Wrong Side of the Paw

by Laurie Cass

  Praise for the National Bestselling

  Bookmobile Cat Mysteries

  “With humor and panache, Cass delivers an intriguing mystery and interesting characters.”

  —Bristol Herald Courier (VA)

  “Almost impossible to put down . . . the story is filled with humor and warmth.”

  —MyShelf.com

  “[With] Eddie’s adorableness, penchant to try to get more snacks, and Minnie’s determination to solve the crime, this duo will win over even those that don’t like cats.”

  —Cozy Mystery Book Reviews

  “A pleasant read. . . . [Minnie is] a spunky investigator.”

  —Gumshoe

  “A fast-paced page-turner that had me guessing until the last dramatic scenes.”

  —Melissa’s Mochas, Mysteries & Meows

  “Reading Laura Cass’s cozies feels like sharing a bottle of wine with an adventurous friend as she regales you with the story of her latest escapade.”

  —The Cuddlywumps Cat Chronicles

  Also by Laurie Cass

  Lending a Paw

  Tailing a Tabby

  Borrowed Crime

  Pouncing on Murder

  Cat with a Clue

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Janet Koch

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the B colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698405516

  First Edition: August 2017

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Praise for the National Bestselling Bookmobile Cat Mysteries

  Also by Laurie Cass

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 1

  There are many tasks that I find difficult. Braiding my annoyingly curly hair, for starters. Differentiating equations and putting down a good book before one in the morning are also beyond my capabilities. Another thing I’ve found hard in each of my thirty-four years? Choosing a favorite season.

  Summer is easy to enjoy with its warm freedoms, but winter offers skiing and ice skating and the sheer beauty of a world transformed by a fleecy blanket of white. And though spring is exciting with its daily growth spurts, right in front of me was a glorious hillside in its early autumn colors of green with sprinklings of red and orange and yellow, a scene so stunningly beautiful it was hard to look away.

  “Fall it is,” I murmured to myself.

  I was standing at the bookmobile’s back door, which was wide open to let the unseasonably warm air of late September waft around the thousands of books, the hundreds of CDs and DVDs, the jigsaw puzzles, my part-time clerk, myself, and Eddie, the bookmobile cat.

  “Mrr,” Eddie said. On his current favorite perch, the driver’s seat headrest, he stretched and yawned, showing us the roof of his mouth, which was the second least attractive part of him. Then he settled down again, rearranging himself into what looked like the exact same position.

  Julia, who was sitting on the carpeted step under the bookshelves that served as both seating and a way to reach the top shelves, looked up from the book she was reading. “What does he want now?”

  One of the many reasons I’d hired the sixtyish Julia Beaton was because of her tacit agreement to pretend that Eddie was actually trying to communicate with us. Julia had many other wonderful qualities, among them the gift of empathy, which was a huge plus for a bookmobile clerk, and an uncanny ability to understand people’s motivations.

  Those two traits had undoubtedly contributed to her success as a Tony Award–winning actress, but when the leading roles started to dry up, she’d retired from the stage and she and her husband moved to her hometown of Chilson, a small tourist town in northwest lower Michigan, which was where I now lived and worked—and there wasn’t anywhere on earth I’d rather be.

  Though I hadn’t grown up in Chilson, I’d had the good fortune to spend many youthful summers there with my long-widowed aunt Frances, who ran a boardinghouse in the summer and taught woodworking during the school year. It hadn’t taken me long to fall in love with the region, a land of forested hills and lakes of all sizes, and I soon loved the town, too.

  Which was why, not long after I’d earned a master’s degree in library and information sciences, when I found a posting for the assistant director position at the Chilson District Library, I spent half the night and all the next day working on a résumé and cover letter. I’d sent the packet off, crossing my fingers, and after a grueling interview and a couple of nail-biting weeks, I’d been ecstatic to be hired.

  Since then, not all had been what anyone might call rosy, but the bookmobile program I’d proposed had become a reality a little over a year ago, and in spite of sporadic funding problems, library director issues, and the occasional need to appear in front of the library board to answer pointed questions, I was a very happy camper.

  Eddie, on the other hand, did not look like a contented cat. Instead of the relaxed body language he’d been exhibiting moments earlier, he was now sitting up, twitching his tail, and staring at me with a look with which I was intimately familiar.

  “What he wants,” I said, “is a treat.”

  “He had treats at the last stop,” Julia pointed out.

  “Which is why he thinks he deserves a treat at this one, too.”

  “If he has treats at every stop,” she said, “he’s going to get as big as a house.”

  I’d first met Eddie a year and a half earlier. In a cemetery. Which sounds weird, and probably was, but Chilson’s cemetery had an amazing two-lake view. Janay Lake to the south, and to the west, the long blue line that was the massive Lake Michigan.

