Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

Eddie, who was sitting on the kitchen counter, sat up even straighter as I finished walking through the door.

“Get down,” I said firmly. “There aren’t many rules in this house, but No Cats on the Kitchen Counter is one of them and it’s at the top of the list.”

“Mrr.”

“Down,” I said, raising my voice.

Eddie blinked at me.

“Down!” I dropped my backpack and clapped my hands. It was a noise Eddie hated. He glared at me and jumped down with a loud thump!

“How do you do that?” I asked. “That was a louder noise than I would have made and I weigh . . .” I tried to do some quick math in my head, failed, felt a little embarrassed about the failure, then remembered that I was a librarian and mental math wasn’t a required duty. “And I weigh a lot more than you do.”

“Mrr.”

“Talkative tonight, are you?”

Eddie, who had been walking toward me in a straight line, suddenly swerved and went around my feet in a wide arc, and returned to his straight path, the end of which was to jump on the pilot’s seat and sit on top of my backpack. “Mrr,” he said, settling in.

“Thanks. A little more Eddie hair on my stuff is exactly what I needed. Because, really, can you ever have enough of—”

From deep inside the backpack, my cell phone rang.

Eddie jumped and scrambled onto the dashboard. When he arrived safely, he turned and gave my pack the evil eye. If the world had been a just place, the backpack would have spontaneously combusted. But since the world was unfair, even for Eddies, I patted him on the head and reached for the phone.

The number wasn’t one I recognized, but it was local, so I thumbed it on. “Hello?”

“Is this Minnie Hamilton?”

“Yes,” I said. The voice was female and elderly, but it wasn’t one I recognized. “This is. How are you this evening?”

“Well, isn’t it nice of you to ask,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her words. “I’m so glad I decided to call. I knew it was a cellular phone, and in general I don’t like to talk to the things—that time lag is wretched if you want to have a meaningful talk.”

“I know what you mean.” I’d made a strategic error in starting a conversation before I knew who was on the other end of the phone, and it was too late to ask her name. Nicely done, Minnie. Very nicely done.

“Anyway,” she said. “My Thomas said you’d rung the other day when I was downstate visiting our daughter. He said it sounded important and that I should call you as soon as I got home.”

And then I knew who was on the other end of the phone. I stood by the dashboard and gave Eddie a few absent pets, watching stray hairs fly up into the air. “Thank you for calling, Mrs. Panik. It is important.”

“Well, then. What can I do for you?”

Lillian Panik was the longest-serving Friend of the Library. She’d volunteered under more presidents than . . . well, not more presidents than Eddie had hairs, but probably more than he had whiskers. I made a mental note to count them later and said, “It’s about the break-in in the book-sale room.”

Mrs. Panik sighed. “That was so sad. I’ve never seen anything like it. Such a mess, and for what?”

I had a pretty good idea for what, but said, “I was just wondering if you’d noticed anything unusual in the days just before it happened. Odd phone calls, strange questions, someone in there you’d never noticed before—anything, really, that was different.”

“You’re sleuthing!” Mrs. Panik exclaimed. “How wonderful! You young girls nowadays will turn your hand to anything.”

I didn’t think I had a thing on Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. “Can you think of anything?”

“Well, now.” She hummed a tune that sounded a lot, but not quite, like the theme song to Dragnet. “I don’t see how this could have anything to do with it, but I know that Monica had someone substitute for her.”

Monica? Who was Monica? Denise kept recruiting new volunteers, which was fantastic, but she didn’t always bring them around to meet the library staff. I asked for Monica’s last name, but Mrs. Panik didn’t know it.

“Tell you what,” she said, lowering her voice. “I’ll make a few inquiries. If I discover anything, I’ll call you right back.”

I stood straight. “Mrs. Panik, please don’t—”

“No trouble at all,” she said. “Good-bye, Minnie.” And she was gone.

For no good reason, I was uneasy at the thought of the petite, white-haired, and very proper Mrs. Panik playing Bess Marvin to my Nancy Drew. All those stories turned out okay in the end, but there was a time or two in every installment where you weren’t sure.

“Well, rats,” I muttered. There was no help for it. I’d have to go clean the bathroom.

The shower was almost clean when the phone I’d shoved into my pocket rang. I dropped my sponge and pulled it out. It was Mrs. Panik. I thumbed it on fast. “How are you?” I asked.

“Just fine, Minnie. But how are you? You sound a touch breathless.” She paused. “And a little hollow.”

I stepped out of the tiny shower stall. “Is this better?”

“Much. Now, I have something to tell you, and it’s a little disturbing. I hope you’re sitting.”

Anyone who’d reached the age she had undoubtedly knew the best way to deliver bad news. I walked the few steps to my bed and slowly sat down. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s Monica Utley,” Mrs. Panik said. “I don’t know if this is against the rules or not, but she asked someone to substitute for her the Saturday before the disturbance at the sale room. Someone who wasn’t a Friend of the Library.”

“Denise would know,” I said. “About the rules, I mean.” Not that I was going to ask her. “Do you know who Monica asked to substitute?”

“Yes, I do. Now, mind you, I didn’t talk to Monica about this. I learned it from Stella, who heard it from Peggy, who talked to Edith about it.”

I’d had high hopes at first, but with each degree of separation, my hopes went lower. “I see.”

She took in a deep breath. “From what I hear, you have a nice relationship with that fine young Ash Wolverson, so I will assume that you’ll take any pertinent information straight to him.”

“Yes,” I said cautiously. “Of course I will.”

“Then that’s all right. Now, here’s the difficult part.” Her words, which had been measured, began to run into each other. “The person who substituted for Monica was Andrea Vennard, that poor woman who was killed in the library, and I know you know all about that, you poor thing, and I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it’s best that you know. You have a good night, and now that I’ve passed on this information, I’ll be able to sleep easier.”

I held the phone to my ear long after Mrs. Panik had hung up, thinking about what she’d said. Then I pulled out my laptop and did something a thinking person would have done days ago: used a search engine to look up Andrea Vennard’s obituary. It didn’t take long, and a paragraph in, I found the name of the business Andrea had owned downstate: VM and Associates. Which didn’t tell me much, so I looked that up, too.

“No kidding,” I murmured, reading the screen. Andrea and her business partner, Jayna Molina, owned a company that provided personal assistants and housekeeping staff. E-mail addresses were provided for the partners and key personnel, so I sent a short one to Jayna, telling her I was sorry about her partner’s death, that I had been the one to find her, and that if there was anything I could do, to just call.

When the phone rang an hour later, Eddie and I had been about to turn in for the night. “Is this Minnie Hamilton?” a woman asked. “This is Jayna Molina. I wanted to thank you for your kind e-mail. It meant a lot to me.”