Kelly Sofie - Curiosity Thrilled The Cat

“I’m going to Oren’s. You can’t come. Get out,” I said. I knew he wasn’t going to move. I tipped the bag forward, very carefully, intending to tip him out. He lay down and snagged the front mesh panel of the bag with his claws. I gave it a small shake. It didn’t work.

I bent down. “Fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Stay in the bag. I’ll take something else.”

I put the brownies in a cloth grocery bag, grabbed my keys and went out into the porch for my sneakers. Hercules came through the door behind me. Literally through the door. I rubbed the side of my head with the heel of my hand.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cat’s ears twitch. I could put him back in the kitchen, but all he’d do was walk through the door again. It seemed that Owen and Hercules were determined to help me play detective, each in their own way. There was no way to make Herc stay in the house. And he knew it.

But I wasn’t going to fold right away. I put on one shoe, slowly tied the laces and then did the same with the other shoe. Hercules didn’t look at me. I didn’t look at him. I straightened and brushed off my pants. “All right, you can come,” I said. “Get in the bag.”

This time he waited for me to open the kitchen door. Then he climbed in the messenger bag, lay down and looked at me, all innocent green eyes.

“Don’t be smug,” I said, closing the top zipper. I looked at him through the mesh. “And please be quiet.”

I swung the bag over my shoulder, locked up and started up the hill. The closer I got to Oren’s house the more foolish the idea of going to see him began to seem. Hercules scratched at the top of the bag just as Oren’s house came in sight.

“Stop it,” I hissed. That just made him dig harder at the nylon fabric.

I didn’t know why I thought the cat would listen to me. He was a cat, not a dog that had been to obedience school, or a trained monkey in the circus. He was an independent, stubborn cat. Who was about to destroy my favorite bag.

I opened the zipper a couple of inches. Hercules immediately stuck a paw out. “No, no, no! Don’t do that,” I said.

He raked the inside of the bag with his other front paw. Great. Someone was going to drive by and see me talking to my purse at nine o’clock on a Saturday night in front of Oren’s house.

“Fine,” I whispered. “You can have a look around, but then you go back in the bag because we’re going home. And I’m not drinking any more of Ruby’s wine. It puts the ‘stupid’ in ‘stupid ideas.’”

I pulled the zipper open a bit more. I knew mice and cockroaches could squeeze through incredibly small spaces. So can cats, I discovered. Hercules pushed through the small opening, coming out of the bag like water pouring to the ground. He took off across Oren’s yard, disappearing into the darkness.

Crap on toast!

I scrambled across Oren’s lawn and tripped over the bottom step of the verandah. I caught a glimpse of fur heading around the side of the porch. I felt for the railing and followed, hoping I was chasing Herc and not a nosy raccoon or a sidetracked skunk.

“Hercules,” I called in a stage whisper, knowing I was wasting my breath.

Oren’s house was a renovated farmhouse, like mine, with the same steeply pitched roof and bay window. His house had an addition on one side, set back from the front of the main house, with a covered verandah that ran along part of the main house, down the side and all the way across the front of the extension. Hercules paused by the wooden screen door that led into the extension.

“C’mon, puss,” I called. He looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes huge and unblinking. Then he walked through the door and disappeared.

I sagged against the railing and said a word that wellbred librarians didn’t generally say. Now what was I going to do? If Oren came home before Hercules came out, I was, to put it crassly, screwed. There was no way I could explain to Oren how Hercules had gotten into his house. There was no logical, reasonable explanation.

Not that I had a logical, reasonable explanation for why I was at Oren’s house in the first place. Or why I’d brought my cat along. I was going to come off as very peculiar at best, and deranged at worst.

I looked around. No people. No cars. No lights. So far it looked like I hadn’t been seen. I was very grateful that Oren didn’t have motion-sensor lights.

I dropped to my knees by the door. My head hurt, my shoulder ached and Violet’s blueberry tart was rolling in my stomach like the English Channel ferry in a rainstorm.

I called the cat again. Of course he didn’t come. I lifted the strap of my bag over my shoulder and set the bag next to the railing. There was nothing to do but wait and cross my fingers that things didn’t get any worse. I leaned back against the railing, knees pulled up to my chest, and watched the white wooden screen door.

I thought about Gregor Easton. What did I know so far? Easton had been in my library after hours, meeting someone who’d used my name to lure him there. Someone who had a key or access to a key. He’d had a gash on the side of his head. There was blood at the library. Easton had probably been hurt there, but was it deliberate or accidental?

Oren knew Easton. Oren hadn’t been at the Stratton the morning I’d found the body and hadn’t been at meat loaf night the night before. The most obvious inference was that Oren had something to do with Easton’s death.

Tying Oren to Easton’s death was the part that didn’t work for me. I thought about the beautiful sunburst Oren had created. So much care had gone into making that, and so much caring into the idea to create it in the first place.

It didn’t matter how things looked. I knew how they felt—to me.

Just then I felt something else, the same thickening of the air I’d noticed at the library just before Hercules had come out of the storage area. I leaned forward, eyes on the bottom panel of the door. The screen and the thick wooden door behind it seemed to ripple and go out of focus just a little. I held my breath, hoping, hoping it was the cat and not an earthquake or some part of my brain short-circuiting.

One moment the surface of the door seemed almost fluid and the next there was Hercules. He walked across the verandah and climbed onto my lap. “Bad, bad kitty,” I said. I might have been more believable if I hadn’t had both arms wrapped around him.

“You have to stop doing that,” I said. “What if Oren had come home? What if Oren had been in there? What if he had some huge, slobbery, pointy-toothed attack dog in there?”

Herc lifted his head and fixed his green eyes on me.

“Okay, I’m exaggerating a little,” I said. “But there could have been a dog in there who thought it would be fun to play a game of catch with you as the ball.”

He put a paw on my wrist and butted my hand with his head.

“So, what did you take this time?” I asked, holding out my hand, palm up. He spat out a crumpled ball of paper, damp with cat spit. Gingerly I pulled the edges apart and flattened the paper against my leg.

It seemed to be the top half of something. The page was torn along one short edge. I held the sheet up close to my face, trying to read what was on the paper. It didn’t make any sense. Someone had drawn a row of blocks—actually they looked more like little teeth. There seemed to be dots on some of the teeth and the dots were numbered, but some had more numbers than others.

There was another row of little boxes under the first with dots and numbers in a different pattern.

“What the heck is this?” I asked the cat. “Is it some kind of plan for something?”

Of all the things that were probably inside Oren’s house, why had Hercules brought me this? It didn’t look like any building plan I’d ever seen. In the dim light the handwriting looked like Oren’s, but I couldn’t be sure. “I don’t get it.” The cat’s response was to climb down and sniff around the verandah.