Curiosity Thrilled The Cat

12

Fair Lady Works at Shuttle

Okay, it wasn’t really Santa in my Adirondack chair, but the elderly gentleman in my backyard definitely looked like Saint Nick, minus the belly that shook like a bowlful of jelly. He had thick white hair and a white beard that looked as soft as dandelion fluff.

I opened the door and walked across the grass to find out why Santa Claus’s doppelganger was sitting in my favorite chair. He struggled to get to his feet when he saw me approaching—Adirondack chairs are not always easy to get out of.

“Hello, my dear,” he said, offering his hand. His grip was strong and his blue eyes actually seemed to twinkle.

I didn’t think I’d ever seen the man before; still, there was something very familiar about him.

“You’re trying to decide if we’ve ever met,” he said.

Okay, not only did he look like Santa Claus, he seemed to be able to read minds like the Amazing Kreskin. The old man was still holding my right hand and now he covered it with his left. I could feel the warmth of both of his hands, sinking into mine.

“I’m Harrison Taylor,” the Kriss Kringle look-alike said. “But everyone calls me Old Harry.” He gestured at the chair behind him. “I hope you don’t mind me making myself at home.”

“Not at all.” I gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

“I’m happy to meet you, as well,” he said. “I was feeling a little like someone’s big, old, smelly dog, left in the truck with the window cracked just a little. Plus, I’m a nosy old man and I wanted to see what you’ve done back here.” He patted my hand before letting go of it.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

He looked around and slowly nodded his approval. I felt a small, warm bubble of pride spread inside me. Young Harry kept the yard mowed and trimmed, but I’d cleaned out all the overgrown flower beds.

“Those roses are from the homestead,” Old Harry said, gesturing with a heavily veined hand.

“Yes, they are. So are the blackberry canes.”

“How was the rhubarb this year?”

“Delicious,” I said. It had been, once I’d figured out rhubarb needed a lot of sweetening.

The mower stopped in the front yard, replaced in a moment by the sound of the trimmer.

“Please sit down,” I said, dipping my head at the chair. Old Harry eased back into the seat and I sat on the grass.

He patted the wide arm with one hand. “I didn’t like this color, you know, when Harry started painting the chairs. I thought all the colors he chose looked like something from a box of those fancy little mints you get at the end of a la-di-da dinner party.” He smiled, which made him looked more like Santa than ever. “Turns out he was right.” His gaze shifted to something behind me. “Well, bless my soul,” he said. “Hello there, puss.”

I shifted to see which cat was coming. It was Hercules, probably returning from Rebecca’s gazebo, stalking across the lawn like one of his jungle cousins. He paused beside me for a moment—long enough for a quick stroke of his fur—then went to stand in front of the old man. Old Harry patted his leg. I opened my mouth to explain about the cats, and Hercules jumped up onto his lap.

My lips moved—I could feel them—but no sound came out. If someone had poked me with a feather I probably would have fallen over onto the grass. In fact, I almost did fall over when Owen came out of nowhere and brushed against my back. I turned, but like his brother he moved around me, stopping in front of the big wooden chair.

“Hello. I didn’t realize there were two of you,” Old Harry said. He didn’t even have to pat his lap. Owen jumped up without an invitation. As usual, it took him a moment to get settled. He shifted, kneading Old Harry’s leg, apparently without claws, nudging Herc a tiny bit sideways.

I just sat there, staring at the three of them, wondering when I’d fallen down Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole. I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure I could trust my voice to work, anyway.

“I see the rosebushes and the blackberry canes aren’t the only thing you have from Wisteria Hill,” Old Harry said. He was scratching Owen behind his ears and Herc just at the top of his white face patch. How he knew what each cat liked was beyond me. The whole thing was so . . . weird. The White Rabbit in his waistcoat, glasses and watch could have come around the rosebushes muttering, “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date,” and I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Old Harry smiled kindly at me. “It’s all right, my dear,” he said. “They know.”

From somewhere I found my voice. “Know what?”

“That I’m dying,” he said, in the same matter-of-fact tone you might use to say it’s Tuesday.

“But . . . but you look fine,” I said stupidly, shifting on the grass so I could pull up my knees and wrap my arms around them.

