No Paw to Stand On (A Bookmobile Cat Mystery, Band 12) - Softcover

Cass, Laurie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593547446 ISBN 13: 9780593547441

Verlag: Berkley, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

There’s no rest for the whiskered as librarian Minnie Hamilton and her rescue cat, Eddie, have to investigate a poisoning—and a murder—in the newest installment of the national bestselling Bookmobile Cat Mysteries.

When a heat wave hits northern Michigan, Minnie, Eddie, and their bookmobile head to the beach to catch some rays and some customers. But library business is put on hold when Minnie’s restaurant-owning best friend, Kristen, calls. The specialty ice cream cone treat she'd been serving to patrons was sabotaged, making some customers horribly sick. Kristen needs Minnie to sniff out the culprit fast, or the restaurant's reputation will be destroyed forever.

Minnie and Eddie are hot on the tail of the suspect when an employee from another restaurant is found dead. Could the poisoning and the murder be related? It’ll take a feline to catch a felon...

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laurie Cass is the national bestselling author of the Bookmobile Cat Mystery series.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

There were days in my life when I woke up perky and cheerful. When I bounced out of bed with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. When the sun shone through windows that didn't show a single streak, when my annoyingly curly hair cooperated, and when the peanut butter didn't tear up the bread as I made my lunch. When from morning to night things got done and fun was had by all.

This was not one of those days.

"It's hot."

I looked over at Julia Beaton. Now in her mid-sixties, a few years ago Julia had retired to her hometown in northwest lower Michigan after a successful career on Broadway. She wasn't the type who could sit around and do nothing but enjoy herself, so it hadn't been long before I'd hired her as my part-time bookmobile clerk. She charmed everyone from infants to octogenarians and beyond, she was the best-ever storyteller, and she laughed at my jokes.

But she didn't like the heat.

And neither did I.

We were sitting on folding lawn chairs in the shade cast by the bookmobile's awning. The vehicle itself, all thirty-one feet, twenty-odd thousand pounds, and three thousand books of it, was sitting in the shade of a maple tree and its air-conditioning had been working just fine its entire life. Until today.

How long had the bookmobile been on the road? More than three years, but not four, I was pretty sure of that. My half-melted brain tried to do the math and then quickly gave up.

"Too hot," I murmured.

Julia nodded, waving her face with the fan she'd made out of a local restaurant's take-out menu. Though she'd put her long strawberry blond hair up into a twisted bun, and tendrils had escaped onto the nape of her neck, sticking to her skin. It was actually a good look on her, as pretty much everything was, but she looked miserable with the heat and humidity.

Our first sign of pending air conditioning doom had been a whine from Eddie, my black-and-white tabby cat. Eddie had stowed away on the bookmobile's very first voyage, and now if he wasn't on every trip, he would receive get-well cards from patrons by snail mail, e-mail, and text message.

Twenty minutes ago, there had been an odd click from somewhere inside the rooftop air-conditioning unit.

"Rrr," Eddie had said from his current favorite spot inside the storage cupboard.

Julia and I had been busy setting up for the day's first afternoon stop and hadn't realized what he'd meant. Sure, I knew he usually said "mrr," not "rrr," but what I didn't know was that he was tuned in to the bookmobile's mechanical innards and was trying to warn us.

Well, that or a far more likely explanation, which was that at three in the morning he'd howled so much and for so long for no known reason that the missing "m" was the feline equivalent of laryngitis.

"Rrr," he said now.

I looked over my shoulder. My cat was flopped in the open doorway, stretched flat from one side of the door to the other, but with his head rotated so his chin was on the very edge of the top step. How he managed that without his head falling off, I had no idea.

"Sorry, pal," I said. "That fur coat of yours probably isn't helping, is it?"

"Rrr."

Julie waved her menu fan in Eddie's direction. "Deepest apologies for the weather, Sir Edward," she said in an upper-crust English accent. "I take full responsibility."

He heaved a deep sigh and his body went even flatter, something I wouldn't have thought possible.

"Want to bet on how many people show up at this stop?" I asked.

The movement of Julia's fan slowed as she considered. "Twice as many as the last one."

More math? The woman was cruel. "No one showed up."

"And two times no one is?"

"A big fat zero." I slid down in my chair and wished I had my own menu from Fat Boys Pizza to fold into a fan.

When we'd discovered the air-conditioning was out, I'd called Josh Hadden, the library's IT guy, and asked him to send out a mass text to all the bookmobile patrons to let them know what was going on. He'd grumbled, saying that we were perfectly capable of doing it ourselves with the hot spot he'd set up, but I told him we were on the east side of Tonedagana County, outside of the hills and valleys and lakes of the county's western side. Although we were in the county's flatlands, it was also sparsely populated, so telecommunications were routinely inconsistent and spotty. Josh had given one more obligatory grumble, said I owed him one, and hung up.

The end result was Julia and Eddie and I sitting in the gravel parking lot of a small white clapboard church, waiting for a breeze that wasn't coming.

"Just like Godot," I muttered, but not very loudly, because otherwise Julia would have started quoting the play, and I'd never once been able to sit through a production of Samuel Beckett's most famous work without falling asleep. It was, without a doubt, a character flaw, but so far it was one I'd managed to hide from my coworker, and I hoped to continue to hide it ad infinitum. Which was undoubtedly another character flaw.

"Snow," Julia said weakly. "Remember snow? A bare five months ago this land was covered in a bleak blanket of white. Damp cold pierced our bones and we longed for spring. For summer. And now?" She sighed. "Oh, the trickery of a wish granted."

I expended some energy to turn my head. She didn't look like she was quoting from something, but it could be hard to tell. "Was that you or a character?" I asked.

"No idea." She flapped the fan in her face. "Too hot to remember."

"Rrr."

I slid down in the folding chair so far that my chin was almost touching my chest. Sighing, I wondered how much of the scheduled stop time was left. Once we got back inside, battened down the hatches, and got rolling, at least we'd have some breeze from the open windows.

My phone was in the pocket of my cropped pants, which were made marginally professional because I always wore a belt. I thought about pulling it out to see what time it was but didn't want to risk working up a sweat. If I started sweating, it would be hard to stop. Soon the only thing left of me would be a puddle of perspiration, and who would be left to drive the bookmobile back to Chilson?

Julia had never wanted to go through the training to get her commercial driver's license, a requirement of the library, though not of the state of Michigan, so she was out. Eddie didn't have the license either, but he also didn't have opposable thumbs or legs long enough to reach the pedals.

I closed my eyes, smiling at the image of Eddie driving the bookmobile. If he could, he surely would, because rules and regulations, whether state, federal, local, library, or mine, didn't mean much to a cat.

"Hey, Minnie?"

My eyelids opened slightly. "What?"

"It's hot. I'm . . . hot."

I sat up. Julia, the indefatigable and indomitable perpetual optimist, the instigator of many a "Minnie, pull up your big-girl panties and do what you need to do" conversation, sounded different. If I hadn't known better, I would have said she sounded human.

This could not be allowed to go on. It was time to abandon the heat-and-humidity-inspired ennui.

And I knew exactly what to do.


Half an hour later, Julia was smiling. “Brilliance,” she said. “Sheer brilliance.”

I shrugged. The move had more self-preservation than genius, but I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Now, instead of sitting on a flat windless plain in an empty parking lot, we were sitting in a crowded parking lot with a gentle breeze and an outstanding view of Lake Michigan, with a temperature fully ten degrees lower than where we'd been.

Waves rolled onto the sandy beach, seagulls squawked, and the big lake's flat horizon gave no hint of the distant Wisconsin....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593547446
• ISBN 13: 9780593547441
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland