The Catnap Before Christmas Read online

  The Catnap Before Christmas

  A Whales and Tails Mystery

  by

  Kathi Daley

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Katherine Daley

  Version 1.0

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Whales and Tails

  Romeow and Juliet

  The Mad Catter

  Grimm’s Furry Tail

  Much Ado About Felines

  The Legend of Tabby Hollow

  The Cat of Christmas Past

  The Tail of Two Tabbies

  The Great Catsby

  Count Catula

  The Cat of Christmas Present

  A Winters Tail

  Taming of the Tabby

  Frankencat

  The Cat of Christmas Future

  Farewell to Felines

  The Catsgiving Feast

  A Whale of a Tail

  The Catnap Before Christmas

  Table of Contents

  Whales and Tails

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Up Next from Kathi Daley Books

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  Chapter 1

  Wednesday, December 11

  “I think she’s dead,” he said.

  “She’s not dead,” she replied.

  “She sure looks dead,” he argued.

  “Miss Cait? Are you alive, Miss Cait?” she asked, concern present in her voice.

  Go away, I thought to myself as I resisted the voices that pulled me out of the best sleep I’d had in weeks.

  “You’d better dial 9-1-1,” he suggested.

  I opened my eyes to the orange, red, and green lights twinkling overhead. “I’m not dead, and you don’t need to call 9-1-1,” I assured Anastasia Walker, Archie Cunningham, and the group of choir members who knelt on the floor next to me. “I was just taking a nap.”

  “Why were you taking a nap under the tree?” six-year-old Anastasia asked.

  Why had I been taking a nap under the tree? I tried to remember, but I wasn’t completely awake, and my memory was fuzzy.

  “And why were you taking a nap with a cat?” eight-year-old Archie added.

  A cat? I frowned and turned my head to the side. I had been sleeping with a cat. A gorgeous, longhaired, black-and-white cat that I was certain I’d never seen before. I closed my eyes once again and tried to remember exactly how I’d gotten here.

  “Are you sick?” Anastasia asked, her bright blue eyes filled with genuine concern as she brushed my hair from my face.

  “No.” I yawned and slowly sat up. “I’m not sick. I’m just tired.” I picked up the cat and cuddled him in my arms. “Very, very, tired,” I added in a soft voice.

  “Are you sure?” Archie asked. “Grown-ups don’t take naps unless they’re sick.”

  “I’m sure.” I forced my legs under my body and stood up.

  “If you aren’t sick, why did you take a nap?” Anastasia asked.

  Apparently, the adorable little imp wasn’t going to leave this alone. “The baby has been keeping me awake at night, and I guess it all just caught up with me.” I looked at the cat, who I still cradled in my arms. Where had he come from? I glanced out the window at the dark sky. How long had I been here?

  “You have a baby?” Anastasia asked, confusion evident in her eyes.

  “No, I don’t have a baby,” I answered. “Cody and I are babysitting his cousin’s baby, and I guess he’s missed his mommy since he’s been here and hasn’t been sleeping well.”

  My husband, Cody West, had taken the baby to Seattle to spend the day with his aunt, who was going to be in the area on a business trip. His mother and father were both in the military and currently overseas, so Cody and I were babysitting the infant until his father returned to the States in January. Cody had invited me to go with him on the overnight trip, but I realized that his taking the baby to Seattle was actually a gift, as it afforded me an unselfish reason to spend thirty-six hours on my own. Not that I didn’t love my husband and the baby whose care we’d been entrusted with, but the timing of the whole thing could have been better. Not only did we have a Christmas pageant to prepare for, but Cody and I were in the middle of a move from my little cabin to the mansion next door.

  “Where’s Leo?” I asked after taking a quick mental inventory of who was there and who was still missing. There were actually quite a few kids missing this evening, but having Mary and Joseph was critical if we were going to run through everyone’s lines.

  “What’s the baby’s name?” Anastasia asked, completely ignoring my question regarding the whereabouts of our Joseph.

  “Sammy.”

  “Is he cute?” Anastasia asked.

  I paused and looked at the six-year-old, who seemed to be a lot more fascinated with the idea of my having a baby than she was with rehearsing the play. She was going to make an adorable angel with all those long blond ringlets. “He is cute. Have you seen Leo? We really need to get started if we are going to get anything done.”

  “I guess his dad couldn’t bring him on account of the fire,” Denise Partridge said.

  “Fire?” Leo’s dad was a firefighter, and he was a single dad. I supposed if there had been a fire, he might be tied up and unable to ferry his son to rehearsal.

  “The fire at the Santa House,” Denise specified.

  My brow shot up. “The Santa House is on fire?”

  “It was on fire.” Denise narrowed her gaze. “How long have you been sleeping?”

