The Whole Cat and Caboodle: Second Chance Cat Mystery (6 page)

I took Michelle upstairs to my office and gave her the box with the silver tea set. She looked quickly at each piece and then wrote me a receipt.

“You know this place was briefly a private smokers’ club,” she said as we headed back downstairs.

“That would explain the smell and the window boxes full of cigarette butts,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re giving the place a new life.” She gestured at the sign by the door. “A second chance.” Her expression grew serious. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable before, when I brought up your show.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It was just a job.” I held out a hand. “And now I have this.”

“Not everyone bounces back as well as you did, Sarah,” Michelle said. “Believe me. I’ve seen people at their worst.”

I brushed my hair back from my face. “I’m lucky. I had a lot of people helping me. “

She nodded. “You are.”

I walked her out to the small parking lot. She shifted the box with the silver from one arm to the other and bent down to stroke Elvis’s fur. “Bye, puss,” she said. She straightened up. “I’m glad you’re back, Sarah.” She turned then and headed toward the street.

I watched her go, and then I walked back over to the table. Elvis jumped up again, made a wide berth around the bucket of potting soil and ended up sitting down in the middle of the collection of little plants—the second-most inconvenient place for him to be. Even with him pretty much in the way the entire time I still managed to get all the plants transferred into the cups.

I was just coming back from putting the last teacup in the front window when Nick Elliot walked up the driveway. “Hi,” he said. “I was hoping I’d find you here.”

“Well, you did.” I realized how lame the words sounded as soon as I’d said them.

Elvis was eyeing Nick the same way he’d checked out Michelle.

“Elvis, right?” Nick said. “Mom told me you’d taken the cat that had been hanging around downtown.”

“More like Sam and Elvis”—I gestured to the cat with the tray of plastic pots I was holding—“conspired to trick me into taking him.”

Nick reached for the bucket of soil. “Sam tricked you?” he said, eyebrows raised.

“Yes,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah, I can see him doing that.”

Nick followed me in the storage room, and I took the bucket from him and set it up on the shelf next to my pile of pots. He looked around. “You’ve done a lot of work here. How about a tour?”

“All right,” I said. I held up both hands. “This is part storage room, part workroom. Anything that’s really messy we do out in the old garage. It still needs some work.”

I led him over to the doors that led into the shop.

“This is great,” he said as he stepped into the space. “Are you using both floors?”

I shook my head. “No. I have an office upstairs and some more storage.”

He nodded but one of the guitars on the wall had caught his eye. “That’s a Rickenbacker,” he said. “A ’sixty-five.”

“Uh-huh. Sparkle inlays. All original.” I walked over and lifted the guitar off the wall. It was the deep russet color of an autumn leaf. “Try it,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” I held out the guitar. “You still play, don’t you?” I asked.

He gave me a wry smile. “Not as much as I used to, but yeah, I still play.”

“So play something for me,” I said.

Nick took the guitar from me and sat down on the steps to the second floor. I leaned against the wall while he tuned the strings and played some chords. Then he looked over at me. “I don’t know,” he said a little self-consciously, “but maybe you remember this.” He bent his head and started to play.

I did remember. It was the first song Nick had taught me to play on guitar. “Comin’ Back to You.” He played the bridge and then he started into the first verse, singing along softly with the music:

I’m comin’ back to you,

Somehow I always knew

No matter what I do,

All roads lead back to you.

For a moment I was fifteen again, it was summertime and the night sky was filled with stars. The memory wrapped around me with the music. Nick played through to the end of the chorus, then looked up at me and smiled a bit sheepishly. “I’m a little rusty.”

“You sounded great to me,” I said.

“Do you play much?” he asked.

I pushed away from the wall and shook my head. “I’ve been a little busy.”

“That’s too bad.” He got to his feet again and his gaze darted to my face for a moment. “Mom told me about your radio show being canceled,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Nick didn’t say anything for a moment, as though maybe he was waiting for me to say something more. Then he held out the guitar. “It’s a nice instrument, Sarah. Thanks for letting me play it.”

