“No one who cares anything about environment or wildlife will miss him, that’s for sure.” Goldie ripped a hunk of bread from the loaf, but she put it down and spoke again. “I asked someone from my birding group, and I was right. He’s the one bent on developing a wetlands out east of town, and a couple of years ago he bought up some land that the Nature Conservancy was trying to acquire. A farm, I guess, and he made such an outrageous offer that the owner couldn’t turn it down. My friend said it was a lovely fifty acres, half of it wooded, and Rasmussen’s people cut down the trees, bulldozed, and put up a shopping center.”
“I bet that was the place off Lima Road, just past DuPont.” I had photographed a family of barred owls there over the course of several weeks and remembered the place well. “Big controversy about that at the time.”
She shifted the topic then. “So, what happens now? Did the police seem interested in anyone in particular?”
“Hard to say. They seemed to be sorting out which of us might be worth a second look. They took names and contact information from a lot of us, but that’s all. Tom and me. Giselle, too. Hutchinson said we’ll hear from them within a day or two if they want to talk to us.”
“And who do you think did it?”
“No idea.”
“Oh, come on,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze my arm. “You’re good at this amateur detecting. You must have your suspicions.”
I’d had more than enough of amateur detecting, and I didn’t feel particularly clever about it. “No, I’m not and I don’t. Not really. I mean, it seems like everybody I know had some reason to want the guy out of their lives. But murder? I hate to think that anyone I know would go that far.” But, of course, someone had.
twenty-four
Felicity Feline Rescue, Inc., looks more like a fairytale cottage than a shelter for cats. The outside of the house is painted a warm periwinkle blue, and, in summer, pink climbing roses flank the front door. Now, in chilly mid-November, the stoop was decorated with pumpkins and bittersweet, and a parade of wooden cat silhouettes in all colors of the feline rainbow marched along the sidewalk to the front door. Front doors, really. The entrance was designed to prevent escapes by landing you in a foyer that leads to a second door into the former living room, now lobby.
Felicity, the permanent greeter cat who inspired Angela Fong to start the shelter, yowled hello when I walked in. At least I hoped it was hello. Felicity is not particularly well-named, and she may well have been yelling “Get out!” She has good reasons not to like people, other than her own rescuer. Angela had found Felicity a dozen years earlier scrounging from garbage cans behind the Fong family’s Asian grocery. The little cat had been starving and sick, the whole left side of her face ballooned from an infected wound and her tail rubbed raw by a string knotted around its base. The vet who treated her figured someone had tied something to her to frighten or hurt her. Angela said that finding Felicity was an epiphany, as she suddenly saw how many cats were scrounging for a living in that alley and beyond. She decided to do something about it.
Felicity hopped onto the desk and craned her neck at me, yowling every few seconds. Her face had once been round, but the infection had left one side of her jaw a little off kilter, and the outer corner of the accompanying eye drooped. Her body was stocky and her legs relatively short. Her coat was an odd mix, with tortoiseshell coloring in patches on her body and gray tabby stripes on her face. She had lost her left eye to the infection, but the remaining one was still bright, glimmering green. I was scratching her chin when I heard a door open and close and footsteps on the wooden floor.
“Janet! So good to see you!” Angela Fong wore a soft pink tailored jacket, black wool slacks, and a huge smile.
“Angela! I didn’t expect to see you. Kim said …”
“Oh, I’m not staying. Meeting a client this morning,” she glanced at her watch. “Wish I could stay for the shoot, but no can do. Actually, I’m running late. So …” She leaned in and kissed my cheek, ran a hand down Felicity’s back, and turned to go. As she stepped through the inner door, she called, “Thanks so much, Janet! See you this weekend at the cat show!”
I found Kim Bryant, the shelter’s day-to-day manager, in one of the group cat rooms. Two of the three bedrooms and the dining room housed cats who had been deemed healthy and social. The rooms were impeccably clean, and were furnished with shelves and cat trees for climbing, several types of scratching posts, and several self-scooping litter boxes. The other bedroom was set up with large enclosures arranged to give the residents maximum privacy, and this is where they housed queens with kittens and other cats who had passed the health clearances but were not so keen on feline companionship. The original garage had been converted into Angela’s law office. The house was on a corner, and the garage faced the side street, so the shelter and her office had separate addresses, which I’m sure prevented a lot of confusion.
