The next day was a Bookmobile Day. Thessie, Eddie, and I headed to the southern part of Tonedagana County and today was our first run to an adult foster care facility, a small facility where residents need some care, but not the high-level care of a traditional nursing home. If the visit went even marginally well, I had a long list of similar facilities that were excited about the possibility of having the bookmobile make a regular stop.
Actually, the term “excited” wasn’t even close to the reactions I’d received when making the invitational phone calls. After two, I’d learned to hold the receiver away from my ear to prevent permanent damage to my eardrum.
I parked the bookmobile in the shade cast by the tall maple tree outside Maple View Adult Foster Care. As soon as I’d set the brakes, Thessie jumped out of her seat and headed to the back to start wrestling with the heavily laden book carts.
Thessie started down the steps, then paused. “What about Eddie?”
The cat in question was sitting in the middle of the floor, licking his paw and swiping the backs of his ears with it. Lick. Swipe. Lick. Swipe.
“Why can’t he come with us?” she asked. “He follows you like there’s a leash on him.”
There’d been no reason to tell Thessie about Eddie and Stan’s farmhouse, so I hadn’t. “I don’t want to take any chances,” I said. “If he saw a . . . a chipmunk or a bird, he could take off. We’d spend an hour hunting him down and we’d be late for the next stop.”
While we were opening the back door and pushing the buttons to lower the wheelchair lift that could also carry the book carts, Gayle came out to the parking lot. Gayle, the manager of Maple View, had volunteered to be the guinea pig for the first AFC bookmobile stop.
“Hi, Minnie,” she said, smiling. “Hope you brought lots of books. The residents are more excited than I would have guessed.”
I was introducing her to Thessie when a large voice trumpeted forth. “I spy a cat,” she said. “Right there in the window of the bookmobile.” The size of the voice matched the size of the woman who filled the wheelchair from one side to the other. Her white hair was short and curly and she wore a matching knit shirt and pants of lavender. “Gayle? Gayle, do you see?” she called, pointing to my little buddy. “It’s a cat come to see us.”
“Yes, Polly, I see.” Gayle glanced at Eddie, then at me. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure the cat is here to visit Maple View.”
Polly wheeled herself down the short concrete walk and across the parking lot. “We haven’t had a cat here in ages and I miss hearing a nice purr. He’s got that nice white chest, just like a tuxedo. What’s his name?”
I made a note to myself to go back in time ten minutes, shut Eddie up in his cabinet, and avoid this entire scene. “Eddie. He’s friendly, but . . .”
Gayle smiled. “The residents are used to cats. I have one of my own that I bring in once in a while.”
“Please?” Polly looked up at me beseechingly. “I miss my own cats so very much.”
My heart panged with sympathy. Now that I had a cat, I couldn’t imagine life without one. At least one particular one. I looked at Gayle. “He’s friendly, but he isn’t declawed.”
She smiled. “Mine isn’t, either. The residents know what to do.”
“And we can’t stay long. We have to be at the next stop in a little over an hour.”
“I’ll kick you out in plenty of time.”
“Well, then . . .” I got an image of a head-shaking Stephen, then banished it from my brain. “If you’re sure, let’s give it a try.”
“Great!” Gayle clapped her hands. “Polly, let’s get you back into your room so you can greet Eddie properly. Minnie, I’ll send Audry out to show you things, okay?”
“Who’s Audry?” Thessie asked. She’d rolled the book carts off the ramp and was ready to take them inside.
“No idea. But I’d guess that’s her.”
Walking toward us purposefully was a woman who looked to be about ten years older than Gayle’s sixtyish, though while Gayle was short and round, this woman was short and slender, moving with a comfortable ease that put me in mind of a cat trotting on its way to do cat things.
An odd noise came from inside the bookmobile, but I ignored it in favor of holding out my hand in greeting. “Hi, I’m Minnie and this is Thessie. You’re Audry?”
“Audry Brant. I help Gayle a couple days a week.” She smiled. “Helping out until I have to move in here myself. Thessie, could you be a big help and take those into the dining room? In through the double doors, then straight on until morning. The readers are ready and waiting. Well, those who aren’t waiting for your cat.”