I raised an eyebrow at him as I took it, trying to lighten the mood a little. “You know, you qualify for the family discount.”

He shrugged. “It should go to someone who would actually play it once in a while. I don’t have a lot of time these days.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, copying his words and the tone of his voice from before.

He smiled. “Touché.”

I smiled back.

“Speaking of family,” he said. “How’s yours?”

“Good,” I said. “Dad’s teaching journalism now and still doing some writing, mostly longer pieces for magazines. Mom has a new book out next month.” My mother wrote a series for elementary school kids about a talking gerbil named Einstein. “And Liam’s pretty much focused on passive solar design now.”

Nick nodded. “Yeah, he told me he’s gotten involved with the small-house movement.”

“I didn’t know you guys stayed in touch,” I said. I wondered why Liam hadn’t told me.

Nick shrugged. “Off and on.”

I hung the guitar back on the wall and turned to face him. “I’m thinking the reason you’re here isn’t because you wanted a tour of the shop or to catch up on my family.”

“Yeah, I do have a few questions.”

Elvis had wandered in from wherever he’d been. He twisted around my legs and I bent down and picked him up. “No offense,” I said, “but isn’t that Michelle’s job?”

Nick leaned over to give the cat a scratch under his chin, which pretty much earned him a friend for life. “It’s mine, too,” he said. “The police are trying to figure out whether or not a crime’s been committed. I’m trying to figure out how and why Mr. Fenety died. We overlap a little.”

I explained about the workshop and Maddie not showing up. Elvis was leaning sideways, his head nestled in the crook of my elbow. I shifted him slightly in my arms and he turned his head just enough to shoot me a look. “I knew Charlotte would go over there to check on Maddie. I went with her, just in case.”

I recounted how we’d tried the front door and then decided to see if Maddie had been working in the backyard and just lost track of time.

“What did the body look like?”

I narrowed my eyes and pictured Arthur Fenety’s body in my mind. “It . . . he was slumped to one side and his eyes were closed. There was something at the corner of his mouth.” I raised a hand to my face.

“Where was Maddie?”

“She was just sitting there,” I said. “I think she was in shock.”

Elvis started to purr. Nick smiled at the cat. “Do you have any idea how long she’d been sitting there?”

“I don’t know. A couple of minutes, I guess. She said she’d been making an omelet for the two of them. Then the phone rang.” I paused for a moment, picturing the table and running Maddie’s words through my head again. “When, uh, she went back outside Arthur Fenety was dead.”

He caught my hesitation and his brown eyes narrowed. “What is it?” he asked. “Did you remember something else?”

“I just realized that I’m going to have to tell all of this to Gram over the phone.”

Nick gave me a sympathetic smile. “Your grandmother and Maddie are close.”

“They’ve been friends as far back as I can remember.”

My left arm was starting to fall asleep. I set Elvis down on the floor again. He shook himself and started washing his face but I saw him dart little glances at Nick and at me, almost as though he wanted to listen to the rest of our conversation but didn’t want us to know. I reminded myself that he was a cat and what he was probably thinking about was how he could get another scratch.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” Nick asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, brushing cat hair off my sleeve.

“If you think of anything, will you call me?” he said, pulling his keys from his pocket. “Please. You have my cell, don’t you?”

“I do,” I said. Elvis stretched and headed for the stairs.

“So, tell me about your new job,” I said as we headed toward the back door. “You’re not like the kind of crime-scene investigator I’ve seen on TV.”

He laughed. “No one’s like the crime-scene investigators on TV.” He pulled a hand back through his hair. “I told you I’m working for the medical examiner’s office.”

I nodded.

“My official job title is medicolegal death investigator. It’s my job to figure out the cause and manner of death when someone dies in this part of the state. Sometimes I have to investigate, like today. That means taking pictures, talking to witnesses, collecting evidence, working with the police. Other times it’s as simple as taking a basic report and having the deceased’s doctor sign the death certificate.”

We stepped out into the parking lot. “So you’re doing this because you’re trained as an EMT?” I asked.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said with a shrug. “But I actually took a course in St. Louis.” He narrowed his gaze. “Mom didn’t tell you.”

