Лори Касс - Wrong Side Of The Paw

The door was opened by a dark-skinned man who looked to be in his mid-forties. He had a coffee mug in one hand and a pile of papers in the other. “Hello,” he said in a polite, but cautious, tone.

I smiled disarmingly. “Morning. I was looking for Gail and Ray Boggs, but they don’t seem to be home. Love your ghosts, by the way.” I nodded toward the front lawn, where a group of five gauzy figures stood around one of the largest pumpkins I’d ever seen. Each ghost held a different sketch of a plan for carving their pumpkin and they were clearly arguing about whose design would win.

The guy grinned. “Reality becomes art. My wife, myself, and our three kids all wanted to do something different with the pumpkin we grew last summer in the backyard, so this is what we settled on.”

I laughed. “Compromise can be funny.”

“Well, the zombie versus ghost discussion was a little loud, but we worked it out,” he said, smiling.

“It looks great,” I said, then before he could start wondering about the stranger on his doorstep, I told him my name, adding, “I’m from Chilson, where Gail and Ray had a place up until a couple of months ago. I thought I’d stop by to see them.”

“Chilson?” he asked. “You live there?”

“Fifty-two weeks a year. I’m assistant director for the library.”

“No kidding. There’s this restaurant I saw on one of those cooking shows a while back. Do you know it?”

I beamed. “Three Seasons. My friend Kristen owns it.”

“That’s the place,” he said, nodding. “So you’d recommend eating there?”

“If you like high-quality local ingredients cooked by a perfectionist, presented by people who obsess about the size of the garnishing sprigs, and served by staff who know how often the parsley was weeded, then absolutely you should eat there.”

Laughing, the guy introduced himself as Tim Soane. “We’ll have to get up there next summer. But if you’re looking for Gail and Ray, you’re out of luck. They headed down to Florida last Friday.”

“Oh.” I glanced at the vacant-looking house. “They weren’t here very long.”

Tim shook his head. “Few weeks. Seems that’s the way those two operate. A month at this place, a month in Florida, a month in one of their other places. If they get bored or don’t like the weather forecast, they head out.”

I blinked. “How many places do they have?”

“Depends on the day.” He smiled briefly. “They build and buy and sell at the drop of a hat. From what Gail said, it ranges anywhere from three to six. Some of them are time-share condos, so you might count those differently.”

I had a hard enough time moving twice a year. I couldn’t imagine the logistical difficulties of having multiple homes and having to fill them with multiple sets of belongings. I’d constantly be wanting something in another house. “Sounds like a complicated way to live,” I said.

“Well, when you win one of the biggest lotteries in the history of lotteries, you can afford complications.”

My eyes bugged out, then I remembered that, though I hadn’t specifically said I was a friend of the Boggses’, I’d certainly implied so and brought my eyeballs under control. “Well,” I said, “thanks for your time. If I get to Florida this winter, I’ll try to track them down there.”

“Good luck with that.” Tim laughed. “By that time they’ll probably have moved on to Hawaii.”

I nodded, thanked him again, and headed back to my car.

• • •

“What do you think?” I asked.

Eddie, sitting next to his food bowl, was staring at the kitchen counter and not paying any attention to me.

“Hey.” I snapped my fingers. “Over here. There is nothing on that counter of any interest to you.” This was a blatant lie, as he clearly was interested in the empty glass dishes that had held leftovers I’d scrounged out of the refrigerator for dinner, but he knew full well he wasn’t allowed on the counter, so I stood by my statement.

I tapped my fingertips on the round oak kitchen table and he turned his head. “Right. Now that I have your complete and undivided attention, I have some things to discuss with you.”

“Mrr.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble for anything.” As far as I knew. There was always a possibility that he’d done something horrible that hadn’t yet entered my awareness, but since I was currently in blissful ignorance of any particular Eddie transgression, he had no reason to worry about punishment. Not that he would take punishment as a recommendation to modify behavior. His response would be more along the lines of a sullen teenager’s shrug and a muttered “Whatever.”

Eddie rotated his head, owl-like, to look at me.

“Right,” I said. “Things to discuss. Sorry to say, they’re not about you. Yes, the world revolves around cats in general and you specifically, as it should, but in this particular case I’d like you to just listen.”

My fuzzy feline friend rotated himself a hundred and eighty degrees and settled his unblinking gaze upon me.

“Can you stop that?” I asked. “Please? When you look at me like that, I always feel like you’re trying to tell me something and I’m too stupid to understand.”

His stare hardened. “Mrr!” he yelled, his whole body twitching with the effort.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice to know that you think I’m stupid. Anyway, I wanted to discuss my recent findings about people who had dealings with Dale Lacombe.”

Until Eddie, I’d never known how talking out loud to a four-legged companion could help straighten out your thoughts. It helped that Eddie seemed to pay attention to what I was saying and inserted the occasional contribution, but I was under no illusions that he actually understood the one-sided conversations. He was just a cat, after all. A lovable and personality-laden dork of a cat, but there was no way that any cat’s brain power could match that of a human.

“Mrr,” Eddie said agreeably.

“Right.” I nodded. “So here’s the thing. Dale Lacombe was a jerk of the first order and it was a surprise to basically no one except his wife that he wound up murdered by person or persons unknown.”

The phrase, one I’d heard on television dramas and seen in print numerous times, rang oddly in my ears.

“You know,” I said, frowning, “why am I working on the assumption that it was one person who killed Dale and is trying to frame Leese? Why couldn’t it be two people? A whole host of people, like the Orient Express ?” Drumming my fingers on the table, I considered, then rejected the idea.

“Nope. Too complicated, especially for a small town. Someone would have talked or confessed or acted weird enough that eyebrows would have gone up and next thing you know it would have been on Facebook or tweeted all over the place.”

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

“Glad you agree.” I got up and opened the cupboard door that housed his treats. “But let’s keep in mind that two people might have had a small conspiracy going. I know, I know, there’s that proverb that two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead. Still, it’s a possibility.”

Eddie swiped a paw at the air and made a chirpy sort of noise in the back of his throat.

“Sorry.” I opened the canister of treats and tossed one onto the floor. “We’re going to skip the remote possibility that Dale’s death was an accident. If it was, why bother moving the body to Leese’s truck? If it had been an accident and someone had been afraid of being found guilty of negligence or something, it would have been far easier to drop the body in a lake.”

By this time, the treat had long since disappeared down Eddie’s throat, and the only sign that a treat had ever existed was a wet spot on the floor in the shape of a cat tongue.