Cat With A Clue

There are many tasks that I find difficult. Braiding my annoyingly curly hair, for starters. Differentiating equations and putting down a good book before one in the morning are also beyond my capabilities. Another thing I’ve found hard for all of my thirty-four years? Choosing a favorite season.

Though summer is easy to enjoy with its warm freedoms, winter offers skiing and ice-skating and the sheer beauty of a world transformed by a fleecy blanket of white. Spring is exciting with its daily growth spurts, but right in front of me was a glorious hillside in its early-autumn colors of green with sprinklings of red and orange and yellow, a scene so stunningly beautiful it was hard to look away.

“Fall, it is,” I murmured to myself.

I was standing at the bookmobile’s back door, the door wide-open to let the unseasonably warm air of late September waft around the thousands of books, the hundreds of CDs and DVDs, the jigsaw puzzles, my part-time clerk, me, and Eddie, the bookmobile cat.

“Mrr,” Eddie said. On his current favorite perch, the driver’s-seat headrest, he stretched and yawned, showing us the roof of his mouth, which was the second-least attractive part of him, then settled down again, rearranging himself into what looked like the exact same position.

Julia, who was sitting on the carpeted step under the bookshelves, which served as both seating and as a step to reach the top shelves, looked up from the book she was reading. “What does he want now?”

One of the many reasons I’d hired the sixtyish Julia Beaton a few months ago was her tacit agreement to always pretend that Eddie was actually trying to communicate with us. Julia had many other wonderful qualities, among them the gift of empathy, which was a huge plus for a bookmobile clerk, and an uncanny ability to understand people’s motivations.

Those two traits had undoubtedly contributed to her success as a Tony Award–winning actress, but when the leading roles had started to dry up, she’d retired from the stage, and she and her husband had moved back to her hometown of Chilson, a small tourist town in northwest lower Michigan, which was the town where I now lived and worked, and there wasn’t anywhere on earth I’d rather be.

Though I hadn’t grown up in Chilson, I’d had the good fortune to spend many youthful summers with my long-widowed aunt Frances, who ran a boardinghouse in the summer and taught woodworking during the school year. It hadn’t taken me long to fall in love with the region, a land of forested hills and lakes of all sizes, and I soon loved the town, too, with its eccentric restaurants, retail stores, and residents.

Soon after I’d earned a master’s degree in library and information sciences, I’d heard about a posting for the assistant director position at the Chilson District Library, and spent half the night and all the next day working on a résumé and cover letter.

I’d sent the packet off, crossing my fingers as I imagined it being read by the library board, and, after a grueling interview and a couple of nail-biting weeks, I’d been ecstatic to be hired as the library’s assistant director.

Since then, not all had been exactly rosy, but the bookmobile program I’d proposed had become a reality a little over a year ago, and in spite of sporadic funding problems, library director issues, and the occasional library board confrontation, I was a very happy camper.

Eddie, on the other hand, did not look like a contented cat. Instead of the relaxed body language he’d been exhibiting moments earlier, he was now sitting up, twitching his tail, and staring at me with a look with which I was intimately familiar.

“What he wants,” I said, “is a treat.”

“He had treats at the last stop,” Julia pointed out.

“Which is why he thinks he deserves a treat at this one, too.”

“If he has treats at every stop,” she said, “he’s going to get as big as a house.”

I’d first met Eddie a year and a half earlier. In a cemetery. Which sounds weird, and probably is, but Chilson’s cemetery had an amazing view of Janay Lake to the south and, to the west, the long blue line that was massive Lake Michigan.

The day I’d met Eddie had been another unseasonably warm day, and I’d skipped out on the cleaning chores I should have been doing and gone for a long walk up to the cemetery. I’d taken advantage of a bench placed next to the gravestone of an Alonzo Tillotson (born 1847, died 1926) and been startled by the appearance of an insistent black-and-gray tabby cat.

