Faux Paw: A Magical Cats Mystery (9 page)

Marcus’s jaw tightened, but all he said was, “Thank you.”

Gavin turned his smile on both of us. “And I’ve interrupted your lunch enough.” He looked at me and the smile widened just a bit. “Kathleen. I’ll call you later and we’ll coordinate getting the exhibit packed and out of your library as soon as the police are certain they’re finished.” His gaze moved to Marcus and the smile faded. “Detective, let me know if you have any questions.”

He stood up and put the chair back in one smooth movement, raised a hand and made his way over to the counter.

Marcus’s mouth moved but he didn’t say anything. I took a bite of the last bit of my sandwich and waited.

“A cat burglar,” he said finally.

I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

His eyes flicked over to the counter where Gavin was talking to Nic. “Okay, even I have to admit this whole thing is starting to seem a little . . . out there. A cat burglar for hire, female no less, ends up here, in Mayville Heights. She climbs up onto the roof of the building, gets inside via a skylight no one knew was working, and makes it down to the floor like some kind of ninja.”

I reached across the table, took another forkful of macaroni and ate it before I answered. “Number one. Women can be cat burglars. What we lack in upper-body strength we make up for with persistence.” Marcus opened his mouth and I waggled a finger at him. “I wasn’t finished.”

“I’m sorry. I should have known that,” he said.

I held up another finger. “Two. It certainly looks like someone did get into the building via that skylight that Will Redfern left unsecured. Whoever it was probably didn’t somersault down onto the stairs like a ninja, but they did get inside. And that at least partly explains how they managed to circumvent the alarms on the windows.”

I picked up my fork again, speared the last chunks of ham and tomato in Marcus’s dish and ate them.

He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “There’s no number three?” he said.

I held up three fingers. “And number three: Again, you’re jealous.”

His blue eyes narrowed. “I’m jealous? Of Gavin Solomon?”

I reached for my cup and when I realized it was empty leaned sideways and caught Eric’s eye at the counter.

I turned my attention back to Marcus. “You get a little caveman when he’s around.”

“I don’t get a little caveman,” he protested, “and what does that mean?”

“It means you want to throw me over your shoulder, beat on your chest and then carry me back to your cave.”

“I’m not jealous and I’m not going to beat on my chest,” he said. Then he raised an eyebrow. “Although throwing you over my shoulder and carrying you back to my cave does have a certain appeal.”

I was saved from having to answer by Eric with fresh coffee. “Any idea when the library is going to open?” he asked as he filled my cup.

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “A couple of days at least, if everything goes well.”

Eric reached for Marcus’s mug. “Susan and the boys made Gak yesterday. Do you know what Gak is?” he asked.

“It’s like Silly Putty, isn’t it?” Marcus said. He looked around as though he couldn’t quite figure out what Gak had to do with when the library was going to reopen.

“Yes, it is. It’s slimy and stretchy and it will stick to the ceiling if you throw it high enough, where it will then remain until there is a lemon meringue pie cooling on the counter.” Eric looked from Marcus to me. “Susan needs to come back to work. She
really
needs to come back to work.”

“Oh, Eric, I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t quite swallow a grin.

“Go ahead and laugh, Kathleen,” he said darkly. “Maybe I’ll send all three of them up to visit you.” He moved to another table with the coffeepot.

Marcus smiled at me across the table. “Poor guy.”

“He loves every minute of it,” I said. Eric had had some tough times growing up, and I knew that having a family meant the world to him. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say they were his life.

Marcus looked at his watch.

“Are you heading over to the library?” I asked.

He nodded. “You and Maggie are going out to Wisteria Hill to have supper with Roma, aren’t you?”

I stood up and reached for my jacket. “We are. Which reminds me, I should stop in at the co-op store and let her know the local artists aren’t going to be able to pick up their artwork for a few more days.” I glanced in the direction of the counter, where Nic was handing a take-out order to Ella King.

Marcus put a hand on my arm. “I’ve got this.”

“You got the last one,” I said.

“And I have this one, too.”

He gave me a look that made my knees turn to pudding, and I held on to the back of my chair for a moment. “Um . . . thank you,” I said after the silence had lasted just a little bit too long.

“Are you staying downtown for a while?” he asked as he pulled on his own jacket.

