Paws Аnd Effect

9

Marcus called at five to seven the next morning. I was standing at the counter waiting for the coffeemaker. “Are you up?” he said.

“Yes,” I teased. “I had to get up. The phone was ringing.”

“Did I wake you?” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I laughed. “I’m kidding. I was up. I’m just waiting for the coffee. Owen decided we should all be up at six thirty.”

The cat lifted his head when he heard his name, flicked his tail in my direction and then went back to his food.

“Since you made coffee, how about I come and make us breakfast?”

“I’d like that,” I said, smiling into the phone even though he couldn’t see me.

“See you shortly,” he said.

I was wearing an old T-shirt and leggings and my hair was half up, half falling out of a messy bun. I had time to change before Marcus arrived.

Then I heard a knock on the back door. “If that’s Elliot, you can deal with him,” I told Owen, who murped what sounded like agreement and kept on eating.

It wasn’t Elliot, though; it was Marcus. He pulled me into a one-armed hug.

“How did you get here so fast?” I said.

He grinned. “I was already in the driveway.”

I tugged at my T-shirt. “I was going to put on something a little less covered in cat hair,” I said, brushing a clump of Owen’s fur from my knee.

“I like covered in cat hair,” Marcus said, pulling me in for a kiss.

A meow came from the kitchen. Marcus laughed. “Hey, Owen,” he called.

There was another meow in answer.

Marcus followed me inside.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked, pointing to the canvas grocery bag he was carrying. He shot a quick look over in the cats’ direction.

“B. A. C. O. N.”

Hercules glanced in his brother’s direction, stretched and then ambled over to sit in front of Marcus.

“Don’t tell me he can spell,” Marcus said.

“Apparently he can,” I said. “He hasn’t mastered subtlety, just five-letter words that pertain to food. And keep in mind that Owen has a nose like a wolf.”

Right on cue the little tabby lifted his head. His nose twitched and he turned and made a beeline for Marcus, pawing the tote he’d just set on the floor.

“Hey!” I said sharply. “Don’t do that.”

Owen ignored me completely. He raised a paw and tried to reach into the top of the bag.

“Don’t do that, either,” I snapped. I picked the bag up and set it on the counter.

“Later,” Marcus whispered to them. He looked at me. “Got any tomatoes?”

“There’s a couple in the fridge.”

“How about a breakfast sandwich?”

“Sounds good,” I said. After a moment there were two agreeing murps from the floor.

“Sit,” he told me, making a shooing motion with one hand. Both cats immediately sat on the kitchen floor and then glared at me as if I was somehow ruining it for everyone by not sitting down right away too.

“I’m just going to get myself a cup of coffee,” I said.

Marcus gestured at the chairs. “Sit,” he repeated. “I’ll get it.”

So I sat, watching him get a cup of coffee for me and one for himself. The cats watched the bag with the bacon. “I have to tell you something,” I said. “I talked to you father last night.”

“Did he plead his case for why he thought he should be my lawyer and not Brady?”

He thought I meant at the restaurant.

“Here,” I said.

Marcus was holding an egg and the shell smashed in his fingers. He dropped it in the sink and ran water over his hand. “You let him in?”

I nodded.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to talk to him. I think he can help.”

I watched Marcus take one deep breath and then another before he spoke. “I don’t want his help.”

I suddenly didn’t know what to do with my hands. I pushed at my messy bun with one hand and it went sideways. I pulled out the bobby pins and elastic and shook my hair loose. It gave me time to get my feelings under control a little more.

“I know you don’t want his help. And I wouldn’t ask you to take it. But I do want it.”

“Kathleen, you don’t know what he’s like,” Marcus said, frown lines carving deeper into his face.

“He’s charming, manipulative, and has no scruples about saying what he thinks you want to hear just so he can do what he was planning on doing all along. And he always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room, which he may very well be some of the time, but not all of the time.”

Marcus shook his head. “Okay, so you do know my father. What did he want?”

I leaned my elbow on the table and propped my head on my hand. “He wants to help you.”

“On his terms.” Marcus turned back to the counter and reached for another egg.

I nodded. “Yes, on his terms. Doesn’t mean I agreed to that.”

He glanced at the cookie tin/first-aid kit that I hadn’t put back in the cupboard and then looked at me. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“Merow!” Owen said.

I sighed. “Your father tried to pet Owen. I told him not to.”

“He doesn’t listen well. Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “It was just the back of his hand. I cleaned it up and put on a small bandage.”