In spite of my commands for him to go home, he’d followed me back to my place. By the time I’d cleaned him up, making him a black-and-white cat, I’d fallen in love. Even still, I’d dutifully run a notice in the local newspaper’s lost and found and had been relieved when no one answered the ad. Eddie was my first-ever pet; my father had suffered horrible allergies, and until last year I’d never felt the connection a human and a pet could have. I’d also never realized how opinionated and stubborn a cat could be.

“He’s already pretty big,” I said, “but the vet says he’s a healthy weight.”

“Mrr,” said the cat in question, starting to ooze off the headrest and toward the driver’s seat.

“Thanks so much,” I muttered. “I love it when you sleep there and shed all over the upholstery so I get your hair on the seat of my pants.”

Eddie thumped himself onto the seat. “Mrr!”

“I think,” Julia said, laughing, “that he took offense to that ‘big’ comment.”

“Who you calling big?”

Julia and I turned. Up until that point, the bookmobile’s stop had been empty of patrons. I smiled, pleased that we weren’t going to turn up completely dry. Of all the facts and figures that my library board scrutinized, the numbers from the bookmobile got the most attention. So far, the trends were upward ones, but I didn’t for a moment assume that all would be well forever.

“Hey, Leese,” I said to the woman, who was almost a foot taller than my efficient five feet. Her height was the same as my best friend’s, who owned a restaurant in Chilson, but instead of Kristen’s slender blond Scandinavian inheritance, Leese Lacombe’s ancestors had endowed her with a broad build, olive skin tone, and brown hair almost as curly as my unruly black mop.

Leese, a few years older than me, possessed a razor-sharp brain, a quick wit, and a prestigious law degree. She’d spent her time in the corporate trenches in a big downstate firm, and had moved back north a few months ago to start up her own law office, one that specialized in elder law. To keep costs down, she was using her home as an office, and had taken to borrowing books from the bookmobile instead of making the half-hour drive into Chilson.

“What’s new with you?” Julia stood and went to get the stack of books Leese had requested online. I was still tweaking the bookmobile schedule, but at that point we were visiting each stop every three weeks. Though that wasn’t a very long time to most people, it was an eternity for bibliophiles, and we were getting used to bringing along huge piles of requested books and lugging back the corresponding huge piles of returns. I doubted that any bookmobile librarian had ever needed to buy a gym membership to get an upper-body workout.

“New?” Leese perched the books on the corner of the rear checkout desk. “I’m glad it’s almost October, for one thing. My summer neighbors have slammed their trunks for the last time.”

Julia and I nodded, understanding the feeling. We lived in a part of Michigan that was the summer playground for a large number of folks from the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Chicagoland areas. Some people visited for a weekend or a week, while others had seasonal residences they occupied from May through September.

The population of Chilson and the entire Tonedagana County more than tripled in the warmer months, and summer came with a complicated set of issues. Most of us were glad to renew the friendships that had been put on hold the previous fall—not to mention the fact that many businesses depended on the summer dollars—but October was undeniably a sigh of relief. No more parking problems, no more waiting in line for a restaurant table, and no more waiting anywhere, really.

“It is nice to have our town back,” Julia said. “We’ll be tired of looking at one another by April, though.”

Leese laughed, and it was a surprisingly gentle sound from such a large person. “Undoubtedly. But without this quiet time, would we appreciate the busy time?”

The question was an interesting one. I gave up trying to shift Eddie from the driver’s seat and walked down the aisle to join the conversation. “So it’s part of that old question: How can we value the highs of life if we don’t know what the lows are like?”

“Exactly!” Leese beamed at me with a high-wattage smile, and I knew exactly what was going to happen next. She would sit on the carpeted step, Julia would pull around the desk chair, I would perch myself on the edge of the desk, and the three of us would dive into a long, leisurely discussion when we all had better things to do. But it was nearly October, the summer folks were mostly gone, and it was warm enough to prop the door open. What could it hurt to let the bookmobile chores wait a few minutes longer?

