A Body at Book Club (Myrtle Clover Mysteries) (15 page)

Myrtle picked up Pasha and escorted Miles to the door. He turned to look at the cat, reaching out a tentative hand to pet her again. “Does this mean that Pasha is going to be an inside cat now?”

Myrtle said, “Pasha and I will have to figure that out, I suppose. Pasha is feral, so I don’t even know if that’s possible. I think she’ll miss the outside. But I plan on keeping her in as much as possible. And if I see or hear those mean dogs again, I’m calling Red on the phone and getting him to arrest those owners. It’s the owners who are at fault, not the dogs.”

Maybe Pasha, now that she had a full stomach and was back at her home base actually
wanted
to resume her outdoor adventures. But Myrtle was very gratified that she decided instead to curl up at the foot of Myrtle’s bed and sleep the rest of the night with her.

Chapter Fifteen

Pasha appeared content to stay inside the next morning. Myrtle fixed her a can of cat food, made sure her litter box was clean, and left her curled up on an afghan on her sofa. She’d wanted to let Red and Elaine know that Pasha was home safely. And perhaps encourage Red to pull down any flyers he saw around Bradley while he was making his rounds. After all, he’d be driving around anyway and what else did he have to do?  It would be annoying to have people call her with Pasha sightings when Pasha was completely safe at home.

Myrtle found that Red had already left for the police station that day, but Elaine was home, busily cross-stitching as Jack played. It was good to see that Jack was back to his normal, happy self again. It was certainly a lot easier to be a doting grandmother when your grandchild had a sunny disposition.

“Pasha is home!” announced Myrtle, beaming.

“That’s wonderful!” said Elaine with a happy gasp. She hugged Myrtle tightly and Jack came over to hug Myrtle’s leg, simply because he liked hugs.

Elaine sat back down on the sofa and Myrtle sat down next to her. “Myrtle, I’m so glad! I know you’ve been worried sick about her. Does she look all right? Did someone find her? Or did she just come scratching on your door?”

Myrtle colored a little. “She does look all right. And, as a matter of fact, Miles found her.”

“Miles?”

So Myrtle told Elaine the whole story.

“So y’all are friends again?” asked Elaine with a smile.

“Friends. Of course we
were
friends, even when we were mad—but we’re friends who are
speaking
to each other again, which is much nicer. I have to hand it to Miles—his methodical nature, although it sometimes drives me crazy, actually helped to find Pasha.”

“I’m just so, so glad,” said Elaine with a relieved sigh. She picked up a square of cloth, pulled a needle out from where she’d tucked it into the square, and started diligently making stitches.

“How is the cross-stitching going?” asked Myrtle a bit warily. Elaine kept trying to find her true passion through various crafts. Judging by the results, she hadn’t hit on it yet.

“Great!” said Elaine brightly. She brought the cross-stitch over for Myrtle to see. It was a pattern of a little owl sitting on a branch, looking wise.

Myrtle could tell that the owl’s head was much bigger on one side than it was on the other. What’s more, Elaine appeared to continue making
x
s on that lopsided part of the owl’s head. Elaine seemed to be waiting for her to say something about her artwork. Myrtle cleared her throat. “How cute! Yes. Very cute. Ahh…good job.”

She was relieved to see that Elaine was taking the warped owl away again and was now putting it on a nearby table. A cloud passed over Elaine’s face and Myrtle frowned. Had her initial reaction to the owl been obvious?

But soon it became clear that Elaine had something else on her mind. “I’m glad you came by today, Myrtle—especially since Red isn’t around this morning. There was something that was weighing on me a little and I thought you should know.”

“That sounds serious,” said Myrtle. “What is it? Nothing with your health, is it? Or Jack’s or Red’s?”  Or the little owl’s, since he clearly had a tumor on the side of his head?

“Nooo, no. Nothing like that, Myrtle. Rest assured.” Elaine glanced away from Myrtle and seemed to be choosing her words with care. “Now promise me you won’t let Red know I talked to you, because you know I don’t want to get in the middle of any arguments between the two of you. I love both of you. Very, very much.”

“For Pete’s sake, Elaine!  Spit it out!”