Marcus cracked an egg into my red mixing bowl. “Thank you,” he said. “But I meant Owen.”

At the sound of his name Owen meowed loudly again just in case we were, say, deciding who was getting bacon and who wasn’t.

I smiled and shook my head. “No, you don’t,” I said.

Marcus grabbed a fork and began beating the eggs. “No, I don’t,” he repeated. “But it’s just typical of the things he does.”

“He loves you.” I shifted in the chair, pulling up both legs so I could lean my chin on my knees.

“I do know that,” he said. “And I love him. I just don’t always like him.”

“So I’ll be careful. I’ll try not to be charmed or conned by your dad. Can you live with that?”

He sighed and then nodded. “I can live with that.”

I smiled. “So maybe you can stop beating the heck out of those eggs.”

Marcus finished our breakfast sandwiches—scrambled eggs, cheese, bacon and fried tomatoes. I was glad I hadn’t changed after all when a bit of egg fell out of my sandwich, bounced off my T-shirt and landed on the floor.

Hercules immediately put his paw on top—not that Owen was going to go after a bit of egg when he could be eating the extra bit of bacon Marcus had slipped him and I’d pretended I hadn’t seen. I had warned Elliot not to try to pet the cat, but that didn’t mean I thought it was okay that Owen had gone all Wolverine on the man.

Herc looked up at me with a slightly pained expression on his furry face. The egg had been sandwiched next to the fried tomatoes, which meant he now had tomato on the bottom of his foot.

I lifted my napkin off my lap. “Hold up your foot,” I said to him, gesturing with my free hand. He dutifully held up his paw, but not the one that was still firmly on top of that bit of egg, because who knew what one’s brother might do if it was uncovered.

“The other foot,” I said, nudging it with one finger.

“Merow,” he said and his green eyes darted in Owen’s direction.

“No, he won’t.” I leaned forward and put my left hand, on its edge, next to the bite of egg, which had to be pretty soggy by now. Hercules hesitated, then lifted the paw and I managed to wipe it with the napkin in my other hand. He turned it over, licked it a couple of times for good measure and then dropped his head to finally eat the scrap of scrambled egg.

I tried to sit up again but my center of gravity was off. I flailed one arm in the air and then I felt Marcus’s hands on my shoulders pulling me upright.

“Thank you,” I said, kissing his mouth and only getting about half of it because I was still slightly off balance.

“You’re welcome,” he said. He got up for the coffeepot.

“You haven’t said what happened last night,” I said, reaching for my sandwich.

Marcus shrugged. “It was just more of the same, the same questions I’ve answered three times now. What kind of a relationship did Dani and I have? Did we stay in touch? What did we talk about the day she died? What did we argue about?” He pulled his hand back through his hair. “I’ve done the same thing myself but only when I had a viable suspect—which I’m not in this case.”

“What did Brady say?”

“He thinks it was a fishing expedition. Right now all they have is what looks to be part of my key chain under her body and a so-called gap in my alibi.” He set down his fork. “There have to be thousands of those key chains out there.”

“Twenty-one thousand, five hundred,” I said around a mouthful of bacon, egg and tomato-soaked toast.

He laughed. “I should have known you’d know that.”

I reached for my coffee. “Would it bother you if I went to talk to Travis and John? They spent more time with Dani in the last few weeks than anyone else. They might know if she’d had any problems with anyone.”

His smile faded and his expression became more guarded. “I’m not sure either one of them will talk to you. Maybe John, but not Travis for sure.”

“But I thought things were better between you two.”

“They were for a while, but as far as Travis is concerned things were good until Dani and I reconnected. He said he knew I didn’t have anything to do with her death but he just couldn’t stand the sight of my face.”

I got up and put my arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry. He’s just saying those things because he’s hurt.” I kissed him and sat back down again. “I keep meaning to ask you: How long did your dad live here when he was a kid?”

“He was about twelve when his family moved here and they were still living here when he left for college at seventeen. I don’t think my grandparents moved until the year after that.”

I took another bite of my sandwich. I could feel two sets of kitty eyes watching my every move even though Marcus had already given both of them a tiny bit of bacon. “He never came back here to live after that?”

Reaching for his coffee, Marcus shook his head. “No. We came here in the summer for a lot of years when I was a kid. If you go past the marina and stay on Main Street there are half a dozen little houses near the water.”

“I know where you mean.”

“You could rent those in the summertime back then. That’s where we’d stay. Always in the very last one.” He smiled at the memory. “There were two little bedrooms under the eaves with a shared closet between them. Hannah and I would open our closet doors and we could lie in bed and talk to each other.”

