The Adventures of Thistledown Copperbottom #2: Fat Cats

New Story Launch

2010-10-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

http://secretidentitynovel.blogspot.com/

the final chapter

2010-10-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

“So it had to be Mrs. Daws,” Tabitha said, still staring at the house from the car. “She and I are the only two people that feed him, and I didn’t do it.”

But what are the other ways he could have been poisoned, other than food?” Thistle prompted and Tabitha thought back over the days leading up to Mr. Daws’ death. “I always got the coffee,” she said carefully, “so it couldn’t have been that…but Mr. Daws forgot his heart pills the day before he died. Mrs. Daws brought them in for him--it must have been the pills!”

Tabitha fumbled for her cell phone and called Maya. “The poison had to be in his pills,” she explained excitedly.

“We checked every bottle in his house already,” Maya explained. “There was nothing.”

Tabitha felt her heart drop. “Nothing? At all?”

“There were pills for high blood pressure, cholesterol and heartburn, as well as some over the counter stuff. None of it tested positive.”

“Do you think Mrs. Daws did it?”

Maya was silent for a few moments. “I think that if she was going to murder her husband, she would have done it a long time ago.”

“Then it must have been Vanessa.”

“We don’t have any indication that she had the opportunity.”
“Ok
ay,” Tabitha said with a sigh, thanking Maya and hanging up the phone. “Lets get out of here before someone thinks I’m a stalker.”

Tabitha drove a few blocks before she slammed on the breaks, sending Thistle flying off the seat. “What was that for?” he complained from the floor.

Tabitha was already dialing Maya’s number again. “What about vitamins?”

“What?”

“Did you find any vitamins when you searched Mr. Daws’ house?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Tabitha felt lightheaded with excitement. “Vanessa bought him vitamins. She asked him if he was taking them.”

“We didn’t find any vitamins,” Maya assured. Her voice sounded a little higher--
she was excited herself.

“His pill box probably had them.”

“I know we didn’t find anything like that--only bottles.”

“The last time I saw it was in the conference room when Mrs. Daws brought it in. Maybe its still in the office somewhere.” Driving again, Tabitha changed directions, heading towards the office building. It was only four o’ clock--Vanessa would still be there.

“I’ll call Gould,” Maya said.

“Don’t you want to check yourself?”

Maya sighed on the other side of the line. “It’s not my case anymore. All I can do is pass on the info.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m getting sick and tired of people taking my arrests away from me.”

Poor Maya. “Do you want to get a drink tonight?” Tabitha asked suddenly. “I have a feeling I’m going to celebrate clearing my name.”

“I get off at eight.”

“Well, I’m not going to miss this,” Tabitha said to Thistle after she hung up. “Lets go.”

“I’m sure that’s a great idea.”

“Is that your sarcasm voice?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds like your regular voice. I want to see that bitch get arrested.”

“What about me?”

“You can wait in the car.”

“Sounds like fun.”

******

“If I have to use the litter box and I’m still locked in here, I cant be held responsible for what I do,” Thistle said when Tabitha pulled into her usual parking spot. She was running on pure adrenaline now--she hardly heard him.

“Okay,” she said, and left him alone in the car.

“She’s going to get herself in trouble,” he told himself as he watched her walk away. He put his paws up on the arm rest of the door. She’d left the window cracked, and he tested it with his whiskers. He would just be able to slip through.

With some effort he squeezed out of the car and followed Tabitha. She took the elevator up and he noted the floor it came to rest on.. There was no door on the stairwell, thankfully, and he was able to follow her up using the stairs.

He came out into a small lobby area. Tabitha was arguing with the woman at the desk, and Thistle slipped past them into the office. “Come on Kim,” Tabitha said. “I want to see this.”

“You’re not allowed--” Kim said, but Tabitha ignored her, and soon was walking past Thistle. He hurried to catch up, and Thistle and Tabitha walked right in on three people talking. They were in a small office full of cardboard boxes--someone was moving. One of them was Caleb, and he assumed the others were Gould and Vanessa. “You shouldn’t be here,” Gould said immediately.

“Why is your cat here?” Caleb demanded, and Thistle froze inside the doorway.

Tabitha let out a heavy sigh. “I told you to wait in the car.” Thistle wanted to say something but didn’t dare, as usual. “I promise not to touch or say anything,” Tabitha said. “I’ve been cleared, right?”

“You’re looking pretty suspicious now,” Caleb said.

“Stop being an ass,” Tabitha snapped. “I didn’t do it and you know it, so just shut up. Did you find the pills?”

“They’re right here,” Vanessa said angrily, taking a huge plastic pill box out of one of the cardboard boxes. “They were under the table in the conference room. And I didn’t buy the vitamins, Lawrence did. He has a friend who runs a health food store and got a good deal. I even had him put them in the box for me--he‘d do anything I asked him.”

Gould, wearing rubber gloves, snapped open one of the little doors and picked up a green capsule. He pried the two sides apart and the powder spilled out of the flimsy halves. “It would be real easy to fill empty capsules with poison,” Caleb said. “You can buy them empty online.”

“I didn’t do it either,” Vanessa said. “I know I come across as a callous bitch, but I loved my grandpa,” Vanessa said. “Lawrence. It had to be Lawrence. If that is poison in those capsules, it was him.”

“Where is he?” Gould asked.

“Getting coffee.”

“Why would Lawrence do it?” Tabitha asked unable to help herself.

Vanessa gave her a haughty look. “That man worships me,” she said, and Thistle had to admire how unabashed she was when she said it. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“He certainly worships himself,” Tabitha said. “But yes, I will admit he’s got a loyalty. He actually likes his job in any case. I suppose that says a lot.”

“He knew I wanted the partnership. I was getting impatient.”

“Is this his desk?” Gould asked, and when she nodded he started checking the drawers. The desk was pushed up against the wall, and Thistle thought he saw something white underneath. No one way paying him any attention, so he slunk over and slipped under the desk. The white thing was a bottle, and he batted it out from under the desk. It made a slight rattling sound. “The cat,” Vanessa said when Thistle re-emerged. “Why the hell did you bring your cat?” she asked Tabitha, momentarily distracted.

“He’s special,” Tabitha said, openly smiling. Gould picked up the bottle and opened it.

“That’s the bottle of pills,” Vanessa said as Gould poured a few into his palm. “But they’re brown--not green.”

“He emptied them out,” Caleb said. “And replaced the insides with the poison.”

The four humans stared at the pills and Thistle sat down and started to give himself a bath. He had to do all of the work--it was exhausting.

Even Thistle was startled when the door clicked open, and Lawrence walked in with a cardboard tray of cups. “Officers--you’re still here.” He held up a Krispy Kreme bag. “I brought snacks. Tabitha,” he said, surprised. “They let you out of jail?”

“Because I didn’t kill him,” she said. “You’ve been spreading all the rumors about me, haven’t you? To take suspicion off yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lawrence said, even as Gould took the cups and bag from his hands while Caleb brought out his handcuffs. “Of course you--” his voice cut off when the first cuff wrapped around his wrist.

“You are under arrest,” Caleb said, running though the Miranda Rights.

Lawrence stared at his cuffed wrists. “Vanessa?” he questioned.

She was staring at him. “You poisoned my grandfather so I could become partner?”

“We’re a great team,” Lawrence said. “I wanted us to be the best. You deserved it and so did I.” He glanced over at Tabitha. “She didn’t.”

“Come on,” Gould said, bagging the pill box and bottle and handing them off to Caleb so he could grab Lawrence roughly by the arm. “You’re toast.”

They were gone quickly, and Thistle walked over to Tabitha and meowed. She scooped him into her arms. “That was unexpected,” she said to Vanessa. “I really thought you did it.”

“I thought you did it,” Vanessa said. “Sorry.”

“Sorry enough to give me my job back?”

“I do seem to be short a secretary.”

Tabitha laughed and shook her head. “I hated being a secretary.”

“You’re happier selling sandwiches?”

“Yes. I am.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I know.”

*****

Tabitha dumped Thistle into the car. “I told you to stay put.”

“You needed me,” Thistle said.

She was about to start the car when Vanessa ran up and tapped on the window. “We were keeping this under-wraps,” Vanessa said, handing Tabitha an envelope. “But now that I know…this is yours.”

Confused, Tabitha opened it and found a check for fifty-thousand dollars. “What is this?”

“Grandpa had you added to his will only a few weeks ago.”

“No wonder you all thought we were having an affair.”

“He really did like you,” Vanessa said. “Grandma thought he loved you.”

“I was just a secretary.”

“Well, you were a good one. Good luck with your new career.”

“Thanks.”

When Vanessa was gone Tabitha looked at Thistle. “This will pay off over half the house.”

“You have impossible luck,” Thistle said. “I can’t believe it.”

“Thank you for helping me. You’re a good cat.”

“I’m an amazing cat.”

