Софи Келли - Paws Аnd Effect

“I suspected,” he said. “I’d heard some talk—he wasn’t exactly discreet. It wasn’t that hard to find out for certain.”

I handed the photo and envelope back to him. “Thank you,” I said.

“I’m sorry it wasn’t the answer you were looking for.”

I sighed softly. “I just want the truth.”

Simon slipped the photo back into the envelope. “In my experience that’s not always so easy to find.”

There were even fewer people in the library in the afternoon than there had been in the morning so I was able to spend some time in the workroom doing some of the simpler repairs to our pile of damaged books. I left the more complicated work—including the sticky picture book from Tommy Justason—for Abigail, who had just taken a book-repair workshop in early September.

I was staring at a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, wondering how a piece of purple bubble gum had gotten wedged down between the spine of the book and the dust jacket, when there was a knock on the half-open door behind me. I turned around to find John standing there smiling at me.

“Hi,” he said. “Mary was downstairs. She told me to come up. I hope that was okay.”

I stood up and rolled my neck from one shoulder to the other. “Yes,” I said. “I could use a break. I’ve been hunched over so long I’m beginning to feel like Quasimodo.”

He was carrying a small white paper bag with handles. He offered it to me. “I just came to thank you for all your help, not just for letting me use the herbarium. You introduced me to Rebecca and Maggie. And I know you went out to check on Travis this morning.”

“You didn’t have to do this,” I said. “Thank you.” The bag held apples from Hollister’s.

“They’re Honeycrisp,” he said. “Good for eating and cooking, so I was told.”

“I’m sorry about everything, John,” I said, setting the apples on the table.

“Me too.” He swiped a hand over his neck. He seemed subdued, even given everything that happened.

“You didn’t find what you needed, did you?”

He shook his head. “The bats are on Wisteria Hill land. There’s no evidence of them in any caves on Ruby Blackthorne’s property or on the land around the lake. And it’s probably a good idea that you don’t ask me how I can be sure about that last bit.”

“So the development will go ahead?”

John shifted restlessly from one foot to the other. “Barring some kind of last-minute Hail Mary, yes.” He looked down at his feet for a moment. “I feel like I let her down.”

I knew he meant Dani. “I know how hard you looked for something, anything, to use to stop the project.”

He laughed but there really wasn’t any humor in the sound. “I thought about faking something, you know. Capturing a few bats somehow and relocating them. Looking for some plant and—” He shook his head. “I know how stupid that sounds. Dani would have said, ‘Have you lost your mind, John-Boy?’ I wanted to finish what she started, but not like that.”

“It was a good decision,” I said.

“I keep thinking that if she were alive she would have been able to find something.” He smiled. “We met in middle school, you know. In the rock club—Dani and thirteen geeky boys. We all spent more time looking at her than we did at rocks. Sometimes I wish we could just go back there and do things just a little bit different.” He shook his head. “I have to get going. I need to return the journals to Rebecca.”

“Take care of yourself, John,” I said.

He nodded. “You too, Kathleen.”

* * *

Marcus called while I was on my supper break. He’d stopped in at the house to check on Owen and Hercules and return my stepladder. I told him about my visit with Travis and relayed his message.

“I’ll call him,” Marcus said. “Or maybe it would be better to just go see him. Thanks.” We made plans to check out a flea market after the library closed the next afternoon and I hung up.

I was no closer to figuring out who Dani was as a person. I wanted to know the real woman, not the idealized version that Marcus and his friends had told me about.

* * *

The evening was just as quiet as the rest of the day had been—sometimes Fridays were that way—and I was home a few minutes earlier than usual. I pulled on my sweats, grabbed my laptop and sat at the kitchen table. I’d just turned on the computer when a furry paw poked its way around the basement door and the rest of Owen followed. He looked surprised to see me.

“I live here,” I said. He padded over to me. I picked him up and he planted his two front paws on my chest and peered at my face. “How was your day?” I asked, as I scratched behind his left ear. He made a rumbling sound of satisfaction low in his chest. After a moment he turned to look at the computer screen.

“I wanted to see what else I could find out about Dani,” I said. “Roma pointed out that if I knew more about her as a person maybe I’d be able to figure out why someone killed her.”

Owen wrinkled up his gray tabby face. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t think much of the idea or because I’d mentioned Roma. He’d had his shots just a couple of weeks earlier and he was still nursing a grudge at her over that.

It took an hour before I found what I was looking for. Owen sat on my lap and watched the screen intently, pawing at the air occasionally as though trying to tell me what to click on next. In the end it was luck as much as it was my good research skills and his suggestions.

American Land Trust had created a memorial page for Dani on their website. As I read the comments I began to get more of a sense of the woman. She had a great sense of humor and a penchant for playing pranks on her friends. She was a big Minnesota Wild fan and it struck me that she would have gotten a kick out of meeting Eddie.

The remembrances were all heartfelt, but one comment made my throat tighten. It was one sentence: The light has gone out of my world . Tanith Jeffery. Dani’s best friend, maybe?

It was an uncommon name, Tanith—the Phoenician goddess of love, I remembered reading somewhere, because those kinds of facts stuck in my head. And maybe in the end it wasn’t luck. Maybe it was that tiny piece of information that twigged something in my brain.

Tanith Jeffery was a jewelry designer, I learned. I found several photos of her eating ice cream and standing, arms linked with three other women, smiling into the sun at Twin Cities Pride. After that it took some leaps, but everything began to make sense.

I went into the living room and called Marcus. “I need to talk to you,” I said.

“I’m just leaving Eddie’s. I can stop in on my way home.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

I went out to the porch to wait for him. Owen had disappeared again.

Marcus saw me as he came around the house. He waved and then stepped inside the porch, leaning down to kiss me. “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“Waiting for you,” I said, “looking at the stars, thinking.”

“So what did you need to talk to me about?”

“Sit, please.” I gestured to the bench by the window. I sat next to him, turning so I was facing him. “I know that there was nothing going on between you and Dani when you were in college,” I said. I couldn’t see his face very well in the moonlight that was coming through the window, but it seemed to me that he blanched a little. “Her grandmother was—is—extremely conservative. I think the day Travis caught you two kissing outside her dorm room you were covering for Dani so he wouldn’t find out there was a girl in her room—a girl she was involved with.”

For a moment he didn’t say anything, then he sighed softly. “I wanted to tell you, but like I said, it wasn’t my secret to tell.”