Cat With a Clue (7 page)

She pointed her index finger straight at me. “I have a problem, and I want to know what you're going to do about it.”

I folded my hands on my desk. Denise had a lot of problems, but it wasn't likely that she was coming to me for advice on how to win friends and influence people. Then again, if she was interested in doing that, there were some books I could recommend.

“Can I get you some coffee?” I asked.

“If Kelsey made it, then yes. Otherwise, no. She's the only one who makes a decent brew around here. The rest of you are a bunch of coffee wimps.”

“Holly made the last pot.”

Denise shuddered. “I'd rather go without.”

Then that's what she'd do. I smiled, trying my best to stay friendly and composed. “What's the problem?”

Her frown turned into a glower. “The book-sale room.”

“What about it?” For eons, the Friends of the Library had been running a book sale. In the old library they'd been shoehorned into a basement room little bigger than a closet, but now they were in a spacious area on the second floor with room to grow. Donated books and books we took out of circulation were sold, and all the profits went to benefit the library.

The Friends purchased books for us, hosted author events for us, held children's events for us, and lent a
helping hand whenever one was needed. I didn't want to think what running the library would be like without the Friends, and I was deeply grateful for everything they did.

“It's a mess,” Denise said. “A huge mess, and no one is admitting to having done it.”

This wasn't a huge surprise. A mess by Denise's standards would have been a comfortable clutter to anyone else. I'd once heard her berate a volunteer for walking past a shelf of sale books without straightening them to be flush with the front edge.

“How much of a mess are you talking about?” I asked.

“Come see,” she said, and shoved herself out of the chair and to her feet.

Not for the first time, I realized that I hadn't given Stephen enough credit. When he'd been here, he'd been in charge of soothing Denise's ruffled feathers, and I was now realizing it must have taken more time and patience than I'd ever dreamed. I made a silent apology to my former boss and remained seated.

“Sorry, Denise,” I said. “I don't have time right now.” I nodded at the piles of papers on my desk. “Give me half an hour.”

She huffed out a massive sigh. “And here I thought you were going to be a better director than Stephen. You're just as bad as he was at meeting the needs of the Friends.”

Though it was disheartening to be compared to a man whom I'd never thought had an ounce of management skills, I was learning. Slowly, but I was learning. “I'll be up in half an hour.” I smiled politely and went back to my papers.

Half an hour later, on the dot, I walked into the
book-sale room. “Wow,” I said, looking around. “You weren't kidding.”

Denise rolled her eyes. “I told you, didn't I? A mess.”

For once, she was making a huge understatement. Books were on the windowsills. Books were on the tables. Books were scattered across the floor. It looked as if a huge wind had rushed through the room, sucking every book off a shelf and spitting them out every which way. It was a horrendous mess.

“You'd better stop,” I told Denise.

“What?” She was crouching on the floor, picking up books, and sliding them onto the nearest shelf. “Don't be ridiculous. We have to get this room back in shape before tomorrow. That's sale day, you know.”

Once upon a time I'd known when the Friends opened the room to the public for sales, but Denise had switched it around so much the past few months that I never told anyone the sales days without running upstairs and checking the dates taped to the door.

“The police need to look at this,” I said.

“Police? That's nuts. This was vandalism, pure and simple. Some kids snuck up here and, without Stephen in his office down the hall, they had time to do all this.”

I frowned. “Haven't you heard what happened?”

“Heard what?” she said crossly. “I've been downstate visiting friends. Drove up this morning and came straight to the library.”

Oh, dear. If I'd had to make a list of the people who'd heard about the murder ten minutes after I'd called the police, Denise's name would have been at the top. She was related to half the people in Chilson and had gone to school with the other half. That she hadn't heard about Andrea Vennard might well be a
sign that the world was about to end. I hoped not, though, because I had things to do. Like grow older.

I walked across the room and gently took the books out of her hands. “You'd better sit down. There's something I need to tell you.”

Since murder had struck her own family less than a year ago, I thought she might take the news hard, and she did. She dissolved into sobbing tears after I'd told her a woman had been killed in the library, but after she'd recovered, I called the city police and they sent up the nice Officer Joel Stowkowski. He looked around, took notes, snapped photos, checked doors and windows, and offered a lot of sympathy, but he hadn't been able to promise much in the way of retribution for anyone who had the temerity to damage books in a library, even if they weren't technically library books.

