“Hey! Stop that!” I said.
As usual, Hercules ignored me. He caught the end of something with his paw and bent his head over it.
“No!” I snapped, so loudly my voice echoed around the room and startled both of us. I leaned forward. “Give that to me,” I said. He moved his paw and a purple plastic paperclip skittered across the floor toward me.
I picked it up. Hercules looked from the twist of plastic to me to the baseboard trim. Then he sat, wrapped his tail around his feet, and looked at me again.
It was crazy, but it was like . . . he wanted me to do something. What?
I got up and knelt down in front of the window. Feeling along the edge of the baseboard I found a small gap, not much thicker than the blade of a butter knife, between the trim and the floor. No surprise in a hundred-year-old building. And because the building had shifted over the past century the floors had also moved a little. They slanted toward the window. Anything I dropped tended to slide or roll up against that wall.
I looked over my shoulder at the cat, who was patiently watching me. I was still holding the purple paperclip as well as the glass bead Hercules had found. I rolled the tiny bead under my thumb, along my fingers.
And then I got it.
I got to my feet, walking around the desk to stand with my back to the door. I shut my eyes, trying to see the meeting-room space before the renovations had started, before it had become the storage place for tools and supplies. The space below was almost identical to my office. Maybe that floor had the same slant toward the window. Maybe there was a gap between the baseboard and the floor in there, too.
I held the bead up to the light. I felt light-headed. “Could this bead have something to do with Gregor Easton’s murder?” I asked Hercules.
Okay, so now I had to deal with the idea that not only did my cats have magical abilities, but they were also trying to nudge me to solve a murder. I looked at Herc with narrowed eyes.
He continued to stare unblinkingly at me.
The mosaic tile floor on the main level of the library had been repaired and resealed early in the renovations, then covered for weeks with heavy brown paper—that had made me think of butcher’s paper—and a layer of cardboard. The paper was still down in the storage area to protect the floor.
Vincent Gallo’s crew had done meticulous work. They wouldn’t have left a bead, a bit of paper or even a dust bunny behind. The old man, who could have been anywhere from seventy to ninety, had crawled all over the floor on his hands and knees, glasses perched on the end of his nose, to check the work.
I shook my head. “Maybe it does,” I said. I crossed to the window again and looked down on the reading garden. “I should take this bead to the police or call Detective Gordon,” I said to Hercules. I dropped onto my swivel chair again. “Of course, I can’t do that, because how can I explain why it might be important without explaining how I have it.”
I slumped against the back of the chair. Hercules came to sit front of me. I patted my leg. “C’mon up,” I said.
He leaped into my lap. I stroked the top of his head and he began to purr. Slowly I rolled my head from one shoulder to the other, to try to loosen the knots in my neck. The cat continued to purr in my lap, warm and comforting.
Warm.
Solid.
He wasn’t some superhero from the X-Men comics who could teleport or manipulate DNA. He couldn’t shoot lightning bolts from his fingers. Hercules was a cat. A small, furry, black-and-white cat. That I’d seen walk through an inch-and-a-half-thick wooden door. That defied the laws of physics. It couldn’t have happened.
Except it had.
What could I do? I couldn’t go to the police. I couldn’t tell the truth—not that I was even sure what the truth was. But how could I lie? Was there some option in between the two? I was tired. If there was a third option, I couldn’t think of it right now.
“Let’s go home,” I said to Hercules.
I stood up and set him on the desk. He made disgruntled murp sounds but he climbed willingly into the bag.
I glanced out the window again. It was getting dark. I swung the cat bag over my shoulder, grabbed the rest of my things and left the office.
“We’ll figure this out when we get home,” I said as I locked the gate and the main doors. “Some chocolate for me, some tuna for you and we’ll work it out.”
“Work what out?” a voice said behind me.
Maggie was standing at the top of the steps. How could I have forgotten that she was meeting me so we could watch the Gotta Dance reunion special?
I turned, brushing my hair back behind one ear. “Umm . . . ah . . . I just meant everything that’s happened since I found Gregor Easton’s body.”
We walked down the stairs together and out along the path to the sidewalk.
“Are you all right?” Maggie asked.
I blew a wayward strand of hair off my cheek, remembering that I hadn’t had a chance to tell Maggie about the piece of paper the police had found on Easton’s body. For a while I’d almost forgotten about it. “I can’t believe I didn’t tell you before, but the police found a note in Easton’s pocket, supposedly from me, asking him to meet me here at the library.”
Maggie stopped so abruptly I almost banged into her. “How could he have a note from you? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.” The shoulder strap of the bag was digging into the side of my neck. I shifted it a little. “I didn’t write it. It’s not my handwriting. But whoever wrote it signed my name.”
She shook her head dismissively. “Of course you didn’t write it,” she said. “But somebody obviously wanted him to think you did.”
We started walking again. “Why?” I said.
“Because that somebody knew Easton wouldn’t show up for him . . . or her.”
“But they thought he’d show up for me?”
Maggie shot me a wry sideways glance. “Kath, you’re not exactly ugly, you know.”
“I’m not exactly Easton’s type, either. From what I’ve heard he liked women young enough to be his granddaughters.”
We crossed the street and started up Mountain Road, and I switched Hercules to my other shoulder.
“After what happened with Owen in the library Easton probably thought you were looking to make amends.”
I squirmed at the image. Then comprehension set in. I stopped walking and turned to face Maggie. “But that would mean whoever sent the note knew what had happened.”
She nodded. “So who knew?”
“You. Susan. Mary.” I held up my hand and ticked the names off on my fingers. “That’s it. Oh, and Eric—Susan’s husband—because I’d asked her to call him and have breakfast delivered to Easton as an apology.”
Maggie stretched one arm behind her head as we started up the hill again. “Anyone else?” she asked.
“Just the cats,” I said. “And I don’t think they told anyone, but I have no idea who Susan or Mary or Eric—”
“—or even Easton himself might have told,” Maggie finished. “Did you see the paper? Do you know what it said?”
“I saw it,” I said. I pulled the image of Detective Gordon holding up the plastic bag with the note inside into my head. “It was written on a piece of paper from one of the library notepads. Remember? The ones that say ‘Mabel’ instead of ‘Mayville.’ There were two boxes in the workroom. There’s a silhouette of an open book in the left corner and it says ‘Mabel Heights Free Public Library’ across the bottom.” I rubbed the back of my neck again. “The note itself said, ‘Meet me at the library at eleven thirty. Kathleen.’”
Maggie made a skeptical noise and touched my arm. “He sure had an overinflated idea of his appeal if he thought you were interested in a rendezvous among the stacks at eleven thirty at night.”
“The man didn’t lack confidence, Mags,” I said.