Orphaned in Cherry Hills

by Paige Sleuth

  Julie shuffled toward the hallway. “You want to come see my room?”

  Kat considered for a moment whether Elsa would be bothered by her hanging around, then decided she would risk it. “Sure.”

  One of the cats followed them. Kat wasn’t sure which one. Earth, probably. He seemed to be the friendliest of the bunch. Whichever one he was, he looked at home as he jumped onto Julie’s bed and laid down on her pillow.

  Julie closed and locked the door. “What did you and Aunt Elsa talk about?”

  Kat hesitated. “Nothing much.”

  “What about you and Mrs. Treeger?”

  “Oh, this and that.”

  Julie sat down on the mattress and stroked the cat. “You talked about me, right?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then it was about my mom.”

  “Yeah.” Kat supposed she shouldn’t be surprised by Julie’s deduction. After all, it wasn’t as though she and Mrs. Treeger had much in common.

  “What did she tell you?” Julie asked.

  “She said everybody loved your mother.”

  Julie dipped her head down. Earth—or whoever—swatted at her hair as it cascaded around her shoulders.

  Kat watched her, debating over how much to say. Although she didn’t want to shut down all talk of Carolyn as Elsa had apparently done, she also didn’t want to get Julie’s hopes up only to send them crashing down later. As eager as she’d been to investigate this morning, she was growing increasingly skeptical of her ability to unearth something that might crack open the case.

  But Julie looked so sad right now Kat didn’t think anything she said could do more damage than remaining silent.

  Kat sat down next to her. “I asked Mrs. Treeger if your mother had any enemies. I thought maybe she could tell me if someone on the PTA might have had it in for her.”

  Julie’s head snapped up. “You think one of the other middle school moms killed her?”

  “It was an option that crossed my mind.”

  Julie dragged her lip ring between her teeth, appearing to ponder that.

  “But that doesn’t seem to be what happened,” Kat said, needing the reminder herself. “The police interviewed and eliminated everyone in the PTA.”

  “What about Old Franny?” Julie blurted out. “I mean, Mrs. Dearborn?”

  “What about Ms. Dearborn?”

  Julie plucked a stray cat fur off of the sweater. “Maybe she killed Mom.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  Julie wiggled the ends of her hair in front of Earth, not meeting Kat’s eye. “She’s cold-hearted.”

  Yesterday, Kat might have agreed with her. But her conversation with Ms. Dearborn today had shown her a different side to the woman.

  “Reserved might be more accurate,” Kat said.

  Julie pulled away from Earth to look at Kat. “But it’s possible she did it, right?”

  “I suppose.” It certainly wouldn’t hurt to consider it, Kat figured. It wasn’t as if they had many other suspects. “Did she know your mom?”

  “I don’t think so, but I didn’t exactly hang out with Mom’s friends.”

  “How old was your Mom when she died?”

  “Gosh.” Julie’s brow furrowed. “She had me when she was twenty-four, so . . . thirty-six?”

  Kat nodded. Then she flushed, hoping Julie didn’t think she had just administered an impromptu math lesson. At least Willow would be proud of her.

  “Ms. Dearborn said she turned eighty-five last year,” Kat said, forcing her thoughts back to Carolyn’s murder. “How likely is it that your mom befriended somebody over forty years her senior?”

  Julie deflated. “Not very, I guess.”

  Guilt flooded through Kat over how quickly she’d knocked the wind out of Julie’s sails. “But it’s a good theory,” she said. “And you all lived in the same city, so it’s conceivable Ms. Dearborn and your mom did know each other somehow.”

  Julie nodded with renewed enthusiasm. “Right.”

  “But what would be her motive?”

  “Maybe she . . . wanted Voldemort.”

  “Is there something special about him?” Kat asked. “Besides the fact that you love him.”

  Julie pressed her lips together for a moment before she sighed. “No. I guess not.”

  “And she offered to let you take him back,” Kat pointed out.

  “Yeah. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t her.”

