Pouncing On Murder

Chapter 9

After a late lunch at the houseboat—peanut butter and jelly for me, cat food for Eddie—I drove to the boardinghouse to pick up a few things.

“You do this every year,” Aunt Frances said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, paperwork spread out around her.

“Four years in a row,” I answered cheerfully. “Moving with the seasons, out with the old winter, in with the new spring, opening myself up to new horizons and new adventures, opening my bedroom here for new boarders.”

“No, I mean every year you leave things behind.”

I looked at the cardboard box into which I’d been tossing items. A book, a magazine, a handful of hair bands, a comb, a bottle of liquid soap that had been a Christmas present from my sister-in-law, and a package of instant oatmeal. “Not a lot, percentage-wise.”

She laughed. “I’m just saying that maybe it’s psychological. That you leave things behind because you want to come back.”

“Well, of course I want to come back. You’re my favorite aunt in the entire world.”

“I’m your only aunt,” she said.

“True, but even if you weren’t you’d still be my favorite.”

“And you know this how?”

I grinned. “Going with the odds, that’s all. You’ve met my uncle, haven’t you?” My mom’s bachelor brother was a fine man, but there were common qualities in everyone born to the Rivard family, including my mother, and a keen sense of the absurd was not one of them.

Aunt Frances nodded, conceding my point. “Speaking of favorites, how’s Tucker doing?”

“Fine,” I said vaguely, repacking the box. Which didn’t need repacking, but with any luck she didn’t know that. My aunt, however, had the eyes of an eagle and suddenly didn’t seem very interested in her paperwork, so a fast distraction was needed.

“Ash Wolverson stopped by the marina the other day,” I said. I’d found out last fall that Aunt Frances was a friend of Ash’s mother.

“He’s a nice boy,” my aunt said.

“Boy” wasn’t a term I would have thought applied to the very masculine deputy, but whatever.

“Are you two becoming friends?” she asked.

I’d met Ash last year, during the bookmobile’s maiden voyage, but almost all of our interactions had been law-enforcement-based. “I doubt it,” I said. “He asked me out.”

“And you turned him down?” Aunt Frances frowned.

“Of course I did.” I frowned back. “I’m dating Tucker.”

“Exclusively?”

I looked at her. “Aunt Frances, what’s going on here? No, don’t deny it, I know from the way you’re pursing your lips that you’re holding back on me. What aren’t you telling me? Have you heard something about Tucker?”

She blinked at me. “Good heavens, no. How would I hear anything about him?”

“Because you have amazing powers that, thankfully, you use only for good. And you have a vast network of contacts. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d been getting reports from a former boarder all winter about Cade’s recovery.”

Smiling, she said, “You make me sound like a spymaster. A career choice I never considered. But to answer your question, what I’m holding back is about Ash. Though it’s an old story, and public knowledge, I still feel a little squirmy telling you.”

“Then don’t,” I said promptly. “I don’t want you to feel squirmy.”

And I certainly didn’t want to feel squirmy myself, the next time I ran into Ash. My face warmed a little as I pictured a physical running-into episode: Minnie, trundling head-on into the sturdiness of Ash, his hands gripping my shoulders to keep me from falling to the ground, my face turned up to his. A nice image, but I was seeing Tucker. Every once in a while.

Aunt Frances sighed. “No, I think you need to know.”

“Okay.” I pulled out a chair and sat. “Spill.”

She toyed with the corner of an envelope. “I met Lindsey, Ash’s mother, the first year I moved here. I know you don’t remember Everett very well, but he and Lindsey’s husband had grown up next door to each other and were good friends up until the day Ev died.”

“So you got to know Lindsay because Uncle Everett and Ash’s dad hung out together?”

Aunt Frances nodded. “Dinners, card games, cookouts. You know the kind of thing. Ash was the cutest little toddler imaginable.”

Oh, I could imagine all right.

“Anyway,” she said, “it wasn’t until Ash started to talk that anyone realized there was something wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“The poor boy stuttered.” She sighed. “It was awful. He couldn’t say two words in a row without one of them getting stuck inside his mouth. The other children were horrible to him.”

