what could a marijuana grow license have to do with murder? Medical marijuana has been decriminalized in Michigan for more than ten years, and the recreational stuff went the same way in 2018. So . . .” He shrugged.

A downside of having my boyfriend help me with a murder investigation was that he was helping me investigate a murder.

The three of us were sitting at one of the marina’s picnic tables, getting ready to eat the burgers Rafe had grilled and the potato salad, chips, and dip that I’d picked up at the grocery store. It was a beautiful evening; the sun was still high in the sky, the wind was light, seagulls were squawking, and if I turned around and looked hard, I would have been able to see Eddie’s face pressed up against a houseboat window.

“It’s an anomaly,” I said. “Something different. Things that are different cause disagreement. Conflict. Anger. All that. And even if marijuana isn’t a criminal offense in Michigan, it’s still a cash business. And there’s bound to be a black market for it.”

Rafe added pickles, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, and mayonnaise, guaranteeing that he’d end up with burger goo on the picnic table. “Okay. Money’s always a murder motive, so that’s a given. But how about a motive that isn’t money-based?” He frowned. “There must be some.”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s say Barry Vannett wanted to grow marijuana and . . .” And what? From what I knew about the licensing process, if the township where Vannett lived allowed growing operations, all Vannett had to do was apply, assuming he wasn’t a felon. Even if Rex had been appalled at the idea of marijuana next door, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Was it possible I’d zoomed off into assumption land? That I’d been wrong to say there could be nonmoney motives?

He was looking at me over the top of his burger, waiting for my response. So I changed the subject.

“Look, Kate!” I bumped my silent niece with my elbow and nodded toward the waterfront sidewalk, specifically at the two teenage girls with ice cream cones who were more focused on keeping their ice cream from dripping than they were on where their feet were taking them. I didn’t think they’d actually fall into the water, but since I happened to know they were both good swimmers, I wasn’t too worried. “There’s Emily and Alyssa.” The Gwaltny girls were regular library patrons, sisters who actually got along, funny, smart, and about Kate’s age.

Kate shrugged and kept on dipping her chips.

“Let’s go meet them,” I said with forced cheerfulness, ignoring the look of warning from Rafe. “Come on.”

“Do I have to?” she asked.

“Well, no, but I thought it’d be fun for you to meet some other teens. When I was up here at your age, I—”

“That was, like, a generation ago,” Kate said, suddenly fierce. “It’s not like that now, okay? Everything’s different.” She jumped up and ran off.

“Be back in a minute,” I murmured to Rafe and went after my niece. Inside the houseboat, I looked around. No Kate in sight, which on a boat this size had to mean she was in the bathroom. “Kate?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” came her voice from behind the door. “Just leave me alone.”

“But—”

“I’m fine!”

I twitched at the intensity of her tone and was about to venture directly into the Not Leaving Alone category of aunting, when I heard an odd rustling noise. I looked left and right and up and down and finally found my cat, who was mostly under Kate’s sleeping bag.

He wriggled out from underneath and stretched. After moving roughly six inches closer to me, he sat upright and looked me in the eye. “Mrr,” he said.

“Do you believe her?” I asked softly.

“Mrr.”

“Yeah, I don’t, either.” Because there was no way Kate was fine. She’d suffered the trauma of falling over a murder victim, and was probably dealing with a variation of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I wanted to help her, I was trying to help her; I just didn’t know how.

I sighed, called to Kate that I was going to finish eating, got a muffled “Fine” in reply, and headed out.

* * *

Rafe hadn’t wasted any of the time I’d left him alone. In those ten minutes, he’d finished eating, gone up to the house for a small cooler, filled it with ice and adult beverages, brought it back down, and replaced me with someone else.