Pouncing on Murder Page 3

  Now Aunt Frances rearranged her hold on the empty box. “I make enough money from teaching during the school year,” she said. “I don’t have to take in boarders if I don’t want to. And there are so many things I don’t have time to do in the summer. I can’t remember the last time I went to Mackinac Island, let alone Pictured Rocks.”

  Oh-ho! I grinned, then wiped it from my face before my aunt could see. This was an Otto-induced change, I was certain. And while it might be the end of an era—children who were products of some of my aunt’s earliest matches were traveling north with their own children—it was always better to leave a party while it was hopping.

  “Well,” I said, “I hope you’re not thinking I’m going to take on your boarders.”

  My aunt snorted. “With your cooking skills? They’d make their regrets and abandon you within a week.”

  “Really?” I frowned. “You think they’d last that long?”

  “Only if you get two different kinds of cold cereal.”

  She dropped the box on my bed, gave Eddie a fast pet, and scampered out before I could find a rubber band to shoot at her.

  • • •

  I stopped by the marina the next day after work to make sure Chris would have my houseboat set up for me to start cleaning that weekend.

  “Hey, Mini Cooper,” he said lazily. “What’s new with you?”

  Since his uncle Chip, the marina’s owner, was almost seventy, Chris was probably somewhere in his forties, but if you went by his speech patterns, you’d think he was twenty. And though the marina was always spick-and-span and shipshape, I rarely saw Chris lifting anything heavier than a twelve-ounce can of beer.

  My best friend, Kristen, was sure that he hired elves to do the real work, and I was starting to think she was right. Another of my good friends, Rafe Niswander, said Chris was one of the last of a dying breed of Up North men and that we should encourage him in all ways. Of course, Rafe and Chris were also friends, so I had a good idea of what kind of encouragement he meant—the kind that came in a six-pack.

  How Rafe and Chris had become friends, I really didn’t know. They had to be a decade apart in age, and in spite of Rafe’s summery, laid-back attitude, he had a top-notch work ethic and was the best middle school principal Chilson had seen in years. When Rafe wasn’t being the principal and wasn’t wasting his time lounging in the marina’s office, he was renovating a mess of a house that was next door to the marina. He was also taking his own sweet time about it. He kept saying he wanted it to be perfect and ignored me when I kept telling him that perfection was an unattainable goal.

  “Hey yourself, Chris,” I said. “My aunt was making fun of my cooking skills, can you believe it?”

  He grinned. “Sure can. Good thing you’re not running the boardinghouse, eh?”

  “True fact. I’d run it into the ground inside of a week if I took over.”

  “Frances Pixley is giving up the boardinghouse?” Chris pushed back his Detroit Tigers baseball cap and stared at me.

  From such conversations, rumors are born. “This is a purely theoretical discussion,” I said. “Aunt Frances can’t understand that I’m happy living on cold cereal for breakfast all summer long.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.” His feet went back up onto the counter. “Especially if it’s Frosted Flakes.”

  I squinted at him. “I always figured you for a Wheaties kind of guy.”

  “Too healthy.” He took a long swig from a can of soda, then said, “I got some news. You’re getting a new right-hand neighbor this year.”

  “Gunnar getting a slip out on the point?”

  Why the wealthy Gunnar Olson had ever rented a boat slip at Uncle Chip’s had always been a mystery to the regular marina renters. His massive boat dwarfed all the others in both size and price, and his flagrantly expensive lifestyle fit in more with the folks at the west end of Chilson.

  “Other way around.” Chris creaked back in his ancient canvas director’s chair. “He’s getting a divorce, and to pay off his wife he had to sell his boat.”

  “Oh.” A year ago the news would have made me smile. I would have felt bad about it later, but I would have smirked a little and thought it couldn’t happen to a nicer human being.

  Late last summer, however, the famously bad-tempered man had done me a favor out of the blue. It had made me look differently at a guy who, previously, had seemed to go out of his way to make his nearest neighbor—me—miserable. After that incident, he’d returned to his annoying “I’m the only one who matters” attitude, but I got to carry the knowledge that underneath the crusty exterior he did, in fact, care about things other than keeping his boat shiny and his drinks cold.

