Cat With a Clue Read online

  “Mitchell,” I said, “there are only two people who can help you.”

  “Yeah?” He perked up. “Do you have their numbers? Because I’ll take any advice I can get, even if I don’t like it.”

  But I was shaking my head. “The only two people who can help are you and Bianca. Talk to her, Mitchell. Tell her how you feel.”

  He sighed. “Not going to happen. I use the L word now, and she’ll run for the hills. I need her to love me before I say anything, see?”

  “How do you know she doesn’t?”

  “Why would she?”

  The conversation was starting to circle around. “Do you two have a good time together?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And she calls you to make dates?” He nodded, and I said, “Then she obviously likes you, Mitchell. If you love her, give her time to fall in love with you.”

  “But what if—”

  “But nothing,” I said firmly. “Give her some time, Mitchell.”

  “What should I do while I’m waiting?” he asked.

  That I could answer. “Stay busy,” I told him. “Best way to not think about something is to stay as busy as possible.”

  He nodded slowly, then more vigorously. “Okay, yeah. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.” A wide grin lit up his face, almost making me forget about the four days’ worth of beard he hadn’t bothered to shave off before going into public. “Thanks, Minnie. I knew I could count on you.”

  I watched him saunter off, the swagger already back in his walk, and wondered what I’d done this time.

  Two hours later, I hurried through the back door of Cookie Tom’s. On bookmobile days, I had a standing order for two dozen of whatever he had plenty of, and even though I was running late, I didn’t want to show up at the first stop empty-handed.

  “Hey, Tom,” I said, standing at the end of the glass display cases. Though it was late morning, there was still a line of people in the bakery’s main room. Which could only mean that, no matter what the calendar said, it was officially summer. Pam Fazio, a tall travel mug of coffee in hand, was in the middle, listening to a sixtyish woman not much taller than me, who was saying how much she’d like it if Pam would purchase her collection of china cups and saucers. Pam caught my eye and toasted me. “Morning,” she said.

  Tom nodded my way. “Hang on, Minnie, I’ll be right with you.” His summer helper, a high school girl, was ringing up orders while he was stuffing white bags and boxes with doughnuts, cookies, croissants, and muffins. I averted my eyes from the custard-filled chocolate long johns and dug the appropriate amount of cash out of my wallet.

  A twentysomething man who was standing in line looked vaguely familiar, and I gave him a genial nod, trying to remember where I knew him from. The diner? Maybe. Or did he look like someone I’d gone to high school with? Then again, it could indeed be someone I’d attended high school with, even though I’d lived my early years in the greater Detroit area. Or it could be an actor from a hit movie I’d never seen. In a tourist town like Chilson, you never knew who you might run into.

  “Mostly chocolate chip.” Tom plopped a bag in front of me. “Some raisin, some oatmeal. Tossed in some broken peanut butters, too.”

  “You are a gentleman and a scholar,” I said, handing over my money. “A prince among—”

  “Hey,” the sort-of familiar guy brayed. “Why does she get to cut in line?”

  I flicked a glance at Tom. In all the months I’d been getting early dibs on cookies, we’d never once had anyone comment. “Sorry,” I said, “if this—”

  “No apologies necessary,” Tom said, smiling at me, then turned to face the complainer. “This is my store, and I get to choose how I do business. Ms. Minnie here drives the bookmobile and she buys cookies for the patrons out of her own pocket. Getting her on her way quickly is my contribution to the bookmobile.”

  “Yeah,” the guy said, “but—”

  His objection was drowned out by the happy chatter and smiles of everyone else standing in line.

  “There’s a bookmobile in Chilson? That’s wonderful!”

  “Every time my grandson sees the bookmobile, he wants me to read him a story.”

  “Someone told me the bookmobile has a cat. Is that true?”

  “Is there any way to make a donation?”

  I smiled, handed out some business cards, and said I’d be happy to talk to anyone if they called me during library hours. Angry Guy folded his arms and didn’t say a word. “Sorry,” I murmured to Tom as I picked up the big white bag.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Go forth and deliver books.”