  “Who else besides Ms. Dearborn do you think could have done it?”

  Kat held her breath as she waited for Julie’s response, anxious to see if she would mention her aunt. With their relationship already strained, she didn’t want to plant the idea in her head, but if Julie came up with it on her own she wouldn’t hesitate to try to dig up more evidence against the woman.

  But Julie merely shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  So much for that tactic, Kat thought. But perhaps she could still get answers to some of her questions without actually mentioning Elsa. “Do you know what happened to your mother’s assets after she died?”

  “Her assets?”

  “Her money.”

  “It went into some sort of trust thingy.” Julie pulled a few stray furs out of the sweater and let them fall to the floor. “I get it when I turn eighteen.”

  “Oh.” So Elsa hadn’t benefited financially from Carolyn’s death after all. That made Kat feel a little better, even if she was still no closer to identifying Carolyn’s killer.

  They fell silent, having seemingly run out of theories. Kat supposed it was just as well. With Elsa in the kitchen working on dinner, Kat would have to leave soon anyway.

  Julie plucked another cat hair out of the sweater and held it over the wastepaper basket next to her nightstand. It glinted white as it caught the light during its descent into the bin, prompting Earth to swat at it.

  Julie grinned. “Water’s cute, huh?”

  Oops. So apparently this was Water, not Earth. “How do you tell them apart?” Kat asked, grateful to be moving on to a more upbeat topic. She would hate for their parting words to be about the murder.

  “I don’t know. Their quirks, I guess. They act different.”

  “That makes sense.”

  Julie bent over the cat and swished her hair back and forth over his body. “Like, Water digs this game more than his brothers.”

  As though to corroborate her statement, Water attacked Julie’s hair with a vigor that made Kat laugh. Julie giggled along with her, and for the second time that day Kat could almost picture what she had been like before her world had crumbled around her.

  She only hoped that one day that happy-go-lucky girl would be back for good.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “How was Seattle?” Andrew asked, folding his arms behind his head as he reclined against Kat’s sofa.

  “Okay.” Kat sat down next to him and snuggled into his side, relieved to be dressed in jeans and a T-shirt again. The first thing she’d done upon returning home was change out of that scratchy skirt she’d worn for Ms. Dearborn’s benefit.

  Andrew wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Ms. Dearborn tell you anything new?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning.” Kat tipped her head back to peer at him. “You know, she’s different than I remember.”

  “Different how?”

  “She still has that aloof air about her, but listening to her it’s clear she cares.”

  “I guess sometimes people aren’t always what they seem.”

  Elsa’s face flashed through her head as Tom jumped up to join them. She absently petted the cat, wondering if she was the only person who had ever suspected Elsa of killing her sister. To an outsider, she would come across as the dutiful aunt who had stepped up to do the right thing by taking in her orphaned niece when she had nowhere else to go.

  But with money out of the picture, what would Elsa’s motive have been? Had she been jealous of her sister? Maybe that was the real reason why she didn’t like talking about her.


  Tom leaned close to Kat’s face and meowed. She was so preoccupied with Carolyn Conway’s death that for a second she thought he was trying to brainstorm with her.

  Andrew stroked the feline. “You didn’t like us ignoring you, huh, Tom?”

  “He probably thinks he deserves treats since I was away all morning,” Kat said.

  Andrew eased away from her and stood up. “Well, then we’ll have to give him some.”

  “Later. I don’t want him to think he can beg to get what he wants.”

  Andrew smirked. “You mean like how you begged for me to get you that police report?”

  “That’s different. I promised you my undying gratitude in return. I don’t think Tom’s promising us anything.”

  Matty exited the kitchen. Spotting the humans clustered together, she trotted over, stopping to bump her head against the underside of the coffee table and stretch out one hind leg. Kat grinned as she watched her, well aware that Matty’s show had been choreographed to get their attention. Tom might be the more vocal of the two cats, but Matty had perfected her own, silent way of letting people know when she wanted to be petted.

