Pouncing On Murder

Chapter 20

“Eddie!” I tore around the houseboat, looking everywhere I’d already looked. “Eddie?” After all, maybe Duvall was just messing with me. Maybe he really hadn’t taken Eddie, maybe he was just trying to get me out to his cottage and—

The beep of my phone interrupted my anxious thoughts. Since the thing was still in my hand, it was a relatively loud beep and, reflexively, I glanced at the screen. There was an incoming text message and there was a photo attached. I opened the image and immediately sat down. Hard.

It was a picture of Eddie. An Eddie crouched in the far corner of a cardboard box, his mouth frozen open in what I could see was a loud “Mrr!”

“I am so sorry,” I whispered to his picture. Eddie hated being shut up in dark boxes. My early attempts at using a picnic basket for a cat carrier had not ended well. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of there.”

Only . . . how?

Ash had given me his cell number that morning, which seemed long ago and far away now, but when I called the number, I was instructed to leave a voice mail. I stumbled over what to say—was catnapping a crime?—and ended up just asking him to call me as soon as he could.

I started to call 911, then stopped as I imagined the conversation. “Yes, ma’am, let me get this straight. Your . . . cat has been . . . kidnapped?”

Duvall had given me an hour. No way would I be able to explain everything and get a police presence out to Duvall’s cottage in less than . . . well, I didn’t know how long it might take, but it was bound to be more than an hour. Maybe Duvall would make good on his time limit and maybe he wouldn’t. I wasn’t about to take any kind of a chance, not with Eddie.

A sob came up out of my throat. From where I was sitting, on the narrow stairs down to the bedroom, the noise sounded a lot like a whimper.

“Stop that,” I said out loud.

That made me feel a little better, so I stood and tried it again. “Stop that. You need to figure out what to do.”

But what?

I paced around the kitchen, trying to come up with a plan, but all I did was get dizzy. Time ticked away and I knew I had to get going if I was going to meet Duvall’s deadline. There was no choice about that—he had Eddie and I had to get Eddie back, no matter what the risk might be.

And, after all, maybe Duvall just wanted to talk. Maybe he’d only taken Eddie to make sure I’d take him seriously. There was no way Duvall could know that I suspected him of killing Henry and trying to kill Adam, so how could I be at risk? Well, okay, his wife could have told him what I’d said about knowing his whereabouts the first weekend of April, but when Larabeth stopped by the library, it hadn’t sounded as if she was about to have any long conversations with him. And though it was extremely unlikely, it was possible that he’d been following his wife and had overheard our conversation.

So actually, there were lots of ways I could be at risk. I pushed them all out of my head. What mattered was Eddie.

I slid my phone into my backpack, grabbed my car keys, scrawled a quick message on the kitchen whiteboard, and hurried to rescue my cat.

• • •

It was almost dark by the time I reached the road where Henry had lived. Halfway there, I had called 911, and though the conversation had started out much as I’d anticipated, once I’d explained the whole story, the dispatcher had assured me that deputies would arrive on the scene within half an hour. She’d told me sternly to stay away from the scene, saying that the officers would do everything they could to ensure my cat’s safety.

The dispatcher talked, and I listened; then I talked, and talked some more. Eventually I was transferred to someone else, but I kept glancing at the clock on my car’s dashboard, wondering whether I’d make it in time, wondering what Cole Duvall would do if I was two minutes late, hoping that the few moments I’d taken in the car to breathe deep, think ahead, and plan a little hadn’t jeopardized my . . . hadn’t made Duvall . . . wouldn’t end . . .

“Stop that,” I said.

“Excuse me?” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

My car’s headlights caught the reflective flash of the numbers on Duvall’s mailbox. I reached out and turned the headlights off. While I wasn’t sure sneaking up on him would help, knowing that I had the ability to control at least this little thing gave me half an ounce of confidence.

“Time for me to go,” I said, turning off the phone in the middle of an instruction to stay away from Mr. Duvall.

Coasting through the trees, I eased down the slope toward the cottage. Toward the water. Closer in, I could see that the only lights on at the house were exterior ones, small shin-high lights that would undoubtedly lead me around to the dock.

A hundred yards away, I did a three-point turn and parked off the side of the driveway and behind a cluster of shrubs, putting the car’s front bumper in the heading-out direction, just in case we needed to make a fast exit.

