Copycat Killing: A Magical Cats Mystery (16 page)

I took a bite of toast myself and chewed thoughtfully. It all proved exactly nothing. Nothing.

Maybe Maggie was wrong. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Jaeger hadn’t been up to anything at all other than trying to make a new life. Maybe we were seeing conspiracies where there weren’t any.

Then again, maybe we were right.

I knew how hard Maggie had worked to make the co-op a success. What if Jaeger had gotten the store mixed up in something illegal? If I was going to convince Marcus, I needed a smoking gun, so to speak.

I slid down in the chair so I could lean my head against the back and that’s when I saw it. Not a smoking gun. It was the little purple puff I’d picked up out at Wisteria Hill, still on top of the refrigerator. I pushed myself upright and hobbled over to retrieve it. Okay, so it probably wasn’t a wig for a forest pixie. What the heck was it?

I sank back onto my chair. “Any idea what this is?” I asked the cats, holding out the puff. Owen immediately
leaned in to sniff it, discovered it wasn’t something he could eat and went back to his last bit of toast.

Hercules took his time, eyes narrowed, as though he were trying to think of a good answer to my question. After a minute he looked over at the sink and then turned his green eyes on me.

“You think it’s something to scrub dishes with?” I asked.

He meowed his agreement.

I turned the purple puff over in my hand. It did have a rough, abrasive feel to it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it’s big enough to scrub a pot.”

Owen made a sound that sounded a lot like a sigh. He stalked over to my briefcase on the floor under the coat hooks and put one paw on top. Then he meowed. Loudly and impatiently.

I looked down at Hercules and shrugged. “I suppose we could go online and see if we can find this thing.” Was it my imagination or did he give a why-the-heck-not shrug in return?

It took several tries with my favorite search engine and Hercules on my lap, “helping,” before I found a photo of the tiny, purple thingamajig. It was a fine grit, abrasive buff, an attachment that worked exclusively on a small rotary tool. Imported from Sweden.

What had Ruby said when Maggie had told her Jaeger had complained that the cabinet where he kept his tools had gotten wet?
His fancy Swedish tools.

“Jaeger was out at Wisteria Hill,” I told the cats, holding up the abrasive buff. “This has to be his. How many other people in town are going to have some tool exclusively from Sweden?”

Hercules looked thoughtful, at least to me. Owen, on
the other hand, had gone into his faux-modest routine. “Yes, it was a very good suggestion that I go online,” I said. He lifted his head to stare pointedly at the cupboard. “And yes, this calls for a kitty cracker.” I bent my face close to Herc’s black-and-white one before he could start yowling his objections. “For you too. You were a big help with the typing.”

I put Hercules on the floor and got a cracker for each cat. I turned the small purple attachment over in my hand. So Roma was right about seeing Jaeger at Wisteria Hill. The old estate would be a good source of aged pieces of wood. The main house and the carriage house were over a hundred years old, I knew. It looked like Maggie was right. But was this enough to convince Marcus?

I leaned forward. “How about a road trip?” I said to Hercules. He immediately looked over to where my messenger bag was hanging next to my jacket as he licked crumbs off his whiskers. Owen, meanwhile, scurried up close to my feet and meowed loudly to get my attention.

“This job needs your brother’s particular skill,” I said. The cats exchanged looks. Owen made a face and shook his head. Hercules turned his back and started washing his face.

“You can go next time,” I said to Owen, who refused to look at me. I pulled another cheese and sardine cracker out of the bag and held it out with a sigh. I was trying to placate a cat.

He took the kitty treat from my fingers and set it on the floor, sniffing and at the same time making sulky, grumbling noises. Hercules kept on ignoring him.

“Good to have that settled,” I said, grabbing my cup and heading for the phone.

“Hey, Mags, do you have any plans for lunch?” I asked when Maggie answered her phone.

“No,” she said. “What were you thinking?”

“How about Eric’s?”

“Oh that would be good.” She sounded a bit distracted. “Could you meet me at the shop?”

This was working out perfectly. “Sure,” I said. “But isn’t it still off limits?”

“Nope. I got the keys back about twenty minutes ago. The police are finished. And guess what?”