Elaine said, “Okay. Red arranged for a representative from Greener Pastures Retirement Home to pick you up and take you on a tour of the facility. They’re taking a couple of other ladies from Bradley, too, apparently.”

“What?”  Myrtle felt a burning rush of a white-hot anger that threatened to completely undo her.

Elaine grimaced. “I know. It’s the last thing you want and you’ve been very vocal about it. If it helps at all, I can tell you that Red genuinely believes that the move would be good for you—that you’d be safer there and would enjoy yourself more than you think.”

“Well, it’s good to know that Red is completely deluded. Remind me to tear up my health care power of attorney. My health and general welfare certainly don’t need to be in
his
hands. Perhaps he has early-onset dementia.” Myrtle struggled to keep her temper in check. Elaine didn’t deserve to be at the receiving end of it, after all. And Jack was already staring curiously at her.

“Thanks for letting me know, Elaine,” she said in a warm voice without the snippiness she’d used earlier. “I appreciate it. I’ll figure out how to handle this and Red won’t know that you said a thing about it.”

Myrtle had a feeling that “handling it” meant that as soon as she saw a car from Greener Pastures out front, she was going to be slipping out the back door.

Elaine seemed ready to change the subject. “I’m glad you’re all right after discovering poor Rose yesterday. I know you seemed fine when I took you to Lena Fowler’s, but I thought maybe you would have had nightmares all last night.”

“It was certainly a shock yesterday morning. Especially after finding Naomi in the same spot during the book club meeting. It’s been a very peculiar week.”

“I still can’t imagine who would do such a thing,” said Elaine, resuming her cross-stitching and passionately adding more
x
s to the side of the owl’s head.

“Everyone I’ve spoken with seems very surprised. And apparently no one has seen Rose out and about the last couple of days—I guess having Naomi expire in her living room was more taxing on her than she’d admitted,” said Myrtle. Jack brought her an airplane and she beamed at him as she made airplane noises and had it “fly” around her.

“To me, it sounds as if everyone is lying,” said Elaine with a short laugh. I’ve seen Rose out a couple of times, myself. And I saw her chatting with Claudia outside in her yard yesterday morning.”

“What?”  Myrtle stopped flying the airplane around to stare at Elaine.

“Sure. The weather has been so hot that I haven’t been able to exercise in the afternoons. Plus, the only time I can leave to exercise during the week is early in the morning with Red gone. I’ve been trying to walk very early a few times a week.”

“How early?” 

“Well, not as early as
you
walk around. Not at four in the morning or three in the morning,” said Elaine with a snort. “But I’m out there right before seven. I’ve seen Claudia chat with Rose before yesterday, as a matter of fact, on my walks. Claudia tries to walk then, too, and Rose was very, very predictable about the time she’d go get her newspaper.”

Why hadn’t Claudia said she’d seen Rose? Myrtle frowned and absently handed the plane back to Jack who took off running with it.

A key rattled in the front door and Red came through, greeting them and swinging Jack through the air when he ran toward him. Elaine gave Myrtle a concerned look, knowing that Red wasn’t exactly in Myrtle’s good graces with the whole Greener Pastures thing. Myrtle gave Elaine a reassuring wink. She certainly wasn’t going to give everything away and tattle on her informant. Myrtle would put up a show of tolerating Red. Temporarily.

So she said to Red, “I was just telling Elaine that Miles brought Pasha back to me last night. He’d set up a sort of trap for her. Not
really
a trap. I guess he simply lured her to a particular spot and then threw a blanket over her. She seems like she’s skinny and a little dirty, but none the worse for her adventure.”

Red grinned. “Really? Well, that’s fantastic news, Mama. It really is. So you and Miles are friendly again, are you?”

Red appeared to be missing the point of the good news. The good news wasn’t that she and Miles had made up—it was that Pasha was back. She gritted her teeth and decided to continue acting as if Red wasn’t irritating the stew out of her. “Yes, that’s right. And it’s great to have the cat back home, too.”

Elaine gave a relieved sigh that Myrtle clearly was keeping a lid on her emotions.

Myrtle gave Red a very pleasant smile. “Which reminds me. While you’re doing your rounds in Bradley, could you take off the different posters and flyers that you see posted around town?”