“I know.”

******

A/N:
That turned out better than I thought...

To answer Thrantor's question: Mysteries are just not my thing. I read dozens of them while researching Thistle and hated them all. I love the characters in this story and I had a lot of fun writing the first mystery, but this second one really grated on me, hence the shorter chapters and all of the late posts. Every update felt like a chore when it should have been fun, and I get that writing is supposed to be work, but if you dont enjoy what you're doing, you're doing something wrong.

I can't say I'll never pick up Thistle again. If I come up with a brilliant murder I will certainly come back and write another.

In the mean time, Secret Identities will launch as soon as I remember my flash drive (yep, forgot the damn thing again). Either this afternoon or this evening, I promise. Here is the link for it in any case: http://secretidentitynovel.blogspot.com/

ugh.

2010-09-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

forgot my flash drive again. update tomorrow morning.

Just to Let You Know

2010-09-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

I want to post the last chapter of Thistledown and the first chapter of my new project, Secret Identity, at the same time. Both will go up tomorrow nite--I just want one more day to fiddle with the new story.

Thanks to everyone who read Thistledown--I'm sorry it didn't work out, but mysteries are not my thing.

A bit about Secret Identity (you're going to love it--I love it):

Glory Hart and Lola Merriweather are best friends in high school, but things change when they start at The University Noir. Glory has been accepted into the training program for the League of Heroes, her dream since she discovered her super-speed as a child.

Despite Lola's impressive mind control skills she did not receive an invitation to join the League, nor does she want to take after her mother, notorious bank robber Mesmera. Lola has bigger plans--she want to take over the world.

Lawrence Lawrence wants nothing more than to escape from small town hell and a family that doesn't understand him, but he doesn't know where. He never even considers his powers of telekinesis to be anything more than a freak accident, but receiving a letter from the League of Heroes gives him direction and meaning, plus he meets a girl!

Super villain Dark Lothario has just been released from the mental institution and he's determined to pick up where he left off, but not if Glory has anything to do with it.

Ch 7 In which Suspects are Observed

2010-09-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

Tabitha had to admit that the last thing she wanted to do was go into work the next morning, but she couldn’t let Leticia down, so she stumbled out of bed and got dressed in a pair of jeans and a green t-shirt, finding her most comfortable shoes to better stand a day on her feet. She barely had time to get food for Thistle and Fritz and put the dog outside. “We’re talking about what you did last night when I get home,” she told Thistle. “And you’d better be here.”

The world was washed clean from the rain the night before. Normally Tabitha would have taken great joy in the freshness, but she was preoccupied as she drove. It had to be a family member, she decided. No one else would benefit from it. And from the Sandwich Shop, she was in the perfect position to spy on the one most likely to have done it--Vanessa.

“You okay?” Leticia asked when Tabitha came into the shop.

“Sure,” she answered.

“You look like you want to kill someone, that’s all. Not that you would do that,” she added quickly. “This will all blow over sooner or later. Don’t let it stress you.”

Tabitha was given a time card and a name tag before Leticia set her up to use the cash register, exactly where she wanted to be when at eight-thirty Vanessa walked in, staring at her phone as she texted someone. “Double-shot espresso,” she said without looking up, “and a cheese Danish.”

“Your total is five dollars, ninety-five cents,” Tabitha said, hiding a smile.

Vanessa’s head jolted up and her cell phone clattered across the counter. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You fired me, remember? I had to get a new job. Will that be cash or credit?”

“You can’t work here!” Tabitha grabbed a danish out of the cooler case and put it in a wax paper bag. Behind her Leticia was making Vanessa’s drink, her back to them. Tabitha knew she was laughing by her reflection shaking in the door of the cooler. “It’s not right! You should be in jail.”

“Because of the poison they found in my desk, right? The police aren’t stupid Vanessa. I know you planted that poison to frame me, and they do too.”

“I did no such thing!” Vanessa sputtered, turning red.

“You had the most to gain from your grandfather’s death,” Tabitha continued, unable to help herself. “You weren’t going to be made partner until he was gone. It had to have been you. And as soon as I figure out how you did it, you’re going down.”

“My grandfather was pushing eighty with a bad heart. Why would I have poisoned him? You did it, for revenge.”

Revenge. It did make more sense. Tabitha looked at Vanessa. She was still not her polished self. Something had to be wrong, it had to be her. But it could have been Mrs. Daws.

“I didn’t kill your grandfather,” Tabitha insisted. “I didn’t like him, true, but I was not having an affair with him and I didn’t kill him. The fact that none of you people will believe me is ridiculous. Now, here’s your Danish and your coffee. That’ll be five ninety-five.”

Vanessa glared at her and stalked out of the restaurant, leaving her order on the counter. “Sorry about that,” Tabitha told Leticia, who plucked up the danish and took a bite of it. “I think I might have cost you a customer.”

“I’ll live. Hey, at least with you here things wont be boring. This is what I’ve been craving all morning.” She leaned against the counter, closing her eyes as she chewed the pastry. “This pregnancy thing is great for an excuse to eat anything I want.”

*****

Tabitha was tired again when she got home at two o’ clock, and she knew her day wasn’t over yet. She sat down with Thistle and Fritz. “Okay,” she said, mostly addressing Thistle, but knowing the dog would get something out of the conversation, even if it was only her tone of voice. “What the hell happened last night?”

“We tried to go spy on the wife,” Thistle admitted. “But Kyle caught us before we even got off the street.” Fritz barked. “Fritz says he likes walking in the rain, but not the dark.”

Tabitha frowned. “You’re not a person, Thistle,” she said finally. “You can’t just go off like that--it’s dangerous. What if you’d gotten lost? You could have been hit by a car, or picked up by animal control--especially with Fritz with you. People don’t like strange animals wandering around.

“We’re both micro chipped,” Thistle offered. “I memorized the map, I look both ways before crossing the street. It would have been fine.”

“The Daws’s house is miles away--what did you think I was going to do when I came home and you were gone? I was panicking! If you had decided to dissapear for the night I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” Thistle said, but she couldn’t tell if he meant it or not. How much of a concience did a cat have? “I promise I wont do it again.”

“No, you won’t. You’re an indoor cat now.”

Thistle surprised her--he growled. “You can’t do that.”

“Watch me. Does he understand what I’m saying?” she asked, referring to Fritz.

“He knows we did bad last night,” Thistle replied. “He thinks it’s my fault.”

“It is.”

“You have to let me check out the wife. She might have done it.”

“Forget it.”

“You can drive me and wait for me outside the house--I just want to know what she’s doing now that her husband is gone. You want to know too, don’t you? Don’t you want to clear your name?”

“I hate you,” Tabitha replied.

******

Riding in the car Thistle had the faintest fear that he was on the way to the vet, and this fear carried him across town, until Tabitha pulled over at the end of a tree lined street full of huge Victorian mansions. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Tabitha said as she turned off the engine.

Thistle looked at her from his perch on the passenger seat. “I know what I’m doing.”

“No you don’t!”

“I do,” Thistle insisted. “I write a gossip column, remember? I spy on people all the time. I
know just what to do.”

“Be careful,” she said. “I’m going to drive around the neighborhood and come back, okay? I don’t want to look suspicious. I’ve been doing that enough.”

“I‘m not suspicious,” Thistle said, eager to be out of the car. It felt awfully claustrophobic.

“It’s the house in the middle of the street, with the green door,” Tabitha said, and leaned over him to open up the car door. “You have fifteen minutes.”

“Got it, boss,” Thistle said and jumped out of the car, walking down the strange street like he owned it. The Daws residence had a slightly wild front yard of trees and ivy, surrounded by a cast iron fence that Thistle slipped through easily. It was mid-afternoon and suprisingly warm (much better spy weather than the night before) so Thistle hoped for an open window or door.

He circled the house to a large brick patio surrounded by more trees. At first glance he could see that the house was shut up tight, but Thistle's eyes were immediately drawn to the Siamese sunning himself on top of a glass topped table near the kitchen window. "Hey you," Thistle said, stepping up to the other cat.

The Siamese raised his head, a bell on a pink collar jingling from the movement. "Go away alley cat."

Thistle tried to stay calm. "Is this your place?" Thistle asked, waltzing up to the table. "Its a nice place."

"Don't bother. My mistress will have nothing to do with strays," the Siamese said, purposefully ignoring Thistle's own collar. Thistle didnt know who he was kidding--no cat cared about who was owned and who wasn't. Except for purebred assholes like this guy. He was probably neutered. The toms with the biggest attitudes always were. The Siamese stretched and Thistle noted he had no front claws. The poor bastard.

"I wouldn't eat anything your mistress brought me," Thistle continued. "This the Daws place?"

"Why?"

"Heard you had a death in the family. It must be very sad."

"Hardly!" the other cat exclaimed.

"So everything has been peachy-keen around here?"

