Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

I nodded.

“Does anyone know,” Barb asked, “why Andrea was in Chilson?”

“Oh, we know why.”

“We do?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “She came up for her great-aunt’s funeral. Talia DeKeyser.”

It was as if I’d tossed a restrictive force field over them just after they’d witnessed a shocking sight. Both stared at me, unblinking and unmoving. Just at the point where I was beginning to wonder if time had indeed stopped, Barb turned to her husband.

“You’re going to have to tell her.”

“Yes,” he said, breaking the spell I’d unwittingly cast.

“Tell me what?”

Cade pulled in a long breath. Then, instead of doing the expected thing and letting it out in a long, gusting sigh, he picked up his beer. When the only thing left on the inside of the glass was a sticky foam, he returned it to the table. “Sorry,” he said to his wife, “but I do believe I needed that.”

“Wanted, not needed.” She patted his arm and half smiled. “It’s all right. I have the car keys.”

There was a long pause. I tried to be patient, but was on the verge of using my foot to whack at someone under the table in the hopes of kick-starting the conversation, when Cade started telling the story.

“This was when Cal, Talia’s husband, was still alive. About five years ago, I’d guess.” He turned to Barb, who nodded confirmation. “Barb and I had bought our lake house the year before, and we were still getting to know the area and the town. Still meeting people and getting to know the neighbors.”

It was a familiar story. Newcomers, if they didn’t use some sort of method to establish a social network—volunteer work, church activities, whatever—took a long time to develop friendships.

“We were in Benton’s,” Barb said. “Mr. Smart Alec here was at the candy counter, trying to guess how many jawbreakers he could fit into his mouth before his jaw actually broke, when this tall, old guy spoke up and said he could take in fifteen.”

Cade laughed. “And then an elderly woman, who was standing next to him, said his mouth was much bigger than that, he’d be better off guessing twenty, and did he want to try an experiment?”

I smiled. “That was Talia and Cal?” All the stories I’d heard about them, I’d never once heard they were funny.

Barb nodded. “We were instant friends, despite the age difference.” She smiled at me. “One of these days we’re going to have to get some friends our own age.”

“Age is nothing,” Cade said, waving off the issue. “What matters is that you laugh at the same things.”

“I laugh at you every day,” his loving wife told him.

He ignored her and said, “We went out to dinner with Talia and Deke a few times—”

Barb saw my puzzled look and interrupted. “Deke was Cal’s nickname. From DeKeyser, and from his playing pond hockey into his sixties.”

Cade barely slowed down. “One day they invited us to dinner at their home. Barb insisted on bringing salad and bread, so when we arrived, she and Talia went back to the kitchen, while Deke and I mixed drinks in the dining room.”

It was an easy picture to summon; women and men in separate rooms, all four chatting easily and comfortably. Of course, the picture I was bringing to mind was incomplete, since I had no idea where the DeKeysers had lived, so I asked.

“Just a few blocks from downtown,” Barb said. “In the historic district.” She described a house I had seen many times, a Victorian home of gingerbread trim, lace curtains, and creaking wooden floors, the kind of house where grandmothers grew up, the kind of house that could almost make you smell lilacs and taste homemade ice cream.

“In the dining room,” Cade said, bringing me out of my historical fog, “the bottles and glasses were on a sideboard. Also on the sideboard was a stack of books.”

Books?

Cade gave me a crinkly smile. “You are suddenly a little more interested in this story, I see. Yes, there was a stack of books. Picture books was what I noticed. Books to read to the grandchildren on a rainy day. Blueberries for Sal , Stellaluna , Make Way for Ducklings , The Little Engine That Could. ”

I nodded at the names, all as familiar to me as the back side of my teeth.

“At that moment,” Cade continued, “I just glanced at the pile. But then Talia called for Deke’s help to reach a dish on a high shelf, and I was left alone.”

“You looked at the books.”

“Exactly,” he said, nodding. “I was in the home of an acquaintance and didn’t feel free to finish mixing the drinks, and I didn’t want to sit uninvited. Yes, I could have stood there and been bored, but why do that when there are picture books at hand? An artist can always learn something from other artists. Our research never ends.”

Barb coughed into her fist, but it was a multisyllabic cough that sounded a lot like the word “Plagiarism.”

Once again, her loving husband ignored her. “So, of course I looked at the books. And there, at the bottom of that small stack, underneath the mass-produced copies of children’s books that are in half the houses in the country, was a first edition of . . .”

He stopped for a moment, shook his head, then said, “Right there on the sideboard, well within the reach of grubby-fingered five-year-olds, was a first-edition copy of Chastain’s Native Wildflowers of North America .”

* * *

Eddie, who was doing his best to sprawl across the full length of the dining booth’s seat back, and doing a very good job, didn’t look impressed at my story.

Clearly, he hadn’t been listening.

“You must not have been listening,” I said. “Chastain’s Wildflowers is, well, it doesn’t have anything close to the value of Audubon’s book, but a complete copy in good condition is worth upward of half a million dollars.” And possibly much more. Cade, a fan of Chastain’s work, had said no first-edition copy had gone up for public auction in years.

That night at the DeKeyser’s, Cade had told Deke about the worth of the book that was casually lying underneath a copy of the Cat in the Hat . Cade had also advised Talia and Deke to move the book to a climate-controlled environment, but, he’d told me wryly, “It’s hard to communicate the value of a book that’s been sitting on the same piece of furniture for close to a hundred years.”

Over dinner, Deke had told the McCades that the book had been given by Robert Chastain himself to the then-matriarch of the family for her kindness in showing him a variety of wildflower he’d never seen. The family story was that Robert Chastain had been a nice gentleman who was a little nuts about flowers. The DeKeysers smiled at Cade’s story of the book’s value, and Cade had said it was obvious they didn’t believe him.

“Thus, the sideboard,” I said.

Eddie, unblinking, looked at me and flicked the tip of his tail up and down, up and down.

“Cade,” I told my uncaring cat, “had even confessed that he was a hugely successful artist himself, and that he knew what he was talking about when it came to a first edition of Chastain’s, but Deke and Talia just smiled and said they were fine with things the way they were.”

And, I realized, maybe they were right. What did a happy elderly couple need with the headache of a valuable volume like Wildflowers ? Let the next generation worry about it.

Which was exactly what was happening.

I’d driven home from Petoskey, thinking about it, and to me there was no doubt that Chastain’s Wildflowers was why the book-sale room, the bookmobile, and Pam’s store had all been broken into and tossed around into a huge mess. Someone out there knew about Wildflowers and was looking for it in all the places that Talia might have been expected to gift a book.