Sofie Kelly - Copycat Killing - A Magical Cats Mystery

“Going by yourself?” She was all innocent sweetness.

“Maybe,” I said. I knew where the conversation was headed.

For months, Maggie had been trying to play matchmaker between Marcus Gordon and me. Marcus was a police detective and we’d gotten off on the wrong foot the previous summer when he thought it was possible that I had killed conductor Gregor Easton, or at the very least been involved in some intimate hanky-panky with the man who was twice my age and a … well … pretentious creep.

But last winter Marcus had rescued me when I was left dazed, wandering through the woods in the bitter cold after an explosion. And we’d gotten closer since then; though not close enough to suit Maggie. She was indirectly responsible for our friend Roma’s relationship with hockey player Eddie Sweeney and it had just made her worse where Marcus and I were concerned. Maggie believed in happily ever after and she had no problem in giving it a nudge, or even a big shove.

“Meeting anyone out there?” she continued.

“Don’t start,” I warned.

“Start what?”

Ruby grinned. She’d heard us do this before.

“Start on Marcus and I getting together. We’re friends. That’s all. He’s not my type. He doesn’t—”

“—even have a library card,” Maggie finished. “Is that the only thing you can find wrong with him?”

Okay, so I had probably used that excuse too much. I thought about Marcus for a moment. He was tall, with dark wavy hair, blue eyes and a gorgeous smile that he didn’t use nearly often enough. He was kind to animals, children and old people.

I caught myself and shook my head. I was supposed to be thinking of what was wrong with the man, not what was right. Maggie was smirking at me like she could read my mind. I stuck out my tongue at her.

“So how about breakfast?” Ruby said.

Maggie nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

“I have to get out to Wisteria Hill,” I said. “But I’ll drive you two over and get a cup of coffee to go.”

Maggie picked up the length of pipe again.

“Are you taking that with you?” I asked.

“Would it look stupid?”

“Well, not exactly stupid,” I said. “More like you’re about to start looting and pillaging.”

“You know, I really do believe every creature has a right to exist. It’s just”—she blew out a breath—“I don’t want some of them for roommates.” She set the piece of piping on the floor against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

Maggie locked the building, and then we piled in the truck and headed for Eric’s Place farther up Old Main Street. Even though I knew the town pretty well now, I still found the whole Main Street versus Old Main Street thing kind of confusing.

“Is it ever going to stop raining?” Ruby asked, looking skyward as we got closer to the café.

“There’s more rain in the forecast,” I said.

“It could be wrong.”

“It could.” I rubbed my left wrist. It had been aching for days and not just from slinging sandbags. I’d broken it the previous summer and now it was pretty good at predicting bad weather. Maybe the fact that it didn’t hurt so much today meant the forecast was wrong.

The restaurant was warm and dry and smelled like coffee instead of wet feet. Eric’s wife, Susan, worked for me at the library and I knew he had a heavy-duty sump pump in the basement.

I crossed to the counter. “Hi Kathleen,” Eric said with a smile. “What can I get you?”

“Just a large coffee to go, thanks,” I said.

He reached for a take-out cup, poured the coffee and added just the right amount of cream and sugar. He noticed Maggie’s overly large bandage on my left thumb as he passed over the cup. “That doesn’t look good,” he said. “How did you do that?”

“She was scooping up dead things with a shovel and throwing them at me,” Maggie said, behind me.

“New hobby?” Eric asked dryly.

“More like side job,” Ruby said with a grin. “Rodent wrangler.”

Eric nodded. “Yeah, the rain’s driving them out of their hiding places.”

Maggie put her hands over her ears and started humming off-key.

“Maggie has a hear no rodents, see no rodents, speak of no rodents policy,” I said.

“We tried that with the twins when they went through their streaker stage,” Eric said.

I handed him the money for my coffee.

“How’d that work?” Ruby asked.

“About as well as you’d expect. They may be four, but they have the tactical skills of Hannibal getting those elephants across the Alps. They always managed to be stark naked at the most embarrassing moment.”

He handed me my change. “Thanks, Eric,” I said.

Maggie dropped her hands. “Have fun with…the cats,” she said. Her lips were twitching as she tried not to smirk at me.

“Nothing’s going to happen out there,” I hissed at her. “Nothing.”

Of course I was wrong.

2

I made it out to Wisteria Hill before Marcus did. I drank the last of my coffee, got out of the truck and stretched, bracing my hands against the left front fender.

I had felt kind of strange about accepting the truck from Old Harry just for saving a few papers. Then a couple of weeks ago his son, Harry Junior, aka Young Harry, had come into the library to tell me they’d found the old man’s daughter. I think I’d been almost as happy as he was.

I heard Marcus before I saw his SUV. The runoff from all the rain had left the driveway looking more like two trenches in the gravel and mud, and he eased his way slowly around the last curve. I patted the side of the old, brown Ford, grateful for its big, thick-treaded tires and good springs.

Marcus had brought two jugs of clean water and I had the food for the cats. “Hi,” he said with a smile as he got out of the car. “Can I really see a tiny bit of blue sky or is that just an optical illusion?”

I smiled back at him. “I’m not sure about the blue sky, but my wrist feels pretty good so it’s a possibility. I should tell you, though, the forecast I saw this morning was for more rain.”

“I have more faith in your wrist’s forecasting ability than I do in any weather report,” he said. We started up the path to the old carriage house where Wisteria Hill’s feral cat colony slept and ate. “Have you been downtown this morning?” he asked.

I nodded. “There’s still a lot of water everywhere. We did get everything moved up out of the store into the tai chi studio, but there’s at least four feet of water in the co-op basement, and I sort of threw a rat at Maggie.”

“You were aiming at somebody else?” he asked, completely straight-faced.

“No,” I said. “It was floating in the basement. I thought it was dead.”

Marcus stopped and looked over his shoulder at me. “You thought it was dead? So you picked up a live rat and threw it at Maggie?”

“No…well…sort of.” I could feel my face getting red. “It was more like I dropped it on her.”

He was looking at me with what I thought of as his policeman look, basically no expression at all, barely even a blink. Then a lock of his dark, wavy hair fell into his eyes and broke his concentration.

“There was more to it than that.”

He turned and started up the path again. “I’m listening.”

I explained about scooping up the rat with the snow shovel, how it accidentally landed on Maggie’s foot and then came to life when I flung it out onto the sidewalk. I left out the part about it whizzing by Ruby’s head.

Marcus stopped in front of the side door to the old building. “That was littering,” he said, pulling the wooden door open. The wood had swollen with all the rain and it would come open only about halfway.