The cat swished his tail. "I wouldn't go that far. Too many people, too much arguing. Too much new stuff." He looked up at the sky. "Good thing the weather's nice."

"Got kicked out, huh?" Thistle said.

"Of course not!" The Siamese sat up. Thistle got a good look at his tag--it read "Pookie." Poor, poor bastard. "I simply slipped out the basement window to get away from it all. It's nice out. I like it."

"Basement window?" The cat was suddenly less interesting, and Thistle left him to his own devices and poor neutered, claw-less Pookie didnt try to follow. The broken window was on the other side of the house, barely wide enough for Thistle to squeeze through. He dropped about five feet into a slightly damp basement featuring an ancient furnace and not much else. The basement door was open and he hurried up the stairs, coming up in a laundry room featuring brand-new appliances. The dryer still had stickers on it. < Interesting. >

He moved carefully through the kitchen (new refrigerator) and into the dining room, keeping low to the floor. He found Mrs. Daws in a half-decorated sitting room, talking on the phone with a wireless headset while opening a large box. "I just got the new curtains in the mail," she was telling someone on the other line, "and I'm having men come next week to re-paint. It's so nice to do everything I've always wanted to." Boxes littered the room, more flowing into the front hall. Apparently Mrs. Daws had been doing some shopping since her husband's death. "Vanessa is being difficult--the girl is so much like her grandfather--she wants to keep that moldy old study just like it was before, but I've always wanted an exercise room. I daresay I'll just dump all those books in the attic and she can do what she will with the place when she owns it. Lord knows my days are numbered."

Vanessa caring about her grandfather's things didn't fit with what Tabitha had told him.
Thistle wanted to listen more, but the doorbell rang and Mrs. Daws got off the phone, and
Thistle figured he had been gone longer than fifteen minutes anyway.

He went back the way he came, heading to the front of the house without going back to see Pookie again. At the front of the house there was a large truck and two men in uniform struggled with a large, flat package that might have been a painting. Thistle contemplated tripping one of them but decided against it and hurried up the sidewalk to where Tabitha's car was waiting.

"Well?" she asked when he jumped in through the window she had rolled down.

"I think motive is all well and good," Thistle said, "She has motive--the entire family does--but we are forgetting. Who--besides you--had opportunity?"

*****

A/N:
Sorry for the hold up. I am feeling better today, but I still have a nasty cough.

I think this will be wrapped up in one or two more chapters. In case you havent figured it out, mysteries are apparently not my thing, so this will be the last Thistledown for the time being. I havent given up on it entirely, just probably.

I'm fairly certain you guys will like my next project. It should be launching by the time I finish up here. I'm going back to slightly more familiar territory with a super hero genre, called The Talented. (I think that's what its called.) More info with next week's post.

Ch 6: In Which Maya Saves the Day

2010-09-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

Chapter 5: In Which

By two o’ clock Tabitha was dragging. What had started out as fun had turned into real work, and she wasn’t used to the manual labor. Plus there was the whole what-did-Detective-Gould-want hanging over her head. Leticia sent her home.

“Eight AM if you still want the job,” she said merrily as she sent Tabitha out the door.

Tabitha collected her car from across the street and went home, letting Fritz into the house immediately because it looked like rain. She collapsed on the couch as soon as she walked into the living room. Thistle jumped up next to her. “Good, you’re here. I just got off the phone with the guy at Broadway Security. He says he can have our surveillance equipment by this afternoon.”

“What?” Tabitha woke back up again. “You’re a cat, Thistle. Why can’t you act like one for once? How much did you spend?”

He was silent and she groaned. “I havent paid for it yet,” he said finally. “Don’t you want to catch who did this?”

“Yes! But you can’t do stuff like that. It’s not admissible in court for one. For another, we can’t afford it. I’m making sandwiches for a living now. We need that money to do things like pay the mortgage.”

“You shouldn’t have bought this place,” Thistle said. “Stuff’s always breaking, and the bank gave you a terrible rate.”

“Too late, too bad.”

Someone knocked on the door and a flash of fear shot through Tabitha. She peeked through the window and saw her fears were valid. A stern man in a suit stood at her doorstep. Caleb was still with him. How did he manage to stay on the case when Maya got kicked off? Tabitha wondered and opened the door.

“Can I help you officers?” she asked, trying to keep her voice cool and collected.

“Miss Silverstein,” Caleb said, “You need to come down to the station.”

She clutched the doorknob. “You can ask me any questions here.”

“I’m afraid we can’t,” Gould said. “Please come with us.”

Tabitha looked back at Thistle but the cat offered her no advice, nor would he in front of people. She sighed and grabbed her purse and locked the door. Across the street Mrs. Garret was standing in her yard, not even hiding the fact that she was staring as Tabitha followed the two police to their car. Caleb opened the door and she got into the back seat, immediately feeling trapped by the cage separating her from the front seat. This is so not happening, Tabitha thought.

“This is silly,” she tried to tell the two men in the front seat as they drove. “I didn’t do it--Caleb, you know I didn’t do it.”

“Last summer she had an affair with a guy who bashed his mother’s head in,” Caleb told Gould, ignoring Tabitha’s pleas.

“That’s not fair!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know--Caleb. I’m sorry. I already told you I was sorry. Our relationship had been on the rocks forever before last summer, and you know that fully well.” She frowned. “You never even liked me much.”

“Shut up.”

Deciding it would be best to not antagonize the man with the gun and handcuffs Tabitha was silent until they sat her down in a bare interrogation room at the police station. “Please state your relationship with the victim,” Gould said, sitting down across from her. Tabitha was relived to see that Caleb would not be joining them.

She spent the next hour going over every minute detail of her relationship with Mr. Daws and his family. “I’ve gone over all of this with Detective Vargas,” Tabitha said finally. “You could have just talked to her.”

“Well, it’s not exactly wise for friends to interrogate friends,” he said. “And Detective Vargas missed something vital.”

“What’s that?”

“A can of rat poison we found in your desk, and we still don’t know how the poison was administered. But you brought him lunch every day.”

“Are you insane? Even if I did do it, why on earth would I keep the murder weapon in my desk?”

“You think someone is trying to frame you?”

“Obviously. You should be dusting for Vanessa’s prints, not mine. I didn’t kill him. I swear.”

“Okay.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Then you don’t mind if we take your prints?”

“I insist on it,” Tabitha said, a sick, empty feeling in her stomach.

“Okay then.”

*****

Thistle could hardly sit by idyll while Tabitha was hauled off by the police. He was online and soon had the route to the Dawses house committed to memory. They lived in the Victorian Village on the other side of downtown. “Come on,” he told Fritz. “We have a mission.”

“A what?”

“I want to check out Mrs. Daws. People kill over three things--jealousy, money, and revenge. She had three reasons to kill her husband, which means she probably did.”

“But Thistle,” Fritz said, looking out the front window. “I think its going to rain.” All the same he followed Thistle to the back door, as the cat knew he would. Thistle slipped through the cat door and waited on the other side for Fritz to join him. The dog popped his head out the door. “I don’t think I’ll fit.”

“If your head fit’s the rest of you will,” Thistle replied knowingly.

After some struggle Thistle had to concede that though this might be true for cats, dogs didn’t follow the same rule. “My butt is stuck,” Fritz complained, scrabbling for a grip on concrete in front of the door. Eventually he managed to work his way through, though Thistle doubted he would be able to get back in again.

He looked up at the sky, way too dark for early afternoon. It was going to rain. He hated rain. “Come on,” he said to Fritz. “Listen, you don’t do anything unless I tell you to. It’s a big, dangerous city out there, and we have to cross it.”

Thistle led the way down the street at a fairly fast clip, concerned with getting back to the house before Tabitha did. They hadn’t even gotten off the street, however, when Thistle was taken surprise by a pair of strong hands wrapping around his middle.

*****

Tabitha’s panic did not subside when they actually put her in a holding cell. The cell was ten by ten feet with nothing in it but a hard plastic bench, one of half a dozen in the room. There was a large woman with tattoos napping in the cell opposite her, but besides that she was alone. Alone and freaking out.

Their evidence is circumstantial, she told herself sitting on her bench. That Gould character can’t possibly think I had anything to do with it. My fingerprints are definitely not on that can. Why did they put me in here and forget about me? I want my phone call. The door of the room clanked open and Tabitha got to her feet. “I want my phone call,” she said before she saw who it was, and let out a breath of relief when she saw it was Maya.

“I can’t believe they still have you in here,” Maya said. “I pushed the paperwork through. You’ll be out in an hour. If I‘d known I would have been here sooner.”

“Thank you,” she said, relief flooding her. “I could kiss you through these bars.”

“I’d be sure to get fired for that,” Maya said with a smile. “You’re nowhere near the main suspect. Gould thinks you’re telling the truth and your prints weren’t on the can. No one’s were. We think it was planted to incriminate you.”

