Pouncing on Murder (31 page)

“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
oof
ed 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.