It was all kinds of rotten, and I was glad to head home to the marina that evening and curl up with Eddie and a book. But that night the wind came up, slapping waves against the houseboat and rocking me into dreams that featured earthquakes and landslides. Then, as the dark edged into a gray, dreary, windswept morning, the heavens opened up and the rain came down.

Eddie and I sat at the dining table, me on the bench, Eddie on the back of the bench looking out at the wet world.

“It's a bookmobile day,” I reminded him. “What do you think?”

There was no response from my feline friend.

“You don't have to go, you know,” I said. “People will understand.” Which wasn't exactly true. Once, last winter, Eddie hadn't been feeling well and I'd left him at the boardinghouse instead of dragging him out into the
cold. I'd had to explain his bookmobile absence, and he'd received more Get Well cards than I'd received Christmas cards. Not that it was a contest, but still.

Eddie jumped onto the table and started to stick his head into my cereal bowl.

“Hey!” I pulled what was left of my breakfast away from him. “What do you think you're doing? This is mine. Yours is on the floor. You know, in the cat-food bowl? And get off the table. You don't belong up there.”

He gave me a look, then started a slow ooze onto the floor.

“Faster,” I said, giving his hind legs a slight shove.

“Mrr!” he said just before he landed.

“Yeah, well, back at you.”

When I didn't hear anything else, I turned and saw that he was sitting on top of his cat carrier. “Ready to go?” I asked.

Cat fashion, he managed to rearrange his feet without moving, staring at me the whole time.

“I'll take that as a yes.”

“Mrr!”

I laughed out loud. I was almost sorry I'd had Eddie fixed, because if I'd been able to find a girl cat who could tolerate him, their kittens would have been something extraordinary.

“Then again,” I told him a few minutes later, as I fastened my car's passenger's-side seat belt around the cat carrier, “having an entire litter of you might be too much. Yes, I know that none of your offspring could possibly be an improvement on your own unique species, but just imagine four or five or six little Eddies, all trying to talk to me at the same time.”

Months ago, I'd decided that Eddie had to be one of
a kind and named him
Felis eddicus.
Very like the more common
Felis domesticus
, but not quite.

“What kind of cat would be your mate of choice?” I asked. “Tortoiseshell? Another tabby? A Siamese? How about a Scottish fold? They're way cute.”

“Mrr.”

“Okay, no Scottish folds.” I glanced over. My cat was flopped on his back, wedging himself into a corner of the carrier, waving his legs in the air. “Though a better question might be, what self-respecting lady cat would have anything to do with you?”

“Mrr!”

“Yeah, whatever.” Grinning, I squinted through the rain. “You're out of practice, pal. As I recall, the last time you talked to a female feline, there was a lot of fur flying and you weren't the clear victor.” Last winter, my aunt Frances's new love interest, Otto, had brought over his adorable little gray cat, hoping the two would become friends, but all had not gone well.

I flicked on the turn signal and made a right into the library's back parking lot, which was the only place Stephen had allowed me to site a garage for the bookmobile. It was a very small garage, not much bigger than the bookmobile itself. This made hefting books back and forth to the library more than a small chore, but at the time I'd accepted his conditions willingly, because it was either accept or not have a bookmobile at all.

“If that estate ever gets settled,” I told Eddie, “what do you think the chances are that I'll get to use some of that money for a real garage?”

“Mrr.”

“You think so?” Because he'd sounded optimistic. “That would be wonderful. And maybe the new Stephen
will let me . . .” I trailed off. Holly and Josh and Donna and Kelsey and everyone else on the staff were still after me to turn in my application. “I could be the new Stephen. What do you think of that?”

“Mrr!”

I frowned. “It's not that unlikely. I'm doing an okay job so far. It's not that much of a stretch to—”

“MRR!” Eddie howled, banging his whole self against the carrier's wall, thumping so hard that I winced.

“Will you stop that? What's wrong with—”

It was then that I noticed the people door to the bookmobile garage wasn't closed up tight. In fact, it wasn't closed at all. I braked to a sudden stop.