“No kidding. So why have I been here all afternoon?”

“Evening,” Maya admitted. “Its after eight. Caleb. He ‘forgot’ to file your paperwork. We’ve had words.”

“I’m going to have more words,” Tabitha bristled.

“My advice is to let it go and stay out of the way of the investigation.”

“My pleasure.”

Maya gave her a long look. “Are you sure?”

“As long as I’m not going be arrested and sent to death row I don’t really care that much.”

“You weren’t wanted for murder when you went over my head about your neighbor.”

“That was for a friend.”

“Okay. I’m gonna go see if I can let you out yet.”

“Thank you.”

*****

Tabitha felt drained when Maya dropped her off at home later that evening. It was raining now, a heavy downpour that did not improve her mood. She expected Fritz and Thistle to be waiting for her at the door, demanding their dinners, but no cat and no dog greeted her. “Thistle?” she called through the empty house. “Fritz? Here kitty-kitty!” They were gone. “I don’t need this,” Tabitha moaned, trying to bite back tears. She went out the back door to call for them outside--nothing. It was raining harder now, and she was soaked immediately. “Thistle you stupid cat!” The mental and physical exhaustion of the day piled up on her all at once and she began to cry, her hot tears mingling with the cold rain as it hit her face. She stumbled back inside. Surely they were simply hiding from the rain, and would be home as soon as it stopped.

It was all she could tell herself as she collapsed on the sofa, too tired to do anything but stare at the ceiling. Only a few minutes passed before the doorbell rang. “If they’re back to arrest me, I just don’t care anymore,” she moaned. “At this point I’d welcome the electric chair.”

It wasn’t the police at the door. It was Kyle--holding a pissed off and bedraggled Thistledown, Fritz at his side. “Oh my God, Kyle, thank you!” Thistle jumped out of his arms and walked into the house completely composed. Fritz began to jump frantically at her legs.

“They were wandering around outside,” Kyle said. “I know how much you care about them so I--”

“I could kiss you,” Tabitha said. “How are you doing? Please, come in out of the rain.”

“I do okay, I guess. I gotta get going though,” he said apologetically. “My mom thought I was insane when I brought them inside.”

“I’m so very glad you did,” Tabitha said.

“Maybe you’d like to go out for coffee sometime?” Kyle asked, looking shy and suddenly younger in his damp Hollister shirt. Oh god, Tabitha thought. What have I done?

“Yeah, maybe,” she answered carefully, not wanting to hurt his feelings. After all, he was very fragile after loosing Janine.

“I’ll see you around then.”

“Thank you,” she said, and shut the door. She turned to Thistle and Fritz, who were trying to look innocent. “Where the hell did you two go?”

“Nowhere,” Thistle remarked, but Fritz replied with several barks.

“You’re not going to translate that for me, are you?” she asked Thistle.

“Never,” he admitted. “What’s for dinner?”

******

Tabitha fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, but she woke up slowly from dreams about the murder, and she started thinking. Her entire life had been blown apart in two short weeks. She’d quit, been fired, she found a new job, she’d been a suspected murderer and a suspected mistress. And when it got down to it, it was no one’s fault…but the person who killed Mr. Daws. She wasn’t just mad, she was furious.

And she couldn’t take it out on whoever did it unless she knew who they were.

*****

A/N:

Look, the chapter is on time and an appropriate length this week! I'm feeling better now, in case anyone was worried. I have gotten all but one of my school problems squared away, my personal life is back in order, and I've found homes for 3 of my cats. Life is still not good, but its better.

Ch 5: In which Jobs are Lost

2010-09-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

Tabitha’s head ached and her throat felt raw when she walked up to her front door a short time later. She had already cried--she did that in the parking deck before she left. Now she just felt alone. She didn’t even notice the large box on her porch until she tripped over it.

“What the hell?” She picked it up and went inside. Thistle was sitting on the back of the couch, alert and waiting for her.

“Why are you home so early? Is that my package?”

She set it down on the couch and dropped her purse beside it, kicking off her shoes in the same movements. “Well, it’s not mine.”

“Great. Go get Fritz and we can open it.”

There was no point in arguing. She went to the back yard and freed him from his chain. The little dog rushed into the house, barking excitedly and jumping up on the couch to sniff at the box. He turned back at her and barked again. “He wants you to open it,” Thistle said.

Tabitha ripped open the tape and pulled away a sheet of bubble wrap. The box was filled to the brim with pet toys. As soon as Tabitha picked up a rawhide bone Fritz was grabbing it from her hand and falling to the floor. There were balls and bits of cured animal for fritz, toy mice made of real fur and feathers for Thistle. At the bottom of the box there were two large packages tightly wrapped in plastic. They appeared to be of dried plant material. “Are you running a pot ring too?” Tabitha asked Thistle.

“It’s catnip,” he said. “Which you very well know. I want to bathe in it--so go one, fill up the sink for me.”

Tabitha let the packages fall back into the box. “I really am not in the mood for this, Thistle.” She picked up the invoice at the bottom of the box and glanced at the price total. “Two hundred dollars on pet toys?” She was too tired and too upset for it to even phase her. “Thistle, really.”

“I make no apologies,” he said as he jumped into the box and started to dig his claws into the catnip.

“I’m a murder suspect,” she said, sitting down on the couch. “Someone killed Mr. Daws and Maya thinks it was me.”

“What?”

She explained to him what had happened, and, catnip momentarily forgotten, Thistle listened completely. “We’ll get you off,” he told her seriously. “That bitch can’t do this to you.“

“Is ‘that bitch’ Vanessa or Maya?”

“It’s Maya! She’s supposed to be a friend--she asked you out on a date. And now she’s questioning you for murder?”

“She’s just doing her job,” Tabitha said, getting up to find some aspirin. “I can’t blame her for doing her job.” Despite all that was going on Tabitha couldn’t help but think about the date proposal. If Maya was bringing it up did that mean she was still interested? Tabitha had never been a lesbian, and it had been so long since she had been with a woman she wasn’t even sure she could call herself bisexual. She wasn’t even sure if she liked Maya. She was a good person, but so cold… And then there was poor Caleb--she had treated him terribly. She had no right to go out with his old partner, none at all.

Tabitha gulped down twice the recommended dosage of pills and returned to the living room. Fritz was happily oblivious, but Thistle had a brooding expression on his face. “I’ll help,” he said. “With the investigation. I’ll help find out who did it.”

“That’s sweet of you Thistle. But what can you do?”

“I figured it out last time, didn’t I?”

“Fritz did.”

“So he can help too. Take us to work tomorrow, let us check things out.”

“I can’t go back there,” Tabitha protested. “They think I’m a boss-scewing murderer.”

“And the only way we can prove them wrong is by finding out who it really is.” He jumped over to the computer and pawed it on. “Alright. Who are the suspects?” he asked, and started setting up a spreadsheet.

*****

It took Tabitha every ounce of willpower to go into work the next day, and a preternatural amount to actually stay in the building once she was there. As she walked down the hall it felt like all eyes were on her. She did her best to ignore the stares and made her way to her office. She wasn’t even sure she would be allowed in it, but the crime scene tape was gone--apparently they had collected all of the evidence they needed.

As soon as she walked in the door Vanessa exited Mr. Daws’ office. She was not her usual self--her suit looked rumpled an Tabitha noticed that she was missing two acrylics from her right hand. There were dark circles under her eyes, like she’d been crying.

Tabitha felt sorry for her for about ten seconds. As soon as Vanessa set eyes on Tabitha she began to scream. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here, coming back after what’s happened? I don’t want to look at you, I don t want to speak to you. You make me sick! If you are not out of this office in thirty seconds I’m calling security.”

“Does this mean I’m fired?” Tabitha asked.

“You murdered my grandpa! Of course you’re fucking fired! Get out. Out!”

Tabitha backpedaled out the door, not the least bit upset that she was no longer welcome in the building. It wasn’t until she was crossing the street to The Sandwich Shop that a small smile broke across her face. “I’m fired,” she said to herself.

“I’ve been fired,” she said to Leticia when she entered the restaurant. “I was fired for murdering my boss. I can sue for wrongful termination.”

Leticia stared at her. “Congratulations?”

Tabitha laughed. “Thank you. Being wanted for murder has never felt so good!”

“Girl, if you don’t explain right now there will be hell to pay. I can’t hire a murderer.”

Tabitha knew fully well that Letica was joking, and stepped behind the counter to make herself a cappuccino as she explained the situation. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to take a few weeks off before you start here, then,” Leticia asked, “until everything blows over?”

“Oh no,” Tabitha said. “I want to start immediately. “Almost the entire office comes here for lunch or coffee--it will be the perfect place to spy on them and figure out what was going on.”

“You think it was someone in the office?”

