“Since no one knows that he's dead yet the will won't be read. His property will stay intact,” Murphy said, her tail straight out horizontally.
“Someone has to run the business.” Tucker began to feel uneasy.
“Whoever is vice president of his corporation will. But think about it, it doesn't matter who runs the business. What matters is where the profits go. And they won't go into anyone's pocket until he is legally declared dead.”
“Mrs. Murphy, if the killer stands to profit from Tommy's death then the body must be revealed.” Pewter was hungry and frustrated. This didn't make a bit of sense to her.
“Exactly.”
“I don't get it,” Tucker forthrightly said, her voice high.
“Be patient.” Mrs. Murphy smiled at them as they caught up to walk beside her. “Whoever killed Tommy is in no hurry. I don't know what Virginia laws say about when you're legally declared dead, but I guarantee you our killer knows. Someone has a great deal to gain by this.”
“Could be love gone sour.” Pewter searched for a different tack.
“Could be.” Murphy inhaled the sharp fragrance of the shed bursting with wood shavings.
Pewter was happy they were home.
Tucker was growing more concerned by the minute. “You're making me nervous.”
“Maybe we're looking at this from the wrong angle.” Mrs. Murphy bounced through the screen door when Harry opened it. She liked to let Harry open it. It wouldn't do for Harry to know all her tricks. “Maybe the question is, what do Tommy Van Allen and H. Vane have in common?”
“Nothing,” Pewter said.
Tucker demurred. “Plenty.”
The two animals looked at each other as Harry wiped off the kitchen counter and pulled out cans of food.
“They don't have anything in common.” Pewter defended her position. “Tommy is young and handsome. H. Vane has got to be in his seventies. The face-lift makes him look a little younger.”
“He had a face-lift?” Tucker asked.
“I can always tell. The eyes. The faces lose some of their expressiveness—even with the good jobs,” Pewter authoritatively declared. “But those two don't have anything in common. Tommy is divorced. H. Vane is happily married, or appears to be. Tommy is wild and boisterous, H. Vane has a stick up his ass.”
“My turn. If you're finished.”
Pewter waited by her food bowl, which said LOYAL FRIEND. “I'm finished, I think.”
“Okay, they're both well-off. H. Vane is beyond well-off. He's Midas. But they can do whatever they want. They belong to the same clubs. They go to the same parties. They both like to fly. And Tommy was going to do the reenactment.”
“Every man in Crozet was going to do that. That's not enough.” Pewter purred when Harry scooped out tuna.
“Maybe Tommy had an affair with Sarah.” Tucker buried her face in her food.
They tabled the discussion until after they ate.
Harry whistled, tired of her own whistle, and turned on the radio. She liked the classical station and country and western. She tuned to the classical station out of Lynchburg. She heated the griddle, pulled out two slices of bread and two fat slices of American cheese. She loved cheese sandwiches, dressing them up with mayonnaise and hamburger pickles. Sometimes she'd squirt on ketchup, too.
Tucker finished first, as always. “Hurry up.”
“You don't savor your food.” Pewter did, of course.
“It tastes good to me. I don't know why you hover over yours.”
“Tucker, you're such a dog,” Pewter haughtily replied.
Mrs. Murphy, a slow eater, paused. “If Tommy slept with Sarah, the question is, did H. Vane know? He certainly seemed friendly enough to Tommy.”
Pewter pitched in her two cents. “H. Vane would hardly kill Tommy, then get it in the back himself. This is screwy.”
“No, it isn't. We haven't found the key yet, that's all.” Murphy was resolute.
“And now that we've somewhat compromised Mom we'd better figure this out.” Tucker had lived with Mrs. Murphy a long time. She knew how the cat thought.
“Yes.”
Pewter, food bits clinging to her whiskers, jerked her head up from the bowl. “She'd stick her nose in it even if we hadn't taken her to the airplane. Even Miss Tally said it was in the blood.”
“You got that right.” Mrs. Murphy thought Pewter looked silly. “Remember what she said about Biddy Minor?”
“Curiosity killed him,” Tucker whispered.
“I thought curiosity killed the cat.” Pewter swallowed some carefully chewed tuna.
“Shut up.” Murphy hated that expression. “I prefer ‘Cats have nine lives,' myself.”
“Well, I only have one. I intend to take good care of it.” Tucker snapped her jaws shut with a click.
22
The shadows etched an outline of the budding trees onto the impeccably manicured back lawn of the Lutheran church. The Reverend Herbert C. Jones, in clerical garb, fiddled with his fly rod as he stood on the moss-covered brick walkway to the beige clapboard office, window shutters painted Charleston green.
He'd finished his sermon for Sunday and since this was Tuesday he felt on top of the world. True, his desk contained four mountains of neatly ordered paperwork but a man couldn't work around the clock. Even the Good Lord rested on the seventh day. And the afternoon, balmy and warm, enticed him from the grind of paperwork. He got his fishing rod and went outside.
Usually Herb parked the church's 1987 white Chevy truck on the corner to let people know he was at church. Since he received many calls to pick up this and drop off that for a parishioner in need, it was also useful for the truck to sit ready, keys in the ignition. However, at the moment the Chevy had a flat left-front tire, which irritated him no end because he'd endured a flat just last year on the right front and had replaced both front tires. He had parked the Chevy in the brick garage behind the office until he could fix it. Lovely winding brick paths meandered from the church to the garage, formerly the stable, and to his graceful residence, a subdued classic in flemish bond.
The tail of the Chevy poked out from the garage. His Buick Roadmaster was parked next to the old truck.
“I'll stand here and cast at the taillight,” he told himself.
Lucy Fur watched her human with detached amusement. Mrs. Murphy and Pewter were visiting from the post office. The animal door that Harry had installed there was a godsend because the animals didn't have to lurk by the front door waiting for a person to open it. All too often the human would close the door fast or step on them, because humans lacked a sharp sense of how much space they took up or how much other creatures needed. They were always bumping into things, stepping on tails, or tripping over their own feet. With the animal door at the rear of the old frame building the creatures could come and go at will. The cats especially enjoyed prowling the neighborhood to visit other cats.
Lucy Fur, a gorgeous young Maine coon cat, had walked into Herb's life one stormy night. He kept her because Elocution was getting on in years and he thought a younger companion would do her good. At first Elocution had hissed and spit. That lasted two weeks. Then she tried the deep freeze. Every time the kitten would walk by she'd turn her back. After a month she accepted Lucy Fur, teaching her the duties of a preacher's cat. The first, for any cat, is to catch mice. However, there were communion wafers to count, vestments to inspect, sermons to read, parishioners to comfort, and a variety of functions to attend.