A Familiar Tail Read Online Free PDF Page B

possibly prejudicing eagerness off my face by eating more grunt.
    â€œWell, all right.” Valerie gave me an eye roll that said she was humoring the anxious father-to-be. “Just for a minute.”
    Carrying the bowl and mug, I decided to live dangerously and take a table on the brick terrace below the porch, in the full blaze of the morning sun. Valerie sank carefully into the chair across from me with a cup of peppermint tea and an audible sigh. I nodded in sympathy as I dug into my blackberry grunt. My invitation was not purely social, which was probably not going to come as a surprise to my hostess, who had already started eyeing me sideways. What she probably didn’t guess, though, was that my deep ulterior motives for asking her to sit with me were not limited to her reaction to finding out who my grandmother was.
    â€œValerie, do you guys have a cat?” We could work around to what she knew, or thought she knew, about Blessingsounds slowly.
    Valerie shook her head. “We’d like one, but so many people have allergies we decided against it. Why do you ask?”
    â€œThere was a gray cat on my sill yesterday.” I waved my spoon up toward my window and kept my tone very, very casual. Because on the way downstairs I hit on the perfect explanation for what had happened. The cat who’d turnedup here last night wasn’t actually Alistair the Spooky Cat who had been in and under my Jeep. This was another cat entirely. It only
looked
like Alistair. Maybe they’d come from the same litter. It was a small town. It could happen.
    Valerie followed my gesture with her gaze. She frowned and my heart plummeted. “Was he a sort of solid silvery gray, by any chance? With blue eyes?”
    â€œYes, that’s the one.”
Oh, no. No. Come on, no.
    â€œAlistair?” Valerie breathed. “Oh, my G . . .
you
saw Alistair? Where? When?” she demanded, leaning forward over her rounded tummy. Her pink cheeks flushed bright red, and she clutched her mug so hard I was afraid the thing might break.
    I have to admit, the force of her reaction startled the heck out of me. “On my windowsill yesterday, and he was hiding under my Jeep before that, if it was the same cat.”
    Valerie pressed her fingertips against her mouth and stared up at my window. “Could it . . . ? After all this time, I’d given up . . . Alistair? Really?”
    â€œAlistair,” I repeated gloomily. I was right. The universe had heard my declaration about no mystery cats for Annabelle, and the universe had laughed. “Sean, the bartender at the Pale Ale, recognized him and told me he’d been missing for a while.”
    â€œYes,” murmured Valerie. “Yes,” she repeated more firmly, like you do when you’re dragging your thoughts back from a long ways off. “Six months and more . . . since Dorothy—she was his owner . . . since she . . . died.” Her voice wobbled.
    â€œI’m sorry for your loss.” This was a guess on my part, but normally a person didn’t wobble for absent strangers, not to mention strangers’ cats. Plus, I couldn’t help noticing how Valerie was chopping her sentences to bits. This was also not normally a sign of emotional detachment.
    â€œSorry. It still hits me sometimes.” Valerie took several rapid sips of her tea, as if trying not to talk too much, or tocry. Guilt shriveled my insides. Here I was worrying about a weird cat encounter when the woman in front of me had lost her very real friend. “I’ve known her since I came to Portsmouth. I had known her, that is,” Valerie said. “We were neighbors.” She gestured toward the back fence. “She was always in and out of here. In fact, she was the one who talked me into buying this house and setting up the business. It was after that I met Roger . . .” Val cut that sentence