Cat Trick

“Do I want to know what you mean?” I asked. Hercules came in from the kitchen and leaned his black-and-white head against my leg. I reached down and lifted him onto my lap.

“I mean Milo, Devon, Jake and our baby brother without their shirts on.” Sara was older than Ethan by close to four minutes and never let him forget it.

“Why?” I said.

She laughed. She sounded so much like Mom. “Because I had to airbrush them from the waist up. Well, not Ethan. I got a friend of mine to come do him.”

“Airbrush?” I said.

“Makeup.” Sara worked as a makeup artist to support her filmmaking. “I needed the tattoos and the piercings gone for one of the scenes in the video. They’re supposed to look like seventeenth-century pirates in frilly shirts open to the waist. The piercings were easy; they just had to take out all their hardware. Best way to cover up all their ink was to airbrush. It did a great job, but none of those guys were on my list of men I wanted to see without their shirts.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. I got a mental picture of Sara airbrushing makeup onto Ethan’s band mates while they stood around bare-chested, cringing. It’s not that they weren’t all exhibitionists to some degree, but I knew each one of the guys had a bit of a crush on her, and as for Ethan, the only thing that would have been more embarrassing was if it had been Sara spraying him with makeup instead of her friend. It still made him squirrelly when I reminded him that I’d changed his diapers.

“I don’t know whether to be glad I wasn’t there, or sorry I missed it,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I’m sending you pictures of them in their frilly shirts,” she said.

In the background, Ethan yelled, “No, you’re not.”

I talked to Sara for a few more minutes. She promised she’d tell Dad I’d called, and I promised to turn the most embarrassing shot of Ethan in his ruffled shirt into my screensaver.

I put the phone back on the table. I missed them. And I couldn’t stall much longer on giving Everett my decision on whether or not I was going to stay in Mayville Heights. The whole thing had gotten a lot more complicated since I’d gone back to Boston to see everyone during the summer.

“They were different,” I said to Hercules. “I didn’t feel like I had to take care of everybody and everything.” He walked his front paws up my chest and licked my chin. “Okay, maybe it was me that was different.”

I picked him up and went out to the kitchen. I’d miss my little house and my friends if I went back to Boston, and I had no idea how Owen and Hercules would adjust to being in the city. And if I stayed, then I was always going to be a little homesick to see Sara and Ethan and Mom and Dad. There wasn’t any easy answer.

I scratched Hercules’s chin and he made a contented sigh. “When I was in Boston, no one ever asked me to figure out why someone got killed,” I said.

Herc turned his head to look at the volunteer schedule for feeding the cats at Wisteria Hill. Marcus and I were up on Friday morning. I laid my cheek against the top of the cat’s soft, furry head. There was no playing Sherlock Holmes in Boston, but there was no Marcus, either.

13

Maggie called first thing in the morning while I was standing bleary-eyed in front of my closet, trying to decide what I was going to wear. “Did I wake you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Owen did that. He seemed to think that if he was awake then everyone should be awake. He sat by the bed and he was either meowing the ‘Toreador Song’ from Carmen or ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm.’ I’m not sure which.”

“Aww, I bet he was adorable.” Maggie thought everything Owen did was sweet or adorable. Mr. Adorable himself was coming across the floor to me with that uncanny radar he had that always told him when it was Maggie on the phone.

“If by adorable you mean annoying, then yes,” I said.

She laughed. “I need your truck, Kath, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” I said. “I could pick you up on my way to the library and then you could bring the truck over whenever you’re finished with it.” Owen’s back end was twitching, but before I could lean over and scoop him up, he jumped onto my lap.

“Don’t you want to know why I want your truck?” she asked.

“I’m guessing you need to move something.”

I heard her breathe out and guessed that she was stretching while she talked to me. “I need to get a couple of collage panels over to the community center, and Ruby’s gone to Minneapolis for the day, so I can’t use her truck.”