Софи Келли - A Tale Оf Two Kitties

“I love you, too,” I whispered.

At that moment Micah appeared on the empty chair beside me. Not launched herself from the floor or jumped from another chair. Appeared, as in the opposite of disappeared.

For a moment the air almost seemed electric, the way it did before a thunderstorm. Micah cocked her head to one side and meowed at me.

“Does Marcus know you can do this?” I asked the cat and immediately felt foolish. Did I really think she was going to answer me?

The cat wrinkled her whiskers and meowed again almost as though she were saying, “Maybe.” And given what I’d just seen her do, who was I to say that she wasn’t?

I thought about all the times lately that Marcus had told me the little cat had “snuck” unseen into his SUV. “I’m going to have to tell him,” I said. “As soon as this case is over I’m going to have to tell him.”

I left Micah with some sardine crackers and a promise to bring an actual tin of sardines next time I came out. She licked her whiskers and I had the feeling that the ability to disappear wasn’t the only skill she shared with Owen.

When I got home there was no sign of Owen, but one of my hats was in the middle of the kitchen floor. I bent down to pick it up and discovered that there was a funky chicken head inside. I sat back on my heels. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?” I said to Hercules, who had just come in from the living room.

“Mrr,” he said, blinking his green eyes at me. In other words, he didn’t know, either.

Hercules had gotten his name from Roman mythology. At least that was what I told people. For the most part it was the truth. He had been named after Hercules, the son of Zeus. As portrayed by the very yummy Kevin Sorbo. Or as Maggie liked to teasingly describe him, Mr. Six-Pack-in-a-Loincloth.

Owen, on the other hand, was named because of the book A Prayer For Owen Meany —John Irving—which I’d been reading when I brought the boys home. Whenever I put the book down Owen sat on it. His name was either going to be Owen or Irving and to me he didn’t look like an Irving.

I dumped the soggy chicken head in the trash and shook my hat over the can to get the bits of catnip out. I went upstairs to change, trailed by Hercules. I told him about my day and he murped at intervals as though he was actually listening.

About twenty minutes later, I was peering in the refrigerator to see if I had any Parmesan cheese to top a plate of spaghetti when Owen came up from the basement. He walked past me, stopped in the middle of the floor and looked all around the kitchen. Roma had been keeping an eye on his ear ever since the collar had come off. It seemed to be healing well.

Owen looked at me. It was hard to miss the accusatory glare in his golden eyes. “Merow!” he said loudly.

“It wasn’t your hat, it was my hat,” I said, setting a Mason jar of spaghetti sauce on the counter. “And hats don’t belong in the middle of the kitchen floor.”

He looked around the room again and then seemed to zero in on the trash can. He stalked over to it and meowed again, turning back to look at me over his shoulder.

“Yes, I threw out your chicken head,” I said. “It was wet, it was disgusting and it was inside my hat.”

I saw his muscles tense and I knew he was about to launch himself at the can.

“Knock that can over and I will vacuum up every chicken part in this house.” It was an empty threat. My best guess was that I knew where maybe half of his stash was, but Owen didn’t know that. He glared at me. I folded my arms over my chest and glared back at him. Hercules suddenly became engrossed in checking out something on the floor under the chair next to where he’d been sitting. Who knows how long the standoff would have gone on except Hercules sneezed . . . which scared him the way it always did. Startled, he jumped, the way he always did. Except he was under the chair. His head banged the underside of the seat. He yowled in indignation and flattened himself against the floor, turning from side to side as though he thought someone had hit him over the head.

Owen sat up and took a few steps toward his brother. I immediately moved the chair and bent down to Hercules. “Let me see,” I said. He was still looking around suspiciously.

“You banged your head on the chair,” I said. “Let me take a look.”

He made grumbling noises in the back of his throat but he let me feel the top of his head. He didn’t pull away from my carefully probing fingers and didn’t even wince as I examined the top of his head. “I think you’re going to be okay,” I said. Could cats get concussions? I wondered. Hercules seemed all right; annoyed and a little embarrassed but otherwise fine.

I got him a couple of bites of cooked chicken from the fridge and gave one piece to Owen as well. I noticed Hercules gave the offending chair a wide berth as he made his way over to his water dish, shooting it a green-eyed glare as he passed.

Owen disappeared after supper, probably checking his various stashes of funky chicken parts to make sure they were still hidden. Hercules was still a bit out of sorts. He followed me around the kitchen as I cleaned up and did the dishes and twice I almost tripped over him. Once the dishes were put away I set my laptop on the table. “Want to help me look up a couple of things?” I asked the cat.

“Mrr,” he said after a moment’s thought. It sounded like a yes to me. I picked him up and settled him on my lap. He put one paw on the edge of the table as I pulled the computer closer and turned it on.

“I’m kind of curious about Simon and his family,” I told Hercules. “Let’s see what we can find.” Simon Janes had no Facebook or Twitter accounts but there was still a fair amount of information about him online. He’d started his development company in college when he rented a room in a run-down house about fifteen minutes from campus. On the weekends he went home to see baby Mia, who stayed with Leo. Simon persuaded the landlord to let him fix up the old house instead of paying rent. He did the same thing in another place the next year. In his third year he used the money he hadn’t spent on rent as a down payment on a tiny two-bedroom house, renovated it and then rented out rooms to his friends. By then Mia was living with him full-time.

I tried to imagine what Simon’s days had been like, going to class, going home to see Mia every weekend and then having her with him all the time, trying to make time to study and working on whichever old house he was living in. It had been all I could do to manage my classes and a very early breakfast shift at an off-campus diner that catered to early risers, hunters and people just getting off the night shift. “Simon wasn’t afraid of hard work, as my mother would say,” I said to Hercules.

The cat seemed less impressed. He pawed at the keyboard and somehow I found myself looking at a newspaper article about the death of Meredith Janes outside Chicago. Hercules leaned in toward the screen as if he was reading the copy. He paused for a moment, looked back at me and meowed. Clearly he thought this was important somehow. So was it?

“Fine, I’ll read it, too,” I said.

The piece was the second of a three-part series on accidents along a stretch of twisty road. The police had spent a lot of time investigating Meredith Janes’s accident. There was some question at the time that another car had been involved, possibly forcing her off the road, but in the end police found no evidence at the scene or on the car and the investigation was closed, the accident blamed on road conditions and excess speed.

But what caught my attention as much as the article was the photo of Meredith Janes. It was the photo I’d seen lying on the side table when I’d found Leo Janes’s body. Something had been bothering me about that picture, or more specifically, the frame. There had been one other photo on the table—of Simon and Mia. It had been professionally matted and framed in an expensive metal frame. The old photograph in the inexpensive plastic department-store frame had seemed oddly out of place next to the professionally presented image of Simon and Mia. I remembered Rebecca saying that Leo never forgave his brother or his wife. I wondered why he had a photo of her in a place he was only staying at for a few weeks if he felt that way. Did it have anything to do with Leo’s decision to give his brother a second chance?