A Tale of Two Kitties Read online

  TITLES BY SOFIE KELLY

  curiosity thrilled the cat

  sleight of paw

  copycat killing

  cat trick

  final catcall

  a midwinter’s tail

  faux paw

  paws and effect

  a tale of two kitties

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Penguin Random House LLC

  “The Cat Burglar” copyright © 2016 by Sofie Kelly

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the B colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “The Cat Burglar” was previously published in the eBook Two Tall Tails.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kelly, Sofie, 1958– author.

  Title: A tale of two kitties / Sofie Kelly.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley Prime Crime, 2017. | Series: Magical cats ; 9

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017010909 (print) | LCCN 2017010934 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399584572 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399584589 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Cat owners—Fiction. | Women librarians—Fiction. | Cats—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Mystery fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.K453 T35 2017 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.K453

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010909

  First Edition: September 2017

  Cover art by Tristan Elwell

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Patrick

  contents

  Titles by Sofie Kelly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  epilogue

  Bonus Story: The Cat Burglar

  acknowledgments

  There are so many people working behind the scenes at Berkley Prime Crime that I never talk to directly, who helped put together this book. Thanks to each one of you. A special thank-you goes to my editor, Jessica Wade; her assistant, Miranda Hill; and PR whiz, Roxanne Jones. I’m so glad we’re on the same team.

  Thanks as well are due to my agent, Kim Lionetti, and the entire staff at Bookends Literary Agency. I don’t tell you nearly enough how much I appreciate your hard work and unfailing good humor.

  To all the readers, bloggers, reviewers and booksellers who have embraced Kathleen, Owen and Hercules, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  And, as always, thanks to Patrick and Lauren. Love you both!

  chapter 1

  You’d think by now it wouldn’t bother me to step on a body in the middle of the kitchen floor, but I was in my sock feet and the body—missing its head, no surprise—was damp.

  With cat slobber.

  “Owen!” I yelled, hopping on one foot while I rubbed the other against my pant leg.

  The cat stuck his gray tabby head around the living room doorway and looked at me, face tipped quizzically to one side.

  “Come and get this,” I said, pointing at the headless yellow catnip chicken, aka Fred the Funky Chicken, I’d just stepped on.

  He craned his neck to see what I was referring to, then gave a murp of recognition almost as though he were saying, “So that’s where I left it.” He came across the floor, picked up the chicken body in his mouth and deposited it next to his food dish beside the refrigerator, nudging it out of the way with one paw. Then he turned to look at me.

  “Thank you,” I said. I leaned down to pick up the few bits of catnip that had fallen out of the mangled cat toy. Owen had a thing for catnip in general, and neon-yellow chickens stuffed with it in particular, and I had friends who bought them for him just about as fast as he could chew them apart.

  I dumped the bits of dried catnip in the garbage and reached for my shoes on the mat near the back door.

  “Mrr?” Owen said.

  “I have a meeting at the library.”

  He immediately raised his paw and took a couple of passes at his face with it. Then he crossed to sit in front of the kitchen door.

  I knew what that meant. “No, you can’t come with me,” I said.

  He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Mrr,” he said again.

  I shook my head. “You can’t come. Cats don’t belong at the library.” They didn’t belong at the library, but both of mine had ended up there more than once. “Just because I’m the head librarian doesn’t mean that you and your brother get special privileges.”

  Owen narrowed his golden eyes. His whiskers twitched, and then he disappeared.

  Literally. It was his superpower, so to speak, the way the Flash could run faster than anyone else on the planet, although I was pretty sure Owen hadn’t gotten his ability due to the explosion of a particle accelerator during a thunderstorm.

  I’d gotten very blasé about Owen’s ability to just vanish whenever he wanted to. I remembered how it had made me think I was losing my mind the first few times I’d seen it happen, and then the stomach-churning fear I’d felt when I realized what could happen to him and his brother, Hercules, if anyone found out about my cats’ unbelievable abilities. Hercules couldn’t become invisible at will; he could walk through walls. Both cats also had a seemingly uncanny ability to understand what was said to them. And now, to make things ten times more complicated, I was almost positive that Marcus’s little ginger tabby, Micah, had the same vanishing skill as Owen.

