Wrong Side of the Paw Read online

  Most days, my inane conversation caught Eddie’s attention, slowing him enough for me to catch up. This time, if anything, he sped up and he sniffed the air and trotted ever closer to the truck.

  “Here kitty, kitty,” Leese called as she climbed down the bookmobile’s steps. “Come get a cat snack.” She rattled the cardboard can of annoyingly expensive moist morsels, but Eddie trotted onward.

  “That your truck?” I asked.

  “For now.” She made a face. “It’s a long story.”

  Eddie, still ignoring the siren call of cat treats, jumped onto the truck’s rear bumper, then up onto the edge of the tailgate. I slowed from my half run and started planning how best to snag my cat. Cornering Eddie was a lot easier than capturing him. “I think he wants to go for a ride.”

  “I’ll give it to him with my blessing as soon as my SUV is fixed.”

  Eddie’s ears swiveled. Laughing, I edged a few feet closer to the truck. “I think he’s rejecting your generous offer.”

  “He’s a cat of good taste.” Leese gave the treat can another shake. “That thing’s a piece of junk.”

  “Mrrr,” Eddie said, then jumped off the tailgate and into the truck’s bed.

  Reaching the side of the truck, I stood on my tiptoes and peered in. All there was to see was a large tarp and a black-and-white cat walking over the top of it in an ungainly fashion.

  “Fred Astaire, you are not,” I told him. “Please don’t make me come in there after you.”

  “Mrrr,” he said, but his tone was different from the usual communicative chirp he gave. It was low and long and almost a growl. He started pawing at the edge of the heavy canvas and tried to poke his nose under it. Of course, he was standing on the edge, which made things difficult, but Eddie didn’t like to do things the easy way.

  I turned to look at Leese, who was now standing next to me. “What’s under your tarp?”

  “No idea,” she said shortly. “It’s not mine. Tarp or truck.”

  Two minutes earlier, she’d been ready to give away a truck she didn’t own? “I don’t—”

  “Mrrroooo!”

  I winced as Eddie’s howls penetrated my skull and sank deep into my brain.

  Enough was enough. I walked around to the truck’s back end and put one foot on the trailer hitch. Grabbing on to the tailgate, I climbed onto the back bumper, swung one foot over into the pickup’s bed and then the other.

  Eddie was howling for all he was worth and had managed to burrow his front half under the tarp. I crouched down and took a gentle hold of his back half. “Come on, pal. Let’s go, okay?”

  But when I stood, cat in hand, his claws were still extended and they’d snagged the tarp’s edge, yanking the canvas to one side and revealing what Eddie had been after.

  “Oh!” I stumbled backward. “Oh . . .”

  Because Eddie had uncovered a body. A dead body. Of a man. A man about sixty years old. With staring eyes of blue.

  I scrambled over the tailgate, holding a squirming Eddie close to my chest, and dropped to the ground, panting, not wanting to see any more.

  Leese was standing quiet and tall, her hands gripping the edge of the truck, her mouth working as if she was trying to say something. For a long moment, nothing came out, but when it did, her voice was a raw whisper.

  “It’s my dad.”

  Chapter 2

  Julia, who’d been standing in the bookmobile’s doorway watching the scene unfold, was the first to recover enough to call 911. After she’d told the dispatcher the circumstances, given our location, and received instructions that all of us should stay away from the truck, she hung up and took a long look at Leese.

  “You need to sit down,” she commanded, using her strongest stage voice. “Minnie, go inside and bring out the chair. We’ll sit Leese over there.”

  She was indicating a spot near the bookmobile’s front bumper, in the sun and out of the light breeze. It was also out of view of the truck, which was certainly intentional. Nicely done, I thought, and hurried to do her bidding. First, though, I put Eddie, who I’d been clutching so hard he was starting to squiggle something fierce, into his carrier.

  When I came out with the chair and put it on the sunny grass, Leese was speaking in short, awkward, and repeating sentences. “He can’t be dead, I just saw him last week. Why is he in the truck? I just saw him last week. Why is he in the truck? I don’t understand. He can’t be dead.”

  But she was biddable enough that it wasn’t any problem for us to maneuver her into the chair. Her ruddy face was a peculiar shade of pale and her hands, typically strong and sure, were shaking and searching for something to do. Once she was sitting, her hands gripped each other and didn’t let go.

  “Water,” I murmured.

  “I’ll get mine,” Julia said quickly. “You stay out here.”

  She vanished around the corner of the bookmobile, and I was glad she’d volunteered, because if I’d fetched the water, I would have had to see the truck, and then I’d remember those staring blue eyes, and—

  “Hard to believe it’ll be October the day after tomorrow,” I said. Talking about the weather was banal, but it was always there to talk about, and getting Leese to talk about anything had to be better than letting her thoughts circle around inside her head.

  Leese blinked. “What?”

  “The weather.” I sat cross-legged on the grass in front of her. “It’s so warm, it feels like early September.”

  She barked out a short noise that might have been a laugh. Probably not, but maybe. “You’re right. It is warm enough for early September.”

  “Do you think this means we’ll have a mild winter?”

  Weather discussions were easy and, if you encouraged them even the slightest bit, could fill hours of time. We didn’t require hours, but I did see a need to distract Leese from what lay across the parking lot for a little while.

  One of the downsides about living in a rural area was the time it could take for emergency vehicles to respond. Thanks to my boyfriend, Ash Wolverson, a deputy with the Tonedagana County Sheriff’s Office, I knew where the sheriff’s satellite offices and the local fire and EMS stations were located, which was why I knew it would take at least fifteen minutes for anyone to get to us. We were in the far northeast part of the county, the least populated part with the least amount of emergency services, and even law enforcement can drive only so fast.

  So Leese and I chatted about the weather and talked about the advantages of snow tires. I’d just started to edge into asking tentative questions about her father when an ambulance rolled up.

  We stood as two EMTs got out of the vehicle. The driver, a blond woman in her forties, glanced from Leese to me to the bookmobile and back to Leese. “We got a report of a—”

  “Over there,” I interrupted, not wanting to hear the words she was about to say. “In the bed of the truck.”

  They nodded and moved away, and as they were pulling back the tarp, a police car pulled into the parking lot and a deputy I didn’t know climbed out.

  After that, things moved quickly and, in retrospect, inevitably. Why I hadn’t put two and two together, I did not know, but it wasn’t until Leese was put in the back of the police car that I realized two things. One, that her father had been murdered, and two, that Leese was a prime suspect.

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Julia, as we watched the police car drive away. Leese had been quiet throughout the entire episode. Now crunched up into the backseat, she was staring straight ahead.

  I looked at the EMTs, who were sitting on their vehicle’s bumper. The sheriff’s deputy, a man I didn’t know, had asked them to wait to take the body away until a forensics detective arrived and cleared the scene. Judging from their slumped shoulders and crossed ankles, they were clearly bored. I thought about asking if they wanted to borrow some books, but figured
they probably shouldn’t be reading on the job.

  “There’s a lot about this I don’t understand,” Julia said. “But there is one thing I know for certain.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you’ll figure it out.”

  I shook my head. “This is beyond me.”

  Julia rolled her eyes dramatically enough so that, if we’d been in a theater, the people in the back rows could have seen it. “Leese is a friend. You know she didn’t kill her dad. And you won’t let her be arrested for something she didn’t do. Ergo, if the police don’t resolve this fast, you’ll jump in where no law enforcement officer would dare to tread and risk life and limb to save your friend.”

  I did my own eye roll, a very slow version. If I couldn’t match the quality, at least I could outdo her in quantity.

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” Julia said.

  But since she was essentially right, I couldn’t.