  So I did.

  * * *

  Not much later, I was behind the wheel of a thirty-one-foot-long moving library, complete with more than three thousand books, CDs, DVDs, jigsaw puzzles, and games. Also along for the ride were the sixtyish Julia Beaton, and the thirteen-pound, three-year-old Eddie, who was in the strapped-down cat carrier at Julia’s feet.

  “Oh, my dear,” Julia, my part-time bookmobile clerk said, when I finished telling her about Andrea Vennard. “What a wretched thing to have in your memory.”

  Her empathic reaction made my eyes sting. Then again, if anyone knew empathy, it was Julia. She’d grown up in Chilson, but had hightailed it for the bright lights of New York City to make it as a model or bust as soon as her parents had given the nod.

  Bust as a model she did, but her second-choice career, that of acting, served her to the tune of multiple Tony Awards. However, since she’d stuck to Broadway and never set foot in Hollywood, and with Chilson being Chilson, she’d never achieved much local fame. Julia being Julia, she found this extremely funny and welcome. “Why would I want complete strangers staring at me when I’m not onstage?” she’d asked, and I gave her the point.

  I’d looked up reviews of plays in which she’d once starred and read that one of her strengths as an actor was in understanding people, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that she had so quickly sensed what kept returning to my thoughts and too-vivid imagination.

  “How did you sleep last night?” she asked.

  “Surprisingly well,” I said. “Then again, I had some help from our little pal down there.”

  Neither Eddie nor the patrons would have been pleased to have a bookmobile absent of its bookmobile cat, so, after leaving the library that morning, I’d carefully driven the extremely expensive vehicle from the library down the narrow road that led to the marina, sat it temporarily in the parking lot, and run in to fetch Mr. Ed.

  Julia leaned forward and reached her long fingers in through the wire door to scratch Eddie under the chin. “You did a fine job, my furry friend. Keep up the good work.”

  “Mrr,” he said.

  Julia sat up, pushed back her long strawberry blond hair, and laughed. “There are times when I really do think he understands what we say to him.”

  “I sincerely hope not,” I said fervently, earning another laugh.

  “Just think of it,” Julia mused. “Eddie sees all, understands all, knows all.”

  “If so,” I said, “why doesn’t he make himself more useful?”

  “That’s not what cats do.”

  “What do they do, besides shed and eat and make a mess of the paper towels, no matter where I put them?” Eddie had a penchant for paper products and not in a loving way. He liked to shred them to bits, strewing pieces in every room possible.

  “They purr,” Julia said.

  I grinned. “They do indeed.” Which more than made up for every cat hair that ever had been or ever would be shed upon my person. “And they’re excellent at convincing people to take naps.”

  Julia nodded. “Plus they help keep the mice population down.”

  And it was a cat, Eddie in particular, who had brightened the day of a little girl with leukemia the da
y he’d stowed away on the bookmobile. Brightened it so much, in fact, that he’d become a permanent bookmobile feature. At the time, I’d been intent on keeping Eddie’s presence on the bookmobile a secret from Stephen, who’d been rule-bound to the extreme. But it had all worked out in the end, and Brynn Wilbanks, who was now six years old and attending kindergarten, was in remission and melted my heart with her wide smile every time I saw her.

  “You realize, of course,” Julia said, “that the primary reason for the existence of humans is to take care of cats.”

  “Eddie has mentioned that.” I glanced down at the carrier. “But I thought he was exaggerating.”

  “Mrr!”

  Julia laughed. I shook my head and flicked on the turn signal in preparation for our first stop of the day, in the parking lot of a township hall.

  In less time than it takes to tell, I’d swiveled the driver’s seat around to face the front desk and readied the computer, Julia had reached up to pop open the ceiling vents—at five foot eight, she could do it without the help of a step stool—and gone to the back of the bus to fire up the rear computer. I unlatched Eddie’s carrier and, after a pause of almost half a second, he leaped out and jumped up on top of his latest favorite perch, the passenger’s-seat headrest.