Julia pulled the chair around, and Leese dropped onto the step. “It’s the swings in life that make things interesting,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hitching myself up to sit on the edge of the desk. “Isn’t that some Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”

“Would you rather live in a boring era?” Leese challenged.

Julia laughed. “Minnie Hamilton couldn’t live a boring life if she wanted to. She’s just attracted to trouble.”

“Am not,” I said automatically. “I’m just—”

“Do you know what this tiny woman did earlier this spring?” Julia demanded of Leese. “In the middle of a massive power outage, she managed to hold a very successful book fair.”

Leese looked at me with interest. “You did that? Wasn’t Trock Farrand the headliner?”

“Minnie’s show, from top to bottom,” Julia said. “When the original big-name author pulled out, Trock heard about it and flew out from New York.”

“He’s a friend. That’s all,” I said, knocking my shoes together. “He wanted to plug his new cookbook.” Trock, host of a nationally televised cooking show, owned a summer place just outside of Chilson and in spite of the differences in our ages, backgrounds, and interests, we’d struck up a solid friendship.

Another solid thing was the relationship between Trock’s son, Scruffy, and my friend Kristen. I had the inside scoop that a proposal was in the near future, and I was having a hard time keeping quiet.

“Whatever.” Julia waved off my comment. “And just a couple of months ago, Minnie figured out that—”

“Hey!”

Julia frowned. “I’m on a rant, Minnie. Please don’t interrupt me when I’m in full flow.”

But it wasn’t Julia who I was scolding. I shifted on the desk and called to my cat, “Where are you going?”

We’d felt free to open the bookmobile door because for the last year, Eddie had completely ignored it. When we were en route, my furry friend traveled in a cat carrier strapped to the floor on the passenger’s side, but once I set the parking brake, Julia unlatched the wire door, allowing him to roam free about the interior. Though he’d run outside a couple of times the first year of the bookmobile’s service, since then he’d shown little interest in leaving the bus before we did.

Eddie, being a cat, paid no attention to my question, but continued to sniff at the open doorway.

“Is he going to make a run for it?” Leese asked, amused.

“Not a chance,” I said. “He wouldn’t want to get too far from his cat treats.”

Eddie’s ears flattened and Julia laughed. “I think you hurt his feelings. You should apologize before he does something drastic.”

“I shouldn’t have to apologize for telling the truth.”

But she did have a point. A miffed Eddie was not a good situation. He had claws and knew how to use them, especially on paper products. Paper towels, toilet paper, facial tissues, newspapers, and even books weren’t necessarily safe when Eddie was in the mood for destruction.

“I am sorry,” I told my cat, “that you take offense to a fact-based statement.”

“Huh,” said Leese. “Not much of an apology, if you ask me. And from the looks of him, he doesn’t think much of it either.”

Eddie was standing at the top of the stairs, intent on ignoring everything in the bookmobile, twitching his ears and nose.

“Hey, pal,” I said, sliding off the desk. “Inside only. You promised, remember?”

“That was before you insulted him,” Julia said. “All previous deals have now been canceled.”

“Come here, Eddie.” But just as I leaned down to grab my fuzzy friend, he hopped out of my reach, jumping down to the bottom step.

“That’ll teach you to make fun of a cat,” Leese said, laughing.

“Especially an Eddie cat,” Julia added.

We were parked in a large church parking lot, at least a hundred feet from the closest road, which hadn’t had a car pass in the last ten minutes, so I wasn’t overly worried about Eddie getting dangerously close to traffic, but there was a long line of shrubs at the far side of the lot and I could just see Eddie crawling into that prickly mess and not wanting to come out until long after we should have been at the next stop.

“How about a treat?” I crouched at the top of the stairs. “Come back right now and I’ll give you a whole pile of treats.” Not a big pile, but still. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

Eddie, catlike, was bent on his new mission, whatever that might be, and launched himself off the bottom step and into the bright late-September sunshine.

I groaned and went after him. Over my shoulder, I called, “Can someone bring me the treats? He might come if I shake the can.”

