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“It wasn’t exactly dead,” I said.

“So it was what, just partly dead?”

That made Maggie laugh harder.

“It was—I don’t know—unconscious, stunned.” I pressed a hand to my forehead. I was laughing now, too, because the whole scenario had been just like something out of a Monty Python movie. The rat had zipped by Ruby’s head, landed on the sidewalk with an audible splat and then gotten up, shaken itself and scurried away.

Nic turned to Maggie. “Yeah, you definitely wanna get the cat,” he said, deadpan.

Once Maggie got control of herself, she apologized again to Nic.

“Let me know what happens,” he said. “If the cat doesn’t catch anything, I can set some traps—the humane kind.” He grinned at me. “Because I don’t even know where the snow shovel is.”

Maggie and I walked back up to her studio. She bumped me with her hip. “Are you mad at me because I told that story to Nic?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No you’re not,” she retorted. “Because that’s one of the things that made Marcus fall for you.”

I stopped and stared at her. “What?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head. “No. He told you?”

She smiled. “Uh-huh. He said he saw how kind you were.”

“Because I flung what I thought was a dead animal at Ruby?”

Maggie’s grinned. “Because you were worried that Ruby might have been hurt and you were worried about the rat, too.” She nudged me again. “I’m glad you didn’t go back to Boston.”

I bumped her back. “Me too.”

“So what do we do now?” she said as we started up the steps again.

“First we deal with the furry intruders,” I said, “then we’ll find the thief.”

I headed straight up the hill at the end of the day. Owen was waiting by the kitchen door, almost as though he knew I was coming for him, which of course he didn’t.

“Okay, Fuzz Face,” I said, bending down to pick him up. “Maggie needs you to do rodent patrol at the store.”

“Merow,” he said loudly. Translation: “Let’s do it.”

As we drove down to the shop, I explained about the possible mice incursion at the co-op store. Owen listened intently, and when I finished talking, he licked his whiskers. I was pretty sure he knew exactly what was expected of him.

Maggie was waiting at the store, and Owen looked adoringly at her when she thanked him for coming to her rescue. She unlocked the door and we went inside. I saw her hesitate and look around.

I set Owen down. “Go for it,” I whispered.

He immediately began to nose around. Beside me Maggie sucked in a breath as Owen began to sniff around the shelving unit that still held some of the woven placemats. Then he suddenly headed purposefully for the back door, meowing loudly a couple of times.

“I think we’re supposed to go after him,” she said.

“Do you want to wait here?” I asked. “I can go.”

She shook her head. “No, but if Owen catches anything, I will be in the back of your truck—or standing on the roof of the cab.”

“Got it,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulders and giving her what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze.

Owen was sitting in front of the back door that led to the alley. He gave another insistent meow when we joined him.

Maggie opened the door. “Where are we going?” she asked as though she expected him to answer.

Owen led us down the narrow alley to a green metal Dumpster pushed up against the wall of the building, a pile of wooden pallets stacked beside it. He stopped, looked up at me and made a low murping sound.

I peered around the side of the metal bin. “Mags,” I said softly. In the cramped space between the garbage container and the pallets, a mama cat had made a home for three tiny kittens from a couple of scarves and some placemats.

“I think we’ve found your ‘cat burglar,’” I said.

Maggie crouched down and began to talk quietly to the mother cat. I pulled out my phone to call Roma, who was a vet and would know what to do about moving the mother and her babies. I glanced down at Owen, who looked up at me with a decidedly self-satisfied expression on his furry face, and I had the niggling feeling that somehow he’d figured this whole thing out long before we had.

No More Pussyfooting Around

A Second Chance Cat Story

Sofie Ryan

“Good things are coming your way, Sarah,” Tom Harris said as we watched my cat, Elvis, make his way across Tom’s yard and into mine.

“Aren’t black cats supposed to be bad luck?” I asked.

I smiled at Tom because I’m not really superstitious, although I’d certainly heard about a variety of superstitions and omens from my grandmothers’ friends over the years: everything from spitting on a new bat before using it for the first time—which struck me as being really unsanitary—to standing at a crossroads and reciting a little rhyme to get rid of a sty (trust me, that one doesn’t work).

“Where I come from, a black cat arriving at your house brings prosperity with it.” Tom smiled back at me, and his soft Scottish burr seemed just a little more pronounced. He’d been in Maine for more than fifty years, but he’d never completely lost his accent.

I squinted at Elvis, heading purposefully from Tom’s property, skirting the trees and the rock wall at the back. My 1860s Victorian was only a few blocks from North Harbor’s waterfront. The neighborhood, with its big trees and old houses, had felt like home from the first time I’d turned onto the street. The house had been turned into three apartments about thirty years ago, and it had been let go over time, but my dad had agreed with my assessment that it had good bones and after a lot of work it had turned into the home I’d hoped it would be.

Beside me, Rose Jackson nudged me with her elbow. “I don’t think that’s prosperity that Elvis has in his mouth,” she said. “It looks more like a field mouse or a vole to me.”

Rose was one of my grandmother’s friends. Barely five feet tall with short white hair and kind gray eyes, she also lived in one of the apartments in the house and worked for me at my repurpose shop, Second Chance. In theory, living so close together shouldn’t have worked, but it did. We gave each other lots of space—in truth, Rose had way more of a social life than I did. And she was even having some success in teaching me how to cook, something no one else had been able to do.

Tom took a step forward and craned his neck to get a better look at the cat. He was a small, round man, no taller than five eight or so, with thick iron gray hair and small black frame glasses.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “And while I generally like to take a ‘live and let live’ approach to other creatures, if that happens to be the vole that made several meals of my hyacinth bulbs, I can’t say I’m sorry.”

Rose nudged me again. “Stop scratching,” she said softly, a warning edge in her voice.

She’d seen me trying to wedge a finger under the splint on my left arm. I’d dropped a cardboard box full of old elementary school readers on that arm, injuring a tendon in the palm of my hand a couple of weeks earlier. I had to wear the plastic and neoprene splint for another two weeks and it was driving me crazy. It itched. A lot. Rose had already caught me trying to jam my toothbrush underneath the splint to get some relief. She’d confiscated the toothbrush and I’d gotten a stern speech about mouth germs, skin infections and the four stitches at the base of my thumb. Then she’d given me a bowl of warm rhubarb crisp as a distraction from the itching.

I made a face at her now and she made one right back at me before gently squeezing my arm.

I tucked a strand of hair that had slipped free from my ponytail behind my ear and looked over at Tom’s yard, trying to shift my attention away from the sensation that ants were marching in formation up my wrist. Tom’s lawn was probably the most perfectly manicured one in North Harbor, Maine. Maybe even in the entire state. No weeds dared poke their heads up in the two planters that flanked the front door and ran the length of the house on either side. Tom had replaced the bulbs that had been eaten by the voles with little clay pots of daffodils and paper whites and today had started replacing those with white and pink geraniums.