Лори Касс - Pouncing On Murder

I’d passed through a line of trees and was on the edge of a wide-open field. Neva’s garden, I supposed, but there was no sign of my runaway cat. I looked around and down, trying to find his kitty footprints.

“Ha!” I’d spotted the Eddie trail. It headed south, straight toward a trio of greenhouses. “I’ll get you, my pretty.” Jogging again, I followed the tracks, which, Eddie-like, didn’t go in a straight line, but zigged and zagged. “Cat, if you give me motion sickness,” I panted, “you’re not getting treats for hours, do you hear me, hours, and—”

I stopped running and talking, because off in distance I’d heard a voice. A female voice. An elderly female voice.

Neva.

From a standstill, I leaped into a flat-out run. Through the far half of the garden, past two greenhouses, and around the end of the third, all the while following Eddie’s tracks, all the while hoping that Neva didn’t have her gun, that she wasn’t . . . that she wasn’t . . .

I came around the corner of the last greenhouse and skidded to a stop. Neva was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with Eddie on her lap, petting him and talking to him as if she’d known him for years.

“You are a shedder, aren’t you, my dear?” She shook her hand free of Eddie hair and I watched it twist away in the breeze. “But you’re well groomed and wherever you came from, I’m sure someone is looking for you.”

“Um,” I said. “I’m afraid he’s mine.”

Neva looked up and squinted at me. “I know you. No, don’t say, I’ll remember.” She continued to pet Eddie as she squinted. “Ha! I got it. You were looking at my dad’s boat. Scared you off but good, didn’t I?” She grinned, and once again I wondered about her mental stability.

“That’s right,” I said. “But this time I came in the Chilson Library’s bookmobile.”

Neva’s grin dropped away and I tensed. Maybe she had a thing against libraries. Or bookmobiles. Or librarians. Or Chilson. Maybe that gun was behind her and she was going to pull it out and—

The elderly woman placed Eddie on the grass and sprang to her feet twice as fast as I could have managed. She charged toward me, and I was stuck in place so tight that I might have been glued. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I’d have to defend myself as best I could and—

Neva was holding out her hand. “I have to apologize,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do.” She clasped my hand between hers and pumped up and down. “There was no excuse for going after you like that. I’d tell you about how that afternoon I’d had to write a big fat check to my accountant and how that made me cranky as all get-out, but that doesn’t excuse me, so I apologize.”

“Apology accepted,” I said, starting to smile. I was also starting to see why the sheriff’s office hadn’t considered Neva a threat.

“Come on in.” She released my hand and started striding to her house. “I have to show you something. Better grab that cat of yours.” Neva opened the back door and ushered Eddie and me inside. “Here you go. What do you say about a drink? Tea? Water? Something stronger?” She winked.

I opted for water and looked around the kitchen as she opened the door of a Hoosier cabinet and took out two jelly jars. One of the bookmobile folks had said that Neva lived in her parents’ house, and I was suddenly sure it had been her grandparents’ house, too. Either that or no owner had ever changed a thing since the day the house was hatched.

There was a large porcelain sink underneath a set of two double-hung windows. There were wooden countertops. Open shelves and the Hoosier cabinet instead of cabinets. A single ceiling light fixture. Plaster walls that showed trowel marks. Pegs next to the back door that held jackets. A round wooden table so scarred I could hardly tell what kind of wood it had been made from.

The entire room was squeaky clean and smelled of sunshine and outdoors. It also reminded of my aunt’s boardinghouse kitchen, which tempted me to put Neva on the side of Good.

“Have a seat,” she said, putting the glasses on the table and pulling out a chair. “Him, too,” she added, nodding at Eddie.

My show-off cat jumped up and sat in the middle of the chair’s seat, looking at Neva as if she might give him a treat.

“You,” she said, “are a cat among cats, but I do not feed pets at the table.”

He inched forward so his chin was almost on the edge of the said surface.

Neva laughed and fuzzed up the fur on his head. “Like I said, no treats at the table. You’ll get yours later, mister.” She looked over at me. “What did you say his name was?”

I introduced Eddie and myself and said I already knew her name.

“Just bet you do.” She chuckled. “Probably talked to Kit Richardson, didn’t you, after that day? She’s a good sheriff, that girl.”

I’d never thought of the tough, take-no-prisoners sheriff in terms of gender, let alone a term like “girl,” but I gave a vague nod.

“Anyway,” Neva said, “I need to tell you about my dad’s boat. It was his dad’s before him and when Granddad got too old to take it out, it sat in the barn for years. Dad wouldn’t dream of working on Granddad’s boat without permission, so it sat and sat.” She sighed.

“That’s not good for a wooden boat, is it?”

“True words.” She nodded. “Granddad lived till he was ninety-three, and Dad didn’t want to start on the boat right after he died, if you see what I mean, and then Dad got sick.” She petted Eddie absently. “Then it was Mom’s boat and then it was mine, and I don’t have the know-how to fix it up or the money to pay someone else to do it for me.”

Eddie started purring and she kept petting. “But I can’t let it go,” she said. “Not that boat. Not now, not ever.” Her voice was soft, but determined, and I believed every word.

Neva gave Eddie one last pet. “I should get a cat,” she murmured. “Been too long.”

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

The three of us chatted a little while longer, and then Eddie and I returned to the bookmobile.

I wanted to like Neva, wanted to very much. Okay, I did like her. But I still wondered about her temper. It could obviously run high, and if Henry had stoked it high enough, could she have been angry enough to kill him if she thought he was after her father’s boat?

“What do you think, pal?” I asked.

But for once, Eddie didn’t have a single thing to say.

• • •

“Sorry about bugging you,” I said, recording my third voice mail for Bob, Gordon’s cousin, “but I’m still trying to find out the weekend in April that Cole Duvall was up here.” I paused, then said, “It’s very important, and I need to find out as soon as possible.”

I tried to think of something to say that might get him to call back quickly but couldn’t come up with anything other than shrieking at him like a harridan. And though that might move him to action, it likely wouldn’t be the action I wanted, so I just said thanks and hung up my cell phone.

“Are we taking bets?” Julia leaned forward to unlatch Eddie’s door. “Fly and be free, little one.”

“Bets on what?” I tossed the phone onto the console and flipped the driver’s seat around in preparation for the bookmobile stop.

“Whether your plaintive bleat will encourage Bob to call you back.”

I debated getting out the five-dollar bill that I always had in my wallet for bets with Rafe, but decided to let it stay there. “No bet. We wouldn’t be able to get a definitive answer.”

Julia smiled one of her stage smiles, the sultry temptress version. “Do you really think so?” she asked in a low, husky voice.

“It’s not me you have to convince,” I said, laughing.