Final Catcall: A Magical Cats Mystery

by Kelly, Sofie

  “How’s the painting coming?” Susan asked as we climbed the stairs.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “I hope it makes a lot of money for Cat People. They do good work.”

  “Me too,” she said. “That’s really nice of Ruby to do the paintings for the auction.”

  A muffled meow came from the cat carrier.

  “And it was nice of you to pose for her, Hercules,” Susan said with a grin.

  I took the cat to my office, where he jumped up onto my desk, sat down on the budget projections for next year and started to wash his face.

  A few minutes after nine a woman came in, stopping just inside the doors. She looked around, smiling at the building. I was about to walk over and say hello when she caught sight of me and smiled even wider. She started toward me, still smiling as though she knew me. I didn’t know her, but I felt as though I should. Something about her was very familiar. She was tall and slender with auburn hair brushing her shoulders, and side-swept bangs. She looked to be in her early forties.

  “You’re Kathleen, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  She nodded her head slightly. “You look like your mom, but you have John’s smile.” She held out her hand. “I’m Chloe Miller. I worked with your dad a couple of times.”

  Now I knew who she was. Chloe Miller had been on a nighttime drama a few years back called Vengeance, playing the main character’s mother in flashbacks. I’d stopped at my parents’ house unannounced one Wednesday night and found my mother—who claimed she only watched PBS—glued to the TV. I confessed I was recording the show on my DVR at my apartment. A couple of weeks later I discovered that my little brother, Ethan, was a big fan as well.

  The three of us started watching the show together every Wednesday night and then speculating about what was going to happen next for the following seven days. My dad and Ethan’s twin, Sara, thought we’d taken leave of our senses.

  “I was a big fan of Vengeance,” I said. “I’m glad to meet you.”

  “When Ben told me you were the librarian here I had to come say hello. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Absolutely,” I said with a smile. “Are you here for the New Horizons festival?”

  She nodded. “I am. I had another commitment and couldn’t get here until last night.” She looked around again. “The building is beautiful. How old is it?”

  “We celebrated its centennial this past spring.” I couldn’t keep a touch of pride out of my voice.

  “It’s a Carnegie library, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “I thought so,” she said. “I spent a year in Scotland doing theater and I actually got to visit the very first Carnegie library, in Dunfermline.”

  “I think I’m a little jealous.”

  “I’m a little jealous that you get to work here every day.” She looked toward the stacks. “Would you have a minute to help me find something?” She loosened the black scarf at her neck. “I’m looking for a copy of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10.”

  “‘Death, be not proud.’”

  She smiled again and shook her head. “I should have guessed you’d know it. I heard your dad quote Donne once.”

  I led her over to the poetry section. “When did you work with Dad?” I asked.

  “My very first job,” she said. Her cheeks turned red. “Promise you won’t laugh?”

  I put my hand over my heart. “Librarian’s honor.”

  “It was a cereal commercial.”

  I shook my head and grinned. “You were in the raisin bran commercial. Were you a raisin or a flake?”

  “I was a flake. John was a raisin.”

  “A dried-up, wizened raisin with no sense of rhythm.”

  Chloe laughed at the memory. “You know those commercials have a cult following online.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not surprised. I was at college when the first two aired and that Halloween everyone I knew dressed up as a raisin.”

  “Now that they’ve revived the whole campaign, get ready for lots of dried-up raisins running around this Halloween, too.”

  “What is it about those ads that people like so much?” I asked.

  She frowned, narrowing her eyes as she thought about my question. “I don’t know. I think it’s because they’re funny even though they weren’t intended to be—at least not the first one.” She smiled again. “Ben said your mother’s coming to fill in for Hugh.”

  “She is.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing her. We did a benefit reading together a couple of years ago for the Coles Island Theatre. She told a story about doing summer stock, outside in a public park.”

  “The raccoon story.” I scanned the shelves looking for the book of poetry Chloe wanted.

  She laughed. “That’s it.” Her expression grew serious again. “It’s really kind of her to offer to come like that, especially at the last minute.”

  “She’s been friends with Ben a long time,” I said. “Ah, there it is.” I bent down and pulled the book I’d been looking for from the bottom shelf. “And we get to spend some time together, too,” I said, straightening up and handing her the book.

  “Thank you,” Chloe said, turning it over in her hands. “Ben’s having a little . . . remembrance for Hugh this afternoon. I wanted to read ‘Death, be not proud,’ and I know it sounds silly, but Hugh would have hated it if I’d just printed the poem from somewhere online. He loved books.”

  There was genuine sadness in her eyes and the set of her mouth.

  “You were friends,” I said, reaching out to straighten the shelf of books closest to us.

  “For a while we were more than friends.” She played with her scarf. “My life went in a different direction, but I’m always going to have a soft spot for Hugh.” She shook her head. “I wish I could have gotten here sooner. He worked so hard to convince me to take this job and we didn’t get to work together in the end.”

