Paws and Effect (22 page)

“I absolutely will,” he said with a smile, wrapping me in his arms. His clothes were damp.

“Why didn't you go home and change?” I said.

“Because I didn't want to spend one more minute away from you,” he said. “I hope it's okay that Eddie's going to get me some dry clothes. I don't want to make it hard for Roma.”

“It's okay,” I said.

Maggie got a bowl of soup for Marcus and by the time he'd finished it Eddie had arrived with his dry clothes. “Go take a shower,” I told Marcus, patting his face with my padded hands.

He leaned down to kiss me. “I won't be long.”

“I'm really glad you're okay,” Eddie said to me.

“Stay,” I said.

He looked over at Roma, who was making a fresh pot of coffee. She couldn't stop hovering, watching me, feeding me, trying to make me sit down.

“It's okay,” I said. “Stay. Please?”

Eddie sighed softly. “All right.”

There was an empty chair at the table next to Elliot and I sat down beside him. Roma immediately came over. “Is there anything you want?” she asked.

“Marry Eddie,” I said.

She just looked at me. I could see how close to the surface her emotions were. I took her hand awkwardly with my two bandaged ones. “You're one of my best friends and you know I love you, don't you?”

She frowned. “Of course I do.”

“I learned something today,” I said. “I learned that no one has the right to tell another person who they're supposed to love. And that includes you. You don't have the right to tell Eddie who he should love. And by the way, that's still you.” She tried to pull her hand away but I wouldn't let her. “You love Eddie and he loves you and the rest doesn't matter. Life is too short to waste happiness.”

“What if it turns out to be a mistake?” she asked in a shaky voice.

Elliot had been listening to the conversation. “Then you do everything in your power to fix it,” he said.

“You asked what I wanted,” I said. “This is what I want.”

“Me too,” Roma said softly.

I let go of her hands. She looked across the room “Eddie,” she said.

He turned to look at her.

Roma took a deep breath and let it out. “Eddie Sweeney,” she said. “I love you. Will you marry me?”

Eddie looked at her, stunned.

I bunched up my napkin and threw it at him. “Hey,” I said. “This is the part where you say yes.”

“Yes!” Eddie said, a huge grim splitting his face. He grabbed Roma and swung her around, almost taking out Maggie and my toaster oven.

Elliot tipped his head to one side. “Nice work, Ms. Paulson,” he said.

He held up his hand and we high-fived—very gingerly. Marcus was in the kitchen doorway. He smiled at both of us. I smiled back and nudged Elliot with my shoulder. “You too, Elly May,” I
said.

If you love Sofie Kelly's Magical Cats Mysteries, keep reading for an excerpt of the first book in Sofie Ryan's
New York Times
bestselling Second Chance Cat Mysteries . . .

THE WHOLE CAT AND CABOODLE

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E
lvis was sitting in the middle of my desk when I opened the door to my office. The cat, not the King of Rock and Roll, although the cat had an air of entitlement about him sometimes, as though he thought he was royalty. He had one jet-black paw on top of a small cardboard box—my new business cards, I was hoping.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

His ears twitched but he didn't look at me. His green eyes were fixed on the vintage Wonder Woman lunch box in my hand. I was having an early lunch, and Elvis seemed to want one as well.

“No,” I said firmly. I dropped onto the retro red womb chair I'd brought up from the shop downstairs, kicked off my sneakers, and propped my feet on the matching footstool. The chair was so comfortable. To me, the round shape was like being cupped in a soft, warm giant hand. I knew the chair had to go back
down to the shop, but I was still trying to figure out a way to keep it for myself.

Before I could get my sandwich out of the yellow vinyl lunch box, the big black cat landed on my lap. He wiggled his back end, curled his tail around his feet and looked from the bag to me.

“No,” I said again. Like that was going to stop him.

He tipped his head to one side and gave me a pitiful look made all the sadder because he had a fairly awesome scar cutting across the bridge of his nose.

I took my sandwich out of the lunch can. It was roast beef on a hard roll with mustard, tomatoes and dill pickles. The cat's whiskers quivered. “One bite,” I said sternly. “Cats eat cat food. People eat people food. Do you want to end up looking like the real Elvis in his chunky days?”

He shook his head, as if to say, “Don't be ridiculous.”

I pulled a tiny bit of meat out of the roll and held it out. Elvis ate it from my hand, licked two of my fingers and then made a rumbly noise in his throat that sounded a lot like a sigh of satisfaction. He jumped over to the footstool, settled himself next to my feet and began to wash his face. After a couple of passes over his fur with one paw he paused and looked at me, eyes narrowed—his way of saying, “Are you going to eat that or what?”

I ate.

By the time I'd finished my sandwich Elvis had finished his meticulous grooming of his face, paws and chest. I patted my legs. “C'mon over,” I said.

He swiped a paw at my jeans. There was no way he
was going to hop onto my lap if he thought he might get a crumb on his inky black fur. I made an elaborate show of brushing off both legs. “Better?” I asked.

Elvis meowed his approval and walked his way up my legs, poking my thighs with his front paws—no claws, thankfully—and wiggling his back end until he was comfortable.

I reached for the box on my desk, keeping one hand on the cat. I'd guessed correctly. My new business cards were inside. I pulled one out and Elvis leaned sideways for a look. The cards were thick brown recycled card stock, with S
ECOND
C
HANCE
, T
HE
R
EPURPOSE
S
HOP
, angled across the top in heavy red letters, and S
ARAH
G
RAYSON
and my contact information, all in black, in the bottom right corner.

