Лори Касс: Gone With The Whisker

Who, indeed, had killed Rex Stuhler?

Why had someone killed Rex?

And would that someone kill again?

* * *

I delivered the screws to Rafe, who accepted the double delivery without batting an eye, and looked around for an out-of-the-way place to sit. Rafe and a friend of his were installing drywall on the basement ceiling and there wasn’t a role for me, other than having my phone at the ready to call 911.

Yes, I could have tried to be useful, but the couple of times I had done so during drywall work, things hadn’t ended up well for me, Rafe, or the drywall. I could do other things, though, especially when it was a benefit to be efficiently sized. A five-foot-tall body fit far better into an attic space for placing insulation, for instance, and my compact-size fingers were much better than Rafe’s big ones for installing tiny pieces of trim.

I spotted an upside down plastic five-gallon bucket that had once held paint, carried it near the work area, and sat on my new stool.

Rafe glanced at me through his upraised arms. “How’s Katrina?”

“Asleep,” I said. “At least she was when I left.”

“She seemed pretty shaken up last night.”

“Who’s Katrina?” Bob asked. “Is she hot? And single?”

I wasn’t sure exactly how Rafe knew Bob, but if I asked, I’d get a long story that may or may not have provided a real answer, so I imagined a story about a late blizzard and a lost puppy, which was almost certainly a much better explanation than reality.

“She’s seventeen.” Rafe pulled his screw gun from his tool belt.

“And my niece,” I said over the noise of drywall screws being screwed in tightly.

Bob gave a heavy sigh, which fluttered his thick, dark blond beard. “So my bad luck is holding.”

“Right now it’s more important that you hold up your end of the drywall,” Rafe said, installing screws faster than I would have thought possible for a guy who wasn’t a professional contractor.

As I watched them work and listened to them banter, I thought about the other revelation I’d had last night, the one from my sister-in-law. My brother had gone to bed, but Jennifer and I had talked a little longer, and one of her questions had come across as so odd that I’d pursued it.

“Is Katrina acting . . . secretive?” she’d asked.

I’d been puzzled by the question. And curious as to the reason behind it. “Why do you ask?”

Jennifer hemmed and hawed and eventually said, “Well, there was this boy . . .”

And so I learned that the reason behind my niece coming north had almost as much to do with her parents wanting distance between their eldest daughter and her erstwhile boyfriend as it did with aunt-niece bonding and summer employment.

Jennifer had sighed. “We should have told you, I know we should have, but somehow . . . somehow it never came up.”

Last night I’d been too tired and emotionally fraught to deal with family drama, but now that I was awake and chipper, I was taking it out and looking at it.

Yes, they absolutely should have told me. So how was I going to react?

After thinking for a bit, I decided not to react at all. I’d gone through a few rounds of bad judgment myself, and since I wasn’t a parent, my viewpoint of appropriate parental action was bound to be skewed. But now what did I do? Did I tell Katrina that her parents had told me about The Boy? Or did she assume I already knew?

I stood, still having no idea what my next steps should be, niece-wise.

“Headed out?” Rafe asked.

“Much as I’d like to sit here and watch other people work, I have a niece to tend to.”

“Say ‘hey’ for me. She had a rough night.”

I sent a kiss in his direction and left them to it.

Outside, the sky was starting to cloud up. I sent the sun and sky a fervent wish to stay strong and walked the two hundred feet to the marina. My tiny houseboat shared a short pier with a large Crown powerboat owned by Eric Apney, a forty-ish divorced downstater who made his living as a cardiac surgeon. He was an excellent neighbor, quiet and conscientious about following marina etiquette, and was sitting on his deck with a cup of coffee and a newspaper.

“Morning, Minnie,” he said. “Been out running?”

“Sort of.” I explained about the screw delivery, and he looked interested. There was something about other people’s renovation projects that got a certain slice of the population to volunteer their time, sort of a small-scale version of the classic Amish barn-raising.

“Ceiling work?” Eric settled back into his chair. “Maybe I’ll go up after lunch.”

I grinned. Which was when Rafe and Bob would be done.

“Want some?” Eric gestured with his mug.

Since I hadn’t had any caffeine in almost twenty hours, of course I did, but I tried not to look too eager. “Sure. That’d be great.”

He got to his feet and went into the cabin, and I stepped aboard. The view from Eric’s taller boat was different than mine. Just a few feet of elevation allowed me to look over the top of my houseboat, the boat owned by Louisa and Ted Axford, and all the way to the marina’s slightly dilapidated office.

Chris Ballou, the marina’s manager and head mechanic, was sweeping the office’s front sidewalk and talking with Skeeter, a guy about my age. Skeeter was a slightly mysterious figure. He had a very nice boat, lived at the marina from Memorial Day through Labor Day, and disappeared completely the rest of the year. And that was the sum total of my knowledge about him.

“Do you know Skeeter’s last name?” I asked Eric, who was handing me a steaming mug of happiness. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, and it’s Conlin.”

Eric was a wealth of Skeeter knowledge. “I have no idea what he does for a living. Or where he lives the rest of the year. Do you?”

“Huh.” Eric put his forearms on his boat’s gleaming metal railing. “I do not.”

“Seems odd, doesn’t it?” I mused.

“It does.”

We stood side by side, watching Chris and Skeeter pull chairs into the sun and promptly drop into them. I knew as much about Chris as I wanted to know, but how was it we knew nothing about Skeeter?

“You going to find out?” Eric asked.

I thought about it, then shook my head. “Some things are best left to the imagination.”

* * *

A still-sleepy Katrina and a hungry Minnie stood in line at the local diner. I’d decided against making breakfast—although since she hadn’t opened her eyes until almost eleven o’clock, calling it breakfast was questionable—and I was now questioning the Round Table decision.

We’d been standing here five minutes and the line hadn’t moved an inch, which shouldn’t have surprised me considering it was the busiest weekend of the year, but somehow did because nine months of the year there was never any line at all.

I stood on my tiptoes and craned my neck left and right, trying to see inside. My niece eyed me. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for . . . ha!” I dropped down onto my heels. “Wait here,” I told her, and eeled my way through the crowd and into the heart of the restaurant, because I’d spotted a possible solution to our problem. “Hey,” I said, coming up to the booth in the back corner. “Got room for two more?”

Holly Terpening, a fellow library staff member, smiled up at me and pushed her lovely straight brown hair behind her ears. “Hey, Minnie. We can shove over, can’t we, Brian?”

“Sure.” Holly’s husband, Brian, a strapping man who towered over me when sitting, let alone standing, slid over and patted the seat beside him. “Make some space for Miss Minnie, Anna. You too, Wilson.”

Anna, aged seven, and Wilson, a year older, were miniature versions of their parents. They obligingly made room and I fetched Katrina. Holly had already met her, but Brian and the kids hadn’t, so I introduced her saying, “This is Katrina, my niece from Florida and—”