“I think it was someone in his family.” Tabitha was already starting to second guess her suspicions about Vanessa. She had looked upset and not at all herself that morning. Could it be that she was finally mourning her grandfather’s death? Tabitha wasn’t sure about Mr. Daws Jr. He seemed level-headed and pleasant enough. Was there some deep, dark psychosis deep down inside him?

But Mrs. Daws was her prime suspect, when all was said and done. She was just so bitter, which, Tabitha supposed, she had every right to be. But bitter enough to kill? It was definitely something to mull over, but she didn’t have the time.

After finishing her cappacino she went back into the kitchen and helped Jerry finish the morning prep until the other cook, a friend of Jerry’s from his short stint as a boxer, came in. Vince and Jerry were both wide and muscular and quite filled up the tiny kitchen with their bulk when they were both there. Vince only worked part time--he was writing his second book.

I wish I could do something like that, Tabitha thought as she took a bag of garbage out to the dumpster behind the building. Work part time and do my art. That would be a dream.

She worked the register with Leticia and Denise, she went around the dining room wiping off tables and picking up trash--she learned to work the dish machine. Her afternoon was spent cutting up and plating frozen desserts. She was standing at a tiny counter in a corner of the kitchen. Her feet hurt and her back was starting to ache, but it was so much better to be moving around and doing something than it would be to go home and mope, listening to Thistle rave about things that as a cat he wasn’t capable of doing.

“Hey, Tabitha,” Leticia called through the window separating the kitchen from the front. “Someone here to see you.”

“See me?” She set down her knife and pulled off her plastic gloves. She found Maya standing at the counter, holding a ticket and waiting for a sandwich.

“Not on purpose,” Maya said. “I saw you through the window there--what the hell are you doing?”

“I have a new job,” Tabitha said. “I got fired today.”

“Me too,” Maya’s voice was glum.

“What!”

“Not really fired,” she said. “But I’ve been kicked off the case.”

Behind them Vince set out Maya’s plate and Tabitha passed it over to her. “Take a break,” Leticia offered to Tabitha, and she went to sit down at one of the tables with Maya.

“Why were you kicked off the case?”

“People tend to freak out when the detective in charge has been asking suspects out on dates.”

Tabitha flushed. “I am so sorry! I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.”

Maya sighed. “It doesn’t matter. The fact that you were involved with Caleb made the entire situation unstable anyway. But I don’t like having my cases taken away from me. I was just over here to introduce my replacement to the Dawses and show him the crime scene.” She grimaced. “Which he insisted on going over again with a fine-tooted comb. Like I was going to miss anything.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah. Well, it’s John Gould, so you should be sorry. They guy is an ass. A much bigger pain in the ass than I am.” Maya let herself smile. “I know I play too tough out there. But it’s hard to be accepted as a woman cop. You have to be one of the guys, on top of everything. And if you don’t do as well as they do you’re seen as weak. If you do better than them you’re a threat. It’s pretty stressful to find that fine line and then walk it.” Her phone rang and Maya excused herself getting up from her half-eaten sandwich, but even a few steps away Tabitha could still hear that something terrible had happened.

The voice on the other end of the phone was talking loud and fast, and half-way though Maya’s expression darkened. “I didn’t miss anything,” she said. “If you found something it was put there last night.” More talking. “Have fun with that. Goodbye.”

“What was that?” Tabitha asked when Maya returned to her lunch.

Maya frowned and picked at a loose piece of lettuce on her plate. “I’m not supposed to tell you. I’m not supposed to talk about the case, especially to the suspects.” She sighed. “You’re going to get a visit from Gould today. And you’re not going to like it.”

*****

A/N:

Can I quit life now? Thank you.

Ch. 4: In Which Things Get Serious

2010-09-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

Tabitha barely noticed Thistle’s dry laugh until it occurred to her that cats, as a rule, didn’t tend to giggle manically. She muted the television and turned to find Thistle at the computer. “What’s so funny?”

Thistle snorted at the screen. “I’ve been thinking about poor Jacques, Mrs. Garret’s pitiful poodle. I thought I’d buy him some Neuticles.” The laughing started over again.

“What the hell is a Neuticle?”

“Testicular implants for dogs. You know, so he can lick himself and pretend he didn’t have his balls chopped off by a madwoman.”

“Maybe I should get you some,” Tabitha offered, and the laughing stopped. “I mean it. It’s irresponsible of me to have an outdoor cat that hasn’t been fixed.”

“That is a barbaric term for a barbaric custom,” Thistle told her. He jumped down from the table and made his way to the couch to dig his claws into her leg.

“Yeah, well, not all animals can control themselves the way you do.” She unhooked his claws from her flesh. “It’s necessary. It should be done to people too. I should get you declawed as well.” Thistle bristled and hissed at her. “I wouldn’t and you know it,” she promised. “People shouldn’t go mutilating cats with no just cause.”

“I hate people sometimes,” he said, settling down on her leg.

“Me too.”

******

Tabitha went to work the next morning, Friday, feeling stretched thin and anxious. Her last week had been spent going though Mr. Daws’ files, helping Vanessa redistribute his caseloads, and calling all of his clients to inform them of the changes. Vanessa had been somewhat chagrined when two of them refused to take her on, instead demanding her father. Vanessa was now at the top, but the good ol’ boys her grandfather worked for weren’t comfortable with a young woman.

Tabitha would have hired her. She didn’t like Vanessa as a person, but she was efficient, smart, and good at her job. Very much her grandfathers’ granddaughter. But she was also just as demanding of Tabitha’s time, and there were just as many inappropriate comments, this time about Tabitha’s supposed relationship with Mr. Daws.

Now that the man was dead, rumors that had been kept on the down low seemed to fly through the office. Lawrence was the worst, in her office every day measuring and planning to redecorate, all the while chatting freely.

“I can see what you have to offer,” he said. “You’re pretty, in your own way. Not my type of course--”

“I wasn’t aware your type was even of my gender,” Tabitha couldn’t help but snap as he held up fabric swatches to the walls.

“Do you really think the metrosexual man can be phased by gay insinuations?”

“I wasn’t sleeping with Mr. Daws,” she said. “What on earth would I get out of it?”

“Money, fancy dinners. That pretty little house of yours in the German Village.”

Tabitha could feel her face grow red. “I bought that house with my own money,” she growled. “It’s all mine, okay? I work for every penny that goes into that place. Every penny.”

“If you say so.”

“And it’s not as nice as you think it is,” she couldn’t help but add. She’d done a lot of work on the place, most of it by hand. “Mr. Daws was just my boss. You know that. You just want to give me a hard time because you’re the secretary of a partner now, and think you’re better than me.”

“Personal assistant,” he said, and Tabitha tried not to scream. He took a measuring tape out of his jacket pocket and started measuring her desk.

“I’m taking my break,” she snapped, and stormed out of the office. Across the street in the Sandwich Shop life was much more pleasant. Tabitha stood in the kitchen with a cappucino and watched Jerry make sandwiches, learning the menu and how everything was put together. “Everyone ends up doing everything here eventually,” Jerry said reaching for a large, frightening knife hanging from a magnetic strip on the wall. Jerry was tall and solidly built, and wore a hairnet over his shaved head. “You might as well learn now.”

“Can I try the next order?” Tabitha asked, and Jerry offered her a box of hairnets and some plastic gloves.

*****

Tabitha didn’t go back to work for over an hour. She was starting to get excited about her new job, even if her pay was almost being cut by a third. She knew she was lucky to have a job at all, and really though that things were going to work out with Leticia and Jerry.

When she did return, expecting to have either Lawrence or Vanessa yelling at her for being away so long, she was surprised to find a gathering of cops in her office, among them her ex, Caleb, and Detective Maya Vargas. “What’s going on?” Tabitha demanded. Besides the police stringing crime scene tape across the door, Vanessa, Lawrence, and Mr. Daws Jr. were all standing around her desk. Mr. Daws Jr. looked a little overwhelmed by the police intrusion. Vanessa looked annoyed.

“Ms. Silverstein,” Maya said, stepping forward. The others all stared at her. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your employer’s death.”

“What do you mean?” Tabitha said. “He had a heart attack, didn’t he? He was seventy-seven.”

“According to the autopsy, it was murder.”

*****

Thistle finished updating his blog and went outside to check on Fritz. He found him snapping at leaves as they fell from the trees. “You are a simple creature, aren’t you?” he remarked before heading out to the front of the house. It was rather windy and the ‘for sale’ sign next door rattled. Thistle caught a flash of red out of the corner of his eye and sighed.

Her turned his attention to the front porch of the empty house, and poor Kyle Harding. He was sitting on the top step of Janine Bukowski’s house, a textbook open in his lap. To the extreme dissapointment of his mother, Kyle refused to return to Brown that fall. He was taking classes at OSU and living at home. He was not taking Janine’s death well.