  “Are we all set?” I asked.

  “Ready,” Julia called.

  “Mrr.”

  I patted my cat on the head, watched a few black and white hairs fly in multiple directions, and opened the door.

  “Good morning, Bookmobile Ladies!” A woman with short graying hair bounced up the steps. “And how is the Bookmobile Cat today?”

  Eddie blinked at the woman, whose name was Faye, and said, “Mrr.”

  She laughed delightedly. “You are a treasure. Minnie, if you ever get tired of him, I’ll take him home with me.”

  I smiled. “Sorry, but Eddie and I are bonded for life.”

  “Mrr.”

  Faye snorted out another laugh and patted him on the head. “Oh, Eddie, if only all cats were like you.”

  Someone else came stumping up the stairs. “Minnie! Are you all right?” Mrs. Dugan, a matronly woman in her mid-sixties, frowned at me, her firm white curls bouncing a little with the effort. “After what happened yesterday, I can’t believe you’re able to work, let alone drive the bookmobile!”

  She flung her arms wide, and I had little choice but to stand up and get the stuffing hugged out of me.

  “Poor Minnie,” she murmured. “You’re lucky you’re so strong. I would have been a wreck, just a wreck. I take things to heart, and finding that poor woman would have sent me to bed for a week.”

  I murmured a thanks for her sympathy and extracted myself. To fend off further exuberances, I picked up Eddie, unashamedly using him as a shield. I made a mental vow to give him extra treats and asked Mrs. Dugan if she’d known Andrea Vennard.

  “She was a Wiley, wasn’t she?” Mrs. Dugan turned to look at Faye.

  “Hmm?” Faye was perusing the new books and was just opening the cover of Sophie Kinsella’s latest release.

  “Andrea Vennard,” Mrs. Dugan said. “Wasn’t she Bob Wiley’s daughter?”

  “Is Bob married to Missy?” Faye asked. She looked up from the book and saw Mrs. Dugan nod. “Then yes, Andrea was a Wiley before she was a Vennard.”

  This confirmed what Holly and Donna had said. “How long ago did Andrea leave Chilson?” I asked.

  Mrs. Dugan laughed. “That one? She left town right after high school.”

  Faye nodded. “Said Chilson wasn’t big enough for her, that she had places to go, people to meet, things to accomplish.”

  I looked from one to the other. “And did she?”

  “I live next to a high school friend of Andrea’s,” Faye said, “and she says Andrea was too busy to have kids or to get back home. I guess she owned a business downstate. Grosse Pointe? Bingham Farms? One of those fancy suburbs of Detroit, anyway.”

  Mrs. Dugan sniffed. “She came back fast enough when Talia DeKeyser died. That was her great-aunt, you know. Probably hoped she was named in the will.”

  “What kind of business did Andrea own?” I asked, but Faye didn’t know. I shifted Eddie around a little, trying to ease him into a position that made him weightless. Thirteen pounds isn’t much until you start shooting for the world’s record in the Longest Eddie Hold. “Did Andrea have money problems?”

  “Who doesn’t?” Faye gave a crooked smile. “But I wonder what Andrea was doing in the library in the first place. From what my neighbor says, Andrea wasn’t what you’d call the literary type.”

  “More a partying type?” I asked. If so, that could open up all sorts of possibilities for murder. I’d tell Ash tonight, and he would find a fast lead to the killer, and soon everyone would forget that the library had—

  But Faye was shaking her head. “She was ambitious, mainly. There’s a story about her high school boyfriend, Steve something. He was really serious about her, gave her an engagement ring on prom night. She laughed in his face, and I guess he went nuts. Got so angry that some other guys had to hold him back from hitting her. She got a personal protection order against him and left town the next week.”

  I shivered. “He doesn’t sound like a good choice for a long-term relationship.”

  Mrs. Dugan snapped her fingers. “Guilder. Steve Guilder, that was his name. Didn’t he move to Texas?”

