Book 'Em, Eddie (Bookmobile Cat Mysteries, 13, Band 13) - Softcover

Cass, Laurie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593818326 ISBN 13: 9780593818329

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

When cat-astrophe strikes, Minnie and her trusty rescue cat, Eddie, will have to read between the lines to solve a murder in the newest Bookmobile Cat Mysteries.

The Chilson library bookmobile has a new stop on its route: Honey Hollow Adult Foster Care. When Minnie learns that Honey Hollow is just down the road from an enclave of gorgeous Victorian homes, she decides she has to take a look, especially after she learns about identical houses that stood side by side, and were owned by twin siblings. But when Minnie and Eddie and the bookmobile take their scenic detour, Eddie uncharacteristically escapes from the bookmobile - and finds a woman in the woods, horribly wounded with an arrow.

Though Minnie desperately calls 9-1-1, all too soon she realizes she was too late. The police seem ready to call the death a hunting accident, but Minnie can’t shake the feeling that foul play was involved, particularly given the woman’s final whispered words. With evidence lacking, Minnie and Eddie will have to claw their way through a thicket of suspects to find the truth.

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

I propped my elbows on our kitchen island's counter. "Different," I said.

My husband looked at me over the bowl of oatmeal he was sliding in my direction, and his expression was easy to interpret: confusion overlaid with a clutch of anxiety that he hadn't actually been paying attention to what I was saying and that our conversation was about to take a hard turn in a negative direction. His mouth opened and shut a couple of times before he managed to say, "Uh, that's, um . . ."

I quelled a shameful urge to take advantage of the situation and waved my free hand-the other being occupied with eating breakfast-and said, "I thought I'd feel different."

"About?"

His cautiously questioning tone, the verbal equivalent of taking sliding steps on a just-frozen lake, made me take pity on the poor man. "Being married," I said. "It's been, what? Just over a month?"

Rafe glanced at the microwave clock, squinted at the ceiling, then came around to sit on the stool next to me. "Four weeks, two days, and fifteen hours."

Math. Before eight a.m. The man was cruel. "Like I said, just over a month. How long is it going to take to sink in?"

"What? That you're stuck with me for the rest of your life?"

He grinned, the slightly crooked version that always made my heart go mushy. Rafe Niswander, tallish but not so tall that his height overwhelmed my efficient five foot zero, with dark hair almost the same shade as my black (but straight against my annoying curls), had an uncanny knack for making me feel better, even when I wasn't feeling all that bad to begin with.

It was just one of the zillions of reasons that I'd married him, and the fact that it had taken me umpteen years to recognize how much I loved him was something I put down to his regrettable predilection to pretend he was far stupider than he actually was. Mostly to get out of doing something he didn't feel like doing, which might have explained the habit when he was seven, but not so much as an adult, let alone principal of our town's middle school.

"Mrr!"

Rafe and I looked at the source of the sound.

Eddie, the black-and-white tabby cat who'd followed me home one fine spring day three and a half years ago and was now my buddy for life, was sitting on top of his carrier and staring hard in my direction.

"He thinks you're late," Rafe said.

The Chilson District Library bookmobile wasn't scheduled at its first stop for almost two hours. There was plenty of time for me to finish eating, do the dishes, catch up on work e-mail, and even start the pointless task of picking cat hair off my clothes before Eddie and I headed up to the library.

I narrowed my gaze at our furry friend. "Just because you're eager to meet your adoring fans doesn't mean I need to skip my breakfast."

He gazed back, won the staring contest because cats always do, then sighed and curled himself into what might have been the most uncomfortable cat ball ever, right on top of the carrier handle.

"Anyway," I said to Rafe, "it's not that I expected to be a different person or anything now that we're married."

"But, Minnie, you are different."

I squinted at my blurred and distant reflection in the refrigerator, blurred partly by distance and partly because it was my self-appointed chore to clean the stainless steel. "Looks the same to me."

Rafe pointed his chin. "Left hand. Finger between the pinky and middle."

Oh. That. Nodding, I admired the wedding band that had recently been soldered to my engagement ring. "One thing. What else?"

"Have you taken a look at your driver's license?"

In truth, I had two driver's licenses. The normal operator one and a commercial driver's version. The State of Michigan didn't actually require that drivers of the thirty-one-foot-long, twenty-three-thousand-pound (when loaded) bookmobile get a CDL, but it was the library's policy, and since I'd written the policy, I'd had one more thin rectangular piece of plastic in my wallet for the last few years. Both now noted yours truly as Minerva Joy Niswander instead of the Minerva Joy Hamilton that had been my name for more than thirty-five years, and the change hadn't quite sunk in yet.

I nodded again. "Keep forgetting. But all those extra letters are a lot, you know."

"You do realize Niswander is only one more letter than Hamilton."

"It's not the count so much as the shapes. That W is exhausting. And don't get me going on having an R at the end of the name. How am I supposed to deal with that?"

"No idea." Rafe used his spoon to give his oatmeal bowl a final scrape. "But I have great confidence that you'll figure it out. You always do."

He flashed a grin, and two minutes later, after depositing his breakfast dishes in the sink, dropping a kiss onto my upturned face, and giving Eddie a light thump on the head, he was out the door and in his truck, headed up to the middle school. My husband-husband!-was the most popular principal the school had had in years. Popular in that the students actually said hello to him, that the teachers had real conversations with him, and that the school board treated him like an actual human being. All in all, he had a good gig going, and unless something shifted dramatically, I couldn't imagine he'd ever leave.

"Then again," I told Eddie as I buckled the now cat-filled carrier into my car's passenger's seat, "the gig I have going is pretty sweet, too."

He ignored my conversational sally, so I felt obliged to continue to talk as we drove to the library.

"Take Chilson." I twiddled my fingers at the passing buildings. "Oh, wait. You can't see, can you, being inside the carrier and all, so you'll have to trust me that this is the quintessential small resort town."

Our permanent population of about three thousand swelled to more than twice that in the summer, and if you added day-trippers, it went to three times the September through May size.

"Maybe October through April," I murmured. Thanks to the many national and even international Top Ten lists that proclaimed northern lower Michigan as a tourist destination, the shoulder seasons were getting busier and busier. Though this was good news for the region's economy, our recent popularity was also resulting in more traffic, more parking problems, more crime, higher housing prices, and a slight but significant shift in culture. We were no longer the out-of-the-way place no one had ever heard of. We were becoming a place to See and Be Seen In, and not all locals were loving it.

I had divided feelings about the changes. For one thing, I was a transplant myself. I had the classic story of youthful summers spent in Chilson, and as an adult realizing that the quieter life of Up North suited me better than the bright lights and activity of downstate.

Soon after getting my master's in library and information science, I'd had the great good fortune to be offered my dream job. Assistant library director? At the Chilson District Library? What could be better than that?

My aunt Frances, the person I'd stayed with during many long teenaged summers, had offered me an off-season room in her boardinghouse. I got creative for my summer housing and scraped up enough money to buy the cutest little houseboat imaginable. For years I'd moored it on Janay Lake, at Uncle Chip's Marina, and only abandoned that seasonal double move when I got engaged.

We now lived in the large Shingle-style home that Rafe had spent eons restoring from its previous life as multiple tiny and not overly functional apartments. Our house, though not on the water, was a mere stone's throw away from Uncle Chip's and Janay Lake, and so not far away from Lake Michigan itself.

"Anyway," I said to Eddie, "Chilson is my favorite downtown ever. I mean, over there on our right is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593818326
• ISBN 13: 9780593818329
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 369
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland