Выбрать главу

“I’ll see you,” Julia said, standing at the top of the stairs and pointing at me down her long arm, “on Saturday. To be completely honest, I hadn’t planned on coming, but missing an opportunity to buy Trock Farrand’s cookbook from the man himself would be ludicrous.”

She exited stage right, and shut the door as she departed.

“Go figure,” I told Eddie. “Turns out that some cook hawking a book about getting dishes dirty is a bigger draw than one of the bestselling thriller writers of the decade.”

“Mrr.”

“Well, sure,” I said, putting the bookmobile in drive and sailing away, “Trock’s a great guy and I suppose you do end up with something to eat before having to do the dishes, but at the end, isn’t food just fuel?”

“Mrr!”

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

“Mrr,” he said.

But Eddie’s point of view was understandable. Last summer, Trock and Eddie had become fast friends and the cat treats the famed chef had concocted were the hit of my cat’s day.

“Is the way to a cat’s heart through his stomach?” I asked.

Eddie, however, was too busy licking his front paw and swiping the top of his head with it to answer the question.

“Just as well,” I said. “You should never ask a question for which you aren’t ready to hear the answer.”

That little aphorism had been one of my dad’s many phrases of wisdom, and it had been one that I hadn’t understood until the time I asked a high school boyfriend who he liked better, Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. He’d said he wasn’t sure who they were, unless they were the new teachers, and our relationship drifted apart soon afterward.

“And that was just as well, too,” I told Eddie. “If that had lasted, I might have gone with him when he moved out West after college, and then I wouldn’t have the bookmobile and I certainly wouldn’t have found you.”

This loving statement also didn’t get any response from Eddie, which was slightly disappointing, but I soldiered on.

“What do you think?” I asked. “About Henry and Adam, I mean. I still have no idea what really happened, and honestly don’t know how to go about finding out. But Irene’s getting to be a real mess and Adam’s not far behind, so I need to . . . Eddie, what are you doing?”

My cat was rubbing his face against the wire door of his carrier. This not only made a very odd noise, but it also made his little kitty lips pull back so that I saw way too much of his gums.

“And very healthy gums they are,” I said, “at least according to your doctor. But if you want the truth, they’re not your most attractive feature.”

“Mrr!”

Once again, we decided to agree to disagree, and I went back to thinking out loud. “What I really need to do is find out more about Neva. You know, the shotgun-toting senior citizen? From all accounts, she hardly ever leaves the house, so I’ll have to go to her and . . .”

My outward musings tailed off, because if I took a single back-road shortcut, we were only a handful of miles from Chatham Road and Ms. Chatham herself.

“No time like the present,” I said bravely, trying not to quail at the thought of confronting a woman who’d brandished a gun at me the one and only time we met. But the sheriff’s office didn’t seem to think she was threatening, and besides, I was in the bookmobile, which many people were convinced had a magical power to create happiness in everyone who came near.

I planned out what I was going to say to Neva as I drove carefully down the bumpy Chatham Road and parked the bookmobile out of sight of her house.

“There you go.” I released Eddie from his carrier. “I shouldn’t be long, but if I am, do you remember how to call 911? Oh, wait.” I sighed heavily. “You don’t have a phone, and even if you did you don’t have the thumb power to make the call. Poor Eddie,” I said, patting him on the head.

He put his ears back and squinted at me with a dire expression. I gave him one more pat, slid my phone into my pocket, and headed down the stairs.

I opened the door, but before I could turn around and shut it, a black-and-white blur shot past me. “Eddie!” I cried. “You get back here!”

Ignoring me, he zoomed across the road and onto Neva Chatham’s property.

There was really no point in calling him—he was a cat, after all—so I locked the bookmobile and hopped into a jog, muttering a monologue as I went.

“Why can’t he stay on the bookmobile like a normal cat? Because normal cats have no interest in bookmobiles, that’s why. Normal cats don’t talk to you as if they understood what you said. Normal cats don’t—huh.”

I’d passed through a line of trees and was on the edge of a wide-open field. Neva’s garden, I supposed, but there was no sign of my runaway cat. I looked around and down, trying to find his kitty footprints.

“Ha!” I’d spotted the Eddie trail. It headed south, straight toward a trio of greenhouses. “I’ll get you, my pretty.” Jogging again, I followed the tracks, which, Eddie-like, didn’t go in a straight line, but zigged and zagged. “Cat, if you give me motion sickness,” I panted, “you’re not getting treats for hours, do you hear me, hours, and—”

I stopped running and talking, because off in distance I’d heard a voice. A female voice. An elderly female voice.

Neva.

From a standstill, I leaped into a flat-out run. Through the far half of the garden, past two greenhouses, and around the end of the third, all the while following Eddie’s tracks, all the while hoping that Neva didn’t have her gun, that she wasn’t . . . that she wasn’t . . .

I came around the corner of the last greenhouse and skidded to a stop. Neva was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with Eddie on her lap, petting him and talking to him as if she’d known him for years.

“You are a shedder, aren’t you, my dear?” She shook her hand free of Eddie hair and I watched it twist away in the breeze. “But you’re well groomed and wherever you came from, I’m sure someone is looking for you.”

“Um,” I said. “I’m afraid he’s mine.”

Neva looked up and squinted at me. “I know you. No, don’t say, I’ll remember.” She continued to pet Eddie as she squinted. “Ha! I got it. You were looking at my dad’s boat. Scared you off but good, didn’t I?” She grinned, and once again I wondered about her mental stability.

“That’s right,” I said. “But this time I came in the Chilson Library’s bookmobile.”

Neva’s grin dropped away and I tensed. Maybe she had a thing against libraries. Or bookmobiles. Or librarians. Or Chilson. Maybe that gun was behind her and she was going to pull it out and—

The elderly woman placed Eddie on the grass and sprang to her feet twice as fast as I could have managed. She charged toward me, and I was stuck in place so tight that I might have been glued. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I’d have to defend myself as best I could and—

Neva was holding out her hand. “I have to apologize,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do.” She clasped my hand between hers and pumped up and down. “There was no excuse for going after you like that. I’d tell you about how that afternoon I’d had to write a big fat check to my accountant and how that made me cranky as all get-out, but that doesn’t excuse me, so I apologize.”

“Apology accepted,” I said, starting to smile. I was also starting to see why the sheriff’s office hadn’t considered Neva a threat.

“Come on in.” She released my hand and started striding to her house. “I have to show you something. Better grab that cat of yours.” Neva opened the back door and ushered Eddie and me inside. “Here you go. What do you say about a drink? Tea? Water? Something stronger?” She winked.