A Case Of Cat And Mouse

chapter 3

I thought about what I had overheard Kassie saying to Richard as I drove over to Fern’s Diner. Her words just seemed to confirm what I’d observed and the rumors I had heard about her. Whatever Kassie’s issues were with Richard, whether they were justified or not, people liked him, and when it came to taking sides they were all going to be lined up on his.

I was going to Fern’s to pick up an order of cupcakes—devil’s food chocolate with mint-chocolate-chip buttercream. Usage numbers were up again at the library and I thought we should celebrate. Georgia Tepper, who owned Sweet Thing bakery, had made them for me. She had been doing all of her baking for the last two days in the diner’s kitchen after a small fire on top of a power pole on her street had caused more damage than anyone had realized.

“Hi, Kathleen,” Peggy Sue said when I walked in. She was wearing hot-pink pedal pushers and a pink-and-white short-sleeved polka-dot blouse with the collar turned up, along with her retro cat’s-eye glasses. With her bouffant hair and a hot-pink scarf tied at her neck she looked like everyone’s idea of a 1950s diner waitress. She even had a pair of roller skates that she would put on for special occasions. Peggy was co-owner of the diner and a very savvy businesswoman.

She reached down behind the counter. “I have your cupcakes,” she said. “They smell terrific.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking the cardboard box with the Sweet Thing logo on the top from her. “Is Georgia here?”

Peggy shook her head. “The power is back on in her kitchen. She left about an hour ago.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Thanks for hanging on to these for me.”

“Anytime,” she said with a smile.

It was a quiet Friday afternoon and evening at the library. I put the box of cupcakes in our staff room—minus the one I took for myself. I knew they would be gone by the end of the day. I set our newest student employee to work cleaning gum from under the table and chairs in the children’s department. It was a tedious, neck-knotting job but Levi had actually offered to take it on.

Levi Ericson had worked part-time as a waiter at the St. James Hotel before I’d hired him. He was a voracious reader, at the library at least once and often twice a week. When he had applied for the part-time job I’d had a good feeling that he might be the person we had been looking for.

We all missed our former student staff member, Mia Janes, who had left to attend college. We’d had a couple of students since then but neither of them had the rapport with the rest of the staff or our patrons that Mia had had. It was looking like Levi was going to be a good fit. The quilters and the members of the seniors’ book club were already trying to fatten up the lanky teenager. The little ones crawled all over him at story time and he didn’t seem to mind. And he read everything from graphic novels to War and Peace, which meant he could suggest a book for pretty much any reader who came in. I was hoping he would stay with us for a while.

Marcus called during my supper break. “How’s the paperwork coming?” I asked. The Mayville Heights Police Department along with the police in Red Wing had broken up a group smuggling counterfeit blood-sugar-monitoring devices.

“I swear someone is rearranging it all whenever I get up for a cup of coffee.” He raised his voice and I knew the words were being directed at someone besides me.

I pictured him standing at his desk, his tie loosened, his dark hair mussed because he’d been running his hands back through it.

“I have to drop something off to Eugenie after the library closes but it shouldn’t take long.” I broke a bite off my biscuit. “Any chance you’ll be done by then? We could go to Eric’s for chocolate pudding cake or just sit in the truck and make out like a couple of teenagers.”

“I thought you loved me for my sharp intellect,” he teased.

“Nope,” I said. “Turns out I’m way more shallow than that.”

Marcus laughed. “You’re many things, Kathleen, but shallow is not one of them.”

We agreed I’d call him when I finished with Eugenie and we said good-bye.

I was just bringing one of the book carts back to the front desk after my supper break when Kate Westin and another contestant from the show came in through the front doors. They both looked around in surprise. We often got that reaction from first-time visitors. The building, a Carnegie library, was more than a hundred years old. It had been restored to its original glory in time for its centennial, and I still took pride in showing off the mosaic tile floor, the refinished trim, the huge windows and the beautiful carved sun with the inscription Let There Be Light over the main doors, reminiscent of the original Carnegie library in Dunfermline, Scotland.