  I’d anticipated a night of fitful sleep, tossing and turning and starting awake in the middle of the night from haunted dreams of staring eyes and flashing police lights, but instead I slept like a rock from the moment my head hit the pillow to the moment my alarm went off.

  Though I wasn’t sure that sleeping so soundly after the shocking events of the previous afternoon said anything positive about my character, I was pleased to wake up well rested and practically perky.

  “What are you going to do today?” I asked Eddie, who was snuggled between my elbow and hip. “Hey, here’s an idea. How about if you help pack? This warm weather isn’t going to last much longer and we don’t have any real heat in here, remember?”

  “Mrr,” my cat said, and, without moving a muscle, wormed his way deeper into the covers.

  “Fine.” I slipped out from underneath the sheets. “Just don’t blame me if your favorite cat toys get left behind.”

  In my jammies and socks, I padded across the small bedroom and into the tiny bathroom. Everything was miniaturized because our current abode was a houseboat, the cutest little houseboat imaginable, and it was our home through the warm months.

  When the weather turned cold, I dragged my stack of cardboard boxes out of the storage locker that came with my boat slip rental at Uncle Chip’s Marina, packed, and hauled everything that I didn’t want to get covered with a winter’s worth of dust up to my aunt Frances’s boardinghouse.

  I wasn’t sure if I truly remembered my uncle Everett, the long-dead husband of Aunt Frances, or if I just thought I remembered him from looking at old family photos. My aunt had met him in college and it was soon after he died that she’d turned the Pixley family’s summer place into what it was now.

  More than once I’d been told there was an exact total of one traditional boardinghouse left in the world, the one being the place my aunt ran. I had no idea if that was accurate or not, but I did know that I loved its wide front porch, its pine-paneled living room with its fieldstone fireplace and shelves of jigsaw puzzles and board games, the massive kitchen, and the back screen porch that looked out onto a tree-filled backyard.

  When I told people about my unusual living arrangements, I typically saw furrowed brows and heard murmured concerns about building equity and establishing credit. I would say something about paying off college loans, which seemed to satisfy the questioners, but the truth was I loved the winters I spent with my aunt. We were more than relatives; we were friends.

  Then again, sometimes it was hard to believe that Aunt Frances and I were close blood relations. I was short; she was on the tall side. I had pale skin; she tanned easily. She was also amazingly skilled with her hands and was equally capable of building a six-panel door and of cooking a perfect lemon meringue pie. I much preferred ordering takeout over doing dishes, and still wasn’t exactly sure what a router did.

  But none of that seemed to matter, because we laughed at the same things and agreed on a basic fact of life—that worrying didn’t do much good. Aunt Frances was a lot better at not worrying than I was, but I was working on being more like her.

  Of course, not worrying was getting a little harder, since Aunt Frances had agreed to marry her across-the-street neighbor, the distinguished Otto Bingham. Not until next spring, she kept assuring me, but I saw no reason for them to wait and had started saying so. The stalling was starting to make me a bit nervous.

  “There’s no hurry,” Otto would say.

  “No?” I’d ask, arching my eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet.” After all, I was the one who’d originally shoved Otto in my aunt’s direction and I felt a degree of responsibility for the pending nuptials.

  “We have a few details to work out,” my aunt would say vaguely.

  “Like what?” I’d demand. “Why waste time? Just go down to the magistrate and get it done. Why are you waiting?”

  My aunt would look at Otto, Otto would look at her, and they’d exchange one of those happy-couple smiles. Then they would determinedly change the subject and I’d be given the choice of being an incredible pest or letting the subject drop.

  “I should start being a pest,” I told Eddie. Now showered and dressed, I was rubbing my freakishly curly hair dry with a towel. Aiming a hair dryer at my head would create a frizzy mess that could only be solved by a ponytail and a hat. “I bet I could be a really good one. After all, I’ve been getting lessons from you for a year and a half now.”

