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

by Cass, Laurie

  I adjusted my backpack’s straps and started trudging across the open field. It was dotted with the scrub trees that grow up after a farm field lies fallow for even a few years. I tried to picture the young Stan of the high school photo driving a tractor up and down, up and down. Couldn’t quite do it.

  Through the wet field I went, heading for the trail I might—or might not—have seen. At the edge of the field, which was the bottom of the hill, there were rocks. Lots of rocks. Whoever had cleared the field had tossed all the fieldstones into a large heap exactly where the hill had started turning a serious slope. Not so dumb.

  I took a look up at the steepness, wished I hadn’t, and started climbing through the drippy rain.

  Halfway up, I stopped to rest. While Josh’s weather forecast might have been right about the rain, the temperature part was way off. The cool he’d promised was instead a hot heavy humidity that made it hard to breathe.

  On up I climbed. And climbed. Slipping on the wet grass, clutching to it to keep from skidding back downhill, wishing Eddie had suggested I bring cleats instead of a book, climbing, climbing, head down and feet moving, thighs aching, lungs working hard.

  At long last, the burning in my legs fell from a hot fire to a slow ache. I looked around and found I’d reached the edge of the hill’s top. Not the tippy-top, but close.

  I squinted into the deep, dark forest. The thick cloud cover was making night fall before its time, and up ahead, thick canopies of maple leaves blocked out even that dusky light.

  Well.

  I looked back and saw the wet trail I’d just laid. Looked ahead to the murky forest. Shivered, then extracted the flashlight from my backpack. My dad had given me this LED light when I’d bought the houseboat, gravely telling me that no homeowner should be without one.

  With a push of the thumb it went on, and I flinched as the bright light turned the night practically to day. Since I’d never used the flashlight before, its range amazed me. I danced the beam up the trees, down on the ground, and all around in a giant circle. “Wow,” I murmured, “this thing is awesome. Thanks, Dad.”

  I aimed the light forward. Maple tree trunks a foot and a half in diameter. A few scattered bushes. The occasional tuft of grass. A thin carpet of leaves from last autumn. Moss. Not much else. Following a weeks-old quad trail through the woods wasn’t going to be easy. Or . . . was it?

  Bouncing the light off the ground, I saw some rips in the pea green moss. Long rips that were in a direct line with the trail behind me. The rips curved, then faded to dents.

  Well, there you go. Tracking wasn’t so hard; all you had to do was pay attention.

  I took out my cell. Using one hand to shield it from the rain, I clicked off a few pictures, then followed the mossy trail to the very top of the hill. From here, I could see nothing at all except more trees. When the leaves were down, the view must be stupendous, but now there was nothing but green.

  The trail wound around the trees, zigging for an occasional monstrous maple, zagging every so often for a large rock, zigging again for a fallen tree, but always trending in the same direction. South, I was pretty sure. Another thing Eddie should have suggested was to bring a compass. Not that I owned one, but I could have downloaded a compass app to my cell.

  On through the greenish murk I went. Every so often I lost the trail and had to circle around to find it. Every so often I’d be fooled into following a deer path that would peter out to nothing, and back I’d go until I again found the moss dents.

  At one point I stopped to drink some water and glugged down half of it before sense came into my brain. I didn’t know how much farther there was to go; drinking all the water now would be worse than dumb.

  I capped the bottle and started walking again. Intent as I was on following the moss trail, I didn’t notice the bush with the very sharp thorns until I was in the middle of it.

  “Ow!” The stinging pain flared up hot. Muttering to myself about the stupidity of city folk who like to pretend they know what they’re doing out in the woods, I used the flashlight to push the branch this way and that, trying to loosen its thorny grip. I stepped back, oh so carefully, gritting my teeth at the scratches, then came to a sudden stop.

  There, right in front of my eyeballs, was a cluster of long threads. “Huh,” I said. Someone else had been caught by the clutching bush. And there, down at my feet, was another denting impression of quad tires.

  A clue!

