Cat With a Clue (12 page)

“A mess,” Pam said. “Hard to believe it looked like that a few hours ago,” she said in a wondering tone. “And hard to believe that all those people would drop their plans for the day and help me. I barely know most of them. And you,” she said, her voice cracking. “You've done so much for me, I can't—”

“What you can do is look at those pictures,” I cut in. If she started bawling, I would, too, and soppy tears on top of too much leftover pizza wouldn't sit well in my stomach. “Really study them. Tell me if you see what I see.” Which sounded a little too much like that Christmas carol, something completely inappropriate in June.

“All I see is a mess,” Pam muttered, but she kept looking. “A big, fat mess. I had no idea I had so much stuff in here. How could I have accumulated so much in such a short time? And what's—” She stopped abruptly. “Hang on. The hatboxes are on the floor, but they're close to where they should be. Same with the linens and the wooden puzzles and everything else. There's only one category of item that's scattered far from where it should be.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The books.”

*   *   *

The next morning was Monday, a library day, but I stopped at the sheriff's office before going into work.

“Good morning, Ms. Hamilton.” Detective Inwood's greeting was a salute with a powdered doughnut. “If you don't make any jokes about cops and doughnuts, you're welcome to a pastry.”

I blinked at the man. As far as I could remember, he'd never before invited me to partake of anything inside the office. Had he had a personality transfer since we'd last talked?

“Take advantage while you can,” Ash said, walking
into the interview room, handing me an apple fritter with one hand and a cup of coffee with the other. We brushed hands during the transfer and smiled at each other. “Hal got another grandkid yesterday.”

“Congratulations!” I transferred my smile from Ash to the detective. “Girl or boy?”

“Girl,” he said, beaming. “Emily Grace.”

It was a nice name. I said so, and his smile went a little wider. For a second I was worried that the unaccustomed expression might send his face into spasms that could end up freezing there forever, but it went back to normal as he began to eat.

I breathed a sigh of relief. There was only so much dramatic change I could take in any given time span.

“Have a seat, Ms. Hamilton,” the detective said. “Unless this won't take long?”

“Sorry to dash your hopes,” I said, sitting, “but I have a new theory.” I'd texted Ash yesterday about Pam's store, but hadn't said anything about what Pam and I had both noticed at the end of the day.

True public servant that he was, Detective Inwood didn't even blink at my statement, even though I was sure he would have been content to never hear another idea from me the rest of his career. He and Ash sat across from me. “One of these days,” the detective said, “you'll sit on this side.”

I glanced up at the stained ceiling tiles near the doorway. A few months back, when I'd mentioned that I'd thought the stain looked like a dragon, he'd said it wasn't a dragon at all, that I needed to see it from that side of the room. One of these days, I'd break out of my rut and remember to actually do so.

“So, what's your new theory?” Detective Inwood asked.

“This first part isn't the theory,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you knew about Andrea Vennard's old high school boyfriend, Steve Guilder. You know she had a personal protection order against him?”

Inwood brushed powdered sugar off his jacket. “Yes, Ms. Hamilton, we're very aware of the documents issued out of this county.”

I colored the slightest bit. “Well, it was a long time ago. I just thought I'd mention it.”

“We're exploring all avenues of investigation,” Detective Inwood said, and I almost mouthed the words along with him. “That includes looking into any possible suspects from her business downstate.”

“I heard she owned a business. What was it, anyway?”

The detective popped in the last bit of his doughnut. “The theory?” he asked around it.

I decided not to be miffed that he wouldn't tell me. There were lots of other ways I could find out. “It's about books,” I said.

Ash glanced at his supervisor. His supervisor, who was still in the act of taking a pen from his shirt pocket and flipping open a small notebook, didn't glance back. He also didn't write anything down.

“What's about books?” Detective Inwood asked.

I almost said “Everything,” but knew that would earn me raised eyebrows from the detective and a shake of the head from Ash. “The murder. The break-in at the Friends' book-sale room. The break-in at the bookmobile garage. The break-in at Pam Fazio's store on Saturday night.”

