Cat With a Clue (11 page)

“The beautiful Talia,” he murmured. “Yes, I did indeed. She was kind and generous and, to be blunt, a trifle shallow. Not the deepest thinker in the family. But she had a good heart, and what could count more?”

It was my opinion that it would count a little more if you could have a good heart and be a devoted reader,
but I just nodded. “Andrea Vennard was Talia's great-niece,” I said.

“One of the many.” Mr. Zonne nodded. “And if I had a free afternoon and a large sheet of paper, I could sketch out all of Talia's relatives.”

“Er . . .”

“Don't worry, Miss Minnie,” he said. “I won't subject you to all that. But I can share a story or two about the beautiful Talia and the handsome Cal. They were a few years older than me, but their storied romance cast a long and memorable shadow.”

“How did he propose?” Julia asked. “Do you know?”

Mr. Zonne laughed. “He'd asked her father for permission first, as young men did in that day and age, then purchased a ring chosen by Talia's mother. He took her out in his canoe one fine summer evening, held out the jeweler's box, and got down on one knee.”

Uh-oh.
“Um . . .”

“Miss Minnie,” he said, “I see you know where this is going. Cal, in his efforts to be the gallant swain, tried a little too hard. He tipped the canoe, sending his lady love and himself into the waters of Janay Lake.”

Julia sputtered with laughter and I asked, “What about the ring?”

“Ah, now, there's the rest of the story,” Mr. Zonne said. “Cal, still being gallant, escorted Talia to shore, settled her down with a blanket from his jalopy, as such things were called, and dove back into the water to find the ring.”

“Good thing it was Janay Lake,” Julia said, still laughing, “and not Mud Lake.”

“That small fact has not gone unnoticed in the DeKeyser family,” Mr. Zonne said. “Many a family gathering has discussed the fate of Talia and Cal if
Janay Lake hadn't had clear water and a rock bottom. As it was, young Cal fished out the ring after a dozen dives, then, dripping wet and panting, once again offered it, on bended knee, to his ladylove.”

An uncharitable thought crossed my mind. If my former boyfriend, Tucker, had dropped an engagement ring in a lake, he would have called the insurance company before going to any great personal efforts.

“Now they're both gone.” Mr. Zonne sighed gently. “So many are.” He stood for a moment, lost in his thoughts. Then he shook himself and looked directly at Julia and me. “If I can share a small piece of advice with you ladies, make friends with people younger than yourself. Don't, and someday you might wake up to find that all your friends are gone.”

Julia slung her arm around my shoulders. “One down. How many do I need?”

Mr. Zonne laughed. “You can never have too many, but you know that. You both do.”

We did indeed. I gave Julia a quick hug, then stooped down to pull Eddie up into a snuggle. Eddie, who made friends easier than any human I'd ever met. “What about Talia and Cal's children?” I asked.

Mr. Zonne slid his hands into his pockets and squinted at the ceiling. “Leslie. Kim. Tom. Kelly. Dave. Melissa. Bob. I think that's the correct birth order, but don't hold me to it.”

I assured him we wouldn't. “Do you know anything about them?” Even the youngest ones were probably older than Andrea Vennard, but in a small town, who knew what slings and arrows had wounded whom?

Mentally, I spun out a scenario in which Andrea had stolen away the younger DeKeyser daughter's boyfriend, a hurt from which she'd never recovered. She'd
snapped when she'd seen Andrea at her mother's funeral and tracked her down at . . . at the library? I shook my head. Every theory fell apart when you put the library into the mix.

“Most of what I know about them is secondhand,” Mr. Zonne said. “They grow so fast and leave even faster. Talia and Cal invested thousands into college educations for their offspring. They all married years ago and have grown or nearly grown children of their own. If I recall correctly, the girls stayed in Chilson.”

“And the boys?”

“Gone off to find fame and fortune in the wide blue yonder.”

“Did they find it?” Julia asked.

