I hadn’t zippered the carrier bag all the way. Hercules poked out first a paw and then his entire head. He looked at me quizzically, which might have meant he was curious about what we’d just learned from Abigail, or that he was thinking when do we eat.
“This just gets more and more complicated,” I told him. “Looks like Jaeger wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.” I put the key in the ignition. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” I glanced over at the cat. “That’s not Shakespeare, by the way.” He wasn’t impressed.
When I got to the corner I really intended to turn up the hill and go home. Really. Instead I found myself driving over to the River Arts Center.
I shot a quick glance at Hercules. He’d climbed all the way out of the bag and was sitting, looking out the windshield, seemingly checking the scenery as it went by. “If Ray’s not there, we’ll go home,” I said.
The cat didn’t even bother looking at me. And it might have been my imagination that he shrugged.
I parked on a side street and reached for the cat bag. Hercules continued to look out the window. “C’mon, get in,” I said.
He didn’t so much as twitch a whisker.
“You’ll miss all the fun if you stay in the truck.”
Nothing.
I glanced at my watch. I didn’t really have a lot of time. “Ruby might be there and she usually has cookies.”
That did the trick.
I pulled out my cell phone and called Ruby. She answered on the fifth ring, sounding a little distracted. “Hi Ruby, it’s Kathleen,” I said. “Are you in your studio?”
“I am,” she said.
“Could I come up?”
“Yeah. Sure.” There was a momentary silence. Then she said, “This might sound weird, but if I don’t ask you now I’m going to forget; could I take some pictures of your cats?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, wondering why Ruby wanted to photograph Owen and Hercules. Feeling slightly embarrassed, I said, “And as it happens, I have Hercules with me.”
“Um, you do?”
“Uh huh.”
“Great,” she said, clearly deciding not to pass judgment. “I’m on my way down.”
I closed my phone and reached for the cat bag. One furry black ear was sticking out the top. “You know what this is,” I said. “Deus ex machina.”
The entire black-and-white head popped up out of the opening. Herc narrowed his green eyes at me.
“That’s Latin for ‘God from the machine.’ Or what my mother calls, ‘God in a helicopter.’ You know that moment in a really bad movie where the hero is about to be attacked by a grizzly bear and then the bear remembers the hero dug a splinter out of his paw back when the bear was just a cub and so he teams up with the hero and they take out the bad guys together.”
Hercules pulled one paw out of the bag, turned it over and looked at it, then looked quizzically up at me.
“Yes, it could have been a cat instead of a grizzly bear.” He ducked down into the bag and I reached for the strap. I shook my head. Maybe I should spend more time talking to actual people instead of cats.
Ruby was waiting by the back door in flip-flops and a paint-spattered T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was stuck in three little pigtails, one on each side of her head and one sticking straight up.
“You’re not looking for Maggie, are you?” she said.
“No, I was hoping Ray Nightingale was here,” I said.
She twisted her mouth to one side. “I’m not sure,” she said. “He probably is. He works pretty much every day. We can go see.”
Hercules decided to announce his presence then with a loud meow. I held up the bag. “Like I said, I have a cat. Do you have a camera?”
She grinned at me. “Yes. I’m not even going to ask you why you’re carrying a cat around town with you.” She started up the stairs and I followed.
“Rodent patrol at the co-op,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m thinking Hercules would probably be better at it than you were,” she said over her shoulder. “He’d at least make sure whatever he caught was dead before he threw it at someone.”
“First of all, I wasn’t aiming at you,” I said. “Because if I had been, I wouldn’t have missed. And second, how the heck was I supposed to know it wasn’t dead? Check its pulse?”
I should have known Hercules would meow his opinion at that exact moment. Ruby laughed.
“No one was asking you,” I said to the top of the bag.
We stopped at the second floor and Ruby pointed down the long hallway. “That’s Ray’s studio on the right-hand side at the end. It looks like there’s a light on.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll take Hercules upstairs and I’ll come back down.”
We went up the rest of the way to Ruby’s studio and I set the cat carrier on one of the big tables she had in the middle of the room. Hercules climbed out, shook his head and looked around.
“I’m not making any promises that he’ll sit still for you,” I said.
Of course he immediately sat down, tipped his head to one side and gave Ruby an I’m-so-cute look.
Ruby laughed. “That cat is smart,” she said.
He did his modest head duck, which pretty much worked on everyone but me.
“He certainly thinks he is,” I said. “Remember not to touch him, and if you have any cookies, you should be able to get whatever photos you want.”
Hercules’s head had come back up at the word cookies and he was scanning the room as though he were trying to scope out where they were.
“Is it okay to give him people food?” Ruby asked.
Hercules answered with an exuberant yowl.
“Roma says not to overdo it,” I said. I gestured at the cat. “They don’t agree.”
Ruby picked up her camera from the other table.
I ducked my head toward the door. “I’m just going to talk to Ray. I’ll only be a couple of minutes.” I leaned sideways so I was in the cat’s line of vision. “Behave,” I said sternly.
I hesitated outside the door of Ray’s studio. What exactly was I going to say to him? Hi Ray, were you and Jaeger running some kind of a scam? If he had been, it wasn’t likely he’d confess everything to me. On the other hand, I didn’t really have another approach.
I knocked on the door. After a minute Ray opened it. “Oh…uh…Kathleen. Hi,” he said.
“Hi Ray,” I said. “Could I talk to you for a minute?” I was unsure what his reaction was going to be.
“Sure,” he said, frowning slightly. “Does it have to do with the library centennial?”
Another of my mother’s favorite sayings came into my head: Always tell the truth, it’s easier to remember. “No,” I said. “It has to do with Jaeger Merrill.”
One hand came up and slid over his smooth scalp. There were smudges of black ink on his fingers.
Ink equals pen. I filed the thought away to chew on later.
“I don’t know what I can tell you, but come in,” he said.
Ray’s studio was incredibly tidy. One end wall was made up of what looked like commercial shelving units, all painted black. The other wall had several glass display cabinets holding Ray’s collection of vintage ink bottles. There was a long work station in the center of the room and a big drafting table with a couple of stools by the windows.
He crossed his arms over the front of his body and gave a slight shrug. “So what did you want to know? I didn’t know Jaeger that well.”
“You went to the Summerhill estate sale with him a couple of weeks ago,” I said.
Ray shook his head. “No. Why do you think that?”
“People saw you there.”
“That’s because I was there. I just wasn’t there with Jaeger Merrill. I think I talked to him for a second. That’s all.” He was good. He didn’t fidget or look away, and if I hadn’t been watching for it, I probably would have missed the slight hesitation in his voice and the equally small change in his tone.
“To tell the truth, I wasn’t that crazy about Jaeger. He was way too pushy about the sponsorship business at the co-op. He was the kind of person who just didn’t hear no.”