“The Pump Fairy found a pump for the basement?”

There was silence for a moment and then Maggie started to laugh.

“What?” I said.

“I’m telling Larry you called him The Pump Fairy,” she giggled.

“Larry found a pump? Seriously? Where?”

“Seriously. I have no idea where. It’s gas powered so we’ll have to make sure it’s vented properly, and Larry said it’s older than Noah’s grandmother, but he and Harry got it going and he swears it’ll work. I’m going to meet him over there in about fifteen minutes.”

I did a little fist pump in the air. “I’m so glad,” I said.

Maggie let out a breath. “Me too. Why don’t you meet me there in maybe an hour or so?”

“Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

I headed upstairs to change my old jeans for something a little more presentable. When I came back down Hercules was waiting in the kitchen, sitting underneath the hook where my new messenger bag was hanging. I lifted the bag down; he climbed inside, kneaded the bottom a little with his paws and then lay down.

There was no sign of Owen. He was probably off
somewhere pouting and gnawing on a funky chicken. “We’re leaving,” I called out.

No response.

“He’s still sulking,” I said to Herc, who murped his agreement from inside the bag.

We drove down to the library and I was happy to see that while a small part of the parking lot was still underwater, that section of street was open again. Inside the building I let Hercules out of the bag, crouching down so we were face to face. “You can look around for a while,” I told him, “but please come when I call you.”

He stared at me solemnly, and then he licked my nose and headed for the stacks.

I did a quick survey of both floors of the building and the basement, looking for leaks or any standing water. Happily there were none. I retrieved all the messages from our voice mail and then I cleared the book drop. I was reshelving books when Lita called to tell me the library could reopen on Friday.

As I was putting a couple of back issues of
Scientific American
in their slot, I happened to glance over at the local history section. The library had inherited a collection of Mayville Heights High School yearbooks and photographs during some renovation work at the school building.

I walked over and pulled down the volume for the year that Roma’s mother, Pearl, would have graduated.

My first thought was that she looked so young and so serious in the black-and-white photo. She wasn’t smiling, but no one was. She wore a short-sleeved white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and black cat’s-eye frame glasses. I could see some of Roma in the way she tilted her head and looked directly into the camera.

Roma had Thomas Karlsson’s coloring. He too, looked directly into the camera. There was something confident, challenging even, in his gaze.

There was an accordion file full of notes and pictures that went along with the yearbook. I flipped through several mock-up pages that hadn’t made it into the finished volume. One section called “School Life,” was all unposed, candid snapshots. There was a shot of a group of baseball players crowded into the front seat of a Ford Biscayne with Tom Karlsson grinning behind the wheel. On the second page I discovered a picture of Pearl and a couple of girls standing beside a 1959 T-Bird convertible. It was a beautiful car with fins and wide whitewall tires and I got so caught up in looking at it that I almost missed the young man in the photograph leaning awkwardly on the T-Bird’s front fender: Sam Ingstrom. The caption read: Sam gets ready to hit the road.

Except Sam wasn’t paying any attention to the road or the car at all. Sam was looking at the girls. One girl.

Pearl.

Interesting.

I checked my watch. It was time to head over to meet Maggie. I decided I’d take the yearbook and the pictures home for a closer look. I walked back to the front desk and called Hercules. After a moment he came around a set of bookshelves, crossed the mosaic tile floor and climbed in the bag. I didn’t have to call him six times, threaten, cajole or even offer a bribe.

Clearly, he was screwing with me.

M
aggie was watching for me at the front door of the co-op. I stepped inside and she smiled. “The pump’s working.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “The street’s open in front of the library so we’re reopening tomorrow and”—I held out my arm and rolled my left wrist in the air—“there’s no rain in the forecast for at least the next twelve hours.”

Maggie laughed. “Harry said the same thing. Well, technically his leg did.”

“There you go,” I said. “A forecast from two unimpeachable sources.”

Maggie scrunched up her face as she checked out my forehead. “That looks awful,” she said.

“Thank you for sharing.”

“No. I mean it looks sore.”

