Софи Келли - A Midwinter's Tail

She waved as we started down the long driveway.

I headed for Maggie’s apartment. “I like Brady,” I said as we drove down the hill.

“I hope you’re wrong,” she said.

I knew she didn’t mean about liking Brady.

“Me too,” I said.

“Could you imagine you and Marcus and Brady and me on a double date?” she said after another silence.

Marcus, the straight-arrow police detective, and Brady Chapman, defense attorney and son of the alleged town bootlegger, breaking bread together?

“That could be . . . interesting,” I said.

She laughed. “Uh-huh.”

The idea kept us laughing the rest of the way to her apartment.

“Thanks for the drive, Kath,” Maggie said. “Give my love to my furry boyfriend.”

“I will,” I said.

My cell phone rang just as I pulled into my own driveway. I put the truck in park and looked at the screen. It was Marcus.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m running a little late, but supper is in the slow cooker.”

“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” he said. “I’m not going to get there.”

I knew what he was going to say before the words came out.

“It looks like Dayna Chapman was murdered.”

9

Marcus told me he’d stop by later just to say good night if he could. Then we ended the call and I tucked my phone back in my pocket. At least I had Owen and Hercules for dinner companions.

Except neither cat was anywhere to be seen. They weren’t in the kitchen. They weren’t in the living room. I went upstairs to change my paint-spattered clothes, and there weren’t any cats nosing around in the closet or sitting in the big chair by the window, either.

The bulb had burned out in the ceiling light at the top of the stairs. As I padded down the steps in my sock feet in the dark, I made a mental note to ask Marcus to put in a new bulb for me.

Three-quarters of the way down the stairs, I saw movement just inside the living room doorway next to the bookcases. There was enough illumination from the streetlight outside that I could catch a glimpse of gray fur.

Owen was so focused on what he was doing that he didn’t notice me come behind him until I flicked on the light. He started and looked up at me, guilt written all over his gray tabby face.

He was standing on his back legs, one paw on the first shelf up from the bottom of the bookcase. I’d seen him drop whatever he’d been carrying in his mouth on the shelf and put one paw on it. Now he tried to casually rest his other front paw next to the first one. If he’d been able to lean against the side of the bookcase and whistle, I think he would have done that, too.

I looked down at him. “Hello,” I said.

“Murr,” he said softly, his golden eyes not quite meeting mine.

“What’s that?” I asked, nodding my head at whatever he was trying to hide with his front paws.

“Merow?” he said, blinking at me as though what I’d said made no sense at all to him.

I wasn’t fooled. “Nice try,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “What’s under your paws?”

He lifted a paw, giving me his confused-kitty expression. At the same time he seemed to be surreptitiously trying to bat whatever he was hiding toward the back of the shelf. Sometimes I thought that if Owen hadn’t been a cat he could have been some kind of criminal mastermind—Lex Luthor or the Joker, maybe.

“Owen!” I said, sharply.

To his credit he knew when he was caught. He dropped down onto all fours and dejectedly hung his head. I leaned over to see what he had been trying to hide from me. Sometimes he liked to swipe things from Rebecca’s recycling bin, although I was fairly sure there was too much snow on the ground for him to do that now.

A tiny purple mouse lay on its side on the dark wooden shelf.

“What are you doing with that?” I asked sternly, narrowing my eyes and glaring at him.

He kept his head down, and his shoulders seemed to sink just a little more.

The little purple mouse belonged to Hercules. It had been a gift from Rebecca, who loved to spoil the boys no matter what I said to her. She kept Owen in yellow catnip chickens, but Hercules was pretty much indifferent to catnip. He wasn’t the only cat who felt that way, I’d learned. Rebecca had found the little mouse at the Grainery where she bought Owen’s chickens and other cat treats. Once it was wound up, all you had to do was press down on it and the mouse would run in a circle on the floor, randomly changing direction and occasionally doing a loop or a figure eight.

Roma thought the toy was a wonderful idea, the feline equivalent of a person doing the New York Times crossword puzzle or a Sudoku puzzle to keep their mind sharp.

I crouched down on the floor beside Owen. “This is not yours,” I said. “You did a very, very bad thing.”

He muttered almost under his breath, like a child making excuses for his behavior.

“Were you trying to hide this from your brother?” I asked.

He turned his head sideways a little and one half-lidded eye looked at me.

I sighed in exasperation. It had become pretty clear to me from the beginning that Owen and his brother weren’t ordinary cats, even without taking into account their extraordinary abilities. Among other things they seemed to have a nose for, well, crime solving, as preposterous as that seemed. And Owen, at least, seemed to have a bit of a larcenous streak.

I tried to imagine how Marcus would react if I told him that the cats seemed to have helped me every time I’d been connected with one of his cases. Oh no, that wouldn’t make me seem crazy.

The problem in front of me at the moment, thankfully, had to do with a lesser crime.

“Owen, you must have five or six funky chickens—or parts from them—hidden in this house,” I said. “This belongs to Hercules. You can’t have it.”

I said each word slowly and clearly and shook the purple mouse for emphasis. His eyes followed my hand.

Maybe I was crazy. Maybe Owen didn’t understand one word I said. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I could have been speaking Italian or pig Latin. His eyes moved to my face and he gave me his best innocent/repentant look. I thought of it as his “I didn’t do it and I’ll never do it again” expression.

“How the heck am I supposed to discipline you?” I asked, sinking down onto my knees. Owen put a paw on my leg. I couldn’t exactly stick him in the corner or tell him he couldn’t go out in the yard. That wouldn’t work with a normal cat, let alone one who could disappear whenever he felt like it. I knew some animal training experts advocated using a spray from a bottle of water to discourage bad behavior. Maybe I was treating Owen and Hercules too much like people, because my first thought when I’d read that advice was that I wouldn’t shoot water from a spray bottle at Susan or Abigail at the library, so why would I do it to Owen or Herc?

“Don’t do this again,” I said, shaking a finger at him. I was very glad there was no one around to hear what I was saying. “If you do, those sardines in the refrigerator will magically disappear faster than you do.”

Owen’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, and he turned and looked toward the kitchen. I used to threaten to give Owen’s kitty treats to the Taylors’ German shepherd, Boris, but I’d made that threat one time too many without following through, and it had lost its effectiveness.

I reached over and stroked the top of Owen’s head. “I love you,” I said, “but sometimes you make me crazy.”

“Merow,” he said, wrinkling his nose at me. For all I knew, that was his way of saying, “You make me crazy sometimes, too.”

I got to my feet, putting the little purple mouse in my pocket. “Are you hungry?” I asked as we went into the kitchen.