The Whole Cat and Caboodle: Second Chance Cat Mystery

Chapter 2

The second thing I noticed when I stepped into the room we were using at Legacy Place was that nothing had been set up for the workshop. The first thing I noticed was Alfred Peterson. He was naked. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good look for him; he was somewhere between seventy-five and eighty. That’s not to say there aren’t people close to eighty who look good with their clothes off, but Alfred Peterson definitely wasn’t one of them.

I exhaled slowly, sent up a silent prayer—Please don’t let me see anything—and headed across the floor, keeping my gaze locked on the old man’s blue eyes.

“Good afternoon, Sarah,” he said with a slight dip of his head as I got close to the center of the room where he had . . . arranged himself. “What are you doing here?”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Peterson,” I said. “I’m doing a workshop. What, ah . . . are you doing?”

“I’m posing, my dear.”

I could see that. I was fairly certain he was trying to imitate the Farnese Atlas, a marble sculpture in which Atlas is partly down on one knee, holding the world on his shoulders, except Mr. Peterson was holding a red-and-white-striped beach ball with the logo of a beer company instead of the world, and he had two pillows under his bent knee. I was pretty sure he was sitting on a cardboard box, but I wasn’t going to look behind him to find out for sure.

I gave him what I hoped looked like a sincere smile. “But why exactly are you . . . here . . . like this?”

“Sammy called. There’s a busload of tourists down at the pub and they’re running behind schedule, so he’s not going to get here, and I thought, Why don’t I just take his place instead?” He frowned. “I though Sammy said Eric was teaching the class, though.”

Eric was one of Sam’s bandmates. The rest of the time he was an artist.

“Alfred Peterson, where on earth are your pants?” a voice said behind me. It was Charlotte coming from the small kitchen at the end of the main hallway, where she’d gone to put the kettle on for tea. The room rental came with access to the communal kitchen.

“In the gentleman’s lavatory,” Mr. P. said with a slight superior edge to his voice.

“Apparently you left your common sense in there, as well,” Charlotte retorted. She frowned at him, hands on her hips. Even in flats she was an inch taller than I was, and she had the posture and steely glare of a high school principal, which is what she’d been. “What on earth are you doing in the middle of Sarah’s class as naked as the day you were born?”

“This is Eric’s art class, ‘Sketching the Human Form.’” The old man held his head high, chin stuck out. “Sammy couldn’t make it so I’m the model. I may not be a spring chicken but I’ve still got it.”

Charlotte’s mouth twitched and I realized she was trying not to laugh. “Be that as it may,” she said. “There’s no reason to be putting it all on display for the rest of us. And didn’t Sam tell you? Eric’s class is in the small room next door today, and they’re drawing hands.”

“Hands?”

“Hands.”

“But the class is called ‘Sketching the Human Form,’” Mr. P. said stubbornly.

It seemed pretty clear to me that getting him back into his clothes wasn’t going to be easy.

“And hands are part of the human form.” Charlotte made a move-along gesture with hers. “So that’s all we need to see. Go put your pants on before the class gets here and the mystery’s gone.”

Mr. Peterson seemed deflated. He handed me the beach ball, while Charlotte headed back to the kitchen down the hall. “Hands? Really?” he asked me.

I had no idea but I nodded, anyway.

The old man slowly straightened up, and I realized that the washrooms were off the outside hallway, too. I thrust the beach ball back into his grasp. “Why don’t you take this with you?” I said. It at least made the front view G-rated as he headed for the door. I couldn’t exactly say the same for what was bringing up the rear.

Avery and her grandmother, Liz French, came in just as Mr. P. got to the door. He nodded as they passed. The two women crossed the floor to join me, Liz’s high heels echoing on the wooden floor. As usual Liz was elegantly dressed, in a lavender tunic over navy pants. Her soft blond hair curled around her face.

“Hello, Sarah,” she said. She handed me a cardboard box and leaned in to kiss my cheek. “I baked.”

That really meant she’d been to Lily’s Bakery.

Liz had a gleam in her blue eyes and I knew she’d have some comment about Mr. Peterson’s attire—or lack of. “Was Alfred naked, or did his suit just really need ironing?”

Beside her Avery made a face. “Geez, Nonna,” she said. “That joke’s older than I am.” She turned to me. “Why was Mr. P. . . .” She paused and gestured with one hand.

“Naked as a jaybird?” Liz interjected. “Hanging the moon?”

“Sam got held up with a busload of tourists at the pub,” I said. “Apparently he was supposed to be the model for an art class. Mr. Peterson decided he’d help out by taking Sam’s place. He just got the room and the dress code wrong.”