“Depends on what you call success,” Mr. Zonne said. “None of them are millionaires, but they're all solid citizens, from what I hear. Salt-of-the-earth types who spend time volunteering, donate money to nonprofits, and subscribe to newspapers instead of getting information from blogs.”

He pronounced the last word as a curse, and I had a hard time keeping my grin to myself; Mr. Zonne and I had a difference of opinion on the usefulness of the Internet, and the twain would never meet.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Nothing that would be useful.”

Julia opened her arms wide. “Give us your all, kind sir. Give us the details, tiny and large, obscure and not, because one never knows what is important until the right moment.”

I looked at her. “Is that a quote?”

“No idea,” she said. “There are bits of so many plays in my head that I haven't had an original thought since 1987.”

“The year Dave DeKeyser left Chilson for good,” Mr. Zonne said. “And the year van Gogh's
Sunflowers
sold for almost forty million dollars.”

I smiled. “Not sure that's pertinent, but, like Julia said, you never know. Do you remember anything else?”

“The DeKeyser women love to garden,” he said. “From stem to stern and top to bottom, the whole kit and caboodle could spend hours talking about roses, manure, trilliums, invasive species, Gertrude Jekyll, and how to force lilacs to bloom in January.”

“You can do that?” I asked, surprised.

“None of them seem to have any problem,” he said, “but I never had any luck. Forsythia, yes, but not a lilac, not once.”

The three of us started a discussion of Mackinac Island's annual Lilac Festival, which had ended the previous weekend, and my questions about the DeKeysers faded away from the conversation.

But not from my thoughts
.

*   *   *

Late that night I was sitting at the dining table in my pajamas with a copy of C. J. Sansom's
Lamentation
in front of me. Eddie was disgruntled because we weren't in bed, where we should have been, but there was a good reason, which I had to explain to him every few minutes.

“Stop that,” I said, pushing him off the book for the ten-thousandth time. “This book is compelling and wonderfully written, but it's also”—I flipped to the back page and read the number at the bottom—“six hundred and forty-two pages long. That's more pages than you have bits of kibble in your bowl.”

Eddie looked down at the book, then up at me.

“No,” I said firmly. “You don't need six hundred and
forty-two pieces of kibble in your bowl. For one thing, the bowl isn't big enough. The four hundred and fifty pieces in there are its maximum capacity.” I'd made up the number, but Eddie wouldn't know the difference.

“Mrr,” he said.

“Exactly,” I told him. “Any book longer than six hundred pages is too big to take to bed. I might fall asleep and drop it on your furry little head, and we can't have that, now, can we?”

My cat rubbed his face up against the book, leaving a trail of Eddie hair across the rough-cut pages. “Nice,” I murmured, and pulled him onto my lap. One more chapter and then I'd get to bed.

Two chapters and three pages later, my cell phone rang.

I blinked at it, then reached out and flipped it over.
Pam Fazio?
Why on earth would she be calling at—
I glanced at the phone's time and was startled to see that it was past midnight. Well past.

Huh.

I thumbed on the phone. “Pam? What's up?”

“Oh, Minnie,” she said raggedly. “I'm so sorry to call you at this hour.”

“No problem,” I said. “Eddie and I were up reading.” I patted the top of my furry companion's head, making it bob up and down. “What's the matter?” Because something clearly was. Pam, who was extremely capable and very intelligent, was also one of the most self-reliant people I'd ever met, but her voice was tight and worried.

“It's a lot to ask,” she said, “but could you do me a favor? Now, I mean?”

I almost made a joke about being willing to do anything for her, as long as it didn't involve quadratic equations or juggling, and especially not both. But
Pam had moved to Chilson not all that long ago, and she was still forming friendships and connections. I knew how hard it could be to insert yourself into the life of a small town, so I said, “Absolutely not a problem. What do you need?”

“A ride.”

I blinked. “To somewhere or from somewhere?”