The odd noise grew odder. I started to turn to look, but Audry laid a hand on my arm.
“Minnie, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” I prepared myself for the standard bookmobile inquiries. What kind of gas mileage does it get? (Awful.) Did you have to get a commercial driver’s license to drive it? (No, but I did take a truck driver’s course.) How do you plan the route? (With difficulty.)
“I hear,” she said, “that you’re—”
She stopped because this time the odd noise was too loud to ignore. Eddie was making enough noise scratching at the window and yowling that people in the next county could have heard.
“Excuse me,” I said to Audry, and hurried into the bookmobile. By the time I’d climbed up the steps, Eddie was perched on the headrest of the passenger’s seat, moving his head around to peer out the side window at who knew what.
“What is the matter with you?”
All cats are masters of the evil eye, but the frozen glare Eddie sent me was in a class by itself. I shook off the foot-thick ice with which he’d tried to cover me. “Will you cut it out? There are a bunch of nice elderly people inside. For some bizarre reason they want to see you, but I can’t take you in if you don’t stop acting like you have ants in your pants.”
He jumped down to the seat and banged his head against the console.
Bonk! Bonk!
“Eddie!” I picked him up. “What is with you?”
He pulled back to look me in the eye. “Mrr!”
“Well, yeah, but I don’t know what that means. I don’t talk cat.”
“MRR!!”
I sighed and stroked his fur. “You know, sometimes I really think you’re trying to tell me something and I’m just too stupid to . . . Oh, sure, now you start purring, you silly cat.” I kissed the top of his head. “Are you ready to make some new friends?”
He snuggled into my arms. “Mrr,” he said.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“Mrr.”
• • •
The rest of the day went smoothly enough. Polly and a number of the other residents got to pet the kitty, Thessie picked cat hair off her clothes and wondered out loud if it could be spun and knitted, and Brynn—who’d bounded aboard the bookmobile at the next stop wearing a headband with fuzzy cat ears attached—got her Eddie fix while her mother watched with moist eyes. The little girl’s blood count numbers were all where they should be, I was told, and having a regular visit from Eddie was doing wonders for keeping her cheerful.
I drove us back to Chilson. “Eddie’s getting to be more of a draw than the books.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Thessie put another collection of Eddie hair into the plastic bag that had formerly housed her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Did you see the stacks of books those kids checked out?”
I was thinking about that when I took an evening walk. Could we manage to secretly market Eddie as an attraction for the bookmobile? Eddie as an inducement to reading. The mind boggled. My brain was whirring away as I walked through downtown, which was probably why I didn’t see that I was on track for a collision until I ran smack into someone.
“Oh! Sorry about—” I shook myself out of boggle mode and looked up at the woman I’d almost run over. “Aunt Frances! I didn’t see you.” I started to laugh at myself, but then remembered her abrupt departure on Saturday morning. The phone messages I’d left that she hadn’t returned.
The pause hanging between us grew bigger and fatter and wider. “How are you?” I finally asked.
“Fine,” she said.
The pause, which had shrunk slightly, started ballooning again. I felt it grow larger and larger, wondered if it would pop or just keep expanding forever.
A cane tap-tapped along the sidewalk. “Miz Pixley,” Lloyd Goodwin said, nodding. “Miz Minnie. How are you two lovely ladies this lovely summer evening?”
“Fine,” we chorused. And for some reason, that made us both start laughing. The balloon shrank to nothing and suddenly everything was okay.
“Come on,” Aunt Frances said, taking my arm. “I need to visit someone.”
I resisted her light tug. “You sure you want me with you? Do I know her? Him?”
“It’ll be fine,” she said. Which, of course, made us both laugh again.
• • •
She was right—it was fine. The bag she carried held hand clippers, a dandelion puller, a hand cultivator, and a pair of gloves. She took us straight to the oldest part of the cemetery and held out the clippers.
“Do you mind?”
We stood facing the headstone of Mary Alvord, born 1815 in London, England, died 1877 in Chilson, Michigan.
“It’s the oldest headstone in the cemetery,” Aunt Frances said. “There’s no one around any longer to tend her grave, so I take care of things for her.”
