Lending a Paw: A Bookmobile Cat Mystery (Bookmobile Cat Mysteries)

by Cass, Laurie

  “Mrr.”

  • • •

  With food in his stomach, Eddie slept through the next stop, the parking lot of a small fieldstone church. He’d curled up with the paper towels on the floor and not one of the half dozen people who came on the bookmobile even knew he was there.

  The last stop was at a township hall. I pushed the button to lower the stairs, unlocked the doors, and put my head out. No SUVs, no motorcycles, no bicycles, no kids. Huh. There was a single car, large and dark, but no one was in it. Probably a neighbor, using the lot for overflow parking.

  “Are we early?” I asked Eddie.

  He opened his eyes, closed them, and started a deep rumbling purr.

  I patted his head as I reached inside my backpack for my cell phone. “Hey, look, there’s reception out here. Go figure.”

  According to the phone, we were one full minute past the scheduled bookmobile arrival time. Aunt Frances couldn’t understand how I didn’t want to wear a watch, but I saw no need to strap something around my wrist when I had a cell phone.

  I popped up the ceiling fan and went outside. Still nothing, still no one. We were in the bottom of a wide valley that ran between two hilly tree-covered ridges, and the fields between us and the hillsides were dotted with the occasional farmhouse and barn. Some of these farms, I’d been told, had been in the same family for more than a hundred years, handed down through the generations.

  No one from any generation, however, seemed to be on their way to the bookmobile.

  I climbed back aboard, pulled a file out of the rack I’d had installed above the desk behind the driver’s seat, and found the list of today’s stops. As I punched in the phone number, I mentally added “Phone each stop contact day before” to my ever-expanding prep list.

  “Elaine? This is Minnie Hamilton with the bookmobile, and—”

  “Oh, Minnie, I’m so glad it’s you!” Elaine Parker said. “I called the library, but they couldn’t find your cell number. I needed to tell you that our women’s softball team is playing a Red Hat tournament series and we made it to the finals, isn’t that great? Everyone is up at the field, so no one’s going to visit the bookmobile.” She paused, then said hesitantly, “You’ll come back, won’t you?”

  “Of course we will,” I said. “And congratulations on your softball team. I’ll be back in three weeks.”

  Elaine gushed her gratitude, and when I hung up, I looked at my cat.

  “Well, Mr. Eddie,” I said, “now what?” Elaine had said no one was going to show up, but the bookmobile’s published schedule clearly stated that we’d be here for thirty minutes. On one hand, there was little point in staying. On the other, our schedule said “Williams Township Hall, 3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.”

  On the third hand, with a bookmobile full of books, there was plenty to do. The half hour sped by as I straightened and organized and when I looked at my phone, it was past time to go. I closed down the ceiling fan and went to shut the back door I’d left open in hopes of attracting patrons. It had been a dry stop, unless you wanted to count the flies.

  I stood on the bottom step and reached around for the door handle. Just as the door was about to click closed, a black-and-white streak bounded over my foot and leapt into the outside air.

  “Eddie! You get back here right now!”

  He galloped across the parking lot.

  “Eddie!” I yelled. “Don’t go into the road!” I pounded up to the front of the bookmobile, grabbed the keys from the ignition, shoved my cell into my pocket, ran down the steps, locked the door, and pelted hell-for-leather after my cat.

  If he heard my frantic calls, he gave no indication. I ran as fast as I could, but Eddie’s four legs left me far behind. He hurtled across the gravel parking lot, went over the drainage ditch with a graceful leap, raced across the road—The road! Oh, Eddie—and over the opposite ditch, never looking left, never looking right.

  By the grace of all that was holy, no cars showed up to hit either one of us. “Eddie!” I called as I labored behind him, more a pant now than a shout. “Come back!”

  He ran down the far side of the road’s ditch, then shot into a mass of small trees and overgrown shrubs and knee-high grass.

  “Rot. Ten. Cat,” I huffed as I ran. “Why. Do. I. Keep. You?” I made the same turn Eddie had and pushed my way through the vegetation. “Eddie? Eddie!”

