Final Catcall

4

The next week passed in a blur of preparations for the festival. Andrew built not one but two portable stages for Abigail, and helped Oren with a new ramp at the Stratton. He was ingratiating himself all over town, dispensing charm and that killer grin. His self-deprecating story of how he’d ruined things with me by getting drunk and marrying a waitress from a fifties diner somehow had the effect of making people like him even more. More than once I found myself remembering how much fun we used to have together.

Only Owen and Hercules seemed to be immune to that charm. It wasn’t as though they didn’t like Andrew. They just ignored him completely. The two times he’d been at the house, both cats acted as though he weren’t even in the room.

On Friday morning I decided to walk down to Eric’s Place for a breakfast sandwich and coffee. Maggie and I had spent the previous evening after tai chi class painting the stages Andrew had built. Hannah had brought us hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls, which made the work go a little faster, but I was still tired when I woke up. And by the time I gave Hercules and Owen their breakfast I didn’t feel like making my own.

Marcus was waiting at the counter. I walked over and touched his arm. He turned, smiling when he saw it was me. That smile made my chest tighten for a moment.

“Hi,” I said. “Are you here getting breakfast, too?”

He nodded. “I have a pile of paperwork on my desk and I thought it might go a little better with one of Eric’s breakfast sandwiches and a decent cup of coffee.”

“Everything goes better with a decent cup of coffee,” I said. A lock of his dark hair had fallen onto his forehead and I had to put my hands in my pockets to stop myself from reaching up and brushing it back.

“Yeah, I seem to remember that,” he said.

More than once I’d taken coffee to Marcus when he was working on a case. At least once I’d had to resist an urge to pour it on his shoes.

He gestured to my left arm. “How’s your shoulder?”

“It’s better,” I said. I could see the skepticism in his gaze. Marcus knew how much I disliked hospitals and doctors. “I swear.” I held out both hands. “The sling came off yesterday and I’ve been checked by Roma and my own doctor.’

“Good to know,” he said.

Claire came from the kitchen then with a brown paper take-out bag. She handed it to Marcus and then took my order. After she’d relayed it to Eric, she got me my own cup of coffee. I took a big sip and sighed with pleasure.

“How late were you and Maggie painting?” Marcus asked.

“Too late,” I said. I looked at him over the rim of the cup. “How did you know?”

“I picked Hannah up after her rehearsal. She’s staying with me.” He set the take-out bag on the counter and pulled out his wallet. “I should get to the station,” he said. “It was good to see you, Kathleen.”

“You too, Marcus,” I said.

He turned toward the cash register.

“Thank you for the hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls last night,” I said.

He stopped and turned halfway around, his face reddening. “You knew?”

I set my briefcase down on one of the stools at the counter. “I didn’t until just now when you said you picked Hannah up. She brought them in to us and I thought she’d just made a lucky guess.”

“It was Hannah’s idea to get you something,” he said. “I just stopped at Eric’s. I remembered how much you like his cinnamon rolls and I didn’t think you’d want coffee so late.”

“Well . . . thank you.”

His hand moved as though he was going to touch my arm and then he jammed it in his pocket instead. “I’ll, uh, I’ll see you, Kathleen,” he said.

I nodded without speaking and watched him walk over to pay Claire for his food. A moment later Eric stuck his head around the swinging door. “Hey, Kathleen,” he said. “Thank you for recommending me to Ben Saroyan to cater the opening reception for the theater festival.”

“Does that mean you got the job?”

He grinned. “Yes, it does.”

I grinned back at him and took the paper sack he held out to me. “I’m so glad,” I said. “Remember, if you need to test any recipes, all of us at the library are willing to act as your tasters.”

Eric laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said and disappeared back into the kitchen.

I walked over to Claire at the cash register.

“Detective Gordon already paid for your order,” she said.

“Oh . . . um . . . oh,” I said stupidly. It was the second time Marcus had done that recently.

Claire gave me a look of sympathy. Everyone seemed to know that whatever had been going on between Marcus and me wasn’t going on any longer. I wished her a good day and headed for the library.

Ben called just before lunch. “Good morning, Kathleen.” His big voice boomed through the receiver. “Is your wi-fi working over there?”

“I think so,” I said. “Let me check.” I reached for my laptop. “It’s working,” I said after a moment.

He exhaled loudly. “I need a favor.”

“Of course. What is it?”

