Dying to Read (The Cate Kinkaid Files Book #1): A Novel

by McCourtney, Lorena

  “Well, um, no, I don’t think so. But I’m sure it’s a good cause,” Cate said hastily.

  Willow collected cocoa powder, eggs, and oil. She talked as she mixed.

  “Okay, about Amelia. I did leave in a hurry—” She broke off abruptly. “What about Octavia? Oh, I hope nothing happened to her too.”

  “She’s okay.”

  “I’d have brought her along when I left, but I couldn’t find her. She’s such a fat, sweet thing. Would you believe she figured out how to open the door to my bedroom if I didn’t shut it tight enough?”

  Yes, Cate could believe that, but her attention zoomed in on what Willow said just before that. “You’d have just walked off with Amelia’s cat when she fired you?”

  “I was worried that—” Willow broke off, waved a hand, and went back to her mixing. “I was just so upset, being fired and all. Not thinking too straight, I guess.”

  Cate had the feeling Willow had started to say something entirely different but had caught herself and reverted to her distress about being fired. “Actually, I have Octavia. Cheryl was going to dump her at an animal shelter, so I took her.”

  “Sounds like something Cheryl would do.” Willow turned and appraised Cate again, this time apparently on her qualifications for cat ownership. Cate must have passed, because she said, “Good.” Then she changed the subject again and demanded, “How’d you know about Beverly?”

  “Cheryl gave me copies of your reference letters. I wanted to find you and make sure you got your inheritance.”

  “Okay, thanks. I appreciate that. I had a good reason for leaving Beverly’s so suddenly. But it had nothing to do with a wedding ring.” She grimaced. “What it had to do with was dear ol’ great-uncle Jeremiah Thompson. Anyway, I do remember the ring. Beverly was always afraid somebody was going to steal it, so she kept hiding it in different places around the house. Sometimes in a kitchen canister of rice or sugar. Sometimes in a bureau drawer or a box under her bed. Once in the toilet tank. Then she’d forget where she’d put it and go into panic mode until we found it.”

  “Why didn’t she just wear it?” Cate asked.

  “She said she’d lost weight since her husband died, and it just falls off her finger now.”

  “So maybe it isn’t really missing?”

  “Oh, I imagine it’s ‘missing,’ all right, in that she can’t find it. But I’ll bet it’s right there in the house somewhere. I feel bad that she thinks I could have taken it. I thought she liked me. I know I liked her.”

  “Oh, she does like you! She’d like to have your recipe for meat loaf.”

  “I don’t have a recipe. It’s like these brownies. I just put in what seems right.” She tasted the mixture in the bowl and cocked her head to one side. “This needs vanilla.”

  She pulled a bottle out of the cupboard, read the label, and grimaced. “Ugh. Imitation, not the real stuff.”

  After an unmeasured dribble of the imitation vanilla, she added a handful of chopped nuts, and a minute later the brownies were in the oven. She set the timer to buzz. By now Cate was sitting at the kitchen table with her tea. Willow plunked into the chair across from her. Lines creased her forehead.

  “Beverly mentioned that someone you worked for before her was also killed in a fall.”

  “Yeah. Margaret Addison. Maggie. That was awful. I tried to get rid of her liquor, but she always seemed to have a stash of it hidden somewhere I didn’t know about. That night …” She shook her head. “If you ever take up drinking, here’s my advice: don’t try dancing on a balcony railing when you’ve had half a bottle of vodka.”

  Two employers, two falls, two deaths. The coincidence was a bit worrisome. But Cate reasoned that a lot of elderly people fall, drinkers or not. Look at Uncle Joe.

  “Are you going to tell the police where I am?” Willow asked.

  “I think it would be better if you went to them yourself.”

  Willow’s shoulders slumped, but she nodded. “I suppose I’ll have to do that.” In an abrupt change of subject she said, “So, you like being a private investigator?”

  “Finding you for your great-uncle is my first assignment,” Cate admitted.

  “Oh yes. Great-uncle Jeremiah. I’m sure he’s eager to find me.”

