Buy a Whisker (7 page)

Mac opened the cider and poured a glass for each of us while I dished out the pork and cabbage. It was still hot.

“It smells good,” Mac said as he moved behind me with the glasses.

“Thank you,” Jess said from the doorway. She set the blind on the counter and kicked off her boots. “Oh, this looks nice,” she said approvingly, looking around the room.

“Thanks,” I said.

She leaned around the living room doorway. “Umm, I like that color on the walls.”

The living room, bathroom and bedroom were a creamy, buttery shade that warmed the small rooms.

“That's because you picked it out,” I teased.

“And I do have good taste,” she retorted.

She shook off her coat and hung it over the back of the chair. “Let's eat,” she said.

The meat and sweet cabbage in a spicy sauce was as delicious as I'd promised Mac it would be. About halfway through the meal, Jess ran her hand over the tabletop.

“I hate it, but you might as well sell this table,” she said with a sigh. “There's no way North Landing is going to happen now.”

I turned to her, my spoon halfway between the bowl and my mouth. “What do you mean by ‘now'? Has something happened?”

She looked from Mac to me. “Right. You've been working here all day, so you haven't heard.”

“Heard what?” I asked. I felt the bottom fall out of my stomach, as though I'd just rolled over the top of a roller coaster. I knew what she was going to say before she spoke.

“Lily's death has officially been called a homicide.”

I rubbed the space between my eyes with two fingers. “You know what this means, don't you?” I said.

Jess looked confused. “No,” she said.

Mac gave me a sympathetic smile. “It means the Angels are going to be spreading their wings.”

I was lying on the couch with Elvis sprawled across my chest, trying to read—and failing because someone's big, furry head kept getting in the way—when my cell phone rang later that evening. I put the book on the floor and reached for the phone while Elvis raised his head and glared at me.

“You could always go lie somewhere else,” I said.

He narrowed his green eyes at me and flopped back down again.

It was Nick on the phone. “Hi,” he said. “Am I taking you away from anything important?”

I folded one arm behind my head. “No. I'm just basically being a lounge chair for a cat. What's up?”

I heard him exhale slowly and pictured him swiping a hand over his chin. “I didn't know if you'd heard: Lily's death has been ruled a homicide.”

“I know,” I said. “Jess told me.” I'd been trying not to think about what she'd said, but I hadn't really succeeded. “Do you think it could have anything to do with the development proposal?”

“That's not really my job,” he said. “That's Michelle's department.”

Elvis yawned and rolled partway onto his side.

“I know,” I said. “But you have to have an opinion. C'mon, Nick. I'm not going to tell anybody.”

He sighed. “At this point I don't know.”

Neither one of us said anything for a moment. “Someone pushed her down those stairs,” I said after a moment of silence.

“You know I can't tell you that,” Nick said.

“I didn't ask you anything,” I said, sliding up into a halfway-sitting position. That was too much moving around for Elvis. He jumped down to the floor and stalked away, flicking his tail at me because he didn't have fingers. “And I'm not going to repeat any conversation we have. I'm just saying,
hypothetically
”—I put extra emphasis on the last word—“someone must have pushed her.”

“Hypothetically, yes,” Nick said dryly.

I stretched out one leg and then the other. “But whoever it was didn't just come up behind her and give her a shove
. Hypothetically
.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, and I could hear a note of caution in his voice.

“She was lying on her left side. If she'd been starting down the steps and someone had given her a push, she most likely would have landed on her right side.”

For a moment he didn't say anything. When he did finally speak, it was just one word. “Because?”

I grabbed a pillow and stuffed it behind my back.
“Lily went up and down those steps a dozen times a day. So she probably didn't use the railing. I go up and down the stairs at the shop easily that many times in a day, and I know I don't.”

“Okay,” he said.

“If someone had pushed Lily, her instinct would be to grab for the railing. It's on the left side. If she couldn't get her balance, she'd be leading with her right side as she fell and she'd land on that side. Which she didn't.”

“No, she didn't.”

“Someone hit her,” I said slowly, the idea just occurring to me, making my heart sink. “She was at the top of the stairs. She was turning, and whoever killed her hit her on the back of the head. The momentum and the fact that she wasn't turned completely around means that she would most likely have ended up landing on her left side.”

I waited for Nick to say no, to tell me I was wrong.

He didn't.