“To home,” she said. “From . . . from the hospital.” And then the brave and capable Pam Fazio did something that shocked me.

She started crying.

T
he next day, after the police had come and gone, I stood in the back doorway of Pam's antiques store.

It was a horrific mess.

Linens, shoes, clothes, and books lay scattered everywhere. Slowly, I walked through the store, bits of broken glass and porcelain crunching under my feet, bits that had, until yesterday, been whimsical teapots, adorable mugs, stunning vases, gorgeous candlesticks, and hand mirrors that had probably survived two world wars.

Standing in the middle of the room, I turned in a slow circle. Even the framed prints and photos on the walls had been tossed onto the floor, their glass shattered and frames broken. The noise filled me, and I wanted to plug my ears against a memory that was only in my imagination.

I crouched and picked up a metal lunch box, one from the female-themed collection Pam had been growing the past few months. Supergirl was still flying, but one of her arms was a little dinged.

Just like Pam.

My friend had returned to her store late the previous night to make sure she'd turned off the coffeepot. “I always double-check before I leave,” Pam had said as I drove her home from the hospital. “But when I was getting ready for bed, I just couldn't remember. I had to go back.”

I'd nodded. Though the library's coffeepot had a timer attached, on my way out I always made sure there was no heat. Not that I distrusted electronics; I just trusted my own senses more.

“So I walked back to the store,” Pam had gone on. This made sense, since her small house was only a few blocks from downtown. “It was a beautiful night. I was looking at the stars, thinking how lucky I was to live in a place where you could actually see the Milky Way without driving for miles to get away from the city lights. I cut down the alley, like I always do, and went to the back door. “But . . .” She gave a pained noise. “But the door was partly open. There was no possible way I'd left it that way. Something was seriously wrong.”

She'd looked over at me. “I know I should have left right then and called the police—I know they do hourly rounds downtown all summer—but I had to look inside. I mean, it's my store.”

Her last words were emphatic and heartfelt, and I knew exactly how she'd felt. If I hadn't had Eddie with me the morning I'd found the bookmobile garage broken open, I might have done the same thing. Sometimes the right thing to do takes second place to what you have to do.

Pam had continued on with her tale. That she'd pushed the door all the way open. That she'd seen a large shape moving around inside the shadows. That she'd called out in anger. That the shape had moved
toward her, shoving her aside with so much force that she'd fallen hard against a counter. The shape had run into the poorly lit alley and vanished.

Struggling to her feet, Pam had put her hands on the floor to push herself up and fallen back down from pain. She'd extracted her cell phone from her purse and called 911. The city police had arrived quickly, the ambulance right behind them. In the emergency room, Pam was told she had a broken arm and that it would take eight weeks to heal.

“Eight weeks,” she'd said, as I helped her out of my car and into her house. “I have a store to run. A store to clean up! I can't . . . I don't . . .”

“Shh,” I'd told her, helping her out of her clothes and into her nightgown. “Don't worry about that now. Get some rest.” I pulled back the bedcovers and tucked her into bed. “Sleep now. That's what you need more than anything.”

“Sleep?” she had asked sleepily. “I can't possibly go to sleep right now. I have too much to do . . . too much to figure out . . . too much . . .”

And she'd been out.

I'd soft-footed it across the room and shut the door behind me. I turned to leave, then went the other way and stopped in the kitchen. After reassuring myself that she had food in the refrigerator edible for someone one-handed, I'd driven home and settled into bed with a purring Eddie
, thinking that if I'd been a truly good friend, I would have offered Pam the comfort of my cat.

“What do you think?” I'd asked him, yawning. “Would you mind being someone else's security blanket for a few days?”

“Mrr,” he'd said, lightly sinking the claws of one front foot into my arm.

“Okay, maybe it was a bad idea.”

“Mrr.”

“Okay, it
was
a bad idea.”

“Mrr.” He'd retracted his claws and snuggled up against my shoulder.