I slipped out of the car, shutting the door so quietly I barely heard it myself. Soundlessly I made my way to the front door and peeked inside through the tall, narrow side windows. Nothing in there but darkness and vague furniture shapes. I tried to open the door, but it was locked.

My faint hopes of finding Eddie alone inside a closet or a bathroom, grabbing him under my arm, and running off to freedom faded almost before they’d had a chance to grow.

Now what, smarty-pants?

I slid my cell phone out of my pocket and checked the time. Nine o’clock straight up. My hour was over. I couldn’t wait any longer.

Pulling in a deep breath for courage, I walked around the side of the house. The horizon on the west side of Rock Lake was still pale with the sunset’s afterglow, and I could see the silhouette of a man sitting on a bench at the end of a long dock.

Cole Duvall.

Still moving quietly, I walked down the stone steps, keeping an eye on Duvall. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see that he was sitting casually, one arm laid across the back of the bench, one ankle over the opposite knee. He was also lifting his other arm, every so often, in a motion that could only mean he was drinking something.

Around and about me, the spring flowers were blooming and the summer ones were starting to poke out of the ground, but it was still too early for the summer lawn games to be out and available. No sense in putting out a croquet set when there was still a chance of snow. I looked hard for a set of lawn darts, but since I’d never played that game as a kid, it was probably just as well that the Duvalls didn’t have any around. I’d be just as likely to stab myself in the leg as to do any real damage to my enemy.

Because Duvall was my enemy. I couldn’t let myself forget that. Getting Eddie back, safe and sound, was the priority of the night, but taking care of Duvall was a close second.

I made sure my cell phone was secure in my pocket and stepped onto the dock.

The moment my foot hit the wooden boards, Duvall turned. “You’re here,” he said. “Took you long enough.”

I told myself not to antagonize the man. What I wanted was my cat. That was what mattered right now. Sticking up for myself against a bully could wait another day. Not two, because that would grind in my stomach like bad beets, but I could stand twenty-four hours.

“Where’s Eddie?” I moved up the dock slowly. Duvall didn’t seem to have any weapons, but since he was more than a foot taller than I was, and, at a guess, more than a hundred pounds heavier, he didn’t really need anything more than his own bulk. The self-defense classes I’d taken last year had been useful, but they were designed to help me escape a man’s grip, not to walk right up into the mouth of the lion and demand things that would anger him.

“Right here.” Duvall’s foot bumped what I could now see was a cardboard box.

From inside I heard a “Mrr,” and that faint bleat pushed red into my thoughts and emotions and actions. I took one fast, hot step forward, then pulled back.

No. Rushing headlong into a physical confrontation with Duvall would not help anything. Keep calm, keep him talking, and keep thinking.

So instead of the classic “What do you want?” question that I so desperately wanted to ask, I said, “Nice spot you have here.”

Duvall stared at me. “What?”

I kept on with my slow walk toward the end of the dock and said, “How long have you had this place?”

“None of your business,” Duvall said.

So much for opening pleasantries. I tried to widen my focus to include the empty boat lift that was on my left and anything it might offer me. The bench where Duvall was sitting was on an assemblage of dock sections that made up an L-shaped area. I searched for a weapon—a boat hook, an anchor, a rope, anything—but the only things I saw were the bench, Duvall, and Eddie’s box.

“Mrr,” the box said, and scarlet rage fell down upon me like a net.

“What do you want?” I asked, my teeth tight together.

“I want you to undo what you did.” Duvall snorted an unattractive laugh.

An Undo button for life. Now, that would be useful. I stopped about fifteen feet away from Duvall, well out of his reach. “It would help if you told me what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” he snapped. “You know perfectly well.”

Well, no, I didn’t. Not for sure. But I could guess. “Larabeth came to her conclusions on her own,” I said. “All she wanted from me were confirmations.”

“And you did what, just handed them to her?”

He snorted again and I got the feeling that snorting was a habit of his. A few years of that and it would be no surprise that his wife wanted to divorce him. Though it wasn’t until I’d started poking around that Larabeth had started putting the pieces together, she was a smart woman and would have figured out on her own that Cole was cheating on her. Maybe I’d jump-started the process, but if it saved her from having to listen to that condescending snort even once, I couldn’t say I was sorry.

Of course, he still had my cat. And I still needed to know—desperately needed to know—if he’d killed Henry and tried to kill Adam.