That, too, I could imagine. “There isn’t a trace of it in his speech now. How long did it take for him to get over it?”

She gave me a long look. “Almost eighteen years.”

I stared at her. “You mean, he stuttered all through elementary school?” I winced. “And middle school?”

“High school, too,” she said sadly. “Lindsey finally found a speech therapist who could help when he was a junior.”

I pictured a younger, shorter Ash. Tried to imagine that Ash being a natural target for bullying. No wonder he didn’t realize how good-looking he was. In high school, the popular girls would have turned up their noses at him. Then I realized a piece of the story was missing. “What happened to Ash’s dad?”

Aunt Frances pushed her papers together in a sloppy pile. “Not my story to tell,” she said briskly. “Do you have everything?” She nodded at my box.

I wanted to ask whose story it was to tell, but let it go. “Everything but an answer to one question. If you can ask me how things are going with Tucker, I get to ask you how things are going with Otto.”

The faintest blush of pink gave her cheeks a springlike look.

“Never mind,” I said, holding up my hand. “I think I figured it out.”

We made our good-byes and I hefted my box. I went out through the dining room and the living room, and it was then that I noticed an addition to the long-standing arrangement of framed photos on the narrow table behind the sofa. Uncle Everett. The same photo that had, until recently, been on her bedside nightstand.

I gave my aunt a silent cheer and headed home.

• • •

That evening, an unaccustomed fit of domesticity overcame me and I went all out in the dinner department, to the extent of stopping at the grocery store and buying specific ingredients.

“Mrr.”

“Lettuce is, too, an ingredient,” I said to my feline critic. “It’s listed right here.” I leaned down and held the cookbook in front of his face. “See? Right there under Caesar salad. And don’t get excited about the anchovies, because I didn’t buy any.”

Once upon a time, Kristen had made me try them, and they were okay, but I knew that if I bought them for this meal, I’d use half a dozen and then the rest would turn moldy in the refrigerator. Unless I shared them with Eddie.

“Sorry, pal. I didn’t think about that. Next time.”

He sniffed at the cookbook, then jumped up onto the back of the dining bench to criticize from a distance, but that must have turned boring because he started snoring five minutes later.

I stirred and whisked and cut and broiled and soon I was sitting at the table with a nice meal of salad, brown rice, and shish kebabs. “See?” I pointed at my full plate. “I can, too, cook. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

Eddie opened one eye, then shut it again.

“Yes, I can tell you’re confused.” My fork went into a marinated and broiled chunk of green pepper. “See, it’s not that I can’t cook; it’s that I don’t like to.”

Eddie’s head popped up. He stared at me with wide-open eyes.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve been scamming people for years with the Minnie-can’t-cook theory. But I didn’t start that story. Because I don’t cook, people assume I can’t. The story grew all by itself.”

“Mrr.”

I nodded. “Sure, early on I could have explained myself, but I didn’t, and now the fiction is being taken as fact.” I ate my salad and thought about the myth that I’d accidentally perpetuated. It had its benefits, but there was an element of hovering deceit that was starting to bother me.

“What do you think, Eddie?” I asked. “Should I make sure everyone knows that I’m perfectly capable of, well, maybe not baking, but of cooking as well as the average single person? Should I clear this up? Eddie?”

His snores grew louder. I rolled my eyes at him and reached for a book.

• • •

By the time I’d washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen—tasks that fulfilled nothing in me and were part of what drove me to cold cereal and takeout—a warm wind had blown up from the south. The temperature had skyrocketed, and there was no way I was going to stay inside on the first evening of the year that you could round up to sixty degrees without cheating too much.

I zipped my windbreaker and looked at Eddie, who was sitting on the dashboard, watching seagulls flap past. “Want to come with me?”

Eddie turned and almost, but not quite, looked in my direction.

“Come on, it’ll be fun. We don’t have to go far. A mile at most. I can put on your harness and your leash and—”

My cat hurled himself to the floor, raced across the kitchen, and bounded down the stairs in one leap. He pushed open the bifold closet door and the last I saw of him was the tip of his tail snicking into the closet.

“I take it that’s a no on the walk?” I tipped my head, listening for an answering “Mrr,” but there was nothing.

“Fine.” I took a marker and wrote where I was going on a small whiteboard, just as I promised my mother I’d always do as long as I lived alone, shoved my cell phone into my pocket, and headed out.

Two minutes later, it was clear that I wasn’t the only person in town who wanted to get out into the warm sun. Half of Chilson was out and about on the downtown streets and waterfront. Families with children in strollers, families on bikes. A few singles, like me. Couples walking hand in hand. Friends walking in loose groups. And absolutely everyone was smiling.

“Minnie, hello!” Aunt Frances and Otto—a hand-in-hand couple—strolled toward me.

“Long time no see,” I said. “What’s up with you two?”

Otto, the man I’d practically had to push into my aunt’s arms, smiled. “Why did no one tell me how sudden a northern Michigan spring could be?” He gestured toward the blooming forsythia bushes and the blossoming daffodils. “Didn’t it snow last week? This is glorious!”

I grinned, suspecting that his enthusiasm was due, in large part, to the growing relationship between him and Aunt Frances. “We don’t want everyone to know,” I said in a stage whisper. “Even more people would move up here.”

Otto laughed. “You’re a transplant yourself. Isn’t that a little hypocritical?”

“Didn’t you know?” I looked at him with mock impatience. “It’s okay if I’m hypocritical.” A couple sitting on a nearby bench waved hello in my direction. “Excuse me,” I said to my aunt and her paramour. “I need to go talk to these nice folks.”

“Hey, Minnie,” Irene Deering said. “Want to sit a minute?”

Adam slid over a few slow inches. “Have a seat,” he said. “We have an excellent spot for watching people launch their boats.” Their car was at the nearest curb behind the bench—Adam hadn’t walked far.

I sat. The friendly criticizing of boat launching was a popular pastime. “Anyone back into anything yet?” The previous year I’d watched a guy jackknife his pontoon boat into a piling. It had happened so fast that no one had had time to stop him, and the results hadn’t been pretty.

“Not so far,” Irene said. “But there was this huge cigarette boat that—”

“Shh!” Adam waved her to silence. “Would you look at that?” His voice was full of reverence. “Perfection. Pure perfection.”

It would have been an excellent time to call out for P words, but Irene was rolling her eyes. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He gets like that around wooden boats.”

“Well, he’s not the only one.” I was wide-eyed myself at the mint-condition Chris-Craft being backed down the boat ramp. Twenty-eight feet if it was an inch, in the classic runabout style. “That one’s a beauty.”

“One of these days I’m going to get my own,” Adam said.

I smiled. “You want a woodie?”

“With all his heart and all his soul,” Irene said. “He’s been talking about it for years. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the reasons we moved up North, so it would be easier for him to find the right fixer-upper.”

“Not sure I’ll have as much luck with that now.” Adam pulled in a short breath as the owner of the Chris-Craft climbed into the boat and started the engine. “Henry said he’d find me a boat.”

The backs of my hands tingled. “Oh?”

“Sure,” Adam said. “We used to drive around, looking. Henry was one of those guys who knew guys with boats sitting in their barns. You wouldn’t believe some of the wrecks we saw. But I’ve never restored a boat, so for my first one I need something a little easier.”

Irene elbowed me. “Did you hear that? ‘My first one,’ he says.”

“That implies there’s going to be at least two,” I said.

“Probably won’t even be one, without Henry.” Adam sighed. “I didn’t get the last names of half the guys we talked to, and Henry drove so many back roads I don’t know where most of them were.”

“But you remember the boats,” Irene said, rolling her eyes again.

“Well, sure. There was this Century that would have been great, but the engine was blown. I mean, I can do some mechanical, but a whole engine? Not my thing. I want to do the woodwork. Take this Hacker-Craft. If there’d been less hull rot, I would have picked it up in a minute.”

