The Fast Аnd Тhe Furriest

Elvis regarded breakfast with disdain. “Oh, c’mon,” I said, leaning my elbows on the countertop. “It’s not that bad.”

He narrowed his eyes at me and I think he would have raised a skeptical eyebrow if he’d had real eyebrows instead of just whiskers—which he didn’t, since he wasn’t the King of Rock and Roll or even a person. He was just a small black cat who thought he was a person and as such should be treated like royalty.

“We could make a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich,” I said. “That was the real Elvis’s favorite.”

The cat meowed sharply, his way of reminding me that as far as he was concerned he was the real Elvis and peanut butter and banana sandwiches were not his favorite breakfast food.

I looked at the food I’d pulled out of the cupboard: two dry ends of bread, a banana that was more brown than it was yellow and a container of peanut butter that I knew didn’t actually have so much as a spoonful left inside, because I’d eaten it all the previous evening, with a spoon, while watching Jeopardy! with the cat. It wasn’t my idea of a great breakfast, either, but there wasn’t anything else to eat in the house.

“I forgot to go to the store,” I said, feeling somewhat compelled to explain myself to the cat, who continued to stare unblinkingly at me from his perch on a stool at the counter.

Elvis knew that it wouldn’t have mattered if I had bought groceries. I couldn’t cook. My mother had tried to teach me. So had my brother and my grandmother. My grandmother’s friend Rose was the most recent person to take on the challenge of teaching me how to cook. We weren’t getting very far. Rose kept having to simplify things for me as she discovered I had very few basic skills.

“How did you pass the Family Living unit in school?” Charlotte, another of Gram’s friends, had asked after my last lesson in Rose’s small sunny kitchen. Charlotte had been a school principal, so she knew I’d had to take a basic cooking class in middle school. She’d been eyeing my attempt at meat loaf, which I’d just set on an oval stoneware platter and which I’d been pretty sure I’d be able to use as a paving stone out in the garden once the backyard dried up.

I’d wiped my hands on my apron and blown a stray piece of hair off my face. “The school decided to give me a pass, after the second fire.”

“Second fire?” Charlotte had said.

“It wasn’t my fault.” I couldn’t help the defensive edge to my voice. “Well, the sprinklers going off wasn’t my fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t, darling girl,” Rose had commented, her voice muffled because her head had been in the oven. She was cleaning remnants of exploded potatoes off the inside.

“They weren’t calibrated properly,” I told Charlotte, feeling the color rise in my cheeks.

“I’m sure they weren’t.” The corners of her mouth twitched and I could tell she was struggling not to smile.

Tired now of waiting for breakfast, Elvis jumped down from the stool, made his way purposefully across the kitchen and stopped in front of the cupboard where I kept his cat food. He put one paw on the door and turned and looked at me.

I pushed away from the counter and went over to him. I grabbed a can of Tasty Tenders from the cupboard. “Okay, you can have Tasty Tenders and I’ll have the peanut butter and banana sandwich.” I reached down to stroke the top of his head.

He licked his lips and pushed his head against my hand.

I got Elvis his breakfast and a dish of fresh water. He started eating and I eyed the two dry crusts and brown banana. The cat’s food looked better than mine.

I reached for the peanut butter jar, hoping that maybe there was somehow enough stuck to the bottom to at least spread on one of the ends of bread, and there was a knock on my door.

Elvis lifted his head and looked at me. “Mrrr,” he said.

“I heard,” I said, heading for the living room. It wasn’t seven o’clock, but I was pretty sure I knew who it was at the door.

And I was right. Rose was standing there, holding a plate with a bowl upside down like a cover. “Good morning, Sarah,” she said. She held out the plate. “I’m afraid my eyes were a little bit bigger than my stomach this morning. Would you be a dear and finish this for me? I hate to waste food.” She smiled at me, her gray eyes the picture of guilelessness.

I folded my arms over my chest. “You know, if you don’t tell the truth, your nose is going to grow.”

