“Talk to him,” I said.
My aunt shook her head. “Can’t. Not at this late date. He’d be so hurt. I can’t do that to him.”
Really? Over a kitchen? “He’s a grown man,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he’ll be okay. And you know he wants you to be happy more than anything else. If a renovated kitchen is what it takes, he’ll be ripping cabinets out tomorrow morning.”
She shook her head again. “I can’t do that to him. I don’t know what to do, I really don’t.” And the rest of the evening, nothing I said budged her from that viewpoint.
“What do you think, Eddie?”
My furry pal and I were snuggled in bed. He was in the crook of my right elbow, hindering my ability to read to the point that I’d given up. The book was on the nightstand, the light was off, and I was starting the drift down to sleep.
“Is Aunt Frances having wedding jitters? Is that what the whole kitchen thing is about?”
Eddie yawned and rolled over.
“Or is she having second thoughts about marrying Otto?” The idea was a horrible one, and I was sorry I’d thought it, but now that it was in my head, I wasn’t sure it would go away. “What do you think?”
Eddie, however, didn’t reply.
• • •
Julia began the bookmobile day with a remarkable rendition of the theme song to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which meant the day could only get better from there on out.
When she’d finished (with open arms and upraised face), I nodded at the cat carrier. “Eddie has his paws over his ears.”
“He does not,” she said, then leaned forward. “Okay, so he does, but that’s because he’s tired and it’s bright out.”
I peered up at the cloudy sky. “If this is bright, I don’t want to know what gloomy looks like.”
“Bright for a cat,” Julia said oh-so-patiently. “Their sense of light is different from ours. Especially Eddie’s. He’s not a normal cat, you know.”
Though this was undoubtedly true—I’d long ago decided he was his own unique species, the singular Felis Eddicus—I was also pretty sure that light sensitivity wasn’t on Eddie’s long list of unique traits.
“And what makes you perky enough to sing this morning?” I asked.
“Just woke up happy,” she said. “Don’t you love days when that happens?”
“These days I typically wake up with cat hair on my lips.”
“And isn’t it wonderful to have a furry companion who loves you so much that he sacrifices his very own fur in the name of keeping you warm on cold winter nights?”
Now that was an idea I hadn’t once considered. “Then what’s the explanation for morning cat hair after a summer night so miserably humid that the only thing keeping me alive is the knowledge that I get to work in air-conditioning?”
“Insulation is insulation,” Julia said. “I can’t believe you’re not more appreciative of his efforts.”
“No?” A stop sign loomed. I braked and glanced down at my pants. One, two, three . . . I got to eleven Eddie hairs before losing track. “I’d appreciate them a lot more if his former fur matched my clothing.”
Julia spent much of the rest of the morning trying to convince me that Eddie and I had such a deep bond that he was trying to cover me with his hair so we’d look the same.
She failed spectacularly, of course, but Eddie and I both enjoyed her attempts, especially during the stop when he sneezed and half a hundred Eddie hairs catapulted off his body in every direction, some of them landing on me, some on Julia, and a large percentage on bookmobile patron Leon Clohessy.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “We have a lint roller.”
“No worries.” Leon, who was sitting on the bookmobile’s carpeted step, gazed at his pant legs with a remarkable lack of concern. “He has interesting hairs. So many are variegated. I had no idea cat fur came like that.”
I had limited experience with other cats, since my dad had been extremely allergic, and so as far as I knew, Eddie was the only one, but that seemed unlikely.
Julia tidied some books that had been jostled by a big bookmobile thump into an unavoidable pothole. “Where have you been lately, Leon? We haven’t seen you in a few weeks.”
Leon was an intermittent regular, if you could say that without spontaneously combusting from the sheer absurdity of the phrase. When he was home, he visited the bookmobile every time we showed up, but he and his nonreading wife traveled frequently. A couple of years ago they’d retired Up North from downstate attorney jobs, and Leon quoted his wife as saying that she didn’t care if she read another word again the rest of her life.
I didn’t understand that attitude at all—surely she didn’t mean fiction, did she?—but it clearly existed, and if Leon couldn’t shift his wife to be a reader after forty years of marriage, odds weren’t good that the bookmobile’s presence could do it, either.
“Hawaii,” he said. “Just got back yesterday. And I’m not sure it was a good idea. Nice to not be cold and to get some sun, but now . . .” He glanced outside and shook his head. “Now it seems like winter is going to last forever.”
“How long were you gone?” Julia asked.
“A month, almost exactly.” Leon went on to describe the Airbnb they had rented on the ocean. He was waxing lyrical about the scents of the blooming flowers, and when he took a breath, I interrupted him.
“Did you hear about Rowan Bennethum? She doesn’t live that far from you, right?” If my math was correct, Leon and his wife had left town the day before Rowan had been killed, and this was the stop both Rowan and Leon usually visited, so their houses couldn’t be too far apart.
The lines in Leon’s face, which were already deep with age, went even deeper. “Yes,” he said heavily. “I did. Out here someone who lives a mile away is a neighbor, especially if they’re full-time folks. Is it true she was poisoned?” At our nods, he sighed. “Such a cowardly way to kill. And delayed death can make finding the killer much more difficult. I don’t suppose they’ve arrested anyone?”
“Not yet.” I hesitated, then asked, “Did you happen to see anything out of the ordinary that last day before your trip?”
“Such as?”
“Anything,” I said. “The sheriff’s office is investigating, but if you were out of town and your driveway wasn’t plowed, they might have assumed you were gone for winter.”
“Hmm.” Leon put down the copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom he’d been reading. “Well, let me think. Martha was packing our bags and I was taking care of everything else, so we were busy. I certainly didn’t hear anything because we’d put on Hawaiian luau music to get us in the mood. And I don’t recall seeing anything . . .” He got a faraway look.
“What?” I asked, my voice almost sharp. “You remember something.”
“A car,” he said slowly. “We get so few cars down our road, and in winter we almost always recognize the vehicles, even in the dark. Speed, height, you’d be surprised how little it takes to pinpoint a familiar vehicle.”
“You saw something unfamiliar?”
He nodded. “An SUV. With only one headlight.”
• • •
The next morning, as I brushed fresh snow off the car, I waved at Eddie. He’d crowded himself onto a narrow living room windowsill and was giving me the evil eye through the glass.
“Sorry, pal,” I called. “It’s a library day, not a bookmobile day, and I have errands to run. See you tonight!”
I blew him a kiss—which he ignored—and got into the car, thinking about yesterday afternoon. After Leon had remembered the missing headlight, I’d immediately asked him to call Detective Hal Inwood and tell him about it. He’d protested, saying how could a missing headlight mean anything and telling Hal would only result in adding extra work for the already overworked sheriff’s office.