Tears sparked in my eyes. “I had no idea you did this. It’s . . . really nice of you.”
“I just hope that maybe somebody will do the same for me someday. Ready?”
Fifteen minutes later the grass was trimmed, the weeds were gone, and the marigolds Aunt Frances said she’d planted on Memorial weekend were looking tidy again.
“Now.” She took the clippers from me. “As a reward for your labor, I will treat you to a complete explanation of my odd reactions to comments about Stan Larabee. To be honest, I was being an idiot. I just didn’t . . . couldn’t . . .” She sighed. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“At the beginning.” I led her to Alonzo Tillotson’s bench, looking around with mild trepidation. One Eddie was wonderful, but if there were two, and if they met, the universe would surely explode. Or I would.
We settled down and sat in comfortable silence watching the waters of Janay Lake. Boats went this way and that. The wind blew a light breeze. The sun was on our faces.
My eyes were starting to close for a little nap when Aunt Frances started her story.
“It was a family feud,” she said, sighing. “A very private, very old feud inside Stan’s family, and Stan had made me promise not to say anything to anyone about it.”
“That’s not a beginning,” I said. “That’s more like an explanation.”
“I suppose.” She watched a seagull soaring past, her eyes slits against the sharp sun. “Stan stayed with me the winter before you moved up north.”
I made a squeak of surprise, but managed to keep my mouth shut.
Aunt Frances was still focused on the seagull. “He hated hotels. Hated them with a serious kind of hate. He stayed with me while that house of his up on the hill was being renovated. He moved out of my place and into his just a few weeks before you moved up.” She shifted her gaze from sky to me. “He had the corner room near the stairway,” she said. “Just to be clear about things.”
“Crystal,” I said.
“Good.” She looked at me a moment longer, then returned to the lake view. “As far as I know, no one realized that Stan stayed with me that winter. He didn’t want his relatives knowing he was in town and I was willing to keep his confidence.”
At that time of year it would have been easy enough to keep his presence a secret. The houses surrounding the boardinghouse were all summer cottages. The closest year-round residence was almost a quarter mile away, and that was occupied by a couple who worked in Traverse City and were willing to drive the hour-long commute, one way. As long as Stan had a vehicle no one recognized, he could have driven out to the old highway, headed up to U.S. 31, and blended with the traffic before anyone paid any attention.
“The only thing,” Aunt Frances said, “is I’m good friends with one of Stan’s nieces. Gwen’s the daughter of his oldest sister and isn’t much younger than Stan.” She went quiet. Stayed quiet.
“That’s not the end of the story, right?” I asked.
She watched another seagull wing past. “No. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I connected Stan and Gwen. He never talked about his family and she didn’t mention that Stan was her uncle until he donated the money to the bookmobile. That’s when . . .”
“When . . . ?”
“I decided to play master of other people’s lives.” Her voice was harsh. “I talked to Stan, over and over, on the phone, at the Round Table, at his house, trying to convince him to call his sisters. Tried to convince Gwen to see Stan. All in the name of trying to make people happy.”
She shoved at her hair, trying to push it into a place out of the wind. “It’s not enough that I think I can help people find their true loves. Oh, no. I have to try to end a family feud that has been going on for decades. And look what happened. So stupid.” Creases appeared around her lips.
My mind made a small, frightened leap. “You think you’re responsible for Stan’s death?”
“I don’t know what to think.” The creases went deeper. “The feud . . . I don’t even know what it was about.” She made an impatient gesture. “Something stupid. Feuds always are. But what if old hurts were opened up because I tried? What if my attempts at reconciliation brought it all back? What if . . . ?”
Her strong voice wavered. Quavered. Fell apart into a choking sob. “What if it’s my fault?”
I wanted to say, That’s nuts, of course it’s not your fault. You didn’t have anything to do with Stan’s death and it’s ridiculous to think so.
But I didn’t know what was true anymore. So I took her hand. Held it tight between mine.
And didn’t let go.
• • •
Eddie and I sat on the houseboat’s front deck that night, watching the sun go down and the stars come out. At least I was watching the sun and the stars. Eddie was alternating between being a motionless cat statue and chasing the tip of his tail as if his life depended on it.
