Лори Касс: Lending А Paw

“What? He works here. You’ve met him a zillion times.”

I frowned. “There’s no Kyle at the Three Seasons.”

“Sure there is,” she said. “You know. Larry Sutton.”

Either Kristen was suffering from serious sleep deprivation or something very strange was going on. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, right,” she said. “I guess you wouldn’t know. Back in high school, Kyle played basketball and the story is, the coach kept calling him Larry because he looked like his uncle Larry, a guy the coach grew up with.” She paused. “He looks like a Larry, I guess, so the name stuck. But it’s just a nickname.”

She chattered on about the new potato dish she was making up, but I didn’t hear much of what she said. Any of it, really, because I was suddenly back on Audry’s front porch, drinking her lemonade, and hearing her say, “And one of them used names that started with K . Kevin, Kyle, Karla, and Kendra.”

• • •

Late in the morning, the sky clouded up. The rain held off, but started to spatter down as I locked the building at four o’clock. Josh had been right, or at least right about the weather. When I got home, I found Eddie sleeping in a new spot. The seat of the shower stall.

“Why?” I asked him. “You don’t look at all comfortable.”

He blinked at me and didn’t say anything.

“Okay, sure, I must not have latched the door all the way and this was a brand-new place for you, but still. It’s fiberglass. And it was probably wet.”

He stood, stretched, and jumped down. “Mrr,” he said, and stalked off.

“Yeah, well, don’t come crying to me if you wind up with a . . . with a stiff neck.” Did cats get stiff necks? I watched him trot down the steps to the bedroom. He didn’t look as if he had one, but if he did, how would I know?

I tossed together a fast dinner of grilled cheese and a broccoli/cauliflower mix steamed in the microwave. (“Of course I’m eating my vegetables, Mom.”) I ate sitting at the dining table with the company of Eddie and my laptop, which was displaying the local weather. More specifically, the radar.

“Lots of yellow coming across Lake Michigan,” I told Eddie. “Quite a bit of red, too. You know what that means.”

He sniffed at my sandwich.

I used my forearm to push him away. Like a boomerang, he came right back. “It means a lot of rain. Hard rain that could wash away any of those quad tracks out by the farmhouse.” There’d been rain since Stan’s death, but not the heavy, driving stuff that was coming. “I should get out there,” I murmured. “See if there are any tracks. I’m sure the detectives haven’t been out there.”

Eddie’s sniff stopped abruptly.

“Could have told you you wouldn’t like broccoli,” I said. “Cats don’t do vegetables. Your pointy teeth don’t chew them up right.”

When the kitchen was tidied, I dumped the contents of my backpack out on the bed and repacked with new items. “Flashlight, check. Bottle of water, check. Cell phone with charged-up battery, check. Map, pen, granola bar, all check. Am I forgetting anything?”

Eddie, who’d been supervising my efforts, said, “Mrr.”

“Right.” I snapped my fingers. “A book. Good idea.” I picked through my To Be Read stack and selected a Frost mystery by R. D. Wingfield. When I turned around, Eddie was slithering into the backpack.

“Hey!” I grasped him around the middle and pulled him out. “This isn’t a cat carrier. At least not today.”

“MMrrrrRR!”

I blinked. “That was quite a howl. Did I hurt you?” He squirmed out of my arms, thumped to the bed, and said, “MRR!”

The guilt that had been advancing retreated fast. “Well, sorry if I injured your feline dignity, but you can’t go with me. I’m going to be tromping around the woods and going up and down hills, and that’s just not your style.”

He hurled himself into the backpack.

I pulled him out.

He gave a little growl.

“Eddie!” I held him up and stared. “What’s gotten into you?”

“MMMRRR!” he said, three inches from my nose.

I winced at the cat breath and tried to give him a good snuggle. Nothing doing. He struggled away, jumped to the floor, and ran down the short hall and up the steps.

Fine. After I made a note on the whiteboard, I put on my rain gear and slung the backpack over a shoulder. “Hey, pal. I’m headed out and—”

And there was Edward, sitting on the boat’s dashboard, poised to jump out the door as soon as I pushed it open half an inch.

“Not a chance,” I told him. I stood in front of the door and turned my back to the dashboard. Slowly and carefully, I pushed the door open and slid one foot outside, then eased my body out, too, using the other foot and the backpack as a cat barrier.

Eddie thudded to the floor. Tried to jump over the backpack. “MRR!” His claws slid off the nylon.

I shut the door before he could gather himself for another effort.

“MMRRR!!” He stood on his hind legs and scratched at the glass door. “MRR!!!”

I was a horrible kitty mother. Clearly, he needed to get outside more. Maybe I’d get a cat harness and take him for walks. We could walk to get the mail, or down to the ice-cream shop for double dips of black cherry.

“See you, Eddie.” I waved at him. “I’ll be back before you know it. We’ll go harness shopping tomorrow.”

“Mrr!” He was sounding less like he was complaining and more like he was crying out a question. He kept crying as I walked off the dock and across the parking lot, and I almost thought I could still hear him as I drove out of town, the windshield wipers keeping time with his cries.

• • •

The farmhouse didn’t look any different than it had the last time I’d seen it. I tromped up the driveway, following the path the emergency vehicles had created, and kept my gaze high. The last thing I wanted was to catch even a small glimpse of what was still on the ground. Even if rain had fallen for forty days and forty nights, I’d be able to see the red stains.

I stood near the back porch and looked out at the tall grass. Looked hard. Squinted and looked some more and saw nothing but grass waving in the light breeze. If there had been a path, I couldn’t see it.

“A tracker I’m not,” I murmured, and cautiously climbed up onto the far corner of the porch. Maybe an elevated view would help.

And, oddly, it did. Or something did. I closed my eyes, not seeing anything, trying to think of blank slates and flat lakes and smooth expanses of snow. When I opened my eyes and saw the hills rising up behind the house, I immediately saw the grassy trail. Not a very distinct trail, and maybe not even a trail at all, but maybe, just maybe, it was something to follow.

“Hey, Eddie, check it out!” I looked around my feet, all excited to share, then remembered that I’d left him home.

That’s what happens when you start talking to cats. You think they actually understand what you’re saying. And sometimes you even think they might be contributing to the conversation when, in reality, what they’re saying is “Mrrr.”

I adjusted my backpack’s straps and started trudging across the open field. It was dotted with the scrub trees that grow up after a farm field lies fallow for even a few years. I tried to picture the young Stan of the high school photo driving a tractor up and down, up and down. Couldn’t quite do it.

Through the wet field I went, heading for the trail I might—or might not—have seen. At the edge of the field, which was the bottom of the hill, there were rocks. Lots of rocks. Whoever had cleared the field had tossed all the fieldstones into a large heap exactly where the hill had started turning a serious slope. Not so dumb.