Second Chance was a cross between an antiques store and a thrift shop. We sold furniture and housewares—many things repurposed from their original use, like the tub chair that in its previous life had actually been a tub. As for the name, the business was sort of a second chance—for the cat and for me. We'd been open only a few months and I was amazed at how busy we already were.

The shop was in a redbrick building from the late 1800s on Mill Street, in downtown North Harbor, Maine, just where the street curved and began to climb uphill. We were about a twenty-minute walk from the harbor front and easily accessed from the highway—the best of both worlds. My grandmother held the mortgage on the property and I wanted to pay her back as quickly as I could.

“What do you think?” I said, scratching behind Elvis's right ear. He made a murping sound, cat-speak for “good,” and lifted his chin. I switched to stroking the fur on his chest.

He started to purr, eyes closed. It sounded a lot like there was a gas-powered generator running in the room.

“Mac and I went to look at the Harrington house,” I said to him. “I have to put together an offer, but there are some pieces I want to buy, and you're definitely going with me next time.” Eighty-year-old Mabel Harrington was on a cruise with her new beau, a ninety-one-year-old retired doctor with a bad toupee and lots of money. They were moving to Florida when the cruise was over.

One green eye winked open and fixed on my face. Elvis's unofficial job at Second Chance was rodent wrangler.

“Given all the squeaks and scrambling sounds I heard when I poked my head through the trapdoor to the attic, I'm pretty sure the place is the hotel for some kind of mouse convention.”

Elvis straightened up, opened his other eye, and licked his lips. Chasing mice, birds, bats and the occasional bug was his idea of a very good time.

I'd had Elvis for about four months. As far as I could find out, the cat had spent several weeks on his own, scrounging around downtown North Harbor.

The town sits on the midcoast of Maine. “Where the hills touch the sea” is the way it's been described for the past 250 years. North Harbor stretches from the Swift
Hills in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the south. It was settled by Alexander Swift in the late 1760s. It's full of beautiful historic buildings, award-winning restaurants and quirky little shops. Where else could you buy a blueberry muffin, a rare book and fishing gear all on the same street?

The town's population is about thirteen thousand, but that more than triples in the summer with tourists and summer residents. It grew by one black cat one evening in late May. Elvis just appeared at The Black Bear. Sam, who owns the pub, and his pickup band, The Hairy Bananas—long story on the name—were doing their Elvis Presley medley when Sam noticed a black cat sitting just inside the front door. He swore the cat stayed put through the entire set and left only when they launched into their version of the Stones' “Satisfaction.”

The cat was back the next morning, in the narrow alley beside the shop, watching Sam as he took a pile of cardboard boxes to the recycling bin. “Hey, Elvis. Want some breakfast?” Sam had asked after tossing the last flattened box in the bin. To his surprise, the cat walked up to him and meowed a loud yes.

He showed up at the pub about every third day for the next couple of weeks. The cat clearly wasn't wild—he didn't run from people—but no one seemed to know whom Elvis (the name had stuck) belonged to. The scar on his nose wasn't new; neither were a couple of others on his back, hidden by his fur. Then someone remembered a guy in a van who had stayed two nights at the campgrounds up on Mount Batten. He'd
had a cat with him. It was black. Or black and white. Or possibly gray. But it definitely had had a scar on its nose. Or it had been missing an ear. Or maybe part of a tail.

Elvis was still perched on my lap, staring off into space, thinking about stalking rodents out at the old Harrington house, I was guessing.

I glanced over at the carton sitting on the walnut sideboard that I used for storage in the office. The fact that it was still there meant that Arthur Fenety hadn't come in while Mac and I had been gone. I was glad. I was hoping I'd be at the shop when Fenety came back for the silver tea service that was packed in the box.

A couple of days prior he had brought the tea set into my shop. Fenety had a charming story about the ornate pieces that he said had belonged to his mother. A bit too charming for my taste, like the man himself. Arthur Fenety was somewhere in his seventies, tall with a full head of white hair, a matching mustache and an engaging smile to go with his polished demeanor. He could have gotten a lot more for the tea set at an antiques store or an auction. Something about the whole transaction felt off.

Elvis had been sitting on the counter by the cash register and Fenety had reached over to stroke his fur. The cat didn't so much as twitch a whisker, but his ears had flattened and he'd looked at the older man with his green eyes half-lidded, pupils narrowed. He was the picture of skepticism.

The day after he'd brought the pieces in, Fenety had called to ask if he could buy them back. The more
I thought about it, the more suspicious the whole thing felt. The tea set hadn't been on the list of stolen items from the most recent police update, but I still had a niggling feeling about it and Arthur Fenety.

“Time to do some work,” I said to Elvis. “Let's go downstairs and see what's happening in the
store.”

Sofie Kelly
is a
New York Times
bestselling author and mixed-media artist who lives on the East Coast with her husband and daughter. She writes the
New York Times
bestselling Magical Cats Mysteries (
Faux Paw
,
A Midwinter's Tail
) and, as Sofie Ryan, writes the
New York Times
bestselling Second Chance Cat Mysteries (
A Whisker of Trouble
,
Buy a Whisker
). Visit her online at
sofiekelly.com.