Kelly Sofie - Curiosity Thrilled The Cat

Eric came over with the coffeepot before she could answer. He was a much more serious person than his wife. Eric and Susan seemed to prove the old adage that opposites attract. “Hi, Kathleen. How are you?” he said, filling my cup.

“I’m good, Eric,” I said. “I owe you for the breakfast you sent to the hotel for Mr. Easton.”

Eric shook his head. He’d cut his salt-and-pepper hair very short and it suited him. “I never sent it. I called over there to get Easton’s room number—we do their continental breakfast, so I thought I’d send everything at once—and they said he’d gone out the night before and hadn’t come back. The next thing I heard, he was dead.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Your order will be out in a minute,” Eric said, heading for another table with the coffee.

So, after Easton had been at the library he hadn’t gone back to his hotel room. Did that mean he’d gone directly to the theater? And had he been alone? More questions to add to my list.

I turned my attention back to Maggie. “How do you know Will dyes his mustache?”

She took a sip of her tea. “Ruby saw him buying a box of L’Oréal Excellence number forty-six at Walgreens.”

“It could have been for his wife,” I said, adding cream to my coffee.

“Forty-six is Copper Red, and Will’s wife is a blonde,” Maggie said. “He dyes his mustache, Kath. It’s not even the same color as his hair. And he traded his old truck for that huge thing he drives now—long bed and extended cab. How Freudian is that?” She held out both hands. “Midlife crisis,” she said, lightly banging the table to make her point.

Our breakfast arrived then, which meant, thankfully, that we didn’t have to talk about Will Redfern’s midlife crisis—real or not.

After breakfast we walked down to the farmers’ market, one street up from the hotel. The market was actually open all week. Like the artist’s co-op that Maggie was part of, the farmers’ market was a cooperative—vegetables, fruit, a small bakery, a butcher and a tiny cheese shop. But on Saturday morning the market expanded out into the parking lot, weather permitting. Farmers sold directly to customers from the backs of their trucks. Maggie was looking for Swiss chard and new potatoes. I wanted carrots for salad and maybe muffins.

“I think I see potatoes over there,” Maggie said, pointing to the far end of the lot.

“Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.” I’d caught sight of what I hoped was rhubarb jam being sold from the tailgate of a dusty old Ford.

I was trying to decide between plain rhubarb jam and rhubarb-strawberry jam when someone said, “Good morning, Ms. Paulson,” by my left ear.

I turned and looked up. Way up. “Good morning, Detective Gordon,” I said.

He looked different in jeans and a gray T-shirt. He had a flat stomach and wider shoulders than I’d noticed before, and . . . What the heck was I thinking ?

“Looking for something for your sweet tooth?” he asked.

I flashed back to Andrew teasing me about my habit of putting jam on everything. Andrew, who’d married someone he’d only known two weeks. I wondered what Detective Gordon would think if he knew how many nights I’d sat in the dark in the living room and eaten jam right out of the jar.

I pulled my hand away from the bottles. “Umm, no.” I cleared my throat and caught sight of several dozen bunches of fat, red radishes, farther back in the truck bed. “I was looking for radishes.” Why had I said that?

“Oh, well, let me reach a bunch for you,” he said. He stretched over the side of the bed and handed me a clump of plump radishes, each about the size of a jawbreaker.

“Well, thank you,” I said.

“My pleasure.” I waited for him to walk away so I could put the radishes back, but he just stood there, smiling at me. “I think you can pay right there,” he said, pointing to the other side of the truck.

“Ah, great.” I handed over the money for the radishes, tucking them in my bag next to a bunch of carrots and some peas. Then I turned. “Have a nice day, Detective,” I said, with a not exactly genuine smile.

“You too, Ms. Paulson.”

I threaded my way across the parking lot. He didn’t follow me. I found Maggie, who’d found her potatoes.

“Did you get your jam?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I . . . I changed my mind.” I pulled the radishes out of my cloth bag. “Here,” I said to Maggie, thrusting the bunch at her.

“You bought radishes instead of jam?” she said. “Why? You know how they make you burp.”

“Just take them,” I said.

Maggie shrugged. “Okay.”

We walked around a while longer. We both bought a couple of loaves of crusty French bread from the bakery inside, and Mags had a long conversation with one of the vendors about the upcoming fall harvest of Honeycrisp apples, which, she assured me, I was going to love. We parted company on the sidewalk.

I headed up the hill with the delicious smell of bread coming from the bag over my shoulder. Mentally I kicked myself for not buying the jam. Andrew had a new life, and so did I.

There was no sign of the cats in the yard. I stood on the back stoop for a moment. No sign of them in Rebecca’s yard, either. It was awfully quiet. I went inside and put everything away, after tearing the end off one of the baguettes. The crisp brown crust left crumbs down the front of my shirt. While brushing them off, I found a smear of marmalade from breakfast on my shirt. I went upstairs to change and gathered the laundry. I put in the first load and went back up to the kitchen.

Hercules was waiting at the top of the stairs. I bent down and picked him up. “Hey, fur ball,” I said. “Where were you?” He leaned in and licked my chin. “What?” I laughed. I’d had marmalade on my shirt. Did I have omelet on my chin?

I carried the cat out to the porch, set him on the bench and sat down beside him, rubbing at my chin, just in case there were remnants of my breakfast stuck to it. I reached over to scratch the side of Herc’s face.

“What am I going to do about Oren?” I asked him. He rubbed his head against my hand. “You’re no help,” I said. He shook his head, jumped down and went over to the porch door, where he turned and looked back at me. “Are you going somewhere?”

Hercules scratched the bottom of the screen. “Hey!” I said. His green eyes firmly on my face, he lifted one paw and raked his claws across the door’s kick panel. I opened my mouth to snap at him again and it occurred to me that he was trying to tell me something. “What?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

He smacked the screen with his paw and it came unlatched. Herc almost tumbled out the open door. Shaking himself, he stalked out, flipping his tail at me.

It would have been a lot easier if his superpower was talking instead of walking through walls.

I rubbed the space between my eyes with the heel of my hand. I was afraid Oren could be tied up in Gregor Easton’s death somehow, and I wasn’t completely convinced I’d dropped off Detective Gordon’s suspect list. Plus the cats were acting strangely. Well, more strangely than walking through walls and becoming invisible.

I stepped into the kitchen just as the phone rang. I headed into the living room, thinking for the hundredth time that I probably should get a cordless phone.

“Hello, Kathleen. It’s Roma.”

“Hi, Roma,” I said.

“How’s your shoulder?”

I hadn’t thought much about my shoulder since breakfast. I rotated it slowly forward and backward. It was stiff and a bit sore, but otherwise okay. “A lot better,” I said. “I have an ugly bruise, but nothing’s broken.”

“Glad to hear it,” Roma said. “I realize it’s short notice, but are you available to come out to Wisteria Hill with me this afternoon? My helper had to cancel.”