  Behind a row of shaggy bushes, I saw the roofline of a house. An old farmhouse, of one and a half stories, sagging clapboard siding, and no decorative frills whatsoever. “Eddie?” I heard a faint “Rrrowwr.”

  “Where are you, pal?” I pushed aside snagging branches and reached the side of the house. “Eddie? Are you okay?” Here, it was a little easier to forge through the jungle that might once have been landscaping. “Eddie?”

  “Rrowr.”

  I heard him scratching his claws on something. “I’m getting closer, bud. Where are you?” More bushes, more shrubs . . . and then I burst out of the jungle and into a clearing bounded on one side by the house, on another by a decrepit barn, and on the other two sides by a view of the hills.

  Eddie stood on his hind legs, scratching at the corner of the house. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, looking around, and noted an old driveway. Huh. If I’d been smarter, I would have followed that instead of tracking Eddie through the wilderness.

  “Rrrowwrr!” he yowled, scratching wildly.

  “What is wrong with you?” I waded toward him through the tall grass. My voice took on the wheedling tone I used when I wanted him to do something he didn’t want to. “Tell you what. You come here right now and I won’t take away your PlayStation privileges. What do you say?”

  He gave me a quick look over his shoulder. Went back to yowling and scratching.

  So much for the wheedling tone. Not that it had ever worked before, but it didn’t hurt to try.

  I came within grabbing distance, but bided my time. If I reached for him now, he’d take off in a new direction. Surely, a nice monologue from Mother Minnie would calm him down. “What’s the matter?” I looked down at my troublesome cat, who was continuing to scratch and was now making disturbing howling noises deep in his throat. “It’s an abandoned farmhouse and no one has lived here in years. Mice and rats, maybe, but if it’s mice you want, I’ll take you up to the boardinghouse. Aunt Frances would love your help.”

  “Rrowr!”

  I squatted down to scoop him up. He was a big cat and I’d learned the hard way to lift with my legs. “Here we go, let’s—”

  “RROWR!”

  I jerked back. Eddie had never bitten me, never clawed me, never been anything but the lovable yet dorky cat that he was. But for a second there . . .

  Fine.

  Standing up out of my crouch, I tried to think what to do. My cat had gone berserk and I had no clue how to unberserk him. If only he could talk.

  Or not. I might learn more than I wanted to know.

  I watched him scratch. Obviously he wanted in the house, but what could possibly be in there? Through a side window I saw kitchen cabinets, their doors open and shelves as bare as Mother Hubbard’s.

  “There’s nothing there, Edster.”

  “Mrrorwr!”

  Again with the scary howly noise. If I showed him that the place was empty, maybe he’d come to his kitty senses and we could be on our way. Since this was the kitchen, there must be a door just around the corner. “Let’s go around the back, okay, Eddie?” I headed off in that direction. “C’mon, we’ll—”

  He bounded past me and streaked off.

  Well.

  “Must be you want to check out the backyard,” I said, following him once again. Around the corner, I frowned. Why was the kitchen door open? And it looked broken. Strange . . .

  “Mrr!”

  “Okay, okay.” I scanned the tall grass for signs of Eddie. “I can take a hint if I’m beaten over the head with it. I’m really pretty smart, you know. Did I ever tell you what I got on my SATs? Bet m
y score was a lot higher than yours, and—oh!”

  For a brief, eternal second, I didn’t move. Didn’t think. Didn’t breathe. Because Eddie was standing next to something completely unexpected—the figure of a man. He was lying on his back, one arm flung across his chest, his face turned away from me, so all I got was the impression of age, frailty, and the absence of any life. But maybe . . . maybe there was breath. Maybe there was a chance.

  I rushed forward. “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Do you need help?” I was kneeling, checking for a pulse, feeling the cool skin, knowing I was far too late, but looking for life anyway. “Can you hear me? Can you—”

  My hand, which had been on the man’s wrist, came away slightly red and wet. Blood. What on . . . ?

  I swallowed. The blood had come from a small hole in his shirt, right where his heart was. A small, bullet-sized hole. My gaze went from the wound upward to his face. Which was looking familiar, even in the slackness of death, even in this strange place.

