Sunday, December 20: two days before the murder
7 a.m.
“So sweet of Whitney to get us all that food,” I said, shoving a snow-covered branch aside as we plowed through the woods to our destination.
“Yeah, she’s awesome. Too bad more of them aren’t like that.” Adele Barrows said, huffing a little as she lugged her bag of food and a gallon of water. I worried about Adele. Aside from volunteering regularly at my café, she also worked as a crossing guard, drove a taxi, did all kinds of other rescue work including feeding the feral colony, and smoked like a fiend.
I wished Adele would quit smoking. And drinking boxes of wine. But it was hardly my business. We were on our way to check traps and do the morning feeding. Adele had come to the café early and gotten things cleaned in record time, so we figured it would be easier to just go together and get it done. When we arrived, Whitney must have been watching for us. She had come out to greet us and pointed us toward her garage, where we found two giant bags of dry cat food and two cases of wet food.
“A little something to help out,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “I wish I could get in there and feed for you.”
“Eventually,” I told her. “You need to get all the way better first.”
She rubbed her leg and grimaced. “Seems like this is taking forever.”
I supposed I should ask her what had happened to her leg at some point, but that also wasn’t my business and honestly, I just wanted to feed and get out of there. I thanked her and grabbed one of the cases of wet food.
Armed with it and two traps, I headed off, walking slightly ahead of Adele. The first thing I noticed were all the footprints. I frowned. None of our people—well, the one person we had left besides us two—would’ve come out here already. We were tightly coordinated, and with so few of us it was hard to get in each other’s way. Also it hadn’t snowed for the past two days, so everything was pretty tamped down and starting to melt in some places with the fluctuating temps. But it looked like there had been a lot of people running around out here. Literally. The prints went in circles in some spots, like people were chasing each other.
Weird. I figured it was a bunch of kids messing around, though. What else was there to do out here in the winter?
“At least there are a couple of good neighbors,” I said over my shoulder to Adele. “We have enough dry food for the next two weeks at least. And the wet food should last about that long too.” Finding people to physically do the feeding would be our number-one win, but people who bought us food were close seconds. Even buying cheaper food, feeding a whole feral colony was expensive. And if you were feeding more than one colony at a time, well, the food bill alone could be insurmountable, never mind vet care to get them all fixed and up to date on vaccines even at the heavily-discounted clinic rates. And since Katrina wasn’t allowed to collect donations in her official capacity as animal control officer, the donations had to be given to me through the cat café. Semantics, sure, but that meant on paper that this colony was my responsibility.
Katrina certainly didn’t have the funds to support the effort for a long time, although she told me she’d gotten a bunch of anonymous cash donations and had been buying the food that way since we started caring for this colony. The money had been left in her home mailbox every week, which led her to believe it was the person who had alerted her to the colony. Between that and Whitney’s donations we were set for a while.
Katrina had gotten an anonymous call about the cats three weeks ago. She’d mobilized her core crew immediately—which was basically Adele and me—and we jumped into action. After assessing the colony over a few days, we estimated about fifteen adult cats and a couple of young kittens. One of Katrina’s first acts was to reach out to Dr. Kelly, the island vet who had officially retired over the summer but had unofficially gone back into business when a series of unfortunate events took the new island vet off the scene. Dr. Kelly had been a huge help to Katrina over his many years in business by providing discounted vet care for her rescues. He agreed to vet the cats for his usual discount, and we’d managed to trap five cats and one of the kittens for a mini-clinic last week. The kitten was young enough to be socialized. We’d named him Gimley and he was now at my café. We were going to set traps this morning to try to catch more.
I wondered if the anonymous tipper and donor was Leopard Man, our quirky island character. As his name suggested, he dressed head to toe in leopard-print garb. He also spoke almost completely in Shakespearean phrases, loved cats more than anything, and had a sixth sense for cats in trouble. He always did what he could to help. He never liked taking credit for anything, so it would be just like him to do it that way. I wasn’t about to voice that suspicion, though, since talking about his own generosity made him uncomfortable.