  “I see you there, Matty.” Andrew reached down and scratched the tortoiseshell’s head. “What do you think? Undying gratitude in exchange for treats. You in?”

  Matty’s gray-striped tail swished back and forth.

  “Speaking of undying gratitude,” Kat said, nodding at the tangled mess of outfits still lying on the couch, “you’ll have mine if you help me put those clothes away.”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “You already gave me your undying gratitude yesterday, remember?”

  Kat sighed. “Fine, I’ll do it myself. I should probably put the stuff I don’t plan to wear soon in bags anyway. Otherwise they’ll get dusty.”

  Andrew lifted up the forest-green skirt on top of the pile. “Forget dust. This thing is coated in cat hair. It looks like Matty left half her body weight on here.”

  One glance at the garment confirmed his observation. Kat made a face at Matty. The tortoiseshell stared innocently back at her.

  Andrew beat the skirt a few times before tossing it onto the coffee table. “I give up. You’ll have to get it dry-cleaned.”

  “Or I could give it to charity. I don’t know what even possessed me to buy that in the first place. It doesn’t go with anything else I own.”

  Tom hopped from the couch to the coffee table to see for himself what all the fuss was about. He sniffed at a particularly dense cluster of Matty’s fur, then proceeded to rub first his chin, then the top of his head against the spot. Apparently he couldn’t get close enough for his liking. He ended up flopping over, squirming in pleasure as he rolled back and forth over the fabric.

  Kat had to smile. “You’re bound and determined to cover every last square inch of that thing with fur, aren’t you, Tom?”

  “When it comes to competitive shedding, you have two of the best,” Andrew quipped.

  The laugh his words inspired died before it escaped her lips. She stared at Tom, images of Julie plucking fur off of her mother’s sweater superimposing themselves over the scene playing out before her now.

  What color had that one fur she’d watch fall into the trash bin been? She recalled how it glinted in the light. If it wasn’t white, it was pretty close. Yet Elsa’s cats were all gray. And Voldemort—the only other animal Kat could think of that might have been in contact with that sweater in the past four years—didn’t have a spot of white on him.

  So where had the fur come from?

  “Kat?” Andrew asked, touching her shoulder.

  She peered up at him, her pulse quickening as the implications of her observation sank in. “The fur.”

  “Fur?”

  “There was a white fur stuck to the sweater Julie inherited from Carolyn.”

  Andrew screwed up his forehead. “So?”

  “So, where did it come from?”

  “It could have come from anywhere.”

  “Or,” Kat said, jumping to her feet, “it could have come from Carolyn’s killer.”

  Andrew stared at her as if she’d just confessed to killing Carolyn herself.

  “Think about it, Andrew,” she said, pacing back and forth. “Their dog is black, and Julie’s aunt only has gray cats. Plus, Julie said today is the first time she’s ever worn the sweater since she moved in with Elsa. So, where does that leave us? Carolyn Conway had to have picked up that fur back when she was still alive.”

  “Or it came from Ms. Dearborn’s house.”

  “Ms. Dearborn doesn’t have animals. Well, except for Voldemort, Julie’s black Lab.”

  “She might have had other pets four years ago,” Andrew pointed out. “And even if she didn’t, one of her other foster kids could have brought the fur into her house with them.”

  Kat stopped pacing. “I guess that’s true.”

  “And even if Carolyn Conway had picked up that fur from somewhere, it didn’t necessarily come from her killer. She was a PTA mom. She probably hung out at the school doing PTA things with people who had all sorts of pets at home. Or she could have rubbed elbows with some cat lady at the grocery store, for all we know.”

  Kat frowned, not liking how easily he was poking holes into her theory. But she knew he was only doing what he was trained to do, which was to view all potential evidence through the eyes of the law. And in this case, a court would dismiss that fur faster than Tom could sprint to the kitchen when he heard a bag of treats ripping open.

  And yet, despite all her rationalizations, Kat knew she wouldn’t be able to rest until she pursued this lead for everything it was worth.

