The Cat, The Professor And The Poison

Ten

Syrah and Merlot gave up on their food when they saw me head for the hallway. They thought I was about to start working on quilt orders, since it was that time of the morning. But rather than enter the sewing room, I went to my office and booted up the computer. They sat next to my desk chair and looked up at me as if to say, “You’re in the wrong room, staff person.” Though the computer was fun because that meant I stayed in one place, the days I spent quilting were heaven for all of us. Yes, they loved fabric almost more than I did. Syrah had even been known to sit on a three-inch square of fabric if that’s all that was available.

But I wanted to learn about the professor, seeing as how I knew next to nothing, except that he liked to dress up like a cat burglar and steal cows. I remembered he’d been on the faculty of Denman College, and I brought up the school’s Web site first. Not much to learn, I soon discovered. They offered degrees in general studies, biomedical engineering, mathematics, nutrition and biology. Not big on the arts, but the school was small. No profile page for him when I clicked on the button for faculty.

Next, I Googled Professor VanKleet, and that yielded better results. I found a ten- year-old photo of him and his wife, Sarah, at a fund- raising event. No long hair, and he seemed genuinely happy, his arm around his wife’s waist. But her expression seemed tense, and her hands gripped a rhinestone bag so tightly that her knuckles were white. I printed out that picture and veered back onto the Internet highway. I learned that the professor had dual PhDs, one in animal nutrition and one in biology. At least he’d told the truth about teaching biology. There was a link to a profile page at Denman College, but all I discovered was a message saying that the page no longer existed. The few abstracts for academic papers I was able to locate indicated that he had researched commercial pet food. This was confirmation of what I’d thought yesterday, so no surprise there.

Science was never my strong point in college-my degree was in fiber art-thus, the few summaries I dug up on his papers made my eyes glaze over. Though I didn’t understand all the talk about amino acids and vitamin content, I at least felt more confident that the man might have been researching cat diets in that grubby farmhouse kitchen.

When I sat back in the chair, processing this information, Syrah jumped up on the desk. He stared intently at me.

“Do you like what I feed you, sweet boy?” I said.

He meowed in response to the distress he must have heard in my voice. If what I’d seen in the professor’s kitchen had anything to do with the breakfast I’d just fed my cats, well… I didn’t want to know that much about cat food.

I was set to resume my quest for more personal information on the professor-including wife Sarah-but I was interrupted by the doorbell.

I checked my watch and discovered it was already noon. That’s what the computer is-a giant time suck. Syrah and Merlot were joined by Chablis by the time we reached the foyer. All three sat several feet from the door as usual, not too close, but they of course wanted to see who might be calling this time.

My eyes widened in disbelief when I looked through the peephole. John’s daughter, Kara, stood on the front stoop. I hadn’t spoken to her in so long, I couldn’t imagine why she was visiting.

“Hey there,” I said, after opening the door. I saw right away that dark circles under her eyes marred her complexion. Her shiny brunette hair drooped over her right shoulder in a braid. Although Kara looked tired, she was still one of the most attractive young women I’d ever met. I opened my arms for a hug.

She embraced me briefly and then rolled her suitcase past me and into the foyer. “Hope you don’t mind, but I need a place to crash.” Her tone was brusque, and her brown eyes avoided mine.

“Um, no problem. Sure,” I said. “Been a long time.” I swallowed hard. Gosh, she looked like her father-that is, when John had been dog tired.

Kara dropped her shoulder bag, released her hold on her suitcase and glanced in the direction of the living room. She put her hands on her slim blue-jeaned hips. “So this is the house that Daddy built.”

The house your daddy and I built, I thought. But this was Kara. I’d so wanted her to warm to me, but that had never happened. She was here now, and no matter what, she was part of John and that made her special.

“Are you thirsty? Hungry?” I said.

“Nope. Why don’t you show me the house? I’ve been driving for hours and would rather walk off the stiffness.” She started down the hall that led to my office, the sewing room and the bedrooms.

I noticed that all three cats were gone. A cold wind will make a cat run for cover. Kara was out of sight now, and I rolled her suitcase behind me down the hallway toward my bedroom. When I caught up, I said, “Let’s drop this off, and then I’ll give you the tour.” We walked on to the last room on the right, and while I put her suitcase in the guest room closet, she stopped at the four-poster bed and rested a hand on the quilt. It was one of my favorites, a monkey-wrench pattern in pinks and browns.

“Nice,” Kara said.

I mumbled a thank-you. Did she realize I’d made the quilt? Surely she must. I pointed out the bathroom before we walked back down the hall. We stopped in my office, and her gaze settled on the bookshelves. I noticed her swallow and close her eyes briefly. She recognized many of those books. They’d belonged to her father.

She blinked several times and said, “What else is in this hall?”

I led her to my sewing room.

Though I went in, Kara stood in the entry. “This is where you run your little business, huh? How’s that going?”

She did remember what I do, and her tone hinted at interest rather than the indifference she’d shown in the past.

I said, “Better than I ever imagined. I can hardly keep up with the orders.”

“I suppose all that publicity after you became the hometown hero didn’t hurt,” she said.

“I wasn’t a hero,” I said quietly. “But I guess that means you read about what happened here.”

“Duh. I worked for a newspaper.”

She’d gone snarky on me, something I was familiar with since the day we’d first met. She’d been a freshman at the University of Texas. Her mother had died of cancer a decade before. At that first meeting, it seemed obvious to me that she still hadn’t gotten over her mother’s death. Sullen didn’t begin to describe her attitude back then. And nothing much changed over the ten years John and I were married.