Avery rolled her eyes and folded her arms over her chest. “You guys do get that right now Mr. P. is walking all the way down the hall to the men’s bathroom, past that whole big wall of windows?” She paused, probably for effect. “You know, windows that overlook the parking lot?”

Liz gave me a sweet—and fake—smile. “Given all the cars in the lot, half the town’s probably seen Alfred’s as—”

“Assets,” I said, raising my voice to drown her out. I held out my keys to Avery. “Would you start unloading the truck, please?”

“No problem,” she said. “It’s probably not a good idea for me to stay here. I’m young and impressionable.” She headed for the door.

Liz shook her head. “She’s impressionable, and this is my original hair color.”

“It’s not even close.”

Liz and I turned.

Rose was standing in the doorway. “Do you want to know what your original hair color was?” she asked.

Liz made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “No, I do not. Like my real age, some things should not be discussed in public.”

Rose came across the floor to us. She was barely five feet tall, with cropped white hair and warm gray eyes. She was dwarfed by the neon orange tote bag over her shoulder. Rose’s bags reminded me of Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. I never knew what she was going to pull out of one of them.

“Hello, sweetie bug,” she said with a smile, reaching up to pat my cheek. “Welcome to Shady Pines.”

“Shady Pines?” I asked.

“Don’t encourage her,” Charlotte said. She’d come from the kitchen again, carrying a tray loaded with teacups, napkins and a small glass bowl filled with sugar cubes.

I hurried over to take it from her, setting Liz’s cookies on a stack of napkins, and immediately realized I had nowhere to put the whole thing down.

“She’s not encouraging me,” Rose said. “She just asked a question.” She looked at me. “I call this place Shady Pines because it’s just like living in an old folks’ home. All anyone wants to talk about is how many pills they’re taking and when they last had a bowel movement.”

Liz smirked at me. “You were warned,” she said. She turned to Rose. “Will you please come and live with Avery and me so we don’t have to listen to you talk about other people’s ailments and bodily functions?”

Rose crossed her hands primly in front of her. “Have you actually forgotten Vermont?” She looked over at me. “Liz and I shared a room when we went on a bus tour to Vermont. I seriously considered smothering her with a pillow while she slept.”

“I’m not suggesting we share a room,” Liz said, making a sweeping gesture with her hands. “I have that big house. We could probably go for a day or two and not even see each other.”

“No.” Rose shook her head vigorously. “The key to us having been friends for the past fifty years is never spending that much time together. I’m not about to ruin a beautiful friendship now.” She gestured at the long, multipaned windows on the side wall of the room. “We should open a couple of these. It’s going to get stuffy in here.”

“Is Alfred putting his clothes on?” Charlotte asked me in a low voice.

“I sincerely hope so,” I whispered. I set the tray on the floor and headed for the supply closet at the far end of the room.

By the time I had the cups set out on a table under the tall windows, the other women in the class were coming in. Avery had spread the drop cloths on the floor and was carrying in the various little wooden tables I’d collected for the class to work on. She’d set a cardboard box over by the wall. I was trying to remember what was inside when one of the top flaps, which hadn’t been folded flat, seemed to . . . move.

“Avery,” I said, making a get-over-here gesture with one finger, my eyes fixed on the carton.

She came to stand in front of me. “What?”

I pointed at the box. “Tell me you didn’t,” I said.

She shrugged. “Okay, I didn’t.”

The chance that I would have believed her was pretty much zero, anyway, but Elvis chose that moment to poke his head up out of the box and look around.

“Okay, so maybe I did,” she said. “But, c’mon, he gets lonely hanging out in the store all day.”

The cat jumped out of the box, shook himself and came to sit in front of me, all green-eyed innocence. “Don’t think I don’t know your part in all this,” I said, glaring at him and folding my arms across my chest. In the few months I’d had the cat I’d learned he wasn’t above doing his Sad Kitty routine to get what he wanted. It had even worked on me a couple of times—okay, maybe six or seven times—before I got wise. “Avery, Elvis is a cat. His life is eat, sleep in the sunshine and get scratched behind his ears.”

Elvis gave a short, sharp meow and narrowed his gaze at me.

“And be the enforcer when it comes to mice, birds, bats and the occasional Junebug. You shouldn’t have brought him.”

Avery jammed her hands in the pockets of her black jeans. “You take him with you lots of times.”

“That’s different. That’s work.”

“So is this,” she immediately countered, bending down to pick up the cat.

“How is this work?” I said.

“Public relations. People meet Elvis. They like him. They come to the store. It’s good for business.”