Kim chattered to me and to the cats as he waved feather teaser wands to help set up photos. “Angela wanted to be here for this,” he said, setting a big tuxedo cat on a chair in front of me.
I kept shooting, but answered, “Right, I know she enjoys these photo shoots.” I lay down on my belly to get a good angle on a pair of wrestling kittens. “It’s okay, things come up.” I resisted my nosy impulse to ask what had come up, figuring that if anyone wanted me to know, they’d tell me. Angela did a lot of pro bono work for low-
income victims of domestic abuse, and more than once I had seen her leave an event early because someone needed legal help now.
Kim seemed to be bursting to tell someone what was going on, and said, “Yeah, some bigwig in town apparently pushed his long-suffering wife over the edge by threatening to move her father from a nursing home he likes.” He paused, then said, “More to the point, apparently, he likes someone at the nursing home, if you get my drift. The old guy’s daughter called …”
“What?” I lowered my camera and sat up to look at Kim.
“Yeah, right? What a jerk. Who cares if a couple of old people are gettin’ it on?”
My cheeks flashed hot. What are the chances? I thought, and asked, “You happen to hear a name? Was it Marconi? Or Rasmussen?”
Kim shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Not sure I ever heard a name, actually. Why?”
“No, nothing.” But it had to be. I sat up and the big black-and-white cat oozed off the chair where Kim had put him and walked straight to me, sat down, looked into my eyes, and opened his mouth. “Meeeeyowwwww!”
Angela walked back in. She was very pale and she didn’t smile or speak until she had a hot cup of tea in her hands. I kept taking photos, but glanced at Angela every couple of minutes until finally I couldn’t stand it. “You okay?”
She seemed to come out of a trance. “What? Oh, yeah, fine. It’s just … My client called. Her husband … We were about to file against him, but he was murdered Saturday night.”
Kim said, “Whoa!” and I said, “Wow.” I decided to keep my mouth shut for once and leave it at that for now. Ten minutes later I left with several hundred images to sort through, at least half of them in my mind.
twenty-five
By the time I got to the Firefly Coffee House, Giselle was ensconced at a table in the back corner, sipping green tea, nibbling an almond biscotti, and reading an e-book. I grabbed a cup of coffee and joined her.
“Oh, I didn’t see you come in,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest.
“Whatcha reading? Something fun?”
“Not really.” She shut down her e-reader and tucked it into a big orange tote bag. “Elder abuse. Sociology.”
Neither of us mentioned Rasmussen’s murder. I had already decided to let Giselle be the one to bring it up. She had been badly traumatized twice in the past year, and I thought she should handle this new shock at her own speed. Besides, I’m no therapist, and I was never sure what to say that would help an
d not hurt Giselle. After we laughed a bit about the Johnny-Come-Early incident, Giselle said, “Janet, is your mom okay?”
That stopped me mid-sip. “What do you mean?” And how the heck do you know anything is up with my mother?
“Oh, yeah, you didn’t know?” Back to Giselle’s habitual interrogative inflection. She does that when she’s nervous. “I’ve been working, you know, volunteering, I don’t get paid, at Shadetree?”
“Ah.” I had heard that Giselle was making regular visits with Precious, who was certified as a therapy dog.
“Your mom talks about you all the time.”
“She does?” What, she remembers me better when I’m not there?
“Yes.” Giselle smiled sadly. “I’ve heard about the wildflower hike with your Brownie troop, your piano recital when you wore a taffeta dress and slid off the piano bench, your …”
I couldn’t help smiling at the memories, but I made a stop sign of my hand and said, “She has good days and bad. A lot of good ones lately, it seems. I think she’s really happy again …”
“That man is just awful.” Giselle was practically snarling. For a second I thought she meant Marconi, but the next sentence set me straight. “He brings his wife there and he pushes her around and he’s rude to her father, Mr. Marconi, and he’s such a nice old man, and now Rasmussen wants to make him move …”
I thought about what Kim had said, that Louise planned to take legal action to stop her husband, but it was all moot now and I kept it to myself. “Well, it was certainly mean-spirited to interfere with two people who have found a little happiness late in life.”