I walked over to say hello. “Kathleen, this is a beautiful place,” Kate said with a shy smile.

“Thank you,” I said. “A lot of people put in a lot of work to restore the building.”

“That railing outside on the steps, is it original?”

I shook my head. “No. It’s actually a reproduction. The original had deteriorated so much it had been replaced with a wooden railing about ten years before we started the restoration of the building.” It had been one of the things that had struck me as “wrong” the first time that I saw the building

Oren Kenyon had installed the new railings and had done a lot of other work inside including making several pieces of trim to match the original woodwork. The metalwork had been done by a blacksmith in Red Wing with a lot of help from Oren on the design. Wrought-iron spindles supported the flat handrail. The center spindle on each side split apart into a perfect oval and then reformed again. The letters M, H, F, P and L for Mayville Heights Free Public Library were intertwined and seemed suspended in the middle of the iron circles.

“It’s beautiful work,” Kate said, glancing back over her shoulder at the front doors.

Kate made me think of a princess from a child’s picture book. She was tall and slight and her dark blond curls were loose around her shoulders instead of pulled back in the tight braid she wore on the show. She had pale blue eyes, very fair skin and a perfect oval face. And she was smart as well. The former model was working on a graduate degree in psychology I’d learned. We had started talking after a production meeting when she had noticed I had Ernest Jones’s biography of Sigmund Freud poking out of my bag.

“I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people behave the way they do,” she’d explained in her soft voice. “When my modeling career ended I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I had already taken a couple of psychology courses in high school and I’d done well in both of them. So I enrolled in university. I did think about cooking school, but I had only really ever cooked for myself—just for fun. But now, if I could just make it into the top three, maybe . . .” She hadn’t finished the sentence. She hadn’t had to. It had been written all over her face how desperately she wanted to do well.

Kate had gone on to very matter-of-factly explain that her promising modeling career, along with a lucrative contract with an exclusive line of makeup, had disappeared when five years ago—at twenty-one—she’d had an allergic reaction to a facial mask that had been marketed as being “natural.”

“I didn’t know the word was meaningless when it comes to skincare,” she explained, her voice laced with bitterness. “Anyone can just use one or two natural ingredients in a product and call it natural. I wasn’t the only person who had a reaction, but by the time we all connected with each other and thought about hiring a lawyer the owner of the company, Monique Le Clair, had left the country. Some people think she might be in Asia somewhere or maybe Mexico. No one has been able to find her.”

After the allergic reaction Kate had developed a skin infection that had left her with scars on her face that both the modeling and cosmetics industries couldn’t seem to see past. I looked at her now and all I could see was how beautiful she was.

Caroline Peters was with Kate. Caroline was old enough to be Kate’s mother but the two of them had connected the same way Rebecca and I had. Caroline was a stay-at-home mother, I knew. She was short and round with a head full of black curls and deep blue eyes. She was wearing a blue flowered wrap dress with a jean jacket and white Adidas Superstars with black stripes. She turned in a slow circle to take in the main floor of the building. “What an incredible building,” she said. She gestured to the words over the front door. “This is a Carnegie library, then?”

I nodded.

“So is my library at home. These are great pieces of history. I’m glad this one was restored.”

“A lot of the buildings aren’t libraries anymore,” I said. “I’m glad this one still is.”

Caroline smiled at me. The mom of five was a perpetually happy person. “Right now, we’re looking for a place to hide out for a little while,” she said. “It seemed like a perfect evening for a walk but sadly that means we might possibly be missing a quick get-together for the contestants.”

I laid a hand on my chest. “Your secret is safe with me,” I said. “Librarian’s honor.”

“Is that a real thing?” Caroline asked with a teasing smile.

“As real as wishing on a star,” I said. “How’s the baking going for this week?”

