The Catnap Before Christmas Read online

  I smiled at him. “I know. And I will.”

  Suddenly, it felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.

  “I spoke to Sister Mary this morning,” Cody said after a moment. “She said the rehearsal last night went fine. She offered to take over the lead to free us up. She understands that with everything that is going on, our attention will be divided.”

  “That’s nice of her, and to be honest, I’m inclined to take her up on her offer.”

  “Me too,” Cody agreed. “I did tell her that I’d talk to you and call her back, which I will do while you take your shower.”

  I glanced out the window at the snow flurries in the air. A bit of snow would be nice, but a lot of snow… I wasn’t sure I could deal with that on top of everything else right now.

  ******

  By the time I’d showered and dressed, Tara had arrived, and Cody had left with Sammy. I wasn’t sure what to say to her, so I simply opened my arms and hugged her while she cried. Once she was all cried out, we decided to get organized and come up with a plan. Tara loved plans and lists. She thrived when she had both, so I knew that taking control of the situation was exactly what Tara needed to help her move on from her grief and start the rebuilding process.

  “I called and spoke to the insurance company,” Tara informed me. “They warned me that between the holiday, which slows everything down, and the fact that the bookstore is at the center of an open police investigation, it may be a while before we get the go-ahead to repair and rebuild, but they are sending someone out today to do a preliminary report and take photos.”

  “That’s good. It is important to at least get the claim open.”

  Tara nodded. “I spoke to Danny after I spoke to you. Most of the damage to the building is to the cat lounge, although the contents in the bookstore are a mess thanks to the water the fire department dumped on the entire structure. Danny thinks we should secure the place with some well-placed plywood to prevent looting, so he is going to talk to Finn about doing it. I imagine that Finn is going to stay in control of the building until the investigation is complete, but I trust Danny to know what to do, so I’m leaving that up to him to work out.”

  Wow. Tara trusting Danny with her baby was huge in my mind. Maybe their hanging out again had progressed a lot farther than either had revealed to anyone else so far.

  “The loss of income is going to be significant because the week before Christmas is one of our busiest times of the year,” Tara continued. “Luckily, we do have insurance to cover that, so while I’ll need to work out the specifics with the adjuster, we should have money to get us by until the store can reopen.”

  It was a lot more important for Tara to have uninterrupted income; she lived on her own and had to pay the mortgage and monthly maintenance fee on her condo, whereas I had Cody and lived rent free. I wanted to be sure her income was covered first, but I figured I’d talk to her about that at another time. Right now, this was keeping her busy, and I was content to let her orchestrate things as she saw fit.

  “I called to speak to Alex this morning,” she added. “He and Willow are both pretty shaken up. He would most likely be dead if you hadn’t gotten him out of there in time. Of course, he realized that right off, but I don’t think it completely hit him until he’d had a chance to think about it a bit.”

  “We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Wiley,” I said.

  “Alex mentioned that as well,” Tara said. “He wants to do something for Wiley and his mom. I’m not sure how she’ll feel about that, but Alex does have a lot of money and can afford to help them out a bit, so maybe you could talk to her about that when you see her.”

  “I will,” I said. “I’m not sure how receptive she’ll be to help, but maybe if they need something specific right now, she might be open to the idea.”

  Tara leaned back and tilted her head toward the ceiling. The poor thing looked exhausted.

  “I guess we should let everyone know that book club will be canceled until further notice.” Tara sighed.

  “I think everyone will pretty much assume that,” I assured her. “I know it feels like there is a lot to take care of, but the reality is, the next few weeks are probably going to consist of a whole lot of waiting around for someone else to do something before the next person in line can do their thing.”

  Tara slowly exhaled. “I know. It is going to be hard not to have somewhere to go every day. But it is Christmas, and I remember wishing I had more time to enjoy the season when we were so busy last year.”

  “So let’s enjoy it. You know I haven’t even started my Christmas shopping.” I looked around the cabin. “And I need to finish packing up here so Cassie can move in, and we have Mr. Parsons’s party next week.” I paused to appreciate the brightly lit tree. “There is so very much to see too.” God, I was going to miss this place. “And of course there is also the Santa killer who needs tracking down. I know Finn is on it, and I have every confidence in his ability to catch the guy, but I still think I’m going to head over to talk to Wiley and Jingles. You can come with me if you want.”

  “I’m going to meet up with Danny in a little while. Like I said, he is going to help me figure out how to secure the building, so the things inside the bookstore that weren’t destroyed aren’t stolen before we are able to remove them. I’ll also need to figure out where to temporarily store whatever we manage to salvage. I’m actually hoping Finn will let Danny and me clear out the storage room right away, but there was talk of structural integrity, so I guess we’ll have to see how that goes.” Tara leaned forward and hugged me. “Thanks for having me over this morning. I really needed to talk everything through. I felt so lost and helpless when I first woke up, but then I talked to you and then Danny, and then we met and worked out a plan of action, I feel better now.”

  I smiled. “I’m glad. And I’m glad Danny is helping with the inventory. To be honest, the fact that someone might get into the building through the damaged wall and steal whatever wasn’t destroyed never even entered my mind.”

