I opted for water and looked around the kitchen as she opened the door of a Hoosier cabinet and took out two jelly jars. One of the bookmobile folks had said that Neva lived in her parents’ house, and I was suddenly sure it had been her grandparents’ house, too. Either that or no owner had ever changed a thing since the day the house was hatched.
There was a large porcelain sink underneath a set of two double-hung windows. There were wooden countertops. Open shelves and the Hoosier cabinet instead of cabinets. A single ceiling light fixture. Plaster walls that showed trowel marks. Pegs next to the back door that held jackets. A round wooden table so scarred I could hardly tell what kind of wood it had been made from.
The entire room was squeaky clean and smelled of sunshine and outdoors. It also reminded of my aunt’s boardinghouse kitchen, which tempted me to put Neva on the side of Good.
“Have a seat,” she said, putting the glasses on the table and pulling out a chair. “Him, too,” she added, nodding at Eddie.
My show-off cat jumped up and sat in the middle of the chair’s seat, looking at Neva as if she might give him a treat.
“You,” she said, “are a cat among cats, but I do not feed pets at the table.”
He inched forward so his chin was almost on the edge of the said surface.
Neva laughed and fuzzed up the fur on his head. “Like I said, no treats at the table. You’ll get yours later, mister.” She looked over at me. “What did you say his name was?”
I introduced Eddie and myself and said I already knew her name.
“Just bet you do.” She chuckled. “Probably talked to Kit Richardson, didn’t you, after that day? She’s a good sheriff, that girl.”
I’d never thought of the tough, take-no-prisoners sheriff in terms of gender, let alone a term like “girl,” but I gave a vague nod.
“Anyway,” Neva said, “I need to tell you about my dad’s boat. It was his dad’s before him and when Granddad got too old to take it out, it sat in the barn for years. Dad wouldn’t dream of working on Granddad’s boat without permission, so it sat and sat.” She sighed.
“That’s not good for a wooden boat, is it?”
“True words.” She nodded. “Granddad lived till he was ninety-three, and Dad didn’t want to start on the boat right after he died, if you see what I mean, and then Dad got sick.” She petted Eddie absently. “Then it was Mom’s boat and then it was mine, and I don’t have the know-how to fix it up or the money to pay someone else to do it for me.”
Eddie started purring and she kept petting. “But I can’t let it go,” she said. “Not that boat. Not now, not ever.” Her voice was soft, but determined, and I believed every word.
Neva gave Eddie one last pet. “I should get a cat,” she murmured. “Been too long.”
“Mrr,” Eddie said.
The three of us chatted a little while longer, and then Eddie and I returned to the bookmobile.
I wanted to like Neva, wanted to very much. Okay, I did like her. But I still wondered about her temper. It could obviously run high, and if Henry had stoked it high enough, could she have been angry enough to kill him if she thought he was after her father’s boat?
“What do you think, pal?” I asked.
But for once, Eddie didn’t have a single thing to say.
• • •
“Sorry about bugging you,” I said, recording my third voice mail for Bob, Gordon’s cousin, “but I’m still trying to find out the weekend in April that Cole Duvall was up here.” I paused, then said, “It’s very important, and I need to find out as soon as possible.”
I tried to think of something to say that might get him to call back quickly but couldn’t come up with anything other than shrieking at him like a harridan. And though that might move him to action, it likely wouldn’t be the action I wanted, so I just said thanks and hung up my cell phone.
“Are we taking bets?” Julia leaned forward to unlatch Eddie’s door. “Fly and be free, little one.”
“Bets on what?” I tossed the phone onto the console and flipped the driver’s seat around in preparation for the bookmobile stop.
“Whether your plaintive bleat will encourage Bob to call you back.”
I debated getting out the five-dollar bill that I always had in my wallet for bets with Rafe, but decided to let it stay there. “No bet. We wouldn’t be able to get a definitive answer.”
Julia smiled one of her stage smiles, the sultry temptress version. “Do you really think so?” she asked in a low, husky voice.
“It’s not me you have to convince,” I said, laughing.
“Good morning, ladies,” a voice said.
We turned around and saw a man coming up the stairs. “Good morning,” Julia said.
I would have said the same thing, but I was busy being puzzled. Though I was pretty sure I’d never seen this middle-aged man before, something about him seemed very familiar.
“Minnie?” he asked, looking from one of us to the other.
I held up my hand. “That would be me. And you are?”
“Bob,” he said. “Gordon’s my cousin.”
Light dawned with a sudden, illuminating flash. “You’re Bob!” Which was a stupid thing to say, but it wasn’t the first time I’d said something stupid to a stranger and I was sure it wasn’t going to be the last. “I’ve been calling you.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve seen your bookmobile out here before, so I figured I’d just stop and talk to you instead of calling.”
That would have made perfect sense to another man, I was sure. “So you pinned down the date Cole was here in April?”
“Hey, there’s that cat I heard about. Here, kitty, kitty.” Bob crouched down and rubbed his fingertips. Eddie, the ham, came trotting over. “You’re a friendly little cuss, aren’t you?” He chucked Eddie under the chin. “Got a good purr machine there.”
Eddie bumped his head against Bob’s knee hard enough that the resulting crack echoed around the bookmobile.
“When was Cole Duvall here?” I asked a little louder.
“What’s that?” Bob looked up. “Oh, right. Duvall came north that first weekend in April.”
He went on about what he’d done for Cole, how he’d had to haul in logs for the fireplace, how he’d scraped ice off the driveway, and how he’d even been asked to go for groceries.
I tried to listen politely, but all I could think was one thing.
Cole Duvall had been here the weekend Henry died.
Chapter 18
I woke up the next morning, which was Friday morning, which was also the day before the book fair, knowing that my day was going to be packed full of things that had to get done. It was unlikely I’d have time to stop for lunch, so I slapped together my typical bookmobile lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a little baggie of potato chips.
Eddie, lying on the back of the dining booth, watched this preparation with great interest.
“It’s not a bookmobile day,” I told him, trying to stuff the plastic bag of potato chips to that perfect limit: full enough so the chips didn’t slide around, but not so full as to have the chips break from internal pressure. “I’m going to the library and you’re staying here.”
“Mrr.”
I shrugged. “Okay, don’t believe me. But you’re not going anywhere. Not today and not tomorrow, either.”
“Mrr.”
“I’ve told you why,” I said. “Tomorrow’s not a bookmobile day because it’s the book fair.”
“Mrr.”
“No, you can’t go to the book fair. It’s not for cats and”—I tried to head off any pending argument—“while I know that any place a cat wants to be is a proper place for cats, please trust me when I say that you won’t enjoy a book fair. Too much noise, too many people, too many feet that might accidentally step on your tail. It’s not a good place for Eddies.”