  “Ben has some of Hugh’s notes,” I said. “They seem to have survived the fire. Once he gets them all sorted out maybe he’d let you read them to get an idea of what Hugh had in mind for your character.”

  Chloe held the book of poetry against her chest. “That’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that. I don’t mean I won’t follow your mom’s direction, but I’d like to know what Hugh had been thinking. The play is about star-crossed lovers. Not the kind of part I usually play.”

  “He must have thought you could handle the part or he wouldn’t have pushed you to take it.”

  “He pushed so hard that I was starting to think maybe he was hoping we could get back together again.” She brushed her hair back behind one ear and pasted on a smile. “So thank you for this. It means a lot to me.”

  “I’m glad I could help.”

  “How do I check this out?” she asked.

  “I’ll take you over to the desk and Susan will get you a temporary card,” I said.

  We walked to the checkout desk and I introduced Chloe to Susan. “It was good to meet you, Chloe,” I said.

  “You too, Kathleen,” she said. “I hope I’ll see you again.”

  I nodded. “Me too.”

  Abigail came in early for her shift. I went down to the staff room for a cup of coffee before I started in on the budget figures and found her leaning against the counter with a mug in one hand. She was rubbing the back of her neck with the other hand. She looked tired. There were dark circles, like smudges of soot, underneath her eyes.

  “Hi, Kathleen,” she said. “I forgot to tell you—Ben is going to pick up your mom at the airport tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, reaching for the coffeepot. “I can rearrange the schedule and get her myself.”

  “Thanks, but I think Ben wants to use the time to bring her up to speed.”

  “How are things going?”

  “The police took four boxes of Hugh’s notes, but they let us keep the costumes. And somehow Ben managed to organize a
rehearsal for every one of the plays without resorting to cloning himself. And he’s planned a memorial for Hugh this afternoon.” She handed me the sugar, which was on the counter beside her. “I don’t know when he sleeps.”

  “That sounds like Ben,” I said, adding milk and sugar to my cup. “What about you? Is everything okay?”

  She smiled and I thought it looked a little forced. “I could use a bit more sleep and probably a lot less coffee, but I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded, but her smile wavered just a little.

  “Abigail, what was going on between you and Hugh?” I said quietly.

  It wasn’t a surprise to see her face flood with color.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “We were married.”

  But that was.

  16

  I stared at her. “Married?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were married to Hugh Davis?” Of all the things Abigail could have said, this was the last thing I would have expected. “When? How? How?”

  She pulled out a chair and sat down at the small table in the middle of the room, and I did the same because I had a feeling this was going to take a while.

  “We were married when we were in college. It’s a lot of years ago.”

  “You never said anything.”

  Abigail stared into her cup. “It wasn’t my best moment.”

  I waited until finally she met my gaze. “I was nineteen. We met on a Friday night in a script-writing workshop. Sunday afternoon when the workshop was over I moved my things into his apartment.”

  “Love at first sight.”

  She gave me a wry smile. “Or something like that.”

  “So what happened?”

  Abigail shook her head. “I guess you could say real life happened. Practicality intruded.” She laid both hands flat on the table. “I was already committed to doing a semester abroad in England. Hugh asked me to marry him before I left. By then my father had found out about the two of us. He said that if I married Hugh he’d take away his financial support. I would have had to drop out.”

  “That was an awful choice to have to make.”

  She nodded. “It would have been better if I’d actually made a choice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t want to lose Hugh and I knew my father would follow through on his threat. So I found a minister who wasn’t licensed to marry us and then I left for London.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “The whole thing blew up in my face. My father found out that I had gotten ‘married.’ So I confessed it was a sham. He said I was too immature for college and stopped paying my tuition.”

  “What about Hugh?”

  “He was furious. And he was hurt. He wouldn’t listen to anything I said and I can’t blame him for that.” She sighed. “He stopped answering the phone. I flew back from London and the apartment was empty. I dropped out, got a job fitting bras in a department store, and spent the next six years finishing my degree a course at a time.”

  My stomach hurt for the nineteen-year-old young woman Abigail had been. And I wanted to shake her father and Hugh for bailing on her. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  She gave me the closest thing to a smile she could manage. “It gets worse, Kathleen,” she said.

  “What do you mean, worse?”

  “That first day that everyone involved with the festival arrived, Hugh asked me to meet him back at the theater after supper. I hadn’t seen him in years.” She started picking at the skin on the side of her right thumbnail. “He said we were still married.”

  “What do you mean, ‘still married’? I thought the whole thing was a fake.”

  Abigail nodded. “So did I. Hugh claimed it was because of some loophole in the law about solemnizing marriage. He had documents from a lawyer.” She kept picking at her thumb. “He wouldn’t let me keep them, but they looked legitimate.”

  I felt my chest tighten as though I’d tried to put on a sweater three sizes too small. “What did he want?”

  “Money. He was broke. He knew I’d inherited some when my father died. He said since we’d been husband and wife at the time, he wanted his half. I think he took the directing job with the festival just to have a way to get out here and blackmail me.”

