Curiosity Thrilled the Cat (12 page)

“Where’s Abigail?” I asked.

Jason pointed over his head. “She’s in the workroom, getting all those magazines ready for the yard sale.”

I headed for my office first and let Hercules loose. He poked his head out of the bag, blinked and sniffed my desktop, then came all the way out and walked over a stack of files to the edge of the desk, where he jumped into my chair. Which set the chair spinning.

I darted around the side of the desk and stopped the chair. Hercules looked woozily up at me.

I reached down to pat his head. “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

I started for the second floor but couldn’t resist detouring over to the computer room. True to his word, Oren had assembled all six carrels and chairs. I ran my finger over the closest table. There was no dust, no dirt on the light wood. That was Oren. A computer box sat next to each workstation. As soon as Larry had the wiring fixed and the new outlets working, I could set up the computers, and after a hundred years the Mayville Heights Free Public Library would be part of the electronic age.

Abigail was in the workroom next door to the staff lounge. She was sitting on the floor, two rows of stacked and tied magazines behind her. “Hi,” I said.

She looked up and smiled. Her gray hair was pulled back in a tight braid and her rimless reading glasses had slipped down to the end of her nose. She’d told me she’d started going gray in her twenties. Now, a couple of decades later, her hair was a beautiful mix of red and silver. Somehow it didn’t make her look old—just smarter. Self-consciously I touched my own mussed hair.

“Did you do all this tonight?” I asked.

She pulled a knot tight in the string around a stack of magazines and set them behind her. “Yes, I did,” she said. “It’s been very quiet.” She gestured to the back of the room. “I found some foam board in the cupboard. Do you mind if we use it for posters?”

“No. That’s a great idea.”

Abigail stood up and surveyed her work. “If it’s like this tomorrow night I should be able to finish these and start on the hardcovers,” she said.

“That would be great,” I said.

I headed back downstairs. It was almost eight o’clock, closing time. Jason was going through each section on the main floor, turning off lights and shelving the occasional book as he went. I walked over to the magazines and gathered up a couple of issues that had been left out of their slots. Then I lined up the book carts at the desk and shut down the computer.

Abigail came down the steps carrying her bike helmet as Jason turned off the last bank of lights. Only the overhead above the circulation desk stayed lit. I walked Abigail to the entrance, let her out, and waited for Jason, who was gathering his knapsack, jamming even more books inside. He swung it up onto his shoulder and hurried over to me.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

“Have a good night,” I said. I locked the doors and shut the ironwork gate, but left it unlocked.

Hercules was on the floor in front of the desk when I opened my office door.

“Do you want to look around before we leave?” I asked. He came right over to the open door and looked out, checking right and left. I crouched beside him. “No hiding, and you come when I call,” I said, wagging my finger at him. He batted it out of the way, so I stood up and headed for the stairs. Herc padded behind me.

Except for a bit of trim the new reception and checkout desk was finished. There was some painting to do and lots more books to be shelved, and of course we didn’t have a meeting room, but for the first time I had a sense of how the building was going to look when it was finally finished.

Herc prowled the computer area, twining in and out around the carrels, sniffing each cardboard box.

“Okay. Are you ready to go?” I said.

He looked back at me, then started purposefully across the library. “Hercules, where are you going?” I said. He ignored me.

I hurried after the cat, but when I bent to scoop him up he darted away. Only one of the large sheets of plastic that Will Redfern’s men had hung was still in place. It was a blurry wall on one side of the door to the storage area/someday-to-be meeting room. The heavy paneled door was closed and locked and the space was marked off with yellow police tape.

“Don’t you even think about it,” I called.

Nonchalantly, Hercules walked past the police cordon toward the door.

“Hercules, come back here right now,” I said sharply.

All I got for an answer was a low, rumbly “Meow.”

“C’mon, puss,” I coaxed. “Time to go.”

His attention was focused completely on the heavy wooden door.

“You are never going to eat another spoonful of Tubby’s yogurt in your life if you don’t get over here right now,” I said.