  My Marcus. Detective Marcus Gordon, who only believed in the facts, in things he could see and touch. If I was right about Micah there was a lot I’d need to explain. Not that I had any explanation. All three cats came from the old Henderson estate, Wisteria Hill. That had to have something to do with their abilities. I just had no idea what.

  I’d sold my car when I’d moved to Mayville Heights from Boston two and a half years ago to supervise the renovations at the library. I spent my first few weeks in town exploring, walking for miles, which is how I’d stumbled on Wisteria Hill. At the time the property was abandoned. Now my friend Roma owned it, and the old farmhouse was full of life again. Back then it had seemed lonely and forgotten.

/>   Owen and Hercules had peeked at me from a tangle of raspberry canes, two tiny balls of fur, and then trailed me while I explored the overgrown English country garden behind the old house. When I left, they’d followed me down the rutted gravel driveway. Twice I’d picked them up and carried them back to the empty house, but they were undeterred. They were so tiny and so determined to come with me that in the end I’d given up and brought them home. They were affectionate with me, but I’d quickly learned that because they had been feral they didn’t tolerate anyone else touching them.

  I stepped into my red Keds and bent down to tie the laces. “You’re wasting your time,” I said in the general direction of the last place I’d seen Owen. “You can’t go with me in the truck because I’m going to walk.”

  I counted silently to three and he appeared again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m going to a meeting. You’d be bored.”

  Owen made grumbling noises in the back of his throat and turned his head, pointedly looking away from me.

  “I think you left a Funky Chicken in my closet,” I said.

  One gray ear twitched but he still didn’t look at me.

  “Look in my black pumps.”

  Owen shook himself and started across the kitchen floor. “Mrr,” he said softly when he got to the living room doorway.

  “You have a good day, too,” I said.

  It was a gorgeous morning as I started down Mountain Road. The sun was high in the sky over Lake Pepin and it was already warmer than the typical high for a day in early November.

  It had been a while since I’d walked to the library. It was something I used to do every day. When I’d discovered everything I wanted to do was within walking distance, I hadn’t bought a car. Eventually, Harrison Taylor had gifted me with a truck that could make it through even the worst Minnesota snow, a thank-you because I’d discovered some papers that had helped him find his daughter. Harrison’s son, Harry Junior, took care of the yard work at my small house. The old man and I had met when he’d accompanied his son one day. I’d stepped into my backyard and for a moment thought Santa Claus was sitting on one of my Adirondack chairs. Harrison and I had quickly become good friends.

  Mountain Road curves in toward the center of town, so as I headed down the hill the roof of the library building came into view. The library sits just about at the midpoint of a curve of shoreline, protected from the water by a rock wall. The two-story brick building has an original stained-glass window at one end and a copper-roofed cupola, complete with the restored wrought-iron weather vane that had been placed on the roof when the library had been completed more than a hundred years ago.

  The Mayville Heights Free Public Library is a Carnegie library, built in 1912 with money donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. I’d originally come to town to supervise the restoration of the building for its centenary, as well as update the collections and set up Internet access for the library’s patrons. Very quickly the town and its people began to feel like home and when I’d been offered the chance to stay I’d said yes.

  At the bottom of the hill I waited for two cars to pass and then crossed over to the same side of the street as the library. My friend Maggie, who was an artist, had created a collage map of the hiking trails in the area for the new Tourism Coalition that would be ready to hand out in the spring. Now Everett Henderson had her working on some ideas for a similar map of Mayville Heights. Everett had financed the repairs to the library as a gift to the town. The self-made businessman knew how to get things done and I felt confident that we’d have a town map by spring.

  Ella King drove past me, waving when she caught sight of me. I waved back. I was guessing that she had just dropped her husband, Keith, at the library for the same meeting I was headed to.

  Several weeks previous, a crew working on renovations to the main post office had torn down a wall and discovered a small cache of photos and undelivered mail. No one had any idea how it had all ended up there. Based on the postmarks, the mail had been behind the wall a bit more than twenty years. Some of the photos were of the same vintage; others were much older. The letters and cards had all been delivered, but no one was quite sure what to do with the photos, and before I knew what was happening the library board had offered to take them. Several days later a small cardboard box had been delivered to the library.

  Mary Lowe and I had opened the box at the front desk and looked through the photos. Mary was my most senior employee. I’d hoped she might recognize some of the people in the pictures. In the end she’d taken seven photos to give to, if not their original owners, a family who’d probably be happy to have them.