“We’re just baked out,” Caroline confided. “I don’t think I ever want to see another loaf of bread, and believe me, that’s close to blasphemy coming out of my mouth.” She patted one hip. “I have never met a carbohydrate that didn’t make me say, ‘Come to Mama.’”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. I gestured at the stacks. “You can see that we’re not exactly busy tonight. I can tell you that the chairs in the reading area are a lot more comfortable than they look. And there are a couple of big, almost leather chairs in the back corner by the windows that are good for curling up in. You can look out over the water from there.”

“That sounds perfect,” Kate said. She was wearing ankle-length jeans and a long cream-colored cardigan over a striped long-sleeved T-shirt in shades of brown and orange. A chocolate-colored scarf was wrapped around her neck. Kate always seemed cold. Her shoulders were hunched, her hands jammed in her pockets. Both of her sleeves were pushed back and I noticed the left one was damp, probably from her last cooking session. She looked frazzled, much more than Caroline did. The pressure was on now that there were only six of the original twelve contestants left. I’d seen with Rebecca how finicky sourdough bread could be and I wondered if the stress was getting to Kate now that the semifinals were so close. Patisserie Week had not gone well for her.

I pointed the two of them toward the quiet back corner. “If you need anything, please come find me or you can ask Susan at the desk.”

They both thanked me and headed across the floor.

I walked over to join Susan at the front desk. She and Mary had switched some shifts and we hadn’t worked together very much in the last couple of weeks. I missed her sense of humor and seeing what she had stuck in her perpetual updo to keep it in place. Tonight it looked like a tiny green plastic trellis.

“They’re contestants on the Baking Showdown aren’t they?” she asked.

I nodded. “They are. They’re just looking to take a break from everything.”

“I don’t blame them.” She checked the number on the spine of the book on the top of a pile in front of her and then leaned back to place it on the top shelf of a cart. “I used to watch the original version of the show and I know I would never be able to handle baking under those high-pressure conditions. First of all, I would be way, way too slow and, second, the cameras there all the time would freak me out. How could I pick up a cake layer after I’d dropped it on the floor and get way with it?”

I gave her a pointed look.

“Not that I’m saying I’ve ever done that,” she added with a mischievous expression on her face.

“I feel exactly the same way,” I said. “Although, if I dropped a cake layer on the floor, it would have two cats all over it before I could even bend down to try to pick it up.”

“Trying to make dinner with the twins on either side of me both talking at the same time about two completely different things is hard enough. And I’d only be able to pick up a dropped cake if the boys weren’t home.”

“Not that you’re saying you’ve ever done that,” I added.

Susan grinned. “Of course.” She picked up another book and turned it over to check the cover for damage. “So do you have a favorite baker? I mean other than Rebecca or Ray. I won’t tell.”

“Honestly, it’s hard to choose,” I said. I did have a soft spot for Kate. She had such a flair for decorating. I’d loved the ginger cookies she’d made, decorated with kitty faces. “What about you? Are you Team Rebecca or Team Ray?”

“I’ll be cheering for both of them, but I think my favorite is Charles. He’s been into the café a couple of times.”

Charles Bacchus was a former boxer in his midfifties. He had been the episode “Hot Shot” the previous week. Stocky and balding with a barrel chest and a deep laugh, Charles’s massive hands had a deceptively light touch when it came to baking.

“Just talking to him has blown all of my stereotypes out of the water and I love his laugh,” Susan said. She nudged her black cat’s-eye glasses up her nose. “What are the other contestants like?”

“I’ve only talked to Stacey once,” I said, “and that was when we were introduced. I know Rebecca says Stacey seemed to be the one handling the pressure the best, which makes sense since she’s an elementary school teacher.”

Susan gave me a knowing grin as she put another book on the cart. “No wonder she’s so good at keeping her cool.”

“Caroline is very much the mother of the group,” I continued. I reached over and pulled a book out of the pile in front of Susan. Its dust jacket was torn. I’d leave it in the workroom for Abigail to repair. “She’s always trying to make her bakes healthy, which sometimes doesn’t work out so well.”

Three preteens came in the front door then. Two of them looked a little lost and the third looked petulant.

“Okay, someone assigned a paper that requires reading an actual physical book,” Susan whispered. “Where’s Mary when we need her?”