I’d turned off all the lights in the cabin to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and a sense of invisibility had enveloped me. No one could see me, and since I was lying quietly on the chaise lounge, no one could hear me. But I could hear them.
A few boats down, a new couple was welcoming friends to their boat. Wine corks and beer cans were popping open, toasts were being toasted, and a wild happiness was emanating from all.
Closer, a woman with small children was trying to convince her youngsters that, yes, it was bedtime, that just because they were still awake didn’t mean it wasn’t time for sleepy eyes and if they wanted to go to the beach tomorrow, they’d better get into bed right now, and don’t make me count to three. One, two . . .
Next door, Louisa and Ted were putting away the dinner dishes they’d just washed. Silverware rattled and plates tinked as they chatted in voices too low for me to hear. Not that I was trying to hear, of course. Eavesdropping was a nasty habit and those who indulged in it often heard things they didn’t want to hear. Take the time when I was five and had listened in on my older brother and his girlfriend when they—
“He got what he deserved,” Gunnar Olson said.
Eddie, whom I saw in silhouette against the lights of the dock, perked up his ears and turned his head to look at our other immediate neighbor, the one whose mere presence allowed me a discount rate on my boat slip. When I’d seen his lights on earlier that night, I’d wondered what he was doing up here a full two weeks before the Fourth of July, but had hoped I wouldn’t have to find out.
With Gunnar going full force, my quiet evening was done. I should go in, anyway. There were bills to pay and Eddie hair to vacuum. I swung my feet to the deck and started to stand when Gunnar’s voice boomed out through his open cabin windows. “Larabee lived about twenty years too long, if you ask me.”
Then again, listening in to someone else’s conversation could hardly be considered eavesdropping if you were sitting on your own boat enjoying the evening. I sat back down.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Gunnar said to the person on the other end of the phone. “You know, I was up here when he died.”
I bolted to my feet. I knew it! I knew I’d seen lights on his boat that night.
Eddie padded across the deck and wound around my ankles. “Mrr,” he said.
I put my finger to my lips and waved at him to keep quiet.
“Mrr.”
Why, why is it that cats only seem to understand English when it’s to their own benefit? I knelt on the deck and pulled Eddie to me. He allowed the snuggle for a second and a half, then slithered out of my grasp.
“Flew the Cessna up,” Gunnar said. “I got the itch to play a little blackjack. Good thing the cops don’t know I was in town. They’d slap me on the suspect list in a flash, with my history.” He chuckled. “The wife? Nah, she doesn’t know I came up that weekend. She thought I was in Chicago on business. . . . Sure, I told her I’d quit gambling, but this was the first time since Christmas and I won a couple hundred bucks, so it doesn’t count. Besides, she’ll never know. I didn’t get the car out of storage until today. When I was up before, I hired some local to drive me around for next to nothing.”
Which explained why there’d been no vehicle in their reserved parking spot.
“Not until tomorrow,” Gunnar said. “She’s flying up from Grosse Pointe with some friends. Corporate jet . . . yeah. We have some wedding we have to go to in Charlevoix. . . . That’s the one. At Castle Farms. Waste of a Saturday, if you ask me.”
I thought about what he’d said about Stan. The comment about being twenty years too long—was that important? And if so, how was it important?
“Yeah, I’ll be picking her up at the airport. Pain in the butt, it’ll break up my whole day. Makes me think I should hire that local yokel to drive her around. Get her to show some cleavage and bet it’ll be even cheaper.”
He laughed. My fists clenched. This guy was really getting on my nerves. Maybe next year I’d chin up to the expense and pay full price for a slip in another spot. It would mess up my student loan repayment schedule, but it might be worth it to move away from this yahoo.
“Some guy I met at the bar,” Gunnar said. His voice faded and was replaced by the clinking of ice cubes and the pouring of liquid. “Yeah, he’s . . .”
But I couldn’t hear what he said. Chilson wasn’t exactly a huge metropolis, so odds were good that I knew whom he’d hired to drive him around. That, or I knew someone who knew him.
