Pouncing on Murder (26 page)

I turned back to Pam. “When we were at Shomin’s last week and Felix was being all cranky, you said you’d known him for a while. That he gets like that every so often.” I fiddled with one of the straws Sabrina had left. “But you’ve only been in Chilson a year and Felix . . . well, I guess I don’t know if he’s a native, but he’s had that real estate and development business for years.” I tipped my head questioningly.

Pam grinned. “Should have figured you’d pick up on that.” She ripped open her straw and jammed it into her ice water. “Felix and I grew up together, down in Ohio. It’s because of him that I heard of Chilson in the first
place. His parents came up here every summer when he was a kid, and as soon as he was old enough to be on his own, he moved north.”

It was a familiar story. A lot like mine, actually. “So the two of you are friends,” I said.

“We have a lot of history—no, not that kind of history,” she said, rolling her eyes at my smirk. “We were next-door neighbors from kindergarten through high school. He was another brother, practically. Just one that didn’t live in the same house.”

“A lot of shared history, then,” I said, “and a lot of shared loyalty.”

“Not so much of that second one.” She looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at me. “Felix isn’t the kind of guy who inspires loyalty, somehow. I like him, even love him in a distant cousin sort of way, but . . . well, let’s just say that if I wanted some help moving across town, he’s not who I’d call.”

I knew what she meant. “So, if I asked why you said he was being even more Felix-ish than usual, would you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I thought it was common knowledge.”

Apparently not common enough. “What is?”

Pam looked around, but no one was sitting within two tables of us. “You know that new big mixed-use building on the waterfront? Retail shops on the first floor, professional offices on the second floor, residential units on top?”

“Sure.” I also knew it was more than half-empty. “Are you saying . . . ?”

She nodded. “It’s Felix’s pet project and he’s
overextended to the max. He keeps telling me all he needs is one good anchor store to make it work, but every time he gets close to signing someone, they back out.” She sighed. “I’m getting worried about him, to tell you the truth. If he doesn’t get a big success soon, I’m not sure what he’s going to do.”

Our lunches arrived and the talk turned to other things, but all the while, part of my brain was chewing over what Pam had told me and thinking pretty much one thing:
hmm
.

•   •   •

Deep in thought, I walked back into the library and I was still so deep in thought that I didn’t notice how the personal space between Holly and Josh was playing out until I’d almost walked past the main desk.

At that point, however, I clued in to the fact that something was wrong, came to a slow stop, and then backed up. Holly was at the desk, being perfectly friendly as she checked out books to an elderly man. Josh was nearby, working on the library’s most hated printer.

There they were, less than three feet apart, and Holly had managed to turn herself so that her back was to the printer. This couldn’t have been an easy thing to do, because the printer was placed next to the computer where she was working. I watched the scene for a moment, wondering what was going on and hoping Holly didn’t end up with a stiff neck by the end of the day.

Josh looked up, rolled his eyes and mouthed a single word:
House.

This could only mean that Josh still wasn’t giving Holly the address of his new place and that Holly was
getting well and truly miffed. Which was understandable, because the three of us shared all of our major life events and most of the minor ones. Why Josh was making this a point of contention, I didn’t know, but I hoped it wouldn’t cause lasting damage to our happy trio.

My concern must have shown on my face, because Josh—after making sure that Holly wasn’t watching—grinned at me, then winked.

I sighed and continued on to my office. Sometimes it was best not to know exactly what was going on.

•   •   •

Late the next afternoon, it had been prearranged that I drop Julia off at her sister’s house. Why, exactly, I was doing so I hadn’t understood from the beginning, but it had something to do with a birthday and soup and family traditions, and who was I to stand in the way of traditions? Besides, since the final stop of the day was barely two miles from the sister’s house, it wasn’t a problem.

“I’ll see you,” Julia said, standing at the top of the stairs and pointing at me down her long arm, “on Saturday. To be completely honest, I hadn’t planned on coming, but missing an opportunity to buy Trock Farrand’s cookbook from the man himself would be ludicrous.”

She exited stage right, and shut the door as she departed.

