Cat Trick (10 page)

This was either a very good thing or a very bad one.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, his tone just a tad too casual. “Why do
you think that button is either old or was handmade?”

I shook my head and refocused my attention. “The hypothetical button?” I asked.

A bit of color flushed his cheeks. “Okay, you got me,” he said. “It was a button Owen
found, but that stays between us.”

I nodded and scooped more noodles from my bowl. “I only got a quick look at it, but
from what I saw, it didn’t look like a plastic button. I think it might have been
metal, probably brass, which suggests something old or at least something not mass-produced.
And the design—square center and sloped sides—is very old-style.”

Marcus looked at me, clearly skeptical. “You got all that from a ‘quick look’?”

I felt my own face warming now. “You said I was observant. I guess I am. It probably
comes from living with two actors. My mother and father notice everything, every detail,
every nuance about people and situations. That’s why they’ve both always been good
at creating characters and it’s probably why my mother is developing a reputation
as an excellent director.” I didn’t add that my parents’ keen powers of observation
meant that at any given time they might be “living” their characters as well.

I snared a half-moon of zucchini with my chopsticks. “And I know a little about a
lot of things. That’s just part of being a librarian.”

“Why did you decide to be a librarian and not an actor?” Marcus asked. “Or something
else artistic? Your brother’s a musician, right?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh, and Sara is a filmmaker and a makeup artist. She’s shooting and
directing Ethan’s band’s first video.”

“So why aren’t you on stage or behind a camera?”

“Short answer: I have no talent.”

He slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so. What’s the long answer?”

The conversation had taken a sharp detour away from the Glazer case, but that was
okay. There wasn’t anything else I wanted to know. At least, right now there wasn’t.

“The long answer.” I frowned at the ceiling, trying to find the right words to explain.
“Well, I didn’t exactly have the white-picket-fence childhood. My mother and father
performed in theaters all up and down the East Coast when I was a kid and even for
a while when Ethan and Sara were little. Big elaborate theaters with live orchestras
and balcony boxes and little rinky-dink places that seated only fifty people above
a bakery where everyone went for sticky buns during intermission.”

“You’re kidding.”

I laughed. “No, I’m not. And I’m not saying it was a terrible childhood, because it
wasn’t, but it sure wasn’t conventional.”

Marcus pushed his empty bowl away and leaned back in his chair. “So you wanted ‘conventional’?”
he said.

“I wanted normal. Or what I thought of as normal.”

“Mayville Heights is your idea of normal?” he said, a smile crinkling the corners
of his eyes.

“Compared to how I grew up? Oh, yeah.” I twisted the last three noodles in my dish
around one chopstick and ate them. “Except for the fifteen months my parents were
divorced, I always had both of them in the same house. But sometimes I was living
with Lady Macbeth and Banquo, and sometimes it was Adelaide and Nathan Detroit. I
wanted parents who went to the office and came home and made meat loaf and mashed
potatoes for dinner, not a mother and father who staged Act One of
Les Misérables
in the dining room.” I gave a half shrug. “The acoustics were better than the living
room.”

“Of course,” he said as he got up and collected our dishes.

“Everywhere we lived, I always managed to find a library and my favorite books. When
I found out I could actually work in one, well, I never thought of doing anything
else.” I tucked one leg up under me as Marcus took the pudding cake out of the oven.
“And there probably was a little rebelliousness in the decision.”

“Instead of running off to join the circus, you ran off to join the library.”

“Pretty much.” I watched him spoon dessert into two more blue bowls. He set one in
front of me, and I closed my eyes for a moment and inhaled the rich chocolate scent.
When I opened them again, he was watching me and smiling.

“So what about you?” I asked, picking up my spoon.

“What do you mean?”

I had to make a little moan of pleasure at the taste of the first mouthful before
I could answer. “Why did you become a police officer?” I waved my spoon at him. “And
I want to hear the long answer.”

He pulled a hand back through his dark hair. “I don’t know if there is a long answer.
A police officer is what I always wanted to be except for the summer I was five when
I wanted to drive the ice cream truck.”