Duvall turned on the bench and faced me full-on. “Make this go away,” he said, “and I’ll give you back your cat. Although why you’d want this thing is beyond me.” He gave the box a shove with his foot, pushing it a few inches closer to the edge of the dock and eliciting another “Mrr!” from inside. “All he does is whine, whine, whine.”

He’d taken on a tone close enough to Eddie’s voice that made me think that my cat had said more than usual on the trip out here. Which brought me to another question.

“How did you know that I had a cat?”

Duvall snorted. “Everybody knows about the bookmobile cat. You can’t talk about the bookmobile lady and not hear about her freaking cat. ‘Oh, he’s so cute,’” he said in a high-pitched voice that didn’t sound like any woman I’d ever heard in my life. “‘Eddie is just the nicest cat there is.’” He dropped the fake voice. “Even if there was such a thing as a nice cat, this one wouldn’t be it, not the way he complains about everything.”

No cat liked to be grabbed and stuck in a box, but if Duvall didn’t know that by now, there was no hope for him.

“How did you know where I lived?” I asked.

“Where do you think you live, Chicago? You live in Chilson, for crying out loud. All I had to do was walk downtown and ask about the bookmobile lady with the cat. Everybody I talked to was so happy to talk about you, about your houseboat and your aunt with the boardinghouse.” He snorted. “Only up here would there still be such a thing as a boardinghouse. Doesn’t she know they stopped existing fifty years ago?”

Again, I pushed away the anger threatening to take over my brain, pushing away worry about Aunt Frances, pushing away worry about Eddie and whatever might happen in the next few minutes.

“Why did you lie to me?” I asked. “Up by Henry’s sugar shack. You said Felix Stanton had tried to talk Henry into selling last fall.”

“Really?” Duvall asked, sarcasm oozing from every letter of the word. “You can’t even figure that out? It was obvious you were poking into things that were none of your business. It was dead easy to give you a shove in the wrong direction and get you off my back.”

It was obvious to me that his ploy hadn’t worked at all, but whatever. I put my hands in my pockets and felt the reassuring bulk of my cell phone. I’d set it to record, and hoped its recording qualities were good enough to work through my pants. Speaking of phones . . . “How did you get my cell number?”

Duvall laughed and took a long swig out of what I could now see was a beer bottle. “You should really tell your library staff to be more careful,” he said, swiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “People like me might be calling and saying they’re an uncle who happens to be in town but doesn’t have your phone number.”

He was probably right; I should tell them to be more careful. Then again, did I really want to take away their willingness to help? Where did you draw the line? Where did you decide to take a stand?

“I can’t make your problems go away,” I said calmly. “And anything you do to me or my cat will only make things worse.” Especially my cat. I balled my hands into hard fists, enduring the pain of my fingernails digging into my skin. “Talk to your wife. Apologize. Tell her you’ll never do it again. If you’re sincere, it should all work out.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said shortly. “She’ll never believe that I won’t have another affair. I promised after the last one to never do it again. She said she’d give me one last chance, and this was it.”

“Ah.” When I’d talked to Larabeth, that wasn’t the story she’d given me, but I could understand rearranging reality a little to save her pride.

Duvall upended the beer bottle into his mouth, emptying it of every last bit of alcohol. When he was done, he said, “Last night, after I drove all the way up here, she told me to pack my stuff and get out before she called someone else to do it for me. Then she took off.”

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“How would I know? That woman is too jealous for her own good. If she hadn’t been like this, I never would have cheated on her in the first place.”

I squinted at him, once again wondering how people could hold two opposing viewpoints in their heads at the same time and not blow up. I also wondered at a man who, after years of marriage, couldn’t make a guess as to where his wife had fled after an argument.

Then fear stabbed at me. What if he’d killed her?

Duvall flung the empty beer bottle into the water. Flagrant littering: another reason to put him in jail. “She called this morning,” he said. “I tried to talk with her, tried to reason with her, but she wasn’t having any of it, said that after she’d talked to you everything became clear.” He stared at me. “So now I want you to take it back. I want to stay married to Larabeth. She’s the best meal ticket I’ll ever get and she’s so busy running those stores that I hardly have to see her. All I have to do is get you to convince her I wasn’t up here that weekend with my friend.”

While I was relieved at Larabeth’s continued life, I was appalled at her husband. “You married her to get a free ride?”