  Good question. I remembered stopping off at the church on my way into town to take care of a whole slew of errands. I wanted to drop off the costumes my Aunt Maggie had made for the play but had shipped to the house my older sister Siobhan and her husband Finn now lived in with their son, Connor. Normally, on Wednesdays I worked at Coffee Cat Books, the bookstore I owned with my best friend, Tara O’Brian, but with Cody and Sammy out of town, I’d taken the day off to get some things that had been piling up taken care of.

  “Miss Cait, are you okay?” Anastasia asked yet again.

  I took a deep breath and chased the last of the sleep from my brain. “I’m fine.” I looked at Denise. “You said the Santa House was on fire?”

  “It was, but I think they must have it out by now,” Mitch Brown, one of my ten-year-olds responded. Mitch was the narrator for the play and the oldest member of the cast.

  “Was anyone hurt?” I asked.

  “My dad told my mom that Santa was dead,” Mitch answered.

  “Santa’s dead?” Anastasia began to cry.

  I looked down at the cat in my arms. Santa was dead! A cat had shown up! Suddenly everything felt a lot more serious. “We’re going to take a short break,” I announced.

  “Break?” Seven-year-old Dennis White asked. “We just got here.”

  “I know, but I need to make a phone call. It’s important. While I’m making my call, you can
set up the stage for the manger scene. I won’t be long.” I set the cat down on the floor to the delight of the kids and stepped into the hallway. Leaving the door open so I could keep an eye on my cast of actors aged six to ten, I dialed Cody’s number.

  “Come on, answer,” I said aloud as the call went straight through to voice mail.

  Cody was going to be in Seattle until tomorrow and was most likely visiting with Sammy’s aunt, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he hadn’t picked up. I did notice two missed calls from Tara, as well as a missed call from Siobhan. I called Siobhan back first.

  “Cait. Good. Where are you?”

  “At the church. I just heard about the Santa House. What happened?”

  “I’m not sure exactly.”

  I could hear sirens and noise in the background, so I had to assume Siobhan was still in town. She was, after all, the mayor, so it made sense she would head to the scene.

  Siobhan continued. “I was just getting ready to head home for the day when Finn called to tell me the Santa House was on fire. My first thought was for all the kids who could have been injured, but then I realized the house didn’t open until five on weekdays and it was only four. I called Cassie and asked her to pick Connor up from day care, and then I headed into town. It’s bad. Really bad. It looks like Tom Miller is dead, although no one has been able to get inside to confirm that. The Santa House is a total loss.”

  “I’ve got a choir room full of kids, or I’d come down to help out,” I said. “Was anyone else injured?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I don’t think so, but the building went up fast. A few spectators had begun to gather in the area of the Santa Village and Santa House, and several people saw Tom go inside, but the fire was too hot to search the place to confirm his death or to see if there were any other victims yet. Is Cody still in Seattle?”

  “Until tomorrow.” I glanced at Timmy and James, who were having a sword fight with the shepherds’ staffs. “I should get back to the kids. I’ll call you back when I get the chance.”

  “I’ll probably head home soon. Connor has been teething and is extra fussy, and I don’t want Cassie to have to deal with the bedtime drama. I’m sure Finn is going to be a while, so just come by the house when you are done at the church.”

  By the time I returned to the room, the kids were totally wound up. I decided to switch things up and practice the songs for the event rather than running through everyone’s lines. It was less than two weeks until the pageant, so I supposed we’d need to have some extra rehearsals before the big day. The cat who had been sleeping with me had crawled back under the tree and gone back to sleep. I supposed I should call Tansy, the witch who seemed to be the keeper of the island’s magical cats. In the past, when a cat showed up accompanied by a death or disaster, it was an indicator that the animal and I had a destiny to fulfill, and that destiny usually involved helping Finn bring in the bad guy and ensure that justice was served.

  “Miss Tara,” the kids yelled, running toward the door that led into the auditorium. Tara taught the Sunday school classes for kids aged five to twelve, so most of the choir members knew her.

  “Did you just come from town?” I asked after she took off her coat and hung it on a peg.

  “Yes. The traffic was a bear.” She looked at her watch. “It took me over an hour to get here.”

  Usually, the drive from the wharf, where Coffee Cat Books was located, to Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church was less than twenty minutes. No wonder so many kids were absent tonight.

  “Have you heard about the fire?”

  She nodded. “Cassie was at the bookstore when Siobhan called.”

  Cassie was my other sister, the youngest of the five Hart siblings. She worked at the bookstore Tara and I owned now that she’d moved back to Madrona Island full-time.

  “I spoke to Siobhan. She said it’s bad. She thinks Tom Miller is dead.”

  Tara bowed her head. “I heard. I called Danny, and he filled me in. He left Aiden to hold down the bar while he went over to the Santa House to check things out.”

  Danny and Aiden were my brothers. They’d recently purchased and refurbished O’Malley’s Bar and Grill, one of the oldest bars on the island. Since then, it seemed all the Hart siblings had spent quite a bit of time hanging out there.

