by Annie Knox
“Oh dear.” Pris sighed. “Where did Kiki get ahold of string? That could have killed her.” She shot Hal an accusing glare.
It was true. Contrary to the popular image of a cat playing happily with a ball of yarn, yarn, string, and rubber bands are terrible toys for cats. They can swallow the long, narrow items with ease, but once inside their digestive tracts, the strings can wreak all sorts of havoc.
“Don’t look at me,” Hal huffed defensively. “You won’t let me tie flies in the house because of that cat. Maybe she got into that needlepoint kit you bought and never finished.”
“I honestly don’t think . . .” Pris teared up as she hoisted her Kiki back into her arms. “Poor baby.”
I felt singularly uncomfortable bearing witness to this little domestic spat.
“Um,” I said, “I don’t want to keep you two. I just wanted to return your wallet.” I pulled Hal’s wallet from my purse and handed it to him. “I’m afraid Rena’s ferret, Val, is a bit of a kleptomaniac. We found this in her stash this morning.”
“Oh jeez,” he said, his tanned face turning a mottled red, “I thought I’d left this at the office. Even went back last night to look for it. Thought it must be gone for good. Thank you so much for returning it.”
Pris’s eyes narrowed as she studied her husband. “Yes,” she said softly, turning her eyes on me with a look of frank speculation, “thank you.”
CHAPTER
Nine
Even though the horror of finding Sherry was still fresh in my mind—and the pain of losing Sherry was still fresh for Rena—we had a fledgling business to attend to, and I had the Halloween Howl to plan. Rena was tucked behind our main display case, carefully arranging our selection of cat and dog collars by color, laying them flat and overlapping them, creating a gorgeous rainbow effect. I’d often wondered if Rena was just a tad OCD. Her ability to sit quietly and concentrate deeply on such a precise, detail-oriented task boggled my mind. After all, I tended to jump from one flight of fancy to the next.
While Rena labored, lost in her own thoughts, I was working on hand stitching ribbons to a handful of pumpkin stem hats made of batting and green felt, with wired ribbon leaves. The hats would complete the dozen pumpkin costumes I had stitched, two in each of six sizes, from teacup Chihuahua to standard poodle.
I looked up when the bell above our door rang. Of all people, it was Virginia Harper. A pink leash attached her to a lovely fawn and white corgi.
“Virginia,” I said, laying aside my sewing supplies and getting up to greet her. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
Virginia wasn’t born a Harper, but she acquired their cultured manners and champagne tastes the minute she married into the family. The proprietor of the Grateful Grape was a tall, broad-shouldered woman, who exuded a lush femininity. She wore a flowing black dress draped with an ombre scarf in shades from palest silver to deepest charcoal, and her long dark hair fell in a wild array of curls about her shoulders. She wore a heavy perfume, rich with the scents of jasmine and tuberose, which just barely concealed a hint of cigarette smoke.
By the look of her—bruiselike circles around her eyes, posture slumped—she hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep, and the tragedy of last night clearly weighed heavy on her. Still, she mustered up a smile.
“Carla’s been smothering me with kindness all morning, and we’ve already gotten enough hot dishes to keep us fed for a year. I needed to get away.”
“And who is this?” I asked, dropping to my haunches to greet my four-legged visitor.
“This is Sir Francis.” Even through her grief, her love for the dog shone through the tone of her voice.
“Sir Francis is very handsome,” I said, rubbing my hand beneath the dog’s chin.
From the back of the store, Jinx wandered over to check out the new faces. She did a little swish through the bottom of Virginia’s skirt, then gave Sir Francis a detailed sniffing. Apparently approving of our guests, she strolled to the front of the store and found a stray sunbeam in which to bask.
“What a beautiful cat,” Virginia said. “I don’t think I’ve seen such a large cat. Not fat, but just large.”
“Jinx is a pretty special cat,” I replied.
It was true. About three years after Casey and I returned to Merryville, he brought home Packer to alleviate my loneliness. Packer did keep me hopping. He was a big dork and required a lot of attention. I never intended to get another animal.