There wasn't a single, solitary chance I'd left that door unlocked, let alone standing wide-open. There were things I routinely forgot, such as going to the dentist every six months and making sure I dusted the top of the kitchen cabinets, but I would never, ever forget to shut and lock the bookmobile's garage door.

So there were two possibilities. One, last night's wind had broken the door open. But since the door had remained firmly shut throughout the massive storm of a few weeks ago, when hundred-mile-an-hour, straight-line winds had rushed through town, that didn't seem likely. Unfortunately, the other possibility was far more troubling.

My heart beat fast as I put the car in park and opened the driver's door. I had to find out what had happened, I had to see what was—

“Mrr!”

I looked at my cat.

“Mrr!” he said again, glaring at me.

“You're right,” I muttered, sitting down. “It would be stupid to go barging in there.”

I reached down, pulled my phone out of my backpack's outer pocket, and dialed three numbers. Then I took a deep breath and unclenched my jaw so that I'd be able to respond when the dispatcher asked about my emergency.

“I'd like to report a break-in,” I said.

“Y
ou seem to be making a habit of this,” Officer Joel Stowkowski said, eyeing the mess that had once been a tidy bookmobile.

“Well,” I said, still doing my best not to sit down on the carpeted step and bawl like a toddler, “you know what they say: Bad habits are six and a half times easier to create than good ones.”

Joel quirked up a smile. He was probably fifty years old, and was known throughout town as a good guy. Ash, who had first worked at the Chilson Police Department before moving to the sheriff's office, said he had a nasty tendency to think puns were the highest form of humor, but so far that hadn't bothered me. “Six and a half times?” he asked. “You're making that up.”

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

Joel peered into the cat carrier, which I'd set onto the bookmobile's console. “Was he asking the same thing or coming to your defense?”

“He was wondering where his treats went.” I nodded at the empty shelf near Joel's left shoulder. “They used to be up there. Now . . .” I looked at the thousands of
books, CDs, DVDs, and magazines strewn all across the floor and, once again, felt tears prick at my eyes.
Buck up, Minnie,
I told myself.
You can't fall apart now; there's too much to do.
“He'll probably,” I said, “turn up his nose at treats that have been handled by a burglar, and demand new ones.”

“Yeah,” Joel said. “Cats are like that.” He reached out and patted the top of the carrier absently. “Well, Minnie, I'll do what I did yesterday upstairs—take pictures, take a close look at the doors and windows, and take fingerprints in the appropriate places.”

I nodded. If I ever got tired of working at the library, maybe I'd start a forensic-cleaning business. After all, I now had more experience getting rid of fingerprint dust than most people would get in two lifetimes.

“This is probably a stupid question at this point,” he went on, “but do you see anything missing?”

I just looked at him.

He grinned. “Told you it was a stupid question.”

“The computers are still here.” I gestured at the two laptops—one up front, the other at the back. “Of course, they're bolted in.”

“I'll take prints on those, too. We already have yours for elimination. Is there anyone else who uses the computers regularly?” After I told him I'd have Julia stop by the police station to get fingerprinted, he said, “Okay, then. Let me get the camera from the car and I'll get going.”

He turned to go, then stopped and swung back around. His face, normally creased with a smile, was serious. “I have no idea what's going on here, Minnie, but we will find out. Between us and the sheriff's department, we'll figure out who did this and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.”

I swallowed away another round of pending tears. “Thanks, Joel,” I said quietly. “That means a lot.”

“Maybe it was just kids messing around, maybe it was someone else. But no one is going to get away with breaking into our library and our bookmobile.”

“Our library,” he'd said. “Our bookmobile.” Was any librarian ever so lucky as I was? In the guise of scratching my face, I rubbed away my tears. “I believe you.”

He gave me a sharp nod and trod down the steps. I sat heavily onto the passenger's seat, giving myself three minutes to cry.

When that was done, I started thinking. First, I had to call Julia. Then there were the calls to make to the day's bookmobile stops, giving them the bad news that the bookmobile wasn't coming. I hated to do that, but there was little choice. If Joel's work yesterday at the Friends' sale room was any indication, he'd be here for a couple of hours. And then all the books needed to be shelved and checked against the computer to make sure nothing was missing.

I looked over at Eddie, who was staring at me. “What do you think?”

“Mrr,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It's way past time to install security cameras, isn't it.”

