Never Steal a Cockatiel (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series Book 9) (6 page)

Cara shook her head at once. “No. I don’t believe it. Your mother probably does know who my mother is seeing, but it’s not Cole Harbison.”

Leigh cocked an eyebrow. She knew her cousin had nothing against the kindly history buff who had enjoyed Lydie’s company for much of the last decade. Whether the two were just friends or more than friends had never been entirely clear, and Leigh had gone back and forth on the question more than once, as had Cara. But Lydie always insisted the relationship was platonic, even as Cara assured her mother that she would be fine with them as a couple. Cole was a nice enough man, even if he was significantly older than Lydie. The only weird thing about a romantic relationship between them, if there was one, was why they would bother hiding it in the first place. “How do you know for sure?” Leigh asked.

Cara blew out a breath. “He’s engaged. To another woman from his church. I heard about it through a mutual friend, and Mom confirmed it. She said she’s happy for him.”

“Oh,” Leigh remarked. “Well, I guess that settles it. It’s just that…” Her brow furrowed.

“What?” Cara asked.

“It’s just that I didn’t think my mother was lying. Usually I can tell. Or at least I can tell that she’s covering something up. When she said it was Cole Harbison, I believed her. And I thought Bess did, too.”

The women exchanged a look.

“Your
mother wouldn’t lie to
my
mother, would she?” Leigh asked incredulously.

Cara’s eyes widened. “You know… I don’t know.”

They stared at each other a moment. The Morton twins had been figuratively joined at the hip their entire lives. They had always lived in West View, first in the same house, then in row houses side by side. One always seemed to know everything the other one knew. There was never any visible discord. Bess and Frances might bicker, but Lydie had always been the peacemaker. Her tolerance for Frances’s nonsense seemed boundless. The idea that she would withhold any significant information from her twin seemed preposterous.

Cara shook her head. “No. Your mother must be a better liar than you think. And why not? The whole family had both of us convinced of a total lie about my father for decades!”

“Good point,” Leigh conceded.

Cara frowned. “Speaking of my father, I still don’t understand why he didn’t tell me about the apartment in Bellevue. I tried to call him this afternoon, but he wouldn’t pick up. He did send me an email late this morning, but…” Her voice drifted off.

“What?” Leigh asked after a moment’s silence.

“I think he’s avoiding me,” Cara said unhappily. “I mean, why shouldn’t he answer his phone? Or at least text to say he’s busy? He may be in Vegas, but it’s supposed to be a professional conference. You really think all those pawnbrokers are paying such rapt attention to the workshops that they’re not even texting?”

Leigh mulled over the thought uncomfortably. She had no idea what Mason was doing, but she was sure he wasn’t at any pawnbrokers’ convention. And he knew that she knew. Why would he keep his own daughter in the dark and not Leigh?

Her teeth gnashed. One thing she had learned over the years about the enigmatic Mason Dublin, besides the fact that he was light years smarter than he liked to pretend, was that he didn’t do anything without a reason. He loved his daughter and grandkids more than anything in the world, and if he was fudging on his whereabouts this week, he must believe that Cara was better off not knowing. Still — the fact that he didn’t care if Leigh knew was perplexing. He had no reason to believe that she would keep his confidence if she thought Cara’s wellbeing was at stake. So what was the man playing at?

“He’s had that apartment in Bellevue for two weeks now,” Cara continued. “I did a little digging and found out he’s put the house in Jennerstown up for rent. He must be planning on living in Pittsburgh indefinitely. He’s got a full-time manager at the pawn shop now, so he can certainly do that. But why wouldn’t he tell us?” Her eyes flashed with hurt. “He’s never been secretive like this before. Not with me, anyway.”

“I don’t know, Cara,” Leigh soothed. “But there must be a reason. You know he’d never intentionally hurt you. He’s spent the last decade twisting himself into a pretzel trying to be the father you always wanted.”

Cara smiled sadly. “I know that. You’re right, there must be a reason. As much as it ticks me off that he’s hiding things from me, I suppose I should assume his motives are good.”

“Absolutely,” Leigh encouraged.
Until proven otherwise,
she refrained from adding.

“Mom!” Matthias’s newly deeper voice rasped as he and Ethan burst into the kitchen. “Grandpa Randall wants to pay me to do some work at the clinic this week. Can I?”

