Лори Касс - Cat With A Clue

The song came to an abrupt halt. Had he really said what I thought he’d said? “Sorry?”

“Saturday night. You found yourself in a difficult and dangerous situation and were alert enough to do what needed to be done.”

“Oh. Um, thanks.” He didn’t hang up, so I said, “Most people think I was nuts for rushing a guy with a knife.”

“Most people.” He chuckled. “You are not most people, Ms. Hamilton.” His chuckle turned into an outright laugh, and he ended the call, still laughing.

“‘Nuts’ wasn’t the first term that came to my mind,” came a voice out of the dark. “‘Brave’ was the first. Then ‘stupid.’ Then came ‘nuts.’”

I turned off the phone. “Hey, Eric.” Over our Sunday-morning newspapers, I’d told my neighbor about the events of the night before. “How long have you been sitting out there?”

“Long enough to hear you ask your cat about being profound. Were you?”

“Doubt it.”

“Tell me anyway.”

So I shrugged and did, telling him how sunsets and stars might lead us to a better world.

After a long moment, he said into the evening’s darkness, “You know what, Minnie? You’re probably right. I can’t believe your cat didn’t say so.”

Smiling, I gathered Eddie up into my arms. “See you tomorrow, Eric.”

“Night, Minnie.”

I carried Eddie inside and set him gently on the bed. I brushed my teeth and changed into jammies, and, finally, slid between the sheets, trying to disturb my sleeping cat as little as possible. “Night, pal,” I whispered, and kissed him on the top of his head. “Sleep tight. Tomorrow’s a bookmobile day.”

“Mrr.”

And I would have sworn that he was smiling.

Read on for a sneak peek of

Minnie and Eddie’s next adventure,

available in August 2017!

There are many tasks that I find difficult. Braiding my annoyingly curly hair, for starters. Differentiating equations and putting down a good book before one in the morning are also beyond my capabilities. Another thing I’ve found hard for all of my thirty-four years? Choosing a favorite season.

Though summer is easy to enjoy with its warm freedoms, winter offers skiing and ice-skating and the sheer beauty of a world transformed by a fleecy blanket of white. Spring is exciting with its daily growth spurts, but right in front of me was a glorious hillside in its early-autumn colors of green with sprinklings of red and orange and yellow, a scene so stunningly beautiful it was hard to look away.

“Fall, it is,” I murmured to myself.

I was standing at the bookmobile’s back door, the door wide-open to let the unseasonably warm air of late September waft around the thousands of books, the hundreds of CDs and DVDs, the jigsaw puzzles, my part-time clerk, me, and Eddie, the bookmobile cat.

“Mrr,” Eddie said. On his current favorite perch, the driver’s-seat headrest, he stretched and yawned, showing us the roof of his mouth, which was the second-least attractive part of him, then settled down again, rearranging himself into what looked like the exact same position.

Julia, who was sitting on the carpeted step under the bookshelves, which served as both seating and as a step to reach the top shelves, looked up from the book she was reading. “What does he want now?”

One of the many reasons I’d hired the sixtyish Julia Beaton a few months ago was her tacit agreement to always pretend that Eddie was actually trying to communicate with us. Julia had many other wonderful qualities, among them the gift of empathy, which was a huge plus for a bookmobile clerk, and an uncanny ability to understand people’s motivations.

Those two traits had undoubtedly contributed to her success as a Tony Award–winning actress, but when the leading roles had started to dry up, she’d retired from the stage, and she and her husband had moved back to her hometown of Chilson, a small tourist town in northwest lower Michigan, which was the town where I now lived and worked, and there wasn’t anywhere on earth I’d rather be.

Though I hadn’t grown up in Chilson, I’d had the good fortune to spend many youthful summers with my long-widowed aunt Frances, who ran a boardinghouse in the summer and taught woodworking during the school year. It hadn’t taken me long to fall in love with the region, a land of forested hills and lakes of all sizes, and I soon loved the town, too, with its eccentric restaurants, retail stores, and residents.

Soon after I’d earned a master’s degree in library and information sciences, I’d heard about a posting for the assistant director position at the Chilson District Library, and spent half the night and all the next day working on a résumé and cover letter.

I’d sent the packet off, crossing my fingers as I imagined it being read by the library board, and, after a grueling interview and a couple of nail-biting weeks, I’d been ecstatic to be hired as the library’s assistant director.

Since then, not all had been exactly rosy, but the bookmobile program I’d proposed had become a reality a little over a year ago, and in spite of sporadic funding problems, library director issues, and the occasional library board confrontation, I was a very happy camper.

Eddie, on the other hand, did not look like a contented cat. Instead of the relaxed body language he’d been exhibiting moments earlier, he was now sitting up, twitching his tail, and staring at me with a look with which I was intimately familiar.

“What he wants,” I said, “is a treat.”

“He had treats at the last stop,” Julia pointed out.

“Which is why he thinks he deserves a treat at this one, too.”

“If he has treats at every stop,” she said, “he’s going to get as big as a house.”

I’d first met Eddie a year and a half earlier. In a cemetery. Which sounds weird, and probably is, but Chilson’s cemetery had an amazing view of Janay Lake to the south and, to the west, the long blue line that was massive Lake Michigan.

The day I’d met Eddie had been another unseasonably warm day, and I’d skipped out on the cleaning chores I should have been doing and gone for a long walk up to the cemetery. I’d taken advantage of a bench placed next to the gravestone of an Alonzo Tillotson (born 1847, died 1926) and been startled by the appearance of an insistent black-and-gray tabby cat.

In spite of my commands for him to go home, he’d followed me back to my place. By the time I’d cleaned him up, making him a black-and-white cat, I’d fallen in love. Even still, I’d dutifully run a notice in the local newspaper’s lost and found and had been relieved when no one answered the ad. Eddie was my first-ever pet; my father had suffered horrible allergies, and until last year I’d never felt the connection a human and a pet could have. I’d also never realized how opinionated and stubborn a cat could be.

“He’s already pretty big,” I said, “but the vet says he’s a healthy weight.”

“Mrr,” said the cat in question, starting to ooze off the headrest and toward the driver’s seat.

“Thanks so much,” I muttered. “I love it when you sleep there and shed all over the upholstery so I get your hair on the seat of my pants.”

Eddie thumped himself onto the seat. “Mrr!”

“I think,” Julia said, laughing, “that he took offense to that ‘big’ comment.”

“Who you calling big?”

Julia and I turned. Up until that point, the bookmobile’s stop had been empty of patrons. I smiled, pleased that we weren’t going to turn up completely dry. Of all the facts and figures that my library board scrutinized, the numbers from the bookmobile got the most attention. So far, the trends were upward ones, but I didn’t for a moment assume that all would be well forever.