Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

While it was tempting to say yes, just to see the look on his face, I shook my head. “Kristen asked me over for dinner. I’ll see you guys later.”

They called out dinner suggestions to my back until I couldn’t hear them any longer. “Morons,” I said to myself, but I was smiling.

And I was also early. I’d tried to time my walking pace to arrive at exactly one minute past seven, but something had gone wrong and I was a few minutes early. I didn’t want to barge in on the end of the dinner rush, so I decided to extend my walk.

The homes in this area weren’t large, but they were old and many had been in the same family for decades, DeKeyser style. I went back to thinking about the implications of Andrea Vennard being in the Friends’ book-sale room the Saturday before her murder. Had she intentionally done so to look for the book? While in the sale room, had she discovered something that led her to—

“Hey, Minnie.”

For the second time that night, I jumped and looked around. Over to my right, I saw Mitchell Koyne standing behind a running lawn mower. “Hey, yourself. Don’t tell me you’re working yet another job.”

Mitchell turned off the mower and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Nah. I’m just helping out.” He shoved the damp cloth into his back pocket and put his baseball hat back on his head. “Mr. Wahlstrom doesn’t get around as good as he used to, and I figured I could mow his lawn, at least.”

“That’s nice of you. Have you known Mr. Wahlstrom for a long time?”

“He was my third-grade teacher.” Mitchell glanced at the house. “He gave me a prize at the end of the year. I never got a prize before, you know?”

Part of me wanted to ask the reason for the prize, but the rest of me didn’t want to hear that it had been for good grammar. “He sounds like a good teacher.”

Mitchell nodded. “Well, I’d better get back at it. See ya.” He pulled the cord on the mower and it roared to life.

I slid out my cell phone, checked the time, and hopped up into a fast walk. When I walked in the back door of the Three Seasons, Kristen was standing there, arms crossed, and looking pointedly at the clock on the wall, which indicated clearly that it was three minutes past seven.

“Sorry,” I said. “I got talking to Mitchell.”

Kristen’s blond eyebrows went up. “Mitchell Koyne’s conversation is more interesting than my food?”

“I didn’t know it was a competition.”

“Everything’s a competition. I thought you knew.” She turned and studied her busy kitchen staff. “Okay, guys. If there are any problems, let me know before they happen, yes?” Half a dozen heads bobbed up and down. “Harve, you’ll bring us a couple of specials when things slow down?”

“You bet, Kristen,” he said, nodding.

We went down the hallway that led to her office. She plopped herself into the chair behind her desk, and I settled into the much nicer guest chair. “So, what’s the problem?” I asked. “You said you need me?”

“Oh, yeah.” She pulled out a drawer, pushed back, and put her feet up. “It’s more that I have something to tell you.”

My ears perked. “Scruffy proposed again, and this time you accepted.” For the past three months, on a biweekly basis, he’d been asking her to marry him.

“As if.” Kristen slid down in her chair and put her arms behind her head. “The first time he might actually be serious, I might consider it. But he’s not, so I haven’t, and won’t until something changes.”

“And what might that something be?” This was where things were going to get a little tricky. Scruffy had started texting me, asking what he could do to get Kristen to take his proposals of marriage as a serious offer because he was, in fact, serious about marrying her. “It’ll take some figuring,” he’d said when I’d called him. “She has that restaurant, I have this job in New York, but we could make it happen. I know we could.”

“You love her very much, don’t you?” I’d asked.

“More than the morning sun,” he’d said quietly, and I’d vowed then and there to help him in any way I could, because I knew how much Kristen loved him.

Now she shrugged. “How will I know when he’s serious? I’ll know it when it happens.” She nodded at her computer. “What I needed you for was this. Take a look.”

I squinted at the monitor. “Looks the same as always.”

“No, you idiot. There’s a video clip I want to show you. Here.” She swung her feet to the floor, made some mouse clicks, and turned the monitor so I could see it. “Watch it and weep with me.”

Curious, I hitched my chair forward. The blank screen dissolved into a moving image of sparkling lake waters. The camera was close in, then pulled back, and pulled back more to show the far side of a lake. I blinked. “Hey! That’s—”

“Just wait,” Kristen said morosely.

The camera panned Chilson’s shoreline, then magically shifted off the water and onto the street, moving along at a pace slow enough to see everything, but not fast enough that it made me queasy.

Soon we were in front of the Three Seasons. Kristen and her staff were smiling and waving in a friendly manner. They stepped aside for the camera, and it came in through the front door and into the restaurant, where a smiling hostess stood with menus in hand.

The screen dissolved to black and I looked at Kristen. “And?”

“It’s awful,” she muttered, slumping down. “They’ll add the sound later, but I don’t see how it’s going to help.”

“Um . . .”

“Didn’t you see?” she demanded. “There was gunk in the water next to the boat launch. There was dirt in the street gutters; I asked the city to sweep the streets before the filming, but did they? Oh no, we can’t change the schedule for the sake of some little thing like a national cooking show. And I can’t believe you didn’t notice the dirt on that window of the restaurant, the little one above the stairway. This whole thing was a horrible idea, and I’m sorry I ever agreed to it.”

Kristen had been right. She did need me.

“Play it again,” I said, and watched it a second time. At the end, when I still hadn’t seen any of the things she was obsessing about, I told her to play it a third time. And a fourth.

Finally, I sat back.

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “There was one piece of debris in the water. A leaf, I’d say. There was a little bit of sand on the streets closest to the beach, and that window did indeed have a speck of dust in one corner.”

“Told you.”

I ignored her. “It also took me four times through to see that stuff, and that was when I was looking for it. Your average viewer isn’t going to watch it more than once, and even then they won’t be assuming that they’re going to see the fantasy version of Chilson. The average person recognizes that lake water contains the occasional leaf, you know.”

Kristen looked at me, a grin starting to quirk up one side of her mouth. “And that streets near beaches might have sand on them?”

“And that windows might have a speck of dust.”

My friend’s grin went wide. “See? This is why I needed you. You’re the absolute best at making fun of me to my face without me knowing I’m being made fun of until it’s too late.”

In a convoluted way, I followed her sentence structure. “When will the show be ready?”

She shrugged. “I’ve decided not to ask for updates. It’ll make me nuts.”

“How self-aware of you.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” She twisted the monitor back. “But it’s summer. I’m getting too busy to obsess about anything except running this place.” She pointed to the kitchen. “Now that you’ve taken care of me, what can I do for you? I know you don’t want any cooking pointers, but how about career advice? Romantic tips?” She waggled her eyebrows.