  Eddie, who was on the bed in the exact same position he’d been in fifteen minutes earlier, opened one eye, then shut it.

  “What was that?” I asked, doing my best to make the bed with him still flopped on top of it. “Did you say something?”

  He pulled himself into a tight ball, rolled over, and said absolutely nothing.

  I laughed and kissed the top of his head. “Have a good day, my friend. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

  “Mrr.”

  • • •

  After a quick breakfast of cold cereal and orange juice—which hit my self-imposed limit of morning dishes to wash at three, because spoons counted as dishes to me—I shouldered my backpack and let myself out into the morning.

  The town of Chilson rose from the shoreline of Janay Lake on a shallow slope at first, then up steeper and steeper. The houses perched on the top of the hill had amazing views and property tax bills to match.

  Uncle Chip’s, the marina where I moored my boat at a cut rate in exchange for updating their budget projections, was on the east side of town, the side where normal people with normal jobs could still find affordable homes to buy.

  The west side was massive houses and mansionlike lakefront cottages, a mix of new money and old money left over from the years that steamers running up from Chicago stopped at the natural harbor created by the entrance of Janay Lake into Lake Michigan.

  On bookmobile days, I always drove the mile from the marina to the library, since lugging Eddie and our lunches that far would have been too hard on both me and my friendly feline. The bookmobile’s maiden voyage had included a stowaway Eddie, who’d quickly become an integral part of the operations. If I didn’t bring him along on every trip, there would be innumerable unhappy patrons, something that was best to avoid. On library days, however, unless the weather was horrific, I walked. This hadn’t been a running morning for the Ash and Minnie team, so the walk to work and back would likely be my only exercise.

  The bizarre warmness of the last few days was still holding and I barely needed the nylon shell jacket I’d tossed on over my library clothes of slacks, dressy T-shirt, and loose blazer. This time of year the sun came up just before eight o’clock, and if I timed things right, I’d see the sun rise above the horizon as I entered the library.

  As I walked briskly off the dock and headed up the sidewalk and toward downtown, I glanced at the house closest to the marina. When I’d moved to Chilson, it had been a ramshackle mess, a hundred-year-old family cottage long s
ince chopped up into apartments. For decades it had been given about as much tender loving care as you’d expect from an absentee owner who seemed to care primarily about getting the rents on time.

  Rafe Niswander, a friend of mine, had bought the place about four years ago. The whys of that purchase still had the coffee-drinking geezers at the local diner scratching their heads every morning, but there was no denying that Rafe was doing a fantastic job of renovation.

  From top to bottom and stem to stern he’d redesigned, rewired, and replumbed. He’d fabricated crown molding to match the original, haunted building salvage stores, and researched period colors. And then he’d stare at whatever he’d done, declare it unworthy, and rip half of it out.

  He’d managed to wangle an occupancy permit out of the county’s building official, but no sane person would want to live in a house that had milk crates for kitchen cabinets and a persistent drywall dust issue. None of this, however, seemed to bother Rafe. If a casual observer asked how he could live in a permanent construction zone, he would shrug, start whistling the Seven Dwarfs’ “Heigh-Ho” song, and get back to work.

  When the project was done, it would be a showpiece, but the diner geezers were laying long odds on any completion date within the next five years.

  Yesterday I’d heard the buzz of a floor sander when I’d come home and had stopped by to tell Rafe what had happened on the bookmobile and to remind him to wear his dust mask, a reminder I was sure he’d ignored. This morning he must have left early for his job as principal of the middle school, because the house was dark. I shied away from imagining the dust he’d created the night before and headed up the hill.

  Ahead of me lay a downtown that edged into quaintness but thankfully stayed on the side of reality. The home-grown blend of old and new, brick and wood, stylish and traditional, was part of the charm of Chilson and I thought, as I almost always did while walking to work, that I was the luckiest person alive.

  I unlocked the library’s side door just as the sun shot over the horizon, and let myself in.