  The day I’d met Eddie had been another unseasonably warm day, and I’d skipped out on the spring cleaning chores I should have been doing and gone for a long walk up to the cemetery. I’d taken advantage of a bench placed next to the gravestone of an Alonzo Tillotson (born 1847, died 1926) and had been startled by the appearance of an insistent black-and-gray tabby cat.

  In spite of my commands for him to go home, he’d followed me back to my place. By the time I’d cleaned him up, whereupon I found that he was a black-and-white cat, I’d fallen in love. Even still
, I’d dutifully run a notice in the local newspaper’s lost and found column and had been relieved when no one called.

  Eddie was my first pet ever; my dad had suffered horrible allergies and until last year I’d never felt the connection a human and a pet can have. I’d also never realized how opinionated and stubborn a cat could be.

  “He’s already pretty big,” I said to Julia, “but the vet says he’s a healthy weight.”

  “Mrr,” said the cat in question, starting to ooze off the headrest and toward the driver’s seat.

  “Thanks so much,” I muttered. “I love it when you sleep there and shed all over the upholstery so I get your hair on the seat of my pants.”

  Eddie thumped himself onto the seat. “Mrr!”

  “I think,” Julia said, laughing, “that he took offense to that big comment.”

  “Who you calling big?” a woman asked.

  Julia and I turned. Up until that point, the bookmobile’s stop had been empty of patrons. I smiled, pleased that we weren’t going to turn up completely dry. Of all the facts and figures that my library board scrutinized, the numbers from the bookmobile got the most attention. So far, the trends were upward ones, but I didn’t for a moment assume that all would be well forever.

  “Hey, Leese,” I said to the woman, who was almost a foot taller than my efficient five feet. Her height was the same as that of my best friend, who owned a restaurant in Chilson, but instead of Kristen’s slender blond Scandinavian inheritance, Leese Lacombe’s ancestors had endowed her with a broad build, an olive skin tone, and brown hair almost as curly as my unruly black mop.

  Leese, a few years older than me, possessed a razor-sharp brain, a quick wit, and a prestigious law degree. She’d spent more than a decade playing by the rules in the downstate corporate trenches, and moved back north a few months ago to start up her own law office, one that specialized in elder law. To keep costs down, she was using her home as an office and had taken to borrowing books from the bookmobile instead of making the half-hour drive into Chilson. A July article in the local paper about her practice had generated a number of clients, and it looked as if she was on her way to success.

  “What’s new with you?” Julia asked, standing to get the stack of books Leese had requested online. I was still tweaking the bookmobile schedule, but at that point we were visiting each stop every three weeks. Though that wasn’t a very long time for most people, it could be an eternity for bibliophiles, and we were getting used to bringing along huge piles of requested books and lugging back the correspondingly huge piles of returns. I doubted any bookmobile librarian ever had needed to buy a gym membership to get an upper-body workout.

  “New?” Leese set her returning books on the rear checkout desk. “I’m glad it’s almost October, for one thing. My summer neighbors have slammed their trunks for the last time.”

  Julia and I nodded, understanding the feeling. We lived in a part of Michigan that was the summer playground for a large number of folks from the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Chicago areas. Some people visited for a weekend or a week; others had seasonal residences.

  The population of Chilson and the entire Tonedagana County more than tripled in the warmer months and summer came with a complicated set of issues. Most of us were glad to renew the friendships that had been put on hold the previous fall—not to mention the fact that many businesses depended on the summer tourist dollars—but October came with an undeniable sigh of relief. No more parking problems, no more waiting in line for a restaurant table, no more waiting anywhere, really.

  “It is nice to have our town back,” Julia said. “We’ll be tired of looking at each other by April, though.”

  Leese laughed, and it was a surprisingly gentle sound from such a large person. “Undoubtedly. But without the busy months, would we appreciate this quiet time?”

  The question was an interesting one. I gave up trying to shift Eddie from the driver’s seat and walked down the aisle to join the conversation. “So it’s part of that old question, how can we value the highs of life if we don’t know what the lows are like?”

  “Exactly!” Leese gave me a high-wattage smile and I knew exactly what was going to happen next. She would sit on the carpeted step, Julia would pull around the desk chair, I would perch on the edge of the desk, and the three of us would dive into a long, leisurely discussion when we all had better things to do. But it was nearly October, the summer folks were mostly gone, and it was warm enough to prop the door open. What could it hurt to let the bookmobile chores wait a few minutes longer?

