Cat With a Clue (6 page)

“We can take one home,” I told Eddie, who was
sitting in the middle of the aisle with his tail curled around his paws. “But only one. I know how short your attention span can be.”

Eddie got to his feet and stalked past me without a glance.

Smiling, I watched him go. There really was nothing like a cat.

“S
o,” Lindsey Wolverson said that evening at the Round Table. “Your aunt tells me you have a knack for leadership.”

I sent a panicked glance to my left at Ash, but he was busy sprinkling malt vinegar onto his fries and wasn't paying attention to either me or his mother, whom I was meeting for the first time.

Aunt Frances had known Lindsey for years, but I'd never met her. My aunt had told me of backyard picnics and dinner parties and watching Ash and his sister grow from roly-poly toddlers into adulthood, but she hadn't mentioned that his mother was so flat-out gorgeous that every person in the room—men and women alike—stared at her with dropped jaw. Not only that, but her chic yet casual attire was more elegant than anything I'd ever owned in my life.

It was a little intimidating, and I wish I'd known ahead of time. Then again, given Ash's innate good looks, I should probably have guessed something like this was possible. But mathematics wasn't my strong suit and I didn't always put two and two together.

So I smiled, added more salt to my fries than I really wanted, and struggled for something to say that didn't sound completely stupid. “I . . . I . . . uh . . .” I gave up. Stupid it would have to be.

Ash gave his fries one last dollop of malt vinegar, then screwed the top back onto the bottle. “You should see her with Sheriff Richardson. You'd think they'd been buds since day one.”

Lindsey's perfectly plucked eyebrows went up. “Kit Richardson? That woman has awed me for years. She frightens men who have United States senators on their speed dial. Good for you. How did you do it?”

Basically, I had no idea, but it probably helped that I wasn't from Chilson. I hadn't known I was supposed to be nervous around the sheriff and had assumed she was like the other people I'd met from her office: helpful, courteous, and competent. Then again, it could have been because I'd knocked on the sheriff's front door early one morning, and it was hard to think of someone in terms of fearsome starch once you'd seen her in a ratty bathrobe.

I was about to explain parts of that when I accidentally caught the look on the face of a male passing our booth. He was staring at Lindsey, jaw dropped, eyes goggled, and there might even have been a small trail of drool leaking out one corner of his mouth, although that could have been my imagination. “I . . .” But whatever I'd been about to say had gone clean out of my head. “I . . . I . . .”

Lindsey's smile went from friendly to fixed.

I stared at the food on my plate. A burger and fries, all of which was rapidly growing cold and unappealing, but since I was losing my appetite even more rapidly, that didn't matter.

She hated me. My new boyfriend's mom hated me, and I hadn't uttered more than half a dozen words. A new record!

“How's business?” Ash asked. “Busy?”

Lindsey paused, her forkful of grilled chicken salad halfway to her mouth. “Do you realize that I've had this firm for nearly twenty years? And they said it wouldn't last.”

Ash laughed. “Well, maybe that's what Dad said right after the divorce. I always knew you'd be a success.”

She smiled at him fondly. “I just hired another employee. Who knew financial consulting would be so lucrative?”

My misery deepened. Not only was she beautiful, but she was smart and successful and could do math. There was no way she was ever going to approve of a mousy little librarian dating her son
. Especially one who couldn't put two and two together and get a reality into which I would never, ever belong.

I picked up a French fry and thought about eating it, but its coating of salt crystals glinted in the light. While it was my opinion that fries had to have a certain amount of salt to make them edible, there was also a point at which too much salt made them inedible, and these fries had reached that point halfway through my use of the saltshaker. Poor fries, doomed to end their life in a garbage bag, never to be—

“Minnie?” Ash nudged me with his elbow. “Did you hear my mom's question?”

“Oh.” I blinked at him, then at the stunning woman sitting across from me. “Sorry. I . . . I . . .”

Thankfully, she cut into my repetitious soliloquy. “I hear you had a traumatic experience the other morning at the library.”

