Gone with the Whisker Read online

  Katrina rolled her eyes and flopped down onto the middle of the blanket. “You sound like Grandma,” she muttered.

  For a moment I was horrified. Then I took a deep breath and calmly said, “Grandma has been around the block a time or two. You might want to listen.”

  “Whatever.” She rolled onto her stomach. “And from now on, my name is Kate, okay? I’m tired of stupid jokes about the hurricane.” My niece pulled out her phone and was mentally gone from the here and now.

  Kate? Did her parents know about this? I was thinking seriously about ripping the phone from her hands and pitching it into the lake when my aunt tapped my shoulder.

  “Enjoy the night,” she said. “Things will work out.”

  I wanted to object, to say that life could be cruel and painful, to tell her that horrible things happened to people for no good reason, but since I’d just told Kate-not-Katrina that grandmas knew what they were talking about, I should probably listen to someone of the same age. Besides, my aunt knew all about life’s hard knocks. And she also knew how wonderful life could be.

  So I took her advice and went back to enjoying myself. Dusk was falling slowly and softly, as it did in the north so close to the summer solstice, and it was a sweet pleasure to sit and watch the sky darken, listen to the murmur of passersby, and smell the drifting scents of charcoal fluid and cotton candy.

  As soon as it grew dark, the band started playing and the fireworks started exploding. It wasn’t the exquisitely timed production that big cities could put on, but knowing half the band members more than made up for the timing issues.

  I leaned against Rafe, and side by side, eating the popcorn Otto had bought for me as a final birthday present, we watched the sky. From a barge moored out in Janay Lake, small canisters zipped high and burst into explosions of white, red, blue, green, pink, and even purple. Huge bangs made toddlers squeal and adults wince. Sparkles snapped-crackled-and-popped into fireworks that blossomed into more fireworks that blossomed into even more.

  It was a stupendous show. Once I glanced over at Katrina-now-Kate and smiled to see her staring up at the sky with a look of delight. I nudged Aunt Frances, who was sitting on my other side, and tipped my head in Katrina-Kate’s direction.

  My aunt nodded, mouthed, “Told you,” and then came the grand finale with its torrent of booms and bangs and enough exploding fireworks to light the entire sky.

  The last one hadn’t finished fading when the crowd started applauding, and as always, I got a lump in my throat at the sound.

  “Are you ready?” Katrina asked through the applause. “Because I have to be at work Monday morning and I don’t want to mess up my sleep schedule.”

  “You got a job?” I blinked. “Where?”

  “Oh, you know. Around.” She stood, brushing off her shorts.

  I got to my feet and motioned at Rafe, Otto, and Aunt Frances, who were in a conversation with our left-hand neighbors about local farmer’s markets, to move aside so I could pick up the blankets. “Around where?” I asked. “And when?”

  “Part time, is all. That toy store, the antique place with the weird name, and the old store that belongs in a movie from a hundred years ago.”

  I interpreted these to be the toy store managed by Mitchell Koyne; Older Than Dirt, which was owned and run by my friend Pam Fazio; and Benton’s, a family-owned general store now under the competent hands of Rianne Howe.

  “Did you tell your parents?” I asked.

  Even in the dim light, I could see Katrina’s scowl. “Why do they need to know?”

  “Because they’re your parents, and—”

  “I don’t care,” Katrina said as she started walking backward through the crowd.

  This worried me a bit, because she wasn’t looking where she was going, but she was backing away from the water, not toward it, so I tried to stop worrying.

  “I’m stuck here for the summer with no friends and nothing to do,” my niece said, “so if I want to take ten jobs, I’m going to do it,” she called as she continued backing into the dark. “I have to do something to keep from going nuts and—oohh!” She tumbled down.

  “Katrina, are you okay?”

  “My name is Kate,” she said angrily from the ground. “And I’m fine. I just tripped over something.” She sat up, looked at what she’d fallen over, and screamed. “He’s dead! He’s dead!”

