Laurie Cass - Bookmobile Cat 02 - Tailing a Tabby (11 page)

I took a roll and pushed the bowl back in her direction. “No boyfriend?”

Jari’s hand crept forward, hesitated, then snatched another roll. “She’d had a bad breakup just before she started at Talcott. She said she’d sworn off men her own age, that she was going to try dating older men and see if she had better luck.”

Could this be… a clue? “So, was she? Dating an older man, I mean?”

Jari shook her head. “I’m not sure. When I was on vacation back in June, some guy came into the dealership. She said they went out a couple of times, but I’m not sure it was anything serious.”

“What was his name?”

Jari kept buttering her roll. “She never said.”

My eyebrows went up, and Jari sighed. “Yeah, I
know. I thought it was weird, too. I mean, you always tell your girlfriends the name of the guy you’re dating. Always, unless…”

She stopped talking, so I filled in the blank. “You think he was married?”

“I don’t know.” Unhappiness crowded onto her face. “I can’t think that Carissa would date a married man. That just wasn’t like her.”

I hoped not. “What did she say about him?”

“Not much. Only that he was kind of loaded, moneywise, and that he didn’t look anything like the last guys she’d dated.” Jari gave a vague smile. “She said it was time to break out of the lean build and sandy brown hair rut she’d fallen into.”

So I had a wealthy older man as a suspect, one who was potentially married. Plus the bad-breakup guy. “Who was the guy she broke up with?”

“You mean the Weasel?”

I laughed. “Please tell me that isn’t really his name.”

“That’s what she always called him.” Jari gave a wan smile. “I never knew what his name was.”

Our waiter scooped away the empty dishes and promised that our stuffed whitefish sandwiches would be out soon. I waited until he’d gone to ask the Big Question. “Do you have any idea who could have killed her?”

Jari clutched her water glass. “I wish I did. If I knew who did that to her, I’d go to the police so fast my head would spin around in circles.”

“Do you know if anyone hated her? Or”—a brilliant idea came to me—“was really jealous of her?”

“She wasn’t like that. I mean, she was pretty, so I suppose some wacko could have been jealous, but she
was just fun. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to… wanting to…” She sighed and took another roll.

I couldn’t imagine it, either, and I hadn’t even known the woman. Sorrow leached into and through me, another death diminishing me. What we needed was something for undiminishing purposes. A brand-new baby might work, although preferably not right here in the restaurant.

“There is one thing, though.” Jari pleated her napkin. “She was big on Facebook. Always posting on there, real personal stuff. I kept telling her that she was opening herself up to trouble. I told her over and over that her house was going to be robbed, what with her posting where she was all the time and what she was doing and who she was doing it with. But she just told me not to be such a worrywart and laughed it off.”

Jari’s voice shook. “She said she was careful about her privacy controls and who she friended. She was all fun and games and she hardly ever took anything seriously. I wish… I wish I could be more like her.”

I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “That’s a lovely thing to say and I’m sure that somewhere, somehow, Carissa is smiling down at you.”

Jari swallowed a sob. “Do you think so?”

I did. But I also wondered if Carissa’s Facebook page was still online.

•   •   •

That night the dinner menu was takeout Thai (me) and cat food (Eddie). A stiff breeze had whipped up out of the northwest and eating outside would have meant chasing napkins and keeping hair out of my mouth, so we were eating inside for the first time in days. Eddie
had settled onto the top of the opposite dining bench and was studiously not paying attention to me.

“I’m sorry it’s not nice enough to eat outside,” I told him, “but you don’t like the wind. You know you don’t.”

His mouth opened and closed in a soundless “Mrr.”

I ignored him and turned the page of the book I was trying to read. It was the latest release from James Lee Burke, something I’d been looking forward to reading for weeks, but even Mr. Burke’s lyrical prose wasn’t capturing my attention.