“You’ve probably heard the expression ‘Looks can be deceiving.’” Both cats were purring now. Loudly. “What are their names?” the old man asked.

I pointed. “That’s Hercules and that’s Owen.”

“This one looks like Anna’s cat, Finn.”

I rubbed my damp hands on my shorts. “Everett’s mother? You knew her?” I asked.

“My first job was out at Wisteria Hill,” he said. “Everett’s father—Carson—built the place for Anna when she said she’d marry him. He was older than she was and hard as nails, except when it came to her.” He smiled. “She had that effect on people.”

I leaned forward. “What happened? Why was everything just abandoned?”

For a moment I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. He gave Hercules a last scratch under his chin and said, “Time to go.” The cat jumped down, shook himself and came to lean against my leg. “You too, puss,” Old Harry said to Owen. Owen yawned, stretched and hopped down, as well. He came across the grass and leaned against my other leg, pushing his head under my hand in a not-so-subtle attempt to get me to pet him.

The old man finally looked at me. “I don’t know why Everett gave up on the place. I was in St. Cloud—had been for six months.” He shook his head and I could see the sadness in his eyes. “By the time I got home again Anna was . . . gone. Everett didn’t completely abandon the house, mind you—there was a caretaker—but I don’t think he ever went near the place again.”

He stroked his beard with his gnarled fingers. “There was a lot of loose talk, but nothing you could hang your hat on. And by the time Everett came back to stay”—he shrugged—“he wasn’t saying anything, and nobody liked to push.”

Old Harry gestured to the cats, both still leaning against me, and his face softened. “Now, they’re most definitely descendants of Anna’s Finn.” He pointed at Hercules. “That one looks just like the old cat. And that one”—he gestured at Owen—“has the same eyes.” He pulled himself forward in the chair. “The old mother cat, she picked Anna, you know. Showed up one day at the back door of the house. Didn’t care much for anyone but her. Just the way these two chose you. They know how things are meant to be.”

Before I could ask him what he was talking about he started getting to his feet. I jumped up to help him and saw Young Harry was headed toward us.

“Time to put me back in the truck,” the old man said, giving one of my hands a squeeze. “It was a pleasure to finally meet you.”

I squeezed back gently. “For me, too.”

“Are we headed down the hill?” he asked Young Harry, who had joined us.

“Yes, we are. I have to mow at the Stratton and the library.”

“Good,” Old Harry said, his blue eyes twinkling. “Maybe I’ll crank down my window, stick my head through with my tongue hanging out, and see if it’s as much fun as it looks when Boris does it.”

His son was unfazed. “Yeah, well, try not to shed all over my front seat, Dad,” he said as they headed for the street.

I crouched down so I could talk to the cats at their level. Owen put a paw on my knee. Hercules, on the other hand, decided it would be a good time to catch up on his grooming. “What was that all about?” I asked. Owen suddenly decided that he should wash his face, too.

Was Old Harry really dying? Was it possible the cats could tell? Neither cat so much as twitched an ear in my direction. I sat back on my heels. I was turning into one of those people who talked to their cats and actually expected an answer.

I got up and went back to the house. It didn’t take long to get my things together, change and fix my hair. I put fresh water out for the cats. When I went to the back door, they were waiting to come in. They moved past me, avoiding eye contact. I locked up and headed down the hill.

The library was deserted—again—but two of Will Redfern’s men were there, pulling the temporary desk into sections so they could take it out. Mary waved at me from the new circulation desk, where she was getting organized.

“Isn’t this great?” she beamed, pointing to the new book drop with separate slots for fiction, nonfiction and other media like CDs and DVDs.

“It looks good,” I agreed.

“What are you doing here so early?” she asked.

“I have some paperwork I need to get at,” I said. “Is Jason here?”

She nodded. “He’s shelving, and Abigail is upstairs, sorting books for the sale.” She looked at the boxes piled on either side of the counter. “I could stay an extra couple of hours, if it would help,” she offered.

I looked at the boxes. “It would help, yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

Mary nodded with satisfaction. Organizing things, making labels, setting up files were her idea of fun—aside from kickboxing. She’d be able to get the circulation desk organized faster and better than anyone else.