“I am.” I fished my keys out of my purse. “Is there any chance I could get a few things from my office with an official police escort? I kind of got sidetracked when I was there with Hope yesterday.”

He nodded. “I don’t see why not. Call me when you’re ready.” His hand trailed down my arm.

“Okay, I’ll talk to you later,” I said. I was so busy looking at him, I walked right into a table. I gave him an embarrassed smile and managed to get out of the restaurant without running into anything else.

W
hen I stepped inside the artists’ co-op building, Maggie was just maneuvering her way down the stairs from the second-floor studio space, clutching two large cardboard cartons by their flaps in one hand and three in the other.

“Hey, Kath,” she said and at the same time lost her grip on one of the boxes. It careened down the steps and landed at my feet. I picked it up and reached up for one of the others before she dropped it, too.

“Maggie, what are you doing with all these boxes?” I said.

She came the rest of the way down the steps and headed into the co-op store, and I followed her. She set the three cartons she was still holding on to down by the counter, where Ruby was on the phone. Ruby waggled her fingers at me. I put the other two boxes down next to Maggie’s three.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling at me. She swiped a hand over her neck. “We’re starting to pack up things so Oren can start working.” The artists’ co-op was adding a small space for demonstrations and workshops to the store. Oren was going to be moving a wall, among other things. Maggie’s plan was to keep the store open for as much of the time as she could during the renovations.

“But I thought Oren wasn’t starting until next month,” I said.

“That was when we thought—hoped—that we’d get more traffic in here from the exhibit. Since it’s not happening anymore, there didn’t seem to be any reason not to get started. Oren has the time in his schedule.”

“I’m sorry that all of you lost the chance to be part of the exhibit,” I said with a sigh.

“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Maggie said. “Oren has the time, and now the work will be done before the peak tourist season.” She smiled at me again. “In the grand scheme of the universe I think it balances out.”

That was Maggie. She had a deep belief in the ultimate balance and fairness of the universe.

“Would you like some help getting things packed?” I offered.

Her blue eyes narrowed. “Don’t you have things to do at the library?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Not right now. I’m going to meet Marcus there later. “

“Good dog!” Ruby said behind me. “What’s taking so long?”

“The police are still collecting evidence,” I said.

“Whoever broke in to the library? What did they do? Rappel down from the roof? Use giant suction cups and walk down the wall like Spider-Man?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say whoever it was used rope, not giant suction cups.”

Ruby gave me a smirk. “Yeah, people always make the conventional choice,” she said.

I turned back to Maggie. “That’s why I stopped by. You’ll need to let everyone know they won’t be able to pick up their artwork for a few more days. Or if you want to give me phone numbers, I can do it.”

Ruby leaned sideways so she was in Maggie’s direct line of sight. “Want me to take care of that?” she asked.

“Please,” Maggie said. She gave me a hug. “I’m sorry you can’t get back into the building.”

I tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “The worst part is that there are so many programs that don’t have anywhere else to meet: the seniors, story time, Reading Buddies. We’ve just got the new group of kids paired up and started in Reading Buddies.”

Reading Buddies was a program that paired kindergarteners and first graders with older kids who helped the little ones with their reading skills. The little ones benefited from the one-on-one attention and the older ones from the responsibility. Right after Thanksgiving we’d had a fundraiser that had managed—after some major roadblocks—to leave us with enough money to expand the program and add more kids. Now every younger child had a match and the older ones had finished their training with Abigail. The kids had had only one session together. I hated that they were losing momentum.

“They meet after school, don’t they?” Maggie asked. I knew that gleam in her green eyes. She had a plan.

I studied her face. I swear I could see her mind working, or as Mary would say, the little hamsters running in their wheels. “Yes,” I said. “The little ones come right after school lets out and the older ones get their last period off. We usually get started about two thirty.”

“They can come here,” she said. “I mean upstairs in the studio. You don’t have to have chairs and tables, do you?”

“No,” I said slowly. “But they’re not exactly quiet. I know they’re reading, but—” I held out both hands. “They’re kids. They don’t always do it quietly.”

Maggie pulled a hand through her blond curls. “First of all, we’re not exactly packed with customers at two thirty in the afternoon in April. And second, anyone who has a problem with children learning to read can—”

“—bite me,” Ruby said behind us.