  Julia pulled the chair around and Leese sat on the step. “It’s the swings in life that make things interesting,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hitching myself up onto the edge of the desk. “Isn’t that some Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”

  “Would you rather live when it’s boring?” Leese challenged.

  Julia laughed. “Minnie Hamilton couldn’t live a boring life if she wanted to. She’s attracted to trouble.”

  “Am not,” I said automatically. “I’m just—”

  “Do you know what this tiny woman did earlier this spring?” Julia demanded of Leese. “In the middle of a massive power outage, she managed to hold a bang-up successful book fair.”

  Leese looked at me with interest. “I heard about that. Wasn’t Trock Farrand the headliner? I didn’t know you were involved.”

  “Minnie’s show, from top to bottom,” Julia said. “When the original big-name author canceled, Trock heard about it and flew out from New York.”

  “He’s a friend, that’s all,” I said, knocking my shoes together. “He wanted to plug his new cookbook.” Trock, host of a nationally televised cooking show, owned a summer place just outside of Chilson, and in spite of the differences in our ages, background, and interests, we’d struck up a solid friendship.

  Another solid thing was the relationship between Trock’s son, Scruffy, and my friend Kristen. I had the inside scoop that a proposal was in the near future, and I was doing my best to play innocent.

  “Whatever.” Julia waved off my comment. “And just a couple of months ago, Minnie figured out that—”

  “Hey!”

  Julia frowned. “I’m ranting, Minnie. Please don’t interrupt when I’m in full flow.”

  But it wasn’t Julia that I was scolding. “Where are you going?” I asked my cat.

  When we were en route, my furry friend traveled in a cat carrier strapped to the floor on the passenger’s side, but once I set the parking brake, Julia unlatched the wire door, setting him free to roam about the interior. Though he’d run outside a couple of times the first year of the bookmobile’s service, since then he’d shown little interest in leaving the bus before we did.

  Eddie, being a cat, paid no attention to my question, but continued to sniff at the open doorway.

  “Is he going to make a run for it?” Leese asked, amused.

  “Not a chance,” I said. “He wouldn’t want to get too far from his cat treats.”

  Eddie’s ears flattened and Julia laughed. “I think you hurt his feelings. You should apologize before he does something drastic.”

  “I shouldn’t have to apologize for telling the truth.” But she did have a point. A miffed Eddie was not a good situation. He had claws and knew how to use them, especially on paper products. Facial tissues, paper towels, toilet paper, newspapers, and even books weren’t safe when Eddie was in the mood for destruction.

  “I am sorry,” I told my cat, “that you take offense to a fact-based statement.”

  “Huh,” said Leese. “Not much of an apology, if you ask me. Not sure he thinks much of it, either.”

  Eddie was standing at the top of the stairs, staring out, twitching his ears and nose.

  “Hey, pal,” I said, sliding off the desk. “Inside only. You promised, remember?”


  “That was before you insulted him,” Julia said. “All previous deals have now been canceled.”

  “Come here, Eddie.” But just as I leaned down to grab my fuzzy friend, he hopped out of reach, jumping to the bottom step.

  “That’ll teach you to make fun of a cat,” Leese said, laughing.

  “Especially an Eddie cat,” Julia added.

  We were parked in a large church parking lot, at least a hundred feet from the closest road, and hadn’t seen a car in the last ten minutes. I wasn’t overly worried about Eddie getting dangerously close to traffic, but there was a long line of shrubs at the far side of the lot and I could just see Eddie crawling into that prickly mess and not wanting to come out.

  “How about a treat?” I crouched at the top of the stairs. “Come back right now and I’ll give you a whole pile.” Not a big pile, but still. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

  Eddie, catlike, was focused on his new mission, whatever that might be, and launched off the bottom step and into the bright October sunshine.

  I groaned and went after him. Over my shoulder I called, “Can someone bring me the treats? He might come if I shake the can.”

  Once outside, however, I realized Eddie wasn’t headed for the shrubbery. Or the roadway. Instead he was trotting straight for the only vehicle in the parking lot, a battered pickup truck. Dents and scrapes of all shapes and sizes were scattered along the doors and sides, some serious enough to have scoured the paint down to the metal.

  I leapt to the stunningly obvious conclusion that the vehicle was Leese’s and wondered what a former corporate attorney was doing with an open bed truck. At previous bookmobile visits I was pretty sure she’d been driving a midsized SUV.

  Mentally shrugging—I paid about as much attention to cars as I did to daily temperatures in Hawaii—I trotted across the parking lot, ten yards behind my cat in a very short parade of two. “Eddie, come back here, will you? I thought I only had to run on workout mornings with Ash. I’m not sure I’m ready for more. Think of me, will you? I’m sure you’ve done that once or twice.”