Familiar Motives

by Delia James

  “Would you? It’s not like her to be evasive.”

  No, it really wasn’t. Grandma B.B. was famously direct. A sudden sinking feeling started in the pit of my stomach.

  “Actually, I was wondering . . .” Ginger paused again. I braced myself. “Has she said anything about a fight with Robert Senior?”

  “With Dad? No, she hasn’t.” Not a recent one, anyway.

  “Because when I told him I was worried she might not make it, he said, ‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ only I’m not sure I was supposed to hear that.”

  Okay. This was not good. This was not good at all. “I’ll talk with her, Ginger. I promise. I’m sure it’s nothing.” Thankfully, Ginger decided to take me at my word.

  Ginger and I chatted for a while longer, about how her pregnancy was going (fine, thanks, almost no morning sickness, no, they didn’t know the gender yet); about Ted, who was bringing his new fiancée up to meet the family; about Hope; and of course about Bobby III and how he was utterly appalled that Grandpa Bob did not have any stuffed animals or action figures and kept bringing him new ones to keep him company. He’d sit on the bed and carefully explain the personalities and powers of each one, so Grandpa wouldn’t get them mixed up. Dad was loving it.

  Ginger and I hung up, with me promising again that I’d call Grandma B.B. But what I actually ended up doing was staring at the phone for a very long time.

  Grandma B.B. had given up her practice of the true craft (mostly) when she left Portsmouth. She’d even stopped talking to her own mother for years, or at least Great-Grandma Blessingsound had stopped talking to her. Then, when Grandma finally did work up the courage to try to tell her son, my father, about the family heritage, he got angry. Seriously, deeply angry.

  If Dad was thinking it might be better for Grandma B.B. to miss Thanksgiving, there had to be a serious reason for it. That old, painful fight was the most serious reason I could think of.

  “Merow?”

  I lifted my head. Alistair flowed down from the windowsill and snuggled down into my lap, purring.

  “I wish it was that easy,” I murmured, petting his back. “But you know, maybe I should wait. I mean, Thanksgiving might not be the right time to drop the witchcraft bomb on the family. Especially Dad.” I could pick some neutral weekend, maybe in the spring, after Dad had had a chance to really settle in with Bob and Ginger and when Grandma B.B. wasn’t around, so she wouldn’t have to go through the whole thing again, and . . .

  “Mew, mmph.” Alistair draped his tail over his eyes.

  “. . . And if I procrastinate any more, I’ll be trying to figure out how to tell the family when Bobby III graduates high school.” I rested my chin in my hands and stared out the window at the brown-and-gray garden. My thoughts wandered over the members of my family and how I loved them and was frustrated by them.

  I also thought about the fact that magic tended to run in families, especially through the girls.

  And Ginger was having a baby.

  Who might just possibly turn out to be a girl.

  “Well . . . sugar.”

  “Merow,” agreed Alistair.

  20

  MONDAY MORNING DAWNED late, gray and slightly groggy. Okay, it was me who was slightly groggy.

  Not one of my friends had called, not Kenisha or Valerie or Frank or Julia. I told myself to be patient. I told myself everybody was really busy right now. I told myself I had plenty of useful real-life things to do, like working on my coloring book or updating my Web site and contacting potential clients.

  What I ended up doing was staying up way too late watching cable news reports and surfing Web sites for the latest updates on Attitude Cat and Ramona’s murder.

  So far, no one seemed to be following up on the connection between Valerie and Kristen Summers. There was also no report of a ransom demand from the presumed but so far still theoretical cat-nappers. The official Best Petz Web site had mostly given itself over to Attitude Cat and the e-mails from well-wishers. But the front page was dominated by the reward notice, offered by Best Petz Worldwide, for any information materially leading to the safe recovery of “our beloved Attitude Cat TM.”

  That notice had been up since at least Sunday afternoon, and here it was eight o’clock on Monday morning, and nobody had been able to claim it.

