Sleight of Paw

by Kelly, Sofie

  “Would you like me to stay?” I offered.

  “No.” She waved away the idea. “Kate is here. We have it under control. But before I forget . . .” She looked around the checkout desk. “Ah, there it is.” She picked up a piece of blue paper. “Detective Gordon called to remind you about Wisteria Hill in the morning.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “How are the cats?” she asked.

  Over time, Roma had managed to catch and neuter all the feral cats out at Wisteria Hill, but they were too wild to ever be anyone’s pets. A collection of volunteers made sure they had food and water and care when they needed it.

  Everett never talked about the abandoned estate. He had to know what was going on, but he didn’t say a word about it, and, strangely, neither did anyone else.

  “The cats are doing well. Harry’s managed to keep the driveway clear and they all seem to be healthy.”

  Mary gave me a sheepish smile. “Detective Gordon also said to remind you to wear your snow pants.”

  “Snow pants, parka, wool hat, scarf, insulated mittens, and Sorels. And two pair of socks and long underwear,” I recited, ticking them off on my fingers.

  She nodded approvingly. “This is not your first rodeo.”

  “Or my first trip to Wisteria Hill in the winter,” I said. Even though I wasn’t born and raised in Minnesota, I did know how to dress for winter, though apparently Marcus Gordon didn’t think I did.

  Mary’s expression grew serious. “Kathleen, have you seen Ruby? I heard she found Agatha.”

  “She was at class,” I said, picking clumps of snow off my mittens. “She’s all right for the most part. Sad.”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t seem fair that Agatha would just get home and then . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  A shiver slid up the back of my neck, like a finger slowly creeping across my skin. Agatha’s death had left me unsettled, and I didn’t even know her.

  “And there are already rumors going,” Mary continued, making a neat stack of the book-request printouts by her left elbow. She liked to get things organized almost as much as she liked kickboxing.

  “What kind of rumors?”

  She made a face and smoothed her gray hair with one hand. “Most common one is that Agatha had a secret fortune.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “You don’t generally get rich being a teacher.” I flashed to Eric giving Agatha the bag of take-out food and cup of coffee. “How do these rumors get started?”

  “Probably people with too much time on their hands,” Mary said tartly. “My grandma always told us kids, ‘If you don’t have anything to do, go get the pail and scrub brush and I’ll find you something to do.’ ”

  “A drop-dead practical woman, from the sound of it,” I said.

  “Very,” Mary said. “She couldn’t abide gossip.” The smile turned to a grin. “But since Gran is gone, tell me if there’s any truth to what I heard about Roma.”

  “What did you hear about Roma?”

  Mary looked around and leaned toward me. “I heard from more than one person that she’s seeing someone.”

  “Someone? You mean a man?”

  “No, I mean a grizzly bear,” she shot back with exasperation. “Yes, a man.”

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Mary looked disappointed.

  I tugged my hat down over my ears and pulled on my mittens again. “Since you don’t need me, I’m heading home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Good night,” Mary said. The phone rang then and she reached for it.

  I put the strap of my bag over my shoulder and headed out. Peter Lundgren was just coming across the parking lot, a couple of library books under his arm. I’d always found him a little imposing when we’d talked in the library. He was a large man who seemed to fill whatever space he was in. But I remembered how carefully he’d walked Agatha over to the counter at Eric’s, and I smiled at him as we both got to the bottom of the steps. He nodded and started to move past me. I reached over and touched his arm.

  “Excuse me, Peter,” I said. “Could you tell me if there are any plans yet for a service for Agatha Shepherd?”

  He brushed a few flakes of snow off the top of his sandy hair. He wore it long, almost to his shoulders, a kind of rebel-lawyer look. “I can tell you that there will be some sort of memorial service once her son is back in the country. David wants to plan that himself.”

  I nodded.

  “There should be something in the paper next week.”

  “Thank you,” I said. He was already halfway up the stairs, so I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me.