Myrtle reflected on her visit as she walked back across the street to her home. So Claudia wasn’t telling the truth, then, about not having seen Rose since book club. That was Myrtle’s takeaway from her conversation with Elaine. Well, that and Red’s total and complete perfidy.

She opened her front door and saw Pasha sleeping, curled in a sunbeam on the living room floor. Pasha raised her head briefly to see Myrtle, and then lay back down for more napping. The poor cat must be exhausted from her terrifying adventure.

Myrtle headed to the kitchen to make lunch. She could catch up on some of her soap opera while she ate. Things moved so fast on
Tomorrow’s Promise
that if she didn’t watch for a couple of days, babies could suddenly be preschoolers and sweet teenagers could end up as shoplifting drug dealers. Myrtle made a tomato sandwich and plopped down in front of the television.

As she feared, Angelique, who’d been a darling character—a Sunday school teaching, literacy-volunteering soccer mom—had suddenly morphed into a trashy vixen. She’d thought she’d pulled up the most recent missed episode but clearly Myrtle had either missed a storyline in a previous show or else she’d hit play on the wrong date.

Angelique was actually acting a lot like Naomi or Maxine. She sort of looked like them, too—heavily made-up, lots of teeth, and that flattering, flirty manner. Myrtle started thinking about the competition between Maxine and Naomi. It was true that the town of Bradley was not exactly comprised of a ton of eligible bachelors. But, on the other hand, it wasn’t full of eligible single women, either. Most of the single women were like Myrtle…or Erma next door, thought Myrtle with a shudder.

There was a knock at Myrtle’s door. Pasha lifted her head and made a low growl. “It’s okay, Pasha,” said Myrtle. She hit pause on the show to save her place, found her cane, and hurried to the door.  She peered out the side window. 

It was Claudia. She looked frazzled. “Miss Myrtle, I was supposed to give you something for book club when I saw you and I forgot completely. I guess I forgot because of all the talk about Rose.” She gulped as if the name were hard to get out. “Anyway, you might have missed this because we talked about it during a meeting that you missed, but I’m the new secretary for book club.” Her eyes brightened a bit as she disclosed her new, executive position in the club.

Did book club even have a secretary? Had Myrtle just missed that fact for the last million years? She knew it had a president.  It was certainly a sign of her book club’s incompetence that they had chosen poor Claudia as secretary.

“We’re doing something a little different for the next meeting. Since the last meeting had…well, had something very sad happen. And since we didn’t get any business actually accomplished at the last meeting because of…the incident, we’re going to go ahead and have a meeting instead of waiting for another month.  We’re going to talk about some of our favorite books and then we’re going to place a bid for a chance to choose the next book club title.” Claudia’s eyes shone behind her cat eye glasses.

“What…an auction? To choose next month’s pick?” asked Myrtle. She would love to pick
The Sound and the Fury
. She would even pay for the pleasure of seeing everyone’s jaws drop to the floor when she announced the selection. But really—what good was a book club in the South that never read Faulkner? The only problem with that was that she had no money on this sad little fixed income of hers. Perhaps she could blackmail someone into putting money in on that title. Hmm.

Claudia said, “That’s right. And then the money that we raise goes to charity in memory of Naomi and Rose.”

“A charity? What kind of charity?”

“Oh, well, I thought maybe animals. Since they loved animals so much. You know—the flyers for the missing cat and all.”

Myrtle had known Claudia was spacy, but this brought spacy to a new height. “Claudia, you know those are
my
flyers? Remember, I was the one who was had the missing cat.”

“Right. Right. Oh, you’re right, I’m so sorry.” Claudia’s face was crestfallen. “Sometimes I don’t pay attention very well. I guess something like a nature conservancy or something, then? Since they loved nature.”

“Did they? As I recall, Naomi’s death was directly related to nature. In the form of a mushroom, actually. Now
Rose
, on the other hand…yes, she was probably more of a fan of nature in general. But I’ve got to applaud you on the overall idea—it’s a very nice way to handle this sensitive topic. Book club has certainly endured more than its fair share of loss lately. When is this next meeting?”