“Me too, Mom!” Ethan said excitedly. “Can I? He wants us to start tomorrow.”

“Doing what?” Leigh and Cara asked simultaneously — and somewhat skeptically. The boys were both good workers, but their rambunctious presence within the tight confines of the animal clinic had been problematic in the past.

“Helping Jared move stuff,” Matthias answered, referring to the clinic’s longtime janitor and kennel cleaner. “He can’t lift anything heavy since he hurt his back, and Grandpa hired somebody to help him but they haven’t been showing up and now they quit. Jared’s flipping out because he’s overdue with some cleaning rotation thing he’s always done and he’s afraid of getting mice. We’re supposed to move all the food bags and the freezer and stuff so he can get behind them to clean.”

“It’ll only take a couple of days,” Ethan added. “But with Grandpa on crutches he may need us to help with other stuff, too, like moving the big dogs after surgery. He says the clinic is short on strong arms.”

The boys beamed, and Cara and Leigh exchanged a guarded look. As proud as they were of their bright and amiable sons, they knew that Randall must have reached a point of desperation to invite the two back into the clinic after the havoc they had wreaked in their elementary days. The chain link on one of the larger runs in the basement was still bowed and bent from where they used to lock each other inside and race to see who could escape faster.

“Please, Mom?” Ethan cajoled. “He wouldn’t have asked us if he didn’t think we could handle it.”

Leigh considered. With Jared and her father both out of commission, there really wasn’t anyone at the clinic to do the heavy lifting. The current staff was both all female and unusually weak in the athletic department. But Matthias was almost fourteen, and Ethan, while more than two years younger, was nearly as brawny as his cousin.

Cara’s eyes signaled her approval.

“All right,” Leigh agreed. “But you have to promise to mind Jared. You know he’ll tell me if you give him any trouble.”

Both boys’ eyes rolled. “We won’t, Mom,” Ethan replied.

“Is dinner ready?” Matthias asked hopefully, eyeing the already-set table.

“Five minutes,” Cara replied.

The boys promptly disappeared again.

Cara excused herself to go to the bathroom, and Leigh had not been alone in the kitchen for thirty seconds before the landline rang. She saw her aunt’s name on the caller ID and picked up immediately.

“Aunt Lydie!” she said happily. “It’s Leigh. Cara will be back in a minute. How’s Pennsylvania history? Any breaking news?”

Lydie chuckled. “You’d be surprised. Listen, don’t bother Cara. I just got off the phone with your mother and Bess; I’m so sorry about your father’s accident.”

“We all are,” Leigh agreed.

“I’ll call in a couple days to let you know exactly when I’ll get back,” Lydie continued. “I just wanted to let Cara know not to worry if I don’t answer her right away. Half of this place is below ground level, and the reception is terrible. But she can leave me messages and I’ll check in periodically.”

“Will do.”

“Thanks, dear. Bye-bye, now!”

“Wait, I—” Leigh broke off. Her aunt had hung up already. Leigh set the phone down, puzzled. Lydie had never been the chatty type, but she wasn’t one to rush off, either. Leigh was about to brave asking whether Lydie knew anything about her ex-husband’s recent move to Pittsburgh, but she needed a little more time to work up to it.

Talking to Lydie about Mason wasn’t easy. Although the exes had always been civil with one another and had managed to stay in communication while Cara was growing up, their relationship since his return had been rocky. Although they tried to fake being comfortable around each other at family functions, even now, four decades after the divorce, the tension between them was palpable. As loving and mild-mannered as Lydie was, the humiliation she had endured at her young husband’s hands had clearly exceeded her capacity to forgive and forget, because the deeper Mason weaved his way back into the family, the more his presence seemed to irritate her.

Lydie would hardly be pleased to know that he was now living in Pittsburgh. In fact, Leigh thought suddenly, dread of her reaction could very well be the reason Mason had kept the move a secret in the first place.

In retrospect, Leigh was glad she hadn’t broached the topic. There had never been a surer way to wipe the smile off her aunt’s face than to mention the name Mason Dublin, and just now Lydie had seemed to be in an unusually good mood. In fact, though her words had been both sympathetic and businesslike, her tone had been downright chipper. At times, practically breathless.