“Who wouldn’t?” I mumbled around a mouthful of cake and sauce.

“I have been told I have an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong,” he said. “Maybe
that’s part of it.”

“I don’t think I used the word ‘overdeveloped,’” I said.

“It was implied,” he said dryly.

We ate in silence for another minute or so. Then Marcus spoke again. “Probably my
father had something to do with it as well.”

“Was your father a police officer?”

He shook his head. “No. But he was a very black-and-white kind of person.” He made
a chopping motion in the air with one hand to emphasize the words. “And very focused
on the facts. Not really a people person.”

“You’re a people person,” I said, trying to decide if it would be rude to lick sauce
off the back of my spoon.

Marcus was already on his feet to get me a second helping, which I thought about turning
down for maybe a millisecond. “You’re just saying that so you can have seconds,” he
said.

“No, I’m not,” I said, smiling a thank-you at him. “Yes, I sometimes think you get
too caught up in the facts and forget about the feelings involved, but people like
you. Maggie, Roma, Rebecca, Oren—they like you and they respect what you do.” I ate
another bite of pudding. “And the cats like you—not just my two; look at Desmond over
at Roma’s clinic. Even Lucy will come closer to you than she does to anyone else besides
me.”

He grinned. “Kathleen, cats are not people.”

“I wouldn’t say that out loud around Owen or Hercules,” I warned. “They think they’re
people.”

His grin just got wider.

He pointed in the direction of the living room then. “Don’t let me forget. I have
something I want to show you.”

“Do I get a hint?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

I couldn’t coax even the tiniest clue out of him. He sat there with just the ghost
of a smile on his face, slowly—on purpose, I was certain—finishing his dessert and
sipping his coffee.

Finally, he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Are you finished?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

He led me down to the living room. A small cardboard box was sitting on the coffee
table.

“Go ahead,” he urged. “Take a look.”

I lifted one flap of the carton and peeked inside. Then I turned my head to grin at
him. “Where did you get these?” The box was about two-thirds filled with vintage Batman
comic books from the early 1970s.

“One of the guys at the station found them in the attic of the house he just bought.
He was going to toss them.”

I shook my head. “These are pop culture. These are art. I’m so glad you saved them.”
I pointed to the comic on top of the pile. “That’s
Wail of the Ghost Bride,
and it looks to be in decent shape. Who knows what else is in there?”

“Why don’t you go through them and find out?”

“You don’t mind?”

He was sitting on the edge of the blue corduroy sofa, leaning forward with his elbows
resting on his knees. “Kathleen, they’re yours.”

For a moment I’m sure my mouth gaped like a fish that had jumped too high and to its
surprise ended up on the shoreline instead of in the water again. “Mine?” I finally
said.

“You’re the Batman fan,” he said.

I was. In fact, Owen and I had been watching episodes of the old TV show online. I’d
discovered Batman comics—it was still hard for me to think of them as graphic novels—the
summer I was twelve and my parents were performing in a partially converted theater
in New Hampshire. Emphasis on “partially.”

One of the stagehands had found a pile of Batman comic books mixed in with a stash
of old
National Geographics
and some girlie magazines. In its previous incarnations, the theater had been a dentist’s
office and a funeral parlor, and sometimes I wondered just whose waiting room the
magazines had come from.

“I can’t take these,” I said, putting one hand on the top of the box. “Some of these
issues could be worth money.”

“I told Kevin that, but he didn’t care, probably because he was getting the barbecue.”

I waved a hand in his face. “Wait a second. What barbecue?”

“The barbecue I got from Eric,” he said. “It was one of the ones he used at the party
to celebrate the library’s centennial. Remember?”

I sank down onto the opposite end of the couch from where Marcus was sitting. “No,”
I said. I shook my head. “I mean, yes, I remember the party, but I didn’t know you
ended up with a barbecue.”

Marcus nodded. “Uh-huh. Eric wanted a utility trailer that he could tow with his van,
so we traded.”

