Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

“Gotcha.”

Sabrina pulled the correct slip from her apron pocket without looking. As soon as she slid it onto the table, Lindsey picked it up and slid out of the booth. “Thank you. I’ll pay up front. Minnie, it was a pleasure meeting you.” She smiled politely and was gone.

“Wow,” Sabrina said, watching her go. “That was Ash’s mom, right? She’s gorgeous.”

I pushed my plate away. Ash’s mother was everything I was not and never would be. Tall. Straight-haired. Articulate. Financially successful. Stunningly beautiful. Not to mention articulate.

Sighing, I started to slide out of the booth. I almost asked Sabrina how her husband, Bill, was doing. They’d met here at the Round Table and had been married less than a year. Then I decided to ask the next time I was in. Right now, all I wanted was to go home and snuggle up to my cat.

* * *

“How could I have been such an idiot?” I asked.

“Mrr,” Eddie replied.

“Well, yeah,” I said, pulling the lap blanket up over my legs. We were sitting outside on the houseboat’s front deck. The sun was slipping down into the horizon and the temperature was dropping. “Everyone’s an idiot some of the time. Except you, of course.”

“Mrr.”

“You’re welcome.” I patted his head. “But I’m relatively self-confident. I haven’t had major self-esteem issues since I talked Mom into letting me get contact lenses.”

“Mrr.”

“Right. So, why tonight? Why couldn’t I get out more than three words in a row?” I thought back to the nonconversation, then corrected myself. “More than one word in a row.”

Eddie stood, stretched, and then walked up my body and flopped onto my chest. “Mrr.” A front paw reached out to rest on my chin.

“When you do that, it makes it hard to talk,” I told him.

“Mrr.”

I laughed softly. “That’s the point, is what you’re saying? That I should just enjoy the sunset and your company and not worry so much about one dinner?”

“Mrr!”

So I stopped talking and concentrated on enjoying a cat’s affection and the gloriousness of a summer sunset. And, long before the sky went completely dark, I’d put the Doomsday Dinner to the back of my mind.

Well, almost.

* * *

The next morning, life at the library was more or less back to normal. Work was piling up on my desk, Josh and Holly were trying to pin me down on when I’d turn in my application for library director, and the carpet guys I’d contacted had come and gone, leaving behind nothing but a faint new-carpet smell and a swath of carpet that held no bad memories.

Yes, there was still a killer on the loose and, yes, I was still disturbed by the fact that I had no idea how he—or she—had infiltrated my library, but I was determined not to lose my focus on the multitude of tasks that needed to be done. Because in spite of last night’s miserable dinner, and no matter what Lindsey Wolverson must think of my character, I was a capable human being and people relied on me to do my job.

And in a just world, which would be where hardworking and almost-always-kind people were given dignity and grace, when one of those hardworking and kind person’s cell phone rang, her brain would have used enough of itself to think about how she was going to answer rather than just pick up the phone absently and say, “Busy. What’s up?”

There was a short pause. A male throat cleared itself. “Ms. Hamilton?”

I sat up, blinking away from the invoices on my desk whose numbers didn’t match what the accounting program on my computer was telling me. “Detective Inwood. Good morning.” I darted a quick glance at the computer screen. Yes, still morning. Excellent. While I may not have been paying full attention to what my phone had been trying to tell me, at least I had the time of day correct by three full minutes. “What can I do for you?”

“The Sheriff, Deputy Wolverson, and I have decided to make you aware of the results of Ms. Vennard’s autopsy.”

“Oh.” Did I really want to know this? No, I did not. I’d read far too many thrillers and seen far too many television shows that featured autopsies to want to hear any grisly details regarding a real human being. “Thanks,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure I don’t—”

“Ms. Vennard,” he went on, paying zero attention to my wishes and desires, “was not killed by the knife.”

“She wasn’t?” Once again, I pictured the silver handle. “Then why was it there?”

“We do not know. The cause of death was strangulation.”

That made no sense.

“The knife found in the body,” he said, “was an X-Acto knife. The blade was thin and about an inch long.”

“A what kind of knife?”

He repeated the word. “It’s a brand name. Used by artists, woodworkers, and any number of hobbyists.”

“So not unusual.”

“Not at all. But it’s puzzling,” the detective said. “Ms. Vennard’s fingerprints were sharp and clear on the handle. The lab’s opinion is that no great force was exerted on the handle other than by Ms. Vennard. In addition, the X-Acto injury was postmortem.”

I suppressed a shudder. “Why would she be in the library with an X-Acto knife?”

“That’s why I called,” Inwood said. “I’d hoped that as the acting library director, you’d have some insight.”

“Sorry. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.”

“Well,” he said heavily, “we will do our best to keep all avenues of investigation open.”

It was a phrase I’d heard before. “Do you have any new ideas about how Andrea got in the building?” I asked.

The working theory was that she’d walked into the library when it was open and simply hid. Gareth left at one in the morning, and searching for stowaways certainly wasn’t anything he’d ever needed to do.

“Not yet,” he said. “No signs of forced entry on any doors or windows; no record of any missing keys.”

The possibility of a missing key would have been high in the old building, which hadn’t had new locks since it had been built decades earlier, but Stephen had instituted a strict key-tracking system when we’d moved to the new building, and for once I was grateful for his persnicketiness.

But this scenario also meant that Andrea might have opened the door to her killer, which made—

A sturdy woman barged into my office, tossing back her short brown hair. “Minnie, I need to talk to you.”

I held up my index finger and pointed to the phone. “Is there anything else?” I asked Detective Inwood. “Someone’s just come in that I need to talk to.” Didn’t want to, but would obviously need to, since she was settling into my guest chair, no invitation required.

“If anything further develops,” Inwood said, “I’ll let you know.”

I thumbed off the phone and looked up. “What’s up, Denise?”

Denise Slade was fiftyish and the current president of the Friends of the Library. Just before last Thanksgiving, her husband had died tragically. I was trying to remember that, was trying to allow her time to work through her grief and come to grips with the loss of her life partner, but doing so was easier some days than others.

She pointed her index finger straight at me. “I have a problem, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.”

I folded my hands on my desk. Denise had a lot of problems, but it wasn’t likely that she was coming to me for advice on how to win friends and influence people. Then again, if she was interested in doing that, there were some books I could recommend.

“Can I get you some coffee?” I asked.

“If Kelsey made it, then yes. Otherwise, no. She’s the only one who makes a decent brew around here. The rest of you are a bunch of coffee wimps.”