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She made the universal “zipping my lips” motion with one hand, and added, “Your secret is safe with me.”
Thank the Goddess for that. I was in this deep enough without having Henry Lewis breathing down my neck.
Jennifer walked me to the door, and I thanked her again before hurrying down the sidewalk to my car. Not for the first time, I found myself wishing it wasn’t quite so conspicuous. Everyone in town knew I drove that metallic blue Beetle convertible, and if someone in the neighborhood noticed it and made a casual comment about my visit to Globe’s chief of police….
Well, I’d deal with that if and when it happened. The street certainly seemed sleepy and quiet enough now. There wasn’t even anyone out raking leaves, although, to be fair, we were just at the beginning of fall colors now, and the real raking probably wouldn’t start until sometime closer to Thanksgiving.
I got in my car, head high, as if there was absolutely nothing strange about my coming to visit a woman I barely knew. As I drove off, though, I couldn’t help being glad there was no one around to watch my departure.
7
Cat’s Cradle
There wasno sign of Archie when I returned to my apartment, and I allowed myself a small sigh of relief. Yes, I’d taken care of him long before I headed out on my fact-finding expedition, but that didn’t mean much. My cursed cat was always finding new ways to guilt me for his supposed “neglect.”
Sure enough, I’d barely set down my purse and gone into the kitchen to get a glass of water before Archie appeared, his tail twitching as he fixed me with a baleful, golden-eyed stare.
“All done gallivanting about?” he inquired. “What about dinner?”
“What about it?” I responded calmly. If nothing else, having to deal with Archie these past seven months had allowed me to explore stores of patience I didn’t know I possessed. “It’s not even three o’clock yet.”
That response earned me another flick of his tail. “Considering how slipshod you’ve been about feeding me lately, I thought I had better inquire.”
Because I knew it would annoy him, I went ahead and poured myself some water from the pitcher in the fridge, and then allowed myself to take a sip before I bothered to reply. Then I said, my tone even, “Calvin’s working today, so it’s a quiet evening at home for me. I thought I’d make some soup.”
Archie’s little pink nose wrinkled. Maybe back in the day when he was in human form, he’d been a fan of soup, but he definitely wasn’t into it now. I knew he’d been hoping I’d say I was planning to make fish or chicken or something else that would guarantee a few choice morsels for him.
But I didn’t much see the point in making the effort when I was going to be dining alone — or at least, dining without my significant other. I liked to make soup because that way, I knew I’d have enough left over for lunches and possibly another solo dinner, depending on what Calvin’s schedule looked like. Since he was chief of the San Ramon tribal police, he probably could have set it up so he never had to work any nights or weekends, but taking such an unfair advantage because of his position just wasn’t his style.
Yet another reason why I loved him so much. His innate Libra sense of fairness bled over into pretty much everything he did.
“Chicken soup,” I added, figuring I might as well throw Archie a figurative bone, although not a literal one. “There’ll be some bits and pieces I can shred into your bowl for you.”
Being Archie, he didn’t thank me, but at least he looked a bit less irritated. He jumped onto one of the dining room chairs before asking, “Where did you go, anyway? I thought you were doing inventory at the store.”
“I was,” I said. “But I had something I needed to handle.”
“‘Something’?” he echoed. “Did it have anything to do with Danny Ortega’s death?”
You know, sometimes I wondered if Archie had somehow managed to tap into Josie’s mysterious grapevine. He seemed to know what was going on in Globe almost as quickly as she did.
But then, he came and went from my apartment as he pleased, and I suppose he overheard all sorts of things. No one was going to watch what they were saying around a cat, since no one else in Globe knew there was a little more to the big smoke-colored stray who roamed around downtown than met the eye.
One of these days, I knew I was going to have to tell Calvin about Archie, but so far, the right opportunity hadn’t presented itself.
“Yes,” I said, since it was obvious that Archie already had some inside information on the crime. “I wanted to talk to some of the women Danny was dating and find out if there was any reason why any of them would have wanted to poison him.”
“So, it was poison?” Archie inquired.
Well, at least he didn’t know everything.
“Probably,” I replied. “It’s just an educated guess right now, though, because we all have to wait to hear what the crime lab has to say about the wine he was drinking when he died.”
“If you have to go, I suppose that’s as good a way as any,” Archie remarked in response to my comment about the wine, and I arched a curious eyebrow at him. For some reason, I’d just assumed he must have been a teetotaler back when he was a man. Clearly, he’d picked up on my vibe, because he said, now sounding a bit cross, “I would allow myself the odd indulgence now and then. Surely you didn’t think that I’d pair beef Wellington — the one you’re going to make for me after you break the curse — with a bottle of Coke, did you?”
Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it. Since I’d been making basically zero headway on reversing that darn curse, it seemed to me as though the day when I’d have to make that beef Wellington was still far off in a hazy future.
“I guess not,” I said, and figured I’d leave it there. The curse was a sticky subject between the two of us anyway, and I really didn’t want him launching into more recriminations when I was feeling tired and just a bit headachy.