He tossed a quick glance back over his shoulder but didn’t move. Okay, so the no-yogurt part was a bluff. Why was I standing on one side of a strip of plastic yellow tape when I could just duck underneath it and grab the cat? No alarm bells were going to go off. Detective Gordon wasn’t going to rappel down from the ceiling and arrest me.

Still, I couldn’t help checking around—for what, I didn’t know—before I ducked under the tape.

“C’mere, you,” I said, bending down for the little black-and-white cat, who walked out of my reach, through the closed door in front of us, and disappeared.

M
y knees started to shake. I sat down. Hard. Hercules had vanished. He hadn’t darted past me. He hadn’t run around the corner. He’d walked through a solid wooden door just as if it wasn’t there. I could see it again in my head without closing my eyes. He’d vanished through that door and it was almost as though there was a faint pop as the end of his tail disappeared.

I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. “Be there,” I whispered. I opened my eyes again. No cat.

Leaning forward, I laid my hand against the door. It was solid. I felt all over the panel, pushing at the curved wood. Maybe there was some kind of secret opening. Maybe Hercules had activated a hidden panel. Maybe the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew would show up. The door was thick and unyielding.

“Hercules,” I called. “C’mon, puss. Where are you?”

There was silence and then a faint “Meow” from the other side of the closed door.

He was in there. Somehow he was in there. I grabbed the doorknob. Locked. I twisted the knob in frustration. Of course it was locked. The room was part of a murder investigation. And I’d just been trying to get inside. I yanked my hand away from the door like it was suddenly on fire.

Crap on toast!
Now my fingerprints were all over the door. I used the hem of my T-shirt to rub the doorknob. Then I dropped to my knees and polished the bottom section of the door where I’d looked for some kind of hidden access panel.

I caught a bit of my reflection in the brass kick panel and realized what I was doing. “You’re nuts,” I said aloud, sitting back on my heels.

I shouldn’t have touched the door at all. I took a couple of deep breaths. I should call the police, I realized. How else was I going to get Hercules out? Then I thought,
Oh, sure, call Detective Gordon and tell him my cat just walked through the door into the room. No, that won’t make me look like a nutcase.

Was that what was wrong? Was I crazy? I remembered a psych prof in first year telling the class that if you could ask the question, then you weren’t. Of course, three-quarters of the time he came to class in his pajama bottoms.

Then I remembered how Owen had seemed to just materialize on Gregor Easton’s head, just the way he’d suddenly seemed to appear in midleap, chasing that bird in the backyard.

I couldn’t breathe. Was it possible? Did the cats have some kind magical abilities? I pressed my head to my knees and made myself take several shaky breaths.
Okay, no climbing on the crazy bus,
I told myself. I was tired. I needed glasses. There was a rational explanation for all of this.

I leaned close to the door and called Hercules again.

Nothing.

I could picture him on the other side of the door, one ear twitching at the sound of his name. I also knew he wasn’t coming out until he felt like it.

I pulled the crystal Ruby had given me out of my shirt. If there was any negative energy around, maybe the crystal would keep it away. Then I shifted into a sitting position on the floor, wrapped my arms around my knees and waited. And waited.

Maybe five minutes went by, although it seemed a lot longer. Then I felt . . . something I couldn’t define. It was as if the air around the door suddenly thickened and pushed against me, the way water pushes against your hand if you try to press it over the end of a garden hose.

And then Hercules walked through the door as if there wasn’t any door there at all. He blinked and gave me an
Oh, you’re still here
look. I grabbed him in case he got the idea to take another look inside the room.

“You are in so much trouble,” I said sternly, heading for the steps.

He ducked his head. Translation:
No, I’m not
.

“That isn’t going to work,” I said, shifting him to my other arm so I could open the office door. Herc tilted his head to one side and looked, wide-eyed, at me. “Don’t bother with any of that I’m-so-cute stuff,” I said. I bent my face very close to his. “It’s. Not. Working.”