  Recognition clicked and on its heels came an instinctive reaction that, later, I would never be able to explain. But I’d had to try, couldn’t not try.

  “Stan! Can you hear me? I’m calling 911 right now.” I reached into my pocket for my phone. The instant I heard the dial tone, I pushed the three numbers. “The EMT guys will be here before you know it. They’ll take care of you, okay?”

  I pushed the SEND button hard and leapt up to straddle Stan Larabee’s midsection. My CPR class hadn’t been that long ago. I could bring him back. I could. I had to.

  “Nine-one-one,” the dispatcher said. “What is your emergency?”

  Chapter 4

  An infinitely long time later, Eddie and I were sitting in the bookmobile driver’s seat, waiting for a deputy from the county sheriff’s office to give us the okay to go home. Though my tears had dried up half an hour ago, sniffles remained.

  “I couldn’t save him, Eddie. I tried and tried but nothing I did mattered.” I hugged Eddie tight and he didn’t make even a squeak of protest. “I did everything they told me to in that class, but it wasn’t enough.” Sniff.

  The EMT crew had arrived seventeen minutes after I made the 911 call. Amazing, really, considering the distances in this part of the county, but it hadn’t been soon enough to bring Stan Larabee back.

  “He’s gone, Eddie, he’s really gone.” Sniff. “It seems so wrong. He was so full of life. There were so many things he wanted to do.” During the planning phase of the bookmobile purchase, Stan and I had met on an almost daily basis. I’d learned enough about him to know that he deeply regretted some of the things he’d done while a wheeling and dealing real estate developer. I also knew that he’d divested himself of his third wife a decade earlier, had never had any children, and was working almost as hard at giving away his money as he had at making it.

  “But no handouts,” he’d told me. “I’m attaching strings to the checks I write. And no money for poor planning. If you can’t use the money you have in a sensible way, why should I give, or even loan, you some of mine?”

  Eddie bumped my chin with the top of his head.

  Absently, I started petting him. “I don’t even know who to call. I mean, sure, the police will notify the next of kin, but I feel that I should say something to one of his relatives.” As far as I knew, though, there wasn’t anyone. He lived alone in a great big house on a great big hill that had been designed to take advantage of the views of both Lake Michigan and Janay Lake.

  A big fat raindrop splattered on the bookmobile’s wide windshield. Then another, and another. The blue skies that had accompanied us through the morning and halfway through the afternoon were gone. A thick layer of low clouds, heavy with rain, had moved across the sun and now the bookmobile was getting its first shower.

  “Hope it doesn’t shrink,” I murmured.

  Eddie settled back down into my lap and turned on his purr.

  “You’re not so bad for an Eddie.” I laid my hand on his back. His body heat seeped into my skin, warming me in more ways than one.

  It had been my Florida-based brother who had made me aware of Stan’s existence. Matt, a Disney Imagineer, had run into “this older guy who said he’d just built a place in Chilson. He was down here to tidy up some business, sounded like. Anyway, I told him my sister was a librarian up there and he said for you to give him a call.”

  I’d demurred, but Matt had pressed me with all the pressure a big brother can bear. “Do it, Min. This guy is a big deal down here.”

  So I’d called. Stan invited me to lunch at the local diner and before we’d finished our burgers, it was clear that we were going to be friends. Despite the disparity in our ages, backgrounds, and life experiences, there was an instant rapport between us that defied all understanding.

  But the more I’d gotten to know Stan, the more I didn’t understand the difference between the man I knew and the Stan Larabee that everyone else seemed to have encountered. The comments I heard ranged from “He should have stayed in Florida” to “Stan Larabee never lifted a finger to help anyone in his whole life” to “Larabee wouldn’t part with a dime unless he was guaranteed a quarter back.”

  Yet he’d written a check to the Chilson District Library with so many zeros I wasn’t sure how he got them all to fit on the line.

  “Here you are, Minnie,” he’d said, ripping it out of his checkbook. “The only way this county is going to get a bookmobile is if someone pays for the whole dang thing. Give that shortsighted library board this check and my compliments.”

