“Good morning, sunshine,” I said as I got his breakfast. He grumped at me and avoided making eye contact. Some nights Owen stayed up for hours roaming the house doing who knew what. Then in the morning he was a cranky grump and I had learned to give him lots of space. Hercules came in just as I finished making the pancakes. He sniffed the air and murped inquiringly.
“Pancakes for me, cat food for you,” I said. He seemed okay with that.
We both lingered over breakfast. Hercules took his time eating and making sure he looked good to face the day. I’d brought Abigail’s twenty-five-cent book in from the truck and I picked it up and read the back cover as I finished my second pancake.
Owen, on the other hand, ate, washed his face and then headed for the back door. I let him outside so he could do his morning circuit of the property. He grunted in my direction, which I took as “Thank you” but may not have been. The sky was low and dull and that, combined with the ache in my previously broken left wrist, told me that we were in for rain.
When I stepped back into the kitchen I found Hercules sitting on my chair, bits of paper at his feet. Abigail had bookmarked several places in the slim paperback that she thought might interest me. Hercules had just pulled all but one of those bits of paper out of the book.
“What did you do?” I asked, hands on my hips. For some reason the cat looked quite pleased with himself. “That was bad. Very bad.”
Hercules frowned as though he couldn’t understand my attitude. I picked up the book. The one piece of paper left was marking a place close to the beginning. I opened the book to see what Abigail had wanted me to check out. The text, illustrated with a couple of old maps of Minnesota, talked about how the state got its name. Minnesota was named for the Minnesota River, from the Dakota Sioux word for sky-tinted water.
“Sky-tinted water, I like that,” I said to Hercules, who tipped his head sideways and blinked slowly at me a couple of times. “And I probably would have been interested in the other things Abigail marked, even though you don’t seem to think so.”
Hercules jumped down from the chair, walked over to his water dish and peered down at it. It was still about half full. “Mrrr?” he said. He looked back at me.
“No, I think sky-tinted water means water that’s outside, like a lake or a river. It reflects the color of the sky, which is one of the reasons lakes and rivers look blue. That’s just plain, clear water in your dish.” I was explaining reflection to a cat.
At least he seemed to be considering what I’d said. “Thank you for the place name lesson,” I said. Then I leaned down so my face was inches from him. “But next time stay away from my books.”
Hercules licked my chin and then sat down, looking expectantly at me. He seemed to be waiting for me to do or say something. I had no idea what.
I sat down at the table again, speared the last bit of my pancake and ate it. Then I looked at Herc still looking at me. “I don’t suppose you know where Ira Kenyon is?” I said.
He shook his head, flicked his tail in annoyance and took a step backward, bumping his dish and sending a tiny splash of water onto the floor. Hercules yowled and jumped at the same time, all four feet going in different directions like a feline version of Riverdance.
“It’s okay. I’ve got it,” I said. I grabbed a rag from under the sink and wiped up the water. Then I got a second cloth to dry Hercules’s feet. He complained the entire time. Hercules hated having wet feet, so much so that Maggie had actually bought him a pair of boots—which is how I learned that he hated looking like a dork more than he hated wet feet.
I refilled the water bowl and set it closer to the side of the refrigerator so he wouldn’t spill it again. “There,” I said. “There’s your water, clear because we’re all out of sky-tinted.”
And then, suddenly, I remembered something Maggie had said while we were talking about the development. She’d pointed out that right now this end of the lake wasn’t even any good for swimming thanks to a very late algal bloom.
“The clear water is on the other side,” I said aloud.
“Merow,” Hercules agreed and began to clean his paws.
“Ira Kenyon didn’t go to Clearwater in Florida. He went to clear water on the other side of the lake.” No. That was too easy. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be hard to check.
I looked at Hercules, who was now happily ignoring me, cleaning his front left paw. He’d tried awfully hard to draw my attention to water, in the name of the state and in his dish. Had he been trying to tell me something? More than once it had seemed to me that Owen and Hercules were playing detective in their own unique way.
* * *
I waited until seven thirty to call Hope. “I know how ridiculous this sounds,” I said, explaining my leaps of logic while leaving out the cat’s role in the process.
“I’ve seen cases solved with thinner hunches,” Hope said. “I’ll go out there and look for him. I’ll call you later.”
I was on the back steps shaking the mat from the porch when I spotted Rebecca coming from her house carrying a beautiful golden-orange chrysanthemum. I walked across the grass to meet her.
“Good morning,” she said, holding out the plant.
“Is this for me?” I asked.
Rebecca smiled. “It’s for the library. Abigail is going to put it on the table in the reading corner. She said you’re decorating for the Halloween party.”
I nodded. “She told me she was going to see what she could scrounge to brighten up that spot.”
“Well, I’m one of the scroungees,” Rebecca said.
I took the plant from her. “Did John come to see you?” I asked.
She nodded and her smile faded. “Yes, he did. He told me that he couldn’t find anything that would stop the development. I was hoping for a different outcome.”
“You and me both.”
“The day you introduced us at the library I really believed we had a chance.” She adjusted the yellow scarf at her neck. “It’s not that I’m against progress. It’s just that I don’t want to see a beautiful piece of land destroyed.” She raised her eyebrows slightly. “Everett called me a tree-hugger.”
“I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.”
“If I thought that going out there and chaining myself to one of those trees would stop this whole thing I’d do it, but I think Ernie Kingsley would just cut it right out from under my feet.”
I smiled at her over the top of the plant. “From what I’ve heard about the man, you’re probably right.”
“The day John came out to see the rest of my mother’s journals started out with so much hope and it ended in such a dark way.”
That was the day Dani had been killed and we were still no closer to figuring out who her killer was.
Rebecca leaned sideways to look at Hercules sitting on the step. “Are you coming over?” she asked the cat.
“Merow,” he said.
“All right, then. See you tomorrow.” She smiled at me and headed back across the lawn. Half the people I knew talked to my cats like they were people. At least it made it seem a lot less odd now when I did it.
* * *
Marcus called me mid-morning at the library to cancel our flea market plans. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Brady thinks the prosecuting attorney may be going to take everything to the grand jury sometime in the next couple of weeks.”
I drop into my desk chair as my stomach flip-flopped. “How can they do that when you haven’t done anything wrong?”
“The prosecutor doesn’t want it to look like he’s treating me any differently than he would anyone else.”
“So he’d do this to any other person who’s innocent?”
“Kath,” he said gently.
I sighed. “What did Brady say?”
“That’s why I have to cancel. He wants me to meet him at his office so we can go over everything.”