  I wiggled my way out of the bush, then tucked the flashlight into my armpit, unzipped the backpack, and took out my cell phone.

  Tempting though it was to pull off the threads and take them with me to dangle in front of the detectives, I didn’t want to mess with the chain-of-evidence thing. So I clicked off a few pictures, the phone’s flash lighting up the trees and sucking up battery power. E-mailing pictures to the detectives wasn’t as good as dangling, but it would have to do.

  Pictures taken, I reshouldered the backpack and went back to following the trail.

  How far I walked, I wasn’t sure. My normal walking pace (3.4 miles an hour, according to the last treadmill I’d been on, back in graduate school) was worth nothing in this situation. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been walking—the sky gave no hints and my cell was on my back.

  Flashlight searching, feet moving, I made my way across the forest floor. The sky was so dark that when I at last emerged into open ground, I almost didn’t notice. What tipped me off was the moss fading away to nothing and the grass coming back.

  I looked up, and out. Far, far out and away. Miles of river valley to the left of me, miles to the right, and straight ahead, distant over the wide valley, was another rise of hills.

  A USGS quadrangle map was in my back pocket, but I didn’t need to pull it out to know where I was. This was the Mitchell River Valley, hundreds of acres of state land dotted with the occasional private property. There wasn’t a paved road inside the entire valley, just gravel roads and an extensive trail system.

  Plus the new little trail I was following, now twin paths of bent grass going down down down the hill.

  I stared at it, then hitched up the backpack. Well. This was what I’d come out here for. Not much point in turning back now.

  Down I went, following the curving trail around the side of the hill, picking my way across the wet grass, trying not to fall on my behind, trying not to think how I’d get back to my car in the dark.

  The farther down the hill I went, the quieter I tried to move. Somewhere up ahead there was a house or a barn or a something that the quad had come from. I was pretty sure that ownership of a quad could be traced. The police would find out if the owner had a connection to Stan. Would find out if the owner had a reason for murder. Then, Stan’s voice would stop whispering in my ear, Holly could get some sleep, and Aunt Frances would stop eating herself up with guilt.

  Down and down the hill. My ears strained to hear a car, the voices of strangers, anything, but the only thing I heard was my own footsteps.

  Then, finally, around another curve and down a little more, there was a small house tucked into the side of the hill. The slope was so steep that the uphill roof almost touched the ground. A storybook house, if it weren’t for the decaying shingles and peeling paint. If this was Gunnar’s hunting cabin from the days of yore, it had become something else in the interim.

  I turned off the flashlight. No lights were on in the house. And no lights on in the large weather-beaten barn standing to the side and slightly behind the house. The tracks led to a door in the side of the barn. I took one step forward. Stopped.

  Should I?

  Could I?

  The needle of my moral compass bounced between GO AHEAD and GO HOME, spent a lot of time on GO HOME, then swung firmly to GO AHEAD.

  I edged close to the house and peeked in through a kitchen window. No one was in sight. Excellent. I tiptoed to the barn, one eye on the house, one eye on the steep and rocky driveway. The light breeze I’d felt up on the ridge’s
top was nonexistent down here and my forehead beaded with rain and humid summer sweat. I got the sudden urge to use the bathroom.

  No noise, no lights, no nothing. I made it to the barn undetected by anyone save a grasshopper or two, grasped the door handle, and pulled.

  Nothing happened. I gaped. Locked? People locked their barn doors? A wave of complete defeat drained all the energy from my body. I’d come so far. . . .

  No. There had to be a way in. I took a closer look at the door. No hinges. Duh. I pushed instead of pulled, and it creaked open.

  A musty smell rushed out to greet me. I stepped inside quickly and shut the door.

  Complete darkness.

  I reopened the door a crack and let in enough light that I was able to spot the quad parked in the middle of the large space. Shadows all around suggested smaller rooms and old animal stalls, but I didn’t bother poking around. I wanted to get back over the hill to my car and home.

  Dumping my pack on the ground, I unzipped it and hunted around for my cell. I walked fast around the quad, snapping a few flash pictures, zooming in on the Off-Road Vehicle tag slapped on the front fender.