  Aunt Frances, Rafe, Otto, and I raced toward her, and I reached her first. “It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay. Come on, stand up, let’s see what’s . . .”

  Katrina sobbed into my shoulder. But it wasn’t going to be okay, because she was right. She’d stumbled over a person, not a thing, and the man was indeed dead. Even in the dim light I could see that. The bullet hole in the back of his head was proof, and . . . and . . .

  Around me, I heard Otto calling 911 and talking to dispatch, I heard Aunt Frances comforting Katrina, and I heard Rafe asking me if I was all right.

  I stared at the man lying at my feet, his eyes glazed open, a man I’d seen only a couple of days earlier. “I know him,” I whispered.

  Chapter 2

  The next morning I was bleary-eyed and feeling raw from turbulent dreams and disturbing thoughts. I couldn’t fathom that Rex Stuhler, a bookmobile patron, was dead. At some point during the Chilson fireworks, someone had taken advantage of the show’s bangs and explosions and shot him.

  I’d seen Rex just two days ago, at the temporary stop. He’d been waiting for us when we’d arrived late, and he’d patted Eddie on the head. Rex was maybe fifty, and a voracious reader. His profession as a pest exterminator out of his home office meant he worked irregular hours, and the combination of those facts made him a bookmobile regular.

  He was also one of those guys who loved gadgets, especially electronic gadgets, and when we’d teased him about preferring paper books over e-books, he’d whispered it was a secret he was trying to keep from his buddies, and what did he have to do to buy our silence?

  At the time we’d laughed, but now I was having a hard time swallowing my tears. Rex didn’t have to worry about anything any longer.

  But life went on for those still living, and last night Rafe had asked me to pick up a box of drywall screws at the hardware store first thing. “Sorry,” he’d said after we’d been questioned and dismissed by a sheriff’s deputy and he’d walked us back to the houseboat, “but if you get those, I can keep working.”

  “No problem,” I’d told him, putting my arm around a shivering Katrina. Her life in Florida had not prepared her for cool summer evenings in northern Michigan, but she continued to shrug off recommendations for always having a sweatshirt at hand. “I’ll take care of it.”

  So now, though I deeply wanted to roll over and sleep for twelve hours, I yawned, yawned again, slithered out of bed to avoid waking Eddie, and got showered and dressed as quietly as possible.

  Not that Katrina moved a muscle, other than those involuntary ones that kept her heart and brain going. As I wrote my whereabouts on the kitchen’s whiteboard—Hardware store, house, back by noon—I listened to her soft, regular breathing. Last night, she hadn’t taken well to my command to call her parents and tell them what had happened, but when I’d asked if she was going to text any friends about it and did those friends have parents who knew hers, she grudgingly saw the need.

  My brother and his wife had been understandably shocked and concerned, and after Katrina curled up in her sleeping bag and went into coma mode, we talked into the wee hours of the morning. We eventually agreed there was no immediate need for her to go home or for them to fly up, but that I’d keep a close eye on her and let them know immediately if she was exhibiting signs of emotional trauma.

  And now it was morning. Gently, I tucked the sleeping bag around her shoulders and hoped what I’d told Matt and Jennifer had been right.

  “Kids are resilient,” I told t
he blue sky as I stepped outside. At least that’s what people said. But I wasn’t so sure. Maybe kids were just resilient on the outside, same as adults. Who knew what was going on inside?

  I made a solemn vow to watch over my niece, to take careful note of any changes in her behavior, and to deepen our relationship so that she’d feel free to talk to me about anything. In the long run, this would all work out, I was sure of it.

  Well, almost.

  But the future would work itself out in due time, so I tucked my worry about Katrina into a back corner and made up my mind to enjoy the morning. Which was easy to do, because the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and so many things in the world were amazing and wonderful.

  A hop, skip, and a jump from the marina was the old, large, 1900s Shingle style house that was rising up from the metaphorical ashes of having been divided into apartments decades earlier. It had a deep front porch, lake views, and my vote for being the most beautiful house in Chilson. Plus, in a few short months it would be my own home. Rafe was already living there, because he didn’t mind living in a state of perpetual renovation. And I might have been living there with him this very moment if it hadn’t been for my recently discovered inability to tolerate the fumes of paint primer.

  I walked on tiptoes as I went past the house, looking for signs of Rafe. There was no visual clue, but then I heard the drywall saw start up. I blew a kiss in his general direction and headed up the hill.

  The hardware store was on the outskirts of downtown, a short walk from the marina, and by the time I arrived, my spirits had risen and I was darn close to one hundred percent awake.

  In many places, hardware stores were closed on Sundays or opened late. In Chilson, as in many other northern resort towns, businesses had one hundred days to make money, more or less Memorial Day through Labor Day. Being closed on any one of those days was close to unthinkable. And here it was, barely eight o’clock on the fifth of July, and the hardware store was so crowded and noisy that I barely heard the door’s bells jingle as I went inside.

  I picked up a big box of number seven by two-inch drywall screws, walked away, went back for another box, then headed up to the counter, where a small group of men I didn’t recognize clustered together. Not long ago I’d been intimidated by hardware stores, but thanks to Rafe’s constant need for fasteners—a catch-all term I’d formerly made fun of, but now accepted as part of the construction vocabulary—I was on a first-name basis with the hardware store owner and his staff.

  “Hey, Minnie.” Jared, the owner, took the boxes and put them into the bag. “Sure you got enough?”

  “I got double what he asked, so maybe.”

  “On the account?”

  When I nodded, he started typing into the keyboard. Rafe and I needed to have a serious chat about money and construction costs and mortgages, but every time I brought up the subject, he diverted the conversation. It had to be soon, though, because I wasn’t moving in until we were both happy with the financial situation.

  “Probably one of those random killings. Bet it wasn’t anyone from around here,” a man to the left of me said, and I realized the male cluster was talking about last night’s murder.

  I shook my head, trying to wish away the image of Rex Stuhler’s unseeing eyes.

  “Downstater. Had to be.” Luke Cagan, one of Jared’s part-time employees, leaned against the counter, crossing his arms, which were covered with thick blond hairs.

  The rest of the men nodded agreement and their cluster dispersed.

  But I stood there, staring at the space where they’d been, because up until that moment my brain had been more occupied with the shock and aftermath of Katrina literally tripping over a murder victim. Up until now, I hadn’t thought about the obvious implications.

  Who, indeed, had killed Rex Stuhler?

  Why had someone killed Rex?

  And would that someone kill again?

  * * *

  * * *

  I delivered the screws to Rafe, who accepted the double delivery without batting an eye, and looked around for an out-of-the-way place to sit. Rafe and a friend of his were installing drywall on the basement ceiling and there wasn’t a role for me, other than having my phone at the ready to call 911.

  Yes, I could have tried to be useful, but the couple of times I had done so during drywall work, things hadn’t ended up well for me, Rafe, or the drywall. I could do other things, though, especially when it was a benefit to be efficiently sized. A five-foot-tall body fit far better into an attic space for placing insulation, for instance, and my compact-size fingers were much better than Rafe’s big ones for installing tiny pieces of trim.

  I spotted an upside down plastic five-gallon bucket that had once held paint, carried it near the work area, and sat on my new stool.

  Rafe glanced at me through his upraised arms. “How’s Katrina?”

  “Asleep,” I said. “At least she was when I left.”

  “She seemed pretty shaken up last night.”

  “Who’s Katrina?” Bob asked. “Is she hot? And single?”

  I wasn’t sure exactly how Rafe knew Bob, but if I asked, I’d get a long story that may or may not have provided a real answer, so I imagined a story about a late blizzard and a lost puppy, which was almost certainly a much better explanation than reality.

  “She’s seventeen.” Rafe pulled his screw gun from his tool belt.

  “And my niece,” I said over the noise of drywall screws being screwed in tightly.