Rose lifted one hand and smoothed her index finger across the bridge of her nose. “I have my mother’s nose,” she said. “Not to sound vain, but it is perfectly proportioned.” She paused. “And petite.” She offered the plate again.

“You’re spoiling me,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” she retorted. “Spoiling implies that your character has been somehow weakened, and that’s not at all true.”

I shook my head and took the plate from her. It was still warm. I could smell cinnamon and maybe cheese?

There was no point in ever arguing with Rose. It was like arguing with an alligator. There was no way it was going to end well for you.

“Come in,” I said, heading back to the kitchen with my food. I set the plate on the counter and lifted the bowl. Underneath I found a mound of fluffy scrambled eggs, tomatoes that had been fried with onions and some herbs I couldn’t identify and a bran muffin studded with raisins. Rose was a big believer in a daily dose of fiber.

It all looked even better than it smelled, and it smelled wonderful.

Rose was leaning forward, talking to Elvis. She was small but mighty, barely five feet tall in her sensible shoes, with her white hair in an equally sensible short cut.

I bent down and kissed the top of her head as I moved around her to get a knife and fork. “I love you,” I said. “Thank you.”

“I love you, too, dear,” she said. “And thank you for helping me out.”

Okay, so we were going to continue with the fiction that Rose had cooked too much food for breakfast. “Could I get you a cup of . . .” I looked around the kitchen. I was out of coffee and tea. And milk. “Water?” I finished.

“No, thank you,” Rose said. “I already had my tea.”

I speared some egg and a little of the tomatoes and onions with my fork. “Ummm, that’s good,” I said, putting a hand to my mouth because I was talking around a mouthful of food. Elvis was at my feet looking expectantly up at me. I picked up a tiny bit of the scrambled egg with my fingers and offered it to him.

He took it from me, ate and then cocked his head at Rose and meowed softly.

“You’re very welcome, Elvis,” she said.

“Why don’t my eggs taste like this?” I asked, reaching for the muffin. Scrambled eggs were one of the few things I could make more or less successfully.

“I don’t know.” Rose looked around my kitchen. Aside from the two crusts of bread, the empty peanut butter jar and the mushy banana on the counter, it was clean and neat. Since I rarely cooked, it never got messy. “How do you cook your eggs?”

I shrugged and broke the muffin in half. “In a bowl in the microwave.”

She gave her head a dismissive shake. “You need a cast-iron skillet if you want to make decent eggs.” She smiled at me. “Alfred and I will take you shopping this weekend.”

I nodded, glad that my mouth was full so I didn’t have to commit to a shopping trip with Rose and her gentleman friend Alfred Peterson.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Mr. P. I did. When Rose had been evicted from Legacy Place, the seniors’ building she derisively referred to as Shady Pines, I let her move into the small apartment at the back of my old Victorian. Mr. P. had generously made a beautiful cat tower for Elvis as a thank-you to me. He was kind and smart and he adored Rose. I didn’t even mind—that much—that Alfred had the sort of computer-hacking skills that were usually seen in a George Clooney movie and he was usually using them over my Wi-Fi.

It was just that I knew if I went shopping with the two of them, I was apt to come home with one of every kitchen gadget that could be found in North Harbor, Maine. Rose had made it her mission in life to teach me to cook, no matter how impossible I was starting to think that was. And Mr. P. had already—gently, because he was unfailingly polite—expressed his dismay over the fact that I didn’t have a French press in my kitchen.

Rose smiled at me again. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she said. “I need to go clean up my kitchen.”

“Do you want to drive to the shop with me?” I asked. “Or Mac and I can come and get you when we’re ready to head out to Edison Hall’s place.”

Rose worked part-time for me at my shop, Second Chance. Second Chance was a repurpose shop. It was part antiques store and part thrift shop. We sold furniture, dishes, quilts—many things repurposed from their original use, like the teacups we’d turned into planters and the tub chair that in its previous life had actually been a bathtub.