  Poor Frank, I thought, as I closed down my laptop and sipped my (second of the morning already) coffee. He can forget about sleep for the next year or so. Those phones are not going to stop ringing.

  “Merow,” grumbled Alistair, who was (reluctantly) hunkered down over a bowl of Best Petz gourmet canned food that I’d doctored (lightly) with water from a can of tuna. My cat clearly regarded this as a malicious deception.

  “We can’t always get everything we want,” I told him.

  There are times when you really are saved by the bell. In this case, it was the front doorbell. I frowned and left my annoyed cat and my half-finished coffee to go answer it.

  “What have you been doing, Britton?”

  Kenisha stood on my tiny porch, in her uniform, arms folded.

  “Nothing!” I yelped. I also took a step back.

  “Then how come I spent a half hour in Blanchard’s office yesterday being bawled out for encouraging a bunch of troublemaking Nosey Parkers?” Kenisha marched into my little foyer. Raindrops sparkled on her uniform jacket and cap.

  “I don’t know! Unless Blanchard’s been tracking my cat . . .” Or has eyes in the backs of his shoes.

  “What’s Alistair got to do with this?” Kenisha narrowed her eyes.

  “Nothing!” I said again.

  “Anna, do you have any idea how much I hate that word?”

  I did, as a matter of fact. I couldn’t figure out why I kept trying to slip it past her. “Okay, not much. Nothing that’s going to cause trouble. I . . .” I swallowed and started again. “I asked Alistair to look for Ruby.” I could not believe I was saying this out loud, even to Kenisha. But telling her that was better than telling her I’d spent even a few minutes crouched under a table in the Harbor’s Rest dining room, trying to get the nerve to poke my head out after Blanchard and Cheryl Bell finally left. My calves still hadn’t forgiven me.

  “You asked Alistair to look for . . . ? Of course you did,” Kenisha snapped. “Because when the district attorney asks how we found her, he’s going to believe it just happened to be your cat!”

  I spread my hands. “Alistair is an outdoor cat. Everybody knows it. If he goes out and finds another cat, what kind of explanation is anybody going to need?”

  Kenisha pulled back at this, at least a little. “Maybe,” she said. I wanted to tell her she worried too much and that it would all be fine, but something behind her eyes stopped me. There are days when the last thing you want from a friend is a platitude, and Kenisha was very clearly having one of those.

  “Look, do you want to come in and sit down?” I said. “I was just going to make more coffee.” This was true, because I am pretty much always just about to make more coffee.

  “I’m not even supposed to be here. This was supposed to be just a phone call.”

  “This?” What do you mean “this”?

  But before I could find a way to ask that, Kenisha turned her back and stripped off her flat cap and dark blue jacket and hung them on the rack beside the door. I watched her hands shake as she did.

  “Kenisha,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  She didn’t turn around. She just folded her arms and bowed her head. For a minute, I thought she wasn’t going to answer. I bit my lip, uncertain what to do. I liked Kenisha, a lot, but she held herself farther apart than the most of the other coveners. I knew she was dedicated to her job and her craft. I also knew that right now she was struggling hard with something that might just be too big for her.

  I remembered Val telling me about how Kenisha w
as a veteran. She was my coven sister and I hadn’t even known that much about her. What kind of friend was I, exactly?

  “You said coffee?” she asked the wall.

  “Would I say anything else?” I headed for the kitchen, and Kenisha followed. She settled herself into the breakfast nook while I pulled out my jar of ground beans and started measuring and pouring all the necessary things.

  “Anna,” she said. “You told Pete that you met Kristen Summers at Ramona’s clinic, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said that Kristen said she was going to see her mother?”

  “She said her mom was in the hospital, and her sister couldn’t get there for a couple of days.”

  “You’re sure that’s what she said?”

  Friend or no friend, there is something about having a person in uniform ask that question that makes you wish you had a good way to fact-check your own memory. “Yes,” I told her. “Of course I’m sure.”