The cat actually leaned his furry face against Avery’s cheek and half closed his eyes. She gave me her sweetest smile.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I muttered. I knew when I was beaten. “He’s your responsibility,” I said sternly. I narrowed my eyes at the cat. “Stay out of the paint.”

Elvis closed his eyes and shook his head, almost as though he’d understood what I’d said and was offended at the suggestion that he’d get paint on his sleek black fur.

I headed out to the truck to get the paint and the trash cans we’d be using to mix the color wash, since Avery had her hands full. The sun was streaming through the wall of windows that made up the east side of the old factory, making checkerboard squares of light on the plank floor of the hallway. Legacy Place had been the Gardner Chocolate factory—“A little bite of bliss in a little gold box”—until the company’s new manufacturing plant had been built just on the outskirts of North Harbor.

The building had had a number of incarnations in the next twenty years, and then about three years ago the Gardner family had renovated the space into a much-needed apartment complex for seniors. The fact that it all happened at the same time that a tabloid had published photos of Hank Gardner, the CEO of the company, boogying at a club with an exotic dancer while wearing a certain item of her clothing as earmuffs was just coincidence. (Gardner had explained it all by saying, “It was January and my ears were cold.”)

The chocolate factory and tourism were the main industries in town and that made for an eclectic mix of people that was part of North Harbor’s appeal. There were musicians, artists, sailors and fishermen, small business owners, factory workers, young people and senior citizens.

I glanced in at the art class as I passed by the room. Mr. Peterson was dressed—thankfully—in a long-sleeved, navy blue golf shirt, gray pants hiked up almost to his armpits and running shoes. He was posed on a stool in the middle of the room, circled on three sides by easels.

Avery had found a chair somewhere and Elvis was perched on it, holding court when I returned with the paint. I set her to work opening the cans and did a quick head count. Eight women had signed up for the class. We were missing someone. I scanned the room. “Does anyone know where Maddie is?” I asked when I realized one of my gram’s longtime friends hadn’t shown up yet.

“Probably with her new boyfriend,” someone said. The speaker was a tiny woman, more petite than Rose, wearing a flowing shirt covered with blue and green parrots.

“Maddie has a boyfriend?” I said.

“Uh-huh. She’s smitten,” Liz said, pulling a men’s faded chambray shirt over her tunic. Liz dressed for every occasion. I’d never seen her in a sweatshirt or yoga pants, unlike most of the other women her age.

Charlotte took a sip of her tea. “Elizabeth is right. Maddie’s like a young girl when he’s around.” She handed me a cookie.

I couldn’t picture sensible, practical Maddie getting giggly over a man. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen her in a long time.

“I was looking forward to seeing her today,” I said. “When I was little, Gram and I would walk to Maddie’s house for lemonade in the summertime. She had an incredible garden behind her house. Gram said there were fairies living there and I was always trying to find them.” I took a bite of the cookie.

Charlotte smiled. “That’s Maddie. She was born with a green thumb.”

Liz nodded her agreement. “I got a poinsettia plant at Christmastime. The thing turned brown—I don’t know what the heck happened to it—but Maddie pulled it out of my kitchen garbage can and brought the darned thing back from the dead.”

“You probably forgot to water it,” Rose said.

“No, I didn’t,” Liz retorted as she fastened the snaps on her paint-streaked shirt. “I definitely remember I gave it the last of the coffee a couple of times.”

Rose sighed. “Well, I don’t think that was a good idea.”

Liz made a dismissive gesture with one hand. Her nails were painted a deep royal purple. “Clearly, since the danged thing turned brown.”

Charlotte shook her head. With her height and perfect posture she might not have fit every grandmother stereotype, but she had a huge, loving heart. She and my own grandmother had been friends since they were girls. “Maddie met her beau, Arthur, at a fund-raiser for the Botanic Garden. She’s still in the rose-colored-glasses stage when it comes to him. She probably just got caught up in whatever his latest plans are and forgot to call you.”

“Arthur?” I said slowly.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “Arthur Fenety.”

Arthur Fenety.

Maddie was seeing the man who had brought in the silver tea set and then wanted to buy it back a day later. The man I’d thought was a little too smooth, a little too charming.

And it was really none of my business.

Avery had the paint cans open and had brought in a couple of big buckets of water. I looked at my watch. It was almost twelve o’clock. Time to get started. Maybe Maddie would arrive in a few minutes.

The ladies were eager to learn. I explained how to make the color wash by diluting the paint. Then we tested the depth of the color on some scrap wood. We got started by dipping the legs—which I’d detached from the underside of each little table—using a brush to pull the color upward and create a faded effect.