“Mrr.”

*   *   *

By lunchtime, I was almost ready to cry again, but this time from the wonderfulness of human beings. I'd called Julia to give her the news, and, without a word of suggestion from me, she, in turn, had called Denise, who had immediately harnessed the tremendous power of the Friends of the Library.

When Joel declared himself done with the documentation of the scene, half a dozen strong-minded men and women wielding vacuum cleaners, spray bottles, and rags went to work. Behind them came another equally strong-minded group who sorted and shelved and called out book titles to the people behind the computers.

“It's amazing,” I murmured as I peered out my office window. Denise and her crew had banished me to the library, and I'd reluctantly done as they'd asked.

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

He'd squeezed himself onto my office's narrow windowsill and, though he didn't quite fit, he didn't seem to mind that half of him was spilling out into the room.

“You look like a dork,” I told him.

He looked at me, and I could almost see the thought bubble rising out of his head. “Whatever,” it said, and he went back to working out how he could morph through the window glass and get at the birds swooping around the back side of the library.

“But it is amazing.” I'd just wandered out for a quick check of the progress at the garage and, with all the hands that had come in to help, they'd be done with the whole kit and caboodle by midafternoon. Which, technically, gave me time to make the last scheduled bookmobile stops of the day. “What do you think?”

Eddie, still at the window, didn't reply. He was miffed because I was keeping him contained in my office. Yes, libraries across the world had resident cats, but even though Stephen had been gone for weeks now, I couldn't break away from his policies in a finger snap. Though Stephen had tacitly allowed Eddie's presence on the bookmobile, the main library was another story altogether.

“Plus,” I told my furry friend as I turned back to work, “I'm only the interim director. That means I'm not the real one. Making drastic changes isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm just keeping the seat warm for the next person.”

“Which should be you.” Holly poked her head into the room. “The library board's about to start the first interview, you know. Did you turn in your application yet?”

“As soon as you finish cleaning out your garage.” The messy state of Holly's garage had been a constant lament for months. The possibility of it actually being cleaned out, however, was as real as the possibility of Eddie not shedding for thirty straight seconds.

Holly stuck her tongue out at me. “Do you have plans for lunch? Want to go down to the deli?”

“Sounds good.” I thought wistfully of my favorite sandwich from Shomin's: olive and Swiss cheese on sourdough with Thousand Island dressing. “But I should eat the lunch I brought to eat on the road. Thanks, though.”

Holly looked at the windowsill. “What about you, Eddie? Anchovies? Sardines?”

“He's fine with the cat food I brought,” I said quickly. Anything else tended to upset his little kitty tummy.

“See how she is?” A straight-faced Holly asked Eddie. “Strict. Uncompromising. Inflexible. She'll make a perfect successor for Stephen.”

“Mrr.”

“What did he say?” Holly asked.

“That if you don't stop insulting me, he's going to make you wish you'd never been born.”

“Really?” She looked at Eddie with some trepidation.

I laughed. “He's a cat. He's probably trying to figure out the most comfortable place to take a nap.”

“He might be smarter than you think.”

“Or not. You do realize that he can't really understand human speech?”

“If that's true, why do you keep talking to him as if he knows what you're saying?”

“Because I like to pretend.”

“Uh-huh.” She looked at me askance. “I'm not sure I believe you. I've heard the way you talk to him. Just like he's another human.”

“He's used to the sound of my voice—that's all,” I said. “Have you seen the size of his head? I mean, it's big for a cat, but compared to a human, it's tiny, and there's no way he has the capacity for cognition, not like we have, and—hey, Eddie, don't—”

A black-and-white shape whooshed past me and past my desk, then eeled through the gap Holly had left between the door and the doorframe, and ran into the freedom of the hallway.

“Eddie!” I called pointlessly. Like he was going to come just because I wanted him to.

Holly laughed. “You sure he doesn't understand what you were saying?”

“He saw an open door.” I got to my feet. “Cats are opportunists.”

“Doesn't that take brains?” she asked.

“Instinct. Natural reaction. Doesn't take any more intelligence than a . . . a horse getting out of a pasture, and I don't hear you saying that horses understand human speech.”

By this time we were both out in the hallway, scouting left and right for any trace of a runaway feline.