“But there’s a barbecue out on your deck,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the
backyard.

“I know.”

We were already way off track, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from asking. “Why
did you trade for a barbecue with Eric when you didn’t need a barbecue?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t need a utility trailer, either.”

I knew where this was going. “Because you already had one.”

“Right.”

Since I was already deeply confused, I decided to go for broke. “How did you end up
with two utility trailers?”

“I had one that I’d built. The second one came from Burtis. It was smaller.”

I pushed a stray piece of hair off my face. “And Burtis got?”

“The blue bench that I got from you.”

The blue bench was something I’d trash picked and painted. And then discovered it
was an inch too long for the space under the coat hooks in the kitchen.

Marcus gestured at the box. “So Batman is all yours.”

It was
Let’s Make a Deal
, Mayville Heights style.

I reached over and gave his arm a squeeze. “Thank you,” I said. “I can’t believe you
did this. I can’t believe you even remembered that I’d told you I was a Batman fan.”
I reached over and took the top comic out of the carton. “I haven’t read any of these
vintage Batman in . . . in a long time. They take me back to my geeky girl days.”

He leaned back against the cushions and crossed his arms over his chest. “I can’t
picture you as ever having been geeky,” he said

“You’ll just have to use your imagination,” I told him, pulling the comic books a
little closer.

“I can do that,” he said.

I ducked my head over the open box. I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear exactly what
he might be imagining.

I spent maybe another five or ten minutes exclaiming over the stack of comics, holding
up issues and giving Marcus a summary of their story lines. Then he poured us each
another cup of coffee, and we went out onto the deck in the fading light. He sat in
a slat-back wooden chair and propped his feet up on the railing while I took the swing,
kicking off my shoes so I could curl my feet underneath me.

“This is so beautiful,” I said, looking out over the backyard, rimmed with trees.
The leaves were already turning, and even in the half-light of dusk I could still
see colors from amber to scarlet. “How long have you been here?”

“Three years this winter,” he said. “I liked the place the moment I saw it.” He sank
a little lower in his chair. “You know, it’s kind of because of Desmond that I’m here.”

“Roma’s Desmond?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Desmond was another Wisteria Hill cat. Marcus had found the cat, injured, by the side
of the road and taken him to Roma’s clinic. She’d ended up having to treat both of
them. Desmond wasn’t exactly social.

Curious, Roma had done a little exploring at the old estate and found the feral cat
colony. Marcus had been her first volunteer, although I wasn’t sure if he’d actually
volunteered or if he’d been conscripted. Oddly, the cat seemed to like the clinic,
so Roma had kept him. Desmond was long and lean with sleek black fur and there was
something just a little intimidating about his presence. He was missing one eye and
half an ear, which only made him seem more imposing.

I made a hurry-up motion with one hand. “Tell me,” I said.

“There isn’t that much to tell,” he said, setting his mug up on the railing. “I found
Desmond. I took him to the clinic, and that’s when I met Roma for the first time.
I knew she’d taken over the practice when Joe Ross retired. A couple of days later,
I went back to see how Desmond was doing and we started talking. She told me that
Joe had bought a sailboat and was planning to sail around the world so he was selling
his house. I drove past on my way home and made him an offer in the morning.”

He reached over and patted one of the railing’s wooden spindles. “Most of the work
has been outside so far. The yard was kind of overgrown. The end wall of the garage
had a tilt that had to be fixed. And I built the deck.”

“You built this?”

He nodded. “With a lot of help from Harry Taylor.” He laughed. “Don’t worry. Harry
put the swing together, so you’re safe.”

“I wasn’t worried,” I said, folding my hands around my cup. He could cook. He could
build things. He smelled good. I took a sip of my coffee. I needed to think about
something else.

“So what’s next?” I asked to distract myself from thinking about how great Marcus
smelled.

“The attic,” he said at once. “There are boxes up there from whoever owned the house
before Joe bought it. I have no idea what’s in them or who they might belong to.”