Cat With a Clue (25 page)

“Mrr!”

I considered the current Eddie situation. If Chastain's book happened to be in the first box I opened, we'd be out of here in a flash. If it was in the last box I opened, we'd be here for days. The most probable reality was
that we'd be here somewhere between those two possibilities. Hours, anyway.

“Promise to come when you're called?” I peered into the carrier through the wire door. Not that he ever had in the past, but maybe today would be different.

“Mrr,” he said quietly.

“Okay, then.” I unlatched the door and let Eddie roam free. “The door to upstairs is closed,” I told him, “so all you can do is wander around down here. And don't even think of asking if you can go up, because you can't. There are too many exhibits that aren't cat toys.” A bear rug for one, a native American headdress for another. And then there were the lace dresses, the carved pew from Chilson's first church, and the dugout canoe. “Claw marks in any of that stuff wouldn't be good.”

“Mrr.” Eddie leaped out of the carrier and onto the concrete floor.

“I agree with you, pal,” I said, blatantly lying. “Claw marks make everything look better. It's just some of that stuff hasn't had any claw marks in it for a hundred years or more, and Amelia prefers it that way.”

As I talked, I studied the boxes that were strewn about. Some were labeled; some were not. Some were taped shut; some were not. There were boxes on chairs, boxes on tables, boxes on shelves, boxes in the maze of storerooms that some said had once housed alcohol during the Prohibition years.

I turned around in a small circle, trying to make sense of the arrangement. Amelia had started to explain the sorting system, but I'd shooed her out the door, telling her that I'd figure it out. And I would.

Eventually.

“How about this one?” I asked, but Eddie was nowhere to be seen. When he wanted to, he could make
himself smaller than a cat hair–covered washcloth. So, without Eddie's assistance, I flapped open the first box and peered in.

I hadn't honestly expected to find
Wildflowers
in the first box, but when I saw a collection of linens, I was still disappointed. “Rats,” I said, after reaching inside and making sure there were no books tucked into the folds of aprons and tea towels. “So much for serendipity.”

I put my hands on my hips and looked around. “It would have been helpful,” I told my invisible cat, “if the date of the donation had been written on the box.” Amelia had said they kept a log of the donations, who they were from, general contents, dates, and so on, but they hadn't written any of that nice data on the boxes, since the moment the donations were taken out of the box, it didn't matter.

This made sense, but it wasn't very helpful for someone like me, who was looking for something larger than a needle in something that was bigger than a haystack. Then again . . .

“How big is a haystack, exactly?” I asked.

Eddie didn't answer, of course. I was tempted to whip out my phone and ask my favorite search engine the question, but no. I was here to find a book. A very valuable book. A book that someone had been killed over.

I rubbed my arms, trying to smooth down the goose pimples. “It's chilly down here. Good thing you have a fur coat, Eddie.”

“Mrr,” came the muffled noise.

And I started opening boxes.

*   *   *

A while later, I was tired of opening boxes. The day had been long and hot, and I was tired and hungry and in need of a shower. “Can we go home now?”

Eddie had climbed onto a set of shelving in a back room and fit himself between the top box and the ceiling. “Mrr.”

I sighed. “You're right. This is important, and I shouldn't give up so easily.”

“Mrr,” he said, and started purring.

“Easy for you to say,” I said, but I went back to the boxes and, as I should have expected, I grew fascinated with things I was finding. It didn't take long, and I soon lost track of time, forgetting about food and water and sleep and even ice cream.

“Look at this!” I held out a framed photo so Eddie could see. “It's Abraham Lincoln—I'm sure of it!” The image was a crowd scene, but President Lincoln was front and center, stovepipe hat and all. “I wonder where it was taken?” I looked closely but couldn't see any identifiers in the photo. “But that guy sitting next to him looks familiar, doesn't he? If I could figure out who he is, I might be able to figure out when and where this was taken and—”

“Mrr!”

I sighed. He was right. We were here to look for
Wildflowers
. President Lincoln had waited this long; he could wait a little longer.

“Don't you get tired of being right all the time?” I asked, reaching for the 1974 newspaper in which the photo had been wrapped. “I mean, being perfect must be exhausting. No wonder you sleep so much.”

