He kept his head down, and his shoulders seemed to sink just a little more.
The little purple mouse belonged to Hercules. It had been a gift from Rebecca, who loved to spoil the boys no matter what I said to her. She kept Owen in yellow catnip chickens, but Hercules was pretty much indifferent to catnip. He wasn’t the only cat who felt that way, I’d learned. Rebecca had found the little mouse at the Grainery where she bought Owen’s chickens and other cat treats. Once it was wound up, all you had to do was press down on it and the mouse would run in a circle on the floor, randomly changing direction and occasionally doing a loop or a figure eight.
Roma thought the toy was a wonderful idea, the feline equivalent of a person doing the New York Times crossword puzzle or a Sudoku puzzle to keep their mind sharp.
I crouched down on the floor beside Owen. “This is not yours,” I said. “You did a very, very bad thing.”
He muttered almost under his breath, like a child making excuses for his behavior.
“Were you trying to hide this from your brother?” I asked.
He turned his head sideways a little and one half-lidded eye looked at me.
I sighed in exasperation. It had become pretty clear to me from the beginning that Owen and his brother weren’t ordinary cats, even without taking into account their extraordinary abilities. Among other things they seemed to have a nose for, well, crime solving, as preposterous as that seemed. And Owen, at least, seemed to have a bit of a larcenous streak.
I tried to imagine how Marcus would react if I told him that the cats seemed to have helped me every time I’d been connected with one of his cases. Oh no, that wouldn’t make me seem crazy.
The problem in front of me at the moment, thankfully, had to do with a lesser crime.
“Owen, you must have five or six funky chickens—or parts from them—hidden in this house,” I said. “This belongs to Hercules. You can’t have it.”
I said each word slowly and clearly and shook the purple mouse for emphasis. His eyes followed my hand.
Maybe I was crazy. Maybe Owen didn’t understand one word I said. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I could have been speaking Italian or pig Latin. His eyes moved to my face and he gave me his best innocent/repentant look. I thought of it as his “I didn’t do it and I’ll never do it again” expression.
“How the heck am I supposed to discipline you?” I asked, sinking down onto my knees. Owen put a paw on my leg. I couldn’t exactly stick him in the corner or tell him he couldn’t go out in the yard. That wouldn’t work with a normal cat, let alone one who could disappear whenever he felt like it. I knew some animal training experts advocated using a spray from a bottle of water to discourage bad behavior. Maybe I was treating Owen and Hercules too much like people, because my first thought when I’d read that advice was that I wouldn’t shoot water from a spray bottle at Susan or Abigail at the library, so why would I do it to Owen or Herc?
“Don’t do this again,” I said, shaking a finger at him. I was very glad there was no one around to hear what I was saying. “If you do, those sardines in the refrigerator will magically disappear faster than you do.”
Owen’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, and he turned and looked toward the kitchen. I used to threaten to give Owen’s kitty treats to the Taylors’ German shepherd, Boris, but I’d made that threat one time too many without following through, and it had lost its effectiveness.
I reached over and stroked the top of Owen’s head. “I love you,” I said, “but sometimes you make me crazy.”
“Merow,” he said, wrinkling his nose at me. For all I knew, that was his way of saying, “You make me crazy sometimes, too.”
I got to my feet, putting the little purple mouse in my pocket. “Are you hungry?” I asked as we went into the kitchen.
“Murp.”
Cat for “I could eat.”
Owen looked at the back door and meowed inquiringly. I’d told him Marcus was joining us for supper. Had he remembered?
“Marcus isn’t coming,” I said. I checked the slow cooker. It had just switched over from “cook” to “keep warm.”
I turned back to Owen, who was sitting by the table looking at me. “He has a case,” I said. I got a bowl down from the cupboard. It was all I needed. I’d set the table before I left. “Dayna Chapman’s death wasn’t an accident. It looks like someone might have killed her on purpose.”
I heard a meow from the other side of the room. Hercules was poking his black-and-white head around the basement door.
“Hello,” I said. “One, supper is almost ready. Two, Marcus isn’t coming. Three, it looks like Dayna Chapman’s death wasn’t an accident. And four”—I pulled the purple mouse out of my pocket and set it on the floor, sending Owen a warning look that I hoped was sufficiently intimidating enough that he wouldn’t so much as twitch a whisker in the direction of the toy—“this is yours.”
Herc nudged the basement door open a little more and started across the kitchen floor toward Owen and me.
“You know, Boris closes the door for Harrison,” I said, taking the lid off the slow cooker. I liked Harry’s big German shepherd, and I’d been impressed the first time I saw him close the back kitchen door in Harry Senior’s small house.
Hercules made a face as though he’d just caught the scent of something bad, even though the aroma from the stew was filling the kitchen. Both he and Owen were smart enough to close any door in the house—although for Hercules it was easier to walk directly through a door—but being cats, they just didn’t.
Herc picked up his mouse and set it next to his food dish. Then he came back over, sat down beside his brother and looked expectantly at me.
“Okay, you can both have a little chicken,” I said. “But just a little.”
The little black tuxedo cat licked his lips.
“Oh, and I almost forgot, Maggie sends her love,” I said to Owen.
I swear he smiled.
I put a little chicken in each of their dishes and then filled a bowl with stew for myself. Since my only dinner companions were furry and were eating without using forks, I had no problem propping my feet on the chair opposite me and leaning an elbow on the table.
I wished Marcus was sitting in the chair opposite me. Things had been so good for the past three months. But we had a history of his cases coming between us. I didn’t want that to happen with Dayna Chapman’s death.
Hercules had finished his chicken. He came over, sat next to my chair and began to wash his face.
“Everyone is going to think it was Burtis,” I said thoughtfully.
He paused for a moment, seemingly considering the idea. Then he resumed washing his face.
“I know his reputation,” I said.
Burtis was the town bootlegger and as a younger man he’d worked for Idris Blackthorne, Ruby’s grandfather, a hard and ruthless man who ran pretty much every illegal enterprise in a hundred-mile radius around Mayville Heights.
“Just because he could squash someone like a bug doesn’t mean that he would,” I said, as much to myself as the cats.
Owen lifted his head and looked around when I said the word “bug.”
I exchanged a glance with Hercules.
“There are no bugs in here, Owen,” I said. He looked over at me. “No bugs,” I repeated. “It’s just an expression.”
He dropped his head over his food again.
Burtis had to have known that he’d be the main suspect if Dayna’s death wasn’t an accident. Maybe that was why he’d been encouraging me to get involved. I thought about what he’d said about the times I’d gotten mixed up in Marcus’s cases. “He isn’t going to want you to stop being who you are.”
Owen had joined his brother and was carefully washing his face, too.
“Okay, so we’re eliminating Burtis. Who else would want to kill Dayna Chapman? She hadn’t even been in town for twenty-four hours.”
They didn’t have any more idea than I did. Aside from what I’d learned from Burtis, I really knew nothing about his ex-wife.