Kelly, Sofie - Sleight of Paw

He turned back to the window. He liked winter as long as he was only looking at it. It was almost as cold in the porch as it was outside, but I knew Hercules had his own way to get in the house again when he got cold.

I locked the door and headed around the house to the driveway. Marcus was just getting out of his SUV. He wore a blue parka with the hood thrown back, black snow pants, and lace-up boots. His cheeks were red from the cold. Okay, so Maggie was right. He was cute. His blue eyes flicked over my old brown quilted coat and insulated pants, and for a second I had the ridiculously childish urge to strike a model’s pose, hands on my hips and feet apart, with a vaguely haughty look on my face. But I didn’t. I kept the fantasy to myself and smiled at him instead.

“Good morning.”

He smiled back. “Good morning.”

I walked around the front of the car and got in the passenger’s side. As I fastened my seat belt, I took the opportunity to quickly check out the SUV. It was clean. Not no-cardboard-coffee-cups-on-the-floor-or-junk-on-the-backseat clean. It was how-the-heck-can-he-be-so-clean-in-the-middle-of-winter? clean. The only thing on the backseat was an old gray blanket. The dashboard in front of me was shining—no smudges, no dust, no fingerprints. There was no mug of half-finished coffee in the cup holder.

I clicked my seat belt into place and then set the thermos at my feet. The floor mats looked like they’d just come from the dealer. Okay, so it seemed as though Marcus Gordon was a bit of a clean freak, at least with respect to his personal vehicle. Being a fairly tidy person myself, I couldn’t exactly see that as a flaw. I wasn’t going to tell Maggie about this. She’d see the clean-car thing as another karmic sign that Marcus and I were soul mates.

He backed out of the driveway and started up the hill. The overnight snow had been plowed and there was sand on the road. As we drove past the road to Oren’s place, I made a mental note to talk to him about which pieces of his father’s artwork I wanted to display in the library for the centennial celebrations. I still had to figure out how to get the massive metal sculptures from his workshop to the library. I was hoping Harry Taylor would have some ideas on that.

“You’re somewhere else,” Marcus said.

I turned from the window to look at him. “Excuse me?”

“You were thinking about something else,” he said, shooting me a quick glance.

“The library centennial.”

“End of May?” he asked, putting on his left turn signal to pull onto the road to Wisteria Hill.

“Close,” I said. “End of June. That’s the one hundredth anniversary of the original construction being completed.”

There was a break in the line of passing cars, and we pulled onto the road. The rear wheels spun for a second on an icy patch and then found traction.

“Are you staying?” Marcus asked.

I’d forgotten that the conversation could take some quick detours with him. I had the feeling sometimes that his mind was three steps ahead of everyone else’s. Thank goodness he didn’t drive the way he talked.

“I have another year on my contract.”

The car in front of us slowed and so did we. Marcus took the opportunity to look directly at me for a moment. “No, I meant are you going to stay beyond that, or are you going back to Boston when your contract is up?”

“I don’t know.” I adjusted the shoulder belt so it wasn’t pushing the hood of my coat against my neck.

That was the truth. I didn’t know if I wanted to stay in Mayville or even in Minnesota. I also didn’t know if I’d be offered the chance. There was always the possibility that the library board would smile politely, shake my hand, thank me for my service and send me on my way.

And did I want to stay? The decision to apply for the two-year job supervising the upgrade of the library and organizing its centennial had been an impulsive one. Probably the most impulsive choice of my life.

Except it wasn’t spontaneous; it was mostly running away, from Andrew—him marrying that waitress had pretty much ended our relationship—and from my wildly unpredictable family, who’d come to expect I’d always be the dependable, responsible one.

But I’d discovered that I liked it here, and I said so.

“You don’t miss Boston?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “I miss my family. I still have friends there.” I pulled my hat down over my ears. “But I have friends here, too. And I can’t exactly picture Owen or Hercules in an apartment in the city.”

I’d never be able to hide the cats’ little idiosyncrasies in an apartment. And Owen would go nuts if he couldn’t stalk around the yard like one of his genetically distant African cousins hunting a gazelle.

“They really won’t let anyone else touch them?” Marcus asked. Again, the conversation went off in a direction I wasn’t expecting.

I thought about Old Harry and Agatha. I didn’t have any explanation for how the boys reacted to them. “Mostly no,” I said.

“Do you think it’s because they came from Wisteria Hill, because they were feral?” He was watching the left side of the road for the two reflectors Harry had set into the ground to mark the long driveway into the old estate.

“I think that’s part of it,” I admitted. I did sometimes think Owen and Herc were the way they were because they’d come from Wisteria Hill. There were things about them I just couldn’t explain logically. And there was something about Wisteria Hill I couldn’t explain, either. Whenever I was out there I always felt as though all my senses were amped up on high alert.

Marcus put on his blinker and started up toward the house.

“Roma thinks they might not have been feral,” I said as we bumped up the long driveway. Harry had plowed and sanded, but the track was dirt and gravel and driving up it in the winter was a bit like being stuck in one of those vibrating machines that promises to shake away excess pounds.

We hit a ridge that ran the width of the driveway and my stomach rebounded like a rim shot off the edge of a basketball hoop. I grabbed the seat on either side of me.

“So someone might have left them out here?” Marcus said.

“Yes.” I didn’t add that if someone had left two tiny kittens at Wisteria Hill, they’d left them to die.

We bounced into a deep well in the frozen ground and the car lurched. “Sorry,” Marcus muttered.

“Is it just me or is this driveway getting worse?” I asked.

He gripped the steering wheel tightly as we bounced over and around the last turn. “It’s been a colder than usual winter, plus all that rain we had last fall made a mess of this.” He pulled into the space Harry had cleared for parking, shut off the SUV and turned to me. “How would you like to talk to Everett Henderson? Maybe he’d agree to have the driveway graded and leveled this spring.”

I pulled on my mittens and tugged the scarf a little tighter around my neck. “Sure,” I said. “What exactly needs to be done?”

“Wait. You’re serious?”

“You’re not?”

“I was being sarcastic.” A rosy flush spread across his cheeks.

“See? I missed that entirely,” I said, trying unsuccessfully not to smile as I got out of the SUV. That got me a smile in return that looked cute with his pink cheeks.

Marcus lifted the tailgate. He handed me a canvas bag with the cat food, dry because the wet froze a lot faster. He grabbed two jugs of water and slammed the hatch shut. Since December Roma had organized extra shifts to make sure the cats had fresh water.

We walked past the old house. It looked sadder and more neglected each time I came out. No one had lived in it for years. No Henderson since Everett’s mother. No one at all since the caretakers moved closer to their daughter a couple of years ago.