The detective sat back. “The break-ins are the jurisdiction of the city police. If you have information, you should speak to them directly.”

Which he would prefer, I was sure. “It all ties in with the murder,” I said quickly. Though the city police were well trained and experienced, they weren't the ones investigating Andrea's death.

“How, exactly?” Inwood asked.

“It's all about the books,” I repeated. He made a rolling motion with his hand, so I kept going. “As far as anyone can tell, nothing was taken from the sale room. And we know that nothing was stolen from the bookmobile or from Pam's store. But it was the books in her store that were examined most closely.”

“What,” the detective said, hunching forward the tiniest bit, “makes you think it isn't simple vandalism?”

“Two things,” I said. “One is that there's been no real damage. Nothing has been taken, nothing maliciously destroyed. Sure, there were things broken at Pam's store, but we did an inventory, and, considering the number of breakable items that could have been shattered into teensy-tiny bits, the number of things broken was surprisingly small.”

Thirteen, to be exact, and most of the broken bits had been from one large mirror. I'd swept up the pieces, hoping, for the first time ever, that the tale about the seven years' bad luck for whomever had broken the mirror was true.

“And number two?” Detective Inwood asked.

“It was too much work,” I said.

His bushy eyebrows went up. “How's that?”

The librarian was about to explain vandalism to the law-enforcement officers. It was a good day. “Straight vandalism,” I told them, “wouldn't have been so thorough. Vandals go in, destroy everything in sight, and leave. Whoever broke into the bookmobile garage, Pam's place, and the Friends' room was very methodical. There
are three thousand books on the bookmobile,” I said. “And each and every one was taken from its shelf and tossed onto the floor. Every one,” I repeated, tapping the scratched table with my forefinger. “Would any vandal be so thorough?”

Inwood and Ash looked at each other, and I knew I'd scored a point. “They were looking for something,” Ash said.

I nodded. “Had to be.”

Detective Inwood made a noise of dissent. “There are no ‘have to's when you're talking about crime,” he said. “You never know what people will do. But”—he put up a hand to stave off my knee-jerk protest—“you have a valid point.”

It took me a moment to realize that the detective had given me a compliment. Or, if not a compliment, at least it wasn't a brush-off, and with Detective Inwood, that was pretty much the same thing.

“So, what I'm thinking,” I said, “is the person who killed Andrea is looking for a book. Andrea must have been, too, because why else would she have been in the library when it was closed? And since none of this happened until after Talia DeKeyser died, maybe the two things are linked. Maybe it was a book Talia owned, maybe it was valuable, and maybe both Andrea and her killer were trying to steal it.”

The detective frowned. “That's a lot of maybes, Ms. Hamilton. And what book,” he asked, tapping the tip of his pen onto his notepad, which was still as pristine as snow on a winter's morning, “could possibly be worth killing for?”

“Not that long ago,” I said, “one of Audubon's first editions went up for auction and sold for almost twelve million dollars.”

The two men across the table from me blinked, but then Ash thinned his eyes to slits. “That book is, what, three feet tall? There's no way one of those could be in the library without everyone knowing about it.”

I grinned. Having a well-educated boyfriend was kind of fun. “Just an example, gentlemen. There are other rare first editions that sell for a lot of money.”

“How much?” Inwood asked.

“There was a first folio of Shakespeare's that sold for over six million,” I said. “And a
Canterbury Tales
that went for seven and a half.”

“Okay,” Inwood said, putting his pen to paper, “other than old first editions, what book could be worth killing over?”

“A signed copy of a rare first edition would send it to another price range, if the signature was authenticated.” I thought a little bit. “Or it could have been some sort of tell-all journal that was given away by accident.” I didn't see how something like that could have gotten into circulation at the library, but the breaker-inner/killer wouldn't necessarily know how the library put books into the system. Besides, the donations box for the Friends of the Library book sale had a sign that the library had first dibs on donations.

Inwood, who had been writing furiously, glanced up at me. “But why would something that rare be in the library or Ms. Fazio's store?”

“Haven't you ever watched
Antiques Roadshow
? Rare things are found all the time in weird places.”

He thought, then nodded. “Anything else?”