Irene nudged me. “He’ll go on like that for hours,” she whispered. “You’d better escape while you can.”

“I’m good,” I whispered back. And I was being completely truthful, because it was a fine night, and I couldn’t think of a better place to be than sitting there in the warm night with my friends, watching boats go in and the sun go down.

It was all very good indeed.

Except for that tapping sorrow for Henry.

And that nagging worry about Adam.

• • •

The next day was another day off for me, which made two in a row and would be the last time I had two days off in a row until after the book fair, so I wanted to make the most of it. I’d go for a long bike ride or maybe a long walk, wash the outsides of the houseboat’s windows, even eat outside if it was warm enough.

So when I woke to a steady drumming of rain on the roof, I heaved a huge sigh.

“Mrr,” Eddie said, sleep heavy in his voice.

“Yeah, I know.” I turned sideways, which made him slide off my collarbone and onto the bed. “Oh, stop whining. Maybe you didn’t want to move, but you don’t mind this.” I snuggled him close and kissed the top of his fuzzy head. “There. Any complaints now?”

He yawned and rolled over.

I gave him another kiss. “You’d complain if you were served your favorite stinky wet food every day for a week, saying you wanted more variety.” I slid my arm out from underneath him and got up. “If every day of the entire year was warm and sunny, you’d complain that it was too hot.” I padded to the shower, talking back over my shoulder. “If I stayed home every single day, you’d complain because I’d disturb your naps.”

At the door to the shower, I paused and looked back.

He’d already moved and was curled up onto a loose Eddie-shaped ball on my pillow.

Cats.

• • •

I ate a bowl of cereal and a piece of toast for breakfast, then spent a happy couple of hours reading. Some might call rereading Cynthia Voigt’s Jackaroo for the fifty-second time a guilty pleasure; I called it therapy.

At noon, I went all out and made a fried egg sandwich with a side of steamed broccoli for lunch.

“Don’t tell, okay?” I said to Eddie as I picked up the sandwich. “About the cooking thing, I mean.”

He was sitting on the bench seat across from me, and the bottom of his chin was level with the tabletop. I was pretty sure he was hoping to get his own plate at the table, but I was equally sure that was never going to happen.

After chewing and swallowing, because I always tried to maintain my table manners, even if my dining companion was a cat, I asked, “So, what should we do with the rest of the day?”

Eddie didn’t say anything, so I picked up my phone and sent Tucker a text.

Day off for me. Recommendations?

A couple of minutes later, my phone dinged. Assisting on a hip resurfacing, Tucker wrote. Come watch—we start in 30 min.

Which meant that the surgery would start three and a half hours before I arrived.

Maybe next time, I texted back. I started to type, Good luck, but stopped. Maybe surgeons were like actors and being wished good luck was bad luck. Of course, texting Break a leg didn’t seem appropriate, either, so I sent my standard Miss you! and set aside the phone.

“I still don’t have any plans for the day,” I told my cat, who looked at me intently.

“No,” I said, “I’m not going back to bed to nap away the afternoon. You can do that if you’d like, but I’m going to do something productive.”

A bright light flashed. Half a second later, thunder crashed overhead.

Eddie’s yellow eyes didn’t blink.

“Nice try,” I said. “But just because I’d be risking life and limb by going outside right now doesn’t mean my only alternative is to do what you want. And stop that. Your sighs don’t influence me at all.”

Which was a downright lie, but he didn’t need to know that.

Eddie jumped up onto the back of the bench and flopped down onto the lap blanket I’d had on my legs when I was reading. My brother and sister-in-law, Florida residents, had given the beach-themed cotton throw to me for Christmas, and Eddie seemed to particularly like lying on top of the palm trees.

I watched Eddie settle down at the base of his favorite tree and thought about snapping a cell phone photo and sending it to Matt, my brother. I could ask him if—

“Brothers,” I said out loud, and reached for my phone.

Half an hour and four phone calls later, I had the numbers for all of Henry’s sons. While living in a small town can limit some of your options, it can also make it relatively easy to get the information you need.