  Just then, the coffeemaker beeped, signaling that it was finished. I pulled two mugs out of the cupboard.

  “So I take it Ramona’s death is . . . ?”

  “Officially a homicide?” Kenisha finished for me. “Yes. It is.”

  I let that settle in as I poured. The news had been full of speculation and assumption, but now it was real. A fresh layer of gray laid itself over the already gloomy morning.

  I set one mug of coffee in front of Kenisha. She took hers black, and in quantity. She was almost as bad as Frank. “I don’t want to ask you anything you can’t answer, but—”

  She didn’t let me get any further. “When we were in Ramona’s condo, you didn’t happen to notice a laptop anywhere, did you?”

  “What?” I shook my head just a little, like I thought there was a loose connection that might snap into place. “Um, no. Sorry.”

  Kenisha curled both her hands around the coffee mug but didn’t drink any. “Dr. Forsythe had a laptop computer. Her sister, Wendy, mentioned it specifically when we asked her if anything besides Ruby seemed to be missing from Ramona’s possessions.” Because of course the cops would be questioning Ramona’s family, and her staff and her friends. Which was probably what Kenisha had been doing while I’d been trying to call her yesterday afternoon. “But there’s no laptop in the apartment or at the clinic. So I wanted to ask you if you’d seen one.”

  “Do you think Ramona was killed during a robbery?” I frowned as I sat down across from her. Frank had said something had gone missing from Ramona’s apartment. As usual, his information was proving highly accurate.

  “Unlikely.” Kenisha shook her head. “At least, not a full-blown robbery. Her purse was still there, with her wallet and all the credit cards. She had some antique jewelry in a box on her dresser, but Wendy Forsythe said none of that was touched either.”

  I was still thinking about this when Alistair trotted up the basement stairs. He twitched his whiskers at us and sauntered over to his food bowl.

  “Could Ramona have come home and surprised the burglar?” I asked as I watched my cat sniff at the bowl and realize nothing had changed. “They struggled and the burglar pushed her and ran out without . . . finishing things.”

  Kenisha dipped her chin and gave me a hard look. “You believe that?”

  “No,” I admitted. It didn’t go with the Vibe I’d sensed in the apartment. I’d felt greed, which would go with a burglary, but there was no panic, like I’d expect if someone was surprised. And there was all that anger.

  On the other hand, as Julia was fond of reminding me, my Vibe was not a newspaper. I couldn’t expect to read it with one hundred percent accuracy. Besides, even I could work out that if you planned to fake a burglary, you’d at least take a purse, and maybe open a few drawers and scatter stuff around.

  Alistair turned his back on the bowl and instead jumped up on the bench beside me. “Merow,” he grumbled as he slid onto my lap.

  I petted him, but my mind wasn’t on the job. I was thinking about my conversation with Frank. “If the computer got stolen, would that mean that Ramona’s murder had nothing to do with Ruby? If someone came to steal a cat, why would they also steal a computer?”

  “Or vice versa.” Kenisha finally took a swallow of coffee, but from the face she made, she might as well have been drinking vinegar. All at once, I saw the real problem.

  “You could find that missing computer,” I said. “Right away. You could dowse for it.”

  “Maybe. Don’t let what happened the other day give you an exaggerated idea of what I can do.” She swallowed more coffee. “The other night, we had your connection with Alistair to call on, and that is extraordinarily powerful. Normally things are not nearly that easy, or that clear. But . . . with Val mixed up in this, and Julia hurting so badly . . .” She stopped and then went on more softly. “I can’t help thinking how I could maybe short-circuit this whole mess before it comes falling down on the people who saved my life.”

  “Except then you’d have to lie to Pete about how you found them both,” I said.

  “And then lie about the lie. Not to mention risk tampering with all kinds of things like chain of custody, and keeping investigative procedure intact so the defense can’t pull it all apart when it comes to trial.” She looked out the window at my brown-and-gray garden. “If I give in and break the rules this time, whether or not I’m actually able to find anything, I risk derailing the whole thing.”