I cocked my head, waiting for his response.

Thud.

I frowned in the direction of the noise I'd just heard, which had sounded a lot like someone stepping onto the bottom creaky step. Amelia had said she'd lock the doors, that I just had to let myself out the side door,
which would lock behind me. I hadn't bothered to make sure she'd locked up, and given her state of anxiety, I now realized I should have.

“Hello?” I called out. “The museum is closed.” I carefully set Lincoln back into his box and headed for the storeroom's narrow door. “Sorry, but the door must have—”

There was a small
click
.

The basement went black.

I stopped. If given a few minutes, I might be able to think of a dozen reasons why all the lights had suddenly gone out. A power outage, for one.

But combined with that footstep, there was only one reason; whoever was after
Wildflowers
had figured out what I was doing and had followed me.

“This is so not good,” I whispered to myself.

Because I was now alone with Andrea's killer.

In the basement of an empty building.

I
edged backward, deeper into the dark, trying to get as far away from the killer as possible, but stopped almost immediately, because the stupidity of that particular action was apparent even to me.

Retreat to a smaller space? One that had a single door and zero windows? Only the dumbest potential victim in the lowest-budget movie would do something like that, and, since I liked to think of myself as smart and resourceful, now would be a good time for that to actually be true.

“You can come out now, Minnie,” said a male voice. “I know you're in there.”

My last hope, that I'd been mistaken about the killer being in here with me and that the museum's electricity had been shut off because someone had neglected to pay the electric bill, fizzled away into nothing.

“Who else is down here?” he asked. “I know you're not alone; I heard you talking to someone.”

Eddie, in a bizarre act of appropriate behavior, remained quiet.

So did I.

“There's no point in hiding.” A flashlight beam started dancing around the room. I moved quickly and quietly, and crouched behind a stack of boxes.

What I needed was a plan, and I needed it fast. Ten minutes ago would have been best, so that Eddie and I could have left the basement before the killer even arrived, the killer being . . . who? Shane, aka Angry Guy? Paul Utley? Jared, the used-book store guy? Steve Guilder? Bob Parmalee? Of the five, I hadn't even met Bob, and I didn't know the other four well enough to recognize their voices.

“Come on, Minnie, there's no need to be scared.”

If I hadn't been so scared, I would have snorted derisively. No one who barges into a closed museum, tiptoes down to the basement, and turns the lights off on the unsuspecting occupants of said basement had good intentions.

“All I want to do is talk.”

And all I wanted was to get out of that basement, cat in hand, but I didn't say so out loud.

The flashlight's beam played over the stacks of boxes, sending long, complicated shadows around the room as it went. “I hear,” he said, “that you've figured out that Chastain's
Wildflowers
is down here somewhere.” He sighed. “All these boxes! I hope I gave you enough time to find the book. The last thing I want to do is spend my Saturday night digging through a bunch of old dusty crap that should have been thrown away generations ago.”

The cone of light came to an abrupt halt. “For crying out loud. Would you look at that? It's one of those hair wreaths. What did some woman do, cut off all her hair to make this thing? Must have taken weeks to make something this complicated, but at the end of the
day, it's just creepy to have some dead chick's hair hanging on your wall, don't you think?”

I wanted to ask him if he thought the DeKeysers should have thrown away
Wildflowers
a generation or two back, but managed to keep my mouth shut. He was trying to get me to talk, and I wasn't going to play his game.

Think,
I told myself.
Figure this out. Come up with a plan A, have a plan B for backup, then start working on implementation. Shouldn't be that hard.

In theory.

“Why on earth do people hang on to old crap like this?” The flashlight played over a box I'd opened early on. I saw a hand reach down to flip through the contents. “And then donate it to a museum?” He made a rude noise. “You must have some kind of ego if you think strangers would be interested in your old family photos.”

Clearly, the man had no sense of history. I continued to keep my mouth shut and silently vowed one more time to keep
Wildflowers
from this guy. Not that I'd found the book yet, but that wasn't the point.