But that Christmas I was at the mall to buy my dad a sweater, and there was a bustling pet adoption event going on in the food court. I’d just bought myself a cinnamon pretzel when I saw Jinx. She was the last cat left. She was enormous—her frame the size of a fox, large even for a Norwegian forest cat—but so skinny I could see her shoulder blades through her dreadlocked black-and-white fur. She had a notch in one tufted ear, and a jagged line of stitches stretching across a bald spot on her flank. In short, she was a mess.
But she sat there in the midst of the craziness, a picture of absolute dignity, her ragged tail wrapped neatly around her toes. She looked at me with her huge green eyes, flicked her tongue across her whisker biscuits, and she was mine.
She came with her name, and it turned out to be apt. In the first month she lived with us, she clawed a hole in the bottom of our box spring, completely unraveled an afghan I was crocheting, and peed all over a pair of Casey’s shoes. (To be fair, after Casey dumped me, I treasured the memory of those ruined shoes, but at the time it was horrible.)
In short, Jinx is a bad, bad cat, and there’s no question that she’s the real head of our household, but I love her more than words can say.
I snapped myself out of my moment of nostalgia. “What can I do for you, Virginia?”
“Oh, nothing much. When Sean came back to the house last night, he mentioned that the store was lovely, and I thought I’d hide out here for a few minutes of peace.” She sighed. “And I also want to thank you.”
“Thank me?”
“I guess it’s more of an apology. I loved Sherry as though she were my own, but I know she caused you quite a headache with her protest. I’d been trying to talk her out of it for weeks.”
“Oh, Virginia. You don’t owe me an apology. For heaven’s sake, I hold no ill will toward Sherry, God rest her, and I certainly hold no ill will toward you.”
I gave her an impulsive hug, and was enveloped in her motherly presence.
“In fact,” I said as I pulled away, swiping tears from my eyes, “I have a proposition for you. I know the timing isn’t very good, but I was wondering if you would be willing to be the judge for the pet costume contest at this year’s Halloween Howl.”
Virginia drew herself up. “Well, Izzy McHale, I would be honored. It will be the perfect thing to keep my mind occupied while the family works through this . . . this whole thing.
“Now,” she said. “Show me some of these cute clothes you have.”
• • •
Sean stopped by Trendy Tails that evening to bring the bad news.
Rena had just locked the door and quickly flipped it back open when she saw Sean bounding up the porch stairs, a wheezing basset hound in tow.
“Hope you don’t mind that I brought Blackstone,” he said as he stamped his feet and rubbed his hands briskly to warm himself. Blackstone, who was a bit zaftig, heaved over on his side, his tongue and ears all flopping in the same direction.
“Of course not,” I said. “Blackstone is our target demographic.”
Sean chuckled. Packer wandered over to give Blackstone a tentative snuffle and then, apparently deciding that the other dog had passed some sort of doggy test, flopped down next to his new friend.
Meanwhile, never one to be left out, Jinx had strolled in to see what the commotion was all about. Unafraid, she strutted up to Sean, sniffed his pant cuff, and began making figure eights around his legs.
“Oh dear. Sorry about that. She’ll get fur all over you.”
“Not a worry.” Sean bent down and sc
ooped Jinx up in his arms. She rubbed the top of her head against the underside of his chin while he made deep cooing sounds and stroked her fur.
For some reason, watching him cuddle with my cat made me feel jittery. I glanced over at Rena to find her watching me, a sly smile on her face.
Sean let Jinx hop out of his arms. “Let’s get down to business,” he said.
We clustered around the folk-art table with a pot of Taffy’s famous calming herbal tea.
“They’ve completed the autopsy,” he said. “They won’t have an official cause of death until the toxicology results come back, and that could take several weeks. But a picture is starting to emerge, and it doesn’t look good.
“When they found Sherry, there was a bag next to her and a bunch of stuff on the ground around her.”