I was glad I’d brought Avery along. She had a great eye for color, she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty and she might have had an opinion on well, pretty much everything, but a lot of her insights were dead-on. Elvis stayed on his seat, watching intently but happy to be away from the paint.

The hour-long class was over before I knew it. A couple of times I couldn’t help glancing over at the door from the hall, hoping Maddie might show up late, but she didn’t.

When the class ended, Avery helped me pack everything and prop up the color-washed table pieces so that they weren’t lying on the drop cloths as the paint finished drying. There was nothing happening in the room for the rest of the day, so we’d be able to pick up the completely dry tables in the morning and the ladies could retrieve them from the shop later in the week. We carried the rest of our supplies back out to the truck. Mr. P., whose posing duties had ended at the same time as the workshop, held open the door to the parking lot. The only spot I’d been able to find was at the far end of the space—the parking area of the office building next door was being paved and their clients were using the Legacy Place lot—so I tried to carry as much as I could in each trip.

Once everything was loaded, Avery left with her grandmother. I could hear the two of them arguing about what they were going to have for supper. Liz wanted to order a pizza and Avery seemed to be making the case for fermented vegetables.

I walked back to the building. I’d found a heavy canvas tote in the truck that I used at the market and it was over my shoulder, Elvis’s head poking out of the top. Mr. P. held the door for me. “Thank you,” I said. “That was the last load.”

He smiled. “You’re welcome, my dear.” He reached over and stroked the top of the cat’s head. Then he pulled a tiny spiral notebook and an equally tiny pencil out of his pocket. He tore a page out of the book and offered it and the pencil to me.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“You’ve been repeating the same three names under your breath. Why don’t you write them down?”

I felt my cheeks get warm. “Thank you,” I said. “They all wanted me to say hello to Gram next time I speak to her and I was afraid that I’d forget somebody’s name. I hadn’t realized that I was talking out loud.”

My grandmother was somewhere on the Atlantic Canadian coast with her new husband, John, in an RV that wasn’t much bigger than a minivan. John looked like he could be actor Gary Oldman’s older brother. He had the same brown hair, streaked with gray, waving back from his face, and the same intriguing gleam in his eyes. There were thirteen years between them, which had raised some eyebrows, but Gram didn’t seem anywhere near her seventy-three years and, even more importantly, she didn’t care what other people thought.

I took the pencil and paper from Mr. P. and scribbled down the three women’s names before I forgot them.

“At your age when you talk to yourself it’s charming,” Mr. P. said. “When you do it at my age they start asking if you eat enough roughage, and watch to make sure you’re not wearing your underwear on the outside.” He hiked up his pants and gave me a wink and a smile. “Sometimes I do, just to mess with people.”

I watched him head down the hallway, nodding at Charlotte as she came from the kitchen. I wasn’t sure if the old man might have been messing with me.

Charlotte smiled as she walked up to me. Like Mr. P., she reached over to pet the top of Elvis’s head. “The class was lovely, Sarah. Thank you. I know Isabel roped you into it.”

“It was fun,” I said, taking the fabric tote she was carrying. “Is this everything?”

She glanced in the top of her bag and then nodded.

“Where could I drop you?”

“Oh, I don’t mind walking,” she said as we started across the parking lot. “I don’t have that far to go,” she pointed at the carryall, “and my bag’s not that heavy.”

I pulled my keys out of my pocket. “I have time.”

Charlotte’s glasses had slid down her nose, and she frowned at me over the top of them. “Thank you, dear, but I’m perfectly capable of getting an empty cookie can and a canister of tea bags home.”

“I know that,” I said. “I also know that no matter what you said, you’re worried because Maddie didn’t show up and you plan on going to check on her. I thought maybe I could go with you.”

She fingered one of the buttons on her rose-colored sweater. “I know I’m being an old worrywart. It’s just not like Maddie to not call if she wasn’t coming.”

My mother had always told me to trust my instincts. Now I was wishing I’d paid more attention to the funny feeling I’d had about Arthur Fenety and at least asked Sam if he’d heard anything about the man. Because he owned The Black Bear, Sam knew pretty much everything that was happening in North Harbor. Maddie had been a nurse and she was one of the most responsible people I’d ever met. I wasn’t going to ignore my gut feeling again.

“You’re not being an old worrywart,” I said. “I want to check on Maddie, too. We might as well go together.”

Charlotte patted my arm. “All right, let’s go see what’s going on.”

“Does she still live at the end of your street?” I asked as I slid onto the front seat of the truck. I set Elvis down and he settled himself in the middle, between us.

She nodded. “Oh yes. That house has been in her family for close to a hundred years. I can’t see her selling it.”

