I looked down at the cookbook and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, because right there in front of me was a recipe titled “Eddie’s Salmon Snacks: Treats for Cats of a Discerning Nature.”
• • •
“Hey, Eddie!” I poked my head inside the houseboat’s door. Most days, Eddie was there, waiting for me. Early on in our relationship I’d thought he was waiting for me, anxious about my absence and worried that I’d never return, but I eventually realized he was waiting for me to open the door so he could get outside.
This time, however, he wasn’t at the ready. Sleeping, no doubt.
I came all the way inside and slid my backpack off my shoulder. “Wake up, Eddie. I have something to show you.” Because not only had Trock named his cat treat recipe after Eddie, but he’d also included a photo of said feline and signed the page with his name and “Thanks for the inspiration, Mr. Edward. You are a king among cats.”
While I wasn’t sure I wanted to read the inscription to Eddie, I had to do it at least once, and I might as well get it over with.
“Eddie? Where are you?”
Even on a houseboat smaller than any apartment in which I’d ever lived, it was possible for a cat to find hiding places that took me ages to find.
I checked in the closet.
No Eddie.
Looked in the bathroom cupboards.
No cat.
Stretched high to see the top of the kitchen cabinets.
Nothing but dust.
I even got down on my hands and knees and looked underneath everything there was to look under, but still didn’t find him.
“Well.” I got to my feet and put my hands on my hips. Where the heck was he? He’d been sleeping when I left that morning, so he couldn’t have slipped outside. Then again . . .
I tried to remember if the door had been locked when I came home. Surely I’d locked it when I left, but the morning had been rushed and anxious and I couldn’t remember, one way or another.
“Eddie? Game’s over, okay? You win. I lose. Let’s get some dinner.”
But there was no pad-pad-pad of Eddie feet coming my way and I was starting to feel a flutter of panic. Maybe I’d left the door unlocked. Maybe I’d left it unlatched. Maybe he’d pushed the door open with his little Eddie nose and slid outside. He wasn’t the most graceful cat in the world; maybe he’d fallen in the water and—
No. I wouldn’t think that. He was here somewhere. Or outside somewhere. Maybe Eric had seen him. Maybe Eric had adopted him and was cooking Salmon Snacks for him. Maybe Eddie would never want to come home and—
My cell phone rang, making the noise it made when a new number was calling.
I scrabbled through my backpack and looked at the phone. Unknown caller with a downstate area code. Odd. “This is Minnie Hamilton.”
“And this is Cole Duvall.”
“Oh.” I blinked, not having any idea what to say to a man I’d told police might be a killer. “Um, hello.”
“I have your cat,” he said in a low voice.
My eyes flew open wide and I turned around, looking frantically for a trace of the best feline friend anyone could have. “There’s no way. You can’t. There’s—”
“If you want him back, meet me at my cottage in an hour.”
I protested, I shouted, and I yelled, but he was gone.
Chapter 20
“Eddie!” I tore around the houseboat, looking everywhere I’d already looked. “Eddie?” After all, maybe Duvall was just messing with me. Maybe he really hadn’t taken Eddie, maybe he was just trying to get me out to his cottage and—
The beep of my phone interrupted my anxious thoughts. Since the thing was still in my hand, it was a relatively loud beep and, reflexively, I glanced at the screen. There was an incoming text message and there was a photo attached. I opened the image and immediately sat down. Hard.
It was a picture of Eddie. An Eddie crouched in the far corner of a cardboard box, his mouth frozen open in what I could see was a loud “Mrr!”
“I am so sorry,” I whispered to his picture. Eddie hated being shut up in dark boxes. My early attempts at using a picnic basket for a cat carrier had not ended well. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of there.”
Only . . . how?
Ash had given me his cell number that morning, which seemed long ago and far away now, but when I called the number, I was instructed to leave a voice mail. I stumbled over what to say—was catnapping a crime?—and ended up just asking him to call me as soon as he could.
I started to call 911, then stopped as I imagined the conversation. “Yes, ma’am, let me get this straight. Your . . . cat has been . . . kidnapped?”
Duvall had given me an hour. No way would I be able to explain everything and get a police presence out to Duvall’s cottage in less than . . . well, I didn’t know how long it might take, but it was bound to be more than an hour. Maybe Duvall would make good on his time limit and maybe he wouldn’t. I wasn’t about to take any kind of a chance, not with Eddie.
A sob came up out of my throat. From where I was sitting, on the narrow stairs down to the bedroom, the noise sounded a lot like a whimper.
“Stop that,” I said out loud.
That made me feel a little better, so I stood and tried it again. “Stop that. You need to figure out what to do.”
But what?
I paced around the kitchen, trying to come up with a plan, but all I did was get dizzy. Time ticked away and I knew I had to get going if I was going to meet Duvall’s deadline. There was no choice about that—he had Eddie and I had to get Eddie back, no matter what the risk might be.
And, after all, maybe Duvall just wanted to talk. Maybe he’d only taken Eddie to make sure I’d take him seriously. There was no way Duvall could know that I suspected him of killing Henry and trying to kill Adam, so how could I be at risk? Well, okay, his wife could have told him what I’d said about knowing his whereabouts the first weekend of April, but when Larabeth stopped by the library, it hadn’t sounded as if she was about to have any long conversations with him. And though it was extremely unlikely, it was possible that he’d been following his wife and had overheard our conversation.
So actually, there were lots of ways I could be at risk. I pushed them all out of my head. What mattered was Eddie.
I slid my phone into my backpack, grabbed my car keys, scrawled a quick message on the kitchen whiteboard, and hurried to rescue my cat.
• • •
It was almost dark by the time I reached the road where Henry had lived. Halfway there, I had called 911, and though the conversation had started out much as I’d anticipated, once I’d explained the whole story, the dispatcher had assured me that deputies would arrive on the scene within half an hour. She’d told me sternly to stay away from the scene, saying that the officers would do everything they could to ensure my cat’s safety.
The dispatcher talked, and I listened; then I talked, and talked some more. Eventually I was transferred to someone else, but I kept glancing at the clock on my car’s dashboard, wondering whether I’d make it in time, wondering what Cole Duvall would do if I was two minutes late, hoping that the few moments I’d taken in the car to breathe deep, think ahead, and plan a little hadn’t jeopardized my . . . hadn’t made Duvall . . . wouldn’t end . . .
“Stop that,” I said.
“Excuse me?” said the voice on the other end of the phone.
My car’s headlights caught the reflective flash of the numbers on Duvall’s mailbox. I reached out and turned the headlights off. While I wasn’t sure sneaking up on him would help, knowing that I had the ability to control at least this little thing gave me half an ounce of confidence.