“He’s … he was wicked. He said such mean things, dirty things … He called them ‘sinners,’ for goodness sake!”
“You were there when he found out about their, uh …” I couldn’t find a word that worked. How about “love,” whispered the little voices. Yes, love.
“They love each other, Janet,” said Giselle. “You can see it, you can feel it.” She paused for a moment, then said, “They’re like you and Tom. Everybody can see it.”
It had never occurred to me that anyone was talking about me and Tom. My cheeks went hot, and I shifted in my seat.
Giselle’s face warmed into a grin. “It’s good, Janet. You and Tom are perfect.” The mood didn’t last, though, and she went quiet.
“He—Marconi—was back at Shadetree last night,” I said, “so all is well on that front, I think.” At least I hoped so for both their sakes.
“I try not to wish bad things, especially after, well, you know,” said Giselle, breaking off little bits of biscotti and dropping them into her plate. I did know what she meant. Giselle had found a murder victim six months earlier, someone she cared for, and she was still recovering from the shock. She put the biscotti down and wiped her hands, then looked me in the eye and said, “I shouldn’t wish bad things, but I do sometimes. I wished that evil man all kinds of bad things.”
“We all do that, Giselle.”
“He called your mother some vile names, and he yelled at Ms. Templeton and the other staff, called them,” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “whoremongers.” Giselle rolled her eyes. “He even yelled at me and said Precious was a filthy cur!” Giselle’s hand crushed her napkin in a white-knuckle fist. “That made me so mad!”
Filthy, I thought, remembering how Rasmussen had ranted about Gypsy and her newborn kittens as filthy carriers of disease and parasites. The man has a filthy mind, whispered a voice in my head.
“You know Candace? Candace Sweetwater?” Giselle sniffed. “He’s the reason she lost her store.”
“What store?”
“She had a little gift shop. It was all, you know, hand-crafted things by local artists?” Giselle was slipping back into her habit of turning every sentence into a question. “In that little shopping center where the Doggie Dog grooming shop used to be?”
“I remember that place. The front, anyway. It looked like a gingerbread house,” I said. “I was never in it. Wasn’t it called ‘The Handmade’s Tale’?”
Giselle nodded.
“So what did Rasmussen have to do with that?”
“He wanted them to get out,” she said. “I think he, his group, I think they built that office building that’s there now. But Tory from Doggie Dog told me Candace didn’t want to move and her lease had another year to go, so Rasmussen paid the owner of the shopping center to dig up the parking lot, and that was that.”
“And that meant no customers,” I said.
“When I heard him yelling at the trial on Saturday, I just snapped. I wished he would just fall down dead.” Giselle’s face was pale but for a couple of bright pink points on her cheeks. “I was cleaning up after Precious and watching Rasmussen yell. He grabbed Mrs. Rasmussen and I got madder and madder. Then later I saw him throw a rock at that kitty that Jorge feeds, and Jorge yelled at him, and he called Jorge all kinds of names, you know, bad hateful names.”
Giselle was on a tear, speaking faster and faster, and I tuned her out for a moment, my thoughts bouncing through an array of faces in my mind. So many faces, all attached to people who hated Rasmussen, people he had assaulted one way or another. Giselle. Jorge. Alberta. Hutchinson. His wife, Louise, had plenty of reason to clobber him. I remembered him yelling at Marietta. My mom and Anthony Marconi, although Mom had neither the opportunity nor, probably, the strength to kill him. I didn’t think Marconi did either. I could certainly picture Tom hitting the man again in self-defense, but he would never leave someone to die like that. I was beginning to wonder whether anyone who had ever met Rasmussen had not wanted to kill him. Surely he was a different man when Louise married him. What happened to make him so angry, so belligerent? And then Giselle’s voice recaptured my attention.