  “Mine either,” Tara admitted. “At first. But then my mind went into overdrive, and I started to imagine every possible scenario. I even began to worry about someone breaking in to rob us getting hurt and then suing us because we didn’t take precautions to stop people from breaking in and getting hurt.”

  As ridiculous as that sounded, I wasn’t sure that Tara’s concern was all that far off.

  “I was going to head next door and check in with Cassie and Siobhan before I head into town,” I informed Tara. “Do you want to come along?”

  She nodded. “I do. I want to check on Cassie. I know she wasn’t there when the bomb went off, but she has temporarily lost her only source of income. I want to assure her that we are going to take care of that.”

  “Cassie can probably pick up some shifts at the bar, and she has a place to live rent-free,” I pointed out. “I think she’ll be fine. But it might be nice if all of us talked things out. Willow too. She doesn’t need to worry about the income, but I’m sure she is feeling as displaced as the rest of us. Maybe we should all meet to discuss things at some point.”

  Chapter 18

  I drove over to Jane’s after Tara left. I was anxious to check in with Wiley and Jingles. I hoped that Wiley would have a new drawing for me. Something that might make the drawing he gave me yesterday make sense.

  “So, how did Jingles do last night?” I asked Jane when she answered the door and invited me in.

  “Excellent. I tucked both Wiley and Jingles into Wiley’s bed last night at around eight, and they both slept in until almost eight this morning. After the rough night Wiley had the night before, he really needed to have a good night’s sleep, which he did. Which we both did.”

  “I’m so glad.” I smiled.

  “How are you doing after yesterday’s events?” Jane asked.

  “I will admit that now that things are beginning to sink in, I feel pretty out of sorts. But I also realize I don
’t have time to sit around feeling sorry for myself. The most important thing is that no one was hurt, and I need to focus on that and not let the rest get me down. Besides, Jingles and I still need to help Finn track down the person behind these fires. From past experience, I know that the cats I work with have their own timeline, but I am hoping that Jingles will have a new clue for me today.”

  “Both Wiley and Jingles have been really quiet today. They came down for breakfast shortly after waking, but they’ve been back up in Wiley’s room staring out the window quite contently ever since. I’m fine with you going up to check in with them.”

  “I’d like to do that.”

  I followed Jane up the stairs. As she’d said, the cat and the boy were sitting on the bed looking out the window. When I arrived, Jingles jumped down and crossed the room to greet me, but Wiley never looked in my direction.

  “Good morning, Jingles,” I said to the cat, who was doing circle eights between my legs.

  “Meow.”

  I bent over and picked him up. “I don’t suppose you have a new clue for me today?”

  The cat put a paw on my cheek but didn’t answer.

  I glanced at Jane. “Have there been any new drawings?”

  “Not since you were here yesterday.”

  I glanced at Wiley, who was still staring out the window. “Is he looking at something?”

  “I don’t know. I suspect that he is staring off into the distance while his mind is elsewhere, but I don’t know what he is thinking about. I haven’t noticed anything particularly interesting going on out the window this morning.”

  I glanced around the room. Someone, probably Jane, had picked up the drawings that had been strewn all around the room yesterday and stacked them neatly on a table.

  “The tall man with the scribbled-out face that Wiley drew several times in the past couple of days: Has he drawn him before?”

  Jane paused. “I don’t know. He does draw a lot of really dark stuff sometimes. I find it disturbing, so most of the time I ignore it. I have a closetful of drawings we can look through if you are interested. I will admit that my first impression of the man without a face—that he was the person who set the fire at the Santa House—has changed somewhat.”

  “And why is that?” I asked.

  “Initially, we talked about Wiley having seen someone but hadn’t gotten a glimpse of his face because it was dark. That made sense in isolation. It is possible that the person who set fire to the Santa House passed by his window at some time. But the same figure was in the picture at the bookstore, and the man without a face was standing behind a woman with long hair in another picture as well. He couldn’t actually have seen anyone in either of those situations. The man with the scribble-out face must exist in his mind.”

  I paused and watched Wiley for a moment. He hadn’t moved, but he did look to be at peace. Wherever he was in his mind, he seemed to be happy there. “Do you think Wiley would mind if we looked at some of his drawings from the past few weeks?”

  “I don’t think he’ll mind.” Jane walked over to the closet, which contained hundreds of drawings. She took a pile from the top. “I just keep piling them in here, so these should be the more recent drawings. Well, except for the ones he’s done in the past couple of days, which are all in the pile on the table.”

  I began to sort through the drawings. Some were dark and featured monsters, blood, and graveyards, but others were bright and colorful. There were drawings of puppies and rainbows as well as of disfigured creatures that moved around in the night. There were also drawings of random images: a hairbrush, a broom leaning against a wall, even a plate with two fried eggs sitting on it.

  “Have you ever been able to decipher why he draws what he does? I mean, like the plate with the eggs. Was he just hungry when he drew that?”

  “Sometimes I have a good idea why he chooses to draw the things he does, and other times, I have no idea. Like these.” Jane pulled out a series of drawings of a puppy. “I’d taken Wiley for a walk in the park on the day he drew these. There was a woman there with a golden retriever puppy. Wiley didn’t appear to be particularly interested in it. I didn’t notice him watching or even looking at it. But when we got home, he drew at least twenty pictures of the puppy. Other times, I’m not sure where the ideas come from. Like this one.” She held up a drawing of a red bike on a blue cloud floating over a green sea with a pink raft floating on top of it. “I have no idea where any of this came from. The thing that really stood out to me about this drawing was the colors. Most of Wiley’s drawings are pencil drawings in black and white. When he does add color, it is usually subtle. But this is a rainbow of color.”

  Jane continued to sort through the drawings, stopping to point out a few along the way. When she came to a drawing of the people who’d drowned in the car, she paused. “The man with no face again,” she said, handing me the drawing.

  I took it from her and looked closely at the pencil drawing. The car, with four people inside, was covered with water, and the picture was very clearly drawn to the point where you could see the panic in their faces. In the background, there was an image hidden amid the grass growing beneath the waterline: a thin figure with no face.

  I held up that drawing. “So either the same person was responsible for the fire at the Santa House and the death of these four people, which I highly doubt, or the tall man with the scribbled-out face represents something a bit more general. Maybe the image represents evil. Or maybe death. Maybe it is what he uses to represent fear or foreboding. I’m not sure we can know, but I do suspect that looking for a real man who is thin and tall and wears dark clothing would be a waste of time.”

  “I would tend to agree.”

  I set the drawing aside and looked at Wiley again. It didn’t appear he’d moved an inch since I’d come into the room. “I was talking with some friends last night about everything that has been going on. We were trying to determine whether the fact that Wiley made drawings of Santa in the boat and the wall of locked drawers, both of which turned out to actually exist, indicates that whatever Tom Miller was doing with the boat and the items that were locked in the cabinets were connected to his death. Do you think he would have drawn them if the boat and the things in the drawers weren’t related?”

  Jane shrugged. “I have no idea. As I said, don’t know why he draws what he does. I suppose whatever Mr. Miller was doing might be instrumental in determining why he was killed, but I believe it is equally possible that Wiley was simply focusing in on the man wearing the Santa suit, and he picked up those images in his mind.”

  Okay, I supposed that did provide a bit of clarity. If it was possible that Wiley had drawn Tom in his boat and the wall of locked cabinets in the boat just because they were connected to Tom, and Wiley had only been picking up images associated with Tom because he’d been focused on Santa and Tom just happened to have been acting as Santa, that meant we didn’t have to limit ourselves to suspects known to Tom.

  After chatting with Jane a bit longer, I decided to continue to leave Jingles with Wiley for the time being. She assured me that if either Jingles or Wiley became agitated or showed any signs of distress, she would call me. I planned to call her later to check in regardless.

  I headed to Finn’s office straight from Jane’s house. I wasn’t certain he would have had time to obtain any new information since last night, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  “I do have something to tell you,” Finn informed me after I’d sat down on the other side of his desk and asked for an update. “I took some time to go through the letters and journals I found on Tom’s boat, and from what I have been able to gather, it appears that someone stole a load of silver bullion back in the 1950s,” Finn began. “The journal that mentions it doesn’t say where the silver was stolen from or who stole it, but it sounds as if the individual used the silver to make the counterfeit coins and then hid them. Perhaps the coins were earmarked for a specific use, or it could be the coins we
re a means of disguising the stolen silver. The journal doesn’t go into detail about why the coins were produced but never circulated, so we may never know the answer to that specific question.”

  “So Tom found the letters and journals and decided to look for the coins, which he must have had reason to believe were hidden on the island?”

  “It appears, based on what I can extrapolate from the diaries from the fifties and the letters, that is exactly what happened. Tom left his own journal of sorts in which he wrote about stumbling upon the old letters and journals and recognizing certain landmarks. He chronicles buying the boat so that he could go after the coins, which he believed were buried on a deserted island nearby. Based on the fact that we found coins in his pocket, and another twenty or so on his boat, I am going to assume that he found the stash he was looking for. Unfortunately, he didn’t name a location, but I suppose that if he was able to find the coins from clues left in the journals, someone else could have as well.”

  “So are we thinking that Tom’s death had something to do with these coins?” I asked.

  Finn bobbed his head slowly before answering. “I’m not sure. The coins have some value. The friend I sent them to told me they aren’t particularly good fakes, but of course, the silver could be melted down, and at today’s prices, if there are as many coins as the journal indicates, they’d be worth a pretty penny once melted down. Still, if someone found out about Tom’s treasure and wanted it for themselves, it seems they would have chosen a less public method of killing him. The idea that the coins are the motive for Tom’s murder doesn’t quite work in my mind.”

  “If Tom found a buried treasure and someone wanted to steal it, it would make a lot more sense if the person who wanted Tom dead shot him and dumped his body in the sea.” I leaned back in my chair. “Okay, so we can explain why Tom had old quarters in his pocket and what the key opened. We also can explain why Wiley might have drawn Santa on a boat. But I still don’t feel like we are any closer to finding the killer.”