I vaguely remembered seeing the bag and the scattered bits of refuse, but the whole event had become a bit of a blur.
“Well, it looks like Sherry was holding the bag when she died, dropping it as she fell to the ground. There was still some sweet cereal mix—the kind Rena was serving to party guests that night—in the bag as well as all over the bricks. But there was other plant matter mixed in with the cereal. The forensics guys sent that over to the U of M Extension office and they identified it as dried water hemlock root.”
“Water hemlock?” I asked. “That sounds positively Shakespearean, like something from a witch’s cauldron.”
“Apparently it’s one of the most poisonous plants in North America. Even a small amount of it could have killed Sherry in fifteen minutes or less.”
“Dear heavens,” I muttered. “Where would someone get something like that?”
Rena was as pale as skim milk. “It grows wild all over the place,” she said. “Lots of it down by Badger Lake.”
“How do you know these things?” I wondered. Rena hadn’t gone to college, but her brilliant brain was stuffed with all sorts of bits of arcane information.
Rena clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Didn’t you pay any attention at all in camp? All those nature walks where they told us not to pick the flowers that looked like Queen Anne’s lace?”
In truth, I’d been too busy mooning over Casey during all those idyllic walks to pay a whit of attention to the information about the local flora and fauna.
Rena reached a hand out to Sean. “Are they sure that’s what killed her? It’s a horrible way to die.”
“They haven’t completed toxicology studies, but the contents of Sherry’s stomach are consistent with her eating both the cereal mix and several pieces of the dried hemlock shortly before she died.”
“Could it have been an accident?” Rena asked.
“Highly unlikely,” Sean said.
“And I can’t imagine Sherry taking her own life in our alley,” I added, “especially leaving Gandhi there to fend for himself.”
“Exactly,” Sean said. “The police suspect foul play. The working theory is that Rena spiked the cereal mix with the poisonous root and killed Sherry.”
Sean placed a hand over Rena’s. “It may not be official, but I think you’re a murder suspect.”
• • •
I knew Rena couldn’t have killed Sherry, but that didn’t mean the rest of Merryville wouldn’t speculate. Rena hailed from a poor neighborhood called Frogtown, where the rickety houses seemed to sprout from the low-lying landscape like pale and crooked mushrooms. Her family had had more than its share of brushes with the law. Rena herself had a reputation as a small-time juvenile delinquent—though, to be fair, that reputation mostly arose from fights in which she’d been defending herself or her dad—and the incident in Minneapolis was sure to come to light. A few superstitious souls in Merryville even gossiped that Rena—with her skulls and studs and purple hair—dabbled in the occult . . . making her a prime candidate for serving up a sack of hemlock-laced treats.
Bottom line, if the police made their suspicions public, most of Merryville would be only too quick to believe them.
“So what’s next?” Rena asked, spreading her hands, palm up, in the universal sign of surrender.
“Mostly we wait,” Sean answered.
“No way am I just going to sit around waiting to be arrested. No way.”
I didn’t know if Sean was aware of Rena’s unfortunate incarceration in Minneapolis yet—though eventually he would have to be—but I knew that Rena wasn’t about to go down for someone else’s crime again.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of trying to find the killer,” Sean said, echoing my own concerns precisely. “But that would be a mistake. If you’re seen talking to potential witnesses, it may look like you’re attempting to manipulate them. You’ll look even more guilty.”
Rena rested her elbows on the table and collapsed, her head in her hands.
“Don’t worry,” Sean said. “We’ll take care of everything.” Sean and I exchanged a brief look, but I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, leaving me to wonder whether the “we” meant he’d forgiven me for that long ago slight.
Sean turned his full attention to Rena. “Speaking of looking even more guilty, you want to tell me what that text message was about?”
Rena opened her mouth to answer, but Sean held up his hand. “Before you say a word, I want you to think about whether that text is really incriminating or not. Because what you say to me is protected by privilege, but what you say in front of Izzy may come back to haunt you.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s brutal.”