“I’m at the theater and our wi-fi keeps cutting out. They’re sending someone to check it, but Hugh needs a place to work for the rest of the afternoon. Any chance you could find some space for him over there?”

I thought for a moment. The library’s workroom could be available if I moved the boxes of programs that were being stored there into my office. The room had a big table and I could give him one of the chairs from the computer area. There’d be coffee in the staff room, too. “I think we can make it work,” I said.

“Thank you.” I could hear the smile in his voice.

“Send him over,” I said. “We’ll get things ready.”

He thanked me again and hung up. I went downstairs and got Susan to give me a hand. We shifted the boxes into my office, cleared the table and managed to carry a chair up from downstairs.

“This should be perfect,” I said to her, smiling with satisfaction over how quickly we’d gotten the space ready.

It wasn’t.

Hugh Davis stood in the doorway of the workroom and made a face. “This won’t work,” he said, shaking his head. “I need a desk.” He looked over at me. “Don’t you have an office?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, “but I need it.”

“Well,” he said. He didn’t finish the sentence but the disparaging tone in his voice told me he didn’t like my answer.

Susan touched my arm. “Kathleen, what about the antique library desk?” She spoke in a low voice, but her eyes darted in Hugh’s direction and I knew she’d intended for him to hear what she said.

The problem was I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. Heaven knew, that was the truth.

Hugh looked at us, his eyes narrowed in curiosity. “Excuse me—do you have a desk I could use or not?”

Susan made a face. “We do have a writing desk, but, well, it’s very old. I can’t even begin to tell you what it’s worth. This building is a hundred years old, so you can understand the desk isn’t something that gets used on a day-to-day basis.”

I still had no clue what desk she was referring to.

Susan let her gaze slide away from Hugh’s face as though she was uncertain about what she was going to say next. “You know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul?” she blurted.

Whatever she was up to was going too far. “Susan,” I said warningly.

She nudged her cat-eye glasses up her nose. “I’m sorry, Kathleen,” she said. “I know I’m not supposed to talk about that.”

“If you have a desk somewhere here in the building, then let me see it,” Hugh demanded.

Susan looked at me.

I nodded. “Show him.” I was curious to see this “antique writing desk” myself.

Susan led the way downstairs and through the building to the larger of our two meeting rooms. “Do you have your keys?” she said to me.

I pulled them out of my pocket and handed them to her. She unlocked the door and as she did I suddenly figured out what she was up to.

There was no way it was going to work. But there was no stopping Susan now. For the first time I had a sense of where her twins got their fearless spirit.

She walked across the room and opened the door to a large storage closet. Packed carefully beside a pile of boxes there was in fact a small desk, wrapped in padded mover’s blankets.

It could have been an antique, although I doubted it. Harry Taylor Junior’s brother, Larry, had found the desk in the back corner of the basement. Susan wasn’t lying when she said that she had no idea of its value. What I did know was that no one had been willing to pay five dollars for the thing when we’d had the library’s yard sale.

Susan carefully removed the coverings. The old desk had been varnished at one time but more than half the finish had worn off. It had intricate turned legs, a small writing surface and a back that went up about two and a half feet. There were two rows of tiny drawers on the back unit and two small doors in the center.

The desk was dinged and battered and it wobbled, but Susan unwrapped the thing like it was a treasure.

Hugh Davis laid a hand on the worn desktop. “F. Scott Fitzgerald?” he said.

“I can’t in all good conscience tell you that I have proof that he used this desk,” Susan said. She ran one finger along the side of the banged-up writing surface and smiled. “But . . .” She let the end of the sentence trail off.

Hugh turned to me. “This will work.” He gestured at the desk. “We should get this upstairs. I’ve already wasted too much time today.”

Hugh’s “we” actually meant Susan and me. The desk may have been banged up, but it was likely made of black walnut, according to Larry Taylor, and it was heavy. Still, we managed to get it up the stairs and set it down in the center of the workroom.

Hugh pulled his chair over and sat down. He looked up at me. “My briefcase is in the hall.”

It took me a moment to realize he expected me to go out and get it.

His briefcase turned out to be a huge black leather pilot’s flight case. I set it beside his chair and realized that his chair was actually my office chair.

Hugh followed my gaze. “I had to switch chairs with you,” he said, with an offhand gesture. “The other one didn’t have the right support for my back.”