  As far as the post office was concerned the photos were now the property of the library. I hated the thought of them sitting in a box on a shelf in our workroom. What I wanted to do was reunite the pictures with the people in them or at least a family member. I thought of how much fun my sister and brother and I had gotten from looking at old photos a friend of our parents had unearthed from early in their acting careers. I knew there had to be people who would treasure these images if I could just find them. That’s what this meeting was about.

  Maggie was coming because I knew whatever we ended up doing would benefit from her artistic eye. Rebecca Henderson and Keith King were on the library board. Rebecca was a longtime member, while Keith was the newest addition, and I felt both of them would have some good suggestions. I’d also asked Sandra Godfrey, who was a mail carrier now but who had worked in the main post office at one time, to join us.

  It looked like I was right about Ella having dropped off Keith. He was standing on the walkway in front of the building, talking to Abigail Pierce, another of my staff members. She was wearing a chocolate-brown sweater coat she’d knit herself, which went well with her red hair streaked with gray. Abigail was also an author and I was hearing lots of great buzz about her new children’s book.

  Keith caught sight of me and smiled. He was about average height, wiry and strong with dark hair and a pair of black-and-stainless-steel-framed glasses. The glasses were new in the last month. “Hey, Kathleen,” he said, nudging one corner of the frames.

  “Good morning,” I said. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and started up the library steps. “Why don’t you come wait inside?”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  I nodded. “You can have a cup of coffee before the meeting starts.”

  “I can’t say no to that.” He grinned.

  I unlocked the doors, shut off the alarm system and we stepped inside.

  Abigail had switched on the main floor lights. She started for the stairs. “I’ll put the coffee on,” she said over her shoulder.

  “You mind if I take a look at the magazines?” Keith asked.

  I shook my head. “Go ahead. I’ll let you know when the coffee’s ready.”

  I went upstairs and dropped my things in my office. It only took five minutes to get set up for the meeting since I’d gotten the room ready before I’d left the previous day.

  “Napkins,” Abigail said, poking her head around the doorway.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking them from her. I looked around the room. There were enough chairs around the long table, I’d brought down a whiteboard and there was a carafe of coffee along with another of hot water for tea.

  Maggie arrived about five minutes after we opened. I was at the circulation desk sorting the books from the book drop when she walked in. She smiled when she saw me and walked across the mosaic tile floor to join me.

  “Good morning. Is this really November?” she asked, unzipping her jacket. “I think it was colder in September than it is today.”

  “According to the forecast we could hit close to seventy this afternoon,” I said.

  “Global warming or something else?” Maggie cocked her head to one side and eyed me. “I know you know.”

  “A weak La N
iña that developed in October,” I said, feeling a little like that kid back in elementary school who had liked to read the encyclopedia for fun—which was exactly the kind of kid I had actually been.

  Maggie grinned, playing with the fringe of the multicolored scarf she’d wrapped twice around her neck. “You’re better than Google!”

  I grinned back at her. “And I work even when there’s no Wi-Fi!”

  “Am I the first one here?” She looked around the main floor of the library.

  “Keith’s here,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the meeting room.

  Just then Harry Taylor walked into the building. He looked around and when he saw us raised a hand to get my attention and headed over.

  “Morning,” he said, nodding at both of us.

  Harry was in his late fifties. There were deep lines carved around his green eyes from years of working in the sun, and the fringe of salt-and-pepper hair peeking out from under his Twins baseball cap was pretty much the only hair he had left. He was a quiet, thoughtful man, and very well-read, I knew.

  “I was hoping I’d catch you before it got busy, Kathleen,” he said. “I’ve pretty much done all I can do on those shelves in the workshop. Next step is to get them put together here.”

  Harry was building a shelving unit to fit on one wall of our upstairs workroom. I was hoping that would help us finally get the space organized.

  “I can get everything moved out of the way this afternoon,” I said. “You can get started tomorrow if you want to.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “And I’ll be back this afternoon to fix the broken seat in the gazebo.”

  “You’re putting shelves in the workroom?” Maggie asked.

  I nodded. “On the end wall that’s common with my office. And not just shelves. Harry is making a cupboard we can lock with a drawer underneath. That whole wall will be storage.”

  Maggie turned to Harry. “Could you do something like that for me at my studio? I need a better way to organize supplies.”