Katrina hadn’t actually had a feral colony to care for in a while—she, along with the island’s former rescue group, had managed to reduce the feral population drastically, and the ones that were left had their own ongoing feeders. We had no idea how or when this situation started out in Turtle Point, but it was even harder to accept given the status of the neighborhood. The last couple of colonies she’d been managing were out on the other side of the island, in more rural communities where people didn’t really have the means to care for them. Or know better in the first place not to turn unfixed cats loose outside where they could repopulate.
But this fancy-schmancy neighborhood … that was different.
“So where do you want to put the traps?” Adele asked, pausing to look around.
“Over behind the shelters,” I said, pointing ahead. Although I must’ve been a little directionally off today because I couldn’t actually get a visual on the shelters. I was hopeless in the woods, even though these woods couldn’t have been more than two blocks deep. Good thing too, because otherwise there was a chance I’d get lost when I was here on my own and never make it out. A Girl Scout I was not.
A group of local high school students had built some shelters for the cats, which meant we had more places to store their food, and we could put blankets inside the little houses for them. Before now, we had a makeshift house that Grandpa had tried to make. His effort was valiant, but the house itself was a little iffy. Other than that, Whitney let us use her heated shed. She’d made it a real room with heat and electricity, her attempt at a “girl cave,” she’d told us jokingly, but never used it. Which had never really made sense to me since Whitney lived alone in a giant house. The entire thing could be one big girl cave, in my opinion.
Adele was not so patiently waiting for me to get my bearings. “Did you move the houses since I’ve been out here?”
“No. They’re way too heavy. I thought we had put it closer than this.”
I took one more slow spin around. We weren’t that far into the woods, directly behind the Hacketts’ house, which was friendly territory. We’d tried to strategically place the three houses behind homes we knew did not object to the cats or their feeders, so at least one of the houses should be somewhere around where we were standing.
“Thought so,” Adele said. “I mean, I know I’m a crazy old bat, but I didn’t think I was that crazy.” She squinted into the tree line. Then she pointed to the left. “What’s that?”
I peered in the direction of her finger. Deeper into the woods, I could see a speck of green, which was the color of the feral houses. “I don’t know. Did someone move our house?”
Adele’s eyes darkened. “Who would do that? Jonathan’s even scrawnier than you.” Jonathan was our other remaining volunteer. “If you can’t move it, he sure can’t.” She started toward it.
I had to smile—Should I consider that a compliment?—as I dropped the traps and food and followed her. She reached the house a few steps before I did. But the way she just stopped and stared, I assumed there was a problem. I pulled up beside her and surveyed the damage.
This, I wasn’t anticipating. Someone had taken one of our shelters and destroyed it. The little shingles had been ripped off and one of the sides had been completely caved in. I had a moment of panic that a cat or two had been inside at the time, but a quick peek in the door with the flashlight on my cell phone put those fears to rest.
“What the…” I murmured. “Who would do this?” I circled around it, trying to figure out if there was some way to make it usable again. I couldn’t ask the class to make another one.
“Well,” Adele said, waving in the direction of the houses behind us. “Plenty of choices, I suppose.” She shook her head, disgust sharpening her features. “Though I got a real hard time seeing how they think this’ll solve anything. But I guess the rich just don’t care.”
Adele was even less a fan of the island’s upper class than Katrina was. She had her reasons, but the constant reminder of the haves versus what she and Katrina considered the have-nots was a big part of the problem out here. “Yeah, but most of these people are older. You think I don’t have the strength to move that house? If I don’t, they sure don’t. It weighs a freakin’ ton.” I’d been surprised at how heavy they were when the teacher and kids delivered them. That had been a banner day. I thought June Proust would lose her mind. She’d stood on her deck glaring at the kids the whole time.
“Not all of them,” Adele reminded me. “That Trey Barnes is, what, your age, even though he’s married to that nasty old Edie? I mean, man, she’s older than me.” Adele shook her head, no doubt thinking about the injustice of rich old women snagging young hot men. “He’s big and strong. Probably had his drunken friends over and they all drank a case of beer and came out here to wreak havoc. Maybe Edie even gave him an extra allowance to do it.”