I closed the cover. I probably shouldn’t be reading a library book while eating something as slurpy as pad Thai, anyway. If I sprayed even the slightest spot of sauce on a page, I’d feel obligated to buy the book and my monthly book budget had taken a serious hit during the library’s Fourth of July book sale. Two dollars a hardcover and a dollar a paperback are sweet prices to a bibliophile, but spend a couple of hours wandering the tables and you can still fork out a serious amount of money, no problem.

With no book at hand, I had two options. Read the newspaper or talk to Eddie. Since getting the newspaper meant I’d have to stand up, walk all the way across the room, bend down to get it out of my backpack, stand up, and walk all the way back again, I opted for Eddie.

“Not that you’re second choice,” I told him.

He turned his head and stared at me without blinking. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking about how best to punish me for being a liar or if he was wondering how my food would taste if I keeled over dead.

“You wouldn’t like tofu,” I said. “Shrimp, sure, but I didn’t order that today.”

He went back to looking out into the windy world and I went back to talking to a cat that couldn’t understand a word I said. Well, ninety-eight out of a hundred words. I was pretty sure he knew his name and what “No!” meant even if he didn’t change whatever behavior was causing the command.

“So I need to find out more about Carissa Radle.” I wound rice noodles around my fork, saw that it was far too big a bite, and shoveled it in anyway. Living alone allows you to do things like that. The trick is to remember to stop doing them when people are watching.

I chewed and swallowed. I might take big bites in the privacy of my own houseboat, but at least I didn’t talk with my mouth full. A girl has to have standards.

Eddie stood and leaned backward to stretch his front legs.

“Stay out of my pad Thai,” I warned him, but he didn’t even glance at my food. Instead he jumped onto the floor and soft-footed it over to his water dish, where he crouched on the far side of the bowl and leaned all the way across it to drink.

I lived with the weirdest cat on the planet. Life was good. “So, Weird One, what should I do next about Carissa? How do I find out more about her?”

Eddie glanced up at me, a large drop of water hanging off his chin.

“Nice look.” I spiraled up another mouthful of noodles. “Most times I’d ask Rafe or Kristen.” Local knowledge had leached into their bones at birth. As a newcomer to Chilson, I was operating at a decided
disadvantage. “But Carissa wasn’t from here, so that network isn’t going to be very useful.”

Okay, so what would be useful? Talking to relatives. Friends. Neighbors. The only thing was, Carissa hadn’t been up north long, and—

“Mrr.”

I turned around. In the thirty seconds I’d had my back to Mr. Ed, he’d flopped on my backpack, wormed his back end inside, and burrowed around to make himself comfortable. In doing so he skidded my cell phone onto the floor.

“You are a cat of many talents.” I crossed the kitchen to pick up the phone. “You even managed to turn it on to the calendar screen. How’d you do that?”

Once again, he didn’t answer, but this time it was because he was sound asleep, deep into my backpack, the only part of him visible a pinkish nose.

Weirdest cat ever. No doubt about
it.

T
he first bookmobile visitors the next day were a boy of about seven and his mother. They’d been on the bookmobile once before, but the boy, whose name was Sheridan, had been too shy to say a word to any of us, and that included Eddie.

This time it was different.

Sheridan marched straight up to me. “Miss Minnie,” he said in a strong voice, “I have a question.”

I glanced at his mother, Tonya. She nodded, smiling. “Go right ahead,” I told him.

“Your candy contest,” he said. “You told me that if I’m closest to guessing the number of candies, I get the candies and the bookmobile will come to my house.”

“Absolutely right,” I said, crossing my fingers that the winner’s driveway would be wide with a huge area in which to turn around.

He looked up at me with serious blue eyes. “If I win, does it have to come to my house?”

“You want it to go somewhere else?” This was a possibility I’d never considered.

“I want it to go to my grandma’s. I want her to see
the bookmobile. It’s my favorite place in the world. And I want her to meet Eddie.”

We all looked toward the front of the bookmobile. The Eddie in question had perched himself on the passenger seat headrest. He was staring straight at us, the tip of his tail drumming to a beat only he could hear.