In North Harbor a hundred years didn’t really make a house that old. There were lots of buildings that dated back to the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Charlotte fastened her seat belt and reached over to give Elvis a scratch under his chin. “We’re probably worrying about nothing.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “But it doesn’t hurt to check.” Once we got there I’d decide how to sound Maddie out about Arthur Fenety.

I backed out of my parking spot, made a tight turn in the tiny lot and pulled out onto the street.

“You drive like your grandmother,” Charlotte said, folding her hands in her lap. Elvis was looking straight ahead out the windshield.

“That’s probably because she’s the one who taught me how to drive,” I said. “Do you remember that old one-ton truck she had? She called it Rex.”

“Heavens, yes,” Charlotte said, with a shake of her head. “Don’t tell me she taught you how to drive on that old rust bucket.”

“She did,” I said, grinning at the memory of being behind the wheel of the old green truck for the first time, front seat squeaking as we bounced down a pothole-pocked dirt road just on the outskirts of town. “Liam took driver’s ed, but the class was the same time as honors math, so I was going to have to wait an entire term to learn to drive. I didn’t want him to get his license months before I did.”

There’s only a month between my brother—well, strictly speaking, my stepbrother—Liam and me. My mom and his dad had gotten married when we were in second grade. One moment he’d be a pain-in-the-butt, overprotective big brother, making it pretty much impossible for me to date anyone, and in the next he was covering for me when I set the vacuum cleaner on fire. (Another long story.)

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Charlotte shoot me a skeptical look. “Your mother agreed to let Isabel teach you how to drive?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly tell her.”

“And I’m thinking you didn’t exactly tell Isabel that you didn’t have your mother’s permission for driving lessons.”

“Pretty much.” I stopped at the corner and looked over at Charlotte. Elvis seemed to be as interested in the story as she was.

She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “I can’t believe I’ve never heard this story. So, what happened?”

I grinned. “I got my license two hours before Liam did.”

“And?” Charlotte prompted.

“And I was grounded for two weeks and couldn’t drive for a month.”

She laughed. “So was it worth it?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Not only did I get my driver’s license before Liam got his, I could drive a stick and he couldn’t.”

Charlotte pushed her glasses up her nose. “Let me guess,” she said. “Isabel taught him how to drive that old truck, too.”

I nodded. “You know Gram. She’s big on being fair.”

Gram was my dad’s mother. She had no biological connection to Liam, but she’d always considered him to be her grandchild, too.

I put on my blinker and turned onto Charlotte’s street.

“That’s Maddie’s car,” she said, pointing through the windshield.

“Maybe she’s here, then,” I said. I pulled up to the curb in front of the little stone house. It looked just the way I remembered it, like it belonged on a winding lane in the English countryside, not on an East Coast, small-town street.

Maddie’s wasn’t the only house in town with a beautiful garden. Even though the growing season was short in Maine, there seemed to be flowers everywhere in the late spring and summer; in window boxes and planters in front of the shops and in backyards like Maddie’s.

I’d seen Maddie only twice, briefly both times, since I’d been back in North Harbor. She’d been visiting her son, Christopher, in Seattle when I arrived and since she’d gotten back we hadn’t had much of a chance to spend time together. Probably because of her new romance, I realized now.

“Stay here,” I told Elvis. He meowed what I hoped was agreement.

Charlotte and I got out and walked up to the front door. She turned the antique crank doorbell and we waited.

“I don’t think she’s here,” she said after a minute or so.

I knocked on the yellow-paneled door with the heel of my hand. There was no response to that, either. “Maybe she went somewhere with her friend,” I said. I tried to keep the little twist of anxiety spinning in my chest out of my voice.

“That’s probably it.” Charlotte pressed her lips together, and I knew she wasn’t completely convinced.

I looked around. A stone walkway led around the side of the house to the backyard. “Or maybe Maddie was working in the garden and just lost track of time. Why don’t we go take a look?”

Charlotte exhaled slowly. “I’m acting like an old busybody, I know, but this is just not like her.”

I gave her arm a squeeze. “You’re not a busybody; you’re just worried about a friend. Let’s take a look. Maybe we’ll find her in the backyard, attacking the weeds.” I was trying to convince myself as much as Charlotte, because the Maddie I remembered wouldn’t have not shown up without calling—unless something was wrong.

Maddie was in the backyard. We found her sitting in a chair pulled up to a round teak table that looked as though it had been set for lunch. For a moment, until she wrapped one arm across her body, I wasn’t sure she was all right. I couldn’t say the same about the man in the chair beside her. It was pretty clear Arthur Fenety was dead.