Our stock came from a lot of different places: flea markets, yard sales, people looking to downsize. I bought fairly regularly from a couple of trash pickers. Several times in the past year that the store had been open, we’d been hired to go through and handle the sale of the contents of someone’s home—usually someone who was going from a house to an apartment. This time we were going to clean out the property of Edison Hall. He had died over the winter and clearing out the house had turned out to be too much for his son and his sister.

Calling the old man a pack rat was putting it nicely. Rose and Mac were going with me to get started on the house, along with Elvis, because I’d heard rustling in several of the rooms in the old place and I was certain it wasn’t the wind in the eaves.

“Why don’t I just come with you?” Rose said. “That will save you having to come back and get me.”

“All right,” I said, picking up a piece of the muffin and wishing I had coffee. “Does half an hour give you enough time?”

She smiled at me. “It does.”

I put down my fork to walk her to the door, but she waved one hand at me. “Eat,” she ordered, already heading for the living room. “I can see myself out.”

I stuffed the bite of muffin in my mouth and waved over my shoulder as the door closed behind her.

I finished my breakfast, sharing another bite of the scrambled eggs with Elvis. He followed me into the bathroom, washing his face while I brushed my teeth. When we came out of the apartment, Rose was just coming out of hers.

“Perfect timing,” she said, bustling over to us, as usual carrying one of her oversize tote bags.

Ever since I’d seen the movie Mary Poppins, I’d thought that Rose’s bags were like the magical nanny’s carpetbag. You just never knew what was going to be inside. This one looked as if it had been made from the same blue-striped canvas as a train engineer’s hat.

“I have coffee just in case we’re out,” Rose said, patting the side of the carryall with one hand.

“Just coffee?” I asked as I picked up the canvas tote at my own feet. Mine was filled with a stack of thrift store sweaters that I’d brought home and felted for my friend Jess.

“And some tea bags.” Rose held the door so Elvis could go out first.

I looked at her, raising one eyebrow.

“And a coffee cake.” She followed Elvis outside. “Don’t make that face, Sarah. We all work better after a cup of tea and a little taste of something.”

“If I keep on having a ‘little taste of something,’ I’m going to turn into a big something,” I said, pulling out my keys and pushing the button to unlock the SUV.

“Nonsense,” Rose said, making a dismissive gesture with one hand. “All that running you do, you’d be skin and bones if I didn’t feed you.” She set her bag on the floor of the passenger side of the vehicle and climbed inside. Elvis had already jumped in and settled himself in the middle of the backseat. I set my bag and my briefcase next to him.

“Are those more tablecloths?” Rose asked, half turning in her seat and pointing at the canvas tote.

I slammed the passenger door and slid in behind the wheel. “No. It’s a bunch of sweaters I felted for Jess.”

Rose’s gray eyes lit up. “Is she going to make more slippers?”

I nodded as I stuck the key in the ignition.

Jess was a master at recycling and upcycling clothes. Her latest project was making slippers out of felted wool sweaters. We were going to sell them at Second Chance. She’d made me a red pair of slipper “boots” that I’d worn at the shop most of the winter. So many customers had asked about them that Jess and I had scoured area thrift stores over the weekend looking for sweaters that would felt well. I had done the actual process in my washer and dryer, and Jess was coming by the store to pick up the soft, shrunken sweaters.

“Do you think she’d make a pair for me?” Rose asked. “And for Alfred? They’d be lovely to wear around the apartment.”

“I’m sure she would,” I said. I concentrated on backing out of the driveway and tried to push away the image of Alfred Peterson, who generally wore his pants up under his armpits, in a pair of bright felted boots halfway up his calves.

Second Chance was in a brick building from the late eighteen hundreds located on Mill Street, where it curved and began to climb uphill. We were about twenty minutes by foot from the downtown, and easily accessed from the highway—the best of both worlds for catching the tourists. We had a decent side parking lot and an old garage, which we were working on turning into work and storage space.

Tourists came to North Harbor during the spring and summer for the beautiful Maine seacoast. In the fall and winter it was the nearby hills with the autumn colors and skiing that drew them in.