  I shook my head. “I wish you’d said something.”

  She looked away for a moment. “I was embarrassed.”

  I put my hand over hers. “It’s okay,” I said.

  She looked at me then. “I faked a marriage, Kathleen. My brothers don’t even know that.”

  “Okay, so not the smartest thing you’ve ever done.” I squeezed her hand. “We do dumb things when we’re young. That’s how we learn not to do dumb things when we get a little older.”

  She gave me a small smile.

  “Do you remember when Andrew told you we broke up because he accidentally married someone else?”

  “I remember.”

  I shook my bangs back off my face. “He didn’t tell you that he was drunk and the someone was a waitress he’d met in a fifties diner while he was on a fishing trip with two of his buddies. One of which was the best man at the ceremony. The other one was the flower girl.”

  “Seriously?”

  I nodded. “Seriously. There are pictures. That’s partly how I ended up here. The point is, Andrew wasn’t nineteen and he did something really, really stupid. So don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  She sighed. “It’s not the only stupid thing I did.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, giving her an encouraging smile. “Dumb mistakes are not limited to one to a customer. What else did you do?”

  “Hugh had our original marriage certificate and the vows that we wrote. He said he even had a Polaroid that one of his friends had taken of us with the minister. I thought if I had those things maybe I could prove that neither one of us had taken the marriage seriously.”

  She folded one arm across her chest like she was hugging herself. “I figured they had to be in Hugh’s room at the hotel. I needed to keep him away long enough for me to find everything. I managed to get his keycard out of his pocket.” She lowered her voice. “Burtis loaned me his truck. I convinced Hugh to go out to the lookout with me. I told him we could work something out about the money. I haven’t told anyone other than you, but the police are going to figure it out. Somebody probably saw us. I left him stranded out there, Kathleen. It’s my fault Hugh’s dead.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis. “Abigail, the person who killed Hugh is responsible. Not you.”

  She started picking at her thumb again. “He would never have been out there if it hadn’t been for me.”

  “He wouldn’t have been in Mayville Heights at all if there hadn’t been a fire at the theater in Red Wing. Does that mean the person who inspected that faulty circuit breaker and passed it is responsible for his death?”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “I think it is.”

  “I lied to get Hugh out to the lookout. How’s that going to look to the police?” she said. “I heard Detective Lind’s taken over the case. What am I supposed to say to her? ‘Yes, I did lure the victim out to Spruce Bluff, but I didn’t kill him. I was busy ransacking his room instead’?”

  “Actually, that’s exactly what you do tell her.”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “Why? You think she’ll just take my word on it?”

  “What time did you get to the hotel?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime just after six, I think. I had the radio on in Burtis’s truck and they were just finishing the news update.”

  Ben had said that Hugh had tried to send him a text around six thirty.

  “Detective Lind may not take your word on where you were, but she will believe the security cameras. They’re on every floor in every hallway in the hotel. Little tiny cameras, part of a state-of-the-art security system they pu
t in when they did the renovations.”

  “I didn’t see any cameras.”

  “They’re there,” I said. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and pushed it across the table.

  “Hugh tried to text Ben about six thirty, right about the time you were in his hotel room. Call Detective Lind, Abigail. Once she knows how Hugh ended up at Spruce Bluff, maybe she’ll be able to figure out who killed him.”

  Abigail nodded and picked up the phone.

  I felt a huge sense of relief that Abigail’s secret wasn’t that bad, overall. Now that I knew what she’d been hiding, all I needed to do was figure out Hannah’s secret.

  Abigail left to talk to Detective Lind at the police station and I covered the circulation desk while Susan and Mary had lunch. I ate mine outside on a bench overlooking the water while Hercules nosed around the gazebo. The ground was dry and he seemed to have a fine time poking his whiskers into every nook and cranny.

  I expected him to give me a hard time when we had to go back inside, but he climbed into the cat carrier with no complaint. I stopped to leave my coffee mug in the staff room and Hercules poked his head out of the bag and looked around.

  “I’m not fooled,” I said to him as I rinsed the cup. “I know you’ve been in here before.”

  He gave me a look of green-eyed kitty innocence.

  “You don’t really think I believe you stayed in my office all morning, do you?”

  He continued the innocence ruse, staring unblinkingly at me. “So you’re going for plausible deniability,” I said, giving him a little scratch behind one ear. “Good choice, but I know you were roaming around this morning. You heard what Abigail said to me, didn’t you?”

  He was good. He kept his eyes fixed on my face as though he had nothing to be guilty about.

  “I saw your tail when you were by the door,” I whispered. “There was a scrap of paper stuck to the tip.”

  He turned to check it out, forgetting for the moment that the rest of him was still in the bag.

  “Busted!” I hissed. I never won a staring contest with either Hercules or Owen. I wasn’t sure what it said about my character that I was tickled I’d won this one.