Kelly, Sofie - Sleight of Paw

“You two are friends?” I asked. I glanced over at Maggie. She dipped her head in Justin’s direction and raised her eyebrows, code for Do you need rescuing? I gave a slight head shake.

He shifted on the stool again, pulling it a bit closer to me. His foot was tapping to some rhythm only he could hear. “We go way back,” he said. “We used to hang out together.” He laughed. “We got into a fair amount of trouble together.”

“Eric?” I said. That didn’t quite fit with the man I knew.

“Oh, yeah,” Justin said. “Kids I work with? Kids I want the camp for? I used to be one of them. I drank; I used. There’s a big chunk of time when I wasn’t straight for even an hour.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, although I was starting to see the reason for his intensity. “I was shoplifting,” he continued, “swiping stuff out of cars. You know that straight stretch of highway just outside of town, headed for Minneapolis?”

“I do.”

“Raced out there more times than I can count or remember. Pretty much every time with Eric riding shotgun.” He gave me a wry smile, almost like he had a bit of pride for the memory

“So, what changed?” I asked, leaning my elbow on the table and propping my head on my hand. “I take it you’re not still doing that anymore.”

He laughed, “Nope. Sober and straight for seven years now. No dope, no booze, although I do admit to still having a bit of a lead foot on the highway. What happened is I got arrested. I got sent to juvie.”

“Where you’ve learned . . . ?” I prompted.

“How to hot-wire a car and pretty much nothing else.” He fingered the silver skull bracelet on his right arm. “It took a couple more trips there and a couple of kick-ass counselors to turn me around. It’s why the camp’s so damned important. Some of us need a kick in the ass and a lot of help to get it all together.”

He drummed his fingers on the edge of the stool between his legs. “Eric, on the other hand, he got it together by himself. With Agatha Shepherd’s help.” He laughed. “Of course, it probably helped that I wasn’t around.”

His face got serious. “When I drank I was just mostly looking to have a good time, you know, but Eric, he was”—he hesitated—“destructive.”

I was still having a problem picturing Eric as the young man Justin was describing.

“He had blackouts when he had no idea what he’d been doing.” Justin looked at me. “It’s good that he doesn’t drink anymore. Period. I just don’t want what’s happened to mess up everything he’s worked so hard for.”

I thought about seeing Eric at the rink and how my first thought was that he looked like he’d just come off a binge. “Are you saying that something like Agatha’s death could start Eric drinking again?”

“No,” he said. “I mean, she was one of the few people who stuck by him when he was still drinking, so her death had to hit him hard. But start drinking? No.”

He fiddled with one of the silver skulls again. “Stress is not good for an alcoholic. There’s the impulse to have a couple, you know, just to take the edge off.” He exhaled slowly and noisily. “But that’s not where Eric is anymore. He has a wife and kids.” Justin traced the edge of the stool’s curved seat with his finger. “And he’d never do something and let Ruby or anyone else take the blame.”

Abruptly he got to his feet. “Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I talk too much. I need to go see how Ruby’s doing. Excuse me.”

I watched him walk over to where Ruby seemed to be saying good-bye to Peter and slide his arm around her waist. I slipped off my own stool and went to Maggie. “I have to get back to the library.”

“Did Justin talk your ear off?” she asked.

“No, I, uh, learned a couple of things,” I said.

“Anything you want to share?”

“Later,” I said.

Maggie studied my face, but all she said was, “All right.”

I grabbed my coat and left. As I walked, I thought about what Justin had said, his insistence that Eric wouldn’t drink. I thought about Eric’s appearance, his evasiveness, and Susan’s out-of-character excuses. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he had been drinking. And now I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I didn’t know better.

I stopped at the corner. Peter was farther ahead of me, already on the other side of the intersection. All at once I was frozen in place, watching him making his way down the sidewalk in a black woolen Winterfest hat . . . and Ellis Slater’s aviator jacket.

20

Ihad to remind my feet to move, and by the time I was across the street I’d lost sight of Peter. I must be wrong, I told myself as I trudged back to the library. He’d been wearing a jacket that looked like the one I’d seen in Agatha’s house, not the actual jacket. Peter wouldn’t take something that didn’t belong to him. He was a lawyer, after all, and a pretty decent guy, from what I’d heard.

I was glad to get home at the end of the day. I heated the last of the stew and ate with Owen for company. Hercules appeared long enough to let me scratch behind his ears and then he wandered off.

I thought about Hercules’ little forays into Ruby’s apartment and Eric’s office.

“You know what the problem is?” I said to Owen. The cat leaned forward as though he really wanted to hear the answer to the question. “Too many secrets. I’m starting to see connections where there aren’t any. I saw Peter Lundgren ahead of me on the street and I actually thought he was wearing a jacket I’d seen in Agatha’s house and that had belonged to her brother.”

There were a couple of pieces of meat and a bit of carrot left in my dish. I set it on the floor for Owen. “Don’t tell Roma,” I said. Admittedly, I was telling him to keep a secret when I had been complaining about other people doing it.

I checked the clock. I had about a half hour before Harry came to get me. What was the old man going to tell me? Anything? The more roadblocks I ran into, the more curious I got, and the more convinced I became that the envelope’s contents held the key to Agatha’s death.

“Ruby knows what Agatha was carrying around with her.” Owen had finished eating and started to clean himself up. “And Eric is mixed up in this in some way, too. Why won’t anyone tell me what’s in the damn thing? What’s the big secret?”

It didn’t make any sense. What were Harrison Taylor, Eric and Ruby all willing to risk being implicated in a crime for? Had Agatha done something illegal? Had someone else? It wasn’t money. I was fairly certain of that. Harry wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, promise or no promise, over money. For him it was personal, emotional. Probably for Eric and Ruby, too. The one thing they had in common was they all loved Agatha.

I was going to have to talk to Eric again. I kept trying to push the thought that he’d been drinking out of my mind. But it wouldn’t quite go. Justin said Eric had been destructive when he drank and sometimes he blacked out.

I look down at Owen and gave voice to the thought that had been twisting in my head and in my stomach since I’d left Maggie’s studio. “Eric did not get drunk, have a blackout and run over Agatha. Did he?”

Hearing the words made me see how preposterous the idea was. Owen didn’t even dignify the question with so much as a twitch. I didn’t have any real proof that Eric had been drinking, let alone that he had been drunk. And if he had fallen off the wagon and had a blackout I didn’t believe that meant he’d turned into someone else. Even if there’d been some kind of accident, I refused to believe Eric could drink enough to turn into the kind of person who would just leave someone to die.