“Eddie is my favoritest cat in the world,” Sheridan said. “We can’t have cats at home because we live on a busy road. My grandma likes cats, too, and I want my grandma to pet Eddie.”

“If you win,” his mother prompted. “You might not, Sheridan.”

“If you do,” I told him, “we’ll work something out.”

Sheridan nodded. “Okay. Thank you.” Business transacted, he headed off to the candy jar. Soon he was holding his pencil against the jar and muttering measurements and what sounded like volumetric calculations.

Tonya smiled. “He’s only shy at first. Now you won’t be able to shut him up.”

“A kid who says the bookmobile is his favorite place in the world?” I smiled wide. “I forgive any transgression he’s ever made and any he ever will make.”

She laughed and started browsing through the books on CD. When another set of footsteps came up the stairs, Tonya turned and said, “Hi, Faye. How are you this morning?”

It was Faye of the Cookbooks. And the second she saw me, she spun in a half circle and fled back down the stairs.

Tonya and Thessie and I looked at one another. “I have no idea what that was all about,” I said.

“She’s my neighbor,” Tonya murmured, “but I’ve never seen her do anything like that.”

Before we could formulate a good theory, Faye came running back up the steps. “I had them in the car,” she said breathlessly, and held out the stack of overdue cookbooks. “Here you go, Minnie, and I’m horribly sorry about them being so late.”

Laughing, I took the books from her. “If I had a gold star, you’d get one for the most sincere apology I’ve ever had.”

She rummaged around in the bottom of her purse for the change to pay the overdue fine. “But I have to tell you, the heavenly deviled eggs were a huge hit at the reunion.”

Faye had borrowed the cookbooks to prepare for a family get-together. I checked in the books and tried to remember what weekend her reunion had been. “You had good weather, too, didn’t you?”

“Chamber of commerce stuff,” she said. “We had cousins show up that I’d never met.”

Tonya looked over from her perusings. “Faye, don’t you have a cousin who knew that woman who was killed?”

The back of my scalp prickled.

Faye’s face crumpled a little with what looked like worry. “That was a few years ago,” she said. “But you know what? I saw that Carissa a couple of weeks ago in Petoskey, all cozy with some guy who looked old enough to be her father.”

I was twitching with questions. “Who was he? Do you know his name? What did he look like?”

She was shaking her head. “He looked familiar, but even that day I couldn’t come up with his name. Maybe he was just that type. You know, mid-fifties, lots of money, and just good-looking enough that he figured
every woman was half in love with him. Those guys all kind of look the same, don’t they?”

We laughed, but she had a point.

The slippery sound of books starting a downward slide made me whirl around. “Eddie!” Before I could move, the books hit the floor. My furry friend looked up, his front paw still extended. He’d jumped, stealthlike, to the computer desk and had pushed at the pile of books Tonya had returned.

“You are a rotten cat,” I told him, and crouched down.

“Here, let me help.” Faye helped pick up the books, waving Tonya away. “No, we’re all done.” She put the stack back on the desk and patted Eddie on the head. “I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose.”

I was sure he had, but I just smiled.

Faye selected two books—new releases by Nora Roberts and Tess Gerritsen—and promised to bring them back in short order.

“Before they’re overdue is all I ask,” I said, smiling. “And if you remember the name of that man Carissa was with, the police should know. The more information they have, the faster they’ll find out who killed her.”

She looked startled. “I never thought of it that way. You’re right. I’ll try harder to think of his name.” She made her good-byes and left.

I was in the process of beeping the return books into the computer when Faye pounded back up the bookmobile’s steps. “I remembered!” She reached for the books I was working on. “Here. This is what made me remember,” she said, sorting through the stack and extracting a book that had a boat on its cover.

“
The Boys in the Boat
,” I read. “Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.”

“It was wonderful,” Tonya said.