“So, where is it?” he asked. “You've been down here for hours—you must have found it by now. And I must say, I'm pleased you never noticed me following you the past week. I kept hearing you were asking all sorts of questions. I didn't worry too much about that, but once I found out you're dating Ash Wolverson, I had to make sure you didn't cause me any trouble.” He laughed. “On the contrary, I'd say you led me straight to the book.”

He moved around the room, but slow enough that I was able to back away, undetected, by hiding behind boxes, old countertops from the pharmacy, and old
shelving units from the hardware store. Once again, being under-tall was working to my advantage, since it didn't take much to hide me. Hooray for getting the short end of the genetic stick!

Short end?

My inane thought was suddenly so funny I almost laughed out loud. I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep my nervous laughter inside, and the small noise must have alerted him.

“Heard that,” he said casually. His flashlight speared the darkness, and I tried to make myself smaller than I'd been since I was twelve years old. “Look,” he said. “We both know you're down here, so why are you bothering to hide?”

I figured the answer to that was obvious, so this time it was easy to keep my mouth shut.

“Come on, Minnie,” he said. “All I want is that book. Sure, it was donated to the museum, but they don't even know what they have, so clearly they don't deserve it. We're the only ones who know the value of Chastain's book, so let's talk about this.”

I watched the flashlight shift away from me. If I ran now, he wouldn't see the movement. The open stairway was about fifteen feet to my left and it was . . . too far. He was bigger, faster, and stronger than I was, and he'd be on me before I got three steps up the stairs. I had to get closer before I ran.

A lot closer.

Slowly, so very slowly, I stood and wedged myself behind a set of freestanding shelves; old wooden ones with a solid back. If I could inch behind it all the way to the other end, I'd be close enough to the stairs to make a run for it.

“So, here's the deal,” my enemy said. “Let's work on
two assumptions. One, that the book is here. Two, that we both want the money it will bring if we sell it to the right person.”

I almost yelled at him then and there. Any money the book might bring didn't belong to him and it didn't belong to me. It belonged to . . . well, I wasn't sure who it belonged to, considering that Talia DeKeyser had given it away while in the grips of Alzheimer's, that Chandra Wunsch had given it away without knowing what she had, and that the museum hadn't a clue about its value, but that was for the attorneys to figure out.

And speaking of attorneys, the more this guy talked, the more I was sure it was Paul Utley. Angry Guy Shane didn't have this guy's vocabulary, and, if my first impressions of Jared were anywhere close to being accurate, he didn't have this kind of intensity. Then again, I didn't know anything about Bob Parmalee and hardly anything about Steve Guilder.

“Let's talk about a sixty-forty split,” he said. “Sixty percent for me, forty for you. Now, you might think a fifty-fifty split would be fair, or even sixty-forty to your benefit, but let's look at the facts.”

This guy was definitely an attorney. It wasn't possible that any other variety of human would talk that way.

“Yes,” Paul said, “you've found the book, or at least its approximate location, but would you have even known it existed without the inciting incidents that came before? Incidents that were the result of my knowledge? And Andrea's?”

He had a point, but it didn't matter. “Moron,” I whispered. If he thought a true librarian could possibly steal a valuable book, he could think anything.

Paul sighed audibly. “This is getting old.”

I edged farther along the back of the wooden shelves,
stabbing myself with tiny bits of raw wood in the process, hoping that none of them were big enough to catch me tight. I had to get to the other end. There was no other choice.

“I'm stronger than you,” he said, “faster than you, and I'm certainly a lot bigger than you. There's no way this will be a fair fight, which is the way we lawyers prefer things.” He laughed. “So, I ask you: Why are you making this so difficult? I asked Andrea the same the same thing, and look what I had to do to her.” He laughed again. “I even had to pretend to love her all over again, for crying out loud.”

His words sent my blood pressure soaring. If there was one thing I hated more than people turning down the corners of pages in library books, it was condescension, and this guy reeked of it.

“Come out, Minnie,” Paul said, “and let's discuss this like reasonable adults. After all, nothing has happened yet, correct? I haven't done a thing except frighten you, and that was pure accident.”

It was?

