Curiosity Thrilled The Cat

9

Slant Brush Knee

My knees started to shake. I sat down. Hard. Hercules had vanished. He hadn’t darted past me. He hadn’t run around the corner. He’d walked through a solid wooden door just as if it wasn’t there. I could see it again in my head without closing my eyes. He’d vanished through that door and it was almost as though there was a faint pop as the end of his tail disappeared.

I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. “Be there,” I whispered. I opened my eyes again. No cat.

Leaning forward, I laid my hand against the door. It was solid. I felt all over the panel, pushing at the curved wood. Maybe there was some kind of secret opening. Maybe Hercules had activated a hidden panel. Maybe the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew would show up. The door was thick and unyielding.

“Hercules,” I called. “C’mon, puss. Where are you?”

There was silence and then a faint “Meow” from the other side of the closed door.

He was in there. Somehow he was in there. I grabbed the doorknob. Locked. I twisted the knob in frustration. Of course it was locked. The room was part of a murder investigation. And I’d just been trying to get inside. I yanked my hand away from the door like it was suddenly on fire.

Crap on toast! Now my fingerprints were all over the door. I used the hem of my T-shirt to rub the doorknob. Then I dropped to my knees and polished the bottom section of the door where I’d looked for some kind of hidden access panel.

I caught a bit of my reflection in the brass kick panel and realized what I was doing. “You’re nuts,” I said aloud, sitting back on my heels.

I shouldn’t have touched the door at all. I took a couple of deep breaths. I should call the police, I realized. How else was I going to get Hercules out? Then I thought, Oh, sure, call Detective Gordon and tell him my cat just walked through the door into the room. No, that won’t make me look like a nutcase.

Was that what was wrong? Was I crazy? I remembered a psych prof in first year telling the class that if you could ask the question, then you weren’t. Of course, three-quarters of the time he came to class in his pajama bottoms.

Then I remembered how Owen had seemed to just materialize on Gregor Easton’s head, just the way he’d suddenly seemed to appear in midleap, chasing that bird in the backyard.

I couldn’t breathe. Was it possible? Did the cats have some kind magical abilities? I pressed my head to my knees and made myself take several shaky breaths. Okay, no climbing on the crazy bus, I told myself. I was tired. I needed glasses. There was a rational explanation for all of this.

I leaned close to the door and called Hercules again.

Nothing.

I could picture him on the other side of the door, one ear twitching at the sound of his name. I also knew he wasn’t coming out until he felt like it.

I pulled the crystal Ruby had given me out of my shirt. If there was any negative energy around, maybe the crystal would keep it away. Then I shifted into a sitting position on the floor, wrapped my arms around my knees and waited. And waited.

Maybe five minutes went by, although it seemed a lot longer. Then I felt . . . something I couldn’t define. It was as if the air around the door suddenly thickened and pushed against me, the way water pushes against your hand if you try to press it over the end of a garden hose.

And then Hercules walked through the door as if there wasn’t any door there at all. He blinked and gave me an Oh, you’re still here look. I grabbed him in case he got the idea to take another look inside the room.

“You are in so much trouble,” I said sternly, heading for the steps.

He ducked his head. Translation: No, I’m not.

“That isn’t going to work,” I said, shifting him to my other arm so I could open the office door. Herc tilted his head to one side and looked, wide-eyed, at me. “Don’t bother with any of that I’m-so-cute stuff,” I said. I bent my face very close to his. “It’s. Not. Working.”

He licked my nose.

I pushed the door closed with my hip and set the cat on the floor. Closing my eyes for a moment, I rubbed the space between my eyes. It felt like something in my head had twisted into a pretzel, trying to make sense out of what I’d seen. I blew out a breath and opened my eyes. Herc was watching me as though I was the one who’d done something bizarre. I dropped into my desk chair and he immediately jumped onto my lap.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “Is there a kitty version of ‘abracadabra’? Do you click your back paws together or wiggle your whiskers?” I was asking a cat how he walked through a solid door. Maybe I was losing my mind.

I stroked the top of Herc’s head. What if the police weren’t finished in the room? Could the cat have left any DNA or hair behind? I felt a knot clench in my stomach to match the one pressing behind my eyes. He was a cat. How could he not leave hair behind?