“She left out a few details.”

Nick shook his head. “She wanted me to take the teaching job. And she still has this fantasy that I’ll go to med school eventually.” He pulled a hand back through his hair. “She likes the sound of
my son the doctor
.”

“She just wants you to be happy,” I said, as we stepped outside.

He smiled. “I am.” He still had that great mischievous little-boy smile, but I could see lines etched into the skin around his eyes. “How about dinner sometime down at Sam’s? We can catch up.” The smile widened into a grin. “And maybe it’ll get my mother to stop asking not so subtle questions about my love life.”

I smiled back at him. “Somehow I don’t think it’ll work, but dinner sometime would be nice.”

“I’ll call you, then.” He pulled his car keys out of his pocket. “Have a good night, Sarah,” he said, and then he headed for the street.

I went back inside. I found Elvis in my office, sitting next to my bag. “Ready to go home?” I asked.

“Meow,” he said, and then he licked his whiskers in case it hadn’t occurred to me that he was hungry.

Elvis rode shotgun all the way home. In the few months I’d had the cat I’d discovered that he liked riding around in the truck. It made me wonder what his past life had been like. When I’d driven him back to the shop from Sam’s after he’d become my cat, I couldn’t help laughing at the way he’d watched the traffic at every stop sign and how he’d twisted to look over his shoulder as I backed into my parking spot.

When I pulled into the driveway he jumped out of the truck without waiting for me to lift him off the seat and headed for the backyard. “Supper’s in about fifteen minutes,” I called after him.

He meowed in acknowledgment and kept going.

I gathered the mail and I let myself into the house. Standing in the entryway I found myself wishing Gram was upstairs in her apartment instead of in a van somewhere in the wilds of eastern Canada.

My house was an 1860s Victorian that had been divided into three apartments probably thirty-plus years ago. It had been let go when I bought it, but I could see that it had good bones. Liam, my dad, and I had done almost all of the work on my main-floor apartment and Gram’s second-floor one. My mom had helped me decorate with yard-sale chic. The third small apartment at the back of the house still needed a little more work. It was where my parents or Liam stayed when they came to visit.

The house had been an incredibly good deal and for a while I’d told myself that’s why I’d bought it: as an investment. But really North Harbor was the place that most felt like home to me and deep down I’d always known it was where I’d end up.

I unlocked the apartment door and dropped my things on one of the high-backed stools at the kitchen counter. Then I opened the refrigerator door, hoping that somehow it had become magically filled with food. It hadn’t.

I didn’t feel like another egg and tomato sandwich for supper. I wanted to sit at the round wooden table in Gram’s green-and-white kitchen and eat meat loaf with mashed potatoes or baked beans and brown bread. And I really, really wanted to talk to her about Maddie.

I looked at my watch. That I could do. But first I needed to let Elvis in. I found him sitting on the small verandah by the side door. There was a dried leaf stuck to his tail and a prickly brown burdock clinging to the fur on the middle of his back.

“Hang on,” I said, as he tried to make his way around me. He made annoyed sounds low in his throat but he stood still, tail flicking through the air, as I worked the little spiky ball from his fur. “If you’d stay out of that back corner of the yard you wouldn’t get these things in your fur,” I said, for maybe the tenth time. “Why are you back there, anyway?”

He licked his lips.

“Well, in that case you don’t need any supper.”

He didn’t even dignify my comment with a snippy meow; he just headed for the kitchen and I managed to grab the dead leaf from his tail as he went by. My kitchen, living room and dining room were one big, open space with tons of light from the double bay windows at the front of the house. The bedroom overlooked the backyard, which would have been nothing but grass if it hadn’t been for Gram and her friends. Instead I had a raised flower bed full of perennials and two hanging baskets by the back door.

I followed Elvis to the kitchen and gave him his dinner and a fresh bowl of water. Then I wandered in the living room, dropped onto the sofa and reached for the phone.

Gram answered on the third ring. “Hello, sweet girl,” she said.