Mary Lowe looked like everyone’s idea of a sweet grandmother—and she was. She had soft white hair, she wore a themed sweater for every holiday and she made the best cinnamon rolls I had ever eaten. She was also a champion kickboxer and a big proponent of both reading and getting an education. The kids who came into the library looking for her help were partly in awe of her and partly a bit terrified. According to the middle school rumor mill, Mary had once dropkicked two foulmouthed boys out the front doors of the building. It was supposed to have happened before my time but I knew Mary well enough to know she wouldn’t raise a hand or a foot to a child. She would, however, give you a talking-to you wouldn’t soon forget.

When I had asked her about the origin of the story she’d just smiled and said, “Sometimes perception is just as important as reality,” and left it at that.

Susan held out her arm, hand folded into a fist. She tipped her head in the direction of the three boys. “Rock, paper, scissors?” she asked.

I smiled. “It’s okay. I have this.”

“You’re taking all the fun out of my workplace,” she said, wrinkling her nose at me.

“You would have won,” I said. “You always win when we do rock, paper, scissors.”

She grinned. “I know. That’s the fun part.”

I shook my head and walked over to the three boys.

Lita came into the library about quarter to eight. Everett’s assistant sometimes worked late hours. Kate and Caroline had left by then and I had helped the three boys find the books they needed for their English papers. Now I was dealing with a temperamental computer monitor, muttering to myself under my breath.

Lita frowned at the computer. “Does this happen a lot?” she asked.

“More frequently than I’d like,” I said. “That’s why I’m looking at starting to replace them all over time, beginning with the next budget. One of these days, banging on the side with the heel of my hand is going to stop working.”

“I’ll talk to Everett about this,” she said.

“I appreciate the offer.” I grunted as I leaned over the top of the monitor so I could attach a new cable at the back. “But Everett can’t rescue the library every time we need something. We need to make the budget work.”

Lita nodded. “I agree, but when Rebecca finds out, I can’t guarantee that she’ll agree.”

I sighed. “I know.” Rebecca loved the library. It was where she had indulged her love of books as a child and she was happy to spend money for whatever we needed. And if Rebecca was happy then so was Everett. I, on the other hand, felt we needed to run things without Everett always riding to the rescue.

“What I can do is make sure Everett knows what’s going on and how you feel about money falling from the sky, so to speak.”

“Thank you,” I said.

A lot of people in the town and the surrounding area depended on our public-access computers. Even on a quiet Friday night all but the one I was working on were in use. I finished attaching the cable I’d just switched in for what I believed was one with a wonky connection somewhere. I held my breath—at least mentally—and then gave a sigh of relief when the monitor came back to life.

“We’re good for another day,” I said to Lita. I grabbed the balky old cable and for the first time noticed that she was holding a large white envelope. “You found one.” I knew the envelope had to contain a calendar.

She smiled. “Two, actually, in my bottom desk drawer. I set them aside for some reason but I’ll be darned if I know why.”

I took the envelope from her. “Thank you for finding this and for bringing it over.” On the phone I had explained what Eugenie wanted to do. “I don’t know if the calendar will generate any interest in Mayville Heights, but it can’t hurt.”

“You’re very welcome,” Lita said. There was a teasing gleaming in her eye. “Burtis wants to know when you’re coming out for a rematch.”

We started walking toward the front doors. “That man is a glutton for punishment,” I said.

“He’s bone-headed stubborn. No argument there.”

Lita had been “keeping company” with Burtis Chapman for quite a while now. She was elegant and calm, the kind of person you wanted in your lifeboat. Burtis was larger than life, a self-made man who had worked for the town bootlegger when he was barely a teenager. He and Lita were crazy about each other, and anyone who had dared to comment on their relationship to their faces had been stared into silence.

I considered Burtis a friend and not just because he’d once helped Marcus save me from a burning building. He was loyal and dependable and his word was his bond. That was more than enough for me.