  It was snowing lightly, tiny flakes reflected in the pinkish glow of the streetlights like little stars. I started up Mountain Road. The street looked more like a stage set, a picture-perfect town in a picture-perfect scene. Perfect always made me a little antsy.

  I couldn’t help it. Because of my parents’ acting, I’d spent a lot of time in theaters big and not so big. I knew about subterfuge and illusion. I knew things are rarely as they appear on the surface. Other kids had parents that taught them how to ride a bike, manage money or do long division. Not mine.

  What I got from my mother and father was the ability to separate fakery from reality, to spot the truth in a sea of fallacy. And that was why I felt so unsettled. No matter what everyone thought and no matter what Marcus Gordon wasn’t saying, Agatha Shepherd hadn’t died from natural causes.

  Something bad had happened.

  I just knew it.

  8

  I was dressed and ready with my thermos of hot chocolate when Marcus pulled into my driveway in the morning. It was a clear morning, sharp and biting cold, and the sun seemed far away in the cloudless sky. Hercules sat on the bench, looking out the porch window.

  I picked up the stainless-steel thermos sitting on the bench beside him and gave him a quick scratch just above his nose. “Stay out of trouble,” I told him. “I won’t be long.”

  He turned back to the window. He liked winter as long as he was only looking at it. It was almost as cold in the porch as it was outside, but I knew Hercules had his own way to get in the house again when he got cold.

  I locked the door and headed around the house to the driveway. Marcus was just getting out of his SUV. He wore a blue parka with the hood thrown back, black snow pants, and lace-up boots. His cheeks were red from the cold. Okay, so Maggie was right. He was cute. His blue eyes flicked over my old brown quilted coat and insulated pants, and for a second I had the ridiculously childish urge to strike a model’s pose, hands on my hips and feet apart, with a vaguely haughty look on my face. But I didn’t. I kept the fantasy to myself and smiled at him instead.

  “Good morning.”

  He smiled back. “Good morning.”

  I walked around the front of the car and got in the passenger’s side. As I fastened my seat belt, I took the opportunity to quickly check out the SUV. It was clean. Not no-cardboard-coffee-cups-on-the-floor-or-junk-on-the-backseat clean. It was how-the-heck-can-he-be-so-clean-in-the-middle-of-winter? clean. The only thing on the backseat was an old gray blanket. The dashboard in front of me was shining—no smudges, no dust, no fingerprints. There was no mug of half-finished coffee in the cup holder.

  I clicked my seat belt into place and then set the thermos at my feet. The floor mats looked like they’d just come from the dealer. Okay, so it seemed as though Marcus Gordon was a bit of a clean freak, at least with respect to his personal vehicle. Being a fairly tidy person myself, I couldn’t exactly see that as a flaw. I wasn’t going to tell Maggie about this. She’d see the clean-car thing as another karmic sign that Marcus and I were soul mates.

  He backed out of the driveway and started up the hill. The overnight snow had been plowed and there was sand on the road. As we drove past the road to Oren’s place, I made a mental note to talk to him about which pieces of his father’s artwork
I wanted to display in the library for the centennial celebrations. I still had to figure out how to get the massive metal sculptures from his workshop to the library. I was hoping Harry Taylor would have some ideas on that.

  “You’re somewhere else,” Marcus said.

  I turned from the window to look at him. “Excuse me?”

  “You were thinking about something else,” he said, shooting me a quick glance.

  “The library centennial.”

  “End of May?” he asked, putting on his left turn signal to pull onto the road to Wisteria Hill.

  “Close,” I said. “End of June. That’s the one hundredth anniversary of the original construction being completed.”

  There was a break in the line of passing cars, and we pulled onto the road. The rear wheels spun for a second on an icy patch and then found traction.

  “Are you staying?” Marcus asked.

  I’d forgotten that the conversation could take some quick detours with him. I had the feeling sometimes that his mind was three steps ahead of everyone else’s. Thank goodness he didn’t drive the way he talked.

