The Big Kitty (15 page)

Sunny pulled up in a gravel parking lot, empty today, and headed for the farmyard where she’d spotted a man—at least the bottom end of him. His head and arms were hidden by the innards of his tractor.

“Hello?” Sunny called.

The man uncoiled from the tractor to reveal himself as a tall, lanky guy in overalls and a flannel shirt, with a surprisingly boyish face.

Sunny suddenly recognized him as the tall, gangly boy who’d been a couple of grades ahead of her—the one with a perpetual cowlick. He never could hope to be one of the cool kids. In fact, he had been the butt of that nose-picking joke.

Well, he’d filled out a bit since grade school. Sunny couldn’t tell about the cowlick. He was wearing a John Deere cap.

“Hope you weren’t all fired up to go apple picking,” the man said with a cheerful smile. “I’m afraid we’re closed today. Open Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays,”
he recited. “The rest of the week we spend keeping the place going.”

When Sunny introduced herself and explained why she was there, the man wiped away some oil on an old rag and presented a hard, callused hand to shake. “Nate Ellsworth. So you want to talk about our trouble with Mrs. Spruance.” He sighed. “I hoped it’d be over when that poor woman died. Hear the animal control people collected all her cats.”

“It’s pretty amazing that they would come all this way,” Sunny said.

“To tell the truth, we thought so, too,” Nate replied. “I guess we’re the nearest working farm to town.” He grimaced. “Town keeps coming closer and closer, these days.” Gesturing to the fields around him, he said, “We’ve had four generations of Ellsworths farming this land. Thirty acres.”

The orchard was pretty much as Sunny remembered it, neat rows of trees stretching off into the distance. A rounded hill rose in the middle of the land. To Sunny’s younger self, it had looked as if a giant had been buried up to his eyebrows, the foliage on the rounded knoll being his hair.

“My granddad went over to the pick-it-yourself business,” Nate went on. “Dad put in the cider press. We introduced lower trees—easier for the kids to get at the apples—and put in about fifteen acres of blueberry bushes. That way, people can come and pick something anywhere between July and November, if we’re lucky. Got a few pumpkin vines, too, for jack-o’-lanterns and Thanksgiving.”

As he spoke, a brown hen came wandering around the tractor, her head bent over in search of food. She halted in
surprise to encounter Sunny’s running shoes—a strange pair of feet—and scuttled off in a new direction.

“Oh, yeah,” Nate said with a laugh, “and Isabel brought in some chickens. Why don’t you come in and meet her?”

Nate led the way to the farmhouse porch and opened the door. “Isabel?” he called. “Company.”

Isabel Ellsworth was a trim, bustling woman in comfortable jeans and a flannel shirt. With her strong features and deep tan, she looked like Hollywood’s idea of a farm wife.

When Nate explained that Sunny was writing a story about the cats and the chickens, Isabel shook her head. “It’s sort of traditional that farmyards should have a flock of chickens scratching around, and we decided they ought to be free-range. There’s lots of room for them to wander in the orchards.”

“And lots of bugs out there for them to eat,” Nate put in. “Helps to control the insect pests.”

“Then, too, the flock gives us a supply of eggs.”

“Both for our kitchen and for Isabel’s famous blueberry-cider doughnuts,” Nate put in.

Isabel ducked her head at the compliment. “And every once in a while we’ll dress a capon to sell at Judson’s Market. This isn’t some sort of factory farm, with thousands of birds in cages. It’s just enough to feed us, and maybe bring in a few extra dollars.”

“Like Isabel said, these are free-range. We don’t fence the chickens in.” Nate picked up the story. “The more adventurous ones will even go as far as the berry patches. They all come back at night to roost in the chicken coop at the side of the barn.”

“When you let the chickens out like that, you’ve got to
expect to lose some,” Isabel said. “There’s foxes and half-wild dogs around here.”

“And lately folks have even spotted coyotes,” Nate added. “So it wasn’t exactly a surprise when something started raiding the hen house. That’s when we put in the cameras.”

“And then we got the surprise,” Isabel said. “Show her, hon.”

Nate opened an old rolltop desk to reveal a laptop computer. A few taps and clicks, and a fuzzy, grayish image appeared on the screen.

“It’s low-light stuff, so the picture looks a little weird,” he said apologetically.

