I drove home, fuming and not sure what my next move should be. I wondered if the cops knew this whole thing. If they didn’t, they needed to step up their game a bit. I called Craig.
“Did you know Lexie Holt and Zach McConnell were maybe having an affair?” I asked.
He sucked in a breath. “I didn’t. But maybe Ellory did. I’ve been on weather duty.”
“Well, you should check that out,” I said.
“Why do you sound so cranky?”
“I’m not cranky.” I hung up and tossed the phone into my passenger seat. I didn’t want to mention McConnell and the notebook, because then I’d have to tell him we had it and now we’d lost it.
But I was stewing over this. I pulled into our driveway. Grandpa’s truck wasn’t around, nor was Val’s car. Ethan was holding down the fort alone. I hurried inside and almost tripped over a giant cage in the middle of the living room. I peered inside. There were four kittens, two black, one a velvety gray, and the other orange, playing inside. Wrestling, to be more accurate. Throwing one another around. One of the black ones fell right in the water dish and jumped out, shaking water everywhere.
“Uh. Ethan?” I called.
“Yeah?” he answered from the kitchen.
“Where’d the giant cage come from?”
He came to the doorway. “Katrina,” he said.
“Did she … give you any explanations?”
“No, I thought you were expecting them?”
“Oh, she’s good,” I muttered. Waiting until I was gone and then acting like it had been planned all along. “Nope. We already have ten. Eleven actually.” Muffin had been the one who had bumped us over the agreed-upon threshold. “What, did she just drop them and run?”
“Pretty much,” Ethan said. “She was in a hurry.”
“I bet she was.” I’d deal with her later. In the meantime, the kittens were super cute. I bent down to stick my fingers through the crate. They all charged at me, gnawing on my hand with their tiny little teeth. “Do you know where Grandpa is?” I asked.
“I don’t. He was here for a few minutes earlier, but then he left.”
Of course he did. I left JJ to sniff around the kittens and hurried upstairs. I sank down on my bed and texted Becky.
Got some interesting info on Mrs. Holt and McConnell.
I got back a row of question marks in return.
Life insurance and affairs. All kinds of rumors. Call me.
She did, promptly. Becky was never one to sit on a story. I filled her in on Damian’s intel and how both Lexie and McConnell had come to my cafe.
“Interesting,” she said. “My reporter had the possible affair piece, but not the life insurance. I mean, it’s always a guess, but nice to have it confirmed. Is it confirmed?”
“According to this source it is.”
Becky chuckled. “Look at you, with your anonymous sources. So she came to your place?”
“She did. And then he shows up a couple hours later and asks about Holt’s things. Says he doesn’t want the ex taking them. What do you think’s going on? If they’re together, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Becky said. “Life insurance is always a good motive. But then if it was her, how’d she get him into the water?”
It was another good point. But I really had gotten the vibe from Lexie Holt that she cared about her soon-to-be ex-husband. “Do they have any info from the car yet? Any leads on who was in it?”
“Not that I’ve heard. I’ve gotta run.”
Well, she wasn’t much help. I wandered back downstairs. Ethan was putting on his coat.
“Where are you off to?”
“I’ve got to pick up Val. Her car is acting up.”
“Really? Where is she?”
“At the yacht club. Again.”
“Oh, did she finally hear from Ava-Rose?”
“No idea,” he said. “But it’s so bad out I didn’t want her trying to get home if the car wasn’t working right.”
“You’re so sweet,” I said. “But I already knew that. Drive safe. It’s nasty out there.”
“Will do. By the way, Adele was here for a while this afternoon. She did all the cleaning.”
“She rocks.” I locked the door behind him and wrapped my arms around myself to ward off the sudden chill. I really wished the winds would settle down so they would run the ferries again. I couldn’t believe Lucas was still not home.
I cranked up the heat and pulled the blinds to try to shut out the noise of the wind and the tree branches whipping around. I didn’t like storms. I especially didn’t like them in a huge house alone, with the newspeople issuing dire predictions that power would be out for half the island at some point tonight, roads would be closed due to flooding, and basically calling this apocalypse now.