  Done. Time to skedaddle. If this wasn’t enough proof for the detectives, I’d have to keep my promise to Holly some other way.

  I squatted down to put the cell back into my backpack. Just as the zipper hummed shut, complete darkness descended in front of my eyes.

  “What . . . ?” My hands went up. Found cloth. “Hey!”

  An unforgiving grip grabbed at my wrists and pulled them back behind me, one, then the other.

  “What are you doing? I was hiking up in the hills and got lost. I thought maybe—”

  My spur-of-the-moment lie was cut short when I felt my wrists being bound with something strong and sticky. Tape of some kind. Duct tape, or, even worse, the Gorilla Tape that Rafe always went on about. “Strongest tape ever made,” he’d bragged, brandishing a roll. “This stuff won’t ever come off.”

  “Listen,” I said, “whatever you’re doing, there’s no harm done at this point, right? Cut me loose and I’ll leave. Maybe spend a night in the woods, which will be unpleasant, but I’ll live, and in the morning I’ll find where I parked my car and no one will have to know anything about this and—”

  I felt a small rush of air on my face. He was lifting whatever it was that he’d used to cover my head. “Thanks,” I said gratefully, even though he hadn’t lifted it very far. I still couldn’t see, but it’d be okay in a minute. “It was getting a little stuffy in there.” I gave a weak chuckle. “If you—”

  He pushed my jaw shut and slapped tape over my mouth. My yell of protest got as far as my teeth and went no farther. The bag came back over my head and was tied down. I kicked, and hit only air. I tried to pull away, but his grip held me fast. I turned into a kicking, yelling, pulling, shoving, screaming, panicking, sweating mess of a human being. And nothing I did made any difference.

  He grabbed my wrists, and pulled them up behind me. Pain shot through my arms, my shoulders, my back. Nothing existed but the agony being inflicted on me; nothing mattered so much as that it end.

  Which it did when I started walking. He gave me a shove, I took a stumbling step. Another shove, another step. I couldn’t see anything—for all I knew, he’d dug a hole and was going to push me into it and bury me alive. As the idea occurred to me, I slowed. Immediately, he grabbed my wrists again and yanked them high.

  I quick-stepped forward. If he wanted me in a pit, I was going in a pit and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Fury sang through my veins. Frustration came next, with a solid determination following close behind. I was going to get out of this. If he shoved me into a pit, I was going to climb out. If he tried to bury me alive, I’d hold my breath until he left and then climb out. He was not going to beat me. He. Was. Not.

  My anger sustained me during the interminable walk across the barn. Shove, stumble. Shove, stumble. The barn hadn’t seemed nearly this large when I’d walked into it. I spent half a second wanting this horrendous journey to end, then spent a much longer time not wanting it to end. Whatever was waiting for me couldn’t be better than this. Stumbling around in the dark wasn’t so bad when you considered possible alternatives.

  Shove. Stumble. Shove. Stumble. Then a very, very hard shove.

  I ran forward one, two, three steps, almost falling, sinking low to avoid falling because there’s not much worse than falling with your hands tied behind your back. Then, breathing hard, I stood straight, anticipating his next shove.

  It never came.

  Instead, a door banged shut and a bolt slammed home. The door rattled a few times and I heard a grunt. Heavy footsteps crossed the barn. Another door slammed shut. Then nothing.

  He was leaving.

  I was alone. And not dead.

  Two big pluses. Two extremely big pluses. And if I wanted to add more items to the positive side of the column, I wasn’t in a pit, buried alive, or even injured if you didn’t count the bruises I was sure were forming on my back.

  So . . . now what?

  Much depended on what he was going to do. If he was headed for the house to find his killing weapon of choice, I was pretty much out of luck. Maybe I’d be able to work my way out of my bonds, get out of whatever room I was in, and run for help, but each of those things could take hours and he might be back in minutes. If that was his plan, the best I could do was to . . . to what? Make my death as hard for him as possible? Wouldn’t that mean I’d be inflicting even more pain on myself, with the same eventual result?