In seconds, he was snoring as only an Eddie could. I'd lain awake for a few minutes, thinking, then closed my eyes and, still making plans for the next day, had fallen sound asleep.

Now I turned in a small circle, surveying the damage. The stunning shock of seeing the shambles of Pam's geniuslike retail displays had retreated, and I started to take a hard look at the damage.

After a few minutes, I had a plan, and pulled out my cell phone to start its implementation.

“Tom? It's Minnie Hamilton. Sorry to bother you on your one day off, but— What's that? No, I don't need any cookies. Something happened last night, and I was wondering if you'd be willing to help.”

An hour later, a small band of downtown business owners had converged on Pam's store. I handed out work gloves I'd borrowed from the marina office, told everyone to watch for broken glass, and put them all to work.

We piled and we sorted and we swept and we cleaned and we talked a little too loud, trying to keep the fear at bay. Chilson was a haven for so many of us, a place of calm and peace and serenity. Sure, unhappy things came around every once in a while, but to have something like this happen, something malicious and evil, well, this was different.

At one point, I held out my hand for cash donations and ordered a stack of pizzas from Fat Boys. When I came back, arms laden, I held out my hand again.
“Take your money back,” I said. “Those guys heard what we were doing and wouldn't take any money.”

But no one, from Cookie Tom to the Shomins to Shannon Hirsch, an attorney at the other end of downtown, would take their cash. “We'll leave it for Pam,” the owner of the jewelry store said. “It's not much, but she's going to need it.”

Everyone nodded.

“Even if her insurance company pays out,” said the hardware store's owner as he picked up a slice of pepperoni and sausage, “it'll take weeks, if not months, to get a check, and she'll need cash to replace stock.”

Which was far easier said than done, because Pam's buying trips were done in the slower seasons, not in the busy summer. We all knew this, but since there wasn't anything we could do about it, we ate and drank the soda and water that the Fat Boys had also donated, and got back to work.

Late in the afternoon, as Reva Shomin and the owner of the bike shop were trying to wrestle a corner cupboard back into the exact position we'd all decided it had been yesterday, a loud voice cut through the chatter.

“What on earth are you doing?”

The cupboard
thump
ed to the floor, rocking a little, then going still. Everyone looked at each other, then as one, they all looked at me.

I swallowed and turned to face Pam, who was standing in the front doorway with her hands on her hips. Well, technically, one hand on one hip because the other hand was poking out of a sling, but whatever.

“Um,” I said. Earlier, I'd thought about calling her and making sure she was okay with us going ahead and cleaning up. But I hadn't wanted to wake her if she was
still sleeping, and since she'd left her purse behind in my car, a purse that had contained the keys to the store, I'd figured I'd get started, then call her a little later.

“I meant to call you,” I said lamely. And I had; I'd just ended up so busy I'd forgotten all about it. I suddenly remembered my mother's admonitions to think first and act second. Maybe next time I'd remember her advice at a moment when I could implement it.

“Hey, Pam,” Cookie Tom said, nodding. He probably would have waved, but his hands were busy because he was hauling books from one of the carefully sorted piles. “Maybe you should sit down. You look a little pale.”

He was right. I guided her to a tall stool that the owner of a local bar had hauled in for us to use. “Just sit a minute,” I said. “You can direct everything from there.”

“But . . . but I don't even know all these people,” she said, bewilderment clear on her face.

This was because our work crew had accidentally hauled in some passing tourists who had seen the activity inside and been more than willing to roll up their sleeves and pitch in.

“They're people who want to help,” I said, opening a water bottle and handing it to her.

“But—”

“Drink,” I told her. “I'm willing to bet you haven't had enough fluids today, and I know they told you at the hospital to make sure you stay hydrated.”

Not really paying attention to what she was doing, Pam took a sip of water. “How did . . . Why are . . .” She shook her head and glanced around, her eyes wide. “Everything's almost done. I thought this would take days.”

“Many hands make light work,” I said, nodding as wisely as I could.