  Bob gave a heavy sigh, which fluttered his thick, dark blond beard. “So my bad luck is holding.”

  “Right now it’s more important that you hold up your end of the drywall,” Rafe said, installing screws faster than I would have thought possible for a guy who wasn’t a professional contractor.

  As I watched them work and listened to them banter, I thought about the other revelation I’d had last night, the one from my sister-in-law. My brother had gone to bed, but Jennifer and I had talked a little longer, and one of her questions had come across as so odd that I’d pursued it.

  “Is Katrina acting . . . secretive?” she’d asked.

  I’d been puzzled by the question. And curious as to the reason behind it. “Why do you ask?”

  Jennifer hemmed and hawed and eventually said, “Well, there was this boy . . .”

  And so I learned that the reason behind my niece coming north had almost as much to do with her parents wanting distance between their eldest daughter and her erstwhile boyfriend as it did with aunt-niece bonding and summer employment.

  Jennifer had sighed. “We should have told you, I know we should have, but somehow . . . somehow it never came up.”

  Last night I’d been too tired and emotionally fraught to deal with family drama, but now that I was awake and chipper, I was taking it out and looking at it.

  Yes, they absolutely should have told me. So how was I going to react?

  After thinking for a bit, I decided not to react at all. I’d gone through a few rounds of bad judgment myself, and since I wasn’t a parent, my viewpoint of appropriate parental action was bound to be skewed. But now what did I do? Did I tell Katrina that her parents had told me about The Boy? Or did she assume I already knew?

  I stood, still having no idea what my next steps should be, niece-wise.

  “Headed out?” Rafe asked.

  “Much as I’d like to sit here and watch other people work, I have a niece to tend to.”

  “Say ‘hey’ for me. She had a rough night.”

  I sent a kiss in his direction and left them to it.

  Outside, the sky was starting to cloud up. I sent the sun and sky a fervent wish to stay strong and walked the two hundred feet to the marina. My tiny houseboat shared a short pier with a large Crown powerboat owned by Eric Apney, a forty-ish divorced downstater who made his living as a cardiac surgeon.
He was an excellent neighbor, quiet and conscientious about following marina etiquette, and was sitting on his deck with a cup of coffee and a newspaper.

  “Morning, Minnie,” he said. “Been out running?”

  “Sort of.” I explained about the screw delivery, and he looked interested. There was something about other people’s renovation projects that got a certain slice of the population to volunteer their time, sort of a small-scale version of the classic Amish barn-raising.

  “Ceiling work?” Eric settled back into his chair. “Maybe I’ll go up after lunch.”

  I grinned. Which was when Rafe and Bob would be done.

  “Want some?” Eric gestured with his mug.

  Since I hadn’t had any caffeine in almost twenty hours, of course I did, but I tried not to look too eager. “Sure. That’d be great.”

  He got to his feet and went into the cabin, and I stepped aboard. The view from Eric’s taller boat was different than mine. Just a few feet of elevation allowed me to look over the top of my houseboat, the boat owned by Louisa and Ted Axford, and all the way to the marina’s slightly dilapidated office.

  Chris Ballou, the marina’s manager and head mechanic, was sweeping the office’s front sidewalk and talking with Skeeter, a guy about my age. Skeeter was a slightly mysterious figure. He had a very nice boat, lived at the marina from Memorial Day through Labor Day, and disappeared completely the rest of the year. And that was the sum total of my knowledge about him.

  “Do you know Skeeter’s last name?” I asked Eric, who was handing me a steaming mug of happiness. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, and it’s Conlin.”

  Eric was a wealth of Skeeter knowledge. “I have no idea what he does for a living. Or where he lives the rest of the year. Do you?”

  “Huh.” Eric put his forearms on his boat’s gleaming metal railing. “I do not.”

  “Seems odd, doesn’t it?” I mused.

  “It does.”

  We stood side by side, watching Chris and Skeeter pull chairs into the sun and promptly drop into them. I knew as much about Chris as I wanted to know, but how was it we knew nothing about Skeeter?