The look he shot me was clearly disdainful.
I reached for the DVD. It was Young Sherlock Holmes. “You think we should play Sherlock Holmes?”
“Merow,” he said.
I leaned back in the chair. “So what do you think we should do? Round up the usual suspects?”
Herc looked up at the ceiling. Could cats roll their eyes?
“Oh, right,” I said. “That’s Casablanca, not Sherlock Holmes.”
The cat brought his gaze back to me, not at all impressed with my sense of humor or my knowledge of old movies.
I reached down to stroke the top of his head. “Okay, no more teasing,” I said. “So who are our suspects?”
Owen chimed in then with a loud meow.
I looked over at him trying to work something sticky off the side of a back paw. “Liam?” I asked.
He meowed again and went back to his cleanup routine.
I straightened up in the chair. “Okay, Liam,” I said to Hercules. “Maybe Abigail’s friend Georgia, and maybe even Burtis. Who else?” He looked at the books again. “Not Mary,” I said. “I know she threatened to launch Mike Glazer between two streetlights like she was kicking for three points in the Super Bowl, but I refuse to believe she’d kill anyone.”
I laced my fingers together and rested my hands on the top of my head. “I know Marcus said the Scott brothers couldn’t have had anything to do with Mike Glazer’s death, but I’d still like to know more about them.”
Hercules lifted one paw and looked at me. Feeling kind of silly, I leaned down and held out my hand. He put his paw on my palm. It looked like we had a plan.
The phone rang just as I was starting the dishes. “Hello, Katydid,” my mother’s voice said, warm somehow against my ear.
I dropped down onto the footstool. “Hi, Mom,” I said. “How’s LA?” My mother was in Los Angeles, reprising the role she’d created on a soap opera early in the year.
“Warm and sunny,” she said. “At least I’m assuming it is. I’m at the studio.”
“How’s everything going?”
She laughed. I loved the sound. My mother had a great laugh—big and deep and warm. “Wonderful. I could very easily turn into a diva. I have a gorgeous suite. They send a car for me every morning. And my dressing room is bigger than our first apartment.” She paused. “Or our second apartment, or our third.”
I laughed too. “I get the picture, Mom.”
“I read in your paper that there was a dead body found in the downtown,” she said. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, sweetie, would you?”
My mother read the Mayville Heights Chronicle online so she could keep up with what was happening in town.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
She laughed again. “Mother’s intuition. Did you find the body, or is the dead man connected to someone you know?”
I stretched my feet out across the hardwood floor. “Actually, Hercules found the body.”
“Your cat?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Most people just buy their cats a couple of rubber mice and a ball of yarn to entertain them, Katydid,” she said dryly.
“It’s kind of complicated, Mom.”
“The best stories always are.”
I explained about Ruby’s paintings, Hercules bolting across the street, and Mike Glazer’s body being in the tent. I even filled her in on the proposal for Legacy Tours.
“So what happens to the tour idea now?”
“It’s still on,” I said, rolling my head from one side to the other. “One of the other partners is coming to town.”
“My fingers and toes are crossed for all of you,” she said.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “Now, how about a couple of hints about your story line? Maggie’s going to ask me.”
Mags had become a loyal Wild and Wonderful fan after she’d started watching to see my mother in action.
“I could never give away story line secrets,” Mom said, and I pictured her with her hand over her heart. I waited. “But if I were to do it . . .” She went on to tell me a couple of surprises planned for her character that I knew would have Maggie glued to her DVR.
“I have to go,” Mom said. “They’re going to be calling me to the set soon. I love you, and I sent you something in the mail.”
“You sent me something? What?”
“Now, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?” she said. “Call your father and your brother and sister. I’ll talk to you soon.” With that, she was gone.
I hung up the receiver, wondering what she was sending me. Knowing my mother, it could be anything. I looked at the phone. Now that I’d talked to my mom, I wanted to talk to the rest of the family.
Ethan answered the phone. “Hey, Kath,” he said.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked. “Do you have Mom’s ESP?” Our mother had this spooky ability to somehow know when it was one of her kids on the phone.
“No,” he said. “We have this little invention called caller ID here in the big city. I know you probably don’t have that kind of thing out there in the sticks.”
“Yeah, we just make do with tin cans and string.”
“I figured,” he said. “And for the record, when I talked to Mom earlier, she did say you’d call around now.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “So what are you up to, baby brother?”
“Still working on the video. And now Sara’s got this idea of making a video about making the video. Oh, yeah, and I cut my hair.”
“You cut your hair?” I said.
“Well, technically it was cut by a redhead with—”
I cleared my throat.
“—a very nice smile,” he finished. I could hear the laugher in his voice.
He spent a few minutes telling me more about the video. Then he said, “Sara wants to talk to you. She keeps poking me in the back of the head with her bony old-woman fingers.”
There were sounds of a scuffle and then Sara came on the line. “Hi, Kathleen,” she said. “Ignore Ethan. He’s a wuss.”
“Hi,” I said. “How’s the video going?”
“Good. Ethan doesn’t pay attention to what I tell him to do, but everyone else is pretty easy to work with.” I heard something in the background. “Just a sec,” Sara said.
“Sorry,” she said more clearly a moment later. “We shot some of the scenes at the warehouse today. I’m e-mailing you photos.”
The band’s song was called “In a Hundred Other Worlds.” Sara’s idea for the video had different versions of the band singing the song—the bands in the hundred other worlds. They were doing most of the filming in an old warehouse that Ethan had been able to rent for almost nothing.
“I can’t wait to see them,” I said.
“Yeah, well, if you’d been here, you would have seen way more of the guys than you ever wanted to, because I certainly did.”
“Do I want to know what you mean?” I asked. Hercules came in from the kitchen and leaned his black-and-white head against my leg. I reached down and lifted him onto my lap.
“I mean Milo, Devon, Jake and our baby brother without their shirts on.” Sara was older than Ethan by close to four minutes and never let him forget it.
“Why?” I said.
She laughed. She sounded so much like Mom. “Because I had to airbrush them from the waist up. Well, not Ethan. I got a friend of mine to come do him.”