“Hey, pal,” I said, sliding off the desk. “Inside only. You promised, remember?”
“That was before you insulted him,” Julia said. “All previous deals have now been canceled.”
“Come here, Eddie.” But just as I leaned down to grab my fuzzy friend, he hopped out of reach, jumping to the bottom step.
“That’ll teach you to make fun of a cat,” Leese said, laughing.
“Especially an Eddie cat,” Julia added.
We were parked in a large church parking lot, at least a hundred feet from the closest road, and hadn’t seen a car in the last ten minutes. I wasn’t overly worried about Eddie getting dangerously close to traffic, but there was a long line of shrubs at the far side of the lot and I could just see Eddie crawling into that prickly mess and not wanting to come out.
“How about a treat?” I crouched at the top of the stairs. “Come back right now and I’ll give you a whole pile.” Not a big pile, but still. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
Eddie, catlike, was focused on his new mission, whatever that might be, and launched off the bottom step and into the bright October sunshine.
I groaned and went after him. Over my shoulder I called, “Can someone bring me the treats? He might come if I shake the can.”
Once outside, however, I realized Eddie wasn’t headed for the shrubbery. Or the roadway. Instead he was trotting straight for the only vehicle in the parking lot, a battered pickup truck. Dents and scrapes of all shapes and sizes were scattered along the doors and sides, some serious enough to have scoured the paint down to the metal.
I leapt to the stunningly obvious conclusion that the vehicle was Leese’s and wondered what a former corporate attorney was doing with an open bed truck. At previous bookmobile visits I was pretty sure she’d been driving a midsized SUV.
Mentally shrugging—I paid about as much attention to cars as I did to daily temperatures in Hawaii—I trotted across the parking lot, ten yards behind my cat in a very short parade of two. “Eddie, come back here, will you? I thought I only had to run on workout mornings with Ash. I’m not sure I’m ready for more. Think of me, will you? I’m sure you’ve done that once or twice.”
Most days, my inane conversation caught Eddie’s attention, slowing him enough for me to catch up. This time, if anything, he sped up and he sniffed the air and trotted ever closer to the truck.
“Here kitty, kitty,” Leese called as she climbed down the bookmobile’s steps. “Come get a cat snack.” She rattled the cardboard can of annoyingly expensive moist morsels, but Eddie trotted onward.
“That your truck?” I asked.
“For now.” She made a face. “It’s a long story.”
Eddie, still ignoring the siren call of cat treats, jumped onto the truck’s rear bumper, then up onto the edge of the tailgate. I slowed from my half run and started planning how best to snag my cat. Cornering Eddie was a lot easier than capturing him. “I think he wants to go for a ride.”
“I’ll give it to him with my blessing as soon as my SUV is fixed.”
Eddie’s ears swiveled. Laughing, I edged a few feet closer to the truck. “I think he’s rejecting your generous offer.”
“He’s a cat of good taste.” Leese gave the treat can another shake. “That thing’s a piece of junk.”
“Mrrr,” Eddie said, then jumped off the tailgate and into the truck’s bed.
Reaching the side of the truck, I stood on my tiptoes and peered in. All there was to see was a large tarp and a black-and-white cat walking over the top of it in an ungainly fashion.
“Fred Astaire, you are not,” I told him. “Please don’t make me come in there after you.”
“Mrrr,” he said, but his tone was different from the usual communicative chirp he gave. It was low and long and almost a growl. He started pawing at the edge of the heavy canvas and tried to poke his nose under it. Of course, he was standing on the edge, which made things difficult, but Eddie didn’t like to do things the easy way.
I turned to look at Leese, who was now standing next to me. “What’s under your tarp?”
“No idea,” she said shortly. “It’s not mine. Tarp or truck.”
Two minutes earlier, she’d been ready to give away a truck she didn’t own? “I don’t—”
“Mrrroooo!”
I winced as Eddie’s howls penetrated my skull and sank deep into my brain.
Enough was enough. I walked around to the truck’s back end and put one foot on the trailer hitch. Grabbing on to the tailgate, I climbed onto the back bumper, swung one foot over into the pickup’s bed and then the other.
Eddie was howling for all he was worth and had managed to burrow his front half under the tarp. I crouched down and took a gentle hold of his back half. “Come on, pal. Let’s go, okay?”
But when I stood, cat in hand, his claws were still extended and they’d snagged the tarp’s edge, yanking the canvas to one side and revealing what Eddie had been after.
“Oh!” I stumbled backward. “Oh . . .”
Because Eddie had uncovered a body. A dead body. Of a man. A man about sixty years old. With staring eyes of blue.
I scrambled over the tailgate, holding a squirming Eddie close to my chest, and dropped to the ground, panting, not wanting to see any more.
Leese was standing quiet and tall, her hands gripping the edge of the truck, her mouth working as if she was trying to say something. For a long moment, nothing came out, but when it did, her voice was a raw whisper.
“It’s my dad.”
Chapter 2
Julia, who’d been standing in the bookmobile’s doorway watching the scene unfold, was the first to recover enough to call 911. After she’d told the dispatcher the circumstances, given our location, and received instructions that all of us should stay away from the truck, she hung up and took a long look at Leese.
“You need to sit down,” she commanded, using her strongest stage voice. “Minnie, go inside and bring out the chair. We’ll sit Leese over there.”
She was indicating a spot near the bookmobile’s front bumper, in the sun and out of the light breeze. It was also out of view of the truck, which was certainly intentional. Nicely done, I thought, and hurried to do her bidding. First, though, I put Eddie, who I’d been clutching so hard he was starting to squiggle something fierce, into his carrier.
When I came out with the chair and put it on the sunny grass, Leese was speaking in short, awkward, and repeating sentences. “He can’t be dead, I just saw him last week. Why is he in the truck? I just saw him last week. Why is he in the truck? I don’t understand. He can’t be dead.”
But she was biddable enough that it wasn’t any problem for us to maneuver her into the chair. Her ruddy face was a peculiar shade of pale and her hands, typically strong and sure, were shaking and searching for something to do. Once she was sitting, her hands gripped each other and didn’t let go.
“Water,” I murmured.
“I’ll get mine,” Julia said quickly. “You stay out here.”
She vanished around the corner of the bookmobile, and I was glad she’d volunteered, because if I’d fetched the water, I would have had to see the truck, and then I’d remember those staring blue eyes, and—
“Hard to believe it’ll be October the day after tomorrow,” I said. Talking about the weather was banal, but it was always there to talk about, and getting Leese to talk about anything had to be better than letting her thoughts circle around inside her head.
Leese blinked. “What?”
“The weather.” I sat cross-legged on the grass in front of her. “It’s so warm, it feels like early September.”
She barked out a short noise that might have been a laugh. Probably not, but maybe. “You’re right. It is warm enough for early September.”