But I guess I wasn’t alone. I had my babies. And now I had new kittens to take care of, too. I went over to the cage and peered in at the babies. They were sleeping like little angels. JJ had curled up next to the cage, like their big brother. I knew as soon as they woke up the nice clean cage Adele had worked on would be trashed. I wanted to move them into the other room but didn’t want to wake them right now.
I checked on the rest of the cats, then turned off a bunch of lights and went upstairs. I wondered where Grandpa was tonight. Out with Leopard Man and Thea, parking that weird trailer somewhere new, maybe. I flopped on my bed and crossed my arms. I had no idea how to solve any of these problems. JJ strolled in. He must’ve seen me heading upstairs and left his post as protector to see how I was doing. I gathered him close for a kiss.
“What do you think of this, JJ?” I asked.
He stared at me, those piercing eyes locked on mine, almost like he was trying to tell me something.
I sighed and dropped my head back onto my pillow. “Maybe we should go to Grammy’s for a bit. You want to go to Grammy’s?” JJ loved my parents, and he loved going to visit them.
I called my parents’ house.
My mother picked up on the second ring.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Honey. Where have you been? You hung up on me so fast earlier. Have you heard any news on that poor writer?”
“Did you watch the press conference?”
She snorted. “I did. I don’t know why. They never say anything at those things!”
“I know. Becky says they have a whole system for how little they plan to say.”
“Well, what does Grandpa think?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “We haven’t talked about it much. Hey, are you guys busy tonight?”
“Busy? No. We were going to order some food and watch a movie. Maybe snuggle on the couch.” She giggled.
I had to smile. My parents were still really cute together. I envied them. They’d found each other so young, and unlike so many other people who got together young, they stayed together and actually still liked each other. They weren’t just pretending.
“Why do you ask?” she asked.
“No reason. JJ and I were thinking about visiting.”
“Oh, you should come. We’ll order whatever you want. Can you bring me your purple sweater, too? I wanted to wear it tomorrow. If the weather is better there’s a talk at the library I want to go to and that sweater is perfect.”
I didn’t bother to ask what kind of talk demanded my fuzzy purple sweater, but I agreed to bring it. “I’ll be there in a half hour,” I said.
“Just be careful, some of the roads are closed around here,” she said.
I hung up and changed into my fleecy leggings and a comfy sweatshirt. Then I suited JJ up in his harness, grabbed my purse and jacket, and headed back into the nasty weather.
We’d made it around the block when I realized I’d forgotten the sweater. I sighed. I hated when I was scatterbrained, and it always happened when I had too much going on and too many things crammed into my head. I banged a U-turn and headed back, parking haphazardly on the curb in front of the house. I grabbed my keys, locked JJ in the car, and hurried back up to the door.
I was halfway across the living room when I heard a noise. Like something falling, maybe from the construction side of the house. I paused, listening.
And heard a creak. Like someone had taken a step on a loose floorboard. And then a bang.
My heart sped up. I clutched my keys tighter in my hand, working one of them up between my knuckles. I’d heard somewhere that was a good trick to remember in case you had to try to gouge someone’s eye out. I took a few steps forward, looking around for another weapon in case I needed it. There wasn’t much. But I could see the cats were on alert, too. They’d heard it. Muffin and Jasmine were staring in the same direction I was.
Someone was in our house. Was it Thea Coleman? Come to steal JJ? At least he was in my car, safe and sound.
That thought made me angry. I was tired of worrying every waking minute about whether someone would try to steal him. Or maybe it was McConnell, come back to see for himself about the notebook. Whoever it was, this was crap. And I wasn’t going to sit back and hide in the corner. I covered the rest of the room in two strides and threw the door to the side porch open, steeling myself against what—or who—I might find.
The storm door was ajar, and the wind was blowing it open and shut, hence the bang. I paused, wondering if the old lock had just given out. And then I noticed that the window on the top part of the door was broken. Which maybe I could’ve attributed to the wind, if I hadn’t spotted the flashlight lying on the top step. Which didn’t look like any of the flashlights we kept around the house.
Someone had been trying to break in. Then I’d come back and interrupted them.