“No, it's just . . .” I put my hands in my lap, not wanting Ash or the detective to see how they'd turned into hard fists. Pam's phone call was still fresh in my mind.
Could you do me a favor?
that strong and capable
woman had asked hesitantly, as if she wasn't sure I'd help her. As if she'd had been dealt a blow almost too hard to bear.

I looked at my hands, then directly at Inwood, staring him flat in the face. “Just find out who did this to Pam.”

T
hat evening, I intentionally immersed myself in lake water so cold that it made me feel as if the top of my head was going to blow off.

“It'll get better,” Ash said. He was leaning off the back of a powerboat, ready and willing to give coaching advice.

“When?” I asked, teeth chattering.

“Soon as you're up!” He grinned, and large parts of my insides went a little mushy at the idea that this incredibly good-looking man was dating me. Then again, I was in sixty-two-degree water with a wide board attached to my feet. Sure, I had a life jacket and was being watched over by a professional law-enforcement officer who also had EMT certification, but he wasn't the one in the water, now, was he?

“It's the getting-up part I'm worried about,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the motor. The boat behind which I was about to water-ski belonged to, and was being driven by, a friend of Ash's, whom I was pretty sure he'd introduced as Tank. There was undoubtedly a story there, but to me, a thin guy with
long sun-streaked hair and an easy smile could have had a more appropriate nickname.

“Hang tight to the towrope,” Ash said, “and remember the drills we went through on land.”

“Arms straight,” I said to myself. “Knees to my chin. Let the boat do the work.”

“Got it?” Ash called.

I nodded. Excitement and anxiety were knotting up together in my chest. I'd water-skied before, but never had I tried to slalom ski, to get up on one ski. Ash and I had gone out boating a couple of weeks ago with a different friend of his, and I'd looked on enviously as they had cut left and right behind the boat, sending up large rooster tails of spray.

“Next time we ski,” Ash had said, “if you want, I'll show you how.”

I'd said sure, and now here I was, about to fail miserably. On the plus side, I had a ready-made excuse: Since I didn't have quality goggles, I'd taken out my contacts, and the world was blurry around all its edges. On the minus side, my vision wasn't that bad, so it wasn't that great an excuse.

“No,” I said out loud.

“What's that?” Ash called, cupping a hand to his ear. “Did you say roll?”

As if.
I took a deep breath and nodded. If I fell the first time I tried, it wouldn't be a big deal. If I fell twenty times, it wouldn't be a failure. I would fail only if I gave up. “Roll.”

Tank pushed the throttle slightly forward and there was an immediate tug on the rope. The boat puttered ahead with me trailing afterward like a baby duck behind a great big momma.

“Arms straight!” Ash called. “Knees to your chest!”

I nodded, although I was mostly trying to figure out where to put the towrope. To the left of the single ski that was sticking out of the water or the right? This wasn't a decision you had to make when you got up on two skis. I tried one side then the other and settled on the right. Then, before I really thought about it, I tightened my grip on the handle and shouted, “Hit it!”

The boat's engine roared. I was hauled forward at an incredible rate of speed. Water rushed over my face and over my head. Then, miracle of miracles, I felt myself rise, felt the ski start to level out. I was getting up! I was actually going to get up! I was . . .

Splash!

I fell forward with a resounding crash. After a second, I even managed to remember to let go of the towrope. Coughing away the water that had shoved itself into my nasal passages, I took stock of my body and of life in general.

“You okay?” Ash was hanging out the front of Tank's open cockpit boat.

“Fine,” I said, coughing. “I hear fresh water is good for your sinuses.”

Ash laughed. “You were almost up. Ready to try again?”

“Sure. What did I do wrong?”

“Leaned too far forward.”

Since I'd fallen on my face, that made sense. I vowed not to let that happen again. And so, a couple of minutes later, I was in position a second time. “Hit it!”

Splash!

A few minutes later . . . “Hit it!”

Splash!

“Hit it!”

Splash!

The boat circled back around. “You getting tired?” Ash asked. “This is hard work.”

