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city square with a statue of a miner with a gold pan, and then I looked down a side street and saw a palomino horse rearing up on its hind legs.”
    “A horse? In town?”
    “I was surprised too. I thought it must have gotten loose from somewhere.”
    Kelli laughed delightedly. “Dr. Sugarman’s horse.” She spoke the name with unexpected warmth, considering her chilly attitude toward the other residents of Hello. “And the horse does look real, doesn’t it? But it’s made out of fiberglass.”
    If there’s an animal of any species within jogging distance, Abilene will find it or it will find her. Maybe that includes fiberglass varieties.
    “So I walked over there to look, and by the time I got there I saw what it was. It’s in front of a veterinarian’s office. And there was a sign in the window saying ‘Assistant Wanted.’ I wondered what kind of experience or training a veterinarian’s assistant would need, and I decided I’d just go in and ask.”
    “What did you find out?”
    “Nothing right then. The door was locked, and there was one of those clock-face signs in the window, with the hands showing the vet would be back at four o’clock.”
    “Dr. Sugarman does mostly small animals,” Kelli explained, “but in an emergency he’ll go out to a ranch for a sick horse or cow. Or over to Stella Sinclair’s, if she gets in a tizzy about her potbellied pig eating too many Godiva chocolates.” Kelli rolled her eyes, apparently not overly sympathetic to the plight of a pig on a chocolate high.
    “Anyway, I didn’t have a watch to know what time it was,” Abilene went on, “so I was just standing there trying to decide whether to wait for a while, when an SUV screeched up. A little girl jumped out with a cat wrapped in a blanket, and her mother jumped out right behind her. And both of them were frantic when they found the vet wasn’t there, because the cat was unconscious.”
    “Oh no—”
    “They’d had some old Christmas lights out and were testing them. The cat chewed on the electrical cord and got shocked.”
    “And it was still alive?” Kelli said. “That’s a wonder.”
    “I didn’t think it was alive. It was limp . Then I remembered seeing on TV about how this fireman gave CPR to an unconscious cat he’d pulled out of a burning building.”
    “You gave CPR to a cat?” Kelli asked.
    “I wasn’t sure exactly how to do it, but I figured I couldn’t hurt the poor thing. It wasn’t breathing at all. So I tried to remember what I’d seen on TV, and I closed the cat’s mouth and put my mouth over its face and breathed into its nose. It’s different than how you do CPR on a person,” she added.
    “A whole lot different,” Kelli said, which I had to echo. Then Kelli added thoughtfully, “But I guess I could do it if I had to. If it were my Sandra Day . . .”
    Now it was my turn to be astonished. “You named your cat for a former Supreme Court judge?”
    Kelli smiled self-consciously. “Not many people make the connection. It’s kind of a lawyer thing.”
    I nodded toward Koop, who was busily kneading Kelli’s lap. “He hates smokers. His name’s Koop.”
    Kelli looked blank for a moment, then awareness lit up her face with another smile. “After the surgeon general who was such a fanatic against smoking!”
    “Not many people make that connection either.”
    It’s odd how bonds form between people. You wouldn’t think cat names would do it. But we smiled at each other, and I felt a definite link here. It didn’t prove Kelli Keifer wasn’t a murderer, but it was going to take more than Ben’s “everyone knows she did it” to make me think she was.
    I turned back to Abilene. “So what happened with the cat?”
    “After a little while it started breathing on its own.”
    Kelli clapped. “Hey, that’s awesome!”
    “I was really surprised when it worked,” Abilene admitted. “And then the vet drove up, and the woman told him what I’d done. So he asked if I’d