“Hmm,” she said. “Remember that television show,
Mr. Ed
? Maybe there's something about the name.”

Right. “I doubt he ran into the main library or the children's section. All those people would freak him out. Can you check back there?” I nodded toward the front desk and the office spaces behind. “I'll check the reading room.”

Holly headed off, and I hurried toward the reading room. And though I was doing my best to project nonchalance, I was actually a little worried. If Eddie had been close to an outside door when someone opened it, he could have zoomed out and—

“Stop it,” I said to myself. It was a big library, but there were only so many places a cat could hide. It wasn't like a house where there were nooks and crannies everywhere. The building was mostly public space without much furniture. There was no place for him to hide in the main stacks, unless . . . My steps quickened.

Unless he squirreled his way in behind a row of books. The shelves were deep enough for a cat to fit behind there, especially a cat wanting to hide from a human companion who had been seriously disrespecting his mental capacities.

Maybe he didn't know what I was saying, but he certainly understood the different tones in my voice, and he'd been tossed into a brand-new environment just a few hours earlier. Cats like routine, at least Eddie did, and I hadn't taken enough time to make sure he was happy. I was a horrible cat owner and didn't deserve Eddie's friendship and—

“Mrr.”

I stopped dead, just outside the entrance to the reading room. “Eddie?” I called. “Where are you?” I waited, but didn't hear him again. Which was frustrating, because
I hadn't been able to pinpoint his location from that one little “Mrr.” For the first time ever, I wished he'd start howling.

The reading room, my favorite space in the library, was almost empty. Even on this dark day, natural light filled the space, streaming through the windows that lined one wall. A multitude of seating options were offered through window seats, upholstered couches, chairs, and large ottomans, some of which were clustered around the large tiled fireplace at the far end of the room. The gas fire wasn't turned on today, but I almost wished it had been, because its heat would have been a sure Eddie magnet.

“Shhh,” an elderly male voice whispered. “If you don't tell, I won't. What do you say?”

I should have known.

Smiling, I walked around the back of a large wing chair to see one of my favorite library patrons, Lloyd Goodwin, feeding Eddie small bits of . . . “Is that beef jerky?” I asked.

Mr. Goodwin closed his hand over the meat. “I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“You,” I said, crossing my arms, “are a horrible liar.” Eddie, curled up on Mr. Goodwin's lap, reached out with one white-tipped paw and patted the closed fist. “Besides, Eddie knows what you have in there, and he doesn't care if you get caught eating in a room where food is forbidden.”

Mr. Goodwin had noticed Eddie the day I'd walked home from the cemetery with a stray cat on my heels, and the two had met numerous times since, because Mr. Goodwin's summer walking route went right past the marina.

“That was,” Mr. Goodwin said, “the leftovers from
my morning snack that I ate out in the hallway. I would never eat in this room.”

“But you'll let him?” I nodded at Eddie, who was snarfing down the last bits of jerky from the hand that Mr. Goodwin had opened. “That stuff probably isn't good for cats.”

“Cats are smart,” Mr. Goodwin said. “They don't eat what isn't good for them.”

I wasn't so sure about that, not in Eddie's case, anyway. “I need to get him back to my office,” I said. “He's an escapee.”

“This one?” Mr. Goodwin's age-spotted hand rested on Eddie's back. Eddie started purring immediately. “What's the harm in letting him roam? Pity about the bookmobile this morning,” he added. “Makes you wonder what's next. And that Andrea Wiley.” He sighed. “I don't like it when young people die. Such a waste. She had too many years taken away from her. And I'm so very sorry that you had to be the one to find her, dear Minnie.”

That was not something I wished to revisit. “Thanks. Did you know her?”

He began to pet Eddie, eliciting even louder purrs. “My wife was a good friend of her mother's, so I heard about her until my Mary went away.”

Two years ago, Mrs. Goodwin had gone to the emergency room because she was having trouble breathing. They'd diagnosed a serious heart condition and admitted her immediately for emergency surgery, but she hadn't survived. It had taken Mr. Goodwin more than a year to come back to being anything close to his former self, and only recently had he been able to speak her name without his voice breaking. I could only guess the
depth of his grief, and still hadn't decided if I wanted to love someone that much. Not that we got the choice. Or did we? Something to wonder about tonight.