“It’s okay unless I forget and push my hair back or try to wiggle my eyebrows,” I said. I could feel Hercules getting restless in the bag. “And that little packet of herbs
you gave me for the bathtub helped. I’m not nearly as stiff as I was.”

“You know, I have a marigold salve in my office that Rebecca taught me how to make. That would help your head,” Maggie offered.

“Okay.” My ankle felt better thanks to the salve Rebecca had given me. It wasn’t the first time one of her herbal remedies had made a difference.

“What’s in the bag?” Maggie asked. “I thought we were going to Eric’s?”

“I brought you a visitor,” I said. I unzipped the top of the bag and Hercules poked his head out, looked right at Maggie and meowed.

“Hey, Hercules,” she said. Then she looked at me and lowered her voice. “Why did you bring him?”

“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “I brought Hercules so he could make sure there aren’t any other furry little visitors in the building.” And do a little sleuthing for me, I added silently.

I lifted the cat out of the bag and set him on the floor. The first thing he did was shake himself and take a couple of swipes at his face with a paw. It’s important to look good when one is nosing into other people’s business.

“Are you sure he’s not going to take off?” Maggie said.

“Hercules?” I said. “There might be dirt outside. There might be puddles. Not a chance.”

Maggie bent down to the cat. “Thank you for coming, Hercules,” she said. “I owe you a can of sardines all to yourself for this.”

He gave her a decidedly upbeat “meow” and licked his lips.

“Maggie, you talk to them like they’re people,” I said as she straightened up.

“I can’t help it,” she said. Hercules was looking around, plotting, maybe, where he was headed first. “They just bring out that kind of response in me.” She reached over and locked the door. “Anyway, you talk to them like they’re people too.”

Hercules meowed loudly. He was looking past me into the store space. “Go ahead,” I said. “You know what to do.”

“See what I mean?” Maggie said, starting up the stairs.

“The only reason I talk to Hercules and Owen as though they understand is because they have a very large vocabulary,” I said, following her up the steps into the studio space. The cat was already out of sight. “They’re like that dog we saw on the news a few months ago that knows over a thousand words.”

“Do you think Owen and Hercules know a thousand words?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I said. “And they all have to do with food.”

“So why didn’t you bring Owen?” she said as she unlocked her office door.

“Because all he would have done was moon around you. The Godzilla of rodents could be in the room and he wouldn’t see it. If cats can have crushes, Owen has one on you.”

“I like the little fur ball,” Maggie said as she unlocked the cupboard opposite her desk. “Look at how he brought that chicken out to Roma. You can’t tell me he didn’t know she was upset. Okay, there it is.” She held up a small glass jar.

“What are you going to do about tai chi and yoga classes?” I asked.

“I’m hoping by Tuesday I can get everything out of the studio and back downstairs so we can have class again.”

“That would be good,” I said.

She put one hand on her hip and looked me up and down. “Have you been practicing the form?”

“Some.”

Her green eyes stayed fixed on me. “A little,” I said, ducking my head.

She grinned. “Maybe I’ll teach some of the movements to Owen and Hercules and then you’ll have someone to practice with.”

I got a mental picture of the two cats doing cloud hands and laughed. “Hey, have you talked to Roma?” I asked, only partly to change the subject.

Maggie shook her head. “I called her, but all I got was her voice mail. I’ll try her again later.”

“I will too,” I said.

She gestured to her desk chair. “Sit down.” She went into the little bathroom to wash her hands, then came back, pinned my hair off my face and put a thin layer of the salve on my scraped head. “How’s it feel?” she asked.

“Good,” I said, “and it doesn’t smell like feet.”

Maggie rolled her eyes and screwed the lid back on the little jar. She—with Rebecca’s help—had made a wrap for my wrist after the cast had come off last summer. It had helped the ache and the stiffness, but it had smelled, well, like feet.

“So what happens now?” I said. “Is Marcus still investigating Jaeger’s death?”

Maggie sat on the corner of her desk. “I don’t know. Did he say anything to you this morning?”

I shook my head. “No.” I thought about what I’d said to Lucy about Marcus and felt my face flush. Luckily
Maggie had gotten up to put the salve back in her cupboard. “I did share your theory with him.”