Cat on the Scent

            “They don’t have anything in common.” Pewter defended her position. “Tommy is young and handsome. H. Vane has got to be in his seventies. The face-lift makes him look a little younger.”

            “He had a face-lift?” Tucker asked.

            “I can always tell. The eyes. The faces lose some of their expressiveness—even with the good jobs,” Pewter authoritatively declared. “But those two don’t have anything in common. Tommy is divorced. H. Vane is happily married, or appears to be. Tommy is wild and boisterous, H. Vane has a stick up his ass.”

            “My turn. If you’re finished.”

            Pewter waited by her food bowl, which said LOYAL FRIEND. “I’m finished, I think.”

            “Okay, they’re both well-off. H. Vane is beyond well-off. He’s Midas. But they can do whatever they want. They belong to the same clubs. They go to the same parties. They both like to fly. And Tommy was going to do the reenactment.”

            “Every man in Crozet was going to do that. That’s not enough.” Pewter purred when Harry scooped out tuna.

            “Maybe Tommy had an affair with Sarah.” Tucker buried her face in her food.

            They tabled the discussion until after they ate.

            Harry whistled, tired of her own whistle, and turned on the radio. She liked the classical station and country and western. She tuned to the classical station out of Lynchburg. She heated the griddle, pulled out two slices of bread and two fat slices of American cheese. She loved cheese sandwiches, dressing them up with mayonnaise and hamburger pickles. Sometimes she’d squirt on ketchup, too.

            Tucker finished first, as always. “Hurry up.”

            “You don’t savor your food.” Pewter did, of course.

            “It tastes good to me. I don’t know why you hover over yours.”

            “Tucker, you’re such a dog,” Pewter haughtily replied.

            Mrs. Murphy, a slow eater, paused. “If Tommy slept with Sarah, the question is, did H. Vane know? He certainly seemed friendly enough to Tommy.”

            Pewter pitched in her two cents. “H. Vane would hardly kill Tommy, then get it in the back himself. This is screwy.”

            “No, it isn’t. We haven’t found the key yet, that’s all.” Murphy was resolute.

            “And now that we’ve somewhat compromised Mom we’d better figure this out.” Tucker had lived with Mrs. Murphy a long time. She knew how the cat thought.

            “Yes.”

            Pewter, food bits clinging to her whiskers, jerked her head up from the bowl. “She’d stick her nose in it even if we hadn’t taken her to the airplane. Even Miss Tally said it was in the blood.”

            “You got that right.” Mrs. Murphy thought Pewter looked silly. “Remember what she said about Biddy Minor?”

            “Curiosity killed him,” Tucker whispered.

            “I thought curiosity killed the cat.” Pewter swallowed some carefully chewed tuna.

            “Shut up.” Murphy hated that expression. “I prefer ”Cats have nine lives,“ myself.”

            “Well, I only have one. I intend to take good care of it.” Tucker snapped her jaws shut with a click.

            22

            The shadows etched an outline of the budding trees onto the impeccably manicured back lawn of the Lutheran church. The Reverend Herbert C. Jones, in clerical garb, fiddled with his fly rod as he stood on the moss-covered brick walkway to the beige clapboard office, window shutters painted Charleston green.