  “Danny said that he spoke to one of the firefighters, who told him it looked like someone set the structure on fire intentionally,” Tara informed me. “Apparently, the speed with which the building was enflamed could only have been accomplished with an accelerant.”

  I glanced at the kids, who were all looking at us by this point. “The parents will be here to pick up the kids in thirty minutes. Why don’t you hang out and we’ll figure out our next move once everyone has gone?”

  Tara nodded and headed to the piano. She began to belt out a tune that had all the kids singing. Cody and I usually had a pianist for choir practice, but tonight I’d planned to run lines rather than practice our songs, so I hadn’t asked her to come in.

  By the time I got the kids delivered to their parents, it was after eight. Tara and I decided to head over to O’Malley’s to check in with the brothers after we took the cat back to the cabin and got him settled along with my dog, Max. As we pulled up to the cabin, Siobhan walked out of the main house to greet us.

  “Did you get Connor to sleep?” I asked.

  “I did.”

  “Is Finn back?”

  “Not yet. I was waiting for you to get home. I thought I’d come over and we could try to make some sense of this.”

  I glanced at the house. “What about Connor?”

  “Michael and Maggie showed up out of the blue. Marley’s birthday is Friday, so they wanted to do something with her this weekend.” Maggie Hart Kilian was our aunt, and she’d owned the house Siobhan and her family lived in before gifting it to her oldest niece. While the house was now owned by the Finnegans, Maggie and her husband, Michael, had their own bedroom in it and often spent time here when they were on the island. Marley Donnelly was Maggie’s best friend and ex-business partner. “Anyway, they said they’d listen for him should he wake before I get back. They are planning to go to bed early, but there’s a baby monitor in their room.”

  “Tara and I were going to head over to the bar after we get the cat settled. You can come with us if you’d like.”

  “Cat?” Siobhan asked.

  I opened my back door and picked up the cat.

  “He’s beautiful. Is he a Tansy cat?”

  “I think so. He showed up at the church today. It’s too late to ask Tansy about him now, but I’ll ask her in the morning.”

  “I’d like to go with you to the bar. Let me just tell Maggie what I’m doing and grab my purse. I’ll ride along with you. I think Cassie was heading over there when she left here, so maybe among all of us, we can figure out what in the heck is going on.”

  When we arrived at O’Malley’s, we found Cassie sitting on a barstool chatting with Danny. We motioned to them that we were going to grab a table. Both Cassie and Danny joined us.

  “Any news?” I asked, sliding toward the center of the booth.

  “It has been confirmed that Tom Miller was inside the Santa House when it burned down,” Danny said, pulling a chair up to the end of the booth.

  “It was a small building. It seems like he would have had time to get out,” Tara said, waving for Aiden to bring us a bottle of wine.

  “It seems the fire was started by a small explosion,” Danny informed us. “It’s too early to know much, but it looked as if Tom might have suffered a blow to the head. Like I said, nothing is known for certain yet, but I heard one of the firefighters say that it appeared that Tom might have been unconscious before the flames got to him.”

  “Poor Tom,” I said. “I guess his daughter must have been notified.”

  “I guess,” Danny responded.

  Tom was a widower with one child, an adult daughter who lived in Chicago. On the outside, he
seemed to have lived a lonely life since his wife died, but I knew he volunteered in the community and seemed to keep busy. I was really going to miss him.

  “Everyone want a glass?” Aiden asked, setting a bottle of the wine he knew I preferred on the table.

  Tara, Cassie, and I confirmed that we did, but Siobhan asked Aiden to bring her a diet cola instead.

  “I just don’t understand who would blow up the Santa House,” Cassie said after Aiden left to fetch the glasses and Siobhan’s soda.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Siobhan said. “I can’t help but wonder if the Santa House was the intended victim or if it was Tom.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “What do you mean? Why would anyone intentionally kill Tom Miller?”

  “Why would anyone intentionally burn down the Santa House?” Siobhan countered.

  I supposed that she had a point.

  “Tom worked the Santa House Monday through Fridays from five to nine,” Tara joined in. “If he was the target, the arsonist would have been able to anticipate where he’d be when the explosion occurred.”

  “He was there an hour early,” I countered. “Did he always show up an hour early?”

  No one seemed to know.

  “Setting an explosion to go off at four when the house opens at five makes sense from the standpoint of minimizing human casualties, but why kill Tom in that manner?” Danny asked. “If he was the target, why not just kill him in his home? He does live alone. It would have been a lot less messy to simply wait for him to be home alone and then take care of things at that time.”

  I paused to consider the situation. “We need to find out if it was Tom’s habit to show up so early. If not, if he usually didn’t show up at the house until closer to five, then maybe the person who set off the explosion didn’t intend there to be any deaths at all.”

  “Then why blow up the house?” Cassie asked.

  “Not everyone likes Santa or Christmas,” I reminded the group.

  “So maybe we are just looking for a Grinch who wanted to destroy part of the town’s Christmas celebration,” Tara said. “How can we find out?”