  “He sounded very nice on the phone. Very concerned about you.”

  “The thing is …” Willow paused to take a long sip of tea. “There is no great-uncle Jeremiah.”

  7

  Cate straightened in the chair. “There isn’t?”

  “No. No Jeremiah Thompson. No great-uncles of any variety. No grandmother in Texas who left me an inheritance. There’s probably a Texas, but if this guy is saying it, I wouldn’t be too sure of even that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What did he sound like on the phone? Other than ‘nice.’ ”

  “Old. A little shaky, with kind of a hillbilly-southern drawl. Very fond of you.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  Cate blinked at the out-of-the-blue question. “I was engaged once.”

  “Were you in love?”

  “Of course I was! I wouldn’t have been engaged if I weren’t.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We just had a big meltdown. He’s engaged to someone else now.”

  “Were you heartbroken?”

  Cate considered the question, not sure herself. “I was … stunned. I’d thought God meant us to be together for a lifetime.”

  “But there’s never been anyone else since this guy?”

  “I haven’t been a hermit. I’ve had a few … relationships.”

  The hunk who, at thirty-one, turned out to be addicted to video games. The charmer who declared he’d love her forever—and moved to Australia the next week. The guy who embezzled a hundred thousand dollars from the company where they both worked. A friend had once asked, “Where do you find these guys? Creeps-R-Us?”

  “But you think God’s going to bring the guy you were in love with back to you?” Willow asked. “Because that’s your destiny or something?”

  Cate didn’t believe in “destiny,” but she did believe in God’s will, and what God could do. And she had thought, even after Kyle accepted a sudden transfer to the Georgia headquarters of the company he worked for, that they would get back together. All they needed was a little time, a little space. Hearing he was engaged to someone else rattled that thought like the tremor of an earthquake, but she rationalized that engagements didn’t necessarily end with a walk down the aisle.

  Now all she said was a flip, “God’s going to send me a package by UPS or FedEx, maybe Pony Express, and Kyle will jump out and surprise me?”

  “Doesn’t God work in mysterious ways?”

  The often-repeated quotation coming from Willow startled Cate. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I don’t know. But sometimes I think about it, because most stuff that happens in my life doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’s God working in some mysterious way.”

  “God working in mysterious ways isn’t actually a biblical quotation, but—”

  Willow cut her off with a some-other-time wave of hand. “I was in love too. His name’s Cooper Langston. Coop. Tall and blond and rugged. Too handsome for his own good. Remember the Marlboro Man? That’s Coop.” She paused, her fingers threading together as if to form a protective shield. “Everything was great when we first got together, but then he got all moody and possessive. We were living in this little cabin out near the river, and he wanted to know where I was every minute. He wanted to control where I was every minute. He didn’t want me to have any friends. He just turned … weird.”

  An appalling suspicion leaped into Cate’s mind. “Did he mistreat you?”

  “He slapped me. I should have left right then, but he was so sweet and apologetic, and he felt so awful about it. I thought maybe it was my fault anyway, that I must have driven him to it.”

  A classic abuser. Abuse, apologize, repeat. And
make the victim feel it was her fault. “But it did happen again?”

  “A couple more slaps. A punch. A really bad punch.” Willow didn’t elaborate, but she rubbed her ribs as if in painful memory. “That was when I knew I had to get out.”

  “Before it escalated to something even worse.”

  Willow nodded. “But I couldn’t just walk away. I was scared of what he’d do if I tried. But sneaking away was hard too. He worked from home, a phone-sales thing, and he was always there. But finally he had to attend a sales conference at the main office up in Portland, so I threw what I could grab in my car and sneaked away. He’d taken my car keys, of course, but he didn’t know I had another set.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Anyway, I thought once I’d gotten away, that would be the end of it. I wasn’t hiding at first, just trying to get my life back together. I got a job taking care of a sweet old lady. But after a while I realized he was watching me. I sneaked away again, and that time I did hide. But he found me. It was almost like he had some sixth sense about where I was.”

