Clara jumped and wheeled on her sister. “Don’t do that!” Her fur bristled when she was startled.
“Yes, she met someone with a nice smile, but they didn’t even talk, really,” Clara said, as much to settle her fur as to explain. “He was just being kind. He helped her when that cyclist nearly knocked her over.”
Laurel only flicked her tail, but the message was clear. Two men, both fighting over Becca, even slightly. That got the sealpoint’s interest.
“What’s gotten into you three?” Six eyes—green, blue, and gold—looked up in surprise. “I’d swear you’d think I’d been gone for weeks.”
“Now you’ve done it.” Harriet batted at Laurel. “Bad enough you destroyed her feather. She won’t want to give us treats now!”
“Shhh…” Laurel hissed. “She doesn’t know what happened to the feather.”
Clara wisely sat that one out. In truth, the cats had already had their breakfast, before Becca left. But to Harriet’s delight, she headed once more to the kitchen, as Laurel assumed a particularly self-satisfied smirk.
“No, I couldn’t speak to Gaia either.” Becca cradled the device against her shoulder as she scooped out the savory feast. “The cops were talking to her. I wonder if Margaret said something about her and, oh, never mind. Speaking of, Maddy, I meant to tell you. I met Gaia’s ex. He’s a bike messenger named Tiger.”
She paused then as she laid down the dishes for the three felines. But, looking up from her own second supper, Clara noted the strained expression on Becca’s face.
“You going to eat that?” Harriet’s face pushed close, distracting Clara just when she wanted to listen.
“Hush!” Clara pushed closer to her food, but kept her ears tipped.
“Yes, Maddy, a bike messenger…” Becca was leaning back against the counter, eyes back with exasperation. “No, you’ve got the wrong idea. I mean, sure, he’s cute. But what’s more important is that he might be helpful to the case. He might know who would want to hurt Gaia.”
The buzz coming from the phone sounded like a bee was trapped in there.
“They’re still friends,” Becca explained. “They talk. That’s good, right? I mean, it’s civilized. Anyway, she had told me that he was worried about her, so it was natural to start to chat with him. He’s my first lead.”
A pause so weighted that even Harriet looked up.
“I told you, I’m not interested, Maddy. And even I was, I wouldn’t be poaching. I happen to have it on good authority that Gaia was already seeing someone else. Someone she shouldn’t have been.” The three cats exchanged glances. Becca rarely used that particular tone. “Anyway, I have to go now. My coven is meeting here this afternoon. At least they believe in me!”
***
In truth, Becca had several hours before the coven’s circle—if the informal and somewhat reduced gathering could even be called that. The unsettling events of the previous spring had shaken the group, and in the wake of a summer wedding and an August break, attendance at the weekly meetings had become a bit irregular. Two of the coven, Trent and Larissa, were now such infrequent attendees that Becca hadn’t bothered to ask them about rescheduling their usual Tuesday night to a Sunday afternoon until the day before. Whether it was a fit of pique or a real conflict that caused Larissa to text back a curt excuse, Becca couldn’t tell. Maybe the wealthy older woman really was spiriting away her younger boyfriend for the weekend. The two remaining witches—women about Becca’s own age—were the ones she wanted to speak with anyway.
Besides preparing for her guests, Becca did have work to do. Despite what she’d told Maddy, the fledgling investigator was feeling a bit more desperate than defiant. Money was tight, and her unemployment was running out. If she wanted to make being a witch detective a going concern, now was the time.
Clara might not understand the details—finance being of little interest to a cat—but she picked up on her person’s intensity as she huddled over the laptop for the next few hours.
The first was spent on what Becca called “old-school research.”
“I can’t rely on my sensitivity for everything,” she had whispered to Clara. What that meant, as far as the cat could tell, was typing in people’s names and seeing what came up. Gaia/Gail Linquist seemed to have an awful lot of photos. With, Becca noticed, an awful lot of young men.
“Tiger can’t have been that serious,” she said, with what to her cat sounded like a happy upward lilt. Clara wasn’t sure how she felt about this development. A few clicks later, though, she did agree that the goth girl’s jet-black hair was a more striking look than her original mouse brown.
Margaret and Frank Cross seemed to have less of an online profile. “Makes sense,” Becca said. “Given their ages.”
Once again, Clara couldn’t make heads or tails of the comment, or of the few photos that popped up. One, back when the used car salesman had more hair and his wife’s mouth had been smiling rather than puckered, made her sad, though. She leaned on Becca, and the two sat quietly for a moment with that one the screen.
When Becca rose to fetch the smelly baggie, Clara became concerned. Her person had stuck it in the refrigerator, and her cat had hoped it would disappear there, never to be seen again, like that lettuce from last month. She was relieved to note that its smell had faded, somewhat, after its time in the chill—and even more so when she realized that Becca was only going to look at the thing, through the plastic, rather than touch or taste it. When she put it aside to return to her laptop, Clara considered her options. Harriet’s actions might have been troublesome, but her instincts were dead on, her calico sister realized. If only there was a way to get rid of the thing that didn’t draw attention to the feline sisters’ powers or otherwise break the rules against involving humans in their magic.
“I’m sure Harriet could bury it again.” Silent as a shadow, Laurel had jumped up to join Clara and Becca on the sofa. “She doesn’t have to make it look like anything. She could just dig.”
“Becca would worry.” Clara didn’t even want to admit the truth to herself. “She’d only turn the house upside down.”
“Well, we can’t have that.” Laurel drew back in distaste, any kind of frenzied human activity, including housecleaning, being anathema to a cat.
Before they could decide on any other action, Becca had picked up the bag once more. Holding it close to her laptop, she seemed to be comparing it to one of the odorless images. Clara and Laurel could only trade worried glances as Becca typed madly and then stared long and hard at the screen.
After what seemed like an eternity to the cats, Becca finally put the specimen aside, and with a tantalizing dance of her fingers, the screen before her changed. That picture again—the woman and the cat—moved as Becca read. Although she didn’t have Laurel’s gift, Clara thought she could make out a few stray thoughts as she focused on her person. “Ancestor…” The little cat tried out the word. Yes, that was right. “With her familiar…”
Could Becca be close to understanding? To comprehending, at last, that her cats had a history of power and had protected their people as best they could? Clara closed her eyes to concentrate and found herself visualizing her own mother. Those last days at the shelter…
“Witch.” No, she wasn’t hearing Becca’s thoughts. Her person was whispering to herself, reading, Clara realized, the text on the screen. A story that seemed to dismay her, from the way she blinked and then closed her screen.
She rose, then, but her mood carried over from whatever she had seen. Although their person remained quiet, the set of her mouth indicated trouble, Clara thought, as did the way her brows had pulled together. When she went for the vacuum cleaner, pulling it from the back of a closet where Clara and her sisters had hoped it had gone to die, she and Laurel made themselves scarce. Even Harriet woke in the ensuing tumult, blinking and affronted as they all crowded beneath the bed in safety.