I parked close to the back door because we’d need to load some empty boxes and garbage bags in the back of the SUV. I’d already arranged to have a Dumpster for the garbage and a bin for everything that could be recycled delivered to Edison Hall’s house.

It looked as though spring was going to be a busy time for us between the influx of tourists eager to get away from the city after a cold winter that had stretched all the way from the Atlantic Canadian provinces down to Virginia, and the work I was planning on the old garage. I wouldn’t have said yes to clearing out Edison Hall’s house if it hadn’t been for my grandmother. She’d known Edison’s sister, Stella, since they were, as she put it, captains of opposing Red Rover teams on the playground.

“Please, do this for me,” Gram had asked when she called from South Carolina. She and her new husband, John, were working their way back to Maine after almost nine months of an extended honeymoon traveling around the country and working on several housing projects for the charity Home for Good. “I know what I’m asking, believe me. I was in that house a couple of years ago and it could only have gotten worse.”

I’d pictured her shaking her head, lips pressed together.

“I’ll call Stella,” I’d told Gram. I couldn’t say no to her, which was why both Rose and Charlotte were working for me. And how bad could Edison Hall’s old house really be? I’d reasoned. Very bad, I’d discovered. The man was a pack rat.

I followed Rose and Elvis into the workroom at the back of the store. I could smell coffee. The morning was getting better and better. I set the bag of felted sweaters on the workbench that ran along one wall of the work space and headed into the shop. Mac had just come downstairs. He was carrying a heavy pottery mug and he held it out to me. His title, on paper at least, was store manager, but he was a lot more than that. He was my colleague, a second set of eyes and sometimes the voice of reason I needed to hear. And more and more he was the person I turned to when I needed someone to talk to. It had started the past winter when I was almost killed in my own house. It was Mac I’d called, Mac who I’d shared with how scared I’d really been. Our friendship had only deepened in the following months.

“You read my mind,” I said, dropping my briefcase at my feet and taking the cup from him. “Thank you.”

As good as Rose’s breakfast had been, this was one of those mornings when I needed a nudge of caffeine.

Mac smiled. “You’re welcome.”

This past winter the building where he had rented an apartment had been sold. So we’d renovated part of the second-floor space above the shop and now Mac had a small self-contained apartment up there and I worried a lot less about security for the store. Not to mention that most mornings the coffee was on when I arrived. It seemed to be working out well for both of us.

Rose and her furry sidekick, Elvis, were disappearing up the steps to the second-floor staff room. I knew she’d be back in a couple of minutes with a slice of coffee cake for both Mac and me.

Mac walked over to the cash desk where he’d set his own coffee mug. He was tall and lean and the long-sleeved gray T-shirt he wore showed off his muscles very nicely. He had light brown skin and kept his black hair cropped close to his scalp.

I took a sip of my coffee and pushed a stray piece of hair back off my face. Usually I wore my brown shoulder-length hair down, but I’d pulled it back into a ponytail, since we were going to be working for most of the day on the old house. “I saw the boxes you left by the back door,” I said. “Thank you.”

“There’s more under the stairs if you think we need them,” he said, walking back over to me. He studied my face. “Are you having second thoughts about taking the Hall estate on?”

I shook my head. “No. The numbers are good. We both checked them. We’ll make a nice little profit and I think the price is reasonable as far as what Stella Hall will have to pay. The house just makes me a little sad, piled full of . . . well, boxes of junk that no one else wants.” I ducked my head over my cup and gave him a sidelong glance. “If I tell you something, do you promise not to laugh?”

His brown eyes met mine. He put a hand over his heart. “I promise.”

“The first time we went out to look the place over—when we were trying to decide what to charge Stella—when I got home that night I cleaned out two closets.” Mac smiled. “Just between you and me, I came back here and put two boxes of old parts in the scrap-metal recycling bin.”

“And how much did you pick back out the next day?” I teased.

“No comment,” he said, taking another sip from his cup.

I laughed.

Mac could fix just about anything. About eighteen months ago he’d left his high-powered job as a financial planner to come to Maine and sail. I had no idea what had prompted him to make such a dramatic change in his life. I’d asked him once and he’d very skillfully evaded the question.