I let myself into my office, closing the door behind me. I had an open-door policy, generally, but I had only an hour to see what I could dig up on Gregor Easton.

I turned on my laptop, spreading lunch on the far right side of my desk, and started Googling.

The basics were easy to find—concerts Easton had given to great acclaim, a catalogue of his CDs, a bibliography of the music he’d written. There were photos of the man at Carnegie Hall, at the Grammys, joining an eclectic group of other musicians to record a song for charity—always with some beautiful, younger woman on his arm. But I could find very little about his early life. It was almost as though Gregor Easton hadn’t existed before graduate school. What little information I could find was sketchy and one source seemed to contradict the next. There was lots of information about the public Gregor Easton. But I wanted to know about the private man. How could I get the personal details, the rumors, all the things that didn’t seem to make it into the public record?

Then it hit me. Who knew more about music—classical and contemporary—than Dr. Lise Tremayne, curator and librarian for the music collection at Boston University? I didn’t even have to look up the number.

It was early afternoon in Boston. “Dr. Tremayne,” she answered on the third ring. The sound of Lise’s voice, with its perfect enunciation and touch of French accent left from the years she worked and studied in Paris, immediately made me homesick.

“Hi, Lise. It’s Kathleen,” I said.

“Kath! How’s life in the land of a thousand lakes? You haven’t been carried off to become the consort of Bigfoot, have you?”

I laughed. Lise might seem like a big-city intellectual, but I knew she’d grown up in rural Maine, so far north that the next stop was Canada. She’d dug potatoes and stacked firewood and could dress a deer. Her highbrow friends would have been shocked to find out that the braised partridge they’d savored at one of Lise’s elaborate dinner parties had been running around the Maine woods right before her annual “fall retreat.”

“No, I haven’t been abducted by Bigfoot.” I swiveled in my chair so I could look out over the lake. Even though there were more clouds—which meant Harry was probably going to be right about the rain—the sun still sparkled on the water. The grass, which Harry must have come and cut right after he left my house, was a deep, rich green and the flower bed was an artist’s palette of color. My homesickness eased a little.

“It’s beautiful here, Lise,” I said. “I’m sitting here at my desk, looking out over the lake. The sun is shining. The air is clean—”

“—and all the little forest animals come into the library to help you shelve books while you whistle a happy tune,” she said drily.

“No, but you’d be surprised how useful squirrels can be for getting books up on the top shelves.” She must have known what was coming next. “And,” I added, “they work for peanuts!”

“I miss you, Kath,” Lise said, laughing.

“I miss you, too.” I had to swallow a couple of times to get rid of the sudden lump in my throat.

“So, tell me about your library.” I pictured her leaning back in her chair, propping her feet, in some ridiculously expensive pair of sandals, on the edge of her desk. “Is it really one of the original Carnegie buildings?”

“It is,” I said. I told her about the stone building and the renovations. I left out the fact that it was a possible crime scene and I was a possible suspect.

I took a deep breath. “Lise, the reason I called is I’m looking for some information. Do you know anything about Gregor Easton, the conductor?”

“I know he died just a couple of days ago.”

“He died here, Lise.”

“There? What was Easton doing in Smallville, Minnesota?”

“Mayville,” I said. I held the phone with one hand and stretched my other arm over my head. “He was here for the Wild Rose Summer Music Festival. He’s—he was—guest conductor and clinician.”

“I’ve heard of the festival.” Lise’s voice turned pensive. “I didn’t realize that was where it was.” I could hear her tapping a fingernail against the side of the phone. “But what was Easton doing there? It’s not his usual type of venue.”

I shifted in the chair and pulled my legs up under me. “He was a last-minute replacement for Zinia Young.”

“Now, your festival would be Zinia’s type of event.”

“She had to bow out at the last minute, so Easton volunteered to fill in.”

“Volunteered? I don’t think so.”

“That came straight from someone on the festival board,” I said. “I guess he offered because he and Zinia are close friends.”

An inelegant snort of laughter came through the receiver. “Gregor Easton doesn’t have friends,” Lise said. “He has—had—sycophants and people he was using. Easton and Zinia were not friends. Trust me, if he volunteered, there was something in it for him.”