And when I did track down the driver, a few pointed questions would be in order. Question number one—did you drop Gunnar off at the farmhouse where Stan died? Two. Did you pick him up later? Three. Had he been carrying anything? Say, a rifle?
In the name of trying to keep my head literally down, I got down onto the deck in case Gunnar looked out a window, and crawled on my hands and knees to the very front of my boat’s bow. I always docked nose out to take best advantage of the lake view, and the tip of my boat matched the midship region of Olson’s vessel. Luckily, that was its galley area and was where Gunnar was pouring himself a drink.
Closer, closer . . . I poked my head outside the railing. Heard snippets of words, but nothing clear. Close, but not close enough. I rose to a crouch and slid outside my boat’s railing, put my toes on the deck’s edge, grabbed the top railing with one hand, and leaned out as far as I could.
“Nah,” Gunnar was saying. “That’s the last thing I’m worried about. This guy isn’t any mental giant. Says he reads a lot. Comic books, maybe.” He laughed.
“Say his name,” I murmured. “Say his name.”
“Mrr.”
There I was, ninety-eight percent of me precariously over the water, and my cat was walking along the top railing as if he’d been doing it all his life.
“Eddie!” I whispered. “Get down! You’re going to—”
One of his back paws slipped off the railing. His tail went down, a front paw slipped, and without thinking, without breathing, I released my single-handed hold on the rail and pushed him boatward. He gave a howling yowl and, twisting, fell to the deck feetfirst.
I windmilled for a grip on the rail, on the boat, on anything. Failed completely, and hit the water with a monstrous splash!
My feet hit the lake’s sandy bottom. I let my legs collapse and pushed myself back up. When I surfaced, spluttering out icky marina water, Gunnar Olson was stomping out onto his deck.
“Who’s that? Who’s there?”
I flung my hair around to get it out of my eyes. “Just me, Mr. Olson.”
“Who?”
“Minnie,” I said, treading water. “Your next-door neighbor.” I swam toward the end of the floating wooden dock that ran between my boat and Louisa’s.
“What were you doing out there?” he demanded. “Hey, don’t leave when I’m talking to you! You get back here right now!”
I climbed up the ladder fastened to the dock’s end, clambered over my boat’s railing, and, dripping, went to look for my cat while Gunnar Olson continued to shout at me. I found Eddie under the chaise lounge where he’d compressed himself into the smallest Eddie-ball I’d ever seen.
“Hey, bud,” I said softly. “Come on out. I’m sorry I scared you, but I didn’t want you falling in the water, see? You would have gotten all wet like I did and you’d hate that.”
“Who are you talking to?” Gunnar shouted. “You were listening to me, weren’t you? What did you hear? Invasion of privacy, that’s what you were doing. That’s against the law, you know. I could call the cops and have you arrested.”
Oh, please. I stood tall and faced the man. A difficult task, since his six feet of height combined with the height of his boat’s deck made his face roughly fourteen feet above mine, but when there’s a will, there’s a way.
“Privacy?” I asked. “Expectation of privacy is quite low in a marina, Mr. Olson. And are those open windows I see on your boat? That lowers the expectation even further. Almost like being in a public campground, I’d say.”
He paid no attention to me. “The only reason you’d fall off that little tug of yours is if you were outside the railing. And there’s no reason for you to do that unless you were trying to listen to my conversation!”
“For your information,” I said with exquisite politeness, “I was trying to keep my cat from falling in the water.”
Gunnar scoffed. “You don’t have a cat. You were intentionally eavesdropping. Admit it.”
A low rrrrrrr noise came from underneath the chaise.
“What was that?” Gunnar slapped his big, meaty hands on his railing and loomed over me. “No more of your little-girl games. Tell me the truth and there’s an outside chance I’ll let this episode—”
Eddie hissed, a long indrawn breath that raised the hair on the back of my neck. I’d never heard him make a noise like that. Not ever.
Gunnar drew back. “But you don’t have a cat.”
“I didn’t.” I smiled up at him. “But I do now.”
“You can’t,” Gunnar said. “Not a cat, not right next door to me.”
Eddie spat. Hissed again. Gave a long, low growl.
