Софи Келли - A Midwinter's Tail

“Otherwise she seems to be healthy. And she’s definitely not feral.”

“How do you know?” Marcus asked.

Micah was sitting down now, washing her face.

Roma reached for her tablet to make notes on her examination. “She’s been spayed. She was probably a dump.”

Marcus’s face tightened and I felt a knot of anger in my own stomach. This wasn’t the first time someone had dumped a cat out to fend for itself at Wisteria Hill.

“So, what happens now?” I asked.

Roma brushed her hair back off her face. “I’ll get her up to date on all her shots. We’ll make sure she doesn’t have worms or fleas, and then she can, hopefully, find a new home.” She eyed me. “Any chance you’d take her?”

I looked at the small orange cat carefully washing her face. “I don’t think Owen and Hercules would take to having another cat around,” I said.

She nodded. “I want to take Desmond out to Wisteria Hill when I move out there permanently. I don’t think he’d handle that and another cat around very well.”

“Maybe we could talk Maggie into taking her,” I said with a grin.

Roma smiled back at me. “We could try.”

I looked over at Marcus, who was deep in conversation with the cat. “Marcus, we should get going,” I said.

He straightened up. “Are you going to put her in one of those cages?” he asked Roma.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s for her own safety.” She held out her hands several feet apart. “They’re big cages. You’ve seen them.”

“I don’t think she’ll like it, locked up with all the other cats.”

“Do you want to take her down to the police station for the day?” Roma asked. She kept a completely straight face.

“Could she at least stay in your office?” he said. “She’s been wandering around Wisteria Hill alone for months. She’s not going to like being in a cage.”

I walked over to the window and looked out into the parking lot so I wouldn’t laugh. I did like seeing this side of Marcus.

He could also be charming—and very persistent—when he put his mind to it and he quickly convinced Roma to keep Micah—in a cage—in her office. While he was talking he’d set his gloves and scarf down on the table and Micah had immediately stretched out on the scarf.

“She seems to like that,” Roma said. “Okay if we keep it?”

“I have a scarf at home you can use,” I said to Marcus, turning back around.

Marcus looked at Micah, who was kneading the soft wool with her paws. “All right,” he said.

Roma, with his help, got the cat settled in her office.

“She’s already got a home,” she said softly to me as we watched Marcus put his folded scarf inside the cage for the cat to lie down on.

“I know,” I said. “Marcus just doesn’t know it yet.”

20

I beat Maggie to Eric’s Place for lunch by about five minutes.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said as she shed her coat, hat and scarf and dropped into the chair opposite me. “We had a pile of last-minute Christmas orders at the shop this morning.”

She put a hand flat on her chest, closed her eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. When she opened her eyes again, Claire was coming from the other side of the restaurant with everything for her tea.

“Thank you,” Maggie said with a smile.

“Have you decided what you want?” Claire asked as she set a pot of hot water on the table.

I nodded. “I’ll have the Wednesday soup and the Wednesday bread.”

Claire nodded approvingly. “Good choice.”

“I’ll have the same,” Maggie said.

“It should just be a few minutes,” Claire said. She headed back to the kitchen

Maggie started making her tea. “What did I just order?” she asked.

“Chicken noodle soup and honey sunflower bread.”

She smiled. “Oh, good.”

Once the tea was ready she leaned back in her chair and folded her hands around her cup. “How was your morning?” she asked.

“Good,” I said. “Remember the little cat out at Wisteria Hill that Roma was worried about?”

Maggie nodded.

“Marcus caught her.”

“You’re kidding,” Maggie said, eyes widening. “I thought you were Dr. Dolittle.”

I shook my head as I took a sip of my coffee. “I guess I’m not the Cat Whisperer after all.” I tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Oh, and Roma got back this morning.”

Maggie added a tiny dab of honey to her cup and stirred. “If I’d known, I would have asked her to join us.”

“I did and she couldn’t,” I said. “So, how was your morning aside from the extra orders?”

Maggie picked up her cup again. “Good, actually. Oren brought over some preliminary drawings. He thinks we should move the cash register over to the other wall and then we could make the demo space a little longer.”

I tried to picture the inside of the co-op store. “That might work.”

Maggie ran a hand back through her hair. “Kath, do you think when we finally get the work done in the store that it might be possible to work out something between the library and the co-op?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose at me. “I don’t know exactly. Maybe a demonstration of a technique at the shop and then a talk at the library?”

I nodded. “That has potential,” I said.

Claire arrived then with our soup and bread. We ate in silence for a couple of minutes.

“You said Vincent Starr offered to come back,” Maggie said as she buttered a piece of the thick bread.

My mouth was full, so I just nodded.

“Maybe we could do something with him,” she said. “Rare books can be worth a lot of money, can’t they?”

“Depending on the book, yes,” I said.

She dipped the end of her bread in her soup. “Maybe we could get Starr back at the library to talk about what makes one book more valuable than another, and then he could do some kind of appraisal. You know, like Antiques Roadshow , at the co-op.” She’d dunked her bread two more times while she was talking and most of it was just a soggy lump in her bowl now.

“We could do that,” I agreed. I set my spoon down.

Maggie was talking too much and had barely touched her tea. Something was up. “Or you could just tell me what the heck is going on.”

She looked at me and sighed. “What’s going on is I’m not very good at lying.”

I nodded. “I noticed. And that’s not a bad thing, by the way.”

“It’s Brady. I know I said we were just friends, but we’re sort of turning into more than friends.”

“Okay,” I said carefully.

She looked at me a bit uncertainly. “You’re not surprised.”

I reached for a piece of bread from the basket between us. “I might have been just a little bit,” I said. “When I saw the two of you like this”—I held up my thumb and index finger pressed together—“last night, walking down here, not toward River Arts. It looked like more than two people who are just casual friends.”

She dropped her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really was going over to my studio. Brady sent me a text right after you walked out to get your coat.” She slumped against the back of her chair. “Oh, Kath, I don’t exactly know what happened. He’s not my type.”

“I don’t think you can say that anymore,” I said with a smile.

Her cheeks flooded with color.

“You never really said how the two of you got to be friends.”

“Brady and I started talking at the reception after the opening night of the New Horizons Theatre Festival in the fall. I guess that’s when we really started getting friendly.”

She smiled when she said his name. Just the way I used to do with Marcus. In the almost two years I’d known Maggie, I’d never seen her do that.