Not nearly as traumatic as it had been for Andrea Vennard, but the thought was a kind one. I nodded. And since I didn't want to relive the experience any more times than my stupid brain was already forcing me to do, I returned to contemplating my dinner.

There was a pause. A long one.

“Well,” Lindsey said, and though I'd known her for less than an hour, even I could hear the brittleness in her voice. “Have the two of you seen any movies lately?”

I glanced at Ash, who was in the middle of taking a large bite from his hamburger. He wasn't going to be any help. I looked at Lindsey and shook my head. “I—”

Ash's cell phone burst into life. He shifted his burger to one hand and pulled out his cell with the other. With a huge effort that happily didn't end with the necessity for someone to jump up and perform the Heimlich maneuver, he swallowed, then said, “Sorry—I have to take this,” and thumbed the phone to life. “Wolverson.” As he listened, he flicked glances at his mother, at me, at his food. “Okay. I'll be right there.”

In one smooth movement, he slid the phone back into his pocket and stood. “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Minnie. That was Detective Inwood. He needs me to—”

But his mom was already waving him away. “Duty calls. I understand,” she said as he leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek.

He looked my way, gave me a large wink that his mother couldn't see, and left me alone with her.

This time the pause was even longer.

“Are you a reader?” I asked.

“Of what?”

“Books. Magazines. Newspapers.” Anything, really,
because if we could find some common ground, surely I would figure out something to say to this woman.

“Most of my reading is business oriented,” she said. “Books on economics and financial forecasting. Trade magazines—that kind of thing.”

“No fiction?”

Lindsey looked at me with an expression I couldn't interpret. “My father always said that fiction was the refuge of the unhappy. That readers of fiction were looking for an escape.”

“But . . . but . . .” Then I stopped, because I did not want to get into an argument with my boyfriend's mother the first time I met her.

I turned my attention back to my hamburger, mainly because if I was eating, I couldn't be expected to talk. The resulting silence was awkward. With a capital
A
.

“Ran out on you, did he?” Sabrina, my favorite waitress at the Round Table, stopped by to top off our water glasses. “You ladies need anything else?”

“Just the check, please,” Lindsey said. “And I'll take that right now.”

“Gotcha.”

Sabrina pulled the correct slip from her apron pocket without looking. As soon as she slid it onto the table, Lindsey picked it up and slid out of the booth. “Thank you. I'll pay up front. Minnie, it was a pleasure meeting you.” She smiled politely and was gone.

“Wow,” Sabrina said, watching her go. “That was Ash's mom, right? She's gorgeous.”

I pushed my plate away. Ash's mother was everything I was not and never would be. Tall. Straight-haired. Articulate. Financially successful. Stunningly beautiful. Not to mention articulate.

Sighing, I started to slide out of the booth. I almost asked Sabrina how her husband, Bill, was doing. They'd met here at the Round Table and had been married less than a year. Then I decided to ask the next time I was in. Right now, all I wanted was to go home and snuggle up to my cat.

*   *   *

“How could I have been such an idiot?” I asked.

“Mrr,” Eddie replied.

“Well, yeah,” I said, pulling the lap blanket up over my legs. We were sitting outside on the houseboat's front deck. The sun was slipping down into the horizon and the temperature was dropping. “Everyone's an idiot some of the time. Except you, of course.”

“Mrr.”

“You're welcome.” I patted his head. “But I'm relatively self-confident. I haven't had major self-esteem issues since I talked Mom into letting me get contact lenses.”

“Mrr.”

“Right. So, why tonight? Why couldn't I get out more than three words in a row?” I thought back to the nonconversation, then corrected myself. “More than one word in a row.”

Eddie stood, stretched, and then walked up my body and flopped onto my chest. “Mrr.” A front paw reached out to rest on my chin.

“When you do that, it makes it hard to talk,” I told him.

“Mrr.”

I laughed softly. “That's the point, is what you're saying? That I should just enjoy the sunset and your company and not worry so much about one dinner?”

“Mrr!”

So I stopped talking and concentrated on enjoying a cat's affection and the gloriousness of a summer sunset. And, long before the sky went completely dark, I'd put the Doomsday Dinner to the back of my mind.

