Лори Касс - Lending А Paw

“Not until tomorrow,” Gunnar said. “She’s flying up from Grosse Pointe with some friends. Corporate jet . . . yeah. We have some wedding we have to go to in Charlevoix. . . . That’s the one. At Castle Farms. Waste of a Saturday, if you ask me.”

I thought about what he’d said about Stan. The comment about being twenty years too long—was that important? And if so, how was it important?

“Yeah, I’ll be picking her up at the airport. Pain in the butt, it’ll break up my whole day. Makes me think I should hire that local yokel to drive her around. Get her to show some cleavage and bet it’ll be even cheaper.”

He laughed. My fists clenched. This guy was really getting on my nerves. Maybe next year I’d chin up to the expense and pay full price for a slip in another spot. It would mess up my student loan repayment schedule, but it might be worth it to move away from this yahoo.

“Some guy I met at the bar,” Gunnar said. His voice faded and was replaced by the clinking of ice cubes and the pouring of liquid. “Yeah, he’s . . .”

But I couldn’t hear what he said. Chilson wasn’t exactly a huge metropolis, so odds were good that I knew whom he’d hired to drive him around. That, or I knew someone who knew him.

And when I did track down the driver, a few pointed questions would be in order. Question number one—did you drop Gunnar off at the farmhouse where Stan died? Two. Did you pick him up later? Three. Had he been carrying anything? Say, a rifle?

In the name of trying to keep my head literally down, I got down onto the deck in case Gunnar looked out a window, and crawled on my hands and knees to the very front of my boat’s bow. I always docked nose out to take best advantage of the lake view, and the tip of my boat matched the midship region of Olson’s vessel. Luckily, that was its galley area and was where Gunnar was pouring himself a drink.

Closer, closer . . . I poked my head outside the railing. Heard snippets of words, but nothing clear. Close, but not close enough. I rose to a crouch and slid outside my boat’s railing, put my toes on the deck’s edge, grabbed the top railing with one hand, and leaned out as far as I could.

“Nah,” Gunnar was saying. “That’s the last thing I’m worried about. This guy isn’t any mental giant. Says he reads a lot. Comic books, maybe.” He laughed.

“Say his name,” I murmured. “Say his name.”

“Mrr.”

There I was, ninety-eight percent of me precariously over the water, and my cat was walking along the top railing as if he’d been doing it all his life.

“Eddie!” I whispered. “Get down! You’re going to—”

One of his back paws slipped off the railing. His tail went down, a front paw slipped, and without thinking, without breathing, I released my single-handed hold on the rail and pushed him boatward. He gave a howling yowl and, twisting, fell to the deck feetfirst.

I windmilled for a grip on the rail, on the boat, on anything. Failed completely, and hit the water with a monstrous splash!

My feet hit the lake’s sandy bottom. I let my legs collapse and pushed myself back up. When I surfaced, spluttering out icky marina water, Gunnar Olson was stomping out onto his deck.

“Who’s that? Who’s there?”

I flung my hair around to get it out of my eyes. “Just me, Mr. Olson.”

“Who?”

“Minnie,” I said, treading water. “Your next-door neighbor.” I swam toward the end of the floating wooden dock that ran between my boat and Louisa’s.

“What were you doing out there?” he demanded. “Hey, don’t leave when I’m talking to you! You get back here right now!”

I climbed up the ladder fastened to the dock’s end, clambered over my boat’s railing, and, dripping, went to look for my cat while Gunnar Olson continued to shout at me. I found Eddie under the chaise lounge where he’d compressed himself into the smallest Eddie-ball I’d ever seen.

“Hey, bud,” I said softly. “Come on out. I’m sorry I scared you, but I didn’t want you falling in the water, see? You would have gotten all wet like I did and you’d hate that.”

“Who are you talking to?” Gunnar shouted. “You were listening to me, weren’t you? What did you hear? Invasion of privacy, that’s what you were doing. That’s against the law, you know. I could call the cops and have you arrested.”

Oh, please. I stood tall and faced the man. A difficult task, since his six feet of height combined with the height of his boat’s deck made his face roughly fourteen feet above mine, but when there’s a will, there’s a way.

“Privacy?” I asked. “Expectation of privacy is quite low in a marina, Mr. Olson. And are those open windows I see on your boat? That lowers the expectation even further. Almost like being in a public campground, I’d say.”

He paid no attention to me. “The only reason you’d fall off that little tug of yours is if you were outside the railing. And there’s no reason for you to do that unless you were trying to listen to my conversation!”

“For your information,” I said with exquisite politeness, “I was trying to keep my cat from falling in the water.”

Gunnar scoffed. “You don’t have a cat. You were intentionally eavesdropping. Admit it.”

A low rrrrrrr noise came from underneath the chaise.

“What was that?” Gunnar slapped his big, meaty hands on his railing and loomed over me. “No more of your little-girl games. Tell me the truth and there’s an outside chance I’ll let this episode—”

Eddie hissed, a long indrawn breath that raised the hair on the back of my neck. I’d never heard him make a noise like that. Not ever.

Gunnar drew back. “But you don’t have a cat.”

“I didn’t.” I smiled up at him. “But I do now.”

“You can’t,” Gunnar said. “Not a cat, not right next door to me.”

Eddie spat. Hissed again. Gave a long, low growl.

I hunched down. “You okay, pal?” Even in the dim light I could see that he was puffed up to half again his normal size. “Shhh, it’ll be all right. No one’s going to hurt you, okay? Shhh.”

Eddie subsided and let me scratch the back of his ears. He came out from under the chair and I scooped him up for a snuggle. With a sigh, I decided the right thing to do was introduce cat to human and human to cat. “Eddie,” I said, turning to face my irate neighbor, “this is . . .”

But Gunnar was gone.

• • •

When I got out of the shower, my skin was a splotchy pink from the heat. Swimming in Janay Lake was one of my favorite summer things to do, but swimming in yucky marina water had never been on any of my mental lists.

“List of things to avoid, maybe,” I told Eddie.

He was lying on the narrow shelf that ran above the bed. In former summers, I’d decorated the shelf with vases of dried flowers, Petoskey stones, and bits of driftwood. Early on in my life with Eddie I’d discovered that these things are all cat toys. Of course, when you got down to it, everything was a cat toy if a cat chose to make it one.

Eddie stretched out a front paw and rearranged himself on the shelf. He was a teensy bit too wide to fit comfortably, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Apparently he didn’t care if his back leg hung over the edge. At times it seemed he even liked it.

“Wonder how you’re going to like it at the boardinghouse?” I asked him.

He didn’t say anything.

“Well, we won’t move until October, so—” The floor under my bare feet crinkled. I peeked out from underneath the towel I’d been rubbing my hair with and saw that I was standing on Eddie’s papers. Or what had become Eddie’s papers after he’d decided to shred my Grice-Hamilton genealogy research. “Done with these, I take it?”