I hadn’t missed her use of the past tense when she’d said worked. “Newspapers are going through tough times,” I said. “I don’t want to pry, but I do care, and-”

“Yes, I lost my job. And no, I don’t want to talk about it. Show me the rest of this place. Daddy talked so much about the plans, the lake, and… you. Since I have nothing but free time now, I thought I’d find out about his life before he died.”

I heard the catch in her voice, and it dawned on me that though my grief over losing John had begun to ease, hers might only now be kicking in.

She turned and pointed across the hall. “Is this your bedroom?”

“Yes,” I said.

In the master bedroom, all three cats lay on the king-size bed. This time, they didn’t run off.

Kara stopped a few steps into the room and whispered, “How Daddy loved those cats.” She approached them and held out her hand. Merlot stood and arched his back to stretch and then sniffed her fingers. He rubbed his head along the side of her hand. Cats know when a person needs comfort, and Merlot was great at offering affection whenever I was upset or troubled. He was doing the same for Kara now.

She petted him for a few seconds, but then the photograph on my bureau caught her eye-the last picture of John and me, taken on one wedding anniversary when we’d visited Ireland.

She walked around the bed and picked up the photo. Though her back was to me, I heard her say, “I don’t have this picture.”

She lowered her head, and her shoulders began to shake with sobs.

I went over and rested a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened and continued to hold the framed picture tightly. At least she didn’t step away from my touch.

My search for information concerning the professor was forgotten. For the first time since I’d married John, Kara and I talked about him-for two solid hours. But she was still as standoffish as she’d been during every holiday or vacation we’d shared together while she was in college and after. Plus I was stuck with my original assessment that she had only begun to grieve her enormous loss. She’d worshipped John and had trouble with my marrying him from the beginning. I tried over and over again to befriend her, made her gifts, called her, sent her cards, but I could never break through the wall she’d built between us. But that didn’t mean I stopped trying. Oops. Except for the last year and a half. Yes, I’d allowed my own grief to consume me, had cut myself off from the world.

During our conversation, I’d managed to get Kara to eat a tuna sandwich. I didn’t ask, just made us both one and put hers in front of her. When she would come home for college semester breaks, usually with two or three friends, I could put anything to eat in front of her and it would be gone in fifteen minutes.

Now, between bites, words poured out of her like a stream that had been dammed up since her father’s death. But she never made eye contact with me. That wall remained between us.

When she finally seemed to be finished talking, at least for the time being, I asked whether she’d like to visit my new foster children. One thing I was certain about Kara-she did love animals. She’d had a little mutt for a while but had to find him a home when she moved to a place where pets weren’t allowed.

Soon we were down in the basement sitting next to where Dame Wiggins and her brood lay on the quilt I’d brought down last night. And since I left the door open, Chablis joined us. Her wish to visit these strangers had finally come true.

I told Kara about the suspicious death and what had led up to it, but she was so taken with the kittens, I wasn’t sure she heard a word. And though I expected a hissing face-off between Wiggins and Chablis, it didn’t happen. Chablis took her time getting close, and just as I finished my story about the events of the last three days, my cat did something that totally amazed me. She curled up on a corner of the quilt near Wiggins’s tail and began to groom her new-found friend.

“This shouldn’t happen,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Kara stroked Wiggins’s head.

“Not so much as a hint of a catfight-but then Dame Wiggins is probably the most unusual cat I’ve encountered, and Chablis is as gentle as Mercy Lake at dawn. Dame Wiggins did lead me to her litter, while most cats would have done just the opposite. This pretty calico seems to have a keen sense of what’s safe and what’s not.”

“Dame Wiggins? What a funny name. She obviously understands that Chablis is no threat,” Kara said. “But I could have told her that right away. Chablis is a sweetheart.”

I smiled. “She is that.”

My cell phone rang for the second time today, and I saw Tom Stewart’s caller ID after I dug it out of my pocket. I answered with “Hey there. What’s up?”

“What’s up is that I’m at your front door, but no one’s home. I wanted to talk to you about last night, and I even brought coffee,” he said. “Where the heck are you?”

“I’m home, just didn’t hear the doorbell. I’ll be right there.” I closed the phone and looked at Kara. “A friend of mine is here. Do you mind if we visit?”

She never took her eyes off the cats. “No problem. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay here with the kittens.”

I smiled at Kara and went upstairs. A minute later, I let Tom in, and as he handed me a latte from Belle’s Beans, he said, “Whose car is that in your drive?”

“Kara Hart. John’s daughter,” I said.

“Oh. He had kids?” Tom said.

“Just Kara,” I answered. I didn’t talk about John with Tom, didn’t really talk about him or Kara with anyone.

Merlot and Syrah appeared, and they sauntered up to Tom and began sniffing his jeans for traces of Tom’s own cat, Dashiell.

He handed me his coffee and knelt to pet them. “Kara came loaded, that’s for sure.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Her car is packed to the roof with stuff,” he said.

“Really? Maybe Mercy is on the way to wherever she’s headed,” I said.

“Mercy isn’t on the way to anywhere, Jillian. It’s a destination.” He rose and took his coffee. “Let’s talk about last night. I want to hear all about this latest mess you’re involved in straight from the horse’s mouth.”

We went to the living room, but I was still processing that one little sentence.

It’s a destination.