She had a point. Trey Barnes—although not quite as young as me—always seemed to be hanging around, in the yard or on the street, but it was never obvious what he was actually doing. And I had seen him with his group of friends a few times, usually when Edie was off at her charity luncheons or whatever it was she did all day.
Still, it seemed like such a childish thing to do. I tried to shrug it off, even though it made me super sad. “Could’ve been anyone. There’s probably tons of kids with nothing to do who come into the woods to smoke pot or whatever. Maybe they did it just to be jerks.” I wasn’t sure if I believed that either, but I was having a harder time imagining any of these prissy people taking the time to come out here and figure out how to haul a cat house deep into the woods and destroy it. Their hands would get dirty, for one thing. And the last thing I wanted was for more trouble out here if we all went off half-cocked and started accusing them of doing this. “Look.” I pointed to my right. “That house is fine.”
Adele sniffed. “For now.” She headed over there with her food. I went back to retrieve my stuff, but before I walked over to join Adele I pulled out my phone and pressed the button next to Katrina’s name.
“Someone wrecked one of the feral houses,” I said when she answered.
“What?” Her shriek nearly went right through my eardrum.
I grimaced and held the phone away until I was sure she was done.
“Yeah. Adele and I just found it.”
“Oh, screw this. I’m calling the police.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “That will cause all kinds of trouble. Chaos in the neighborhood, more police lights, more reasons to complain about us. Plus, what are we going to tell them? That this isn’t our property, but we dropped off some cat shelters and someone who does live here vandalized them?”
“So you want to let them win? They have every right to mess with us and keep messing with us because this is their property? It’s the woods! No one owns the woods.” I could feel her anger vibrating through the phone.
“I know. It’s crappy and awful and I don’t think they should get away with it either. But I don’t see a way to get this sorted out without making everything worse. And if they ban us all from being out here, the cats will suffer, no one else. I just wanted you to know, I didn’t want to you to fly off the handle.”
She didn’t answer.
“Well?” I pressed. “Promise you’re not going to call?”
The silence stretched so long I thought she’d hung up, but finally she sighed. “Fine. Whatever. We’ll just let them wreck all the houses. Maybe they’ll kill some of the cats too.”
I sighed. “Katrina—”
“It doesn’t matter, Maddie. I know you don’t want to hear it, but someone’s going to pay for this. Mark my words.”
Three beeps from my phone, signaling she’d hung up.
“Okay, Godfather,” I muttered.
My cell phone rang again before I could return it to my pocket. But it wasn’t Katrina calling back to yell again. It was Becky.
“I need a quote,” she said by way of greeting.
“About what? It’s not the best time,” I said.
“Where are you?’
“In the woods.”
I could hear her snort a little. “Then it actually is a good time. We’re doing a story on the thefts in the Sea Spray development. We got a call from…” I heard papers rustling as she flipped through a notebook. “Someone named June Proust. She’s saying the volunteers are bringing bad influences into the neighborhood.”
I felt a flare of anger. June was not only a bully, but she was clearly determined to slander everyone who had a heart along the way. I should’ve let Katrina call the cops. I was being a wuss trying to keep the peace. They didn’t deserve it.
“Yeah? Well I have another angle to your story.”
“Oh yeah? Do tell.”
“Someone vandalized one of the cat shelters. Adele and I just found it. So I guess it’s an eye for an eye, or at least we can make the accusations right back at them.”
She whistled under her breath. “Cat fight, eh? Come by the paper. I’m here until six tonight.”
I hung up and joined Adele, who had finished filling up dry-food bowls in the first house and was impatiently waiting for my wet food.
“Hey,” I said. “You think Gabe will build us some new feral houses?” Gabe, my contractor, was Adele’s nephew and an awesome guy.
Adele broke into a smile. “You bet your booty, if I tell him to. I’ll call him when we leave. Now get over here with that food. I’m freezing my tush off.”