  Eddie, who up until that point had been purring quietly, started struggling to get down. Knowing that the cat always wins, I let him escape to the floor. “What did her folks say about her leaving home so young?”

  “Normal stuff. That she was just a kid, that she had a lot to learn, that she didn’t know everything, even if she thought she did.”

  So just adolescence, and no long-buried clue to the reason behind her murder. Maybe Andrea, in leaving town at eighteen, had taken her rebellion a step further than most kids, but even that wasn’t too far from of the ordinary. Julia had done the same thing.

  “I remember being that young.” Mrs. Dugan sighed. “Life was simpler then, wasn’t it?”

  It had also been very limited, both in scope and in size, and fraught with self-doubt and self-esteem issues. “Personally,” I said, “you couldn’t pay me enough to—”

  Crash!

  I whirled around. “Eddie! What are you doing up there?” My cat had managed to dump a shelf full of books onto the floor. I reached for him, but he slid away from me and jumped in Julia’s direction. “Fine,” I muttered, crouching to pick up the books. “Be that way.”

  “Maybe he wants you to read to him,” Faye suggested.

  I eyed his selection. He’d dislodged the books in the Dewey decimal five and six hundreds: natural and applied sciences. “You could be right.” I slid the gardening and philosophy books aside and held up Cats: The Ultimate Beginners’ Guide to Raising Healthy Cats for Life! and Think Like a Cat.

  Julia’s laugh was loud and long.

  “We can take one home,” I told Eddie, who was sitting in the middle of the aisle with his tail curled around his paws. “But only one. I know how short your attention span can be.”

  Eddie got to his feet and stalked past me without a glance.

  Smiling, I watched him go. There really was nothing like a cat.

  Chapter 4

  “So,” Lindsey Wolverson said that evening at the Round Table. “Your aunt tells me you have a knack for leadership.”

  I sent a panicked glance to my left at Ash, but he was busy sprinkling malt vinegar onto his fries and wasn’t paying attention to either me or his mother, whom I was meeting for the first time.

  Aunt Frances had known Lindsey for years, but I’d never met her. My aunt had told me of backyard picnics and dinner parties and watching Ash and his sister grow from roly-poly toddlers into adulthood, but she hadn’t mentioned that his
mother was so flat-out gorgeous that every person in the room—men and women alike—stared at her with dropped jaw. Not only that, but her chic yet casual attire was more elegant than anything I’d ever owned in my life.

  It was a little intimidating, and I wish I’d known ahead of time. Then again, given Ash’s innate good looks, I should probably have guessed something like this was possible. But mathematics wasn’t my strong suit and I didn’t always put two and two together.

  So I smiled, added more salt to my fries than I really wanted, and struggled for something to say that didn’t sound completely stupid. “I . . . I . . . uh . . .” I gave up. Stupid it would have to be.

  Ash gave his fries one last dollop of malt vinegar, then screwed the top back onto the bottle. “You should see her with Sheriff Richardson. You’d think they’d been buds since day one.”

  Lindsey’s perfectly plucked eyebrows went up. “Kit Richardson? That woman has awed me for years. She frightens men who have United States senators on their speed dial. Good for you. How did you do it?”

  Basically, I had no idea, but it probably helped that I wasn’t from Chilson. I hadn’t known I was supposed to be nervous around the sheriff and had assumed she was like the other people I’d met from her office: helpful, courteous, and competent. Then again, it could have been because I’d knocked on the sheriff’s front door early one morning, and it was hard to think of someone in terms of fearsome starch once you’d seen her in a ratty bathrobe.

  I was about to explain parts of that when I accidentally caught the look on the face of a male passing our booth. He was staring at Lindsey, jaw dropped, eyes goggled, and there might even have been a small trail of drool leaking out one corner of his mouth, although that could have been my imagination. “I . . .” But whatever I’d been about to say had gone clean out of my head. “I . . . I . . .”

  Lindsey’s smile went from friendly to fixed.