I hunched down. “You okay, pal?” Even in the dim light I could see that he was puffed up to half again his normal size. “Shhh, it’ll be all right. No one’s going to hurt you, okay? Shhh.”
Eddie subsided and let me scratch the back of his ears. He came out from under the chair and I scooped him up for a snuggle. With a sigh, I decided the right thing to do was introduce cat to human and human to cat. “Eddie,” I said, turning to face my irate neighbor, “this is . . .”
But Gunnar was gone.
• • •
When I got out of the shower, my skin was a splotchy pink from the heat. Swimming in Janay Lake was one of my favorite summer things to do, but swimming in yucky marina water had never been on any of my mental lists.
“List of things to avoid, maybe,” I told Eddie.
He was lying on the narrow shelf that ran above the bed. In former summers, I’d decorated the shelf with vases of dried flowers, Petoskey stones, and bits of driftwood. Early on in my life with Eddie I’d discovered that these things are all cat toys. Of course, when you got down to it, everything was a cat toy if a cat chose to make it one.
Eddie stretched out a front paw and rearranged himself on the shelf. He was a teensy bit too wide to fit comfortably, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Apparently he didn’t care if his back leg hung over the edge. At times it seemed he even liked it.
“Wonder how you’re going to like it at the boardinghouse?” I asked him.
He didn’t say anything.
“Well, we won’t move until October, so—” The floor under my bare feet crinkled. I peeked out from underneath the towel I’d been rubbing my hair with and saw that I was standing on Eddie’s papers. Or what had become Eddie’s papers after he’d decided to shred my Grice-Hamilton genealogy research. “Done with these, I take it?”
Since he didn’t say no, I herded the bits into a pile and dumped them into the wastebasket. “I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t mistake those for your litter box.”
Eddie gave me a look that was obviously meant to say I should be grateful for a lot more than that.
I slid on undergarments, shorts, and a T-shirt and chucked him under the chin. “I’m always grateful for your presence, pal, but especially tonight. Did you see Gunnar’s face?” I giggled. “Mr. Big Shot Consultant Don’t Mess with Me or I’ll Sic My Lawyers on You is scared of cats.”
Eddie yawned, showing his sharp teeth. I grinned. If Gunnar had seen those, he would have run for his life.
“And that’s his style,” I said, pulling my fingers through my wet and unruly hair. “Lawyers. If someone gets in his way, he’d hire a battalion of attorneys to fight for him. He wouldn’t do any fighting himself.” My fingers caught on a snarl and I yelped as I tugged through. “Still, did you hear what he said about Stan?”
Another yawn came from the Eddie quarter. He jumped down, made a beeline to the wastebasket, and started rubbing the side of his face against it.
“Cut that out,” I said. “I just filled that. With your mess.”
He rubbed harder and the wastebasket tipped over, sending small bits of paper halfway across the carpet.
“Oh, good job.” I knelt down to clean it up a second time. Eddie sat tall as an Egyptian cat statue and watched me work. “I’m spending twice as much time cleaning up this research as I did doing it.”
“Mrr.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for your comments, but the suggestion box is closed. Try again next . . .” My voice tailed off as I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. It was the only piece still intact and it was kind of a flowchart I’d made of names. I’d added circles and arrows and scrawled questions that had led to no answers whatsoever.
I remembered how I’d stared at it, thinking of previous generations and families and long-ago loves and hates and deaths and motivations.
“You know,” I said slowly. “Gunnar looks guilty as all get-out, but maybe . . . maybe the reason behind Stan’s death isn’t a recent reason. Maybe it came from a long time ago. Maybe . . . I wonder . . .” All those sisters. What were the chances that one of them had murder lurking in her heart? Were the police looking into their alibis? Then again, Stan had been seventy. How likely was it that his sisters were still hale and hearty?
“You know what?” I mused out loud. “I need to know more about Stan’s past.”
My cat catapulted himself onto my shoulder and clonked his forehead against the side of my skull. “Ow! Eddie, jeez, what’s with you?” He started purring loud enough to rattle my teeth. I reached up to pet him. “You are such an Eddie.”
“Mrr,” he said, and purred some more.