  “He stalked you.”

  “I guess that’s what you’d call it, yeah. Then he caught me on the street there by Beverly’s, grabbed me by the throat, and said if he couldn’t have me, nobody could. Which I took as a threat.”

  “I think so.”

  “I felt bad, leaving Beverly like that, but I was scared. I’m thinking now I should have gotten out of Eugene, probably clear out of the state. But I didn’t know where to go, and I didn’t have any money either.”

  Cate’s heart went out to her. Willow, broke, alone, scared. Then a startling thought occurred to her. “What if he found out you were living at Amelia’s? And when he showed up, she wouldn’t tell him anything about you, so he got angry and—”

  “I don’t know how he could have gotten out there on the stairs with her. But maybe he did. And after he pushed her, he figured he might as well steal something.” Willow’s hand went to her throat. “I know he stole a car once, a long time ago. But to kill someone …”

  They looked at each other over the kitchen table, the tantalizing scent of baking brownies an unlikely background for a conversation about possible murder.

  “He threatened to kill you, didn’t he?” Cate said softly.

  Willow nodded as if the movement were painful.

  Cate was having a difficult time rearranging her own thinking. Both the great-uncle “Jeremiah Thompson” and the story he’d told about an inheritance for Willow were just a wild fiction invented by Coop Langston. “He’s not in Texas, is he? He’s right here in Eugene.”

  “Right here in Eugene,” Willow echoed. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

  “But he was calling from out of state.” Oregon had only two area codes, and the code Cate had seen wasn’t one of them. “I saw it on the caller ID.”

  “Spoof.”

  “Spoof?”

  “You know, you get a spoof card and you can use it to make any number you want show up on someone’s caller ID. You can get ’em on the internet.”

  Cate had heard of that, though she’d never known anyone who’d actually done it. “Is anything he told Uncle Joe and me true? What about the Southern drawl?”

  “He always had fun doing impersonations.” Willow smiled, as if the memory were an unexpectedly fond one. “He could do a great John Wayne, and an amazing Jed Clampett, from that old Beverly Hillbillies show.”

  Now that she thought about it, Cate realized that Jeremiah Thompson’s accent did have a touch of Beverly Hillbillies reruns. With a little Andy Griffith and Mayberry thrown in.

  “How’d you get connected with him to begin with?”

  “I had an untypical upbringing, I guess. My folks were part of a carnival, and we were on the move all the time. My mom told fortunes. She was Karma, the Princess of Prophecy, and my dad managed the rides. The only time I went to school was when we stayed in Texas for the winter. By the time I was fourteen, I could tell a pretty good fortune myself.” She grabbed Cate’s hand and studied her palm. “I see a long life … and look at this! Three kids. And some years living in a foreign country.”

  Cate felt a brief flare of excitement. A long time ago, she’d thought about doing missionary work in Africa. Was that still in her future?

  She squelched the unwarranted excitement as quickly as it flared. All her palm showed was wrinkles, plus a scar from the time she’d tried to do a flip with her bicycle like the motorcyclists did on TV. No prophecies about the future there. Though the scar suggested she should stay away from daredevil activities.

  “So where did Cooper Langston come into this?”

  “I got married when I was eighteen. Biker guy. It lasted a couple of years while we chased around the country. After we were divorced, all I wanted to do was settle down in one place and live a nice, ordinary life. Then Coop started coming into the coffee shop where I was waitressing at this little burg in Texas. One day he said let’s move on … and I picked up and left with him.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. Definitely not the brightest thing I ever did, but I was in love with him. You fall in love and you make mistakes.” There was something both forlorn and bitter in Willow’s assessment about love.

  “So nothing this Coop guy told Uncle Joe or me was true?”

  “It sounds as if he threw in a few tidbits of truth. I do have some family in Texas. No great-uncles, but there are some not-so-great cousins. The only grandma I have used to live in Texas, where I lived with her for a while, but she’s in Florida now.”

  “You’re sure she isn’t dead?”