Mags laughed. “Anyone who has a problem can take it up with Ruby.”

I laughed too. “All right. Yes.”

This time I hugged Maggie. “Okay, put me to work,” I said, taking off my jacket. Ruby put it and my purse behind the counter.

“We need to get those shelves apart,” Maggie said, pointing to a wide, ceiling-high shelving unit against the end wall. Her neon orange toolbox was sitting on the floor.

I studied the unit for a moment. “I think we need to detach the shelves first,” I said. I took a look at the underside of one of the long barn-board planks and then opened the toolbox to find the right screwdriver.

Maggie had the neatest toolbox I’d ever seen. Everything was organized by size and function and there wasn’t a speck of dirt or rust on anything. She picked up the cordless drill that had been lying on the bottom shelf of the unit. “Do you want this?” she asked.

“No, the screwdriver is fine,” I said. I knelt down and started on the lowest shelf while Maggie, who was taller, used the drill to work over my head.

“Do Marcus and Hope have any suspects?” she asked. She smelled like lavender oil.

“Not exactly,” I said. I was twisted so my head and one shoulder were under the shelf and my voice was muffled.

“So what do they have, exactly?”

I gave the screwdriver one more twist and the screw in the back corner of the shelf came loose. I pulled my head out from under the length of barn board and sat back on my heels. “Have you ever heard of a woman named Devin Rossi?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Is that who they think took the Weston drawing and killed Margo Walsh?”

“It’s what Gavin thinks,” I said.

Maggie frowned. “He could be right.”

I looked up at her. “Seriously?”

She adjusted the drill bit, tightening the chuck. “You could say she ‘works on commission.’ She never hits the big galleries or museums. And I heard she used to be a gymnast, so getting in through the roof would be something she could do.” She turned the drill over in her hands. “But no one’s ever been hurt as far as I know. In fact Devin Rossi has a bit of a Robin Hood reputation.”

“I think Robin Hood’s thing was take from the rich, give to the poor. Not take from the rich, give to the rich.”

She smiled. “Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy.”

I pushed my hair back off my face and leaned under the shelf again. “What you’re saying is she has her fans.”

“In the art world, to some people, she’s kind of a folk hero, yes,” Maggie said. “Not everyone is a fan of big museums and galleries.”

I twisted onto my left shoulder so I could reach the screw in the other back corner of the shelf. “That doesn’t mean it’s okay to take things that don’t belong to you.”

“I know,” Maggie agreed. “Some people just seem to lose sight of that. Robin Hood was probably nothing like Sean Connery or Kevin Costner in tights.”

I grunted as I tried to get some torque on the screw. “No, he wasn’t. Some historians think Robin Hood was a real person. Others think he was a character based on the exploits of people like William Wallace. Still others say he’s totally a creation of folklore—the outlaw hero of ballads.”

Maggie laughed. “How did I know you’d know that?”

I slid my head out from under the shelf. “Was I being obnoxious?” I asked.

She nudged me with her foot. “No,” she said. “It just fascinates me how you know so many things.”

“I spent a lot of time in the library when I was a kid,” I said, just a little self-consciously.

“And I spent a lot of time taking pictures with my mother’s Polaroid instant camera and then coloring in the image with magic markers,” she said. She looked over at Ruby. “Hey, Ruby, what did you like to do for fun when you were about ten or twelve years old?”

“Shoplift Kool-Aid and use it to dye my hair,” she said immediately. Ruby had been on the road to being a juvenile delinquent as a kid before her school principal, Agatha Shepherd, had taken an interest in Ruby’s flair for art. When Agatha died, Ruby had used the money the older woman had left her to fund an art program for children as well as an art school scholarship.

I looked up at Maggie and smiled. “It seems our destinies were set before we even hit puberty.”

She smiled back at me. “No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

I spent about an hour and a half helping Maggie; then I walked up to Henderson Holdings to see Lita. I called Marcus before I left. “Any chance I could stop by the library and get some files from my office now?” I asked.

“You can,” he said, “but I’ll have to take a look at whatever you take out. Will that be a problem?”