I sidled sideways a little bit more. The end of the shelves were close now. If I leaned to the left, maybe I could see where Paul was and what he was doing. After all, maybe he did just want to talk. Maybe I'd jumped to a conclusion that I'd laugh about later. Maybe my instincts had been wrong.

Moving slowly, carefully, and quietly, and always, always watching the path of the flashlight's beam, I eased left.

“An accident.” Paul was crouching low, sending the cone of light around the room, looking for . . . what? My feet? “You understand that, right? Why would I
want to scare you? Come on out, and we'll talk about how to deal with the book.”

His lawyer's voice was soothing and monotonous and almost sirenlike. Happily, a short stint as a telemarketer when I was desperate for cash in college had endowed me with a permanent immunity to sales pitches, and there was no doubt Paul was trying to sell me something.

Groaning, he put his hands on his knees to help push himself upright. As he did, the flashlight dropped out of his hand and clattered to the floor. He cursed and leaned down to pick it up.

But it was too late. When the flashlight had fallen and hit the floor, it had spun around and illuminated what he held in his other hand.

Illuminated the long, shiny, and very sharp-looking knife he was holding with a strong grip.

If there was ever a time to launch Plan A, it was now.

I braced my back against the wall, wedged my knees tight, placed my hands flat against the shelving. And pushed.

Creak!

Paul Utley whirled around, but since I was behind the shelving, there was nothing for him to see.

Though I was pushing for all I was worth, the freakishly heavy thing didn't tip over. It swayed a little, though, and I moved instantly into Plan A-1, because I hadn't spent the last four winters in northwest lower Michigan without learning something about how to get my car out of a ditch. The key was to rock it.

Push, release. Push, release. Push . . .

With each cycle, the arc of movement grew wider and faster.

Utley's flashlight danced around the room, but too fast to catch the slow action of the shelves.

C'mon,
I urged it.
Tip!

Push, release. Push, release. Push . . .

Paul's flashlight finally touched on the movement. “What the—”

It toppled over in superslow motion. I heard the boxes on the crowded shelves start to slide forward, heard one thud to the floor, heard Utley shout, and then finally, at long last . . .

Crash!

I didn't wait to hear any more. I was scrambling for the stairs, tripping over boxes, hurling myself forward, trying to get away from that long, shiny, deadly knife. My cell phone was in the back room, but it was only a couple of blocks to city police station. If I ran fast, I could have someone back here in less than—

“It's a freaking cat!” Paul Utley said.

I stopped dead.

“Hey,” he said, loudly, “I bet this is that bookmobile cat everyone talks about. What's your name, kitty?”

“Mrr.”

“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

Now Eddie decided to be Mr. Friendly?
Now?

But maybe he'd see through Utley's fake friendliness. Maybe cats really did have some of the traits ascribed to dogs. Maybe Eddie would sense Utley's underlying intentions, claw the back of his hand, make him drop the knife, pick up the knife in his teeth, and scamper away with it, and I'd take it in my handkerchief to preserve the fingerprints and—

And that's where my fast-forwarding fantasy came to a screeching halt. I'd never carried a handkerchief in my life.

My hand was on the front doorknob. Outside it was full dark; more time had passed than I realized. The sidewalks were empty of life, and the only car in sight was parked at the far end of the street. I pushed open the door and squinted, trying to see the time on the freestanding clock at the corner.

“That's a good kitty,” Utley said.

My cat's purrs were loud enough so that I could hear them from the top of the stairs.

“Just a little closer . . . No, come on now, just a few feet more . . .”

A few feet more and Utley would grab Eddie, my fuzzy friend, my pal, my napping buddy. He'd put that long knife to my cat's white throat and use him as a hostage. Eddie would hiss and howl and claw and scratch, but Utley wouldn't care, because he needed that book and he needed me to keep quiet about it and about him.

Time for Plan B.

Which was unfortunate, because I hadn't had time to formulate more than a rough draft.

I scanned the sidewalk one more time, hoping against hope that I'd see someone coming, someone who could help us, someone who would instantly respond to a shriek for help.

But there was no one.

“Come here, you stupid cat!”

“Mrrrr-RRR!!” Eddie growled and hissed and spat.

I turned and ran pell-mell back down the stairs.