But it was clear enough to show a long, lean cat shape creeping into the chicken coop, grabbing a bird by the neck, and skedaddling.

Sunny asked to see it again. It was hard to make out details like stripes, but …

Is that Shadow?
she wondered.

“Once we saw it was a cat, we checked around and found out about all the cats Mrs. Spruance kept,” Isabel continued.

“And when we went over there, we found a whole bunch of bones in the backyard—chicken bones,” Nate said. “Including a leg with one of our ankle tags on it.”

Isabel’s eyes narrowed, emphasizing the crow’s-feet in her deep tan. “This was right after she made such a fuss about that dog going after one of her cats. But she didn’t seem to mind her cats coming after our chickens.”

Probably because she saw the cats as her friends,
Sunny thought,
while the chickens were just … food.

“Anyway, there was a lot of back-and-forth in your newspaper, people writing letters to the editor and such.” Isabel rolled her eyes. “It seemed pretty simple to me. That woman said the dog should have been controlled. Well, shouldn’t she control her cats? And frankly, she had so many she couldn’t keep track of them in the first place.”

“That was all annoying enough,” Nate said. “But folks around here began taking it personally. Customers we’ve had for years suddenly weren’t coming by. We even had a bunch of tour groups cancel. They just didn’t want to get in the middle of anything.”

“It sounds like a real mess,” Sunny said sympathetically.

“We’re trying to make a living here,” Isabel said. “This whole debate definitely didn’t help.”

“So did you do anything to deal with any other possible predators?” Sunny asked.

Nate nodded. “Bought myself a varmint gun.” He pointed toward the fireplace. The gun rack over the mantel was pretty old, but the rifle hanging there was obviously brand spanking new.

“Fellow at the store wanted to sell me a .22, but I wanted something with a little more oomph. That’s a .308 caliber.”

“Have you tried it out?”

“No,” Isabel replied sharply. She clearly didn’t like the idea of a gun in the house. “This isn’t the country anymore. There are houses sprouting up all around here, and that means kids. So no shooting. We keep the bullets locked up separate from the gun.”

From the look on Nate’s face, this was an argument
they’d had more than once. Obviously, he didn’t want to get into it right now.

Sunny closed her notebook. “Well, thank you for talking with me. I wanted to make sure I got your point of view.”

They saw her to the door, and she set out for the parking lot and her car.

She couldn’t see the Ellsworths killing Ada over a couple of chickens. But if she’d continued the controversy, splitting the community so that fewer people went down to the farm, that could have threatened Nate and Isabel’s ability to keep their place.

So, that was motive. As for means … well, farm chores kept them pretty strong. Sunny remembered Nate’s callused grip when they shook hands.

And finally,
she thought as she got into Mrs. Martinson’s Buick,
there’s that .308 rifle that Nate is so proud of. It’s not exactly rare, but Isabel said that none of the ammunition had been used. If Will wanted to look in that box of bullets, I hope Nate didn’t sneak off for a little target practice behind his wife’s back.

Sunny started the car and got onto the driveway heading back to the road. She had to veer suddenly as a foraging hen scurried almost under the wheels of Mrs. Martinson’s big Buick.

Stupid chickens,
she thought.

Thursday morning, Sunny
was back in the MAX office, stifling yawns. The good news was that she’d finished writing the article for Ken with time to spare. Sal DiGillio had brought back her dad’s pickup with plenty of apologies. Best of all, nobody had tried to kill her in the night.

The bad news—Shadow was gone. After saving their lives and irrigating Mike’s prized rosebushes, the cat had disappeared. When she’d completed her article and e-mailed it off to Ken, Sunny had taken a walk through the neighborhood but had had no luck spotting him. She’d even driven through town in the evening in search of the cat, but there was no sign of Shadow.

It looked as if he didn’t want to be found.

At work, Sunny shook her head when she found herself
reading the same e-mail for the third time.
Come on. He’s a cat,
she scolded herself, trying to break out of her funk,
not the man of your dreams.

The door opened, and Ken Howell came in, carrying a stack of newspapers. It was the week’s supply of the
Harbor Crier
, destined for the wire rack beside the potted plant in the office window. Usually Ken took the day off after spending the night printing his paper, delegating distribution to some of the local kids. But today he made it personal.

