Cat Trick

4

I told Mary about discovering the body in the tent. She sighed and shook her head. “He hasn’t been home in years, and now this happens—as if that family hasn’t already been through enough.”

“What do you mean?” I asked as we headed up to the second-floor staff room.

Mary gave me a half smile. “That’s right. You weren’t here when it happened.” Her forehead furrowed in thought. “Let me see. It must be close to ten years ago now. The Glazers lost a son—Michael’s older brother, Gavin—in a car accident.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“It gets worse,” Mary said. “His parents were away for the weekend. Gavin hit a guardrail and rolled his car down an embankment. He died in the hospital, and they didn’t make it back in time to say good-bye.”

Susan nodded in silent confirmation.

“That’s why Mike has no family here anymore.” I fished the keys to my office out of my pocket.

Mary slipped her bag down off her shoulder. “He left for Chicago maybe a month or so after the accident. His mother and father eventually moved as well, just to get a little space from their memories, I think.” She shook her head. “No one deserves this.”

I touched her arm. “If you’d like to take the day, Susan and I can handle things here and I can call Abigail to come in.”

Mary gave me a small smile. “Thank you, Kathleen. That’s very thoughtful, but I’m fine.”

Susan patted her canvas tote. “I have a piece of lemon-blueberry coffee cake. Want to split it?”

“Oh, that does sound good,” Mary said. She might have claimed she was fine, but there were tight lines around her eyes and mouth.

“It is,” Susan said, pushing her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose with one hand and linking her other arm through Mary’s. “But I keep telling Eric that I’m not sure so he’ll keep trying the recipe.”

They started down the hall to the staff room. I unlocked my office door, put my things away and then went back downstairs to officially open the building for the day.

It was about ten thirty and I was at the checkout desk, looking at a picture book that Susan had discovered in the book drop with every page covered in glitter glue, when Wren Magnusson came in. She looked around, almost as though she wasn’t sure if she was in the right place, and then she walked over to us.

I didn’t know Wren very well. She’d been away at university, living with her older brother in Minneapolis. Her mother had died suddenly about six months ago, and Wren had taken the fall term off to sort through the things in her mother’s house and spend some time back in Mayville Heights.

Wren was tiny, with white-blond hair and fair skin that seemed even paler this morning. She was twisting her left thumb tightly with her other hand, although she didn’t seem to really be aware of it.

“Excuse me?” she asked in her soft voice. “Is Mary Lowe here?”

“She is,” I said. “I’ll get her for you.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Mary was shelving books at the far end of the nonfiction section. While her hands were working, her thoughts were clearly somewhere else, and she jumped when I came around the end of the metal shelving unit and spoke her name.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Don’t apologize,” Mary said. “I was woolgathering when I should have been paying more attention to what I’m doing.”

“Wren Magnusson is at the checkout desk, looking for you.”

Mary made a face and pressed a hand to her forehead. “I forgot all about the child being back in town. How could I do that? She must have heard what happened.”

Clearly the fact that I had no idea what she was talking about was showing on my face.

“Wren knows”—she shook her head—“knew Mike. She was close to all the Glazers when she was a kid. It’s . . . complicated.”

A lot of the relationships in Mayville Heights were, I’d come to learn. So was my own background, for that matter. My mother and father had married each other twice, with my brother and sister, Sara and Ethan, front and center with my mother, so to speak, at the second ceremony.

“Go talk to her,” I said. “Take half an hour. It’s not busy. Susan and I will be fine.”

“Thank you, Kathleen,” Mary said. She patted my arm as she squeezed past me. “You have a good heart.”

I followed Mary as far as the children’s reading area and watched her fold Wren Magnusson into her arms. Mary was the one with the good heart.

She pulled out of the hug, keeping her hands on Wren’s shoulders as she studied the young woman’s face. After a moment Mary hooked her arm through Wren’s and they headed for the library entrance.

I walked over to Susan. She looked up at me. “That poor kid.”

“She knew Mike,” I said.

She nodded. “She was almost part of that family.”

I frowned at her. “What do you mean ‘almost’?”

Susan pushed the seafood fork a little more tightly into her topknot. “You know that older brother of Mike’s Mary was telling you about?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Wren’s mother was going to marry him.”

I blew out a breath. “So Gavin Glazer was going to be Wren’s stepfather,” I said.

Susan traced a finger around the outside edge of the heavy hardcover book she was holding. “The Glazers already treated them as though they were family. Wren’s mother never really got over what happened. She cut off all contact with the family even before they moved away. I think it was just too painful for her.” She sighed. “But it had to be hell for Wren. She didn’t just lose Gavin. She lost that entire family.” She set the book on the counter.

“Sometimes life isn’t very fair,” I said.

“You got that right,” Susan agreed.

“I’m going to finish shelving that cart Mary was working on,” I said. “Yell if you need me.”

I was putting back issues of Scientific American into their cubby when Mary returned about twenty minutes later. She walked over to me, and I got to my feet, brushing my hands on my black pants.

“How’s Wren?” I asked.

“A little shaky, but all right, considering,” Mary said. “If her brother wasn’t up in Alaska until the end of the month, I would have suggested she go back to Minneapolis.”

“Susan told me about Wren’s connection to the Glazers.”

“She was so happy to get the chance to reconnect with Mike. She’d been going to see him today. She was even talking about getting to see his mother.” She tucked her hands into the pockets of her peach-colored cardigan. “Kathleen, do you have any idea how Mike died?”

I hesitated, unsure how to answer.

Before I could say anything, Mary held up a hand and gave her head a little shake. “I’m sorry. How could you know that?” She sighed softly. “It doesn’t make any difference how he died,” she said. “It doesn’t make him any less dead. I just thought maybe it would help Wren if I could tell her that he didn’t suffer.” She shook her head again as if to clear it. “Not a very nice way to go, alone in that big old tent of Burtis’s.”

“Is there a good way to die?” I asked, picking up another book from the cart.

“Well, I darn sure know how I plan on going,” Mary said, a saucy gleam suddenly lighting up her eyes.

I put one hand on my hip and looked skeptically at her, happy to have the subject changed. “I don’t think that’s something you can really plan, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear what those plans of yours are.”

She pulled herself up straight to her full height, which wasn’t actually that tall. “I plan to live to be one hundred and be shot in bed by the jealous girlfriend of a much, much younger man.” She smiled at me. “And since I’m nowhere near the century mark right now, I’m going to go wash my hands and then come back and finish those books.”

I watched her head for the stairs. She was in excellent shape. If anyone was likely to make it to a hundred, it was Mary. And even though she was very happily married, I’d seen her get admiring looks from men a lot younger. Those long, strong legs of hers tended to turn men of any age into mush.

I went back over to the desk to see if Susan needed anything, and when she didn’t, I headed upstairs to my office. I dropped into my chair and swung around to look out the window.

How had Mike Glazer died? That question had been rolling around in my mind since I’d stepped into the tent and caught sight of his body slumped in that plastic lawn chair. There had been no blood, no signs of a fight. The body had been cold and stiff.

But when I’d felt for a pulse, my fingers had brushed over something—a small bump, a little smaller than an egg, on the back of Mike Glazer’s head, behind his left ear.

I wasn’t sure that even mattered. Not compared to what I’d noticed on his face. Tiny red marks barely bigger than a needle prick—petechial hemorrhages was the medical term for them—and I knew they were a sign of suffocation, among other things. Which meant Mike Glazer’s death probably wasn’t an accident.

I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. A headache was starting to throb behind my eyes. I knew it was possible that I was wrong. But I was pretty sure I wasn’t.