The man Lise was describing did sound like the man Ruby and Maggie had talked about in class, like the man I’d encountered at the library.

“What else do you know about Easton?” I asked. I kept waiting for Lise to ask me why I was asking for information about the man.

“He wasn’t well liked in the classical music world,” Lise said. “He was arrogant—even for a conductor.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Now, to be fair, he was considered to be a first-rate composer, deservedly so, from what I’ve heard. But technically he wasn’t anywhere near as gifted.”

“What do you mean, technically?” I asked. I heard Lise’s feet drop to the floor and I knew she was probably reaching across her desk for her coffee.

“His playing—and conducting, too—weren’t close to the caliber of his composing. Do you remember Dr. Mitton?”

I thought for a moment. “Wasn’t he musician in residence a couple of years ago? He was English.”

“That’s him.” I imagined Lise nodding on the other end of the phone. “He once compared Easton’s piano playing to that of a three-year-old on a toy keyboard.”

“That’s harsh,” I said.

“That’s the kind of response Easton generated in people,” she said. “I heard him play once, years ago, and while he was good, he wasn’t great. The music was beautiful, but he didn’t seem to connect with it. It was almost as though he hadn’t written his own score. It was so much better than his playing. The best versions of his compositions have been played by other people.”

That was interesting, though I had no idea how it might help me. I glanced at my watch. There was a lot more I wanted to know, but I was running out of time.

“Lise, do you know anything about Easton’s background?” I asked. “Where he grew up, where he got his first degree?”

“I don’t.” I pictured her shaking her head, blond curls bouncing. I felt another sting of homesickness. “But I can ask around, discreetly, of course, if you’d like me to.”

“Please,” I said. I gave her my home phone and my cell number. If we missed each other, I didn’t want a message about Gregor Easton left for me at the library.

“So, Kath,” Lise said. “Why all the interest in a dead conductor?”

So I wasn’t going to get away without answering some questions myself after all. “This stays between us?”

“Absolutely.”

“I found his body.”

“Oh, Kath, I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I am. Thanks,” I said. “The thing is, the police still have some questions and so do I.”

“Do you mean there was some kind of accident, or are you saying someone killed him?” I heard the surprise in her question.

“Lise, I honestly don’t know for sure,” I said. “I can tell you that it looks like the library is one of the last places he was before he died. Somehow he got into the building after hours.”

“And you want to know why a renowned composer was breaking into your library.”

That, and why would someone want to kill him at all, not to mention who did. But I didn’t say that out loud.

“I thought the biggest problems you’d see out there would be grizzly bears and killer mosquitoes.”

“Maybe I’m just being nosy. It’s probably going to turn out that Easton had a stroke.”

“Well, let me see what I can find out and I’ll get back to you.”

I thanked her and we both said good-bye. I hung up the phone and stood up, giving my right foot—which had fallen asleep—a shake. I stood in the doorway of my office. And looked down to the main floor of the library. In the time I’d been on the phone, Will Redfern’s men had taken the temporary circulation desk apart. One of the workers was spreading a heavy canvas tarp over the floor where the desk had sat. The front doors were propped open and another man came in, carrying what looked to me like pieces of steel staging.

Something was up. I headed down the stairs. “Excuse me,” I called, walking quickly over to them. “Are you setting up staging?”

The man spreading out the tarp turned at the sound of my voice. I recognized him as Eddie, a cousin I wasn’t sure how many times removed, of Abigail’s. He was a big, barrel-chested man with a great, booming laugh, but as Abigail had observed wryly, he wasn’t very “work brittle.”

“Yes, ma’am, we are settin’ up stagin’,” Eddie said. “We brought this ’cause we didn’t know if we could get into the storage room to get the other stagin’.”

The other worker set the pieces he’d carried down on the tarpaulin. I knew from watching Eddie work, or, more correctly, not work, who’d be assembling that staging.

“What’s the staging for?” I asked.

“Well, we need to reach something up to the ceilin’ and the ladder don’t go that high.”

Talking to Eddie could be maddeningly slow. I wasn’t sure if he doled out information so slowly just because he truly was literal-minded or whether he secretly enjoyed playing people.

