Two hours before everyone was supposed to arrive, Mary and Peggy showed up with Mia and Taylor King in tow, and box after box of cookies. There were gingerbread men with icing smiles and candy bow ties; round sugar cookies with frosted snowman faces; and Swedish butter cookies, crisp, buttery rectangles dusted with powered sugar. Mia and Taylor’s job would be to circulate through the crowd, each with a tray of cookies, and I suspected our biggest problem was going to be running out before the evening was over.
“Thank you,” I said to the two women. I put a hand on my chest and had to swallow down the lump of emotion that had formed because of their generosity.
Mary patted my arm. “We’re family, Kathleen.” She made a sweeping gesture with one hand that I knew meant she was including the whole library. “We may be a little odd from time to time and we may drive each other crazy once in a while, but when it’s time to get the boat moving we all grab an oar and start rowing.”
It was one of the strangest metaphors I’d ever heard, but I also knew exactly what she meant. As Leo Janes’s death had shown me once again, family wasn’t really about biology. It was about looking out for one another. Mary was right. We were family in the best sense of the word.
Maggie and I had temporarily rearranged our computer area, and the end wall of the space had been transformed into a gallery wall. The co-op artists had, as usual, done a spectacular job turning Maggie’s flea-market frames into works of art. Nic had added reclaimed wood that came from one of the old warehouses by the waterfront to two frames. Ruby had put a selection of the pictures we thought came from the summer camp at Long Lake into small frames she had spray painted black and attached to a bicycle wheel. Several photos of the town, including one of Riverarts when it was still a school, were up for silent auction. And on the wall adjacent to the photos, Maggie had displayed all the letters and cards she’d persuaded the recipients to loan to us.
Thorsten took his share of gentle ribbing over the card from his old girlfriend and Brady was an equally good sport over the note Burtis had gotten from Brady’s teacher explaining that the eleven-year-old spent too much time daydreaming and not enough concentrating on his schoolwork. He’d laughed and held out both hands as he stood with Maggie and me in front of the letter, protected in a shadowbox frame. “What can I say? She wasn’t wrong.”
Both Susan and Abigail were moving among the people, stopping to make notes whenever they heard an exclamation of recognition from someone looking at one of the photographs.
And it looked like we finally had an explanation of sorts for how the photos and pieces of mail had ended up behind the wall at the post office for all those years. Jon Larsen, grandson of the old postmaster, Campbell Larsen, who Harrison had mentioned, had turned up at the library just a day ago. It seemed likely the postmaster had been the one to hide everything.
“My grandfather got a little obsessed about preserving Mayville Heights’s history,” Jon had explained. “He’d been taking photographs his entire life and as his dementia got worse, he got a lot more secretive about where he put things he thought were important.”
It turned out that Jon and his siblings had found a similar cache of old pictures and papers behind a wall when they had started to renovate their grandfather’s house after his death.
I’d thanked him for coming in and giving me what felt like a logical ending to the story.
I was standing by the circulation desk, just taking everything in, when Marcus came up behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. I turned to look up at him. He was incredibly handsome in a charcoal turtleneck and black tweed jacket. I knew how corny it was, but the best part of him really was what was on the inside.
“I think we’re going to figure out who’s in most of those old photos by the end of the night,” I said. “I’ve already heard some great stories, including one involving Everett and a panty raid.”
“A panty raid?” Marcus said slowly.
“It’s when a group of guys try to steal—”
He shook his head, a smile spreading across his face. “It’s okay. I know what a panty raid is. And I’m thinking that story’s going to be interesting.”
“I could tell you over breakfast,” I said, watching his face. I felt a bit like Goldilocks, albeit a romance version, not the porridge-eating version. Too pushy? Not pushy enough?
“Sounds good,” Marcus said, giving me a look that for a moment made me forget how to breathe.
It was just right.
KEEP READING FOR THE MAGICAL CATS MYSTERIES SHORT STORY . . .
the cat burglar
In the uncanny sort of timing I’ve discovered Minnesota rain sometimes has, the sky seemed to open just as I started across Rebecca’s backyard toward my own. I pulled up the hood of my yellow slicker, folded both arms over the front of the raincoat and ran for my back door, my happy face–covered rubber boots clomping across the wet grass and sending water spraying up onto my jeans. It seemed as though all the rain we hadn’t gotten in April we were now going to get in May.
Inside the porch I shook myself a bit like a damp dog, then eased down the zipper of my jacket. Hercules poked his black-and-white face out from underneath and looked at me, green eyes narrowed, a sour expression on his face.
I set him down on the porch floor and the little tuxedo cat held up one white-tipped front paw and shook it, followed by the other.
I slipped off my jacket and hung it to drip on a hook by the back door. “There’s no way your feet are wet,” I said, stepping out of my boots. “In case you didn’t notice, your feet didn’t actually touch the grass.”
Hercules turned his back on me and started for the kitchen, making disgruntled grumbling noises in the back of his throat. The fact that the door was closed made no difference to him. He simply walked through it. The bottom panel almost seemed to shimmer for a moment and then the cat was on the other side with no more than the same soft sound a soap bubble makes when it pops.
The first time I’d seen Hercules walk through a completely solid door, I’d thought I was losing my mind. Now it was just part of his personality, like his intense aversion to wet feet, his indifference to catnip and his love for both sardine cat crackers and Barry Manilow’s music.
I had no idea where this unbelievable ability had come from—Herc’s gray tabby brother, Owen, couldn’t walk through walls. Owen’s superpower was the ability to disappear at will, and since he was a cat, it was almost always at the most inconvenient time for me. From the beginning I’d realized that if I told anyone about the cats’ “skills,” at best it would be my head getting examined and, at worst, theirs, so I kept their secret. A few times I’d had to come up with an explanation of how Hercules had gotten into a room or Owen onto the front seat of my truck, but since cats have a reputation for slightly sneaky behavior, it was pretty easy to cover.
I followed Hercules into the kitchen. He was sitting on the floor, staring at the cupboard where I kept the sardine crackers.
“Nice try,” I said, bending down to scratch the top of his head. “But A, I know you already had bacon with Everett, and B, you didn’t get wet.” I leaned my face close to his as I said the last part and he licked my chin. “You’re welcome,” I said.
Rebecca Nixon, now Rebecca Henderson, had been my backyard neighbor as long as I’d lived in this house, one of the perks that came with taking the job as head librarian here in Mayville Heights. After she and Everett had gotten married, they’d decided to live in Rebecca’s little house and soon Hercules was having breakfast with Everett a couple of times a week. Everett insisted Hercules was interested in what happened on the town council, and for all I knew, maybe the little cat was.