  She snatched her cell phone and keys off the coffee table and stormed toward the front door.

  “Where are you going?” Andrew asked.

  “That fur might not hold up in a court of law, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore it.”

  She threw open the door and raced out of the apartment before Andrew even had a chance to reply.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Kat.” Julie looked startled to see her standing on her doorstep. “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought of something.” Kat peered past her shoulder. “Is your aunt here?”

  “She had to go back to work after dinner.”

  Kat relaxed a little. She didn’t think Elsa would appreciate her dredging up Carolyn’s murder for the second time that day.

  Julie fiddled with the doorknob. “So, do you want to come in?”

  “Yes, please. You didn’t have plans, did you?”

  Julie shook her head. “Brianna’s still grounded.”

  Kat was tempted to ask whether she had any other friends but decided now wasn’t the time to get into that.

  She followed Julie into the living room, drawing the attention of the three cats present. “I’d like to take a look at your mom’s sweater.”

  Julie stopped short. “You would?”

  “Yes. You were picking what looked to be animal fur out of it earlier, and it occurred to me when I got home that it might have been white. Do you remember that?”

  “No.” Julie frowned. “But I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  Kat took a step toward her and softened her voice. “Julie, I’m not sure if it means anything, but if there are hairs from a foreign animal on that sweater, it might be something to look at in terms of figuring out who could have been at your house that Saturday four years ago.”

  Julie didn’t react immediately. When she did, she yelped as if Kat had backhanded her. “You’re saying whoever killed Mom brought that fur with him and left it on her sweater?”

  “Well, it probably wasn’t quite that deliberate. But if there are foreign hairs on your mom’s sweater, it might be possible to trace them back to her killer.” It was also possible they’d end up on a wild-goose chase. “It’s a long shot, but it’s worth looking into, don’t you think?”

  “Gosh, yes.” Julie nearly tripped over her own feet as s
he charged out of the room. “I’ll be right back.”

  Kat sat down next to one of the Russian Blues curled up on the couch. Earth or Fire or whoever leaned forward to sniff her leg. She must have passed inspection because he laid his chin back down on his tail and closed his eyes.

  Julie returned less than a minute later, the cardigan clutched in her hands. “Here.” She lobbed the sweater at Kat but ended up aiming wrong. The cardigan landed on top of a snoozing Earth.

  Startled out of his catnap, Earth leaped up, his back arched in a fighting position, and his tail puffed up to three times its normal size. Once he realized what had happened, he tilted his nose up in offense, gave the sweater a dirty look, and ambled off, his tail still twitching.

  Kat retrieved the cardigan. She could feel the energy sluicing off of Julie in waves as the teenager plopped onto the couch next to her. For Julie’s sake, she desperately hoped something came of this.

  “These dark furs could have originated from either Voldemort or one of your aunt’s cats, so I’m not sure what they can tell us,” she began.

  Julie hung on Kat’s words, her head bobbing up and down.

  A lighter strand caught Kat’s eye. She plucked it from the fabric and held it up for inspection. “Here’s a white one. It’s shorter and finer than I would expect from a human hair. I’m guessing it came from an animal.” She looked at Julie. “Do you remember if any of your mom’s friends had a white pet?”

  Julie’s brow furrowed. “I don’t really know.”

  “There are several white furs on here,” Kat said, picking them out. That reassured her somewhat that their presence wasn’t a complete fluke.

  “I don’t remember Mom mentioning any white dogs,” Julie said.

  “What about cats?”

  Julie shook her head, huffing in frustration.

  Something Susan Treeger had said flitted through Kat’s mind. “What about Pizza?”

  “Pizza?” Julie queried, glancing toward the kitchen.

  “Pizza the First,” Kat clarified. “Susan, Mrs. Treeger, said she had a cat who died a couple years ago named Pizza.”

  “Oh, you’re talking about Mackenzie’s cat Pizza. I remember him. But he was kind of brownish.”