  “I have another year on my contract.”

  The car in front of us slowed and so did we. Marcus took the opportunity to look directly at me for a moment. “No, I meant are you going to stay beyond that, or are you going back to Boston when your contract is up?”

  “I don’t know.” I adjusted the shoulder belt so it wasn’t pushing the hood of my coat against my neck.

  That was the truth. I didn’t know if I wanted to stay in Mayville or even in Minnesota. I also didn’t know if I’d be offered the chance. There was always the possibility that the library board would smile politely, shake my hand, thank me for my service and send me on my way.

  And did I want to stay? The decision to apply for the two-year job supervising the upgrade of the library and organizing its centennial had been an impulsive one. Probably the most impulsive choice of my life.

  Except it wasn’t spontaneous; it was mostly running away, from Andrew—him marrying that waitress had pretty much ended our relationship—and from my wildly unpredictable family, who’d come to expect I’d always be the dependable, responsible one.

  But I’d discovered that I liked it here, and I said so.

  “You don’t miss Boston?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “I miss my family. I still have friends there.” I pulled my hat down over my ears. “But I have friends here, too. And I can’t exactly picture Owen or Hercules in an apartment in the city.”

  I’d never be able to hide the cats’ little idiosyncrasies in an apartment. And Owen would go nuts if he couldn’t stalk around the yard like one of his genetically distant African cousins hunting a gazelle.

  “They really won’t let anyone else touch them?” Marcus asked. Again, the conversation went off in a direction I wasn’t expecting.

  I thought about Old Harry and Agatha. I didn’t have any explanation for how the boys reacted to them. “Mostly no,” I said.

  “Do you think it’s because they came from Wisteria Hill, because they were feral?” He was watching the left side of the road for the two reflectors Harry had set into the ground to mark the long driveway into the old estate.

  “I think that’s part of it,” I admitted. I did sometimes think Owen and Herc were the way they were because they’d come from Wisteria Hill. There were things about them I just couldn’t explain logically. And there was something about Wisteria Hill I couldn’t explain, either. Whenever I was out there I always felt as though all my senses were amped up on high alert.

  Marcus put on his blinker and started up toward the house.

  “Roma thinks they might not have been feral,” I said as we bumped up the long driveway. Harry had plowed and sanded, but the track was dirt and gravel and driving up it in the winter was a bit like being stuck in one of those vibrating machines that promises to shake away excess pounds.

  We hit a ridge that ran the width of the driveway and my stomach rebounded like a rim shot off the edge of a basketball hoop. I grabbed the seat on either side of me.

  “So someone might have left them out here?” Marcus said.

  “Yes.” I didn’t add that if someone had left two tiny kittens at Wisteria Hill, they’d left them to die.

  We bounced into a deep well in the frozen ground and the car lurched. “Sorry,” Marcus muttered.

  “Is it just me or is this driveway getting worse?” I asked.

  He gripped the steering wheel tightly as we bounced over and around the last turn. “It’s been a colder than usual winter, plus all that rain we had last fall made a mess of this.” He pulled into the space Harry had cleared for parking, shut off the SUV and turned to me. “How would you like to talk to Everett Henderson? Maybe he’d agree to have the driveway graded and leveled this spring.”

  I pulled on my mittens and tugged the scarf a little tighter around my neck. “Sure,” I said. “What exactly needs to be done?”

  “Wait. You’re serious?”

  “You’re not?”

  “I was being sarcastic.” A rosy flush spread across his cheeks.

  “See? I missed that entirely,” I said, trying unsuccessfully not to smile as I got out of the SUV. That got me a smile in return that looked cute with his pink cheeks.

  Marcus lifted the tailgate. He handed me a canvas bag with the cat food, dry because the wet froze a lot faster. He grabbed two jugs of water and slammed the hatch shut. Since December Roma had organized extra shifts to make sure the cats had fresh water.