“Go figure,” I told Eddie. “Turns out that some cook hawking a book about getting dishes dirty is a bigger draw than one of the bestselling thriller writers of the decade.”

“Mrr.”

“Well, sure,” I said, putting the bookmobile in drive
and sailing away, “Trock’s a great guy and I suppose you do end up with something to eat before having to do the dishes, but at the end, isn’t food just fuel?”

“Mrr!”

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

“Mrr,” he said.

But Eddie’s point of view was understandable. Last summer, Trock and Eddie had become fast friends and the cat treats the famed chef had concocted were the hit of my cat’s day.

“Is the way to a cat’s heart through his stomach?” I asked.

Eddie, however, was too busy licking his front paw and swiping the top of his head with it to answer the question.

“Just as well,” I said. “You should never ask a question for which you aren’t ready to hear the answer.”

That little aphorism had been one of my dad’s many phrases of wisdom, and it had been one that I hadn’t understood until the time I asked a high school boyfriend who he liked better, Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. He’d said he wasn’t sure who they were, unless they were the new teachers, and our relationship drifted apart soon afterward.

“And that was just as well, too,” I told Eddie. “If that had lasted, I might have gone with him when he moved out West after college, and then I wouldn’t have the bookmobile and I certainly wouldn’t have found you.”

This loving statement also didn’t get any response from Eddie, which was slightly disappointing, but I soldiered on.

“What do you think?” I asked. “About Henry and Adam, I mean. I still have no idea what really happened, and honestly don’t know how to go about finding out. But Irene’s getting to be a real mess and Adam’s not far behind, so I need to . . . Eddie, what are you doing?”

My cat was rubbing his face against the wire door of his carrier. This not only made a very odd noise, but it also made his little kitty lips pull back so that I saw way too much of his gums.

“And very healthy gums they are,” I said, “at least according to your doctor. But if you want the truth, they’re not your most attractive feature.”

“Mrr!”

Once again, we decided to agree to disagree, and I went back to thinking out loud. “What I really need to do is find out more about Neva. You know, the shotgun-toting senior citizen? From all accounts, she hardly ever leaves the house, so I’ll have to go to her and . . .”

My outward musings tailed off, because if I took a single back-road shortcut, we were only a handful of miles from Chatham Road and Ms. Chatham herself.

“No time like the present,” I said bravely, trying not to quail at the thought of confronting a woman who’d brandished a gun at me the one and only time we met. But the sheriff’s office didn’t seem to think she was threatening, and besides, I was in the bookmobile, which many people were convinced had a magical power to create happiness in everyone who came near.

I planned out what I was going to say to Neva as I drove carefully down the bumpy Chatham Road and parked the bookmobile out of sight of her house.

“There you go.” I released Eddie from his carrier. “I shouldn’t be long, but if I am, do you remember how to call 911? Oh, wait.” I sighed heavily. “You don’t have a phone, and even if you did you don’t have the thumb power to make the call. Poor Eddie,” I said, patting him on the head.

He put his ears back and squinted at me with a dire expression. I gave him one more pat, slid my phone into my pocket, and headed down the stairs.

I opened the door, but before I could turn around and shut it, a black-and-white blur shot past me. “Eddie!” I cried. “You get back here!”

Ignoring me, he zoomed across the road and onto Neva Chatham’s property.

There was really no point in calling him—he was a cat, after all—so I locked the bookmobile and hopped into a jog, muttering a monologue as I went.

“Why can’t he stay on the bookmobile like a normal cat? Because normal cats have no interest in bookmobiles, that’s why. Normal cats don’t talk to you as if they understood what you said. Normal cats don’t—huh.”

I’d passed through a line of trees and was on the edge of a wide-open field. Neva’s garden, I supposed, but there was no sign of my runaway cat. I looked around and down, trying to find his kitty footprints.

“Ha!” I’d spotted the Eddie trail. It headed south, straight toward a trio of greenhouses. “I’ll get you, my pretty.” Jogging again, I followed the tracks, which, Eddie-like, didn’t go in a straight line, but zigged and zagged. “Cat, if you give me motion sickness,” I panted,
“you’re not getting treats for hours, do you hear me, hours, and—”

I stopped running and talking, because off in distance I’d heard a voice. A female voice. An elderly female voice.

