Cat Trick

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “Maybe I’m just grasping at straws.”

“I just can’t see how it all goes together.”

“How what goes together?” I asked. Hercules was on my lap, green eyes focused on my face as though he were following the conversation.

Mary sighed on the other end of the phone. “Kathleen, at the end of the day, this is all just gossip, but my mother always used to say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

She was silent for a moment and I waited, knowing she’d tell me in her own way. “Gavin was crazy about Wren’s mother, Celia. She was older than he was and she had two kids, but he didn’t care. The boy was smitten. Instead of going out with his friends on a Saturday night, he was calling bingo at the senior’s center with Celia—lovin’ it and her.” She sighed again very softly. “Not everyone thought it was a good match.”

The hairs came up on the back of my neck. “Mike.”

“They were Irish twins,” Mary said. “Less than a year between them. And as close as real twins before Gavin met Celia, even though they were so different. Night of the accident, Gavin had driven Mike home. He had a part-time job at the St. James. Parents weren’t there. The boys ate supper and then Gavin headed back into town to pick up Celia.”

“Mike was the last person to see Gavin alive.”

“Yes.” There was silence for a moment. “Kathleen, Gavin had been drinking.”

“That wasn’t in the newspaper,” I said. I leaned my elbow on the arm of the chair.

“He wasn’t over the legal limit,” she said. “I don’t know how his family kept it out of the paper, but they did. The only reason I knew was because back then I worked at the courthouse. I heard a lot of things that way. In fact, it’s how I really got to know Celia. She worked there, too.” She lowered her voice. “Celia didn’t drink, mostly because her father had drunk enough for two people. So Gavin didn’t drink anymore. The night of the accident, the boys had stopped for a pizza to take home for supper. A couple of people had heard Mike telling Gavin he was whipped, that a beer or two wasn’t going to turn him into a drunk.”

“Mary, do you think that Mike kept at Gavin until he had a drink just to shut Mike up?”

“They were both barely adults—they were babies really. Full of testosterone.” She sighed. “I can see how that could happen.”

I thought about my brother, Ethan, and some of the stupid choices I’d seen him make because his friends were bugging him. Luckily, his dumbest was coloring in the patchy mustache he was trying to grow with a permanent Sharpie and discovering he was allergic to the marker ink.

An idea was turning over in my head. “Mary, is it possible that Wren and her family suspected?”

“I’ve often thought Celia did.” Mary took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “She didn’t sit with the Glazers at the funeral, and she didn’t speak to them. I know they sent presents for the kids that Christmas. I was there when the mailman brought the box. She handed it to me and asked me to drop it off at the fire station’s toy drive. I asked her why, and all she said was, there was nothing inside she wanted. It was like trying to get answers out of a stone wall.”

“Would Celia have told Wren?” I asked.

“No,” she said. There was silence for a minute. “No,” she repeated, and there was more certainty in her voice.

“Did Celia keep a diary or anything like that?”

“She did,” Mary said after a long moment. “She called it her journal. She had them going back to when she was a teenager. They were all in an old leather steamer trunk.”

“Wren’s been cleaning out the house,” I said. “Maybe she found them, read them.”

“Uh-uh,” Mary said at once. “The trunk isn’t there. I know that because I walked through the house with her when she came back last month. Celia must have destroyed the journals and gotten rid of the trunk when she got sick.” I heard her shift the phone from one hand to the other. “Even if you’re right and someone did kill Mike, it wasn’t Wren, Kathleen. She’s maybe half his size, for one thing. And she’s the only person who seems upset about his death. You heard how she talked about him. She was thrilled at the idea she’d get a chance to reconnect with him. I don’t see how Gavin’s death could have anything to do with Mike dying.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Like I said, I’m just grasping at straws.”