He got up for more coffee, refilling my cup before he topped up his own. “We’d come for three weeks. My father would take the middle week off but at some point he’d have to go back to the office, maybe for the day, maybe for the rest of the week. It never changed.”

I ate the last bite of my sandwich and then pulled up both feet so I could rest my chin on my knees. “Did you ever actually consider going to law school?”

His mouth twisted to one side for a moment. “Yes,” he said.

“So what happened?”

“I told you that he wanted me to go to law school and go into practice with him and I didn’t want to.”

I nodded.

“I didn’t tell you why.”

I reached for my coffee. “So tell me now,” I said.

“I took Business Ethics and Leadership in my third year. The professor had started offering these workshops on financial literacy for student athletes—on his own time, for nothing; he wasn’t making a cent. I volunteered to help, and before you tell me what a great guy that makes me, I got extra credit for it.”

“Okay.”

Again Marcus smiled at something he’d remembered. “A prosecutor from the district attorney’s office came and talked about get-rich-quick investments that people who suddenly have a lot of money can get caught up in. After, we went out for a beer. I talked to the guy for two hours about what he did.”

I smiled across the table at him. “You were hooked.”

Marcus nodded. “I was twenty-one. Putting the bad guys behind bars seemed like a pretty great way to make a living.”

“You dad didn’t agree.”

“No, he didn’t.” He turned his mug in slow circles on the table. “He told me I could work in the prosecutor’s office for a year. I could make connections that would help when I joined him. I didn’t want to make connections. I wanted to make the world a better place and, yes, I know how idealistic that sounds.”

“Idealism isn’t bad,” I said.

Marcus gave me a wry smile. “Tell that to my father. I knew if I went into law I’d always be Elliot Gordon’s son—never my own man. So I decided to be a police officer. He took it as a personal slight. The Christmas after I graduated from the police academy he gave me a study kit for the LSATs. He said I was wasting my potential.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said softly.

“You know what’s funny?” He leaned down to give each cat a couple of fish-shaped treats that he must have palmed when he got up for more coffee.

“What?”

“In a way I owe my father. If he hadn’t reacted the way he did over me wanting to work in the DA’s office I probably never would have become a police officer, and I think I’m better at that than I would have been as a lawyer.”

I smiled. “I think you would have been a good lawyer. I think you would have been good at anything you set your mind to.”

“And you’re not biased,” he teased.

“I’m not,” I said with mock seriousness. “I’m just looking at the facts the way any good reference librarian would.”

Marcus laughed.

“You know what else is funny?” I asked. “The fact that you didn’t even try to hide what you were doing.” I tipped my head in the direction of the boys, who were both happily eating.

“A little treat isn’t going to hurt them.” Owen lifted his head, looked at me and gave a sharp meow as if to say, “What he said.”

“No, but Roma might if she finds out how often you give them a little treat. She swings a mean broom.”

Marcus shook his head at me. “I want a rematch. I still say Roma cheated.”

He was referring to a broom hockey match to benefit the animal shelter that both he and Roma had played in during last year’s Winterfest. Marcus had captained one team and Brady Chapman the other. Roma—who was on Brady’s team—had swept in the winning goal and managed to trip Marcus with the other end of her broom in the last seconds of the game.

“Roma did not cheat,” I said, getting up to take my dishes to the sink. “Your legs are too long for broom hockey.”

He reached out and snagged me with one arm, pulling me down onto his lap. “My legs are too long?” he said. “Really? And what else is wrong with me?”

I frowned and pretended to think about it. “Your shoulders are too broad,” I said, putting both hands on them. “Your hair is too thick.” I reached up with one hand and pulled my fingers through his dark waves. “And your lips are too kissy.”

He leaned in and kissed me. “Umm, I can see that you’re suffering,” he said.

A loud meow came from the floor at our feet. “You don’t need any more treats,” I said.

Owen—because it had been him voicing his opinion—meowed again. “Let me rephrase. You’re not getting any more treats.” I kissed Marcus one more time. “You neither. I need to get ready for work.” I stood up and set my dishes on the counter. “Are you going to help Eddie this morning?” I asked.

Marcus got to his feet as well. “I’m going to go see my father. Maybe I can convince him to go home.”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t think it was likely. “In his defense I think he really does want to help.”

Marcus pulled a hand back through his hair. “He can’t seem to understand that I don’t always want that help. It’s hard to get out of the man’s shadow, because he casts such a big one.”