  “But you must have plenty of leads by now,” I said optimistically. “I mean . . . you’ve talked to Pamela Abernathy, right?” I asked. “And Cheryl Bell?”

  “Anna, you know better than to ask me about the investigation.”

  “Yes. Right. I do. So we won’t talk about it. I will change the subject.” I smiled and said brightly, “Hey, Kenisha, I was having brunch at the Harbor’s Rest yesterday, and you’ll never believe who I saw!”

  Kenisha eyed me suspiciously over the rim of her mug. “Who?”

  “Lieutenant Blanchard! And you’ll won’t believe who he was with. Cheryl Bell! How’s that for a coincidence?”

  Kenisha said nothing.

  “And you know what? The dining room was so full, they got the table right next to mine, and you know, because they were so close, I heard them talking.” Kenisha, I reasoned, did not need to know that I was under the table when I heard their conversation. “And, wow, was I surprised, but it turns out they knew each other, back in the day.” I didn’t say they were friends. Valerie thought Cheryl didn’t make real friends. I thought the same about Blanchard. “By the way, how come you and I never do brunch anymore?” I added, and was deeply relieved to see Kenisha smile.

  “Because last time you snuck home about six extra pieces of bacon for Alistair.”

  “That bacon was for me.”

  “Yeah, right. And you wonder why your cat won’t eat his kibble.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said again.

  “Me-rr-ow,” said Alistair, which sounded way too much like a chuckle for anybody’s comfort.

  “Anyway. We are not talking about Alistair,” I reminded them both. “We are talking about brunch. And how Blanchard and Cheryl Bell are old friends. And how she was offering to do whatever he needed to help make sure the right person got arrested for Ramona’s murder.”

  Kenisha looked at me very steadily for a long time. “Well. You know. Old friends always want to help,” she said slowly.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “They do.”

  We thought about this in silence while the November wind whistled uneasily beneath the cottage’s eaves.

  “You’re doing it again,” said Kenisha suddenly.

  “What?” I squeaked. I may have also started. Alistair grumbled again and flowed down to the floor.

  “Getting your Nancy Drew face on.”

  “I
do not have a Nancy Drew face.”

  That actually made her smile. “And I say again, yeah, right.”

  Whatever face I had, it was starting to blush. Fortunately, Kenisha’s mug was empty, which meant I had to get up and grab the pot.

  “But you know,” I went on as I carefully topped off her coffee, “after brunch, I was driving home and the best idea came to me,” I said. “Kristen Summers said that they were thinking about making an Attitude Cat coloring book, and I thought to myself, hey, maybe somebody should go talk to Pam Abernathy about it, since, you know, she’s in charge of Attitude Cat publicity?” I did not exactly nudge Kenisha with my toe, but I hoped she picked up the hint anyway. “And she’s so involved with Ruby and her owner that she turns up mysteriously at important times and places without any good explanation.”

  “You are about as subtle as a brick, Britton.” Kenisha sighed. “But, since we’re just two friends talking about current affairs here, I’ll say that it’s amazing how few people actually want to talk to the police, and how they seem to have all kinds of reasons for not letting anybody look at their phones to see who has been calling recently. And, since you’re so interested in our criminal justice system, I’ll also remind you that our local judges have really strict standards of this thing called probable cause before they issue a warrant.”

  “I did not know that. Gosh. The things you learn when you’re just sitting around talking with a friend.”

  “Yeah, amazing, isn’t it?” agreed Kenisha. “And speaking of friends . . . have you heard anything from Julia?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve tried to call, but I keep getting her voice mail.” And she hadn’t called back yet, a fact that was rapidly moving up the ladder of things I was worried about.

  “That’s not like her,” said Kenisha. “She should be getting us all together so we can work on finding out whether a witch was involved in Ramona’s death.”