From oldest to youngest, their names were Mike, Dennis, and Kevin. Ages went from forty-three down to thirty-nine. Occupations were a firefighter, a computer programmer, and a piano tuner. Locations were upstate Maine, Denver, and Southern California.

Three sons, three different time zones. I pondered the wisdom of calling, then decided that thinking too much might stunt my growth, and dialed.

When Mike Gill answered, I introduced myself, saying that I’d been a friend of his father’s, was sorry for his loss, and that I was calling because I’d heard a developer was trying to convince the heirs to sell the property.

“Same old Chilson,” Mike said, chuckling. “Rumors run around up there faster than the speed of light.”

“Well, I don’t know how much people are really talking. I ran into Felix Stanton yesterday and he happened to mention it, that’s all.”

“If Felix told you, he’s probably telling everybody.”

Which sounded like a fair assessment of Mr. Stanton. “If you do sell, I hope you give someone a chance to buy your dad’s maple-sugar-making equipment. There’s a lot of history there, and I’m sure someone would love to have those things.”

“Not going to happen,” Mike said.

“Oh.” The light around me went flat. “I see.”

“No one’s going to get Dad’s things,” Mike said confidently, “because next year we’re all going to be up there.”

“You mean . . . you’re not going to sell?”

“I won’t lie to you—we thought about it. We got together via Skype the other day and hashed it out. With Mom and Dad both gone now, it’s on us to make it a point to get together. We’ve talked about it for years, especially now that we all have kids, but it never seems to happen.”

“Scheduling can be hard,” I murmured.

“Absolutely. But the three of us used to help Dad with the syrup every spring—it’s not rocket science, just a lot of wood and a lot of time—and we figured it’s time to start doing it with our own kids.”

He went on, describing the plans they were making to get a neighbor to collect the maple sap—“We’ll let him take at least half”—and how they were going to time their vacations, since syrup making was so completely weather dependent, and how they were already collecting canning jars.

I wished him and his brothers the best and hung up, hoping that Felix wouldn’t be able to convince them differently. Money was a smooth talker, and the lure of making maple syrup might not hold up against the lure of a lot of zeros on a check.

• • •

“What do you think, Eddie?”

My cat, who was still on top of the palm tree, opened his eyes a small fraction, then closed them again.

“So you’re saying you don’t want to go outside for a walk with me?”

As I spoke a gust of wind buffeted the window. Though I didn’t exactly see the glass flex under the wind’s pressure, it probably should have.

Eddie jumped to the floor and made a beeline for my closet. I followed him and found him wedged into the closet’s back corner, wrapped around my rain boots. “You are the weirdest cat ever,” I told him.

He burrowed his head deeper toward the bottom of the closet and didn’t say a thing.

“Have a good nap, my fuzzy friend.” I packed my backpack with cell phone, wallet, and a couple of books because you just never know, pulled on my raincoat, and headed out into the wild weather.

Outside, another buffet of wind almost made me change my mind, but I knew it would do me good to get out and do something, even if it was just driving around. And I could even do something marginally useful, such as check out possible bookmobile routes. I never took the bookmobile down a road without vetting it first with my car—what looked fine on a map had the potential of being problematic for a large, tall, thirty-one-foot-long vehicle with the turning radius of a semi-truck.

I pointed the front bumper of my car south and east of Chilson, and a dozen miles later, once I got around the east end of Janay Lake, I headed straight south to farm country. There were roads down here I’d never driven, and who knew what fun things I might see?

There were all sorts of possibilities, really. Barns with murals painted on their sides. Fences made from stacks of fieldstones. Garages made of hundreds of short pieces of wood stuck together with concrete. Wide vistas of hills and woods and lakes and sky. Deer. Turkeys. Grouse. Woodpeckers. Bald eagles. Black bears, even, and I’d heard rumors of mountain lions, which seemed unlikely but you never knew.

Though it was still windy, the rain had stopped. I pushed in a CD of a Canadian group, the Bare Naked Ladies, and was happily humming along about having a million dollars, enjoying the countryside that was starting to fuzz with green, when the rattletrap pickup that had been a couple of hundred yards ahead of me for the last few miles took a left turn.