  I hoped that Gunnar and his soon-to-be ex-wife could make it through without too much anguish. “That’s too bad,” I said sincerely, earning a pair of raised eyebrows from Chris. Then a thought struck me. “Um, if Gunnar’s not coming back, what’s going to happen to my slip fee?”

  My ability to afford marina space and still eat out on occasion was due to the fact that no one else wanted the slip next to Gunnar. There was no way that my budget could easily absorb the full cost of a slip rental.

  I ran through some fast monetary calculations. If I bought the store-brand cold cereal, purchased Eddie’s food in bulk, stayed away from Cookie Tom’s, tossed out every single take-out menu in my possession, and slashed my book-buying budget . . . no, it still wouldn’t work. I sighed and looked up at Chris.

  Who was grinning.

  “Ah, don’t worry about it,” he said. “What Uncle Chip doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  Relief and guilt washed through me in equal measures. “Chris, I can’t let you do that. Besides, what if your uncle Chip comes up North this summer? You know I can’t tell a lie for beans.”

  Chris nodded. “You’re the worst liar ever except for the dog I had when I was a kid. That mutt would look guilty if he so much as looked at the couch.”

  Being compared to a dog wasn’t exactly flattering, but I supposed it could have been worse. Somehow.

  “Tell you what,” Chris said. “Let’s see what the new guy is like. He may be worse than old Gunnar was.”

  Possible, but not probable. “What if he’s nice? What if he’s friendly and holds the best Friday night parties ever and having the slip next to his would be a bonus and not a misery?”

  “Huh.” Chris rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “Let me think on that.”

  I looked about the office. A calendar from 1996 was tacked to the far wall. “I could help around here. Do a little cleaning. Paint.”

  A horrified expression crowded Chris’s weathered face. “Don’t you dare. It’s taken me years to get the place looking this good. You git before you get any more ideas. Out of here!” He shooed me away.

  “Are you going to pull my boat out for me this weekend?”

  “If you promise to stick to cleaning to that little tub, yeah, absolutely. Just keep your bleach and mops away from here.”

  “Promise,” I said, laughing, and we did a mutual halfway-across-the-room high five to seal the deal.

  • • •

  The next few days, I spent all my free time down at the marina, getting the houseboat ready for moving into. Eddie had been giving me the cold shoulder for not giving him enough attention, so on Thursday, out on the bookmobile, I wasn’t surprised to hear Julia ask in a puzzled tone, “What is your cat doing?”

  I was kneeling on the floor, trying to stuff more returned books into a milk crate than the milk crate wanted to allow, so I happily gave up on the task and looked up. Eddie was lying on the bookmobile’s dashboard and managing to take up the entire length of it. His front legs were stretched out Superman-style, his face was pressed against the dash, his back legs were behind him, and his tail appeared twice as long as it did most days.

  “Dusting?” I suggested.

  Julia lifted one eyebrow. “Wouldn’t he be actually moving if he was dusting?”

  She h
ad a good point. I stood and studied my cat. If the day had been sunny, I might have understood Eddie’s wish to soak up the sunshine with all possible body parts, but it was—once again—cloudy, windy, and wet.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve never seen him up there like that.” Which was odd, because we’d found Eddie in every other possible location on the bookmobile, and that included the top shelves. “Maybe he just wanted to see if he fit.”

  We stood side by side, watching Eddie not move. I had the sudden and scary thought that he might have had a kitty heart attack while I wasn’t paying attention, but as soon as I had the thought he opened his eyes and picked up his head a quarter of an inch.

  “Mrr,” he said.

  Julia sighed. “If only we understood cat.”

  “Eddie-speak is likely a whole different dialect,” I said, watching Eddie’s head drop back to the dashboard. “I’m pretty sure he’s his own species.” I was about to tell her that I’d considering applying to the science folks to get the name Felis eddicus established before someone else stole it away, when the back door was flung open and someone pounded up the steps.