He licked my nose.

I pushed the door closed with my hip and set the cat on the floor. Closing my eyes for a moment, I rubbed the space between my eyes. It felt like something in my head had twisted into a pretzel, trying to make sense out of what I’d seen. I blew out a breath and opened my eyes. Herc was watching me as though I was the one who’d done something bizarre. I dropped into my desk chair and he immediately jumped onto my lap.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “Is there a kitty version of ‘abracadabra’? Do you click your back paws together or wiggle your whiskers?” I was asking a cat how he walked through a solid door. Maybe I was losing my mind.

I stroked the top of Herc’s head. What if the police weren’t finished in the room? Could the cat have left any DNA or hair behind? I felt a knot clench in my stomach to match the one pressing behind my eyes. He was a cat. How could he not leave hair behind?

And Will Redfern had been using that space for storage for weeks. It was a messy, dusty space. Would the police find paw prints?

Or worse?

I scratched the side of Herc’s face so he’d turn toward me. “Please tell me you didn’t hack up anything in there?” I said.

He looked at me, almost . . . smugly, nudged my hand away with a push of his head, then bent over my hand and spat out a small green glass bead.

My mouth went dry. I stared at the tiny glass sphere. There were a few threads caught on it. Hercules had found that in the storage room. How had it ended up there? Before the damaged floor in the room had been repaired, the baseboards had been pulled off and the tile had been steam cleaned. It had been clean enough to eat off of. Literally. And I couldn’t picture any of the burly workmen wearing anything with tiny, green glass beads. Had Hercules found something the police missed?

“How did you get this?” I said. He jumped off my lap and stood in front of the window. He seemed to be studying the wall. After a moment he started scratching at the edge of the trim—where the old wood met the floor—with one paw.

“Hey! Stop that!” I said.

As usual, Hercules ignored me. He caught the end of something with his paw and bent his head over it.

“No!” I snapped, so loudly my voice echoed around the room and startled both of us. I leaned forward. “Give that to me,” I said. He moved his paw and a purple plastic paperclip skittered across the floor toward me.

I picked it up. Hercules looked from the twist of plastic to me to the baseboard trim. Then he sat, wrapped his tail around his feet, and looked at me again.

It was crazy, but it was like . . . he wanted me to
do
something. What?

I got up and knelt down in front of the window. Feeling along the edge of the baseboard I found a small gap, not much thicker than the blade of a butter knife, between the trim and the floor. No surprise in a hundred-year-old building. And because the building had shifted over the past century the floors had also moved a little. They slanted toward the window. Anything I dropped tended to slide or roll up against that wall.

I looked over my shoulder at the cat, who was patiently watching me. I was still holding the purple paperclip as well as the glass bead Hercules had found. I rolled the tiny bead under my thumb, along my fingers.

And then I got it.

I got to my feet, walking around the desk to stand with my back to the door. I shut my eyes, trying to see the meeting-room space before the renovations had started, before it had become the storage place for tools and supplies. The space below was almost identical to my office. Maybe that floor had the same slant toward the window. Maybe there was a gap between the baseboard and the floor in there, too.

I held the bead up to the light. I felt light-headed. “Could this bead have something to do with Gregor Easton’s murder?” I asked Hercules.

Okay, so now I had to deal with the idea that not only did my cats have magical abilities, but they were also trying to nudge me to solve a murder. I looked at Herc with narrowed eyes.

He continued to stare unblinkingly at me.

The mosaic tile floor on the main level of the library had been repaired and resealed early in the renovations, then covered for weeks with heavy brown paper—that had made me think of butcher’s paper—and a layer of cardboard. The paper was still down in the storage area to protect the floor.

Vincent Gallo’s crew had done meticulous work. They wouldn’t have left a bead, a bit of paper or even a dust bunny behind. The old man, who could have been anywhere from seventy to ninety, had crawled all over the floor on his hands and knees, glasses perched on the end of his nose, to check the work.