Even though I knew it was impossible, it seemed as though I could feel the warmth of his voice against my ear. “It’s just some files on books I want to buy and a draft report on the library’s new damage-control strategy. You’re welcome to look at all of it.”

“I’d rather look at you,” he said.

I felt my cheeks flood with color. Marcus wasn’t a wildly romantic hearts-and-flowers kind of man, but every once in a while he’d say something that would make me either blush or forget how to breathe.

“I’ll be there in about . . .” I glanced down at my watch. How long did it take to walk over to the library? Why couldn’t I remember that? “A few minutes . . . I mean ten minutes,” I said, stumbling over my words.

“I’ll see you soon, then,” Marcus said, and I could picture the smile I knew was on his face.

I ended the call and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly.

I liked to think of myself as being pretty unflappable, growing up with my eccentric actor parents and a younger brother and sister who could both be pretty out there sometimes. Someone had had to be the sensible, practical person who remembered to buy milk and carry the health insurance cards. Marcus had the ability to turn me into a blushing, giggly teenager. I’d never really been that and, truth be told, I liked it.

Lita was watching me, a knowing smile on her face. “You two are so adorable,” she said.

“And you and Burtis are?” I teased.

“A mature love ripened by time,” she countered. “Like a bottle of fine wine or an aged wheel of Brie.”

It sounded like an answer she’d given before. I laughed as I picked up my bag. “I’m sure Burtis would like the comparison to a wheel of stinky cheese,” I said.

Lita threw back her head and laughed. “He certainly eats enough of it for it to be an apt comparison.”

I thanked her for her help and headed out. I couldn’t get the image of barrel-chested Burtis, whose hands were big enough that one of them would cover my head, holding a tiny water cracker with a smear of soft cheese, his pinkie raised in the air. The image made me smile all the way to library.

Marcus was waiting for me on the steps to the building. He smiled when he caught sight of me.

“Hi,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm.

“What were you thinking about?” he asked. “You were smiling all the way up the sidewalk.” He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the doors.

I told him what Lita had said about Burtis’s love of old cheese. “I just always thought of Burtis as a beer-and-brats kind of guy,” I said.

Marcus punched in the codes for both security systems and we stepped into the library proper. “Burtis is a complex man,” he said. “There’s a lot more to him than just what you see on the surface.”

Marcus was very much a law-and-order, the-rules-apply-to-everyone kind of person, while some—or maybe all, for all I knew—of Burtis Chapman’s business enterprises danced on the edge of illegality and sometimes fell in. But Burtis was intensely loyal to the town and to people he called his friends. I was lucky to be one of them. And Marcus was the same way, so the two of them had always had a grudging respect for each other. But last winter Owen and I had been trapped in a burning building and Burtis and Marcus had worked together to get me out. It had changed the relationship between the two men in ways I couldn’t exactly figure out.

Curtis Holt was in his chair next to the Plexiglas half wall that still separated the exhibit area from the rest of the library.

“Good morning, Curtis,” Marcus called.

“Morning, Detective,” the guard replied. “Detective Lind is upstairs.” He smiled at me. “Good morning, Ms. Paulson.”

I smiled back. “Good morning, Curtis.”

Hope Lind was at the top of the stairs on the second floor with, I guessed, a couple of crime scene technicians.

“Thank you for letting me get some things from my office,” I said. Hope was the lead detective on the case and I knew it was because of her that I had been allowed in the building, not because of my relationship with Marcus.

“No problem, Kathleen,” she said. Her eyes flicked to Marcus for a second and I found myself wondering about those dates the two of them had had.

I stepped into my office and glanced around the room, trying not to look at the spot on the floor where Margo’s body had been lying. I tried instead to think about what I wanted—needed—to accomplish in the next few days. I pointed out the files I wanted on my desk and Marcus retrieved them, looking carefully through each manila folder before he handed them to me. “Sorry,” he said with shrug. “I have to follow procedure.”

“It’s okay.” I smiled at him.

“Is there anything else you need?” he asked. “I still have no idea when you’ll be able to reopen.”

I stuffed the file folders in my bag. “That’s all right. I can work around the building being closed. Maggie’s offered to move Reading Buddies to the tai chi studio. And Lita is going to offer the boardroom at Henderson Holdings to the seniors’ reading group.”