Софи Райан - Buy А Whisker

After a few moments of silence Mom picked up the phone. “Hi, baby,” she said.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Dad said it’s cold there.”

“You’ve heard the expression ‘a three-dog night.’ Well, we had an ugly-hat day.”

“I heard that,” my dad called out in the background.

Mom and I both laughed.

“So what’s new with you?” she asked.

I explained about Mac losing his apartment and Avery’s idea to create an apartment up above the shop. “That could work,” she said, and I pictured her reaching across the kitchen counter for a pencil and a pad of paper. “What were you thinking of for a layout?”

I shifted Elvis with one hand and pulled my drawing from underneath him while he muttered and murped with annoyance. I described my plan, and Mom made a couple of suggestions for the galley kitchen. I managed to scribble them on my sketch without having to make Elvis move altogether. He’d rolled onto his back and was watching me with a bemused look that seemed to say, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I talked to your grandmother this morning,” Mom said. “She’s going to call you later. She’s worried about Liz.”

“She doesn’t need to be,” I said, stroking the fur under Elvis’s chin, which immediately put me back in his good graces. I explained what Michelle had told me.

Mom gave a soft sigh of relief. “Isabel will be happy to hear that.”

We talked for a few more minutes and then we said good night.

I was about to set the phone up on the counter when it rang. “Gram,” I said to Elvis. He reached over and put a paw on the phone, cat for “well, hurry up and answer it.”

I picked up the receiver. “Hi, Gram,” I said.

“Hello, dear,” she replied. I found myself smiling all over again.

“Before you say anything else, Liz isn’t a suspect anymore in Lily’s death,” I said. “I had supper with Michelle, and they know Liz wasn’t anywhere near the bakery that night.”

“Thank heavens!” Gram exclaimed. “Liz would never hurt anyone. She’s all bark and no bite.”

“That’s because her bark is usually enough,” I said.

She laughed. “So are the Angels dropping the case?”

Elvis butted my hand with his head, and I began to scratch behind his left ear. “Not likely. Rose is determined to figure out who killed Lily.”

“She was a lovely girl,” Gram said quietly.

“Yes, she was,” I agreed. I swallowed a couple of times because all of a sudden there was a lump in my throat. This was the first time I’d let myself acknowledge that I missed Lily. We’d started to make a connection, as far as I was concerned, and I was sorry it was never going to become more than that now.

I cleared my throat. “Gram, what do you know about the Swift family?”

“What do you want to know?” she asked. I pictured her leaning forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “You’re thinking about Caleb Swift, I’m guessing.”

Elvis had started to purr. “Charlotte gave me the bare bones. And I seem to remember you mentioning it when Caleb went missing.”

“He seemed to just vanish off the face of the earth,” Gram said. “They found his sailboat drifting just past the mouth of the harbor the next day.”

“Liz said that Daniel Swift believed Lily knew more than she was telling.”

She sighed softly. “The Swifts founded this town. They’re old money, and sometimes with old money there’s a certain sense of entitlement. Or maybe ‘arrogance’ would be a better word.”

“Elspeth called Caleb a jerk,” I said. I started scratching behind Elvis’s other ear. There wasn’t even a momentary break in the purring soundtrack.

“I can’t really say about Caleb,” she said. “But his grandfather, Daniel, he’s an arrogant, entitled man.”

I’d seen Daniel Swift over the years. He was a tall, imposing man with a lined face from years of being out on the water and a deep voice. I knew his son and daughter-in-law had been killed in a plane crash years ago. Caleb was his only grandchild.

“Daniel couldn’t accept the fact that the police weren’t able to figure out what had happened to Caleb. He hired his own investigators, but they didn’t turn up anything either. He refused to even entertain the idea that Caleb had staged the whole thing and just walked away from his life, which was the speculation around town. Daniel was certain there was some kind of foul play.”

“Do you think he was right?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I don’t buy the idea that Caleb got bored with the money and the influence being a Swift gave him. I think it’s possible he was drinking and fell off the boat, but Daniel wouldn’t even think about that possibility. He’d always had blinders when it came to that boy. Understandable, I guess. Caleb was all he had left.

“Lily was one of the last people to see Caleb, and Daniel became obsessed with the idea that she knew something she wasn’t telling. He kept pushing the police to search her bakery. Finally, one day Lily just got fed up. She stopped Daniel on the street, probably much the way I hear she did with Liz, and told him he could search the building anytime he wanted to because she had nothing to hide.”

I remembered the anger in Lily’s voice when she’d accosted Liz. I wonder what it had been like when she’d confronted Daniel Swift.

“Did he?” I asked.

“He had the good sense not to,” Gram said. I could picture her ruefully shaking her head. “But that didn’t mean he let it go, either.”

I talked to Gram for a few more minutes and then we said good-bye. “Stay safe, my darling,” she said.

“I will,” I said. Just because the Angels were still in the private detective business didn’t mean I still was.

I took my floor-plan drawings to the shop with me in the morning. Mac had only a couple of tweaks. “Want me to start pricing materials?” he asked.

I nodded. “I’ll go down after lunch and do the paperwork for the building permit. Do you have any plans for Friday night?”

“Are you asking me out?” he said, the beginning of a smile playing across his face.

“No,” I said. “I’m asking you in. Do you want to start moving things out of the space upstairs?”

“You mean you don’t have a date?” he teased.

“Only with a furry guy whose idea of a good time is getting scratched under his chin while watching Jeopardy! .” Elvis was sitting in the middle of the love seat, working on a knot in the fur on his tail. He paused long enough to meow his acknowledgment that it was him I was talking about and went back to it.

Jess and I had agreed to meet at her shop after work and walk over to Thursday-night jam together. She was just finishing a display in the tiny front window when I walked in. I waved at Elin, one of her two partners, who was behind the cash register. Jess hugged me, and I began peeling off my outdoor things. “How was your day?” I asked.

“Very good,” she said. “I started a quilt with those vintage rocker tees from that last box I got from you guys. Come take a look.”

I followed her into her sewing space, which was a small room off the main store. The quilt she had started piecing was spread over her worktable. “Oh, that’s nice,” I said.

She grinned. “I think so. Will you tell Mac thanks for me? He’s the one who found the shirts.”

I nodded. “I have some news that involves Mac.”

“What is it?” she asked, leaning back against the table.

“He’s going to move in to the shop. We’re going to make an apartment on the second floor.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“What prompted that?” Jess asked.

I explained about the building where Mac was living being sold and how Avery had suggested we turn the storage room into a small apartment.