Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

Julia leaned forward and reached her long fingers in through the wire door to scratch Eddie under the chin. “You did a fine job, my furry friend. Keep up the good work.”

“Mrr,” he said.

Julia sat up, pushed back her long strawberry blond hair, and laughed. “There are times when I really do think he understands what we say to him.”

“I sincerely hope not,” I said fervently, earning another laugh.

“Just think of it,” Julia mused. “Eddie sees all, understands all, knows all.”

“If so,” I said, “why doesn’t he make himself more useful?”

“That’s not what cats do.”

“What do they do, besides shed and eat and make a mess of the paper towels, no matter where I put them?” Eddie had a penchant for paper products and not in a loving way. He liked to shred them to bits, strewing pieces in every room possible.

“They purr,” Julia said.

I grinned. “They do indeed.” Which more than made up for every cat hair that ever had been or ever would be shed upon my person. “And they’re excellent at convincing people to take naps.”

Julia nodded. “Plus they help keep the mice population down.”

And it was a cat, Eddie in particular, who had brightened the day of a little girl with leukemia the day he’d stowed away on the bookmobile. Brightened it so much, in fact, that he’d become a permanent bookmobile feature. At the time, I’d been intent on keeping Eddie’s presence on the bookmobile a secret from Stephen, who’d been rule-bound to the extreme. But it had all worked out in the end, and Brynn Wilbanks, who was now six years old and attending kindergarten, was in remission and melted my heart with her wide smile every time I saw her.

“You realize, of course,” Julia said, “that the primary reason for the existence of humans is to take care of cats.”

“Eddie has mentioned that.” I glanced down at the carrier. “But I thought he was exaggerating.”

“Mrr!”

Julia laughed. I shook my head and flicked on the turn signal in preparation for our first stop of the day, in the parking lot of a township hall.

In less time than it takes to tell, I’d swiveled the driver’s seat around to face the front desk and readied the computer, Julia had reached up to pop open the ceiling vents—at five foot eight, she could do it without the help of a step stool—and gone to the back of the bus to fire up the rear computer. I unlatched Eddie’s carrier and, after a pause of almost half a second, he leaped out and jumped up on top of his latest favorite perch, the passenger’s-seat headrest.

“Are we all set?” I asked.

“Ready,” Julia called.

“Mrr.”

I patted my cat on the head, watched a few black and white hairs fly in multiple directions, and opened the door.

“Good morning, Bookmobile Ladies!” A woman with short graying hair bounced up the steps. “And how is the Bookmobile Cat today?”

Eddie blinked at the woman, whose name was Faye, and said, “Mrr.”

She laughed delightedly. “You are a treasure. Minnie, if you ever get tired of him, I’ll take him home with me.”

I smiled. “Sorry, but Eddie and I are bonded for life.”

“Mrr.”

Faye snorted out another laugh and patted him on the head. “Oh, Eddie, if only all cats were like you.”

Someone else came stumping up the stairs. “Minnie! Are you all right?” Mrs. Dugan, a matronly woman in her mid-sixties, frowned at me, her firm white curls bouncing a little with the effort. “After what happened yesterday, I can’t believe you’re able to work, let alone drive the bookmobile!”

She flung her arms wide, and I had little choice but to stand up and get the stuffing hugged out of me.

“Poor Minnie,” she murmured. “You’re lucky you’re so strong. I would have been a wreck, just a wreck. I take things to heart, and finding that poor woman would have sent me to bed for a week.”

I murmured a thanks for her sympathy and extracted myself. To fend off further exuberances, I picked up Eddie, unashamedly using him as a shield. I made a mental vow to give him extra treats and asked Mrs. Dugan if she’d known Andrea Vennard.

“She was a Wiley, wasn’t she?” Mrs. Dugan turned to look at Faye.

“Hmm?” Faye was perusing the new books and was just opening the cover of Sophie Kinsella’s latest release.

“Andrea Vennard,” Mrs. Dugan said. “Wasn’t she Bob Wiley’s daughter?”

“Is Bob married to Missy?” Faye asked. She looked up from the book and saw Mrs. Dugan nod. “Then yes, Andrea was a Wiley before she was a Vennard.”

This confirmed what Holly and Donna had said. “How long ago did Andrea leave Chilson?” I asked.

Mrs. Dugan laughed. “That one? She left town right after high school.”

Faye nodded. “Said Chilson wasn’t big enough for her, that she had places to go, people to meet, things to accomplish.”

I looked from one to the other. “And did she?”

“I live next to a high school friend of Andrea’s,” Faye said, “and she says Andrea was too busy to have kids or to get back home. I guess she owned a business downstate. Grosse Pointe? Bingham Farms? One of those fancy suburbs of Detroit, anyway.”

Mrs. Dugan sniffed. “She came back fast enough when Talia DeKeyser died. That was her great-aunt, you know. Probably hoped she was named in the will.”

“What kind of business did Andrea own?” I asked, but Faye didn’t know. I shifted Eddie around a little, trying to ease him into a position that made him weightless. Thirteen pounds isn’t much until you start shooting for the world’s record in the Longest Eddie Hold. “Did Andrea have money problems?”

“Who doesn’t?” Faye gave a crooked smile. “But I wonder what Andrea was doing in the library in the first place. From what my neighbor says, Andrea wasn’t what you’d call the literary type.”

“More a partying type?” I asked. If so, that could open up all sorts of possibilities for murder. I’d tell Ash tonight, and he would find a fast lead to the killer, and soon everyone would forget that the library had—

But Faye was shaking her head. “She was ambitious, mainly. There’s a story about her high school boyfriend, Steve something. He was really serious about her, gave her an engagement ring on prom night. She laughed in his face, and I guess he went nuts. Got so angry that some other guys had to hold him back from hitting her. She got a personal protection order against him and left town the next week.”

I shivered. “He doesn’t sound like a good choice for a long-term relationship.”

Mrs. Dugan snapped her fingers. “Guilder. Steve Guilder, that was his name. Didn’t he move to Texas?”

Eddie, who up until that point had been purring quietly, started struggling to get down. Knowing that the cat always wins, I let him escape to the floor. “What did her folks say about her leaving home so young?”

“Normal stuff. That she was just a kid, that she had a lot to learn, that she didn’t know everything, even if she thought she did.”

So just adolescence, and no long-buried clue to the reason behind her murder. Maybe Andrea, in leaving town at eighteen, had taken her rebellion a step further than most kids, but even that wasn’t too far from of the ordinary. Julia had done the same thing.

“I remember being that young.” Mrs. Dugan sighed. “Life was simpler then, wasn’t it?”

It had also been very limited, both in scope and in size, and fraught with self-doubt and self-esteem issues. “Personally,” I said, “you couldn’t pay me enough to—”

Crash!

I whirled around. “Eddie! What are you doing up there?” My cat had managed to dump a shelf full of books onto the floor. I reached for him, but he slid away from me and jumped in Julia’s direction. “Fine,” I muttered, crouching to pick up the books. “Be that way.”