My shoulders were aching and my thighs were screaming, but no way was I going to quit, not now that I'd fallen every way possible. I set my jaw. “Hit it!”

Splash!

“Hit it!”

And then everything came together.
Arms straight, knees to my chin, let the boat do the work, all you have to do is stand up 
. . . and I was up. On top of the water and skimming away. I let out a shout that was pure, unadulterated joy. I was doing it, I was slalom skiing, I was cruising, I was king of Janay Lake, I was—

Splash!

This time when the boat came back around to me, I'd pulled off the ski and was floating in the water, faceup to the blue sky, panting from the exertion, and happy with the world.

“Not bad,” Tank's gravelly voice said.

“You did great!” Ash leaned over the boat's transom and hauled in the ski.

“Next time,” I said, kicking my way to the ladder, “I'm going outside the wake.”

“That's my girl.” Ash helped me into the boat and handed me a swim towel. “You'll get it in no time.”

“All those years I've spent lifting boxes of books weren't in vain,” I said. “Who needs to go to the gym to lift weights when you're a librarian?”

Tank and Ash laughed, although I hadn't been trying to be funny; it was just true. I rubbed the towel over my hair, making it go all frizzy, and pulled on a fleece sweatshirt.

“You going again?” Tank asked, looking at Ash, who shook his head.

“No, thanks. Have a long run scheduled for tomorrow morning. Don't want to be tired starting out.”

“Got your bet down?”

“What bet?” I frowned. “And what's with that ‘keep quiet' gesture, Deputy Wolverson?”

“Umm . . .” Ash made himself busy with coiling up the towrope.

“He doesn't want you to know because you might get uptight,” Tank said. “But I can see you're not like that, so I have no problem telling you there are bets at the sheriff's office and city police on what place is going to be broken into next.”

“Why would I get upset about that?”

Ash took the towel from me and folded it up neatly. “It's more that I don't want to be the first one to break our agreement.”

Now, that made sense. The morning of our first run after Andrea's murder, we decided that we wouldn't talk about the murder, or any other crime in which I was involved, on an official date. We'd decided that the first one to break the agreement would suffer severe consequences that would be named by the non-agreement-breaker, and sealed the deal with a kiss. Though placing a bet wouldn't violate the contract, a broad discussion would almost guarantee that one of us, at some point, would cross the line.

Of course, we had yet to decide what constituted an official date, but it's hard to get everything right on the first try.

“That used-book store,” I said.

“What used-book store?” Ash gestured for me to sit
in the boat's front seat, across from Tank, and dropped into a backseat.

“It just opened a couple of months ago.” Used-book stores had a hard go of it financially. Their margins were thin, and most advertising was beyond their budgets. I had high hopes for this one—their selection of mysteries and thrillers was outstanding—but only time would tell.

“Huh,” Ash looked thoughtful.

“Too late, pal,” Tank said. “You already placed your bet. Minnie, you betting?”

I shook my head. Putting down money on someone's future misfortune wasn't anything I'd want my mother to know about. Not that I told Mom a tenth of the things I did, but anticipating her reactions was a good way to judge how I should act.

“Maybe there won't be any more break-ins,” Ash said.

“Who gets the pot if there aren't?” I asked.

Tank started the boat's engine. “Ash, man, you really got to talk to your girlfriend more.”

“What?” I looked from one to the other. “Why?”

“Because he”—Tank jerked his thumb over his shoulder—“said if no one wins, the pot goes to the library.”

He slapped the throttle forward and we zoomed across the lake.

*   *   *

A few hours later, back on the houseboat, I asked my cat a simple question:
“Is Ash the nicest guy in the world, or what?” I opened a kitchen cabinet and, standing on tiptoes, rooted around in the back. “Ha! Found it.” The vase was dusty, so as I cleaned it out I talked to Eddie, who was supervising my efforts from the dining booth. The back of the booth, to be exact, upon which he'd arranged himself into a three-dimensional rectangle.

“Do all cats do that?” I asked. “Make themselves into a meat-loaf shape?” There was probably a proper mathematical term, but to me he looked like a furry meat loaf. “And how do you do that, exactly?”

He blinked at me.