  I’d thanked him profusely and said something about the discrepancy in how I saw him and how the rest of Chilson saw him. He’d roared out a laugh that somehow held an edge of black. “You’re not from a small town, are you? Stay here long enough and you’ll see.”

  “See what?” I’d asked.

  “That you can’t live long enough to outlive a reputation.”

  Soon afterward, I’d stopped by to see my best friend, Kristen, owner and operator of the Three Seasons restaurant, and begun to see what he’d meant. Kristen had been horrified when I’d told her I’d gone to Stan and asked for money.

  “You did what?” She’d looked down at me, every inch of her five-foot-eleven self vibrating with disapproval. “Stan Larabee doesn’t hand out money. Everybody knows that.”

  “Everybody is wrong.” I handed her the copy I’d made of the check.

  Kristen pushed at a wisp of her blond hair that had escaped its tight ponytail and read the numbers out loud. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” Her voice squeaked. “Are you serious?”

  “As your double chocolate cheesecake.” I’d plucked the paper out of her hands. The way her mouth was staying open made me anxious about drool. I planned to frame the copy and hang it in my bedroom so I could see it first thing when I woke up in the morning and last thing before I went to sleep at night. A raised spot from Kristen-drool would ruin the effect completely.

  She squinted as I tucked the copy away in a folder. “Did it cash?”

  “Of course it cashed. Do you think Stan Larabee would write a bad check?”

  “I’d believe anything about that man,” she said darkly.

  “Oh, pooh. I bet most of those stories are rumors made up at the bar at closing time. He was perfectly nice to me.”

  Kristen gave me one of those you’ve-only-lived-here-three-years looks, but said, “Maybe. I’ve never talked to him more than a couple of times, myself.”

  “Well, there you go. Makes you wonder what people say about you, doesn’t it?” Grinning, I’d waved and toddled home, elation filling me so full I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d started floating. I’d bearded the lion in his den. Not only had I survived to tell the tale, but I’d been rewarded beyond anything I’d expected.

  “Mrr.”

  Eddie brought me back from my year-old memory by bumping me on the chin. I’d stopped petting him. “Sorry about that.” I scratched the top of his head and the purr machine restarte
d. Outside, the high hills, now half-hidden by the driving rain, looked cold and empty and lonely. Tears threatened again and I bent down to put my face against Eddie’s fur.

  “Miss?”

  I shrieked, Eddie yowled. I shrieked again as Eddie’s claws sank into my thighs. He yowled again as I scrambled to my feet. He detached his claws from my skin and launched himself across the console, onto the passenger seat, and into the back corner of his cupboard.

  The sheriff’s deputy who had started the chain of unfortunate events stood there, dripping rainwater onto the carpet. “Minnie Hamilton?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said as politely as I could while enduring level seven pain. The agony created by cat claws would drop soon, but there was going to be some teeth-gritting in the interim.

  “I’m Deputy Wolverson. Sorry if you didn’t hear me come in. I have a few questions for you.”

  What I minded was the water he was leaving on the new carpet. I reached for the roll of paper towels. “Would you like to dry off a little?”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not.” I tossed the roll to him and he had little choice but to catch it. “You’re dripping all over the inside of a very expensive bookmobile and the humidity’s going up and it’ll take forever for the carpet to dry and every wet spot will collect dirt like crazy and I’ll have to hire someone to clean the carpet and I don’t know where that money is going to come from, because we don’t have anything like that in the budget for months and . . . and . . .” My mouth kept opening and shutting for a little while, but I’d run out of words.

  “Ms. Hamilton, why don’t you sit down?” he asked. “Is your cat okay?” He gestured at the cabinet.

  “He likes it in there.” I sat down with a thump. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scold you, it’s just . . .” But I didn’t know where to go from there. Fortunately, Deputy Wolverson did.

  “Shock takes people different ways,” he said, ripping a handful of paper towels off the roll. “Some cry, some get mad, some go quiet, others talk. Nothing to be ashamed of.”