I blew out a breath and rubbed the knot that was forming between my shoulders. “Why do you need to reach the ceiling?” I asked.

Eddie scratched his stubbled chin. His hands were huge. One of them could have covered my entire head. “Well, ma’am, the ceilin’s where that big, old plaster medallion goes.”

Plaster medallion?

I looked up. The front entry of the library ran up two floors. I could see where a ceiling medallion could fit, but I hadn’t signed anything to order one and it wasn’t part of the original renovation plans.

The knot at the base of my neck tightened.

“Where’s your boss, Eddie?” I asked.

He scratched his ear and frowned. “Well, I can’t exactly say,” he said. I noticed he hadn’t said he didn’t know.

His cell was tucked in his T-shirt pocket. “Give me your phone,” I said. I knew if I called from the library phone Will Redfern wouldn’t answer.

Eddie hesitated. “This is a work phone,” he said.

“Good.” I grabbed the cell from his pocket and flipped it open. “Because this is a work conversation.” I stepped away from Eddie and punched in Will’s number. He answered on the third ring. “Hey, Eddie boy,” he said, all macho good humor.

“Hello, Will,” I said. “It’s Kathleen Paulson. Eddie very kindly let me use his phone.” I looked back over my shoulder and smiled at Eddie, who looked as if he were still trying to figure out how I’d managed to get his cell.

There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Will, are you still there?” I said.

“Umm, yes, Miss Paulson, I’m here. What can I do for you?”

“According to Eddie there’s a ceiling medallion to be installed in the front entry of the library.”

“That’s right.”

Like Eddie, Will could stonewall. “There were no ceiling medallions on the renovation plan.” I was certain of that. I’d gone over the list of renovations, as well as the actual plan, before the work started. And I knew how to read a floor plan.

“Well, you see, the medallion is from before.”

“Before what?” I asked, struggling to keep the growing aggravation out of my voice.

“Before you got here,” Will said. “Roof leaked, right after Thanksgiving last year.”

“I know,” I said.

“Caused quite a bit of damage to the medallion that was up there—part of it came down. Made a helluva mess. So the boys took the whole thing down and we sent it away to be repaired. No one around here can do that fine work. Took a long time to get it back.”

What didn’t, if Will were involved? I cleared my throat. “Thanks for explaining,” I said. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No problem,” Will said. He was full of that good-humored machismo again. “When you’re from away, how could you know what happened last year?”

From away. It wasn’t the first time Will had pointed that out. The words stung and I suspected sometimes they were meant to. Did the person who had used me to lure Easton to the library set me up because I was from away?

“Tell the boys I’ll be over there shortly,” Will said, and hung up.

I closed the phone and handed it back to Eddie.

“That wasn’t a long-distance call, was it?” he asked suspiciously. “You weren’t callin’ Taiwan, were you?”

“Not unless your boss was in Taiwan,” I said with a smile. “He said to tell you he’ll be here soon.”

I started for the stairs. “Call me when Will Redfern gets here, please, Mary,” I said as I passed the desk.

“Will do,” she said.

I closed the workroom door, slumped against it and threw back my head in a silent, head-shaking scream. I opened my eyes to find Abigail watching me with amusement.

“Feel better?” she asked. She was sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor.

I thought for a moment. “Actually, yes,” I said. I also felt more than a little embarrassed.

“Let me guess.” She made a show of closing her eyes and pressing her fingertips to her temples. “I’m getting an image,” she said in a singsong voice. “I see workmen. I see wood and tools. But I don’t see any work being done. I see . . . I see . . .” She opened her eyes and dropped her hands. “Let me guess: You were talking to Will Redfern.”

“Very good.”

Abigail grinned and set four paperback books into the open box in front of her. “It was an easy guess,” she said. “Will hasn’t exactly made the renovations run smoothly—especially lately.” She closed the flaps of the carton, fastening them down with a strip of clear tape. There were a dozen boxes behind her, all labeled in Abigail’s slanted printing: MYSTERY, MYSTERY, ROMANCE, ROMANCE, ROMANCE, FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION. There were more, but I couldn’t see the writing on all of them.

“Maybe my expectations were too high,” I said with a sigh. “I’m used to a big city where things go at double speed.” I snapped my fingers rapidly several times.

