Лори Касс - Wrong Side Of The Paw

Praise for the National Bestselling

Bookmobile Cat Mysteries

“With humor and panache, Cass delivers an intriguing mystery and interesting characters.”

— Bristol Herald Courier (VA)

“Almost impossible to put down . . . the story is filled with humor and warmth.”

—MyShelf.com

“[With] Eddie’s adorableness, penchant to try to get more snacks, and Minnie’s determination to solve the crime, this duo will win over even those that don’t like cats.”

—Cozy Mystery Book Reviews

“A pleasant read. . . . [Minnie is] a spunky investigator.”

—Gumshoe

“A fast-paced page-turner that had me guessing until the last dramatic scenes.”

—Melissa’s Mochas, Mysteries & Meows

“Reading Laura Cass’s cozies feels like sharing a bottle of wine with an adventurous friend as she regales you with the story of her latest escapade.”

—The Cuddlywumps Cat Chronicles

Also by Laurie Cass

Lending a Paw

Tailing a Tabby

Borrowed Crime

Pouncing on Murder

Cat with a Clue

BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

Published by Berkley

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2017 by Janet Koch

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

BERKLEY is a registered trademark and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the B colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Ebook ISBN: 9780698405516

First Edition: August 2017

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

Contents

Praise for the National Bestselling Bookmobile Cat Mysteries

Also by Laurie Cass

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 1

There are many tasks that I find difficult. Braiding my annoyingly curly hair, for starters. Differentiating equations and putting down a good book before one in the morning are also beyond my capabilities. Another thing I’ve found hard in each of my thirty-four years? Choosing a favorite season.

Summer is easy to enjoy with its warm freedoms, but winter offers skiing and ice skating and the sheer beauty of a world transformed by a fleecy blanket of white. And though spring is exciting with its daily growth spurts, right in front of me was a glorious hillside in its early autumn colors of green with sprinklings of red and orange and yellow, a scene so stunningly beautiful it was hard to look away.

“Fall it is,” I murmured to myself.

I was standing at the bookmobile’s back door, which was wide open to let the unseasonably warm air of late September waft around the thousands of books, the hundreds of CDs and DVDs, the jigsaw puzzles, my part-time clerk, myself, and Eddie, the bookmobile cat.

“Mrr,” Eddie said. On his current favorite perch, the driver’s seat headrest, he stretched and yawned, showing us the roof of his mouth, which was the second least attractive part of him. Then he settled down again, rearranging himself into what looked like the exact same position.

Julia, who was sitting on the carpeted step under the bookshelves that served as both seating and a way to reach the top shelves, looked up from the book she was reading. “What does he want now?”

One of the many reasons I’d hired the sixtyish Julia Beaton was because of her tacit agreement to pretend that Eddie was actually trying to communicate with us. Julia had many other wonderful qualities, among them the gift of empathy, which was a huge plus for a bookmobile clerk, and an uncanny ability to understand people’s motivations.

Those two traits had undoubtedly contributed to her success as a Tony Award–winning actress, but when the leading roles started to dry up, she’d retired from the stage and she and her husband moved to her hometown of Chilson, a small tourist town in northwest lower Michigan, which was where I now lived and worked—and there wasn’t anywhere on earth I’d rather be.

Though I hadn’t grown up in Chilson, I’d had the good fortune to spend many youthful summers there with my long-widowed aunt Frances, who ran a boardinghouse in the summer and taught woodworking during the school year. It hadn’t taken me long to fall in love with the region, a land of forested hills and lakes of all sizes, and I soon loved the town, too.

Which was why, not long after I’d earned a master’s degree in library and information sciences, when I found a posting for the assistant director position at the Chilson District Library, I spent half the night and all the next day working on a résumé and cover letter. I’d sent the packet off, crossing my fingers, and after a grueling interview and a couple of nail-biting weeks, I’d been ecstatic to be hired.

Since then, not all had been what anyone might call rosy, but the bookmobile program I’d proposed had become a reality a little over a year ago, and in spite of sporadic funding problems, library director issues, and the occasional need to appear in front of the library board to answer pointed questions, I was a very happy camper.

Eddie, on the other hand, did not look like a contented cat. Instead of the relaxed body language he’d been exhibiting moments earlier, he was now sitting up, twitching his tail, and staring at me with a look with which I was intimately familiar.

“What he wants,” I said, “is a treat.”

“He had treats at the last stop,” Julia pointed out.

“Which is why he thinks he deserves a treat at this one, too.”

“If he has treats at every stop,” she said, “he’s going to get as big as a house.”

I’d first met Eddie a year and a half earlier. In a cemetery. Which sounds weird, and probably was, but Chilson’s cemetery had an amazing two-lake view. Janay Lake to the south, and to the west, the long blue line that was the massive Lake Michigan.

The day I’d met Eddie had been another unseasonably warm day, and I’d skipped out on the spring cleaning chores I should have been doing and gone for a long walk up to the cemetery. I’d taken advantage of a bench placed next to the gravestone of an Alonzo Tillotson (born 1847, died 1926) and had been startled by the appearance of an insistent black-and-gray tabby cat.

In spite of my commands for him to go home, he’d followed me back to my place. By the time I’d cleaned him up, whereupon I found that he was a black-and-white cat, I’d fallen in love. Even still, I’d dutifully run a notice in the local newspaper’s lost and found column and had been relieved when no one called.