Once outside, however, I realized that Eddie wasn’t headed for the shrubbery. Or the roadway. Instead he was trotting straight for the only vehicle in the parking lot, a battered pickup truck. Dents and scrapes of all shapes and sizes were scattered all along the doors and sides, some serious enough to have scoured the paint down to the metal.

I leapt to the stunningly obvious conclusion that the vehicle was Leese’s and wondered what a former corporate attorney was doing with an open-bed truck, since at previous bookmobile visits, I was pretty sure she’d been driving a midsized SUV.

Mentally shrugging—I paid about as much attention to cars as I did to the daily temperatures in Hawaii—I trotted across the parking lot, ten yards behind my cat in a very short parade of two. “Eddie, come back here, will you? I thought I only had to run on workout mornings with Ash. I’m not sure I’m ready for more. Think of me, will you? I’m sure you’ve done that once or twice.”

Most days, my inane conversation caught Eddie’s attention, slowing him enough for me to catch up to him. This time, if anything, he sped up. Then he sniffed the air and trotted ever closer to the truck.

“Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” Leese called as she climbed down the bookmobile’s steps. “Come get a kitty treat.” She rattled the cardboard can of annoyingly expensive moist morsels, but Eddie trotted onward.

“Is that your truck?” I asked, pointing.

“For now,” she said, still rattling the can. “It’s a long story.”

Eddie, still ignoring the siren call of cat treats, jumped onto the truck’s rear bumper, then up onto the edge of the tailgate. I slowed from my half-run and started planning how best to snatch him up into my arms. Cornering Eddie was a lot easier than capturing him. “I think he wants to go for a ride.”

“Ha.” Leese, with her long-legged strides, reached my side. “I’ll give it to him with my blessing as soon as my SUV is fixed.”

Eddie’s ears swiveled. Laughing, I edged a few feet closer to the truck. “I think he’s rejecting your generous offer.”

“He’s a cat of good taste.” Leese gave the treat can an extra-hard shake. “That thing’s a piece of junk.”

“Mrrr,” Eddie said, then slid off the tailgate and into the truck’s bed.

Reaching the side of the truck, I stood on my tiptoes and peered in. All there was to see was a large tarp and a black-and-white cat walking over the top of it in an ungainly fashion.

“Fred Astaire, you are not,” I told him. “And please don’t make me come in there after you.”

“Mrrr,” he said, but his tone was different from the usual communicative chirp he gave. It was low and long and almost a growl. He started pawing at the edge of the heavy canvas and trying to poke his little kitty nose under the edge. Of course, he was standing on the edge, which made things difficult, but Eddie didn’t always like to do things the easy way.

I turned to look at Leese, who was now standing next to me. “What’s under your tarp?”

“No idea,” she said shortly. “It’s not mine. Tarp or truck.”

Two minutes earlier, she’d been ready to give away a truck she didn’t own? “I don’t—”

“Mrrroooo!”

I winced as Eddie’s howls penetrated my skull and sank deep into my brain.

Enough was enough. I walked around to the back end of the truck, put one foot on the trailer hitch and pushed myself high enough to grab the tailgate’s edge with both hands.

I swung one foot over into the pickup’s bed, then the other. Eddie was now howling for all he was worth and had managed to burrow his top half under the tarp. I crouched down and took a gentle hold of his back half. “Come on, pal. Let go of whatever it is you’re after, okay?”

But when I stood, cat in hand, his claws were still extended, and they snagged the tarp’s edge, yanking the canvas to one side and revealing what Eddie had been after.

“Oh . . . !” I stumbled backward. “Oh . . .”

Because Eddie had uncovered a body. A dead body. Of a man. A man about sixty years old. With staring eyes of blue.

I scrambled over the tailgate, holding a squirming Eddie close to my chest, and dropped to the ground, panting, and not wanting to see any more.

Leese was standing quiet and tall, her hands gripping the edge of the truck, her mouth working as if she was trying to say something. For a long moment, nothing came out, but when it did, her voice was a raw whisper.

“It’s my dad.”