Abigail shook her head. “Don’t let Will pull that small-town slash country-boy routine on you. No, we’re not Boston, but we do know how to do a job properly and on time.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “You’re doing a great job, by the way.” I gestured at the stacked boxes. “Is there anything you need?”

She sat back on her heels and looked around. “More boxes would be a help.”

“That’s easy,” I said. “There’s maybe a dozen flattened behind the door of the lunchroom.”

“Then I’m good,” Abigail said.

I left her sorting books and went back downstairs. Will’s workmen had the first lift of staging assembled. Mary was checking someone out at the new desk. Jason was pushing a cart full of books over to the shelves.

For the moment, everything was running the way it was supposed to.

I went back to my office, turned on my computer and pulled up the budget spreadsheets. I spent the next hour going over the numbers, stopping only once to give Mary the key to the back loading dock for Larry, so he could bring in his supplies. I didn’t realize how dark the sky had gotten until I finished the last column of numbers, leaned back in my chair and swung around to look outside. Heavy gray clouds seemed to be pressing on the lake. Spits of rain began hitting the window. Harry was a lot more accurate a forecaster than the weatherman on this morning’s news.

The rain was beating steadily on the window now. I got up to turn on the overhead light and put paper in the printer.

The last copy of the budget was coming out of the printer when Larry knocked on my open door. “Sorry to bother you, Kathleen,” he said. “But it looks like you’ve got a leak in the computer room.”

I sighed and stood up. “Where?” I asked.

“Window on the far left.” Larry looked back over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t have bothered you, but it seems Will’s guys are on a break.”

“They take a lot of breaks,” I said, coming around the desk. I followed Larry to the computer room. Just as he’d said, the end window—a brand-new-three-weeks-ago window—was leaking. A small stream of water ran along the inside edge of the unit, between the actual frame holding the glass and the build-out, across the wide ledge and onto the floor. Actually it was running into a large white bucket with SHORTENING written on the side. The floor around the base of the bucket was wet.

“Do you have any rags or paper towels to soak up that water?” Larry asked.

“There’s a plastic crate full of clean rags under the sink in the lunchroom upstairs,” I said.

Larry touched my arm. “Stay here. I’ll get them.” He headed for the stairs. I checked the other windows.

I was thankful there was only the one leak.

Larry came back with the box of cloths in one hand and a couple of heavy drop cloths in the other. He handed me the drop cloths. “I thought it might be a good idea to put these under the other windows—just in case,” he said.

Together we spread the painting tarps under the two dry-for-now windows. Then I mopped up the small pool of water around the bucket. The leak hadn’t slowed down, but it wasn’t any faster, either.

“There’s probably something wrong with the flashing outside around that window,” Larry said.

I looked at the little river of water running down the side of the window. I took a couple of deep breaths, but they did nothing for the anger simmering in my stomach.

“Looks like I need to track down Will,” I said to Larry, rubbing my wet hands together.

“Good luck with that,” he said with a wry smile.

I went back to my office and called Will’s cell phone. No surprise; all I got was voice mail. I left a tense, brief message.

Then I hung up and called Lita at Everett’s office. I explained about the leak, and after a moment’s hesitation gave her the highlights of what it had been like working with Will, especially lately.

“You have more patience than I do, Kathleen,” Lita said. “Everett’s out of the office right now, but I’ll have him call you when he gets back.”

I thanked her and hung up. I went back out to the desk to see if Mary had any idea where Eddie and the other worker had gone. “They might be in the parking lot,” she said. “Will’s here.”

“He is?” I said. “Where?”

Mary gestured at the staging. “He was checking that when I was on the phone.”

The staging filled all the free space inside the front doors. Neither Will nor his crew was in evidence anymore. How could they have gone off and left it like that?

I threaded my way between the wall and the metal framework. The floor was damp in spots. I hoped it was because the sections of staging had been outside in the rain, not because there was another leak.

I tipped my head back to check the ceiling overhead. My foot skidded on the wet tiles and my shoulder banged into the metal frame.

“Kathleen, look out!” Mary called.

Startled, I put a hand against the wall just as a large roll of plastic fell from the top of the staging above my head.