Laurie Cass - Bookmobile Cat 02 - Tailing a Tabby by Laurie Cass Read Free Book Online Page A

morning would be truly annoying.” I tried to arrange the papers in a neat pile by shoving them around. Didn’t get very far.
    Eddie appeared to be finding my efforts interesting to the point that he was stretching out with his front paw to tap the paper. “Oh, quit. This isn’t a cat toy, okay?” I looked at the date. “This is yesterday’s paper and…” My voice faded away as I caught sight of an article I hadn’t noticed the night before.
    “Check this out, Eddie. A boat exploded out on Lake Michigan.”
    My furry friend edged closer, his paw still extended. I moved the paper up out of his reach. His easy reach, anyway. “The boat’s owner was blown clear and picked up by a nearby boat. Marine experts are investigating the cause.”
    The short paragraph hadn’t told me—the owner of a boat—nearly enough. Had the guy been hurt? Had the boat sunk? What had caused the explosion? Every good boat owner knew that you had to air an inboard engine before you started it in case noxious gases had collected in the engine well, but that boat had been out on the lake. Of course, maybe he’d—
    Eddie’s white paw darted under the bottom of the newspaper and pulled. The print ripped cleanly from south to north. I jumped to my feet.
    “Cut that out! This is not, I repeat not, a cat toy.”
    Eddie gave me a sour look, obviously thinking that if I balled up a sheet and tossed it down to the bedroom, it would be.
    “No,” I said. “This is headed for the outside recyclebin. We live on a houseboat, a small one, and organized tidiness is key.” I gathered up the paper, an empty glass jar, and the flattened can that last night had held chicken broth. “Tidiness, from here on out,” I said, slipping into the sandals I’d kicked off near the door.
    “Mrr,” Eddie said.
    I opened the door and pointed at him with a librarian’s index finger. “Tidiness,” I told him, and shut the door before he could get in the last word.
    •   •   •
    That was a bookmobile day, which was happily free of any unpleasant incidents or medical emergencies, and the next day was a library day that was crowded from open to close with a multitude of patrons needing assistance, a children’s author reading, a Friends of the Library meeting, and a delivery of brand-new books.
    I slept like a rock that night. The next morning, my morning off from the library, I pulled on dress pants and a dressy T-shirt and drove up to the Charlevoix Hospital.
    When I explained to the receptionist that I’d been the one to bring Mr. McCade in, she said he’d been asking about me and let me straight through.
    “Hello?” I knocked on the doorframe of Russell McCade’s hospital room. In my hand were flowers from Oleson’s, a local grocery store. “Mr. McCade? Mrs. McCade?”
    The man sitting up in the hospital bed and the woman in the chair next to him looked up at me. I remembered the woman’s just-shy-of-heavyset build and shoulder-length graying brown hair, but it was the first time I’d had a chance to really look at Russell McCade.
    Despite the stroke-induced sagging of his left side, Icould see that he had those craggy features that many women found attractive: bushy eyebrows, wide forehead and mouth, and a cleft chin. Sitting, he had a small belly, but that might disappear if he stood and sucked in. His hair was similar to his wife’s, half brown and half gray, and though their features didn’t look that similar, they gave off a sense of fitting together like a right hand in a left.
    “Yes?” Mrs. McCade looked at me with a polite, yet distant smile. “May I help you?”
    Rats. They didn’t recognize me. Not a huge surprise, but how exactly do you introduce yourself in a case like this without embarrassing everyone involved? “Um…” I proffered the flowers. “I brought these for—”
    She let out a half squeal, half shout. “It’s Minnie!” She leapt to her feet and ran to me. The momentum of her hug sent me staggering a