Лори Касс: Pouncing On Murder

“Hey yourself, Chris,” I said. “My aunt was making fun of my cooking skills, can you believe it?”

He grinned. “Sure can. Good thing you’re not running the boardinghouse, eh?”

“True fact. I’d run it into the ground inside of a week if I took over.”

“Frances Pixley is giving up the boardinghouse?” Chris pushed back his Detroit Tigers baseball cap and stared at me.

From such conversations, rumors are born. “This is a purely theoretical discussion,” I said. “Aunt Frances can’t understand that I’m happy living on cold cereal for breakfast all summer long.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” His feet went back up onto the counter. “Especially if it’s Frosted Flakes.”

I squinted at him. “I always figured you for a Wheaties kind of guy.”

“Too healthy.” He took a long swig from a can of soda, then said, “I got some news. You’re getting a new right-hand neighbor this year.”

“Gunnar getting a slip out on the point?”

Why the wealthy Gunnar Olson had ever rented a boat slip at Uncle Chip’s had always been a mystery to the regular marina renters. His massive boat dwarfed all the others in both size and price, and his flagrantly expensive lifestyle fit in more with the folks at the west end of Chilson.

“Other way around.” Chris creaked back in his ancient canvas director’s chair. “He’s getting a divorce, and to pay off his wife he had to sell his boat.”

“Oh.” A year ago the news would have made me smile. I would have felt bad about it later, but I would have smirked a little and thought it couldn’t happen to a nicer human being.

Late last summer, however, the famously bad-tempered man had done me a favor out of the blue. It had made me look differently at a guy who, previously, had seemed to go out of his way to make his nearest neighbor—me—miserable. After that incident, he’d returned to his annoying “I’m the only one who matters” attitude, but I got to carry the knowledge that underneath the crusty exterior he did, in fact, care about things other than keeping his boat shiny and his drinks cold.

I hoped that Gunnar and his soon-to-be ex-wife could make it through without too much anguish. “That’s too bad,” I said sincerely, earning a pair of raised eyebrows from Chris. Then a thought struck me. “Um, if Gunnar’s not coming back, what’s going to happen to my slip fee?”

My ability to afford marina space and still eat out on occasion was due to the fact that no one else wanted the slip next to Gunnar. There was no way that my budget could easily absorb the full cost of a slip rental.

I ran through some fast monetary calculations. If I bought the store-brand cold cereal, purchased Eddie’s food in bulk, stayed away from Cookie Tom’s, tossed out every single take-out menu in my possession, and slashed my book-buying budget . . . no, it still wouldn’t work. I sighed and looked up at Chris.

Who was grinning.

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” he said. “What Uncle Chip doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Relief and guilt washed through me in equal measures. “Chris, I can’t let you do that. Besides, what if your uncle Chip comes up North this summer? You know I can’t tell a lie for beans.”

Chris nodded. “You’re the worst liar ever except for the dog I had when I was a kid. That mutt would look guilty if he so much as looked at the couch.”

Being compared to a dog wasn’t exactly flattering, but I supposed it could have been worse. Somehow.

“Tell you what,” Chris said. “Let’s see what the new guy is like. He may be worse than old Gunnar was.”

Possible, but not probable. “What if he’s nice? What if he’s friendly and holds the best Friday night parties ever and having the slip next to his would be a bonus and not a misery?”

“Huh.” Chris rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “Let me think on that.”

I looked about the office. A calendar from 1996 was tacked to the far wall. “I could help around here. Do a little cleaning. Paint.”

A horrified expression crowded Chris’s weathered face. “Don’t you dare. It’s taken me years to get the place looking this good. You git before you get any more ideas. Out of here!” He shooed me away.

“Are you going to pull my boat out for me this weekend?”

“If you promise to stick to cleaning to that little tub, yeah, absolutely. Just keep your bleach and mops away from here.”

“Promise,” I said, laughing, and we did a mutual halfway-across-the-room high five to seal the deal.

• • •

The next few days, I spent all my free time down at the marina, getting the houseboat ready for moving into. Eddie had been giving me the cold shoulder for not giving him enough attention, so on Thursday, out on the bookmobile, I wasn’t surprised to hear Julia ask in a puzzled tone, “What is your cat doing?”

I was kneeling on the floor, trying to stuff more returned books into a milk crate than the milk crate wanted to allow, so I happily gave up on the task and looked up. Eddie was lying on the bookmobile’s dashboard and managing to take up the entire length of it. His front legs were stretched out Superman-style, his face was pressed against the dash, his back legs were behind him, and his tail appeared twice as long as it did most days.

“Dusting?” I suggested.

Julia lifted one eyebrow. “Wouldn’t he be actually moving if he was dusting?”

She had a good point. I stood and studied my cat. If the day had been sunny, I might have understood Eddie’s wish to soak up the sunshine with all possible body parts, but it was—once again—cloudy, windy, and wet.

“You know,” I said, “I’ve never seen him up there like that.” Which was odd, because we’d found Eddie in every other possible location on the bookmobile, and that included the top shelves. “Maybe he just wanted to see if he fit.”

We stood side by side, watching Eddie not move. I had the sudden and scary thought that he might have had a kitty heart attack while I wasn’t paying attention, but as soon as I had the thought he opened his eyes and picked up his head a quarter of an inch.

“Mrr,” he said.

Julia sighed. “If only we understood cat.”

“Eddie-speak is likely a whole different dialect,” I said, watching Eddie’s head drop back to the dashboard. “I’m pretty sure he’s his own species.” I was about to tell her that I’d considering applying to the science folks to get the name Felis eddicus established before someone else stole it away, when the back door was flung open and someone pounded up the steps.

“Oh, Minnie,” Phyllis Chambers said, panting. “Have you heard?”

She reached out to grip my hands, her skin so cold to the touch that I almost flinched. Phyllis was another downstate transplant. She’d moved north from a state government job in Lansing last summer and, in spite of the long winter, she was loving the northern life.

“Heard what?” I asked.

“Oh, dear.” Phyllis squeezed my hands, released them, and rubbed her face. Her short hair, a thick and glorious white, was in its normal disarray. She ran her fingers through it, but everything sprang back to where it had been before she made the effort. “Oh, dear. I hate to be the one to bring you bad tidings, but it’s Henry Gill.”

Julia and I exchanged a quick glance. “What’s wrong with Henry?” I asked. “He was fine last week.”

“I’m so sorry, Minnie,” Phyllis said. “But Henry’s dead.”

• • •

That night, Aunt Frances was out with Otto at a wine tasting, so it was just Eddie and me on the couch in front of the fieldstone fireplace. I could have started a fire, and I could have popped a big bowl of popcorn, but instead I stared into space.