I hadn’t asked again.

During the sailing season he spent every spare minute crewing for pretty much anyone who needed an extra set of hands on deck. Wooden boats were Mac’s passion. There were generally eight windjammers tied up at the North Harbor dock during the season, along with plenty of other boats, so there were lots of opportunities to get out on the water.

I knew eventually Mac wanted to build his own boat. He worked for me because, he said, he liked the satisfaction of having something tangible to show for his efforts at the end of the day. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix, as far as I’d seen. Second Chance was successful as much from his efforts as from mine.

“It probably wouldn’t hurt to take a few extra boxes,” I said, walking over to the front window to straighten two quilts that were hanging on a wooden rack. “According to Gram, Edison was a collector of—well, a lot of things. Maybe some of his collections will turn out to be something we can sell here or in the online store.”

“We have some of those plastic bins out in the garage,” Mac said. “Do you want to take maybe half a dozen?”

I nodded. Rose came down the stairs then, still trailed by Elvis. She handed me a slice of coffee cake on a blue-flowered napkin.

I smiled. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.” She smiled back at me.

Elvis looked up at me and blinked his green eyes.

“No,” I said, breaking off a chunk of coffee cake. “Don’t think I don’t know Rose already fed you a piece.”

The cat made a huffy sound and headed for the workroom.

Rose handed a piece of coffee cake to Mac. “I left half of the cake for you upstairs in the blue tin,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I fixed your iron. It was just a loose connection. It’s on the workbench.”

Rose clapped her hands together. “Aren’t you wonderful?” she exclaimed.

Rose’s steam iron was probably as old as I was. It gave off copious amounts of steam, surrounding her in a cloud as if she were standing in a fogbank. And it was as heavy as an anvil. But she liked using it and when it had stopped blasting steam a few days ago, Mac offered to see what he could do. I wasn’t surprised he’d been able to fix it.

“I may as well go do those last two lace tablecloths,” Rose said. “I can probably get them done before Charlotte gets here.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think we’ll put the bigger one on that table.” I pointed to a long farmhouse kitchen table that sat about three feet from the back wall of the shop. Mac had sanded it for me and I’d whitewashed the top and painted the legs black. It had turned out even better than I’d hoped. With the lace tablecloth and several place settings of vintage china, I knew it would make customers think of happy meals shared with family and friends.

Charlotte arrived about five minutes to nine. Her cheeks were rosy and her white hair was a little mussed.

“Did you walk?” I asked. “I could have picked you up.”

“Yes, I did,” she said. “It was a lovely morning for a walk.” She pushed her glasses up her nose and looked down at me. Even in flats Charlotte was at least an inch taller than I was. She had perfect posture—it seemed she was incapable of slouching. And she still had the steely glare of the high school principal she’d been before she retired.

“I’ll just go put my things upstairs and you can head out to Edison’s.” She hesitated for a moment and then reached out and gave my arm a squeeze. “Thank you for taking this on, Sarah,” she said. “I’ve been in that house.” She shook her head. “I know Stella tried to get Edison to keep the place up, but he acted like running a vacuum cleaner around would kill him. The dust bunnies have probably taken over.”

“I have Mac and Rose and Elvis in case there’s anything with more than two legs,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

“Nicolas is using this against me, you know,” she said, pulling the soft cotton scarf from her neck and tucking it into the pocket of her jacket. “He says my garage is in danger of looking like Edison’s.”

Nicolas Elliot—Nick—was Charlotte’s son, a former EMT who now worked as an investigator for the medical examiner’s office.

“Did you suggest that maybe he should come and clean it out?” I asked. I’d known Nick since we were kids. In fact, when we were teenagers I’d had a huge crush on him. I’d seen him butt heads with his mother over the years. I’d never seen him win.

Charlotte shrugged. “No. Although I did point out that about ninety percent of the boxes in there belong to him.” A smile played at the corners of her mouth. “That was the last I heard about the garage.” The almost smile turned into a grin as she started for the stairs. “I’ll be right back,” she said over her shoulder.