“That’s Mitchell’s truck,” I said out loud. Mostly trucks all looked alike to me, but Mitchell’s had the unusual attribute of having one color for the bed, another for the body, another for the hood, and yet one more for the passenger’s door.

For no other reason than sheer curiosity, I decided to follow him. Maybe I’d figure out why he was acting so oddly. A weird Mitchell was acceptable and even desired, but Mitchell’s current weirdness was so out of the ordinary that it needed explanation.

At least that was what I told myself as I followed him onto a narrow gravel road. Far ahead, I watched the back end of his truck run over the ruts and potholes at a much faster speed than I dared push my little sedan. The only thing I knew about oil pans was that they lived on the bottom of vehicles and were a bad thing to thump upon.

My teeth chattered together as my car bounced down the road. Every so often I’d wince in preparation of a pothole too big to go around and sigh in relief when the hole didn’t suck me in forever.

It wasn’t long before I lost sight of Mitchell altogether. While the number of road crossings in the last bumpy mile were zero, there had been a number of long driveways that he could have turned down and been lost to my sight.

When I reached the top of a long hill and saw no car on the road, either in front of me or behind, I knew I’d lost him. “Rats,” I said, and came to a stop. I reached into my glove box for the Tonedagana County map and opened it up.

“Huh.” If I turned around, I’d drive the same two and a half miles of rotten roads before reaching asphalt. If I kept going, I’d drive two miles of gravel road before I reached asphalt. The odds of the gravel ahead being in better condition were minimal, but at least it would be different gravel, and half a mile less was half a mile less.

I folded the map and tucked it away. “Onward,” I said, and forged ahead.

The next mile and a half of road was, if anything, worse than the road behind. It was wetter, for one thing, and mud spray soon covered the hood and spattered the windows. “Stupid weather,” I muttered.

The weather up North was, I’d found, not what you’d call predictable. It could be raining buckets down at the marina, but not raining at all a mile away at the boardinghouse. On the east side of the county, snow could be coming down at a rate that would guarantee a school closing, and the west side would get a dusting. The temperature near Lake Michigan could be ten degrees different from what it was a quarter mile inland. It was odd, but also wonderful in a weird sort of way.

I bounced down into, and up out of, a hole that wanted to swallow me whole, and when my head stopped bobbing, I saw something that made me brake to a complete stop.

Not too far from the road, parked under a tree and covered with a tarp, was a wooden boat. Back farther in the trees was a farmhouse so dilapidated that I doubted it was still being occupied.

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. Had this been one of the boats Adam and Henry had come across? If Adam had already rejected this one as too much work, there wasn’t much point in me getting out into the mud to take a look, but if he hadn’t, maybe this could be the boat of his dreams.

“Buck up,” I muttered. “What’s a little mud?”

I pulled the car as far off the road as I could and got out, immediately stepping into a puddle. I sighed; I’d left my rain boots in the closet because I hadn’t wanted to disturb the sleeping Eddie, and was wearing old running shoes.

But it was just a little mud and would clean off—eventually—so I kept going.

Closer to the boat, I could read the label. Hacker-Craft. The company had been building boats in New York for more than a hundred years, and every one was a beauty. Expensive, too, so it was unusual to see one in a place like this. Adam had mentioned seeing a Hacker, hadn’t he? Was that the one with the hull rot? I crouched down.

“Hey! You!”

I looked up to see a thin, white-haired woman hobbling toward me. “Oh, hello. I was just looking at your boat. I have this friend who—”

“Get away!” She lifted her hands and I belatedly realized that she was holding a long-barreled gun. “You get away right now! You’re trespassing!”

Fear jumped into my throat and I backed away. “S-sorry,” I said, holding up my hands. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . .” My rear end thumped against my car and I fumbled for the door handle with one hand as I continued to hold up the other.

She pointed the gun at my feet. “Get away!” she shouted.

I fell into the car, started the engine, and got.