Leigh’s brow furrowed. Her aunt didn’t get away much. And she really did enjoy studying history.

But come on.

Cara returned to the kitchen, and Leigh delivered the message.

“How did she sound?” Cara asked offhandedly, putting on mitts to take her homemade pizzas out of the oven.

“Like she was having a good time,” Leigh said carefully.

But not by herself.

Chapter 6

“I feel awful, Mom,” Allison said the next morning, her voice close to tears. “I did everything Grandpa said!”

“I know you did, honey,” Leigh said sympathetically. She studied the cockatiel with chagrin. Overnight, it had plucked a dime-sized patch of feathers off the center of its chest, leaving a naked circle of bumpy pink skin showing.

“He didn’t have any signs of feather picking before,” Allison bemoaned. “He looked perfect!”

“It’s probably a stress reaction,” Leigh suggested. “But we’ll take him down and have your Grandpa check him out, just to be sure.”

Allison tried to get the bird to hop onto her finger, but it merely fidgeted on its perch and sidled away from her. She frowned. “I think he misses his owner. We should get in touch with them and let them know. Maybe they’d want to come get him.”

Leigh’s stomach soured.
If only.
She could ask Mason to try and contact the mysterious Kyle, but if she remembered their predawn conversation correctly, Kyle wasn’t the bird’s real owner either. Still, it was worth a try. The cockatiel wasn’t eating right, it looked unhappy, and without some intervention it would almost certainly keep picking at itself.

“Poor thing,” Allison said miserably.

“Mom!” Ethan called from the living room. “There was a shooting in Ben Avon last night!”

A
shooting?
Ben Avon was directly adjacent to Avalon.

Leigh hurried out of Allison’s room to the television. Ethan was rewinding the DVR. “I just caught the end of it,” he explained. “Here’s where it starts.”

He punched a button on the remote, and the local news segment began.

“We’re here in the normally peaceful neighborhood of Ben Avon,” a reporter said, standing on the edge of a small park Leigh recognized, “where residents were shocked just after midnight to be awakened by the sound of a gunshot.”

The camera panned around to show the front of a small stone cottage barely visible behind a curtain of dense bushes and trailing vines. “Police say that a Ben Avon resident was sitting on her back porch when she spied a man running and then heard him attempt to enter the fence surrounding her property. The woman claims she fired a warning shot into the ground with a shotgun in order to frighten away the intruder. Ohio Township police received multiple calls from concerned citizens who heard the noise. Shortly afterwards, a thirty-two-year-old man who also resides in Ben Avon called police from his home to report a shot being fired at very close range while he was jogging. The man said he frequently runs in the area and prefers to exercise at night because of the cooler weather. He claims he was jogging between houses as a shortcut to the nearby country club when he accidentally ran into some sort of fence. He then heard a shot fired and believed he was being targeted.”

The camera cut to a picture of a short, stocky woman standing in her front doorway while the reporter stuck a microphone in her face. Her dyed-auburn hair was cut short in an androgynous pixie cut, and her pinched and weathered face was tight with displeasure.

“Oh, no,” Leigh murmured.

“Skippy!” Allison exclaimed.

“An intruder came onto my property without my permission and I scared him away,” the woman said unapologetically, her gray eyes blazing. “It’s my right to protect my property, and I’ll do it again if I have to. Nobody messes with my birds.
Nobody.
You got that?”

She pointed a crooked finger at the camera, then withdrew inside and shut the door.

The camera switched to another shot of the reporter at the park. “Police say that according to local ordinances, it’s illegal to discharge any firearm within the borough, although an exception is made in the case of protecting persons or property. The jogger, who was apparently wearing running gear and a reflective jacket, was unavailable for comment.”

“Like, can’t you get arrested for shooting at somebody like that?” Ethan asked.

“Whether any crime was committed here is still under investigation,” the reporter continued. “In the meantime, night runners beware. Back to you, Dave!”

Ethan stopped the playback. Leigh and Allison remained immobile, staring at the screen. “Well, Mom?” the boy repeated. He turned to his sister. “Who’s Skippy?”

Leigh tore her gaze away from the television and shook her head with disbelief. “A client of your grandfather’s,” she answered.