“Which should be you.” Holly poked her head into the room. “The library board’s about to start the first interview, you know. Did you turn in your application yet?”
“As soon as you finish cleaning out your garage.” The messy state of Holly’s garage had been a constant lament for months. The possibility of it actually being cleaned out, however, was as real as the possibility of Eddie not shedding for thirty straight seconds.
Holly stuck her tongue out at me. “Do you have plans for lunch? Want to go down to the deli?”
“Sounds good.” I thought wistfully of my favorite sandwich from Shomin’s: olive and Swiss cheese on sourdough with Thousand Island dressing. “But I should eat the lunch I brought to eat on the road. Thanks, though.”
Holly looked at the windowsill. “What about you, Eddie? Anchovies? Sardines?”
“He’s fine with the cat food I brought,” I said quickly. Anything else tended to upset his little kitty tummy.
“See how she is?” A straight-faced Holly asked Eddie. “Strict. Uncompromising. Inflexible. She’ll make a perfect successor for Stephen.”
“Mrr.”
“What did he say?” Holly asked.
“That if you don’t stop insulting me, he’s going to make you wish you’d never been born.”
“Really?” She looked at Eddie with some trepidation.
I laughed. “He’s a cat. He’s probably trying to figure out the most comfortable place to take a nap.”
“He might be smarter than you think.”
“Or not. You do realize that he can’t really understand human speech?”
“If that’s true, why do you keep talking to him as if he knows what you’re saying?”
“Because I like to pretend.”
“Uh-huh.” She looked at me askance. “I’m not sure I believe you. I’ve heard the way you talk to him. Just like he’s another human.”
“He’s used to the sound of my voice—that’s all,” I said. “Have you seen the size of his head? I mean, it’s big for a cat, but compared to a human, it’s tiny, and there’s no way he has the capacity for cognition, not like we have, and—hey, Eddie, don’t—”
A black-and-white shape whooshed past me and past my desk, then eeled through the gap Holly had left between the door and the doorframe, and ran into the freedom of the hallway.
“Eddie!” I called pointlessly. Like he was going to come just because I wanted him to.
Holly laughed. “You sure he doesn’t understand what you were saying?”
“He saw an open door.” I got to my feet. “Cats are opportunists.”
“Doesn’t that take brains?” she asked.
“Instinct. Natural reaction. Doesn’t take any more intelligence than a . . . a horse getting out of a pasture, and I don’t hear you saying that horses understand human speech.”
By this time we were both out in the hallway, scouting left and right for any trace of a runaway feline.
“Hmm,” she said. “Remember that television show, Mr. Ed? Maybe there’s something about the name.”
Right. “I doubt he ran into the main library or the children’s section. All those people would freak him out. Can you check back there?” I nodded toward the front desk and the office spaces behind. “I’ll check the reading room.”
Holly headed off, and I hurried toward the reading room. And though I was doing my best to project nonchalance, I was actually a little worried. If Eddie had been close to an outside door when someone opened it, he could have zoomed out and—
“Stop it,” I said to myself. It was a big library, but there were only so many places a cat could hide. It wasn’t like a house where there were nooks and crannies everywhere. The building was mostly public space without much furniture. There was no place for him to hide in the main stacks, unless . . . My steps quickened.
Unless he squirreled his way in behind a row of books. The shelves were deep enough for a cat to fit behind there, especially a cat wanting to hide from a human companion who had been seriously disrespecting his mental capacities.
Maybe he didn’t know what I was saying, but he certainly understood the different tones in my voice, and he’d been tossed into a brand-new environment just a few hours earlier. Cats like routine, at least Eddie did, and I hadn’t taken enough time to make sure he was happy. I was a horrible cat owner and didn’t deserve Eddie’s friendship and—
“Mrr.”
I stopped dead, just outside the entrance to the reading room. “Eddie?” I called. “Where are you?” I waited, but didn’t hear him again. Which was frustrating, because I hadn’t been able to pinpoint his location from that one little “Mrr.” For the first time ever, I wished he’d start howling.
The reading room, my favorite space in the library, was almost empty. Even on this dark day, natural light filled the space, streaming through the windows that lined one wall. A multitude of seating options were offered through window seats, upholstered couches, chairs, and large ottomans, some of which were clustered around the large tiled fireplace at the far end of the room. The gas fire wasn’t turned on today, but I almost wished it had been, because its heat would have been a sure Eddie magnet.
“Shhh,” an elderly male voice whispered. “If you don’t tell, I won’t. What do you say?”
I should have known.
Smiling, I walked around the back of a large wing chair to see one of my favorite library patrons, Lloyd Goodwin, feeding Eddie small bits of . . . “Is that beef jerky?” I asked.
Mr. Goodwin closed his hand over the meat. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You,” I said, crossing my arms, “are a horrible liar.” Eddie, curled up on Mr. Goodwin’s lap, reached out with one white-tipped paw and patted the closed fist. “Besides, Eddie knows what you have in there, and he doesn’t care if you get caught eating in a room where food is forbidden.”
Mr. Goodwin had noticed Eddie the day I’d walked home from the cemetery with a stray cat on my heels, and the two had met numerous times since, because Mr. Goodwin’s summer walking route went right past the marina.
“That was,” Mr. Goodwin said, “the leftovers from my morning snack that I ate out in the hallway. I would never eat in this room.”
“But you’ll let him?” I nodded at Eddie, who was snarfing down the last bits of jerky from the hand that Mr. Goodwin had opened. “That stuff probably isn’t good for cats.”
“Cats are smart,” Mr. Goodwin said. “They don’t eat what isn’t good for them.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, not in Eddie’s case, anyway. “I need to get him back to my office,” I said. “He’s an escapee.”
“This one?” Mr. Goodwin’s age-spotted hand rested on Eddie’s back. Eddie started purring immediately. “What’s the harm in letting him roam? Pity about the bookmobile this morning,” he added. “Makes you wonder what’s next. And that Andrea Wiley.” He sighed. “I don’t like it when young people die. Such a waste. She had too many years taken away from her. And I’m so very sorry that you had to be the one to find her, dear Minnie.”
That was not something I wished to revisit. “Thanks. Did you know her?”
He began to pet Eddie, eliciting even louder purrs. “My wife was a good friend of her mother’s, so I heard about her until my Mary went away.”
Two years ago, Mrs. Goodwin had gone to the emergency room because she was having trouble breathing. They’d diagnosed a serious heart condition and admitted her immediately for emergency surgery, but she hadn’t survived. It had taken Mr. Goodwin more than a year to come back to being anything close to his former self, and only recently had he been able to speak her name without his voice breaking. I could only guess the depth of his grief, and still hadn’t decided if I wanted to love someone that much. Not that we got the choice. Or did we? Something to wonder about tonight.