“That’s the law,” he explained. He paused a beat, and then sighed. “Sorry. That did sound a little harsh, but that was my intent. This is deadly serious business, and I don’t want Rena to do something that will hurt her case down the line.
“Is the text really safe?” he asked.
Rena nodded.
“Then let’s have it.”
Rena sighed. “I got a text from Nadya Haas.”
“Nick’s mom?” I asked.
“Yeah. Look, I really shouldn’t tell you this, and I’m only doing so because, A, you won’t ease up until I explain and, B, I trust you two to take this to your grave. Nadya and I go to the same Al-Anon meetings.”
Of course that’s how she knew Nick’s mom—Al-Anon. I imagined Rena at those meetings, with Mrs. Haas and all sorts of other people I didn’t even know, eating cookies, drinking coffee, and sharing the sort of easy camaraderie that comes from common adversity. Once again, I was faced with a part of Rena’s life that had been hidden from me, a part of her life I could never fully understand and share. Coming right on the heels of Sean’s admonition to Rena to watch what she said around me, I’d never felt more alienated from this little pixie girl I loved so much.
“We take the ‘anon’ part pretty seriously. I don’t want Nadya’s text, reaching out to me for help, part of the public record.”
“What did she text you about?” Sean asked.
“After Nick left Trendy Tails that night, he went on a bit of a bender. When he got home, he and his mom got into it.”
“‘Got into it’?”
“Most of the time, Nick’s a gentle drunk, but he’s got a hair trigger. We got a glimpse of that when he and Sherry got into that fight in front of the store. Later that night, Nadya made the mistake of asking him about Sherry, and he lost it.”
“He hit her?” I asked.
“Yeah. I tried to get her to phone the police, but she wouldn’t do it. I walked Packer as a pretense for booking it to her house to check on her. By the time I got there, Nick had gone someplace to cool off, so Nadya said there was no point involving the cops. She’s really, really codependent.”
I thought of Nick raising his fist to Sherry during their fight, the way her body winced away even as she faced him down. Had he hit her before, too? Had he been angry enough at her after their fight—and after his “bender”—to murder her?
“Do you think Nick could have hurt Sherry?” I asked.
Rena laughed, thou
gh there was no humor in it. “Oh, he did. And she hurt him right back. They had a volatile relationship. Most of the time, she bullied him around. And on those occasions he cracked and took a swing at her, she’d clock him one. She is—was—a lot bigger than he is, and she didn’t scare easily.”
“What about the night she was murdered?”
“Oh,” Rena said, letting her head fall back and her eyes drift shut. “I see. You think Nick might be the killer.”
Sean shook his head. “If she’d been assaulted, I might buy it. But she was poisoned. That requires forethought, careful planning. Nick’s pickled half the time, and I can’t imagine him stringing together such a well-thought-out plot.”
Rena nodded her agreement. “Even when he’s sober, Nick doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose. My bet’s on Ken West. It cost a pretty penny to open the Blue Atlantic, and while Ken had a few investors, I heard he sank every penny he owned into the venture. Lost it all, which is why he stayed here instead of moving back to Chicago.”
“I don’t know,” I hedged. “He just didn’t seem that upset when he saw Sherry the day before the opening. He clearly didn’t like her, but he didn’t seem emotional enough to kill her.”
“But that’s what I mean,” Sean insisted. “Poisoning is a deliberate way to kill someone. Cold and calculated. You don’t have to be emotional or even angry, just determined. And Ken had access to the food that night. He had motive and opportunity.”
“Rena, you said Nick had already left his mom’s house when you got there?”
“Yes,” she conceded. “He’d taken off into the night. God only knows where he went. But I don’t think he came back to kill Sherry with water hemlock.”
I had to admit they had a point.
“Okay, so we have a suspect and a half. Ken West and maybe, on an outside chance, Nick Haas.”
“Guys,” Rena said, rubbing her eyes with her fists, “I’m going to have to call it a night. I have to pick up groceries for my dad and me before I go home, and I’m beat.”
