How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery) Read Online Free PDF

the strategically placed lump and emit a terrified shriek—one that indicated she thought she’d accidentally smushed the body of a dead mouse.
    Isabella paused, reconsidering. Even if the niece were suddenly capable of understanding the complicated feline vocabulary, the cat probably wouldn’t share this tidbit with her. The fake mouse–hairball trick was far too much fun to spoil with a warning.
    Speaking of mice, Isabella mused, continuing the list of items her person failed to pick up on, a small family of rodents had taken up residence in the crawlspace beneath the stairs. After chasing a few members through the showroom, Isabella and the mice had reached a temporary truce. She would tolerate the mice’s presence in the Green Vase so long as they stayed clear of her food bowl in the second-floor kitchen.
    The cat lifted her head, proudly preening. She was nothing if not accommodating.
    • • •
    LEAVING THE NIECE still pensively gripping the recliner lever, Isabella hopped off the display table and meandered slowly toward the front of the showroom, pausing every so often to sniff at a floorboard or to rub the side of her face against a sharp corner. After a long course weaving in and around table legs and bookcases, she arrived at her favorite spot on the cashier counter and resumed her surveillance of the wet, wispy morning outside the store’s front windows.
    Isabella’s thoughts shifted from the mundane happenings inside the Green Vase to the far more nuanced machinations of Uncle Oscar and his crew. This was another area where the cat’s vast knowledge and expertise exceeded that of her human.
    She, for one, had always known that Oscar spent his days doing more than just cooking great chicken.
    The cat’s gaze dropped to the floor as she pondered the basement that lay below, stuffed to the rafters with Oscar’s eclectic antique collection. It also held the entrance to a secret underground tunnel that ran beneath downtown San Francisco.
    The tunnel was first formed during San Francisco’s Gold Rush era; its origins went back to the landfill expansion of the city’s downtown area and the coinciding construction of the Green Vase’s redbrick building. Over the years, countless individuals had used the passageway to slip in and out of Jackson Square undetected.
    It had been a busy thoroughfare of late. The most recent users included an intrepid antique shop owner, her two cats, an art dealer with lofty political aspirations, a burly amphibian expert, and a remote controlled mechanical alligator—in addition, of course, to Uncle Oscar.
    Isabella blinked, focusing her finely tuned senses. Her sonarlike ears closely monitored the foot traffic both above and below the showroom.
    Just a few months back, she had detected a pair of rubber-soled sneakers sliding through the second-floor kitchen window overlooking the alley behind the store. The intruder had made a daring leap from the roof of the alley Dumpster, giving him a precarious finger-hold grip on the window’s exterior ledge. Dangling down the side of the building, the young City Hall intern had managed to push open the unlocked windowpane and pull himself inside.
    Isabella’s shoulders stiffened with disapproval. The antique shop wasn’t the only target of the intern’s extracurricular investigations.
    It was this persistent snooping, she suspected, that had led to Spider’s downfall. Somewhere along the way, he had unearthed a secret that was meant to stay hidden.
    • • •
    CONTEMPLATIVE, ISABELLA RETURNED her attention to the art studio across the street.
    Monty’s lanky silhouette could still be seen storming about the open room. With the picture frame now thoroughly demolished from his frenzied stomping, he threw his hands up and clasped them over his head.
    As Isabella studied the scene, her extraordinary vision honed in on an item that her human had, predictably, missed.
    A vaporous being, not discernible to human eyes, trailed two steps