I took a deep breath, imagining my frustration filling a balloon coming out of the top of my head. It was a technique my mother used with her acting students.

Hugh leaned over to open his case. “I’m going to need that table in here,” he said without looking up. “I need to spread out my papers and I guess that’s going to have to do.”

I looked at Susan and inclined my head in the direction of the hallway. Once we were out there I flicked at the imaginary balloon with my finger and pictured it spiraling down the wide wooden steps to the main floor. The thought made me smile.

“What are you grinning at?” Susan asked, grabbing one end of the table. It was a lot lighter than the desk.

“Your ability to spin a line of you-know-what,” I said, taking hold of the other end of the table.

“I wasn’t spinning anything,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “Everything I said was the truth. The library is a hundred years old, F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, and we certainly have no idea what that old desk is worth. It could be a valuable antique.”

“And I could be a talking duck,” I countered, backing toward the door with my end of the table.

Susan wrinkled her nose at me. “I don’t think you’re a duck. Your feet aren’t big enough.”

We moved the folding table about an inch to the left and then forward and back until Hugh was happy with where it sat. Susan got him a cup of coffee—with cream and exactly half a packet of sweetener. I adjusted the blind at the window so there was no direct sunlight shining on his workspace. Then we left him alone.

Susan shook her head. “How do people work with him? He’s so picky.”

“He’s not that bad,” I said. “He’s just . . . creative.”

She slid her glasses down her nose with one finger, frowned at me over the top of them and then pushed them back up again. “Honestly, Kathleen, you’d try to find something nice to say about Attila the Hun.”

“All right, he might be a bit of a challenge.”

She gave a snort of derision and went back downstairs.

A group of kids from the after-school program came in around four to pick out some books and videos. By then I was so tired of being Hugh’s personal minion that I was entertaining the idea of taking my limited computer skills over to the Stratton and trying to fix the wi-fi myself.

He came down the stairs just as I was about to show the kids our newest DVDs. I sighed, a little louder than I’d intended to.

Susan smirked at me. “Remember, he’s creative.”

“What’s creative?” a little girl with brown pigtails and red-framed glasses asked me. She was probably about seven.

“‘Creative’ means you have a good imagination,” I said.

Hugh spotted us and walked over. The little girl looked at him, frowning. “Do you really have a good imagination?” She pointed at me. “She said you did.”

“Yes, I do,” he said, his expression serious.

She twisted her mouth to one side. “You’re kind of old.”

Hugh smiled then. “Old people can have good imaginations.”

The child shook her head. “You’re older than my dad, and my mom says he has no imagination.”

I struggled to keep a straight face. Hugh suddenly dropped down onto all fours, arched his back and stretched.

The little girl grinned with delight. “You’re a cat!” she said.

Hugh nodded. “Very good. I was using my imagination. Now you try it.”

She got down on her hands and knees and meowed at us. With some gentle nudges, Hugh soon had her stretching just the way Owen and Hercules did.

“Great,” Susan said against my ear. “Kind of makes it hard to dislike the guy when he’s good with kids.”

Hugh stood up and brushed bits of lint off his pants. The little girl—whose name was Ivy—went back to the rest of her group.

“You were great with her,” I said.

He ran a hand over his beard. “I like kids. They’re more enjoyable to spend time with than most adults.” He held up the sheaf of papers in his hands. “These need to be stapled.”

I smiled at him. “Mary has a stapler at the circulation desk.”

He nodded. “Good.” He handed me the papers and went back upstairs.

Susan smirked at me. “I was wrong,” she said, shaking her head so her topknot, secured with a red plastic pitchfork, bobbed at me. “It’s really not that hard to dislike him after all.”

Hugh left for an early supper about half an hour later. I made sure that he knew what time we closed and I crossed my fingers that the wi-fi would be working at the theater in the morning.

Andrew came in about six thirty, just as I was going to warm up some chicken soup in the staff room. There was a day’s worth of stubble on his face, but he was one of those men who look good with a bit of scruff. “Hey, Kathleen,” he said, “you think I could borrow your truck for half an hour? I have to move a piece of staging. Oren’s gone somewhere with his truck and I have no idea where Abigail is. She’s not answering her cell.”

“Sure,” I said. “Where are you taking it?”

“The marina.” He looked around. “It’s that way, right?” he asked, pointing upriver.

“No. That way,” I said, indicating a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction.

He sighed loudly. “Explain to me the difference between Main Street and Old Main Street. I can’t keep the two of them straight. I take it Old Main Street is the original street and Main Street is some kind of extension.”

I shook my head. “Nope. Main Street is the original.”

He frowned. “That makes no sense.”

“It does when you know the history of the names. Old Main Street used to be Olde Street, with an E at the end. It was the main route from the lumber camps to where the marina is now. Over time it turned into Old Main Street.”

“Okay, so how do I get there?”

“Just turn left and go straight until you see the sign for the marina.” I pulled my keys out of my pocket. “No, wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t do that. There was a water main break right in front of the hotel. The street’s dug up. You’ll have to go around.”

He groaned. “Kathleen, please don’t make me drive around town in circles.”

I held up a hand. “Hang on. Let me see if Mary can stay a little longer and I’ll just come with you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I can’t believe how easy it is to get turned around in such a small place.”

Mary was happy to stay later. I grabbed my sweater and purse and Andrew and I went out to the truck.

“I’ll drive,” he said, holding out his hand for the keys. “You can direct me.”

“Or, since I know where we’re going, I can just drive.” I made a shooing motion and reached around him to unlock the driver’s-side door.

We drove back to the Stratton and I helped Andrew get the extra section of staging into the back of the truck. Luckily it wasn’t that heavy. We drove across town to the marina, managing to avoid most of the detoured traffic.

“Where are you putting this thing?” I asked as I turned into the marina driveway.

“Right down there at the far end of the parking lot.” Andrew pointed to a grassy space just beyond the pavement. “Just by those stairs. You can’t see them, but the other pieces are already there.”

I backed the truck up to the edge of the grass so we didn’t have far to carry the load. The view over the river was beautiful as the sun sank in the evening sky. Three sailboats bobbed in the water, their masts bathed in amber light.

I knew that Burtis Chapman and two of his sons would be at the marina the next morning with the crane to lift the boats out of the water. Abigail had persuaded Burtis to do the job a week early so it wouldn’t interfere with any of the festival performances.

Andrew came to stand beside me. “It is a pretty spot. I’ll give you that,” he said.

“What? No speech about the sunsets over Boston Harbor?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nope. But they are pretty spectacular.”

I poked him in the ribs with my elbow, but he just laughed.

“Where do they go?” he asked, pointing at the stairs.

“They’ll take you up to the first lookout.”

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s climb up and watch the sunset.”

I shook my head. “I have to get back to the library.”

“Don’t be a stick in the mud, Kathleen,” he said. “Come with me. Watch the sunset. See the pretty colors.” He reached for my hand. “Please?”

He was extremely annoying, but I knew the sunset would be gorgeous from the lookout and there really was no big hurry to get back to the library. Friday was almost always our quietest night.

“Fine,” I said.

Andrew gave me a self-satisfied smile and pulled me toward the steps. It felt odd, holding his hand again, and I let go of it to grab the railing.

“You getting soft?” he teased. “Do you need to hold on to pull yourself up?”

I stopped a step below him. “Who are you calling soft?” I challenged. Andrew had always brought out my competitive side. “Seems to me I heard a lot of heavy breathing while we were unloading that piece of staging.”

He leaned forward, raising one eyebrow in a leer. “That heavy breathing was just because I was so close to you.”

I rolled my eyes. “What a load of . . . lumber,” I said. Then before he knew what was happening, I faked left, darted around him on the right and tore up the steps.

“Hey!” he yelled.

I took the stairs two at a time, glad that I had long legs because I could hear him gaining on me, his feet pounding on the weathered wooden treads.

I lunged for the top step, sticking my arm out to the right so he couldn’t dart past me the way I’d done with him. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was maybe a couple of steps behind me, laughing and breathing hard. I reached blindly for the top of the railing that ran along the edge of the lookout and stumbled over something I couldn’t see clearly in the waning light. Instead of landing on wood, weathered smooth by rain and snow, my hand landed on something soft.

Hair. Skin.

I jerked away and Andrew banged into my back, grabbing my shoulders to steady himself.

“Whoa! You okay?” he said.

I nodded, and took a second to catch my breath.

Then Andrew saw what I’d fallen over. “Is that . . . ?” He didn’t finish the sentence.

I nodded. “Yes.”

It was Hugh Davis.

It was pretty clear that he was dead.