“But how do you know she didn't just hit her head on one of the steps?” I asked. I knew Nick was very good at his job, and if he said Lily's death was murder, then it was. I just didn't want it to be. I hated to think that the last moments of her life were filled with fear.

Nick let out another breath. Was he stretching his arms up over his head? I wondered. “Okay,” he said. “Let's say someone did hit Lily over the head—and I'm not saying that's what happened, just to be clear.”

“I know,” I said, nodding even though he couldn't see me.

“The injury wouldn't be up in the same place as it would be if she'd fallen, and it wouldn't look the same.”

“What do you mean it wouldn't be in the same place?” I asked.

“Did you take any anatomy classes?” Nick asked.

“In high school.”

“So you don't know any of the bones in the skull.”

“Yes, I do,” I said a little indignantly.

My high school biology teacher had had a full-size skeleton in the lab that he'd named Clyde, which we'd all thought was made of some incredibly realistic plastic or resin. There was a bit of an uproar my senior year when it came out that Clyde had been a real person and an alumnus of the school—and really had been named Clyde.

I'd always liked Clyde. Once I'd even done the Macarena with him when the teacher was out of the room.

I pictured the skeleton's bony head now. “The bone in the front where the forehead is, that's the frontal bone,” I said. “The bottom part of the jaw is the mandible. The top of the head and the upper part of the back of the head are all parietal bone. And below that is the occipital bone.”

“Very good,” he said.

I couldn't help smiling as though I'd just gotten a gold star from the teacher. “Thank you.”

“If Lily had slipped and hit her head, we'd expect
to see an injury where the occipital bone and temporal bone meet or a bit above that, but not a lot above that area.” He didn't even bother to say “hypothetically.”

“So if the injury was higher than that, it suggests someone hit her,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Okay, but you said the injury wouldn't look the same,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Did you ever hit a piñata with a baseball bat?”

“Liam's tenth birthday party.
Samurai Pizza Cats
.”

I heard something fall in the bedroom. I was guessing that Elvis had jumped up onto the small table I kept beside the bed and had nosed one of my books onto the floor. He'd done that before when he felt my attention was focused somewhere other than on him.

“Pizza what?” Nick asked.

“
Samurai Pizza Cats
. They were three cyborg cats—”

“Let me guess,” he interjected. “And they liked pizza.”

“Close,” I said. “They worked in a pizzeria.”

“Of course. How could I have missed that?” Nick laughed then. “I can't wait until the next time I see Liam.” He cleared his throat. “When you swing, the end of the bat is moving faster than the part closer to your hands.”

“Right.” I heard what was probably another book hit the floor in the bedroom.

“So when it makes contact with the piñata, it does more damage than the shaft does farther down the length of the bat.”

“Because it has more momentum.”

“Exactly.”

I couldn't say anything for a moment as I tried not to think about the fact that we were really talking about Lily and not a papier-mâché container shaped like a cat.

“You okay?” Nick asked.

“Uh-huh.” I swallowed down the lump that had suddenly tightened in my throat. “Help Michelle catch whoever did this, please?” I whispered.

“I will,” he promised.

I cleared my throat. “Nick, you know that Rose and your mother and—”

“I know.” I could hear a combination of frustration and resignation in his voice. “I'm beating my head against the wall, thinking I can find a way to convince them to stay out of this—aren't I?”

“Yes.”

He laughed. “You couldn't hedge even a little bit? Throw me a bone?”

“Your mother, Rose, Liz—they're all stubborn women. You know that. Put the three of them together and they become an immovable object.” I pulled my legs up and wrapped one arm around my knees. “You saw what happened when Arthur Fenety died and Maddie was a suspect. Nothing you or I said made any difference.”

I imagined him grimacing and raking a hand through his hair. “And after that little experience, you know what I found?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Gray hair. A little clump of gray hair, right in the front. You can't see it, but it's there. My mother is giving me gray hair.”

I smiled. “She says the same thing about you.”

He laughed.

“I'll keep an eye on them,” I said. “I promise.”

We said good night and I ended the call. I got up and went into the bedroom to check on Elvis. He was curled up on the lounge chair, head on his paws. Two paperbacks had mysteriously fallen onto the floor.

“I know you're awake,” I said quietly. One ear twitched, and then he opened one eye, looked at me for a moment and closed it again. I bent down and picked up the books. One of them was a small cookbook Rose had given me full of simple recipes.