Thistle wanted to talk to him, to try to make him see sense in what he was doing--but he couldn’t betray his secret, no matter how pitiful Kyle was. He hopped up on the steps and rubbed up against Kyle’s leg. “Hey cat,” he said, running his hand along Thistle’s back. Scrawny to begin with, Kyle had lost weight over the summer, and he was beginning to grow a beard. Poor, pitiful kid, Thistle thought. He sat with Kyle for a while before heading inside and ordering him a pizza.

*****

“Someone killed Mr. Daws?” Tabitha said, incredulous.

“Some people tend to think it was you,” Caleb said, his voice cold. It hadn’t been the best of breakups after all. Tabitha looked over his shoulder at the Daws family and Lawrence. He was smiling.

“We’d like to take you down to the station for questioning,” Maya said.

Tabitha felt a flash of anger for every person in the room. Bad enough she was losing her job. Now she gets accused of murder by people who were supposed to be her friends? “Am I being charged?”

“Of course not,” Maya said. “I just think it would be better if we did things over there, Ms. Silverstein.”

“So it’s ‘Ms. Silverstein’ now?” Tabitha snapped. “A few months ago you were asking me out on a date.”

“Yes,” Maya said, her voice low as Vanessa and Lawrence immediately started muttering to each other. “And you never called me.” She took Tabitha by the arm and led her out of the room. “That was just what I was trying to avoid happening,” Maya nearly growled as they walked towards the elevator. “These are important people here. I can’t afford to screw up in front of them.

“Is that why they even bothered to do an autopsy? Because Mr. Daws was important?”

“It was the son’s suggestion.” Tabitha knew Mr. Daws Jr enough to know that he liked to see the whole picture. He didn’t like not knowing things.

“So what did they find?”

“Rat poison.”

“Rat poison!”

“Given to him over the course of several days. Ms. Daws says that you brought the victim his lunch every day, and that you were having an affair--”

“Caleb,” Tabitha snapped. “Do you think I was having an affair with my boss while we were dating?”

“I don’t know Tabby,” he said. “You were having affairs with murderers.” He glanced over at Maya. “You asked her out? What happened to loyalty to your partner?”

“You’re not my partner anymore,” Maya said. “ I let you come with me because I’m nice, remember?”

“This how I always wanted to be arrested for murder,” Tabitha groaned. “Look--I wasn’t sleeping with my boss. I hated my boss--”

“Which gives you even more motive,” Maya said. “And you’re not under arrest yet.”

“Good. Because I didn’t do it.”

“We just need to ask you some questions.”

“Fine, but I’m not going to the station. You can ask me right here.” The elevators were next to an empty conference room and Tabitha led the two cops inside, locking the door behind them. “Where should I start? I bought him lunch across the street every day. He made me wear ugly clothes and fake nails and he liked being a sexist asshole, but I wouldn’t kill someone over that. I don’t have enough to gain.”

“We know,” Maya said. “This is just how murder investigations work. You know that.”

“Right.”

“And you found the body?”

“Yes. I’m good at that sort of thing.”

“It is rotten luck,” Maya admitted. “Two bodies in five months. So you’re leaving Daws, Daws, and Billings.”

“I’m getting fired,” Tabitha said. “But I accidentally quit first so I wont get any compensation. Rotten luck indeed. Vanessa is the one you should be questioning. She had the most to gain. Now that her grandfather is dead she’ll make partner. She and Lawrence have been circling the office like vultures.”

“She’s at the top of my list,” Maya admitted. “Now what do you know about the wife?”

“She could have done it,” Tabitha told her. “That woman is terrifying, and paranoid. She thinks I was sleeping with Mr. Daws too. He had an affair with his old secretary, Marta. More than an affair, I think. It lasted thirty years, until she died. That’s when I got the job here.”

“How did Marta die?”

“I don’t know,” Tabitha admitted. “You don’t think the deaths are connected?”

“Who knows,” Maya said. “Just an idea. Okay Ms. Silverstein. Thank you for your time, but we do have to ask you not to leave town.”

“So I am a suspect,” Tabitha said. “Peachy.”

“It’s just the rules,” Maya assured her. “We’re looking into everyone.”

“Okay,” Tabitha said. “I’m going to go home now, and pretend this isn’t happening to me, okay?”

“You do that,” Maya told her.

“And as for me not calling you--I almost had sex with a murderer. I’m just not seeing anyone right now. So no offence.”

“None taken,” Maya said.

“I’m going home,” Tabitha said again, and left them there in the conference room.

*****

A/N:
Neuticles are fairly well known on the internets, but if you haven't heard of them: http://www.neuticles.com/ Yeah. I know.

So sorry for the lateness everyone. I had a bad day yesterday, and a bad day before that, and so on. I'm making big, big changes to fix my life, but there's a lot broken and its a stressful and painful process. (Yes, this is the same crazy from the weekend. It's a messy, emotional, girly type crazy, Thrantor. You don't want to know.)

And then there's this: http://savethecatlady.blogspot.com/ My neighbors are threatening to call the human society on me so I'm trying to find homes for some of the cats. I'd really appreciate it if you guys could post a link on your facebook/twitter/ect. I dont want to be famous on the internet for being a cat lady, but if it gets my life back on track, so be it.

2010-08-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

I'm moving the updates to Wednesdays to better utilize the internet, and because I went slightly crazy this weekend.

Anyone want a cat?

Ch. 3: In which Mr. Daws Dies

2010-08-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

Tabitha was surprised to find her office light still off when she got into work the next morning, and even more surprised to see a light shining under Mr. Daws’ door. He always beat her to the office and he always had the light on when she came in. She set down her purse at her desk and knocked on his door. “Mr. Daws?” she called when he didn’t answer. “Hello?”

She felt a prickle of fear shoot through her. He just forgot to turn off his light and is having a late start, she told herself, knowing that the words ‘forget’ and ‘late’ were not in the man’s vocabulary.

Opening the door Tabitha bit back a scream. Mr. Daws was slumped over in his chair, forehead down on his notes, pen still grasped in his hand. She found her legs weak as she crossed the room. “Mr. Daws,” she whispered, and touched his hand. It was cold and stiff. He was dead.

Tabitha staggered backwards, the phrase ‘not again’ echoing in her mind. What were the chances of walking in on dead people twice in one year? She managed to make it back to her desk and reached for the phone only to pause, not knowing who to call first. Ambulance, police? Mr. Daws Jr.?

Eventually she decided on the latter and dialed his extension. His secretary, Susan, answered. “This is Tabitha,” she said. “I need to speak to Mr. Daws right now.”

“He’s with a client.”

“The--the other Mr. Daws is dead.”

Susan went silent on the other side of the line. “Are you sure?” she said finally.

“Quite sure.”

“I’ll send him right over.”

“Thank you.” Tabitha hung up the phone and started pacing the office. It wasn’t long before Mr. Daws Jr. was in the office, asking her what the hell had happened. “I’m sorry,” she said, and opened the door to his father’s office for him.

Adam Daws was still next to her, staring at his father’s body. Tabitha stood silent and awkward a few paces behind him. “Call Vanessa,” he said. “And my mother--don’t tell her what happened if you can avoid it. And Dr. Rosenberg. His number should be in my father’s files.” It was. Tabitha remembered typing his information when she transferred Mr. Daws’ Rolodex to the computer.

Tabitha called the doctor first, since it seemed like the most straightforward call. She explained exactly what happened and he promised he would be over as soon as possible. Tabitha apparently caught Vanessa just as she was walking in the door, late. “What?” Vanessa snapped. “I have a billion things to do today--dammit!” Tabitha heard the slither-crash of papers falling across the floor. “Lawrence!” She yelled his name into the phone and Tabitha had to hold it away from her ear.

“I’m sorry Vanessa,” Tabitha said, being patient because of the situation. “Your grandfather--he passed away last night. At his desk.” There was silence at the other end of the phone. “Vanessa?”

“Well, that’s the way the bastard would have wanted to go,” she said, her voice more subdued. “I’m coming.”

Vanessa entered the office while Tabitha was steeling herself to call Mrs. Daws. “Your dad is already in there,” Tabitha said. “Do you want to call your grandmother?”

“Not really.”

Tabitha took a deep breath and dialed. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Daws?”

“Who is this?”

“Tabitha Silverstein, you husband’s sec--”

She was cut off when Mrs. Daws started screaming into the phone. “You little whore--I knew that’s where he was! Fifty-three years with the man, and this is what I get? It’s been one secretary after another since 1959. You are not special, missy. You’re one in a line of many.”

“Mrs. Daws,” Tabitha said, aghast. “I wasn’t having an affair with your husband.”

“Is that so? Then where the hell was he last night? Working late? Ha. I don’t believe it. I’ve kept every hotel recept, every credit card statement. I have evidence, Mr. Lawyer. This is the very last straw. I want a divorce!”

“Ma’am,” she said, head reeling with the accusations. “I’m so sorry. But your husband is dead.”