He laughed. “Little Miss Naive, aren’t you? You’d think I’d marry a woman who looks like that for any other reason? I mean, honestly, look at me.”

I did look at him, and in the last vestiges of the day’s light, I didn’t see what he expected me to see, which was a handsome man in his mid-forties, a man full of confidence and appeal. What I saw was a grasping and desperate man who would stop at nothing to keep the life of luxury to which he’d grown accustomed.

“You killed Henry,” I said, in as strong a voice as I could, which wasn’t very, but still. “You were up there that weekend with your girlfriend, and Henry saw her with you. You knew Henry well enough to know he’d never lie for you, so you figured a way to make Henry’s death look like an accident.”

Though the sun had dropped behind the tree line, the rising half-moon was sending out enough light that I could see shapes, if not colors.

“What of it?” Duvall toed Eddie’s box, sending it another inch toward the edge of the dock.

“And you saw Adam try to get Henry out from under the tree, didn’t you?”

Duvall chuckled. “Yeah, figured that guy was toast, the way he fell to the ground, grabbing at his chest. Pissed me off something royal when I found out he was still alive, let me tell you.”

“How did you know that Adam had seen your girlfriend?”

“Didn’t.” Duvall shrugged. “But I couldn’t take that chance. I hoped that heart thing would kill him off, but no, he got better and came home to a wife that hovered over him like a nutcase.” He snorted. “Took me a while to figure out a way to get at him.” He glared at me. “And you had to go and mess that up, too.”

“He’s my friend,” I said quietly. “I help my friends.”

“That’s great for them,” Duvall said, his voice hardening. “But who helps you when you need it? What happens then? Do they come running, lending a hand when you need it?”

Actually they did. And had done so that very day. It would have been hard to count all the friends who had gathered around when I called that morning when I was panicked for the book fair.

Trock had been a trouper, the library staff had hardly blinked an eye, Rafe had come through like a champ, Kristen had handed out the emergency fliers Pam printed up until her restaurant opened, my downtown friends had willingly helped direct people to the school, and there was Ash and my aunt Frances and her friend Otto and the marina folks and—

“Yeah, I thought so,” Duvall said. “You can’t count on anyone these days.” He stood, towering over me, his bulk blotting out the moonlight. “Just like I won’t be able to count on you.”

Of course he couldn’t. Why on earth would he think he should be able to? I barely knew him and didn’t care for what I did know. In addition to making no sense, the man was a jerk of the first order, and I wondered how he’d managed to fool Larabeth long enough to convince her to marry him.

Duvall’s foot slid to the side and I suddenly realized what he was about to do.

“No!” I shouted, and lunged forward, flinging myself onto the cardboard box, the flimsy, wouldn’t-hold-water box, the box that held my furry friend, my confidant, my pal.

My hands snatched the box out of Duvall’s reach just before the rest of my body hit the dock. I oofed out a painful grunt and twisted my body away, rolling as far as I could as fast as I could, trying to escape his powerful kick.

Still rolling, I scrabbled to open the box. It was taped shut, but I yanked away the sticky stuff and pulled open the flaps.

As soon as I did, Eddie, howling and scratching and hissing, launched himself out of his small prison. His paws barely hit the dock as he bounded away from me and onto the Duvall’s empty boat lift. He galloped along the narrow metal beams, clawed his way up the vertical padded posts, and leaped up onto the metal of the canopy’s framework.

I held my breath, because that framework was made of metal tubes and wasn’t anything any normal cat would typically be happy perching upon, but Eddie was no normal cat and this was definitely not a normal situation.

“What’s with him?” Duvall asked.

“He’s scared,” I said, and so was I. Because it was now obvious to me that Duvall had given up on having me clear things up for him with Larabeth. He’d passed the moment when I might have convinced him to work on his marriage. He might have passed it before I even arrived. And the moment I thought about that, I knew it was true.

Duvall had never intended to let me go. Even if I’d sworn to keep quiet, he would never have allowed me to go home, free to call Larabeth and tell her what her husband had just done to me. He’d brought me here to kill me and I’d walked right into his manipulative trap. Too Stupid To Live, they called this. TSTL.

“Stupid,” I whispered to myself. Because now what was I going to do? Duvall was far too big for me to fight and I hadn’t heard the least hint of police sirens.

