She laughed and said she would.
I said good-bye and turned back to the table. My furry early-riser had jumped onto a chair and seemed to have started sorting the papers without me.
“Owen,” I said sharply.
He jumped at the sound of his name and one paw knocked a pile of pages on the floor. I groaned and I might have muttered a word under my breath that librarians generally did not use.
Owen immediately jumped down and started nudging papers toward the table.
I crouched down next to him and began to gather the rest.
“Merow?” he asked, a little tentatively it seemed to me.
“No, I’m not mad,” I said. “Just next time wait for me, please.” I realized if anyone had heard the conversation they would think I was talking to a person and not a cat.
Owen suddenly peered in the direction of the refrigerator. He stretched out a paw and snagged a piece of paper that had slid partway underneath.
“Thank you for your help,” I said as I took it from him. It looked to be a photo of a couple of teenagers, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old.
Owen just sat there staring at me.
Okay, it seemed that I was missing something. I took a closer look at the picture. The two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were on a tire swing. She was wearing a bikini top and a tiny pair of white shorts. He was wearing denim cutoffs and a tank top. I recognized the boy. “That’s Ray Nightingale,” I said, tapping the page with a finger.
Owen murped his agreement and began to wash his face.
I studied the girl. “Hang on a minute. That’s Kassie.”
The cat’s golden eyes flicked to me for a moment without missing a pass of his paw over his face.
I straightened up, still holding on to the picture. “Ray and Kassie knew each other when they were kids?” I had recognized who they were pretty quickly. They had to have recognized each other.
“Why didn’t Ray say something?”
Owen seemed as puzzled as I was.
Could he have been involved in Kassie’s death? No. That didn’t make sense.
I probably should have just called Marcus with the information, but I didn’t. I reached for my cell and called Maggie instead. She was probably still in her studio at Riverarts.
Maggie confirmed that Ray was there or at least he had been about ten minutes earlier when she’d gone down to her Bug to get the new paintbrush she had left in the car.
I told her I needed to talk to Ray and she didn’t even ask me why. She just said she would be at the back door to let me in.
I stuffed all the papers back in their envelope except for the photo. That I took with me. Owen disappeared into his basement lair. Figuratively for a change, not literally. Hercules had gone out onto the back step and was staring at the sky again. I stopped to give him a head scratch.
“Please don’t start a war with the grackles,” I said. “I don’t want to come home and find out I’m living in The Birds.”
As promised, Maggie was at the back door to let me into Riverarts. Ray was one of the newer members of the artists’ co-op. He’d had to wait a while for studio space in the converted school, and he was there a lot.
“Come on up when you’re done with Ray,” Maggie said. “I’ll show you next week’s illustrations.”
I said I would and she headed back to her studio, her long legs taking the stairs two at a time.
Ray’s space was on the second floor of the building on the right-hand side of the hall at the end. I knocked on his half-open door and after a moment he called, “Come in.”
The space was incredibly tidy. A huge commercial shelving unit, painted black, filled one end wall. The opposite wall held several glass display cases with Ray’s collection of vintage ink bottles.
There was a big drafting table next to the window and a long workstation in the center of the room.
Ray was working by the window. He looked up, surprised to see me. “Hey, Kathleen,” he said. “Are you looking for Maggie?”
“No,” I said, “I’m looking for you.”
“What do you need?” he asked. “No offense, but I have a tight deadline on a project and the show has put me behind.”
I put the printed photo of him and Kassie on the drafting table.
“So Kassie and I knew each other when we were kids,” he said with a shrug. “We went to the same school in Chicago for a while. We hung out sometimes. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is she’s dead and you didn’t tell anyone you knew her.”
“I hadn’t been around her in I don’t know how long. We didn’t know each other anymore. Kassie was as surprised to see me as I was to see her.”
“Did either of you tell Elias you knew each other?”
“No. Neither one of us wanted it to look as though there had been some kind of collusion between us. She didn’t want to leave the show and why should I? I worked hard to get to be a contestant. Probably harder than she had to be a judge. So we agreed to act like we didn’t know each other. It wasn’t a big deal. So we hung out when we were teenagers. It wasn’t like that gave me an advantage or anything now.”
He seemed indifferent to the fact that someone he had been friends with had been murdered.
Ray glanced at the photo again. “Look. It has to have been at least fifteen years since I saw Kassie. We might as well have been strangers. I can’t tell you or the police anything about her. I don’t know anything.”
“Do you know where this picture came from?” I asked. I reached over and took it before Ray did something to it.
“I don’t have a clue,” he said. “Maybe she found it somewhere and was going to show it to me and then she didn’t get the chance.”
I remembered when I’d first met Ray. It was after the murder of artist Jaeger Merrill. Jaeger Merrill had been a mask-maker who could take what other people saw as garbage and turn it into art. He was also a liar and a forger, in essence a con artist. He reproduced religious icons—top-quality fakes. He had fooled some of the best art experts in the world. And he used everyone he met. He and Ray had been friends, as much as someone like Jaeger Merrill had friends.
Ray had tried to further his career by fudging an endorsement from another artist. Not only had he not thought about the damage it could do to the co-op’s reputation, it had been clear he didn’t care. All he’d seemed to think about were his own self-interests.
“My work will stand on its own merits. All I’m doing is getting someone to pay attention for a minute,” he had insisted when he was caught.
There wasn’t anything else to say in respect to his friendship with Kassie. I thanked him and headed for the stairs up to Maggie’s studio.
One thing I was sure of, Ray had lied to me the first time we’d met and I was certain he was lying now.
chapter 12
I found Maggie standing in front of her easel frowning at the drawing that was propped on it. “Hi,” I said.
She turned and gave me a distracted smile. “Hi,” she said. “How did it go with Ray?”
I held out my hand and waggled it from side to side.
“Does this have something to do with Kassie?” she asked. I noticed her eyes flick back to the drawing.
I ignored the question for the moment and went to stand beside her. I studied the pen and ink drawing and the color swatches Maggie had propped beside it.
She leaned her forearm on my shoulder. “I can’t get the green right for the kiwi.” She made a gesture over her shoulder toward her computer. “I’ve been looking them up online for the last half hour but the color still feels wrong.” She’d also been running her hands through her hair and her curls stuck up all over her head. Once again I thought she looked like a green-eyed lamb.
“Mags, just go down to Eric’s,” I said. I tipped my head gently to the side so it bumped the top of hers.