Mrs. Daws finally went silent on the other end of the phone, and Tabitha immediately worried that she had messed up. But she could hardly let the woman keep screaming at her for something she would never do. “Dead?” Mrs. Daws whispered, and hung up.

Tabitha tried to call her back but she refused to pick up and Tabitha wondered if maybe Adam Daws should try calling his mother. Tabitha entered her boss’s office. Mr. Daws Jr. had pulled another chair around to his father’s side of the desk. He had adjusted his father so he was upright in the chair, leaning back with his eyes closed. Adam Daws had his head down and he was holding his father’s hand. Vanessa was prowling the office, eying the furnishings, the big beautiful antique desk.

It occurred to Tabitha that now that her grandfather was gone Vanessa was sure to take his place as a partner. She was young--only twenty-eight--but Tabitha had heard Mr. Daws remark that she was almost as good as her father already. That meant that this was now Vanessa’s office, and Vanessa already had an assistant--Lawrence. What did she need Tabitha for?

With that cold thought dawning in her mind Tabitha noticed that Vanessa was holding a piece of paper that she hadn’t had when she went into the office. Vanessa smiled at Tabitha a little when she turned to see who had walked into the room. “I’m sorry to hear that you are leaving us,” she said, her voice sticky-sweet. She held up the paper and Tabitha’s stomach dropped out from under her when she saw it was her resignation letter. How had she gotten it?

“Actually, that was just supposed to be a little joke,” Tabitha said quickly. “It’s nothing.”

“Grandpa had it in his hand,” Vanessa said. “Two weeks notice, you’re no longer happy with your position in the company blah blah blah. It couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.”

“Later Vanessa,” her father snapped, looking up.

“Two weeks should give you just enough time to help me sort out all my grandfathers’ cases.”

“I didn’t quit,” Tabitha said.

“Come now. It’s so much less hassle if you quit than if I fired you.”

*****

Thistle finished his blog post and jumped off the vanity to visit Fritz outside. Without Janine the blog was much more tame. I need to spice things up around here, Thistle thought as he passed through the kitchen. But how?

The Jack Russel was snapping at falling leaves, straining against his chain. It was a comfortable sixty-five degrees out, no need for the air conditioning unit that now took up a few feet of backyard space, but Thistle was immensely proud of his air conditioning and sat on the silent contraption while he visited with Fritz.

“I’ve been thinking,” Thistle said. “Now that Tabitha knows about the credit card, I can buy anything I want and send it to the house. What have you always wanted?”

“A new bone.”

“Of course you do. Cant you think a little bigger than that? What about one of those pink dog houses shaped like a castle? I can order you one.”

“I have a house,” Fritz said, referring to the ugly plastic igloo Tabitha found on Craigslist for free.

“Another dog probably died in that house,” Thistle said helpfully, and Fritz shivered.

“Do you think it’s haunted?”

“Definitely. And you know what, why stop at presents for ourselves? We can buy things for the whole neighborhood. We’ll order Kyle a geriatric hooker and send Playboy subscriptions to Mrs. Garret.”

Fritz gave him a long look. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Thistle said, going back inside. Money could do so many things….

*****

Tabitha couldn’t stay in the room with Mr. Daws dead and Vanessa firing her. She collapsed at her desk, and, not knowing what else to do, tried to call Mrs. Daws again. The woman might have had a heart attack or something.

Tabitha felt the tears start to slide down her face and soon she couldn’t stop them, and they turned into sobs. She put her head in her arms on top of her keyboard and cried. She didn’t even hear the door open but she heard Mrs. Daws’ voice over her, loud and solid and furious. “Poor dear,” the woman said with no pity in her voice. Tabitha looked up and saw her tight-lipped, wearing a pink velour track suit. She’d obviously left the house in a hurry. “Don’t cry over him. He didn’t love you. He was still in love with Marta.”

“I didn’t--” Tabitha managed to sputter, but Mrs. Daws went on past her into the office that was now a tomb. Tabitha couldn’t take it anymore. She gathered up her things and hurried out of the room, trying to wipe away the traces of her tears as she went down the hallway.

She was looking down at the floor and wiping her nose on her sleeve when she nearly ran into Lawrence. “Hey, watch it,” he said, catching her by the shoulders so she wouldn’t fall. She looked up at him and she saw his face brighten. “Wow, you’re really broken up about the old bastard kicking it, huh? I guess I win the office pool.”

“What?”

“Tabitha, people have been talking about you and Mr. Daws for years.”

“Go to hell, Lawrence.”

Tabitha felt completely empty when she crossed the street to The Sandwich Shop. She didn’t even notice the cars honking at her, simply walked across and opened the door and leaned against the counter in front of Denise, the girl who worked mornings three days a week before going to class at noon. “Is your boss here?” Tabitha asked.

“Jerry is,” she offered. “Leticia just went to the bank for change.”

“Okay. I’ll wait.” Tabitha paced the length of the store while Denise served two people coming in for early lunches.

“Can I get you anything?” Denise said doubtfully.

“I guess a coffee would be good.”

“Are you sure caffeine is a good idea right now? How ‘bout hot chocolate?”

“Sure. Whatever.” Denise emptied an envelope of cocoa mix into a real mug and added hot water and whipped cream. She finished it off with real chocolate shavings. “Pretty,” Tabitha managed. It felt good to hold something hot and heavy in her hands, something to keep her grounded. She managed to sit down at one of the tables and sipped the cocoa. It was very good.

Leticia returned, coming in through the kitchen with a handful of ones and another of quarter rolls. Tabitha knocked over her chair when she stood up, the crash causing Leticia’s head to jerk up and notice her. “Tabitha, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Tabitha giggled. It was too ridiculous, and once she started she couldn’t stop. Tears rolled down her face as she went over to the counter, leaning on it to hold herself up as the giggles evolved into out and out maniacal laughter, and Denise took a few steps back. “I’m sorry,” Tabitha managed to gasp. “I accidentally quit my job to a dead man.”

“What on earth do you mean?” Leticia handed the money off to Denise and went around to Tabitha’s side of the counter.

“Mr. Daws is dead,” Tabitha said. “I found him dead at his desk this morning. He had a heart attack or a stroke or something.” As she told the story she reached out for her sanity. Bad things had happened. There could be worse things. Could there? Mr. Daws was dead, Vanessa had more or less fired her, and the entire world thought she had been sleeping with her boss.

“My offer still stands,” Leticia told her when she finished. “Do you want to come work here?”

“I think so,” Tabitha said. “Yes, I do.”

******

A/N: Very sorry about the lateness. Won’t happen again. I started school yesterday and it was a little overwhelming.

Thistle and Fritz arent going to have a lot to do in this mystery (they’ll be doing a bit more in the next one though) so I think I’m just going to let them play a little bit.

So, news--Now starts my career as a cat toy artist. You can buy "I <3 Thistledown Copperbottoms Most Excellent and Refined Catnip. So if you wanna help support Thistledown, me, or my cats, but want something out of the deal, you're good to go.

(You will notice that to the left there is a tiny picture of all 15 of my cats. Ain't they cute?

Ch. 2: In which Options are Considered

2010-08-16T10:16:00.000-07:00

Thistle watched the clock on the wall, willing the hands to slow down. As a talking cat he could only do so much--he still needed Tabitha to answer the door and hand over the credit card, and she was late. The air conditioner guy was supposed to show at six.

Tabitha walked through the door at ten till. “Finally,” Thistle remarked as she shut the door and dropped her purse. She kicked off Janine’s shoes and collapsed onto the couch. “I can’t deal with you today, Thistle,” she groaned. “I hate Mr. Daws. And Vanessa. I wish they would just die.”

“If I had thumbs I might be able to arrange something,” Thistle said, jumping up into her lap. Sometimes it was best to be a pet and he simply sat there and let Tabitha stroke his back. He began to purr, enjoying the attention while he had it, because soon she was going to be very mad indeed. “So I’ve been thinking,” he said eventually. “How much does central air cost?”

“I already told you--if you can’t pay for it we’re not getting it.”

“Well, what if I can?”

“You have many talents, Thistle,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure making money is not one of them.”

“Actually it’s one of my better talents.” Thistle felt Tabitha’s body stiffen beneath him.

“Thistle, what have you done?” Instead of answering her he got up and pawed the computer to life. He had left his bank account balance open on the screen and Tabitha followed him over, growing very silent when she saw the balance and her name at the top of the page. “Identity theft is illegal you know,” she said finally.

“I am above the law,” he told her. “The credit card for the account is under the sofa and the central air guy is coming this afternoon. We’re getting an end-of-the-season deal. I bring in between five hundred and a thousand a month, depending on the market. But it’s your money technically. Everything is in your name.”

He waited for her to start yelling, maybe even hit him, but she did neither. “You are a truly remarkable animal, Thistledown.”