Well, almost.

*   *   *

The next morning, life at the library was more or less back to normal. Work was piling up on my desk, Josh and Holly were trying to pin me down on when I'd turn in my application for library director, and the carpet guys I'd contacted had come and gone, leaving behind nothing but a faint new-carpet smell and a swath of carpet that held no bad memories.

Yes, there was still a killer on the loose and, yes, I was still disturbed by the fact that I had no idea how he—or she—had infiltrated my library, but I was determined not to lose my focus on the multitude of tasks that needed to be done. Because in spite of last night's miserable dinner, and no matter what Lindsey Wolverson must think of my character, I was a capable human being and people relied on me to do my job.

And in a just world, which would be where hardworking and almost-always-kind people were given dignity and grace, when one of those hardworking and kind person's cell phone rang, her brain would have used enough of itself to think about how she was going to answer rather than just pick up the phone absently and say, “Busy. What's up?”

There was a short pause. A male throat cleared itself. “Ms. Hamilton?”

I sat up, blinking away from the invoices on my desk whose numbers didn't match what the accounting program on my computer was telling me. “Detective Inwood.
Good morning.” I darted a quick glance at the computer screen.
Yes, still morning. Excellent.
While I may not have been paying full attention to what my phone had been trying to tell me, at least I had the time of day correct by three full minutes. “What can I do for you?”

“The Sheriff, Deputy Wolverson, and I have decided to make you aware of the results of Ms. Vennard's autopsy.”

“Oh.” Did I really want to know this? No, I did not. I'd read far too many thrillers and seen far too many television shows that featured autopsies to want to hear any grisly details regarding a real human being. “Thanks,” I said, “but I'm pretty sure I don't—”

“Ms. Vennard,” he went on, paying zero attention to my wishes and desires, “was not killed by the knife.”

“She wasn't?” Once again, I pictured the silver handle. “Then why was it there?”

“We do not know. The cause of death was strangulation.”

That made no sense.

“The knife found in the body,” he said, “was an X-Acto knife. The blade was thin and about an inch long.”

“A what kind of knife?”

He repeated the word. “It's a brand name. Used by artists, woodworkers, and any number of hobbyists.”

“So not unusual.”

“Not at all. But it's puzzling,” the detective said. “Ms. Vennard's fingerprints were sharp and clear on the handle. The lab's opinion is that no great force was exerted on the handle other than by Ms. Vennard. In addition, the X-Acto injury was postmortem.”

I suppressed a shudder. “Why would she be in the library with an X-Acto knife?”

“That's why I called,” Inwood said. “I'd hoped that as the acting library director, you'd have some insight.”

“Sorry. It doesn't make any sense to me, either.”

“Well,” he said heavily, “we will do our best to keep all avenues of investigation open.”

It was a phrase I'd heard before. “Do you have any new ideas about how Andrea got in the building?” I asked.

The working theory was that she'd walked into the library when it was open and simply hid. Gareth left at one in the morning, and searching for stowaways certainly wasn't anything he'd ever needed to do.

“Not yet,” he said. “No signs of forced entry on any doors or windows; no record of any missing keys.”

The possibility of a missing key would have been high in the old building, which hadn't had new locks since it had been built decades earlier, but Stephen had instituted a strict key-tracking system when we'd moved to the new building, and for once I was grateful for his persnicketiness.

But this scenario also meant that Andrea might have opened the door to her killer, which made—

A sturdy woman barged into my office, tossing back her short brown hair. “Minnie, I need to talk to you.”

I held up my index finger and pointed to the phone. “Is there anything else?” I asked Detective Inwood. “Someone's just come in that I need to talk to.” Didn't want to, but would obviously need to, since she was settling into my guest chair, no invitation required.

“If anything further develops,” Inwood said, “I'll let you know.”

I thumbed off the phone and looked up. “What's up, Denise?”

Denise Slade was fiftyish and the current president of the Friends of the Library
. Just before last Thanksgiving, her husband had died tragically. I was trying to remember that, was trying to allow her time to work through her grief and come to grips with the loss of her life partner, but doing so was easier some days than others.