And Will Redfern had been using that space for storage for weeks. It was a messy, dusty space. Would the police find paw prints?

Or worse?

I scratched the side of Herc’s face so he’d turn toward me. “Please tell me you didn’t hack up anything in there?” I said.

He looked at me, almost . . . smugly, nudged my hand away with a push of his head, then bent over my hand and spat out a small green glass bead.

My mouth went dry. I stared at the tiny glass sphere. There were a few threads caught on it. Hercules had found that in the storage room. How had it ended up there? Before the damaged floor in the room had been repaired, the baseboards had been pulled off and the tile had been steam cleaned. It had been clean enough to eat off of. Literally. And I couldn’t picture any of the burly workmen wearing anything with tiny, green glass beads. Had Hercules found something the police missed?

“How did you get this?” I said. He jumped off my lap and stood in front of the window. He seemed to be studying the wall. After a moment he started scratching at the edge of the trim—where the old wood met the floor—with one paw.

“Hey! Stop that!” I said.

As usual, Hercules ignored me. He caught the end of something with his paw and bent his head over it.

“No!” I snapped, so loudly my voice echoed around the room and startled both of us. I leaned forward. “Give that to me,” I said. He moved his paw and a purple plastic paperclip skittered across the floor toward me.

I picked it up. Hercules looked from the twist of plastic to me to the baseboard trim. Then he sat, wrapped his tail around his feet, and looked at me again.

It was crazy, but it was like . . . he wanted me to do something. What?

I got up and knelt down in front of the window. Feeling along the edge of the baseboard I found a small gap, not much thicker than the blade of a butter knife, between the trim and the floor. No surprise in a hundred-year-old building. And because the building had shifted over the past century the floors had also moved a little. They slanted toward the window. Anything I dropped tended to slide or roll up against that wall.

I looked over my shoulder at the cat, who was patiently watching me. I was still holding the purple paperclip as well as the glass bead Hercules had found. I rolled the tiny bead under my thumb, along my fingers.

And then I got it.

I got to my feet, walking around the desk to stand with my back to the door. I shut my eyes, trying to see the meeting-room space before the renovations had started, before it had become the storage place for tools and supplies. The space below was almost identical to my office. Maybe that floor had the same slant toward the window. Maybe there was a gap between the baseboard and the floor in there, too.

I held the bead up to the light. I felt light-headed. “Could this bead have something to do with Gregor Easton’s murder?” I asked Hercules.

Okay, so now I had to deal with the idea that not only did my cats have magical abilities, but they were also trying to nudge me to solve a murder. I looked at Herc with narrowed eyes.

He continued to stare unblinkingly at me.

The mosaic tile floor on the main level of the library had been repaired and resealed early in the renovations, then covered for weeks with heavy brown paper—that had made me think of butcher’s paper—and a layer of cardboard. The paper was still down in the storage area to protect the floor.

Vincent Gallo’s crew had done meticulous work. They wouldn’t have left a bead, a bit of paper or even a dust bunny behind. The old man, who could have been anywhere from seventy to ninety, had crawled all over the floor on his hands and knees, glasses perched on the end of his nose, to check the work.

I shook my head. “Maybe it does,” I said. I crossed to the window again and looked down on the reading garden. “I should take this bead to the police or call Detective Gordon,” I said to Hercules. I dropped onto my swivel chair again. “Of course, I can’t do that, because how can I explain why it might be important without explaining how I have it.”

I slumped against the back of the chair. Hercules came to sit front of me. I patted my leg. “C’mon up,” I said.

He leaped into my lap. I stroked the top of his head and he began to purr. Slowly I rolled my head from one shoulder to the other, to try to loosen the knots in my neck. The cat continued to purr in my lap, warm and comforting.

Warm.

Solid.

He wasn’t some superhero from the X-Men comics who could teleport or manipulate DNA. He couldn’t shoot lightning bolts from his fingers. Hercules was a cat. A small, furry, black-and-white cat. That I’d seen walk through an inch-and-a-half-thick wooden door. That defied the laws of physics. It couldn’t have happened.

Except it had.

What could I do? I couldn’t go to the police. I couldn’t tell the truth—not that I was even sure what the truth was. But how could I lie? Was there some option in between the two? I was tired. If there was a third option, I couldn’t think of it right now.