Faye tapped the picture of the rowing shell on the book’s cover. “The guy I saw with Carissa, it was Hugo Edel. Boats, that’s what made me remember. He’s that boat guy.”

He certainly was. Edel, along with his wife, Annelise, were the founders of Crown Yachts, a local manufacturer of high-end boats. My cranky neighbor’s boat, as nice as it was, probably cost a fraction of what a Crown would run.

So the question was, what had Carissa, who sold cars, been doing with a man like Hugo Edel? Certainly not buying a boat from him.

“That’s great,” I told Faye. “Call the sheriff’s department and talk to either Detective Devereaux or Detective Inwood. They’ll want to know.”

At least I hoped they would.

•   •   •

The next day, Saturday, I’d scheduled the bookmobile to appear at the opposite end of the county, including a stop at the marina Chris had asked me to visit, so instead of sitting down to breakfast at the boardinghouse, I was driving east with Thessie at my side and Eddie in the carrier at her feet. He’d snuggled himself into Paulette’s pink blanket so deep that only the tips of his ears were visible.

“Hey, did I tell you?” Thessie asked.

“Can you be a teensy bit more specific?” I checked the side mirrors, flicked on the right turn signal, and aimed the bookmobile at a shady spot created by a clump of white birches.

Uncle Chip’s Marina East looked a lot like the Chilson version, which looked a lot like most fifty-year-old marinas I’d seen. Worn a little at the edges, but worn in a way that was comfortable rather than unsightly. Weathered docks, but no splintered wood. An elderly marina office built with small-diameter vertical logs. Boats of all shapes, sizes, and costs bobbed in the slips, and I could already see people out on their boat decks, pointing at the bookmobile and smiling.

“My mom and dad are going to take me downstate the week after next to look at colleges.” Thessie bounced a little in her seat. “I can’t wait. The University of Michigan and Wayne State have graduate programs in library and information science, but I’ve heard you shouldn’t go to grad school where you got your undergraduate degree. So I was thinking about staying local for the first couple of years, but maybe I should start where I’m going to finish and if I go downstate maybe there will be chances to do an internship somewhere. Hey, wouldn’t it be, like, the coolest thing ever if I got an internship at the Library of Congress?”

She suddenly noticed my lack of response. “Um, are you okay? I thought you’d be excited about this.”

“Oh, I am,” I said. And I was. But if Thessie was going to be away the week after next, I was going to have to quick-a-minute find a bookmobile volunteer. Both Stephen and the library board had been adamant that the bookmobile had to have two people aboard at every stop. I might skirt a rule here and there, especially ones that could involve cats, but the two-at-a-time proclamation was one I dared not flout.

We went through the regular motions for the
beginning of a bookmobile stop. Opened the vent in the roof, released the bungee-corded chair at the back desk, fired up the computers, opened the door, and made sure everything was shipshape.

“Mrr.”

I snapped my fingers. “Sorry about that, pal.” Between Thessie’s excited chatter about college and my own concerns about finding a volunteer on short notice, I’d completely forgotten about releasing Eddie.

“Yes, I am a horrible kitty mommy,” I said, hurrying toward the front of the bookmobile, “and you have every right to scold me. I hope you don’t, of course, but I’m sure those hopes will be dashed to bits as soon as I open this door.”

Thessie laughed. “Do you always talk to him as if he can really understand you?”

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

She stopped laughing. “He, uh, sounded kind of annoyed, didn’t he?”

“You’re not annoyed, are you, Eddie?” I scooped him up into my arms and snuggled him. “Not with Thess. She’s your second favorite human and… hey, cut that out.”

He was doing that wriggle and squirm thing, the one that turned him into a slippery liquid mass that was impossible to hold.

“Come on, Eddie, chill a little.” I tried to pet him calm. “She was just joking and…”

And he was out of my arms, on the floor, and zooming down the carpeted aisle of the bookmobile.

“Eddie!” I called. “Don’t you dare go—”

Down the stairs and out the door he went, running flat-out fast, a black-and-white streak of cat-titude.

