He reached over with his “injured” paw—which didn’t seem to be hurt anymore—and lightly scraped the cover.
“Good idea,” I said.
Two of the remaining journals had at least a few missing pages. I’d have to look at all of them in better light in the morning to be sure. I put Hercules on the floor, gathered everything back in the box, and set it up on the chest again.
Someone had taken a great deal of care to cut pages out of Ellen Montgomery’s journals. It wasn’t something I could see Rebecca doing.
So who else would care about what was written in some old diaries? Everett? That didn’t seem likely. He wasn’t the kind of person who worried about what other people thought. He’d let Wisteria Hill sit empty and neglected for a long time now while people in town speculated about his reasons.
Lita? She was one of the few people who had access to the old house. What reason would she have to remove pages from Ellen’s journals?
Could Everett’s granddaughter, Ami, have done it? I wasn’t sure Ami had ever even been inside the house at Wisteria Hill.
Yawning, I put the lid back on the carton. “I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway,” I said to Hercules who had started washing his face. “I’ll call Rebecca tomorrow and tell her. Maybe this is just another one of the mysteries of Wisteria Hill.”
13
Derek Craig was sitting in his police cruiser when I got to the top of the driveway at Wisteria Hill in the morning. He got out of the car and walked over to my truck.
“Good morning Ms. Paulson,” he said. “You here to feed the cats?”
“I am,” I said, reaching for the canvas bag of food and the jugs of water.
“Could you sign in for me, please?” he asked, offering his clipboard.
“Have you been here all night?” I asked as I signed on the line that read AM Feeding. This had to be Marcus’s idea. He was über organized, one of the reasons Maggie always insisted we’d be a good match. I’d told her if we were using that reasoning, the perfect woman for Marcus would be Mary, the kickboxing grandmother who worked at the library and made the best apple pie I’d ever eaten. She actually enjoyed adding new books to the computerized card catalogue system.
“No ma’am,” the young policeman said. “I got here at six.”
My large metal thermos was on the floor of the passenger side of the truck. “Would you like some coffee?” I asked. “It already has cream and sugar.”
He smiled. “Yes I would. I didn’t think to fill one of those. Cup I brought with me was gone in the first fifteen minutes.”
He walked back to his cruiser and got the thermal mug that had been sitting on the dash. I filled it with coffee and he gave me another big smile. “Thank you,” he said. He gestured to the cat food and water. “Could I carry something for you?”
I wasn’t nearly as stiff as I had been and my ankle felt pretty good—the combination of Rebecca’s salve and Maggie’s herbal soak—but I knew the path around the side of the carriage house was probably still muddy. “Do you think you could carry the water jugs around to the side door?” I said.
He set his coffee on the roof of the truck and grabbed the water. “Lead the way,” he said.
It had rained a little sometime during the night and the path through the scrub at the side of the carriage house was slick and slippery, but we made it to the door without either one of us, or the cat food, ending up on the ground.
“Thanks,” I said.
Derek handed me both jugs of water. “If you need anything, just yell.”
I nodded. “I will.”
He started back around the old building and I leaned on the door, pushing with my good hip against the moisture-swollen wood. It opened with a groaning sound—the door, not me.
I stepped inside, leaving the door a couple of inches ajar so I could see better. There was no sign that anyone had been in the space. The cats were probably still in their shelters.
I carried everything over to the feeding station, set out the food and water and then retreated back by the door. The cats had learned that the sound of someone moving around meant food, so I knew they’d be out in a moment.
A couple of minutes passed and there was no sign of any of the cats. I didn’t hear anything either. Had all the people in the field behind the old carriage house scared them? Had they bolted? Then I thought about Lucy. The little cat didn’t scare easily. If she was still here, then so was the rest of the colony. I leaned against the rough wooden wall of the building and continued to wait.
And finally there was a twitch of motion over by one of the support beams. I held my breath. Lucy came cautiously out of the darkness, scanning the area. She saw me and stopped. Would she go for the food or back to the shelters where the cats slept?
She did neither. She started purposefully across the floor to me, stopping maybe a dozen or so feet away. Lucy and I had a kind of rapport that I couldn’t explain, other than in the unexplainable logic of cats, she just seemed to like me. Now she tipped her head to one side and looked up at me.
“Hey puss,” I said softly. “I bet you wonder what’s going on.”
She meowed softly.
“You’re safe. Marcus is taking care of everything. You know Marcus, the big, cute, annoying guy.”
Lucy meowed again and then turned and headed for the feeding station. I had no idea if she somehow understood what I’d said, been reassured by my tone, or if all she’d heard was blah, blah, blah and now she was hungry.
Like she’d sent off some sort of invisible signal, the other cats came out to join Lucy for breakfast. I looked each one over as usual for any signs of illness or injury. As far as I could tell in the dim light all seven cats were just fine.
I felt myself relax a little. At least one thing was going right. Maybe everything else would fall in place today.
As quickly as I had the thought, I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck as though a slight breeze had blown over my skin. A karmic warning, maybe, that life wasn’t going to work out so easily?
At the edge of my vision I saw something move behind me. I looked back over my shoulder. It wasn’t a warning from the universe. It was Marcus. Okay, maybe it was a warning from the universe after all.
“Hi,” he whispered, moving to stand very close beside my left shoulder. I could smell the citrusy shampoo he always used.
“Where’s Roma?” His breath tickled my bare neck.
“There were some things she had to do,” I whispered back.
Marcus was studying the cats, the same way I had, looking for any sign they weren’t okay. “You all right?” he said. “How’s your ankle?”
“A bit stiff,” I said. “But I’m okay. Rebecca brought me one of her herbal concoctions. I have a doctor’s appointment on Monday, by the way.”
“Good,” he said. He didn’t look the slightest bit guilty about telling on me. “The cats look all right.”
“Lucy took her time coming out, but once she did, the rest followed her. I’m hoping they won’t get spooked and take off.” He was so close to me I could actually feel the warmth coming off his body. Or maybe it was the carriage house that was getting warm and stuffy.
“I’ve told everyone to stay away from this building,” Marcus said.
“Have you always been a cat person?” I asked.
He smiled. “I told you I had a paper route when I was a kid, didn’t I?”
I nodded. It was one of the few things Marcus had shared about himself, sitting at my kitchen table having breakfast not long after we’d first met.
“I was nine. It was a Saturday morning, it was raining and I had maybe four more papers to deliver. I was on Mountain Road, just a couple of houses above yours, and there was this little ginger cat, scrawny and wet under a tree.”