Neva.

From a standstill, I leaped into a flat-out run. Through the far half of the garden, past two greenhouses, and around the end of the third, all the while following Eddie’s tracks, all the while hoping that Neva didn’t have her gun, that she wasn’t . . . that she wasn’t . . .

I came around the corner of the last greenhouse and skidded to a stop. Neva was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with Eddie on her lap, petting him and talking to him as if she’d known him for years.

“You are a shedder, aren’t you, my dear?” She shook her hand free of Eddie hair and I watched it twist away in the breeze. “But you’re well groomed and wherever you came from, I’m sure someone is looking for you.”

“Um,” I said. “I’m afraid he’s mine.”

Neva looked up and squinted at me. “I know you. No, don’t say, I’ll remember.” She continued to pet Eddie as she squinted. “Ha! I got it. You were looking at my dad’s boat. Scared you off but good, didn’t I?” She grinned, and once again I wondered about her mental stability.

“That’s right,” I said. “But this time I came in the Chilson Library’s bookmobile.”

Neva’s grin dropped away and I tensed. Maybe she had a thing against libraries. Or bookmobiles. Or librarians. Or Chilson. Maybe that gun was behind her and she was going to pull it out and—

The elderly woman placed Eddie on the grass and sprang to her feet twice as fast as I could have managed. She charged toward me, and I was stuck in place so tight that I might have been glued. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I’d have to defend myself as best I could and—

Neva was holding out her hand. “I have to apologize,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do.” She clasped my hand between hers and pumped up and down. “There was no excuse for going after you like that. I’d tell you about how that afternoon I’d had to write a big fat check to my accountant and how that made me cranky as all get-out, but that doesn’t excuse me, so I apologize.”

“Apology accepted,” I said, starting to smile. I was also starting to see why the sheriff’s office hadn’t considered Neva a threat.

“Come on in.” She released my hand and started striding to her house. “I have to show you something. Better grab that cat of yours.” Neva opened the back door and ushered Eddie and me inside. “Here you go. What do you say about a drink? Tea? Water? Something stronger?” She winked.

I opted for water and looked around the kitchen as she opened the door of a Hoosier cabinet and took out
two jelly jars. One of the bookmobile folks had said that Neva lived in her parents’ house, and I was suddenly sure it had been her grandparents’ house, too. Either that or no owner had ever changed a thing since the day the house was hatched.

There was a large porcelain sink underneath a set of two double-hung windows. There were wooden countertops. Open shelves and the Hoosier cabinet instead of cabinets. A single ceiling light fixture. Plaster walls that showed trowel marks. Pegs next to the back door that held jackets. A round wooden table so scarred I could hardly tell what kind of wood it had been made from.

The entire room was squeaky clean and smelled of sunshine and outdoors. It also reminded of my aunt’s boardinghouse kitchen, which tempted me to put Neva on the side of Good.

“Have a seat,” she said, putting the glasses on the table and pulling out a chair. “Him, too,” she added, nodding at Eddie.

My show-off cat jumped up and sat in the middle of the chair’s seat, looking at Neva as if she might give him a treat.

“You,” she said, “are a cat among cats, but I do not feed pets at the table.”

He inched forward so his chin was almost on the edge of the said surface.

Neva laughed and fuzzed up the fur on his head. “Like I said, no treats at the table. You’ll get yours later, mister.” She looked over at me. “What did you say his name was?”

I introduced Eddie and myself and said I already knew her name.

“Just bet you do.” She chuckled. “Probably talked to Kit Richardson, didn’t you, after that day? She’s a good sheriff, that girl.”

I’d never thought of the tough, take-no-prisoners sheriff in terms of gender, let alone a term like “girl,” but I gave a vague nod.

“Anyway,” Neva said, “I need to tell you about my dad’s boat. It was his dad’s before him and when Granddad got too old to take it out, it sat in the barn for years. Dad wouldn’t dream of working on Granddad’s boat without permission, so it sat and sat.” She sighed.