Pam blinked. “I can't believe . . .”

Before she could go all teary, I nudged her hand, encouraging her to drink. When she was doing so, I started listing our accomplishments. “We decided to sort things into groups. Things broken beyond repair, things that were damaged but still saleable, and the things that weren't damaged at all.” Her expression turned pensive, and I hurried on. “The busted-up pile was the smallest by far, and we took lots of pictures for your insurance claim.”

“Got them right here,” said Kirk, owner of the local photography studio, tapping his laptop. “I'm finishing up the file names.”

“Same with the slightly damaged stuff,” I said. “Kirk will burn DVDs so you and your insurance company will have records.”

“You . . . will?”

“Not a problem,” Kirk said, smiling at her. “Glad to help.”

“Really?” she asked.

I rolled my eyes. “And over there, at the other laptop, Trudy is finishing up an inventory.” Trudy, an accountant, waved a manicured hand in our direction but didn't look away from the computer. She'd been happy to help out, and even happier to know that her specific help wouldn't involve the lifting of anything heavier than her computer's mouse.

“When it's done,” I told Pam, “Trudy will e-mail you the spreadsheet. We didn't know how you track your stock, so Trudy put the data into lots of columns. You can sort it any way you need and compare it against
your existing list.” I didn't have any firsthand knowledge of Pam's inventorying practices, but I knew without a doubt that this capable woman kept accurate track of the items in her store.

“I . . . don't know what to say.” Pam clutched the water bottle hard enough to make the thin plastic crackle. “I . . .”

“Don't say anything,” Kristen held up two large handfuls of antique cookie cutters. “Unless you want to tell me where these buggers go.”

Without a pause, Pam said, “In a wire basket. It was on the butcher-block kitchen island.”

As Kristen bustled off to display them properly, the owner of the shoe store held up a pair of large dolls and asked, “Pam? How about these?”

She slid off the stool and, within seconds, was deep into the business of directing the placement of the hundreds of items in her store.

I watched for a moment, making sure she was steady on her feet, breathed a short sigh of relief, and then returned to my self-appointed task of sorting the books.

*   *   *

“What's missing?” I asked Pam.

We were eating the last of the pizza, and everyone else was long gone. For the past hour, Pam and I had been comparing her inventory list against Trudy's list and the pictures Kirk had taken.

Pam swallowed a bite of mushrooms and olives and said, “To tell you the truth, I'm not sure.”

“Bzz! Wrong answer. We've worked too hard for that kind of response. Try again.”

She laughed, and I sent up a small prayer of thanks to whomever might be listening for the quick return of
her warm laughter. “That's not what I meant,” she said. “What I meant was, I can't see that anything has been stolen. It looks like this was just vandalism.”

I studied the two lists and murmured, “Another one.”

“That's right,” Pam said. “You had two up at the library, didn't you? The book-sale room and the poor bookmobile. Well, they say things come in threes.”

“They also say drinking coffee as a kid will stunt your growth.”

Pam looked at me. “You do drink a lot of coffee.”

“Didn't drink a drop until I was in college.”

“Then why are you so short?”

“Because you can't breed midgets and raise giants,” I said, quoting my grandfather, who had also told me to pay attention not just some of the time but all of the time. This was my mother's father, and she'd learned many of her stock phrases from him, but somehow I'd always found it easier to listen to Grandpa.

And somehow that made me think of something. I went to the back of the store, trying to put myself back in time to when I'd walked in that morning. After a moment, I asked, “Can you pull up the first pictures Kirk took?” Kirk had been my second phone call and, after I'd explained what had happened, he'd been the first to arrive, camera and lighting equipment in hand. He'd set up quickly and snapped away, finishing just as the rest of the troops trooped in.

“Hang on a sec.” One-handed, she clicked open the appropriate computer file. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“Three things.” I pointed toward the rear wall, to a display in the middle of the room, and to some shelving near the front door. “What do those look like in the pictures?”