I could try to run, but unless I got a huge head start, he’d catch up to me before I got off the dock. I could scream, but it was too early in the year for anyone to be around, and the only weapon I had was . . . well, nothing.

I studied the boat lift, thinking to emulate my cat, but I didn’t see how I could climb what Eddie had climbed. Besides, Duvall could just step onto the horizontal bits, reach up, and yank me down. In the end, he might leave Eddie alone.

Then again, I didn’t want to leave Eddie an orphan. Aunt Frances would take him, but Otto already had a cat and the one time we’d tried to encourage their friendship had not gone well. Kristen’s apartment was above the restaurant and she wouldn’t want that much cat hair floating about. Holly had a young dog, and Josh wasn’t a cat guy. I toyed with the idea of Rafe and Eddie, but wasn’t sure Rafe would remember to feed and water him on a regular basis. During the school year, sure, but what about during the summer when Rafe went for three months without a haircut because his secretary wasn’t there to remind him? So Rafe was out, and I didn’t know Ash well enough to say, not yet anyway.

The dock creaked. Duvall was moving closer to me. I cleared my mind of the panic-induced cobweb of thoughts it had drifted into and inched backward.

“What are you doing?” I asked loudly.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not just yet anyway.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” Brave Minnie, facing down her foe with courage and a fierce determination to battle her way free. If only her voice hadn’t sounded so squeaky.

“I’m not going to do anything.”

His voice was calm and pleasant, and now that he was close to me—far too close—I could see that he was smiling. The smile creeped me out more than anything else had yet and I whirled away, starting to run, wanting to run, trying my hardest to run, but not being able to because a huge meaty hand had clamped onto my upper arm, the weight behind it keeping me from going anywhere.

“No,” he said, “I’m not going to do a thing. But you, you’re going to have an accident. It’s going to be very sad. All your little bookmobile and library friends will boo-hoo when they hear.”

I tried to yank free of his grip. “No one will believe it. I’m not accident-prone.”

He snorted. “So what? You’ll be dead. Besides, no one will be able to tell. You’re going to drown, that’s all. Happens every year. Someone falls in the water, doesn’t realize how fast hypothermia works, and blub-blub-blub, down they go.” He chuckled, and that was when I really started to hate him. Killing me was one thing, but he didn’t have to be so jolly about it.

“I can swim, you know.” I gave my arm a quick twist, hoping to break his grip. Though it didn’t work, I kept trying. I thought about trying to hit him, to scratch at him, to kick him, but was wary of the danger that his other hand—his other fist—presented. One good hit and I’d be down and incapacitated.

“Of course you can,” he said, dragging me toward the end of the dock. “You’d have to be an idiot to live on a houseboat and not be able to swim.” He stopped. “Hang on. You know how to swim, so you’re not an idiot, but you have to be pretty stupid, coming out here all on your own. Kind of makes you wonder what the difference is between stupidity and idiocy, doesn’t it?”

He made a huh sort of noise, and we started moving again, me dragging my feet, him with his hand so tight around my upper arm that I knew I’d be bruised up something horrible the next day, assuming there was a next day. Close to despair, I glanced at the lake’s shoreline, but there was no sign of life, no sign of anyone who might help me.

“Anyway,” he was saying, “this lake here? It’s deep and it’s cold. Did you know the last of the ice came off just two weeks ago? No, I didn’t think so. I checked the water temperature tonight and it’s only thirty-nine degrees. Brr!” He shivered. “That means you can be in the water about twenty minutes before you go unconscious. Now, twenty minutes may seem like plenty of time for you to find a way out of the water, but not if I give you a nice whack over the head before you go in.”

He pulled a rock from his pocket and held it high.

With sudden and absolute certainty, I knew that there was only one chance for me to get out of this, and that this was it.

I sagged down, forcing him to adjust his stance. He had to release me, at least a little, to rearrange his grip on my arm, and when he did, I took my chance.

With all my strength and all my weight and all my might, I shoved at him, pushing him toward the water. Though he grunted as he flailed his rock-laden arm, trying to keep his balance, he didn’t release me. But his grip did lessen.

I twisted hard and fast and, at the same time, stomped on his instep. I didn’t know if he let go or if I broke free and I didn’t care. His hand came off my arm and I did the only thing I could.

I dove off the end of the dock.

And the last thing I heard before the shockingly cold water closed over my head was “Mrr!”