“Here it is, reasonably hot off the press,” he said with a smile, holding up one of the folded copies so Sunny could read the above-the-fold headline:
LOCAL WOMAN’S DEATH LEAVES UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
.

Sunny sighed. “It’s not as dramatic as ‘Murderer Revealed!’ I didn’t exactly crack the case.”

“Still, it’s a very professional story.” Considering his surly reaction when she’d first approached him about a job, Ken was being positively jovial.

And the story
was
professional, Sunny had to admit as she took the copy Ken held out and looked it over. She’d used an old journalism trick—if you don’t have many facts, ask questions. So, using the death of a fairly controversial local figure as a springboard, she’d raised a lot of questions. With Ada Spruance no longer on the scene, what happened to all the conflicts she’d engaged in? Would poor Festus still be labeled a dangerous dog? Sunny made sure to present the Towles’ case fairly, and she only mentioned the Ellsworths in passing—as Nate said, having the cats rounded up probably ended the threat of chicken stealing. But then, what would happen to all the cats collected from
the Spruance house? For that matter, what would happen to the house itself?

Sunny did her best to shine a powerful spotlight of publicity on the homeowners’ association. Maybe that would slow Veronica Yarborough down if she went ahead with her attempt to force Gordie out of his childhood home.

Finally, there were the mysterious aspects of Ada’s death. Sheriff Nesbit had simply issued a curt “no comment” about the case. Mrs. Martinson, never one for publicity, had flat-out refused to be quoted in the story, so Sunny had had to use the weaker “local sources” attribution about Ada being afraid of her kitchen stairs. However, Sunny had her own personal observation to go on when she mentioned the steps in the cellar appearing unused and the fresh paint chips broken off when the long undisturbed doors to the kitchen had apparently been forced open.

And then there was the biggest mystery of all—that legendary lottery ticket. The clerks at Judson’s Market confirmed that Ada had regularly bet on 13, 23, 40, 51, 59, and the Powerball of 14. And they confirmed that those were the winning numbers that had been chosen a year ago. But the countermen couldn’t say for certain whether Ada had purchased a ticket on the given date.

The cutoff to apply for the prize was now barely a week away. If the day passed without a claim, that might be the biggest unfinished business of Ada’s life.

Then Sunny caught the headline on the story below the fold:
QUESTIONS CAN BE DANGEROUS
. Ken had written the story himself, covering the booby trap in Sunny’s car and the discovery of the stolen Jeep and the hose outside her
house. He didn’t step on Sheriff Nesbit’s toes by calling the incidents attempted murder, instead framing the situations as attempts to intimidate a
Crier
reporter who’d merely been making inquiries for a story. But the facts in each case were there to let the readers draw their own conclusions.

“I thought we agreed not to go with that story,” Sunny complained.

Ken just shrugged his skinny shoulders. “You may not like it, but it’s news—the biggest news in these parts in quite a while.”

He deposited the papers in their rack, yawned, and then turned back to Sunny.

“Funny thing happened this morning,” Ken said. “I got a call from Ollie Barnstable.”

Sunny set her shoulders, waiting for bad news. But Ken surprised her.

“He said if I valued my editorial independence so much, maybe I should buy him out of the paper. Named an amount that would half kill me to raise, but oddly enough, it’s less than what he put in. So is your boss getting a bit forgetful, or is he having money problems?”

Ken’s eyes might have been half closed, but his gaze was keen as he looked at her.

Sunny had to shrug. “We don’t sit down every evening and count his money,” she told the editor. “So how should I know? Maybe he decided to cut his losses—or to cut you a break.”

Ken shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like the Ollie I know,” he said. “For him, a free press is never free. For him, it’s always a question of dollars and cents.”

He yawned again, said good-bye, and headed out.

From her desk, Sunny looked at the pile of papers and debated shifting them to someplace less conspicuous. But that wouldn’t even put off the inevitable. There were dozens of places all over town where Ollie the Barnacle could pick up the
Crier
. And if he really was having cash problems, his uncertain temper would be even worse than usual.

It was midafternoon before her boss finally called. “I hope Howell cut you a nice check for the story you wrote for him,” Barnstable growled over the phone. “Because you aren’t getting paid for that sick day you took.”