Софи Келли - Hooked On A Feline

I rubbed the back of my head with one hand. This whole thing gave me a headache. “What about blood pressure medication or something to manage her blood sugar or thyroid?”

Marcus shook his head. “There was nothing like that. The woman was as healthy as a horse. That’s why she was part of that study.”

“I remember that when the accident happened you didn’t find any evidence that Leitha’s car had been tampered with,” I said. “That hasn’t changed?”

He turned his head to look at me for a moment. “No, it hasn’t. Leitha’s death was not an accident, Kathleen. I wish it was. But it wasn’t. Why are you having such a hard time with that?”

There was a knot in my stomach. “Because if someone deliberately killed Leitha, then maybe that same person also killed Mike. Maybe . . . maybe it wasn’t some random burglar who panicked.” I straightened up, linked my fingers together and rested my hands on the top of my head. “I know this is more emotion than logic talking. It’s just how I feel right now.”

“The car was checked from top to bottom. There were no mechanical issues. In fact, Lachlan had taken the car in for service the day before Leitha died.”

“Harry’s looking for answers. So is Johnny. So is pretty much the entire town.”

“And you’re afraid they’re not going to like those answers.”

I sighed, dropped my arms and adjusted my seat belt. “I’m afraid they’re not going to get any answers,” I said.

“I’m not going to give up,” Marcus said. “Are you?”

I studied his profile. I knew what that determined jut of his chin meant. I shook my head. “No.”

“Then everyone will get their answers eventually.”

The cats all looked healthy and they seemed to still be happy in the new home Eddie had built for them. The girls’ hockey team had a training session and Marcus needed to stop in at the station, so I drove home right before lunch.

Hercules was waiting in the porch. I brought him up-to-date on what I’d learned from Marcus while I made coffee. Since I hadn’t had any at lunch, I decided it was okay to have a cup of coffee now. I was very good at rationalizing my coffee drinking.

I sat at the kitchen table with my cup, a banana muffin and two sliced tomatoes. Hercules climbed onto my lap and helped me make the list that Marcus had asked me for. When I couldn’t come up with any more names, I e-mailed it to him, but I didn’t shut down my laptop.

“What do we know about Leitha’s daughter, Eloise?” I asked the cat.

He blinked his green eyes and gave me a blank look.

“Exactly,” I said. “Really, we know nothing.”

I didn’t actually believe Eloise had snuck back into town twice, once to kill her mother and a second time to get rid of her cousin, but maybe there was something in her life or her background that might help me. I was grasping at straws, but right now I didn’t really have anything else to hold on to.

As usual, Hercules was happy to help me see what we could find online, making occasional comments about what was on the screen and swiping at the touch pad when he wanted to check out something else.

Eloise Finnamore Anderson-Hill was a fascinating person, I learned, very different from her mother. She had two daughters adopted from Korea, Nari and Min, and ran a children’s clothing company that focused on sustainable practices and provided shoes and clothing to kids in need. And she had established a scholarship in her father’s name—Markham Anderson. There was only one mention of the Finnamore name in a newspaper article about the scholarship.

“I know I can’t change the world,” Eloise had said in an interview. “But I can work on making my small corner of it better.”

Hercules and I looked at Eloise’s social media and her company’s website. Most people called her Ellie, I learned. She was divorced. She was a vegan. She liked to hike and camp.

“How could Leitha not have been wildly proud of her daughter?” I said to Hercules. I thought about my own mother. She was my, Sarah’s and Ethan’s biggest cheerleader.

He blinked his green eyes at me again. It didn’t make any sense to him, either.

An errant paw took me to a photo of Eloise at her mother’s funeral, which had been private. She wore a navy coat over a gray dress. Mike’s hand was on her shoulder, and even at a distance, she looked profoundly sad. Other than that one time, I couldn’t recall ever seeing the woman in town.

There was a knock at the door.

Hercules looked expectantly at me. “Are you going to get that or should I?” I asked.

His tail flicked through the air and he made a huffy sound, his way of telling me I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was.

Keith King was standing at my back door. He was about average height, strong and wiry with dark hair and dark eyes behind a pair of black stainless steel–framed glasses.

“Hi, Keith,” I said. I was surprised to see him.

He smiled. “Hi, Kathleen. I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I’m going out of town for a couple of days and I didn’t just want to leave this.” He was holding a green file folder and he offered it to me.

“What is this?” I asked. Keith was on the library board. Was there a meeting I’d forgotten about?

“I found some papers in a book that I borrowed from the library. They look like they belong to someone tracing their family tree. You know I’m doing some of that myself. I didn’t get a chance to look at the book before now, so that’s why I didn’t find them sooner.”

“Thanks for dropping them off,” I said. “Maybe I can figure out who they belong to.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” Keith said. “There are several pages of notes in there, which means a lot of research someone will have to do again.” He smiled. “We’re going to see Taylor.”

Keith’s daughter had a summer job in St. Paul.

“Tell her we miss her at tai chi.”

“I will,” he said. “She’s going to be home for a few days at the end of the month. I know she’ll want to see you.”

“We all want to see her, too.”

I thanked Keith again and he left.

I took the file of papers into the kitchen. Hercules was sitting on my chair, washing his face. I pushed the laptop aside and laid the folder on the table. Hercules abandoned his beauty routine and stood up on his back legs, one white-tipped paw on the edge of the table, craning his neck for a look.

I picked up the top sheet of paper and right away I knew who had made the notes. I recognized Mike’s cramped, angular handwriting. I’d seen it many times. I flipped though the pages. Some were just copies of documents with notes in the margins. Others were paragraphs of information and one page was covered with what looked like several Punnett squares. It looked as though Mike had been trying to figure out someone’s eye color. Maybe he’d been trying to eliminate someone from the family tree. I remembered him telling me that back in the 1800s, the Finnamores had been a randy lot.

“I should get these to Jonas,” I said to Hercules.

He yawned and jumped down to the floor. It seemed the eye color of errant Finnamores didn’t interest him.

I looked up Jonas’s address. There was a flea market close to where he lived that would be wrapping up in about an hour. I was searching for some old maps for a display I had planned at the library, but so far I hadn’t found anything that would work. I could swing by the flea market and then drop Mike’s notes off to Jonas if he was around.

I called Jonas, crossing my fingers that he was home. He was. I explained about Keith finding the papers and bringing them to me. “I’m heading to the flea market. I can drop them off afterward. I won’t be that long.”