Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

“Maybe he wants you to read to him,” Faye suggested.

I eyed his selection. He’d dislodged the books in the Dewey decimal five and six hundreds: natural and applied sciences. “You could be right.” I slid the gardening and philosophy books aside and held up Cats: The Ultimate Beginners’ Guide to Raising Healthy Cats for Life! and Think Like a Cat.

Julia’s laugh was loud and long.

“We can take one home,” I told Eddie, who was sitting in the middle of the aisle with his tail curled around his paws. “But only one. I know how short your attention span can be.”

Eddie got to his feet and stalked past me without a glance.

Smiling, I watched him go. There really was nothing like a cat.

Chapter 4

“So,” Lindsey Wolverson said that evening at the Round Table. “Your aunt tells me you have a knack for leadership.”

I sent a panicked glance to my left at Ash, but he was busy sprinkling malt vinegar onto his fries and wasn’t paying attention to either me or his mother, whom I was meeting for the first time.

Aunt Frances had known Lindsey for years, but I’d never met her. My aunt had told me of backyard picnics and dinner parties and watching Ash and his sister grow from roly-poly toddlers into adulthood, but she hadn’t mentioned that his mother was so flat-out gorgeous that every person in the room—men and women alike—stared at her with dropped jaw. Not only that, but her chic yet casual attire was more elegant than anything I’d ever owned in my life.

It was a little intimidating, and I wish I’d known ahead of time. Then again, given Ash’s innate good looks, I should probably have guessed something like this was possible. But mathematics wasn’t my strong suit and I didn’t always put two and two together.

So I smiled, added more salt to my fries than I really wanted, and struggled for something to say that didn’t sound completely stupid. “I . . . I . . . uh . . .” I gave up. Stupid it would have to be.

Ash gave his fries one last dollop of malt vinegar, then screwed the top back onto the bottle. “You should see her with Sheriff Richardson. You’d think they’d been buds since day one.”

Lindsey’s perfectly plucked eyebrows went up. “Kit Richardson? That woman has awed me for years. She frightens men who have United States senators on their speed dial. Good for you. How did you do it?”

Basically, I had no idea, but it probably helped that I wasn’t from Chilson. I hadn’t known I was supposed to be nervous around the sheriff and had assumed she was like the other people I’d met from her office: helpful, courteous, and competent. Then again, it could have been because I’d knocked on the sheriff’s front door early one morning, and it was hard to think of someone in terms of fearsome starch once you’d seen her in a ratty bathrobe.

I was about to explain parts of that when I accidentally caught the look on the face of a male passing our booth. He was staring at Lindsey, jaw dropped, eyes goggled, and there might even have been a small trail of drool leaking out one corner of his mouth, although that could have been my imagination. “I . . .” But whatever I’d been about to say had gone clean out of my head. “I . . . I . . .”

Lindsey’s smile went from friendly to fixed.

I stared at the food on my plate. A burger and fries, all of which was rapidly growing cold and unappealing, but since I was losing my appetite even more rapidly, that didn’t matter.

She hated me. My new boyfriend’s mom hated me, and I hadn’t uttered more than half a dozen words. A new record!

“How’s business?” Ash asked. “Busy?”

Lindsey paused, her forkful of grilled chicken salad halfway to her mouth. “Do you realize that I’ve had this firm for nearly twenty years? And they said it wouldn’t last.”

Ash laughed. “Well, maybe that’s what Dad said right after the divorce. I always knew you’d be a success.”

She smiled at him fondly. “I just hired another employee. Who knew financial consulting would be so lucrative?”

My misery deepened. Not only was she beautiful, but she was smart and successful and could do math. There was no way she was ever going to approve of a mousy little librarian dating her son. Especially one who couldn’t put two and two together and get a reality into which I would never, ever belong.

I picked up a French fry and thought about eating it, but its coating of salt crystals glinted in the light. While it was my opinion that fries had to have a certain amount of salt to make them edible, there was also a point at which too much salt made them inedible, and these fries had reached that point halfway through my use of the saltshaker. Poor fries, doomed to end their life in a garbage bag, never to be—

“Minnie?” Ash nudged me with his elbow. “Did you hear my mom’s question?”

“Oh.” I blinked at him, then at the stunning woman sitting across from me. “Sorry. I . . . I . . .”

Thankfully, she cut into my repetitious soliloquy. “I hear you had a traumatic experience the other morning at the library.”

Not nearly as traumatic as it had been for Andrea Vennard, but the thought was a kind one. I nodded. And since I didn’t want to relive the experience any more times than my stupid brain was already forcing me to do, I returned to contemplating my dinner.

There was a pause. A long one.

“Well,” Lindsey said, and though I’d known her for less than an hour, even I could hear the brittleness in her voice. “Have the two of you seen any movies lately?”

I glanced at Ash, who was in the middle of taking a large bite from his hamburger. He wasn’t going to be any help. I looked at Lindsey and shook my head. “I—”

Ash’s cell phone burst into life. He shifted his burger to one hand and pulled out his cell with the other. With a huge effort that happily didn’t end with the necessity for someone to jump up and perform the Heimlich maneuver, he swallowed, then said, “Sorry—I have to take this,” and thumbed the phone to life. “Wolverson.” As he listened, he flicked glances at his mother, at me, at his food. “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

In one smooth movement, he slid the phone back into his pocket and stood. “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Minnie. That was Detective Inwood. He needs me to—”

But his mom was already waving him away. “Duty calls. I understand,” she said as he leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek.

He looked my way, gave me a large wink that his mother couldn’t see, and left me alone with her.

This time the pause was even longer.

“Are you a reader?” I asked.

“Of what?”

“Books. Magazines. Newspapers.” Anything, really, because if we could find some common ground, surely I would figure out something to say to this woman.

“Most of my reading is business oriented,” she said. “Books on economics and financial forecasting. Trade magazines—that kind of thing.”

“No fiction?”

Lindsey looked at me with an expression I couldn’t interpret. “My father always said that fiction was the refuge of the unhappy. That readers of fiction were looking for an escape.”

“But . . . but . . .” Then I stopped, because I did not want to get into an argument with my boyfriend’s mother the first time I met her.

I turned my attention back to my hamburger, mainly because if I was eating, I couldn’t be expected to talk. The resulting silence was awkward. With a capital A .

“Ran out on you, did he?” Sabrina, my favorite waitress at the Round Table, stopped by to top off our water glasses. “You ladies need anything else?”

“Just the check, please,” Lindsey said. “And I’ll take that right now.”