Thessie shrieked. “He’s out! Minnie, he’s out! He never wants out! We have to—”

“He’ll be fine,” I said with as much calm as I could muster. “But I need to go get him. If you could take care of things for a minute, I’d appreciate it.” Because there were people clattering up the stairs and into the bookmobile. Thessie was many wonderful things, but she did have a slight issue with claustrophobia. Too many people on the bookmobile gave her the absolute willies.

She bit her lower lip, eyed the newcomers, and nodded. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “You have to get Eddie. Just… don’t be long, okay?”

I patted her on the shoulder. “Be back in a jiffy with the kitty.” It didn’t exactly rhyme, but it was enough to get a smile out of her. I headed off, welcoming new patrons as I went, aiming a few at appropriate areas of the bookmobile, and smiling all the while.

My smile dropped off as my feet hit the asphalt. “Rotten cat,” I muttered. “If he does this one more time, I swear I’m never going to bring him on the bookmobile ever again.”

It was a hollow threat and Eddie wouldn’t have taken it seriously if he’d heard it. “Eddie? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” I turned in a small circle, scanning the area. “Where are you, pal? Eddie!”

A distant “mrr” caught my ear. I called his name again and listened carefully. A second “mrr” had come from the opposite side of the marina, close to the office. Instead of taking the sidewalk, I trotted across the lawn, keeping an eagle eye out for the fuzzy escapee.

I kept trotting, dodging picnic tables and pieces of playground equipment. “Eddie? Here, kitty, kitty. Here, Eddie kit—”

And there he was, occupying the top of an already occupied picnic table. At the table were two men sitting on opposite sides, one of whom was fussing with what looked like a very expensive camera. Both men looked vaguely familiar.

Brett, that was it. And the baseball guy. What was his name… ? I snapped my fingers. “Greg,” I said out loud, and he looked up at me.

“Hey,” he said easily. “Minnie, right? From the marina. Thought this cat looked familiar.” He scratched Eddie behind the ears, which was just the way he liked it. “He pounded across the lawn like a bat out of you-know-what a minute ago.”

“Faster than a speeding bullet,” Brett said, laughing.

I moved closer to Eddie, but he slid backward, out of my reach. “He has a habit of doing that. But you don’t look as if you’re having a stroke, so you should be okay.”

“A stroke?” Greg frowned. “That golf ball got me pretty good the other day, but other than that I feel fine.”

Me and my big mouth. I gave a quick explanation that didn’t make much sense. Then, needing to change the subject, I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Too bad about that woman who was killed. Did you know her? Carissa Radle?”

Greg, who had been tickling Eddie’s toes, glanced over at Brett. “Carissa,” he said. “I knew of her, I guess. But I didn’t know her know her if you know what I mean.”

Sort of. “Where did you meet her?” I asked.

“Don’t really remember. Ready to head out, Brett?” Greg stood, and so did his friend. “We need to get
going,” Greg said. “Chris Ballou sent me over here to look at a boat, and these pictures aren’t quite what I wanted, so I need to get some more. See you later, okay?” He sketched a quick wave and walked briskly toward the parking lot.

“Well, that was weird.” I scooped an unresisting Eddie into my arms and we headed back. “If he’s going to take more pictures of that boat, he’s headed in the wrong direction.”

“Mrr.”

Then we were at the bookmobile. I had to introduce Eddie to a new circle of admirers, and I put the odd conversation to the back of my mind.

•   •   •

After an early dinner, Eddie and I hung out on the front of the houseboat, watching the boats cruise past and enjoying the gentle breeze and sunshine that was just starting its evening slant.

I picked up the newspaper and watched as the sports section slid out down to the deck. Convenient for me, since I never read the sports section. “Say,” I asked Eddie, “did you see the look on Thessie’s face when I told her I’d been talking to Greg Plassey? I think the girl was a wee bit starstruck.”