“No, seriously,” I said. “When you stand up, you look like a normal four-legged mammal. But when you're like that, your legs disappear, your tail disappears, and sometimes—yeah, like that—you sink your head down and you're almost completely rectangular.”

“Mrr,” said the geometric shape.

“I suppose that's some sort of an answer.” I poured water into the vase and opened a drawer. Once upon a time, my mother had given me a pair of kitchen scissors. I still didn't know what normal people did with them. I'd asked Kristen once, but her explanation had involved the naming of parts of chickens and turkeys that I hadn't known existed.

“Scissors work great for this,” I told Eddie, clipping off the ends of the flowers Ash had presented as he'd dropped me off. “He'd had these in a cooler in the back of his SUV the whole time we were out water-skiing. Aren't they pretty?” I popped the flowers into the vase and arranged them as artfully as I could.

“Mrr,” said the meat loaf.

“What kind are these? Well, those are daisies,” I said, pointing. “And those are . . . are yellow flowers, and those are blue ones.” Maybe it was time to start studying the wildflower book that was in the bookmobile. I'd learned a lot about birds over the past year while driving around the county, and there was no reason I couldn't learn more things.

“Not that these are wildflowers,” I told my critical
cat. “I've heard you're not supposed to take wildflowers from where they grow.” Why, I wasn't exactly sure, but it probably had something to do with native and protected species and public lands, and that removing the blooms could hurt the flower's reproduction possibilities.

I moved the vase to the middle of the dining booth's table and turned it this way and that, admiring the colors. “Sounds weird, though, doesn't it? Flowers reproducing, I mean. Kind of makes you think about them sneaking around after dark and making out.”

The image amused me. “Maybe that's how we get new species—adolescent flowers doing what Mom and Dad warned them not to do, and suddenly there's a brand-new flower in the family.” Smirking at myself, I turned back to the sink and washed off the scissors. “Then there's this new flower, and it's not accepted by any of the other flowers and—”

Crash!

I whipped around. “Eddie!” I lunged forward, grabbing at the tipped-over vase with one hand and reaching for the flowers with the other. Water streamed onto the floor and puddled around my flip-flopped feet.

Eddie, who was now sitting on the table, just watched.

“Why on earth did you do that?” I shoved the flowers back into the vase before they could drip anywhere else. After refilling the water, I put the vase on the kitchen counter.

“These,” I said, glaring at my cat and pointing at the flowers, “are not a cat toy. They are mine. Not yours. Understand?”

Eddie stared straight at me, then yawned, showing long and white teeth.

“Yeah, yeah.” I pulled off a length of paper towels and knelt on the floor, reaching under the table to get the far end of the puddle. “How did you get water way back here? You're a mess maker—that's what you are. Like a matchmaker, only different. We could make up new lyrics to the song. How about—”

Crash!

“Eddie!” I started to stand, bonked my head on the underside of the table, slid out of the danger zone, and spun myself around on the floor, holding my hand to my head. “What is with you, cat?”

My furry friend was paying no attention to me. He was on the kitchen counter, his entire being focused on pushing a daisy out of the fallen flower arrangement and onto the floor.
Plop.

“Off,” I ordered.

“Mrr!” he ordered back, but he did jump down.

“And quit playing with my flowers.” I pulled the daisy away from his outstretched paw. “Not a cat toy, remember?” For the third time, I put the flowers in the vase. After adding some water, I looked around for a safe home and quickly decided there wasn't anywhere both out of reach and viewable by those houseboat residents—which would be me—who would enjoy looking at the flowers.

“You are horrible.” I put the flowers into the fridge. “I'll have to take those to the library to get any pleasure out of them.”

Eddie pawed at the refrigerator door. “Mrr!”

“Really? How many times do I have to tell you? Not a cat toy.”

He gave me a look of fierce disgust and stalked off.

“You're not going away mad, are you?” I called.

“Mrr.”

“I love you, you know!”

He paused at the top of the short stairway and looked back. “Mrr,” he said, and hopped down the stairs, pushed open the door of my tiny closet, and flopped onto my shoes, where he stayed the rest of the night.