  I debated the point with myself, then decided that since the thought of giving in was making me angry all over again, one issue was resolved.

  Of course, I still had no idea who this guy was. I knew it was a guy, because when he’d been pushing me around, I’d felt arms too hairy to belong to a female. So Caroline Grice was out, unless she’d hired her gardener to follow me. Was it Gunnar? Was it Larry, aka Kyle? Was it another of the Larabee relatives? I still didn’t know.

  The rumble of a engine starting made me blink. I hadn’t seen a vehicle; it must have been parked on the other side of the barn. One point off Minnie’s score for a poor job of reconnoitering.

  I tilted my head, listening, trying to ignore the fear that was growing and spreading fast.

  The car made its way down the gravel drive and onto the narrow gravel road I’d seen coming down the hill. It didn’t take long for the noise of the car to fade away completely.

  It took a lot longer for my sobs to stop.

  Chapter 19

  When I ran out of tears, I started thinking. That didn’t work very well at first, because I kept thinking that the most likely possibility for my future was one of two options. Either the bad guy would come back and finish me off, or I’d die from dehydration and starvation. Years from now, someone would come across my desiccated body. Dental records would eventually reveal my identity, my parents would get a chance to say good-bye, Tucker might see my name in the paper and spare a thought for a woman he barely remembered, and the mystery of how I’d come to die in a barn would go forever unsolved.

  Unsolved? The thought brought me to some semblance of sense. The mystery of my death wouldn’t go unsolved, not if I could help it. I had too much to do before I could even consider dying. I wanted to see the house of Green Gables, to track down the equivalent of St. Mary Mead, to find out if there really was a Zebra Drive in Botswana. Besides, if I died now, I’d never find out how the tangled love lines in the boardinghouse got untangled.

  Time to stop thinking and start doing.

  I shuffled over to a wall and put my back up against it, then slid down its rough surface until I hit the floor. Relax, I told myself. The only way you’re going to get out of this is to stay calm and loosen those muscles. Breathe deep. Center yourself.

  My wish to relax was complicated by the fact that I could die soon, but I did my best to forget that singular item.

  I rolled onto my side
, my arms behind my back, arms that desperately wanted to be in front of me.

  Loosen. Relax. Lengthen.

  Don’t think about the odds of getting free, don’t think that he might come back any second, don’t think about the strong, sticky tape around your wrists, don’t think about the bag over your head—which smells as if it has been sitting on the floor of a barn for fifty years—and don’t think about how thirsty you are. Definitely don’t think about that.

  Relax. Loosen. Lengthen.

  The words of that long-ago ballet teacher came back to me. Long line, Minnie. Make yourself into a long line. Don’t you see?

  Finally, I did.

  I let my arms lengthen into a line of the longest kind. Let my spine grow long. Made it into an arch. And, just like that, the twin changes in my body let my wrists slip around my hind end and up under my knees.

  Gasping, sobbing a little again, I rolled to the floor. Managed to pull one leg through, then the other.

  I tucked my hands under my chin and held them there, relief singing in my ears. My hands weren’t behind my back anymore! I’d won! A battle, not the war, but the small victory thrilled me more than all my Christmas and birthday presents put together.

  Then I got over it.

  Hands in front of me were well and good, but I still couldn’t see, my hands were still tied together, and I was still trapped in a barn.

  But though my wrists were strapped together tight, my fingers were free. I felt the bag that covered my head. Burlap, judging from the thick weave of the fabric. I felt around some more. A lined burlap bag, cotton on the inside, with a long length of twine sewn into the edge as a drawstring.

  Twine that was tied tight with multiple knots.

  I pictured a farm wife cutting a piece of cotton from an old shirt or dress, sewing it into the bag, cutting a length of twine for the drawstring, and giving it to her husband to use for carrying his . . . lunch? His spare socks? City girls don’t spend enough time on farms to know these things. What I did know was that small fingers are good at picking out knots.