A Whisker of Trouble Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SECOND CHANCE CAT MYSTERIES

  “A surefire winner.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Miranda James

  “An affirmation of friendship as well as a tantalizing whodunit, The Whole Cat and Caboodle marks a promising start to a series sure to appeal to anyone who loves a combination of felonies and felines.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Ryan kicks off the new Second Chance Cat Mystery series with a lot of excitement. Her small Maine town is filled with unique characters. . . . This tale is enjoyable from beginning to end; readers will look forward to more.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Cozy readers will enjoy the new Second Chance Cat series.”

  —Gumshoe

  “If you enjoy a cozy mystery featuring a lovable protagonist with a bevy of staunch friends, a shop you’d love to explore, plenty of suspects, and a supersmart cat, you’ll love The Whole Cat and Caboodle.”

  —MyShelf.com

  “Enjoyable. . . . Remember—everyone has a secret, even the cat.”

  —Kings River Life Magazine

  “I am absolutely crazy about this series. . . . The cast of characters is phenomenal. . . . I loved every minute of this book.”

  —Melissa’s Mochas, Mysteries & Meows

  The Second Chance Cat Mysteries

  The Whole Cat and Caboodle

  Buy a Whisker

  A Whisker of Trouble

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © Darlene Ryan, 2016

  Excerpt from Curiosity Thrilled the Cat © Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 2011

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Obsidian and the Obsidian colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about Penguin Random House, visit penguin.com.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62595-8

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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

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  Contents

  Praise

  The Second Chance Cat Mysteries

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Excerpt from CURIOSITY THRILLED THE CAT

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my editor, Jessica Wade, for finding all the leaps in logic and holes in the plot. Thank you to my agent, Kim Lionetti, who keeps my professional life running smoothly. And thanks as well to John, who answered my questions about wine and never laughed at my ignorance. Any errors are mine, not his.

  Chapter 1

  Elvis regarded breakfast with disdain. “Oh, c’mon,” I said, leaning my elbows on the countertop. “It’s not that bad.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me and I think he would have raised a skeptical eyebrow if he’d had real eyebrows instead of just whiskers—which he didn’t, since he wasn’t the King of Rock and Roll or even a person. He was just a small black cat who thought he was a person and as such should be treated like royalty.

  “We could make a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich,” I said. “That was the real Elvis’s favorite.”

  The cat meowed sharply, his way of reminding me that as far as he was concerned he was the real Elvis and peanut butter and banana sandwiches were not his favorite breakfast food.

  I looked at the food I’d pulled out of the cupboard: two dry ends of bread, a banana that was more brown than it was yellow and a container of peanut butter that I knew didn’t actually have so much as a spoonful left inside, because I’d eaten it all the previous evening, with a spoon, while watching Jeopardy! with the cat. It wasn’t my idea of a great breakfast, either, but there wasn’t anything else to eat in the house.

  “I forgot to go to the store,” I said, feeling somewhat compelled to explain myself to the cat, who continued to stare unblinkingly at me from his perch on a stool at the counter.

  Elvis knew that it wouldn’t have mattered if I had bought groceries. I couldn’t cook. My mother had tried to teach me. So had my brother and my grandmother. My grandmother’s friend Rose was the most recent person to take on the challenge of teaching me how to cook. We weren’t getting very far. Rose kept having to simplify things for me as she discovered I had very few basic skills.

  “How did you pass the Family Living unit in school?” Charlotte, another of Gram’s friends, had asked after my last lesson in Rose’s small sunny kitchen. Charlotte had been a school principal, so she knew I’d had to take a basic cooking class in middle school. She’d been eyeing my attempt at meat loaf, which I’d just set on an oval stoneware platter and which I’d been pretty sure I’d be able to use as a paving stone out in the garden once the backyard dried up.

  I’d wiped my hands on my apron and blown a stray piece of hair off my face. “The school decided to give me a pass, after the second fire.”

  “Second fire?” Charlotte had said.

  “It wasn’t my fault.” I couldn’t help the defensive edge to my voice. “Well, the sprinklers going off wasn’t my fault.”

  “Of course it wasn’t, darling girl,” Rose had commented, her voice muffled because her head had been in the oven. She was cleaning remnants of exploded potatoes off the inside.

  “They weren’t calibrated properly,” I told Charlotte, feeling the color rise in my cheeks.

  “I’m sure they weren’t.” The corners of her mouth twitched and I could tell she was struggling not to smile.

  Tired now of waiting for breakfast, Elvis jumped down from the stool, made his way purposefully across the kitchen and stopped in front of the cupboard where I kept his cat food. He put one paw on the door and turned and looked at me.

  I pushed away from the counter and went over to him. I grabbed a can of Tasty Tenders from the cupboard. “Okay, you can have Tasty Tenders and I’ll have the peanut butter and banana sandwich.” I reached down to stroke the top of his head.

  He licked his lips and pushed his head against my hand.

  I got Elvis his breakfast and a dish of fresh water. He started eating and I eyed the two dry crusts and brown banana. The cat’s food looked better than mine.

 
I reached for the peanut butter jar, hoping that maybe there was somehow enough stuck to the bottom to at least spread on one of the ends of bread, and there was a knock on my door.

  Elvis lifted his head and looked at me. “Mrrr,” he said.

  “I heard,” I said, heading for the living room. It wasn’t seven o’clock, but I was pretty sure I knew who it was at the door.

  And I was right. Rose was standing there, holding a plate with a bowl upside down like a cover. “Good morning, Sarah,” she said. She held out the plate. “I’m afraid my eyes were a little bit bigger than my stomach this morning. Would you be a dear and finish this for me? I hate to waste food.” She smiled at me, her gray eyes the picture of guilelessness.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “You know, if you don’t tell the truth, your nose is going to grow.”

  Rose lifted one hand and smoothed her index finger across the bridge of her nose. “I have my mother’s nose,” she said. “Not to sound vain, but it is perfectly proportioned.” She paused. “And petite.” She offered the plate again.

  “You’re spoiling me,” I said.

  “No, I’m not,” she retorted. “Spoiling implies that your character has been somehow weakened, and that’s not at all true.”

  I shook my head and took the plate from her. It was still warm. I could smell cinnamon and maybe cheese?

  There was no point in ever arguing with Rose. It was like arguing with an alligator. There was no way it was going to end well for you.

  “Come in,” I said, heading back to the kitchen with my food. I set the plate on the counter and lifted the bowl. Underneath I found a mound of fluffy scrambled eggs, tomatoes that had been fried with onions and some herbs I couldn’t identify and a bran muffin studded with raisins. Rose was a big believer in a daily dose of fiber.

  It all looked even better than it smelled, and it smelled wonderful.

  Rose was leaning forward, talking to Elvis. She was small but mighty, barely five feet tall in her sensible shoes, with her white hair in an equally sensible short cut.

  I bent down and kissed the top of her head as I moved around her to get a knife and fork. “I love you,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “I love you, too, dear,” she said. “And thank you for helping me out.”

  Okay, so we were going to continue with the fiction that Rose had cooked too much food for breakfast. “Could I get you a cup of . . .” I looked around the kitchen. I was out of coffee and tea. And milk. “Water?” I finished.

  “No, thank you,” Rose said. “I already had my tea.”

  I speared some egg and a little of the tomatoes and onions with my fork. “Ummm, that’s good,” I said, putting a hand to my mouth because I was talking around a mouthful of food. Elvis was at my feet looking expectantly up at me. I picked up a tiny bit of the scrambled egg with my fingers and offered it to him.

  He took it from me, ate and then cocked his head at Rose and meowed softly.

  “You’re very welcome, Elvis,” she said.

  “Why don’t my eggs taste like this?” I asked, reaching for the muffin. Scrambled eggs were one of the few things I could make more or less successfully.

  “I don’t know.” Rose looked around my kitchen. Aside from the two crusts of bread, the empty peanut butter jar and the mushy banana on the counter, it was clean and neat. Since I rarely cooked, it never got messy. “How do you cook your eggs?”

  I shrugged and broke the muffin in half. “In a bowl in the microwave.”

  She gave her head a dismissive shake. “You need a cast-iron skillet if you want to make decent eggs.” She smiled at me. “Alfred and I will take you shopping this weekend.”

  I nodded, glad that my mouth was full so I didn’t have to commit to a shopping trip with Rose and her gentleman friend Alfred Peterson.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like Mr. P. I did. When Rose had been evicted from Legacy Place, the seniors’ building she derisively referred to as Shady Pines, I let her move into the small apartment at the back of my old Victorian. Mr. P. had generously made a beautiful cat tower for Elvis as a thank-you to me. He was kind and smart and he adored Rose. I didn’t even mind—that much—that Alfred had the sort of computer-hacking skills that were usually seen in a George Clooney movie and he was usually using them over my Wi-Fi.

  It was just that I knew if I went shopping with the two of them, I was apt to come home with one of every kitchen gadget that could be found in North Harbor, Maine. Rose had made it her mission in life to teach me to cook, no matter how impossible I was starting to think that was. And Mr. P. had already—gently, because he was unfailingly polite—expressed his dismay over the fact that I didn’t have a French press in my kitchen.

  Rose smiled at me again. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she said. “I need to go clean up my kitchen.”

  “Do you want to drive to the shop with me?” I asked. “Or Mac and I can come and get you when we’re ready to head out to Edison Hall’s place.”

  Rose worked part-time for me at my shop, Second Chance. Second Chance was a repurpose shop. It was part antiques store and part thrift shop. We sold furniture, dishes, quilts—many things repurposed from their original use, like the teacups we’d turned into planters and the tub chair that in its previous life had actually been a bathtub.

  Our stock came from a lot of different places: flea markets, yard sales, people looking to downsize. I bought fairly regularly from a couple of trash pickers. Several times in the past year that the store had been open, we’d been hired to go through and handle the sale of the contents of someone’s home—usually someone who was going from a house to an apartment. This time we were going to clean out the property of Edison Hall. He had died over the winter and clearing out the house had turned out to be too much for his son and his sister.

  Calling the old man a pack rat was putting it nicely. Rose and Mac were going with me to get started on the house, along with Elvis, because I’d heard rustling in several of the rooms in the old place and I was certain it wasn’t the wind in the eaves.

  “Why don’t I just come with you?” Rose said. “That will save you having to come back and get me.”

  “All right,” I said, picking up a piece of the muffin and wishing I had coffee. “Does half an hour give you enough time?”

  She smiled at me. “It does.”

  I put down my fork to walk her to the door, but she waved one hand at me. “Eat,” she ordered, already heading for the living room. “I can see myself out.”

  I stuffed the bite of muffin in my mouth and waved over my shoulder as the door closed behind her.

  I finished my breakfast, sharing another bite of the scrambled eggs with Elvis. He followed me into the bathroom, washing his face while I brushed my teeth. When we came out of the apartment, Rose was just coming out of hers.

  “Perfect timing,” she said, bustling over to us, as usual carrying one of her oversize tote bags.

  Ever since I’d seen the movie Mary Poppins, I’d thought that Rose’s bags were like the magical nanny’s carpetbag. You just never knew what was going to be inside. This one looked as if it had been made from the same blue-striped canvas as a train engineer’s hat.

  “I have coffee just in case we’re out,” Rose said, patting the side of the carryall with one hand.

  “Just coffee?” I asked as I picked up the canvas tote at my own feet. Mine was filled with a stack of thrift store sweaters that I’d brought home and felted for my friend Jess.

  “And some tea bags.” Rose held the door so Elvis could go out first.

  I looked at her, raising one eyebrow.

  “And a coffee cake.” She followed Elvis outside. “Don’t make that face, Sarah. We all work better after a cup of tea and a little taste of something.”

  “If I keep on having a ‘little taste of something,’ I’m going to turn into a big something,” I
said, pulling out my keys and pushing the button to unlock the SUV.

  “Nonsense,” Rose said, making a dismissive gesture with one hand. “All that running you do, you’d be skin and bones if I didn’t feed you.” She set her bag on the floor of the passenger side of the vehicle and climbed inside. Elvis had already jumped in and settled himself in the middle of the backseat. I set my bag and my briefcase next to him.

  “Are those more tablecloths?” Rose asked, half turning in her seat and pointing at the canvas tote.

  I slammed the passenger door and slid in behind the wheel. “No. It’s a bunch of sweaters I felted for Jess.”

  Rose’s gray eyes lit up. “Is she going to make more slippers?”

  I nodded as I stuck the key in the ignition.

  Jess was a master at recycling and upcycling clothes. Her latest project was making slippers out of felted wool sweaters. We were going to sell them at Second Chance. She’d made me a red pair of slipper “boots” that I’d worn at the shop most of the winter. So many customers had asked about them that Jess and I had scoured area thrift stores over the weekend looking for sweaters that would felt well. I had done the actual process in my washer and dryer, and Jess was coming by the store to pick up the soft, shrunken sweaters.

  “Do you think she’d make a pair for me?” Rose asked. “And for Alfred? They’d be lovely to wear around the apartment.”

  “I’m sure she would,” I said. I concentrated on backing out of the driveway and tried to push away the image of Alfred Peterson, who generally wore his pants up under his armpits, in a pair of bright felted boots halfway up his calves.

  Second Chance was in a brick building from the late eighteen hundreds located on Mill Street, where it curved and began to climb uphill. We were about twenty minutes by foot from the downtown, and easily accessed from the highway—the best of both worlds for catching the tourists. We had a decent side parking lot and an old garage, which we were working on turning into work and storage space.

  Tourists came to North Harbor during the spring and summer for the beautiful Maine seacoast. In the fall and winter it was the nearby hills with the autumn colors and skiing that drew them in.