His son, Brady, had bought a pinball machine a while back that he was keeping at his father’s house. I had beaten Burtis twice at the game after giving him fair warning that I was a pretty good player. I’d spent a lot of time playing pinball when my parents were doing summer stock when I was a kid. For a while I was making enough money to indulge my comic book habit and then my father found out what I was up to and my days as a pinball shark were over.

“He says the third time is a charm,” Lita said. She shook her head.

I smiled. “I love an optimist. Not that optimism is going to help his game. Tell Burtis I’ll be out as soon as the show stops taping.”

She pulled her keys out of her pocket. “Do you think Rebecca has a chance of winning?”

I nodded. “I really do, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep your fingers crossed, just in case,” I said. “And tell that big optimist to keep his crossed as well.”

Lita laughed. “I will.”

It stayed quiet until closing time. I said good night to Susan and Levi and drove over to the community center. Zach Redmond was at the back door security desk. Zach also worked part-time as a bartender at The Brick. He was taking several of the evening shifts at the desk because he was also taking a couple of online college courses. It was quiet enough most evenings that he had lots of time to study.

Zach had thick brown hair pulled back in a man bun and dark skin. His most striking feature was his deep blue eyes. Most of the time he dressed in black jeans and one of his collection of rock and roll T-shirts.

“How’s the chemistry course coming?” I asked as I signed in. I noticed that someone had signed out as just “camera crew.” Thorsten was going to get on Zach about that.

“It’s a lot of work,” Zach said, gesturing at his laptop. “And there’s a lot of stuff to remember. But it’s not as bad as I expected—at least so far. All those years of keeping drink orders straight have given me a pretty good memory.”

I went up the stairs and down the hall to Eugenie’s office, hoping that Rebecca would have a loaf of bread still warm from the oven waiting when I got home. I knew I had a bottle of the Jam Lady’s marmalade in my refrigerator.

The door to Eugenie’s office was open and the lights were on but she wasn’t there. She had said there was a production meeting scheduled, I remembered. It was possible everyone was in the community center kitchen. If no one was working on a recipe in the space, it was where everybody tended to congregate, probably because that’s where the coffeemaker was.

I headed for the kitchen hoping maybe there would be a pot of coffee going.

The old brick building had a rabbit’s warren of hallways around the main gym/stage area. The double doors to the kitchen were closed. I eased the left one open as quietly as I could in case the meeting was still going on but there was no one inside.

That was odd.

I scanned the room. Only one overhead light was on. I could see a pair of jeans-clad legs in the far right corner of the kitchen. It looked as though someone was bent over the table.

“Hello,” I called.

The person, whoever it was, didn’t straighten up. Maybe they were wearing ear buds, I thought.

I took several steps into the room. An uncomfortable feeling had settled heavy in my chest. I walked around the large island in the middle of the space. My stomach pitched.

The person I had seen wasn’t working at something on the table. She—it was a woman—was facedown in a bowl full of what looked to be whipped cream. She wasn’t moving. I made a strangled sound and bolted the rest of the way across the kitchen.

I grabbed the woman by the shoulders. Her body sagged against mine. Somehow I managed to balance her body weight and lower her to the floor. Whipped cream covered her face and the front of her shirt. It clung to her hair.

I looked around for something to clean her head with. There was a folded tablecloth on the end of the island. I grabbed it and wiped the whipped cream off of her face. It was Kassie, I realized once I could make out the woman’s features. At the same time it registered that she wasn’t breathing.

Where was everyone?

“Help!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

No one came.

“Help!” I screamed again, hoping that somehow Zach would hear me down at the back door even as I knew it was a futile effort.

I noticed a scrape on Kassie’s lip as I used my fingers to scoop whipped cream out of her mouth so I could start CPR. She didn’t respond. She wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t find a pulse in her neck. It seemed to me that her skin was cool.

I pulled out my phone and called 911.

Where was everyone?

I was still doing CPR when the paramedics arrived I had no idea how many minutes later.

They took over and I stood up and backed out of the way. I wiped my hands on my pants and watched the two medics work on Kassie. She didn’t move. She didn’t make a sound. I knew she was dead.