Лори Касс - Tailing A Tabby

“You mean… ?”

“We’ll bend the rules just this once.” I put my finger to my lips and looked left and right. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

She nodded toward the front of the bookmobile where a black-and-white feline was perched on the headrest of the passenger’s seat. “Not even Eddie?”

“Especially Eddie.” I rolled my eyes. “Cats are horrible gossips, didn’t you know?”

Laughing, she headed straight for the Special Orders shelf.

“Um, Minnie?” Thessie stood at my elbow. “We have a little problem. You know how the guessing game was supposed to be for kids? Well…” She held out six slips of folded paper.

At this particular moment, the youngest human on the bookmobile was Thessie. I glanced at our patrons, all of whom had their noses deep in books, just as it should be. “Didn’t you tell them it was for kids only?”

“By the time I noticed, it was too late. They’d made their guesses.”

Yet another thing no one had taught me while I was getting my library science degree. Clearly, there should have been at least one lecture on how to run contests.

A white-haired gentleman approached. “Here you go, Minnie. May the best guess win, eh?” Smiling, he held out a slip of paper. “Winning a jar of candy from the Three Seasons would be a nice treat, but I can’t pass up a chance to have the bookmobile come to my very own house. Brilliant marketing, by the way.”

What choice did I have? I took his guess. “Thanks,” I said faintly. Thessie, a smirk on her face, started to say something. “Not a word, Thess,” I told her. “Not one word.”

“Dystopia,” she said, grinning.

I crossed my eyes at her and went to help a patron find the perfect beach read.

• • •

My early-morning activities eventually took their toll. At lunchtime, I made an unplanned stop at a convenience store and bought a large bottle of caffeinated soda. Near the end of the day, I wished I’d bought two.

“See you on Tuesday,” I said when I dropped Thessie off at her car.

“What’s that?” she asked. “I couldn’t hear you through that yawn.”

I snapped my jaw shut and gave her a mock glare. “When did the youth of today get so smart-alecky?”

She put on an air of deep thought. “I’d guess it was when the first teenagers were born.” She looked at me. “Um, are you okay? To drive, I mean? You look really tired.”

I smiled. “Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”

“Mrr!”

Thessie laughed. “I guess Eddie will keep you awake.”

She left and I looked at my feline companion. “Please don’t listen to her,” I told him. “The last thing I need is you howling all the way home.”

“Mrr,” he said quietly.

“Thank you.” I pointed the bookmobile in the direction of Chilson. “She’s right, though. I am tired. But I’m not going to think about it. If I do, I’ll just get more tired and that’s no good, not on such a beautiful day.”

And a beautiful day it was, one of those perfect summer days that northern Michigan seemed to specialize in. Temperatures in the high seventies, a light breeze, low humidity, and a few fluffy clouds dotting the sky. No wonder this area was such a tourist draw.

“Speaking of drawing,” I said, “I wonder how Cade’s doing. Last night couldn’t have been good for him.”

Actually there were a lot of things I was wondering. Having a murder in my happy little town was hard enough to wrap my head around, and I was bothered by the fact that I knew nothing about the victim.

I didn’t know if Carissa Radle had been blond or brunette or redheaded. Didn’t know if she’d been short or tall or pretty or athletic or funny. Didn’t know who was left behind to mourn her. Didn’t know anything about this woman whose life had so unexpectedly intersected Cade’s and now, in a diagonal sideways sort of way, mine.

Those thoughts kept me awake all the way to Chilson. They kept me mostly awake while I tucked the bookmobile in for the night, and they sort of kept me awake as I kept an eye out for Stephen while I moved Eddie into my car and then drove home.

“Yo, Miniver!”

I was halfway between the marina’s parking lot and my houseboat. I had Eddie in his carrier in one hand and my backpack in the other. My longed-for nap was less than a hundred feet away. I slowed but didn’t come to a complete stop. “Hey, Chris. Nice day.”

Chris Ballou, the marina’s manager, squinted at the sky, his weathered skin crinkling. “Yeah. Should stay this way for a while.”

Back before I knew better, I would have thought he was using his years of experience of living next to the water to make such a prediction. “Is that the Weather Channel’s forecast or NOAA’s?”

He took a toothpick out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Got something I want to talk about. Come on down to the office a second, will ya?”

I hefted Eddie’s carrier. “I’m kind of busy.” And sleep-deprived. Really, really sleep-deprived.

“Ah, it’ll just take a minute.”

Two sentences ago, it had been a second. Then again, Chris rarely asked me for anything, and he was giving me a discount for renting the slip next to Gunnar Olson. “Let me put Eddie in the houseboat and I’ll be right down.”

Chris grinned around the toothpick. “Nah. Let’s bring him with. Bet he fits right in with the guys.” He took the carrier out of my hand and sauntered off, his long and skinny legs covering ground fast. I had to half trot to keep up and I was very glad when the short walk was over.

“Look what we got here, boys.” Chris carefully placed Eddie’s carrier on the shop counter. The four men lounging on ancient canvas director’s chairs and drinking beer turned to look.

Skeeter, a summer boater about my age, went to the effort of lifting two fingers off his beer can in a sort of salute. “Minnie.”

Rafe Niswander grinned. “Hey, it’s an Eddie.” Rafe was my nearest on-land neighbor and a good friend. September through mid-June, Rafe was the principal of the local middle school. Mid-June through August, however, he did as little as possible and played the bumbling Up North hick role to the hilt. “What do you say, Eddie, my man?”

Thanks to Rafe’s tendency of being accident-prone, he was the reason I’d met Tucker, so I could forgive him much, but it was thanks to his propensity for procrastination that the electrical repairs on my boat were behind schedule.

“Mrr.”

The third and fourth guys laughed. Number three had a shaved head and looked to be in his mid-fifties; number four had light brown hair and was in his mid-forties. I’d never seen either one of them before.

“I think he said quit asking such stupid questions,” the older one said. “How you doing?” He stood, and turned into a very tall man. He held out his hand, and I realized he was a very tall man with very large hands.

We shook and, since no one else was doing the honors, I introduced myself. “Minnie Hamilton. Are you renting a boat slip?”

“Greg Plassey,” he said. “Need to buy a boat first. And this is my bud Brett Karringer. He does something with computers that I don’t understand and plays some really bad golf.”

I nodded at Brett. There was a beat of silence. Rafe held his hand out, palm up, to Chris. “Hand it over.”

“Come on, Min,” Chris pleaded. “Tell me you know who Greg Plassey is. I got five bucks on this.”

“Sorry.” I smiled at Plassey. “No offense, but I’ve never heard of you. Should I have?”

Chris groaned and dug out his wallet.

Rafe laughed. “Told you. This girl don’t know jack about baseball.”

Or pretty much any other professional sport; I was more the toss-around-a-Frisbee-on-the-beach type of person. In short order, I learned that I’d just dissed a Major League Baseball pitching star. Sure, he’d been retired for more than fifteen years, but the human males in the room were still astounded that I didn’t recognize the name of the guy who’d helped pitch the Detroit Tigers to two American League championships.