  “Oh, Minnie,” Phyllis Chambers said, panting. “Have you heard?”

  She reached out to grip my hands, her skin so cold to the touch that I almost flinched. Phyllis was another downstate transplant. She’d moved north from a state government job in Lansing last summer and, in spite of the long winter, she was loving the northern life.

  “Heard what?” I asked.

  “Oh, dear.” Phyllis squeezed my hands, released them, and rubbed her face. Her short hair, a thick and glorious white, was in its normal disarray. She ran her fingers through it, but everything sprang back to where it had been before she made the effort. “Oh, dear. I hate to be the one to bring you bad tidings, but it’s Henry Gill.”

  Julia and I exchanged a quick glance. “What’s wrong with Henry?” I asked. “He was fine last week.”

  “I’m so sorry, Minnie,” Phyllis said. “But Henry’s dead.”

  • • •

  That night, Aunt Frances was out with Otto at a wine tasting, so it was just Eddie and me on the couch in front of the fieldstone fireplace. I could have started a fire, and I could have popped a big bowl of popcorn, but instead I stared into space.

  “Did you hear what Phyllis said about Henry?” I asked softly. Eddie had been mostly asleep the entire stop, so I wasn’t sure what he’d heard. “A tree fell on him.”

  I shivered, hoping he hadn’t suffered. Henry hadn’t been the easiest person in the world to like, but part of my job was to learn about my patrons and bring them . . . well, if not happiness through books, at least something that would lighten whatever load they were carrying, because we were all carrying burdens of some kind.

  What Henry’s load had been, though, I didn’t know. The only personal things I knew about him were his book choices, that he was a widower, and that none of his children lived in the state. Also that he tended to avoid conversation, most often preferring grunting and shaking his head whenever those could pass as communication.

  I sighed, thinking about the exquisite maple syrup that Henry had given Julia and me the last time he was on the bookmobile. “Phyllis said he’d been out at his sugar shack.” I put my hand on Eddie’s warm back to feel his quiet reverberations. “He’d finished boiling sap and was cleaning up.”

  Last year I’d ventured out to a state park to watch a maple syrup cooking demonstration. Add maple sap to a large pan over a fire, boil, add more sap, boil. Add more firewood, add more sap. Repeat until the liquid turned into maple syrup, which was when it reached just above two hundred and nineteen degrees.

  I’d happened to mention my park trip to Henry, and over the next few months, he’d dribbled out a lot of maple syrup–making information. For example, I now knew the large commercial operations had complicated systems of tubes that ran from the trees to large storage vats and fancy machines that processed the sap into syrup. I knew that Henry was old-school—no surprise there—and hauled his sap from the trees in buckets. I also knew that he cooked his sap in a massive and ancient pan that he’d inherited from his father, and I knew that he sorted his firewood by age and that he considered firewood stacking to be a fine art.

  “Poor Henry,” I whispered, pulling Eddie close to my chest and hugging him tight. For a change, instead of struggling to get away, my cat let me snuggle him close.

  And never stopped purring.

  • • •

  The next day, I risked life and limb by venturing into the restaurant owned and run by my best friend. Kristen Jurek was, physically, my complete opposite. Tall, where I was efficient. Blond and straight hair to my black and curly. She also had the easy grace of the natural athlete, while I had to practice the simplest activity over and over again before I got the hang of it, and she was so used to the admiring stares of men that she didn’t even notice them. If a man stared at me, my first reaction was to wonder what food was stuck in my teeth.

  I banged on the back door of the Three Seasons, using the same triple-knock pattern I’d used since we met, the summer we were twelve. We’d encountered each other on Chilson’s city beach and, over cones of mint chocolate chip ice cream, had started a friendship that had endured time, distance, and even living in the same town seven months out of the year. Kristen closed down her restaurant just before winter—hence the restaurant’s name—and spent the snowy months in Key West, tending bar on the weekends and doing as little as possible during the week.

