Cat Trick

The conversation had taken a sharp detour away from the Glazer case, but that was okay. There wasn’t anything else I wanted to know. At least, right now there wasn’t.

“The long answer.” I frowned at the ceiling, trying to find the right words to explain. “Well, I didn’t exactly have the white-picket-fence childhood. My mother and father performed in theaters all up and down the East Coast when I was a kid and even for a while when Ethan and Sara were little. Big elaborate theaters with live orchestras and balcony boxes and little rinky-dink places that seated only fifty people above a bakery where everyone went for sticky buns during intermission.”

“You’re kidding.”

I laughed. “No, I’m not. And I’m not saying it was a terrible childhood, because it wasn’t, but it sure wasn’t conventional.”

Marcus pushed his empty bowl away and leaned back in his chair. “So you wanted ‘conventional’?” he said.

“I wanted normal. Or what I thought of as normal.”

“Mayville Heights is your idea of normal?” he said, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.

“Compared to how I grew up? Oh, yeah.” I twisted the last three noodles in my dish around one chopstick and ate them. “Except for the fifteen months my parents were divorced, I always had both of them in the same house. But sometimes I was living with Lady Macbeth and Banquo, and sometimes it was Adelaide and Nathan Detroit. I wanted parents who went to the office and came home and made meat loaf and mashed potatoes for dinner, not a mother and father who staged Act One of Les Misérables in the dining room.” I gave a half shrug. “The acoustics were better than the living room.”

“Of course,” he said as he got up and collected our dishes.

“Everywhere we lived, I always managed to find a library and my favorite books. When I found out I could actually work in one, well, I never thought of doing anything else.” I tucked one leg up under me as Marcus took the pudding cake out of the oven. “And there probably was a little rebelliousness in the decision.”

“Instead of running off to join the circus, you ran off to join the library.”

“Pretty much.” I watched him spoon dessert into two more blue bowls. He set one in front of me, and I closed my eyes for a moment and inhaled the rich chocolate scent. When I opened them again, he was watching me and smiling.

“So what about you?” I asked, picking up my spoon.

“What do you mean?”

I had to make a little moan of pleasure at the taste of the first mouthful before I could answer. “Why did you become a police officer?” I waved my spoon at him. “And I want to hear the long answer.”

He pulled a hand back through his dark hair. “I don’t know if there is a long answer. A police officer is what I always wanted to be except for the summer I was five when I wanted to drive the ice cream truck.”

“Who wouldn’t?” I mumbled around a mouthful of cake and sauce.

“I have been told I have an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong,” he said. “Maybe that’s part of it.”

“I don’t think I used the word ‘overdeveloped,’” I said.

“It was implied,” he said dryly.

We ate in silence for another minute or so. Then Marcus spoke again. “Probably my father had something to do with it as well.”

“Was your father a police officer?”

He shook his head. “No. But he was a very black-and-white kind of person.” He made a chopping motion in the air with one hand to emphasize the words. “And very focused on the facts. Not really a people person.”

“You’re a people person,” I said, trying to decide if it would be rude to lick sauce off the back of my spoon.

Marcus was already on his feet to get me a second helping, which I thought about turning down for maybe a millisecond. “You’re just saying that so you can have seconds,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I said, smiling a thank-you at him. “Yes, I sometimes think you get too caught up in the facts and forget about the feelings involved, but people like you. Maggie, Roma, Rebecca, Oren—they like you and they respect what you do.” I ate another bite of pudding. “And the cats like you—not just my two; look at Desmond over at Roma’s clinic. Even Lucy will come closer to you than she does to anyone else besides me.”

He grinned. “Kathleen, cats are not people.”

“I wouldn’t say that out loud around Owen or Hercules,” I warned. “They think they’re people.”

His grin just got wider.

He pointed in the direction of the living room then. “Don’t let me forget. I have something I want to show you.”