Nancy J. Bailey - Furry Murder 01 - My Best Cat
Page 17
“What? How come?” He took another big bite of pastry.
“I want to give you time to move out.”
He paused in mid-chew, one cheek bulging out the side of his face.
“Toodles,” I said.
I picked up the carriers and walked away from him. I didn’t look back. I saw that Cecilia was leaving too, trundling her grooming cart toward the door. She noticed my approach, stopped and held it open for me.
“Thanks. Hey, do you want to grab a bite?” I said.
“Sure,” she smiled up at me shyly. As we turned toward the exit, she said, “Do you know any nice single men?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” I said.
Chapter Fifty One
Ginny Robards
Sunday
It was wonderful. Edel had won. We had worked for years for this, but it still felt surreal.
Still, I couldn’t wait to get home. Liesl and I packed up in silence, in a sort of euphoric haze. It was almost as if we said too much, the spell might be broken.
The handsome detective who was investigating the crime scene strolled toward us. Liesl stopped what she was doing.
“I have some information for you,” she said to him.
“What’s that?”
To my surprise, Liesl reached under the cage and pulled a manila envelope out of the show bag. “This is the evidence for motive.”
“What?”
She opened the envelopes and pulled out some large, glossy photographs. “These are digital photos. It wasn’t difficult to do. The camera fits right in the palm of my hand, or in the breast pocket of my shirt, and it takes phenomenal pictures.”
She handed the photos to Reynolds. He took them and began flipping through them. I went over and stood next to him, and he held them out, accommodating, so I could see. There were photos of Roxanne in the vendor’s booth, looking at jewelry. And more photos of her, enlarged and cropped, to show her taking pieces of jewelry and slipping them into what looked like a cloth bag.
“Liesl!” I said.
Liesl gestured to the photos. “You see, Roxanne was smuggling jewelry. Emeralds. She had them hidden in a secret pocket inside Zephyr’s bib. She lifted real jewelry from the vendors and replaced it with fake stuff.”
“How do you know all this?” Reynolds asked.
“I’m a private investigator,” Liesl said. “I was hired by Tracy to tail Roxanne and find out what her campaign plans were.”
Reynolds winced. “Her campaign plans?”
“Yeah, she wanted to know her show schedule. I’m usually hired to find out if someone is sleeping with someone’s husband. Which, as we all know, Roxanne was. Apparently Tracy didn’t care so much about that. But anyway, I stumbled upon other stuff more interesting.”
“Wow,” Reynolds grinned. “You’ve just made my day. Miss Roxanne is going to be locked up for a very long time. Come on by the station tomorrow, we’ll need to do a full interview. Til then, you ladies have a wonderful night.”
He and the security guard moved off to continue their rounds.
I looked at my daughter in amazement. For a moment I was dumbstruck. She had gone back to busily packing things into the show bag, as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place.
”Liesl! You never told me you were a private investigator.”
“Well Mom, that’s why they call it, ‘Private’.”
She smiled. I hadn’t seen her smile in years.
I stared at my daughter. Here I thought I knew her so well. I had thought, really, that there wasn’t much to know. Maybe it was time to start paying more attention.
Chapter Fifty Two
Kim Norwich
Sunday Night
I made my last round, turning off the lights. All was quiet. The show committee had already broken down the cages and everything was gone. The building was transformed back into an empty gymnasium, almost indistinguishable from the place where all the strange events had taken place.
I picked up Baloo’s crate, feeling his weight in it.
“It’s okay Buddy,” I said. “We’ll be home soon. It’s you and me now, and Bill and George. Just the four of us. One big happy family.”
I snapped off the last light, and stepped out the door, and there in the semi-darkness stood Reynolds. He was talking on his cell phone.
“I’ll give a full report in the morning. I’ve got to go.” He snapped the phone shut and turned to smile at me.
“What are you doing still here?” I said.
He gave a little shrug, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be standing outside in the dark. “I was waiting for you.”
The End
About the Author
Artist and author Nancy J. Bailey bred and showed Somali cats for ten years (during a period of temporary insanity). She has written three other books about animals, including Clifford of Drummond Island, a true horse story, and its sequel, Return to Manitou. She lives in Michigan with a family of critters.