  She’d recently returned to Chilson and had immediately jumped into restaurant-readying preparations. For most people, the weeks before the summer season were a time of happy anticipation. Not for Kristen.

  “Hey,” I called, shutting the door behind me. “Are you here?”

  A metallic crash, following by a sailor-quality curse, was answer enough.

  Smiling, I picked my way around stacks of boxes and went straight to the kitchen, where a deeply tanned Kristen, with her hands on her hips, was staring at a large pan on one of the many gas burners. “I hate that pan,” she said. “I’ve always hated it.”

  “Then get rid of it,” I said, pulling a stool up to the work counter crowded with cooking and serving items, half of which I couldn’t identify.

  “Can’t. Paid way too much money for the dang thing.”

  I could see how that would be a problem. “Has Scruffy touched it?” I asked. “Sell it on eBay, saying that it was used by the producer of Trock’s Troubles.”

  Scruffy was Kristen’s current love interest. He was indeed the producer of Trock’s Troubles, a long-running cooking television show hosted by Trock Farrand that was occasionally filmed in Chilson because Trock owned a house in town. Scruffy was also Trock’s son and the tidiest person I’d ever met. This was a man who ironed creases into his jeans. Who always carried a handkerchief. Who never had a hair out of place and always knew the right thing to say.

  Kristen adjusted the burner’s heat and glared at the pan. “No, but it could be arranged. He’s flying in next week.”

  “That will be nice.” I took a linen napkin off the top of a huge pile and tried to fold it into a pirate hat. “Have they scheduled you?”

  The Three Seasons had been short-listed to appear on the show last year and had eventually risen to the top. Kristen had tried to pull out, saying it wouldn’t look right to other area restaurateurs since she was dating the producer, but the avuncular Trock had blustered at her for being an idiot and had ignored her request.

  “Yes,” she said morosely.

  “Hey, that’s great!” I waved the napkin over my head the way I’d heard people did towels at sporting events. “Awesome, even. Why aren’t you more excited?”

  With a whisk, she poked at the contents of the pan. “Because it’s set for a July filming. And an October airing.”

  Her moroseness suddenly made sense. “Oh.” From the Fourth of July to mid-August, tourists and summer residents flooded the region i
n numbers so large that many locals didn’t venture downtown at all. Having a TV crew in the restaurant during peak season would make things worse in ways I couldn’t comprehend. And timing the show to be aired in October, right before the restaurant closed, was about as stupid as timing could get.

  “Scruffy can’t rearrange something?” I asked.

  Kristen shook her head, causing her long blond ponytail to flip back and forth. “Prior and future commitments, blah, blah, blah.”

  The television world was a mystery to me, and the more I learned about it, the more I was glad I’d become a librarian. “Well, I’m sure it’ll all work out.”

  Kristen made a hmmphing noise, reached for a spoon, dipped it into the pan, and tasted whatever was in there. “God, that’s awful,” she said, squinching her facial features into something a five-year-old would have been proud of. “Want to try?”

  “After that advertisement, how could I not?” I accepted the spoonful she held out. “What is it?” I sniffed the whitish sauce. Dark flecks that I assumed were intentional floated around.

  “Bechamel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “White sauce.”

  I rolled my eyes and tasted. It was a glorious burst of rich buttery flavor, heightened by the flavors of whatever herbs she’d tossed in. “This is awful?”

  “You are the worst taster ever.” She turned off the burner and poured the sauce down a sink. “Couldn’t you tell that there were too many competing flavors?”

  “Tasted fine.”

  “Why do I even try to educate you?”

  I grinned. “Because while you enjoy pain, the recovery time from this is far shorter than if you banged your head against the wall.”

  “And involves exactly the same amount of reward.” She filled the pan with warm water and went to the refrigerator. “However, you are to be rewarded for being the person who can keep me sane even after I’ve failed at that stupid sauce ten times in a row.” She thumped two small white dishes on the counter. “Here. Eat.”

  “I get to eat both of them?” The thought made me start to salivate. Eating Kristen’s crème brûlée was the closest I might ever get to heaven.