Софи Келли - Hooked On A Feline

“Thank you,” I said as we stepped inside.

I shut off the alarm and unlocked the second set of doors. Mary handed me my coffee. Then she flipped on the lights and pushed down the hood of her yellow slicker.

“It’s not fit for man nor beast,” she said, patting her hair.

I looked at her, thinking it must have been hard to keep her emotions in check when Roma and I were pressuring her to tell us Zorro’s real name. She’d known Mike forever.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Mary was patting the pockets of her raincoat, looking for her keys or her phone probably. “I don’t think you’re responsible for this weather, Kathleen,” she said without looking up.

“I didn’t mean that. I mean, I’m sorry Roma and I pushed you so hard yesterday.”

She did look up then. Something she saw in my expression made her shake her head. “Sometimes I think you can look right into people’s heads,” she said. “You figured it out, didn’t you?”

“That Mike was Zorro? Yeah, I did.”

“How the hell did you do that?”

I explained about the tattoos he and Johnny had gotten. “Roma sent me some photos from the show. It was really just chance that I spotted it.” Chance and a small tuxedo cat, to be specific.

She laughed. “Shows how much attention I paid. I didn’t even notice he had a tattoo.”

We headed for the stairs. “It really was a last-minute thing, Mike getting up there as Zorro?” I said.

“Very last minute,” Mary said. “We needed to get people’s attention and I knew Mike was comfortable onstage.”

“How did you come up with the costume?”

She laughed. “A little ingenuity and a lot of luck. The pants were his bike pants. His gym bag was in the backseat of his car. We made the mask out of one of my scarves.”

I unlocked my office door and dropped my things on my desk chair, stopping to hang up my damp jacket. Mary waited in the doorway.

“What about the cape?” I asked.

“Remember I said it took a lot of luck? The cape was one of those lucky things. Sandra made it for a vampire routine and then decided the rest of the costume probably crossed a line. The hat was something we had in our costume stash and the fencing foil was another piece of luck. It came from the high school. It was used in a play they put on last year. One of the history teachers drove down and grabbed it for me. She’s a cat person.”

“How did you manage to keep Mike’s identity a secret?”

We went down to the staff room and I started the coffee while Mary hung up her things.

“We were using the office as a dressing room, but there was a small bathroom back there as well for staff. I basically waited until no one was looking and pushed Mike inside.” She made a shoving motion with one hand.

“I thought if we could keep Zorro’s identity a secret that would keep people talking and keep the fund-raiser on people’s minds. Mike was game.” Mary pressed her lips together for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life as when I was trying to get all of his hair under that scarf. I knew if people saw those curls, the jig would be up.” She looked at me. “The reason we kept the secret for so long was that Mike wanted to bring back Zorro for another fund-raiser—ironically just the thing Roma wants to do. In fact, he’d been getting together with Sandra on Wednesday nights to work on a new routine.”

Wednesday nights. Now I knew what Mike had been doing. Now I understood why he’d kept it a secret. I also knew that secret had had nothing to do with his death.

I glanced at Mary, who seemed lost in thought. “I don’t think he’d mind you telling Roma,” I said as I got the cream out of the small refrigerator.

Mary nodded. “It was such a good night. To tell the truth, I was looking forward to doing it all over again.”

She swallowed a couple of times and I had to blink away the unexpected sting of tears.

“I will call Roma,” Mary said, her voice suddenly hoarse. “Make sure you tell that man of yours that someone needs to be held accountable.”

Despite the rain—or maybe because of it—it was a very busy day at the library. It was close to two o’clock before I got to have lunch and I got only half my sandwich eaten before Abigail came up to tell me that the door to the loading dock was leaking. I called Harry, who was able to do a temporary fix that stopped the water coming in.

“It might— might —be possible to order a new seal for that door,” he said. “Otherwise you’re going to need a new door. Water’s coming in now. It’s going to be a lot worse this winter.” He made a face. “Let’s hope this is the last bit of substandard work from Will Redfern.”

Will Redfern was the original contractor for the library renovations. He and his crew had done some quality work and some that was outright shoddy. Harry and Oren Kenyon—with some help from Harry’s brother, Larry, who was an electrician—had fixed most of the problems. Luckily there had been nothing major until now. A new loading dock door wasn’t in the budget.

“Let me see if I can track down a door seal,” Harry said. “We might get lucky.”

“Fingers crossed,” I said.

When I got home, I found both cats in the living room. Owen was on the chair by the phone and Hercules sat on the footstool next to the calendar Ruby had given me. It had somehow been flipped open to April and it almost seemed like they had been admiring themselves.

“Get down,” I said.

Hercules looked at Owen. Owen looked at me. Neither one of them moved. I didn’t have time to argue with them. I started for the stairs.

“I could have gotten some nice, well-behaved goldfish,” I said. “Or a cute little hamster.” We’d had this one-sided conversation before.

I looked back at them in time to see Owen exchange a look with his brother. I’m pretty sure he was rolling his eyes.

Since I’d had just part of a sandwich for lunch, I was hungry. The refrigerator and cupboards weren’t quite in the realm of Old Mother Hubbard, but they were close. I found an onion, a rubbery carrot and two suspiciously soft tomatoes. I cut them all up and added half of one of the zucchini Roma had given me. I stir-fried the veggies with hot sauce and added a fried egg on top. It was filling and healthy, but I needed to get groceries soon.

It was still raining, so I drove down to tai chi and was lucky to snag a parking spot not too far away. I opened my umbrella and ran through the puddles to the studio door, where I shook the umbrella before I darted inside.

Ruby was sitting on the bench at the top of the stairs, changing her shoes.

“The calendar definitely gets two paws of approval,” I said. I told her how I’d found Owen and Hercules when I got home. “I think fame is going to their heads.”

Ruby smiled. “ ‘In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.’ ”

I smiled. “Terry Pratchett.”

Maggie worked us hard and I was sticky and warm by the time we finished the whole form at the end of the class. And I was hungry again. I drove over to Eric’s for something to eat, promising myself I’d make a grocery list in the morning.

I ordered a turkey sandwich to go, which I knew Eric would make with Swiss cheese, tomato, sunflower sprouts and cranberry mayo. Because it was raining, I also got a cup of coffee.

“It should be only about five minutes,” Claire said.

I sat on a stool at the counter. My cell phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I pulled it out and checked the screen. It was Roma.

“I need a favor,” she said.

“Name it,” I said.

“Could you and Marcus feed the Wisteria Hill cats in the morning?”