  We walked past the old house. It looked sadder and more neglected each time I came out. No one had lived in it for years. No Henderson since Everett’s mother. No one at all since the caretakers moved closer to their daughter a couple of years ago.

  Everett didn’t talk about the estate, ever. It wasn’t that he changed the subject. He just didn’t talk about it. And because of that there were a lot of rumors about the old place. Some people said it was haunted; others said that the cats were very old and had some kind of magical powers. Roma felt they were most likely descendents of the kitchen cats from the estate.

  But most people believed the cats were descended from Everett’s mother’s cat, Finn. It was commonly believed that Finn had otherworldly abilities. That last rumor worried me. People knew Owen and Hercules came from Wisteria Hill. After Roma told me that she didn’t think they had ever been feral, I started telling people that they had probably been abandoned. I didn’t want anyone getting the idea my cats might have superpowers.

  At one point there had been a push to round up all the Wisteria Hill cats and find foster homes for them. Roma had strongly resisted that, making a point of educating people so they understood that a feral cat was never going to turn into a fluffy house cat, chasing a ball of yarn across the living room floor.

  “Do you think it’s true?” Marcus asked as we went around to the side of the old carriage house, where the cat shelters and feeding stations were.

  “Do I think what’s true?” I said, as he held the side door for me.

  “Do you think there’s something different about these cats?”

  I looked back at him and tried not to smirk. “You think they might have supernatural powers?” I waggled one hand from side to side at him. “Or maybe they’re shape-shifters?” I stood for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light.

  Marcus closed the door carefully behind us. “No, I don’t mean all that nonsense,” he said. “But you have to admit, some of these animals have lived a very long time under”—he held out both hands—“some pretty adverse conditions.”

  Marcus Gordon didn’t seem the type to buy in to the woo-woo theories about the old estate or the cats. “You think the cats have some kind of genetic mutation?” I asked. Now that I could see better, I started across the wooden floor to the feeding station.

  “Maybe.”

  My chest tightened. I didn’t want him—or anyone else—to get any ideas about Owen and Her
cules.

  I bent to brush some straw and dry leaves from around the shelf where the dishes would sit, so he couldn’t see my face. “So do you think they should be somewhere being studied instead of living here?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  I stood up and turned so I could see him now and read his expression. He pulled off his hat. His dark hair stood up at the crown of his head. It made him look like a kid, not like an annoying police officer.

  He met my gaze directly. “I think the cats have the right to live where they feel safe. They aren’t bothering anyone and I don’t think anyone should bother them.”

  “Wait a second. Has someone been out here again who shouldn’t be?” I asked, stuffing my mittens into my pocket so I could open the bag of cat food. “I know Roma made a couple of extra trips out here this week.”

  “Yeah, I think so.” He took the clean water bowls I held out to him. “Monday the outside door wasn’t closed properly.”

  “It could’ve just been someone being careless,” I said, even though I knew none of Roma’s volunteers would be careless with the cats’ safety.

  “Harry saw tracks when he came out to plow.”

  “What kind of tracks?”

  “Snowmobile.” Marcus leaned around me, setting the water bowls in place. A couple of times during really bad weather, Harry had used his own snowmobile to come out and feed the cats, but other than that everyone else drove their trucks or SUVs.

  “Were the cats okay?” I asked, as he filled the bowls with water.

  “As far as anyone can tell. I don’t think whoever it was realized the shelters are back here.”

  The cats’ homes—insulated shelters built by Roma’s volunteers—were in what she called the cathouse, a corner of the old building that had probably originally been used for storage.

  I filled all the food dishes and Marcus and I retreated to the door, where we waited, crouched down on the dusty floor.

  “Why would anyone want to be out here, anyway?” I whispered.

  His shoulders rose under his jacket. “Who knows? Maybe it was just kids. The rumors are kind of dramatic, when you think about it. What kid wouldn’t want to own a cat that was a hundred years old and could turn in to a wolf?”