“… and it was like a red veil fell over me and …” Something in her tone seized me by the throat and I didn’t think I wanted to hear the rest of this, but Giselle kept going. “I sort of blanked. I had the pooper scooper in both hands, and I was just swinging and pounding, you know?” Giselle’s face was very pale and glistened with perspiration. “It was weird, Janet, because even when I realized what I was doing, hitting and hitting and hitting, I couldn’t stop.”
twenty-six
Alberta laid her finger against her lips and moved in exaggerated tippy-toe posture. Goldie and I followed her down the hall, both careful to be quiet. That was no problem for Goldie in her soft-soled ankle-mocs, but I had to work to keep my boot heels from clacking on the hardwood floor. Alberta stopped and gestured into a bedroom, and we both peeked around the door frame.
Hutchinson sat on the floor beside a medium-sized plastic pet carrier. We must not have pulled off the stealth approach, because he turned and looked at us. When I saw the expression on his face, the word that came to mind was ecstatic. He looked as if he’d had an epiphany.
We all murmured our hellos, and I knelt on the carpet beside him. Goldie joined us and whispered, “Oh, aren’t they beautiful.”
The tiny calico who had so enchanted Hutchinson the night of the kittens’ birth was snuggled against the man’s chest. One hand cradled the kitten’s body, and the other rested with fingertips under her chin. Hutchinson smiled at me.
“Looks like someone is content.”
I meant the kitten, but Alberta grinned as she settled into a chair across from us and said, “That kitten is pretty happy, too.”
Goldie leaned toward the carrier and asked, “Is it okay to hold them?”
“Best thing in the world for them,” said Alberta. She reached both hands into the carrier and lifted the sleeping kittens, then handed the black one to Goldie and the gray tabby to me.
Goldie held the kitten against her lips and whispered, “Lovely, lovely, lovely.” The little tabby nestled into the crook of my arm and went back to sleep, and all the craziness of the past few days faded, if only for the mome
nt. “Boy or girl?”
“Yours,” said Alberta, pointing at Goldie, “is male, and yours,” she pointed at the tabby in my arms, “is female.” Her use of the possessive pronouns was not lost on me. Sneaky, I thought. She finished up with, “And of course Homer’s calico is female.” I didn’t think I’d ever heard anyone call Hutchinson by his first name.
“Ah, lovely,” said Goldie, looking around the room. “And where’s …
what’s her name? The mother?”
“Gypsy,” said Alberta. “She’s taking a little breather. I cooked her some chicken and veggies and gave it to her just before you got here.”
“So, Hutchinson, any news from your world?” I meant the police investigation, and assumed that even if he wasn’t on Rasmussen’s case, he would hear things. I was a bit confused when he responded by grinning at Alberta. I said, “What’s going on? You look like the cat who ate the canary,” I said, and then added for Alberta, “pardon the expression.” Alberta had a big flight cage full of finches in her family room.
“Yeah,” Hutchinson said, looking from me to the kitten on his chest. “This is my new roommate. You know, when she’s big enough.”
I laughed, a warm tickle running through me. “That’s great, Hutch.” I had resisted calling the man by his chosen nickname since I met him, but the better I liked him, the more inclined I was to use the name he liked. He grinned and nodded, and I said, “In fact, that’s perfect.”
Goldie, who now had the black kitten snugged up under her jaw, murmured, “Mmm hmmm.” I wasn’t sure whether she was agreeing with Hutchinson, me, or the little creature in her hands.
“But you meant the murder,” said Hutchinson.
And voila! The world was back. The tabby kitten pushed her head deeper into my elbow as if trying not to hear what Hutchinson had to say. I laid my free hand over her back and her breathing steadied.
“Too soon, of course, to have much. But I heard from …” He stopped himself, and I assumed that he wasn’t really supposed to know what was happening since he was potentially a suspect. But the guy had friends, at least on the force. “Well, I heard that someone clocked him pretty good.”
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