Micah jumped down from the railing and padded over to him, rubbing against his leg as Marcus took off his left shoe and shoved his foot into the corresponding boot. And immediately kicked his foot forward, yelling a word he’d never used in my presence. The boot came off and pin-wheeled up and out over the deck toward the back lawn. A second dead vole that had been dropped inside came shooting out of the open end of the boot. Micah leapt into the air and caught the furry corpse with her two front paws like Lynn Swann catching a forward pass from my dad’s favorite quarterback, Terry Bradshaw.
At the same time, the boot arced its way toward me. I sprinted forward, holding the spade ahead of me like some sort of medieval soldier with a lance, catching the boot on the end of the wooden handle. I stopped at the bottom of the steps flushed and sweaty, feeling pleased that I’d stopped the boot from ending up in Marcus’s rain barrel.
He was still standing by the back door on one foot with a scowl on his face. Micah was sitting in the middle of the deck with a paw on the vole like an African lion with the prey it had just brought down. And I was holding up the boot, impaled on the end of the spade like the leader of some kind of weird processional.
In retrospect it probably would have been better if I hadn’t laughed.
Micah wisely picked up the dead rodent, which was easily half as big as she was, and headed for the backyard without making a sound. Silently, I took the boot off the spade handle, crossed the deck and set it next to Marcus. Then I scooped the other vole off the swing with my shovel and followed Micah. It was pretty clear Marcus needed a minute—or maybe several.
By the time I put the garden spade back in the shed he was waiting at the bottom of the steps wearing his old sneakers, I noticed.
We got into the truck without speaking. I cleaned my hands with the sanitizer I kept in the glove compartment, fished my keys out of the pocket of my jeans and started for Wisteria Hill.
“Nice catch,” Marcus commented, after a minute or so of silence.
I kept my eyes on the road. “Thank you,” I said. “Harrison taught me how to play horseshoes last summer, remember? I think it helped.”
Harrison Taylor, aka Old Harry and Harry Senior, figured since I was a good road hockey player I might be good at horseshoes.
We drove in silence again. I chewed the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh. In my mind’s eye I could see Marcus sending that boot airborne, Micah leaping to pull the dead vole out of the air and me running with the spade, shouting, “I got it! I got it!” I was starting to rethink that part, too.
“Go ahead and laugh,” Marcus said from the passenger seat. “You know you want to.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not funny.” I glanced over and he was smiling at me.
“Yeah, Kathleen, it kind of is. You trying to catch that boot. You should have seen your face. It was like you were at the Super Bowl and there were only two seconds left on the clock.”
“Well if you’d gotten a little more distance you could have sent that boot right between those two maple trees in the backyard for a three-pointer.” I shot him another quick glance and grinned. “You’re not the only one who can do a football analogy.”
He laughed. Then he reached over and gave my leg a squeeze. “Aren’t you going to tell me that I shouldn’t leave my boots out on the deck?”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “I told you that the time you left them out there and it started to rain. And you gave me a small engineering lecture on how the overhang would protect them.”
“Yeah, the overhang didn’t really help this time.”
I flicked on my blinker and turned into the driveway to Wisteria Hill. “Yeah,” I said, mimicking his overly casual tone. “The overhang didn’t really help last time, either.”
“Wait a minute. You saw me pour the water out that time?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him shift sideways a little in his seat so it was easier to look at me.
“Yes, I saw you pour the water out that time,” I said.
“You didn’t say anything.”
I pulled into the gravel parking area to the left of Roma’s house and shut off the truck. “We had just started actually dating.”
It had taken a while for the relationship between the two of us to get started, even though at times it had felt like the whole town was playing matchmaker. It didn’t help that Marcus was a police detective and we’d met when I was briefly a person of interest in one of his cases.
“You volunteered to get up early on a Saturday morning to help supervise a group of teenagers pick up garbage from the side of the road,” I said. “I was so impressed you could have tied a couple of plastic bags around your feet and I wouldn’t have said anything.”
Marcus grinned. “You’re only saying that because Maggie made us wear those big orange trash bags with a giant X on the back made of yellow duct tape because there weren’t enough safety vests.
I laughed, remembering Mags putting the makeshift vest on Marcus while he stood awkwardly with his arms out at his sides. I think seeing a police officer willing to look a little silly had made points with the kids who were with us.
We got out and carried the cats’ food and dishes around to the back of the old carriage house. Because the cats were feral they weren’t socialized, although they had all learned to associate Roma’s regular volunteers with food. After we put out the food and water, Marcus and I retreated back by the door and waited. I leaned against him and he folded his arms around me. I could have happily stayed there all day.
“Do you think catching mice like that one is how Micah survived out here until we found her?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“Possibly,” I said. “And that was a vole, not a mouse. Probably a meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus. They have a short tail and small ears and a chunkier body type.”
“Sometimes I picture the inside of your head as a huge room with row after row of filing cabinets filled with information on pretty much everything.”
“It used to look like that.” I grinned over my shoulder at him. “But everything got digitized last year.” I held up my right thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “It’s all on a little computer chip behind my left ear. Really. Librarian’s honor.”
He smiled, pulling me closer against him.
I turned in his arms and stretched up on tiptoe so I could kiss him. All thoughts of meadow voles and honor among librarians went out the window.
After a couple of minutes Lucy made her way out to the feeding station. She was the smallest of the cats but she was unmistakably the matriarch of the group. “Hi, Lucy,” I said softly.
She turned at the sound of my voice. Lucy and I had developed a connection in the time I’d been helping Roma feed the cats. Although I’d never been able to touch her, she got closer to me than she did to anyone else. Now she crossed the wooden floor and stopped a few feet in front of us. I hadn’t seen the cats in several weeks. After Roma had bought Wisteria Hill from Everett Henderson she didn’t need her volunteers as much.
Lucy cocked her furry head to one side and meowed, inquiringly it seemed to me.
I crouched down but didn’t make any move to get any closer. “I’m sorry I haven’t been out to see you,” I said.
“Mrr,” she rumbled softly.
“I promise not to stay away so long next time.”
Lucy made the same soft sound again and then turned and headed for the food. After a minute, lured by some unspoken signal I’d never been able to figure out, the rest of the cats joined her. They all looked well, even Smokey, the oldest of the group, who had had to have surgery the previous fall.
“I’m starting to think Maggie is right,” Marcus whispered, his breath warm on my neck after I’d straightened up and returned to his embrace. “You are the cat whisperer.”
Cat Whisperer was the nickname my friend Maggie Adams had given me because of my rapport with Lucy and the other Wisteria Hill cats. I felt a special connection to the seven cats. Not only was Wisteria Hill where I’d found my own cats, it was also where my friendship with Marcus had been cemented.