Лори Касс - Wrong Side Of The Paw

He ate fast enough to give himself indigestion, licked his nonexistent lips a few times, washed his whiskers, bumped my shin, then jumped onto the boat’s dashboard and curled up for a nice long look at the seagulls.

“You realize that you’ll never catch one, right?” I asked.

“Mrr,” he said confidently.

I wanted to tell him how wrong he was, but I also didn’t want to burst his little kitty bubble, so I kissed the top of his head and drove to Fat Boys Pizza to pick up our dinner order. Half a veggie sub for me (“Yes, Mom, I’m eating my vegetables”), half an Italian sub for Leese, and a full order of cheesy potato wedges for us to split.

The food was still mostly warm by the time I pulled into Leese’s, so we dove right into our meal. This time, we were almost done eating when we heard the slam of a car door.

Leese, who’d been in the act of trying to convince me to eat the last three potato wedges, instead grabbed two of them. “To give me strength,” she said.

Up the stairs came the brassy hair of Carmen. “Oh, good, you’re here, too, Minnie. You can help with this.” She dropped a box on the kitchen table. “Oof, this is heavy! But the police want me to go through everything. They want to know about any of Dale’s clients, about anyone who might have held a grudge against him.” She pulled out a chair and sat. “There are three more boxes in the car. I’ll start on this one while you go get the others.”

I pushed the last potato wedge over to Leese. “You might need this one, too.”

She snorted out a laugh. “I say we split it.”

Half an hour later, piles of thick folders were strewn across Leese’s kitchen. On the table, on the chairs, on the half wall that marked the stairway, on the counters, even on the microwave. An hour after that, every folder was sorted into alphabetical order and checked to confirm that the contents matched the labels.

Leese stared at the largest set of piles. “Dad had this many lawsuits against him? I knew he had a few, but . . .” She shook her head, muttering something that sounded a lot like, “Could have used more potato wedges.”

“Don’t be silly.” Carmen, her fingers and wrists glittering with jewelry, waved at the reams of paper dismissively. “Why don’t you be a good girl and make me a margarita?”

“Because I don’t have tequila, limes, or Cointreau,” Leese said shortly.

“White wine, then.”

After a long pause, during which I seriously considered making up a fast excuse and running for my car before the family tension became any tighter, Leese got to her feet. “Minnie, would you like anything?”

Um. “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” I said, which was how I ended up drinking a Soft Parade from Short’s Brewing out of a bottle.

Carmen sipped her wine and murmured, “I suppose it’ll be better when it warms up.” Then she said, “I thought you knew almost all of these lawsuits were settled out of court.”

“How would I have known that, exactly?” Leese asked. “I’ve been downstate since I graduated from high school. And it’s not like Dad ever talked to me about his business.”

“And whose fault was that?” Carmen asked. “All you had to do was pick up the phone.”

Leese glowered. “Phones work both ways.”

This was going nowhere in a hurry. “So,” I said, pushing at the tallest pile, “none of these ever went to court?”

Carmen huffed, but said, “That’s right. Dale was always trying to do his best for his customers”—I could feel Leese starting to say something, so I gave her a small kick in the shins— “but you just can’t satisfy some people, no matter how hard you try.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Leese muttered.

“Right,” I said quickly. “It’s too bad, but there are a lot of unhappy people in the world. So all these cases were settled amicably?”

Carmen looked at the stacks of folders. “Well, I don’t know about amicably. They were settled, though, and that’s the important thing.”

I pointed at the remaining piles. “And these are the cases that went to court.”

Carmen flipped through the papers. “Some people, you know? Projects always start out so much fun, and then before you know it, they’re complaining about something silly. I mean, who would think that a little problem with a septic system would make someone sue you?”

“If that ‘little problem’ was raw sewage backing up into my bathtub—” Leese began, but I cut her off.

“How about we sort these a little further?” I suggested. “Recent cases and old cases maybe.”

Carmen shot Leese a glance, but followed my suggestion. Going with the debatable assumption that three years was enough time for home construction wounds to heal, I put aside any paperwork older than that.

I looked at the remaining pile. It was still more formidable than I’d hoped. Now what?

“Cases he lost and cases he won,” Leese said. “See where that gets us.”

Where it got us was two piles, one tall and one not. “These were so unfair,” Carmen said, tipping her refilled wineglass at the higher stack. “The judge wouldn’t listen to Dale, no matter what he said. That case there? That one cost me a trip to Italy.”

“And these?” I pointed at the far shorter stack.

Carmen smiled. “Let’s just say they didn’t end well for the homeowners.” She took a sip of wine and said, “We went to Italy after all, just a little later than I’d hoped.”

I caught Leese’s eye roll, but thankfully Carmen didn’t. Leese pulled the papers toward her and started to flip through them. “Two cases, looks like,” she said. “One was Daphne Raab and the other was Gail and Ray Boggs.”

“Summer people.” Carmen waved the names away. “Well, not the Raab woman, but the Boggses were classic summer people.”

“So if they’re not from here, they deserve to be cheated?” Leese asked.

“Who’s talking about cheating?” Carmen put down her glass. “The judge herself said they didn’t have a solid case. Dale didn’t do anything wrong.”

Leese drew in a breath, but I jumped in fast. “These are definitely names to give to the police, I’d say.”

For the first time in what felt like years, Carmen and Leese agreed on something.

“Excellent,” I said. “Leese, will you have time tomorrow to look these two over? See if you can find anything that looks, I don’t know, weird?”

Leese squared up the papers. “Sure,” she said evenly. “I lost three more clients today, so I don’t have much else to do.”

“Oh, honey.” Carmen reached over the table, jewelry tinkling, and put her hands over Leese’s. “I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could do.”

“Thanks.” Leese withdrew one of her large hands and patted her stepmother’s far smaller ones. “There’s not, but thanks anyway.” She half smiled. “On the plus side, a Bob Blake called me today. He said he has a complicated estate and lots of friends he’s willing to recommend me to if I do a decent job.”

“Well, there you go.” Carmen smiled. “This will all work out, I can just feel it.”

I was happy she felt so positive because, as I stared at the stacks and stacks of folders, I was getting the creepy crawly feeling that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.

Chapter 9

The next day, I pulled out my cell phone the instant I cleared the library’s front door at lunchtime. Outside the wind was up and was bringing in a scattering of low, dark clouds. My personal opinion, substantiated by absolutely nothing except wishful thinking, was that it wouldn’t rain until after I got back to the library, so I started pushing buttons.

“What?” Kristen snarled.