“They just use basic ingredients,” she'd said. “The kind of things you already have in your kitchen.” After she'd looked around my cupboards and refrigerator, she'd amended that to “things most people already have in their kitchens.”

I was certain Rose wasn't thinking about cooking right now. She was probably sitting with a cup of tea and Alfred Peterson, figuring out how the Angels were going to investigate Lily's death. I'd told Nick I'd keep an eye on them. I just wasn't sure how I was going to do that and not get sucked into their investigation, because I definitely wasn't getting involved in a murder investigation again.

Famous last words.

*   *   *

When I got to the shop in the morning, Rose and Alfred Peterson were waiting for me. Mr. P.'s pants were tucked into pile-lined lace-up boots. He was wearing a faux-fur trimmed hat with earflaps, a heavy gray wool overcoat with a green-and-blue fringed scarf I knew Rose had knitted for him wound around his neck and at least two pair of mittens, as far as I could tell. He looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy on his first time out in the snow.

“Hey, Mr. P.,” I said. “What are you doing here?” It wasn't like I didn't know the answer to my question.

“Rose and I are going to start working on the case,” he said.

I pulled the key out of the lock and looked at Rose. “You have a case?”

She squared her shoulders. “I know you have to have heard that Lily's death wasn't an accident.”

“I have,” I agreed, kicking snow off my boots before I stepped inside and turned on the lights.

“We're going to investigate,” she said.

“Do you have a client?”

I saw a look pass between Rose and Mr. P. She wiped her feet on the mat before looking at me again. “Not yet.”

“Rose, the police are going to be investigating, along with the medical examiner's office. Both Michelle and Nick are very good at what they do.”

It was the wrong thing to say, which I realized as soon as the words were out.

“And we aren't?” Rose said. She held her head high, chin stuck out a little.

“I didn't say that,” I said, trying to keep the frustration I was already feeling out of my voice.

“But you were thinking it,” she countered.

“Rosie, I don't think Sarah meant any harm,” Mr. P. said gently.

“You don't think we can figure out who killed Lily,” Rose said, her tone more than a little indignant. She looked so tiny in her blue coat with the collar turned up and her blue-and-red cloche pulled down over her forehead to her eyebrows, but I knew she could do just about anything when she set her mind to it.

“Nice try,” I said, “but you're not going to guilt me into saying I think what you're doing is a good idea.” Elvis squirmed in my arms, and I set him on the floor. He headed for the doors into the store.

“I wasn't trying to guilt you, dear,” Rose said. She gave me her innocent, cookie-baking grandma look.

“Good to know,” I said mildly.

Elvis was standing not very patiently in front of the double doors, and I knew that if I didn't start the morning routine soon, he'd start protesting more aggressively. And loudly.

“I have a list of parcels that need to be packed,” I said to Rose. “Would you start on that, please?” I glanced at Alfred. “Mr. P., would it be too much trouble for you to go up to the staff room and put the kettle on?”

“I'd be happy to, my dear,” he replied. He sat down on the old church bench Mac had put by the back door and started taking off his boots.

I headed for the store. After a moment Rose followed me. She touched my arm as I flipped on the lights.

“I see what you're doing,” she said.

“What I'm doing is turning on the lights.”

She made a face at me. She looked like a little gray-haired elf with her cheeks rosy from the cold. “You think I'll give up if you don't argue with me. Very sneaky.” She was trying to look angry but couldn't manage it.

“I learned at the feet of the masters,” I said. I leaned over and kissed the top of her head and then headed for the stairs trailed by my furry sidekick.

Elvis climbed up on the credenza I used for storage in my tiny office and watched me while I took off my outside things and put on my shoes. I kept a bag of cat kibble in my desk. I fished out a couple of pieces and gave them to him, leaning against the long, low piece of furniture while he ate and then gave his face and paws a quick cleaning. Once he was finished, he rested his head against my arm and looked up at me with his green eyes. I reached over to rub the side of his face.

“I didn't win that one, did I?” I said.

He made a soft
murp
that either meant “No, you didn't,” or “Don't stop what you're doing.”

After a minute I picked the cat up again and set him on the floor. “Time to earn your keep,” I told him.

He headed for the main floor like a cat with a purpose, stopping only to pull the door open a little wider with one paw.

Downstairs I gave Rose the list of items that needed to be packed, and she headed out to the storage room to get started. “Mac's out back,” she said. “He says he may have a customer for those hammered-tin ceiling panels you two salvaged from Tucker's farm.”