By quarter after nine we were on the road, with Mac riding shotgun and Rose and Elvis in the backseat. I’d been serious when I told Charlotte that I was taking the cat along to deal with anything that had more than two feet. While I believed that all living creatures had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of the animal equivalent of happiness, I didn’t really want most of the four-legged ones sharing my space while they were doing it—Elvis excluded, of course.

Before I’d acquired Elvis, or maybe more accurately, before he’d acquired me, the cat had spent some time living on the streets around the harbor front. I wasn’t sure if that was where he’d honed his skill as a rodent wrangler, or if that particular ability came from his previous life, whatever that had been.

Edison Hall’s house was a small white bungalow on the outskirts of town. It was usually a short trip over to Beech Hill Road, but a water main had broken on the street a few days earlier. Now it was being repaved, down to one lane for traffic. When it was our turn to go, I tried not to wince as the tires threw bits of pavement up against the undercarriage of the SUV. Elvis sneezed at the sharp smell of tar and when I looked in the rearview mirror he was making a sour face, despite Rose stroking his black fur.

There was a single-car garage at the end of the short driveway at the Hall house. I was happy to see the Dumpster I’d ordered sitting on a patch of gravel to the left of the garage. As I backed in, I caught a glimpse of the smaller recycling bins against the long right wall of the garage, on the old stone patio by the path to the back door, exactly where I’d asked Aaron Ellison to put them.

“Do you want to leave everything here and take another look around, maybe make a plan of attack?” Mac asked as he undid his seat belt.

I nodded. “Remember all those wine bottles that were in the basement?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Apparently Ethan moved them up to the kitchen. Stella left me a message saying they were supposed to all be moved out yesterday, but I want to make sure.”

I had told Stella that we didn’t have the expertise to handle her brother’s wine collection. She’d said that Edison’s son, Ethan, was planning on hiring someone to put a dollar value on the bottles so they could be sold.

Rose had already picked up Elvis and was getting out of the SUV.

I pulled the keys Ethan had given me out of the pocket of my jeans and climbed out as well.

I noticed the smell the moment we stepped in the front door. Mac looked at me and frowned. “Rat?” he asked.

I made a face. “Maybe.” It wouldn’t be the first time we’d shown up at an empty house and found a dead animal. A couple of times it had been mice, once a raccoon and once a seagull that appeared to have fallen down the chimney.

Elvis squirmed in Rose’s arms. She looked at me and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“Let him go,” I said. “It’s the fastest way to find whatever it is that crawled in here and died.”

The cat was already making his way to the kitchen. There seemed to be a path more or less through the stacks of boxes. One thing I could say about Edison Hall: The house wasn’t dirty. Charlotte was right about there being dust bunnies everywhere, but there were no bags of garbage, no muddy footprints or bits of spilled food. The place was piled, but I had the same thought I’d had the first time I was in the house with Edison’s sister, Stella: The old man had had some kind of system for the boxes that were piled everywhere. The problem was, I had no idea what that system was.

Elvis meowed loudly. I couldn’t see him, but from the sound he was in the vicinity of the kitchen.

“I’ll go,” Mac said.

I shook my head and stuffed the keys back in my pocket. “It’s okay. I’ll go.”

The cat gave another insistent meow. “I’m coming,” I called. I made my way in the direction of the kitchen. There was a path through the boxes, although it was a bit like being in a tunnel made of cardboard.

“I’ll get the shovel and a couple of garbage bags,” Mac said.

The path widened at the kitchen doorway. Elvis had somehow climbed up onto a stack of cartons about shoulder height. He was looking down at the floor, but he turned his head and his focus to me as I reached the doorway.

“Mac, forget about the shovel,” I said, raising my voice so he’d be sure to hear me.

“What do you need?” he asked.

I hesitated and after a moment he appeared behind me.

“What do you need?” he asked again.

I moved sideways so he could see that the body lying on the kitchen floor didn’t belong to a mouse or a raccoon.

“I think we need nine-one-one,” I said.