“Let’s go home,” I said to Hercules.

I stood up and set him on the desk. He made disgruntled murp sounds but he climbed willingly into the bag.

I glanced out the window again. It was getting dark. I swung the cat bag over my shoulder, grabbed the rest of my things and left the office.

“We’ll figure this out when we get home,” I said as I locked the gate and the main doors. “Some chocolate for me, some tuna for you and we’ll work it out.”

“Work what out?” a voice said behind me.

Maggie was standing at the top of the steps. How could I have forgotten that she was meeting me so we could watch the Gotta Dance reunion special?

I turned, brushing my hair back behind one ear. “Umm . . . ah . . . I just meant everything that’s happened since I found Gregor Easton’s body.”

We walked down the stairs together and out along the path to the sidewalk.

“Are you all right?” Maggie asked.

I blew a wayward strand of hair off my cheek, remembering that I hadn’t had a chance to tell Maggie about the piece of paper the police had found on Easton’s body. For a while I’d almost forgotten about it. “I can’t believe I didn’t tell you before, but the police found a note in Easton’s pocket, supposedly from me, asking him to meet me here at the library.”

Maggie stopped so abruptly I almost banged into her. “How could he have a note from you? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.” The shoulder strap of the bag was digging into the side of my neck. I shifted it a little. “I didn’t write it. It’s not my handwriting. But whoever wrote it signed my name.”

She shook her head dismissively. “Of course you didn’t write it,” she said. “But somebody obviously wanted him to think you did.”

We started walking again. “Why?” I said.

“Because that somebody knew Easton wouldn’t show up for him . . . or her.”

“But they thought he’d show up for me?”

Maggie shot me a wry sideways glance. “Kath, you’re not exactly ugly, you know.”

“I’m not exactly Easton’s type, either. From what I’ve heard he liked women young enough to be his granddaughters.”

We crossed the street and started up Mountain Road, and I switched Hercules to my other shoulder.

“After what happened with Owen in the library Easton probably thought you were looking to make amends.”

I squirmed at the image. Then comprehension set in. I stopped walking and turned to face Maggie. “But that would mean whoever sent the note knew what had happened.”

She nodded. “So who knew?”

“You. Susan. Mary.” I held up my hand and ticked the names off on my fingers. “That’s it. Oh, and Eric—Susan’s husband—because I’d asked her to call him and have breakfast delivered to Easton as an apology.”

Maggie stretched one arm behind her head as we started up the hill again. “Anyone else?” she asked.

“Just the cats,” I said. “And I don’t think they told anyone, but I have no idea who Susan or Mary or Eric—”

“—or even Easton himself might have told,” Maggie finished. “Did you see the paper? Do you know what it said?”

“I saw it,” I said. I pulled the image of Detective Gordon holding up the plastic bag with the note inside into my head. “It was written on a piece of paper from one of the library notepads. Remember? The ones that say ‘Mabel’ instead of ‘Mayville.’ There were two boxes in the workroom. There’s a silhouette of an open book in the left corner and it says ‘Mabel Heights Free Public Library’ across the bottom.” I rubbed the back of my neck again. “The note itself said, ‘Meet me at the library at eleven thirty. Kathleen.’”

Maggie made a skeptical noise and touched my arm. “He sure had an overinflated idea of his appeal if he thought you were interested in a rendezvous among the stacks at eleven thirty at night.”

“The man didn’t lack confidence, Mags,” I said.

She smiled and her hand, still on my arm, was warm. “Tomorrow I’ll ask around and see what I can find out about Easton and what he’d been doing since he got here. No one’s going to believe you killed the man.”

Hercules meowed his agreement from my hip. Maggie held up both hands. “See? Even Furry Face knows that.” She checked her watch, then patted the canvas bag she was carrying. “It’s five minutes to showtime, and I have a bag of organic cheese puffs and another bottle of Ruby’s homemade wine.”

I opened the porch door and followed Maggie inside, tucking my keys in my pocket. My fingers touched the little sea-green glass bead. Okay, so I couldn’t take it to the police. I could do some digging of my own. Because I was definitely going to figure out what was going on.

Someone had used my name to get Gregor Easton to meet him or her. And maybe kill him.

Not someone passing through town. Not some stranger.

Someone here in Mayville Heights. Someone I knew.