  “I talked to her a while back, to let her know I wasn’t with Coop anymore. She said she’d pray for me.” Willow sighed in a put-upon way, as if being prayed for was a heavy burden to bear. “But she can be a lot of fun, even if she is a little strong on the God stuff. She’s the one who taught me to cook. Coop can be fun too. When he isn’t being such a jerk.”

  “You wouldn’t go back to him, would you?” Cate asked, alarmed at the hint of nostalgia she heard in Willow’s voice.

  “No. Of course not. I was in love with him, but I’m cured now.” Willow wrinkled her nose. Love was some unpleasant disease. “Are you going to tell him where I am when he calls again?”

  “No! But I’ll have to explain all this to Uncle Joe. Maybe, when you go to the police to tell them about your connection with Amelia, you should talk to them about getting a restraining order against Coop.”

  “Like that would do any good. What do you do, wave it at him while he’s choking you?” Willow put one hand to her throat and gagged as she waved the other hand in the air.

  Good point. “Does he know this friend you’re staying with here?”

  “He knows Nicole, but she and Coop don’t like each other, so I let him think I never saw her anymore. She’s moved a couple times, so I don’t think he can find me here.”

  “I found you.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” Willow peered toward the unlit living room as if afraid Coop might storm through the front door at any moment. “But I don’t want to do anything about him with the police. I’m hoping he’ll think I left town, and a restraining order would let him know I’m still here, wouldn’t it? Mostly I just want to get on with my life.”

  The buzzer on the stove dinged, so Cate didn’t have to answer the question. Willow opened the oven door, tested the doneness of the brownie batter with a toothpick, then set the pan on a hot pad on the counter. “These’ll be cool in a minute. Then I’ll make some frosting.”

  “Actually, I should be getting on home.” Cate looked at the clock in the shape of a fat owl on the wall. “Are you going back to the tree now?”

  “Maybe I’ll get a few hours of sleep first. I could be up there for several days. Providing I can work out the bathroom problem.”

  “I’ll tell Beverly to look around the house for her wedding ring.”

  “Tell her to look under her mattress,” Willo
w advised. “And in the freezer. She froze it in a carton of ice cubes once. And when Coop calls, maybe you could tell him I left town?”

  “I’ll think of something,” Cate agreed. “Be careful up in the tree, okay? Don’t climb too high and fall out.”

  “And you, you be careful too. This whole thing with Amelia sounds, you know, kind of scary.”

  “I’m not really involved.”

  Willow turned and studied Cate. “Aren’t you?”

  8

  Cate drove home still in shock about what Willow had told her about Jeremiah Thompson/Cooper Langston. It was disconcerting how easily he’d deceived both Uncle Joe and her, scary how she could have put Willow’s life in danger if she’d given “Jeremiah Thompson” Willow’s address.

  But she had fulfilled her assignment as a PI now. She’d tell Uncle Joe and write a report for the files. She’d get rid of Cooper Langston when he called and get back to looking for a real job.

  If she could just blast that vision of Amelia lying dead on the concrete out of her head. And get rid of a feeling she couldn’t quite pin down, like when a name or word hid just out of reach somewhere in your subconscious.

  When Cate got home, she found Rebecca in a bathrobe, surrounded by a gardenia scent of shampoo, with a towel around her head. She was watching the news on TV, a sacked-out Octavia overflowing her lap. She said they’d been planning to move Joe to a nursing home the following day for a few weeks of physical therapy, but he’d run a fever this evening and would be in the hospital a little longer. She sounded weary and discouraged, and new lines of worry cut between her eyes.

  Rebecca turned off the TV and they joined hands to pray for Uncle Joe. Willow had sent brownies home with Cate and they shared them, soft but chewy, crunchy with nuts, and altogether delectable. When Cate went to her room for the night, Octavia followed. Cate snuggled the cat into her canopied bed, but two minutes after Cate was in her own bed, she felt the cat cuddle up beside her.

  “Snuggling is okay,” she told the cat. “Just don’t give me any more advice.”