Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

“Really?” Eric asked. Soon after we’d met, he’d heard me talking to my cat as if Eddie could really understand what I was saying. He’d laughed with only the slightest condescension, but when Eddie had responded with a conversational “Mrr,” he’d stopped laughing and hadn’t laughed since.

“No idea,” I said, flipping newspaper pages. “But I know I’m tired of hearing about pitching problems. Okay, here we go. Ready for the good stuff?”

It hadn’t been until I’d started dating Ash, a deputy with the Tonedagana County Sheriff’s Office, that I’d become interested in the law-enforcement tidbits that Sheriff Kit Richardson released to the newspaper. Ash said what made print wasn’t the half of it, but the farcical half was certainly there.

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

Eric shoveled in a spoonful of cereal. “Fire away.”

I scanned the short paragraphs. “Here’s a happy one: ‘Lost six-year-old boy in the woods. Six-year-old boy was located and returned home safely.’”

Eric swallowed and toasted the newspaper with his coffee mug. “Score one for the good guys. What’s next?”

“‘Daughter called from out of state to have her elderly father checked on. Officer spoke with father, who said he turned off his phone because his daughter calls too late at night and wakes him up.’”

Eric choked on his coffee. “Seriously?” he asked, coughing.

“I don’t make this stuff up, you know. Next is about a guy who called 911 to tell the sheriff’s office that he’d been driving with his window down. A bee flew in, and when he was trying to get the bee out, he drove into a parked car.”

“Good story,” Eric said. “Wonder if it’s true.”

Smiling, I went back to the paper. “Here’s a call that someone had broken into a garage the night before a garage sale. Nothing was reported missing.”

“Mrr.” Eddie thumped his head against my leg.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Not that good a story, but they can’t all be winners. How about this one? ‘Caller wanted to see an officer because her cat was being mean to her.’”

“Mrr!”

“Okay,” I said. “It was one sister being mean to another sister, and Mom took care of things before the officer arrived.” I gave Eddie a pat. “Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.”

“Some kid really called 911 because she was fighting with her sister?” Eric held up his cereal bowl and drained the last of the milk into his mouth.

I averted my eyes, swung my short legs off the lounge, and stood. “Last week some kid called 911 because his mom wouldn’t let him play all night with his new video game.”

“Well,” Eric said, “now, that I can see.”

“Mrr.”

I turned around. Eddie was settling onto the newspaper, tucking himself into a meat-loaf shape. “Oh no, you don’t.” I rolled him gently onto his side and slid the paper out from underneath him, like a sleight-of-hand artist pulling a tablecloth out from under a table full of china. Unlike the china, however, Eddie yawned and stretched out with his front feet, catching the paper with one of his claws and yanking it out of my hand so it fluttered to the deck.

“Nice job.” I crouched down to pick up the now-scattered newsprint. “You have a gift for making a . . .”

“A what?” Eric asked.

“Mess,” I said vaguely, now standing with the newspaper in hand, looking at the page Eddie had opened. The obituaries. Talia DeKeyser, I read to myself, died peacefully in her sleep on Memorial Day. Born on May 24, 1933 to Robert and Mary Wiley, Talia married Calvin DeKeyser in 1955—

“Minnie, are you okay?”

I folded the newspaper and put it under my arm. “Fine, thanks.” I picked up a purring Eddie and tucked him under my other arm. “See you later, Eric. I have to get to work.”

* * *

My shower was fast and, since my annoyingly curly shoulder-length black hair didn’t take well to blow-drying without turning into a mess of frizz, I toweled it dry and hoped for the best. And even though I knew from my mother’s years of scolding that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, I didn’t feel like stopping even for a quick bowl of cereal. There were granola bars in the vending machine at the library; one of those could count for breakfast.

I blew a kiss to Eddie, who somehow knew it wasn’t a bookmobile day and was already curled up in the middle of my bed, and headed out into the brightness.

Normally there wasn’t much I liked better than my morning walk through the streets of downtown Chilson, but in spite of the cheeriness of the day, I couldn’t help thinking of that famous line from the John Donne poem, “Any man’s death diminishes me.”

And any woman’s, too, because though I’d barely known Talia DeKeyser, she’d seemed to be one of those people who could light up a room with a smile. Aged, widowed, and suffering from Alzheimer’s, Talia had nonetheless brightened the day of everyone at Chilson’s Lake View Medical Care Facility with her unfailing cheerfulness and horrible riddles. Her family had moved her to Lake View soon after Christmas, and I’d met her when I’d stopped by with a pile of large-print books from the bookmobile.

I remembered her grinning up at me from her wheelchair, all ready to share a knock-knock joke, and had the sudden and certain conviction that she’d gone on to a better place. “Sweet dreams, Talia,” I said softly, and felt my sadness curl up into a tiny spot in my heart. And though I wasn’t quite thirty-four, I knew my sadness would eventually fade and be overgrown by memories of bad jokes and happy laughter.

“Morning, Minnie,” Cookie Tom said. Tom Abinaw, the tall and amazingly skinny owner of the best bakery in the area, had always been a nice guy, but he’d elevated himself to saint status in my eyes when he’d volunteered to let me purchase cookies for the bookmobile at a special rate and, even better, from the back door, so I didn’t have to stand in the long lines that snaked out his front door all summer.

“Hey.” I stopped. “Beautiful out, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.” Tom looked up from his sweeping of the clean sidewalk. “Yet another day I’m glad I don’t work in a big city.”

I laughed. “Better to work seventy hours a week in a small town?”

“Far better.” He smiled and returned to his unnecessary sweeping.

I went back to walking through the few blocks that constituted Chilson’s downtown. The mishmash of old and new, single-storied and multistoried, brick and clapboard, brightly colored and faded melded together into a cohesive whole that worked so well that it couldn’t possibly have been planned. Organic growth, urban planners said. Whatever it was, I liked every inch of it, from the far reaches of the slightly shabby east end, where my houseboat was moored, to the moneyed west end, where my best friend, Kristen, had her restaurant.

Of course, the east end soon wouldn’t be as shabby as it had been for years, thanks to the efforts of my friend Rafe Niswander. By day, Rafe was the best middle-school principal Chilson had had in years. By night, he was the renovator of what had been a run-down wreck of a house within shouting distance of the marina, and he was taking his own sweet time about it.

Whenever I told him that he could have finished two years ago if he hadn’t spent so much of his summer in the marina’s office, hanging out with the manager and the manager’s marina buddies, he would loftily say that perfection couldn’t be achieved in a day, and walk away, whistling.

“Morning, Minnie!” Pam Fazio fingered a wave at me. She was sitting in a small slice of sunshine that was hitting the front steps of her store, Older Than Dirt, and cupping her hands around what was most certainly not her first cup of coffee that morning.