Лори Касс - Pouncing On Murder

“You’re a male,” I said. “You tell me: Why are guys convinced to help a friend with a construction project at the mere mention of pizza and beer, but all they can think of when faced with a friend’s cleaning project is to leave as quickly as possible?”

Eddie turned his back to me and didn’t say a thing.

Men.

Chapter 7

“Why, why did I ever try to do this?” I grabbed two fistfuls of my hair, a move I would regret almost instantly for what it would do to what might be loosely called a hairstyle, and I pulled tight enough to thin my vision to slits. “Why?”

Once again, I looked at the computer screen. Sadly, the flyer design I’d come up with still looked downright awful, even with my skewed eyesight.

I released my hair, and my vision went back to normal. Flopping back against my chair, I stared at the dragonless ceiling and tried to think. The flyer had to be to the printer absolutely no later than Monday noon. If today was Wednesday, that meant . . . I counted on my fingers . . . there were three business days in which to get this done.

“Three days,” I said to the computer in the deepest, most threatening tone I could summon. The computer ignored me and I tried not to consider its continued display of my absolutely awful flyer design as a taunt.

At that point, I realized I’d been ignoring my own hunger pangs.

I got up, grabbed my coat, wallet, and cell phone, and headed out. Everything would look better after a walk and some lunch. And even if it didn’t look better, at least I would get outside for a little bit and get some food in my stomach, a win-win situation if there ever was one.

• • •

Half an hour later, my tummy was happily full with an Italian sub and chips from Fat Boys Pizza, but I still didn’t have any idea how to figure out if Seth Wartella had ever set foot in northern Michigan, I still couldn’t think of any reason why someone would want to kill both Henry and Adam, and I still hadn’t a clue of how to get a designed flyer.

“Hello, Minnie.”

I looked up from my contemplation of the sidewalk to see Pam Fazio. Her short black hair was as smooth as ever, and even though she had to be in her mid-fifties, not a single wrinkle showed on her face. She was standing just outside the door of her antique shop, Older Than Dirt, wearing a cheerful dress in a flower pattern topped with a shawl, and smiling at me with an odd expression.

“Do I have tomato sauce on my face?” I rubbed the corners of my mouth, just to be sure.

“No, it just that’s the third time I said hello,” she said. “You seem a million miles away.”

Henry’s house was a little more than ten miles southeast of Chilson, actually, but I didn’t make the clarification. “Just thinking,” I said.

“Nice footwear.” Pam nodded at my shoes.

I turned them this way and that, displaying each foot proudly. “Yes, indeedy, thank you very much.” Last winter I’d purchased the high-topped black lace-up shoes from Pam and they were my favorite footwear of all time. Whenever I put them on I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder but without the locusts and the scarlet fever and the backbreaking labor.

“What are you thinking so hard about that you didn’t hear me calling?” she asked.

Most of it wouldn’t be appropriate to tell her, but there was one thing I could share. “I’ve just come to the conclusion that I am, without a doubt, the worst designer of a book fair flyer in the history of the world.”

Pam laughed. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

I eyed her. “Hang on.” I’d e-mailed myself a copy of the flyer so I could look at it while I ate. I’d taken one look and decided it would give me indigestion, but it was still on my phone. I opened the image and showed it to her.

She took the phone from my hand, peered close, and snorted with laughter.

“Gee,” I said dryly, “thanks for the support.”

She grinned. “If you want, I could try my hand at a little redesigning.” She looked at the image, turning it this way and that. “When do you need it?”

“Monday noon.” I winced, preparing myself for her reaction.

“No problem. I’ll send you something Monday morning.”

It sounded good, but then so had Amanda’s offer. “Are you sure you want to do this? I don’t want to take up a lot of your time. You have a store to run.” Because I could always make a flyer of text on brightly colored paper. It was what the library had always done before and no one would think twice about it; I’d just hoped for something outstanding for our first-ever book fair.

Pam made a rude noise in the back of her throat. “It’s April. I was warned about the April lull up here, but I didn’t know I was going to get so bored. I’ll be glad for the chance to do something other than dust all my merchandise. Again.”

I thanked her and, as I walked back to the library, I wondered what talents and skills might be hidden inside the people I thought I knew. Then I wondered if talents and skills might be hidden inside cats. Eddie, for one.

“Something funny?” Cookie Tom was in front of his bakery, cleaning the windows and looking at me.

I tucked away my Eddie-induced laughter. “Almost everything,” I said, and headed back to the library.

The next day, I spent my lunch hour deep in the bowels of the Internet, chasing down any wisps of information about Seth Wartella. When I’d come up completely dry for anything since his incarceration, I hunted down what I could find for Henry and Adam and added everything I found to a spreadsheet.

Once the spreadsheet was as full as I could make it, I categorized every item at least two different ways, then sorted and resorted the data in an effort to jiggle useful thoughts out of my brain.

Sadly nothing jiggled loose by the end of my lunchtime, but when five o’clock came, I was officially off the library’s clock. I closed my eyes and ears to the work-related things I could be doing and plunged even deeper into the two separate worlds of Henry and Adam, trying to find something that might connect them.

My rumbling stomach chased me out of my office, but I continued thinking about the problem the entire evening, was still thinking about it as I went to sleep, thought about it first thing when I woke up to another chilly morning, and then as I walked into Cookie Tom’s to get a dozen doughnuts for the staff. It was a Friday, after all, and I’d skipped breakfast because I couldn’t face eating a bowl of cold cereal when the houseboat’s interior temperature was only fifty-one degrees.

Eddie, of course, had no such compunctions and stared at me gravely until I poured him a tiny bowl of milk to replace the leftovers that he usually got from the bottom of my bowl.

The smell of baked goods had me salivating the second I walked into Cookie Tom’s. “Morning, Minnie,” Tom said cheerfully. “What do you need today?”

It was more a question of want than need, but I wasn’t going to enter into that kind of debate with the guy who gave me a deal on cookies for the bookmobile. And, in summer, sold them to me from the back door, letting me avoid the long lines.

“Box of doughnuts,” I said. “A dozen, any kind you’d like.”

He surveyed the contents of his glass cases. “Apple fritters, custard-filled long johns, glazed doughnuts, cinnamon twists?”

There was no way I was going to be able to choose. “Let’s do an assortment.”

“No problem.” He unfolded a white cardboard bakery box and got to work, whistling as he went.

I watched him place the bakery yummies in the box, wondering how on earth he could run a bakery and stay so skinny. If it had been me, I’d have put on so many pounds that—

“Good morning, Ms. Hamilton.”