“I know,” Thistle said, thinking she was a rather remarkable human. “We should go outside and tell Fritz that we can afford to feed him. He hasn’t touched his food dish all day you know.”

*****

On her way to work the next morning Tabitha’s mind was still reeling with the not small pile of money that Thistle had amassed, and what it meant. She had never seen a five digit number in a bank account with her name on it that didn't include a decimal. Tabitha looked across the street at The Sandwich Shop. Surely what Thistle made would be enough to cover the difference between working at Daws, Daws, and Billings, or making sandwiches for a living.

Tabitha tried to make herself laugh for even considering it, but the letter of resignation was still in her desk. Instead of deleting the file like a sane person she had even printed it out and signed it, wistfully thinking about the freedom in her hands. “It wouldn’t be freedom, not really,” she said to herself as she walked into the building, turning her back onto her possible future. It was better to be financially stable than happy forty hours a week, wasn’t it?

She felt heavy as she sat down at her desk and booted up the computer. She checked the phone for messages but there were none, and once the computer was running she copied out all of Mr. Daws’ appointments for the day. He was meeting with one client in the morning and then had a big meeting with his son Adam (the other Daws in the company’s name), Vanessa, and Mr. Billings. They were in the middle of a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Lowbridge Chemicals that had all of the higher-ups on edge, and even though it was technically Adam Daws’ case everyone had a hand or foot in it.

Tabitha knocked and went into Mr. Daws’ office. He was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed—something she had never seen him do. “Are you alright sir?” she asked, passing his schedule across his desk to him.

“Of course I am,” he said, wincing as he leaned forward to reach for the paper. “Just send my first appointment straight in when they get here.” He looked older that morning, and she wondered if everything was okay.

“Yes sir.”

At ten she showed his client in, checked both her and Mr. Daws’ emails, answered a half dozen phone calls. The client left, and Mr. Daws had been uncommonly quiet, but when she checked on him before going to lunch he was sitting up as straight as ever, working. “Tabitha,” he said. “I think I want soup for lunch today.”

“Soup?” He had never, in four years, deviated from his tuna salad regimen.

“Yes. Can that sandwich store make a decent cup of soup?”

“Of course,” she answered. Jerry could cook anything. “They always have chicken noodle or chili, and I think the Tuesday soup is minestrone or French onion.”

“If they don't have French onion, chicken is fine,” he said. She noticed his hand was shaking when he picked up his pen.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” She wondered if she should call his son in to check on him.

“I forgot my heart pills this morning, that’s all. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay.”

She backed out of the room uncertainly and grabbed her purse before heading out. At The Sandwich Shop Leticia gave her an almost flirting smile when she got to the counter. “Change your mind yet?” she asked.

“Nearly,” Tabitha said. “But it’s no good. Maybe if I didn't have a mortgage, but I do. Mr. Daws would like French onion soup instead of his sandwich.”

Leticia raised her eyebrows. “I’m shocked,” she said, but turned to ladle the soup out of a big electric cauldron.

“I just want you to know that I am flattered,” Tabitha continued. “You thinking of me for this job. But you know, I don't know anything about running a restaurant.”

“Didn’t you tell me once that you worked at Taco King in college?”

“For three years,” Tabitha admitted. “But I wasn’t in charge or anything, and it was a lot different than this place. For example, it killed my soul faster than working for Mr. Daws.”

Leticia didn't laugh at her joke. “It’s no fun doing grunt work if you’re not enjoying yourself,” she agreed. “I don’t care about your lack of experience. You’re a hard worker, you never call in sick, and you stick things out. I know you’re dependable, and I like you. I won’t be going on maternity leave until spring, and I’m sure you can learn the ropes faster than that, right?”

“Of course,” Tabitha said, knowing that Leticia listing her virtues was both flattering and convincing. “There are still people better than me. You should hire one of them.”

*****

Mr. Daws wasn’t doing any better when she got back, but he didn't seem worse either. After getting her head bitten off again for asking how he was she decided that Mr. Daws Jr and Vanessa could deal with him at their meeting. It was less than an hour away in any case.

He had just gone into his meeting when a woman walked into the outer office. She was in her sixties and looked it, but she was dressed like someone who could afford plastic surgery, wearing a well-tailored navy blue suit and smart low heels. She completely ignored Tabitha when she entered the room, crossing to Mr. Daws’ office and throwing the door open. “Ma’am?” Tabitha said, getting up.

The woman reappeared. “Where is Adam Daws?” Tabitha wasn’t sure if she was referring to Junior or Senior, but since they were in the same place…

“At a meeting. Do you have an appointment?” But the woman was already out the door and marching down the hall. Not sure what to do, Tabitha followed. Her quarry seemed to know where she was going and slammed into the big conference room with the same single-minded determination that she had used on Tabitha’s office door. Tabitha followed her in, ready to apologize for the crazy woman crashing their meeting.

“You forgot your pills, dear,” the woman said and fished out a pillbox from her purse, and passed them along to Mr. Daws. “You secretary is pretty, but very rude.”

I am not, Tabitha wanted to say from behind her, but knew it would sound petty. And she was fairly sure her looks didn't matter when it came to being Mr. Daws’ personal slave. So this was Mrs. Daws. It was the first time Tabitha had ever seen her at the office, or ever for that matter. Though she was pretty enough, Tabitha could see why Mr. Daws had had an affair with Marta. Mrs. Daws was pushy and rude…Tabitha felt a little bit of sympathy go out to her boss, especially since he looked even sicker.

“My pills,” he said. “I’ll be fine now.” It took him two tries to get the box open, and he downed a handful of various tablets and capsules without water.

“Are you taking the vitamins I bought you?” Vanessa asked him. He nodded. “You don’t eat right,” she continued. “I worry you know.”

“I am fine,” Mr. Daws said, growing annoyed. “Thank you,” he told his wife. “I’ll be along late tonight. Don’t hold dinner for me.”

“Working like you do will kill you,” Mrs. Daws snapped back, but she gave Tabitha a dirty look before stalking out of the room. Tabitha looked at the round table of people. Vanessa looked disgusted at her, Lawrence pleased. Only Adam Daws jr. was paying any attention to his father, who had his head in his hands.

“Can I get anyone anything?” Tabitha said, her voice as bright as possible, wondering what on earth the look was for. Tabitha definitely was no Marta, and they must know that. Mr. Daws might think she was a good secretary, but as a person he had nothing but contempt for her. The idea of him having an affair with her was laughable.

“An iced mocha would be wonderful,” Vanessa said, her voice as icy as her order. “A real one—no fast-food garbage.” Mr. Daws jr, and Mr. Billings took this as a cue to make drink orders as well, and even Lawrence gave her an evil grin and ordered a cappuccino.

“Coming right up,” Tabitha muttered between her teeth. Somehow she knew that fetching coffee wouldn’t be nearly as degrading if she work working in a sandwich shop. She stopped at her desk and took the letter of resignation out of the drawer. It would be so simple to set it down on Mr. Daws’ desk, walk away and never come back. She set it down next to her keyboard instead and picked up her purse out of its drawer.

Across the street she watched Leticia make up the drink order, working the shiny cappuccino machine. “Hey,” Tabitha said. “Can you show me how that thing works?”

Leticia gave her a big smile. “Sure. Get your butt back here.”

******

A/N:
Lets see...made up a better table of contents. easier to navigate.

There were a couple donations last week. Thank you. Really and seriously.

I'm an aunt again! My neice was born on saturday, so here's a picture of me with a baby (and her brother). You can tell my family is made up of geeks--his name is Logan Xavier, hers is River Serenity.

Chapter 1: In Which Tabitha has Issues

2010-08-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

Tabitha was glad summer was over. June had gone straight to hell and July and August hadn’t been much better. After nearly sleeping with a murderer and losing her boyfriend she ended up dealing with one of the hottest summers in fifty years--with no air conditioning. Her dog Fritz spent the summer with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, while the cat, Thistledown Copperbottom, complained at the top of his lungs. “If you go another summer without putting in central air I will kill you with my bare claws,” Thistle promised one Sunday afternoon in mid-October. Things were finally cooling down, but he wasn’t done talking about it.

“Yeah, well, you pay for it--and the electric bill--and you can have it,” she replied, trying to ignore him while she worked on a painting of the old apple tree in the back yard, its leaves a swirl of color. The window was open letting in a comfortable breeze, and she was still wearing t-shirts on a regular basis. “Money is tight right now,” she continued, daubing some orange paint onto her canvas. “Money is always tight and we have an extra mouth to feed,” she couldn’t help but add. Fritz was a new addition after the death of her neighbor that summer.

At her feet Fritz was chewing on a ball, but he stopped to whimper. “He understood that,” Thistle told her.

“Sorry. But I mean it. We can’t afford air conditioning. I don’t know if we’ll be able to afford heat this winter. So you’d better hope the weather holds.” She’d told Thistle that every year for the three years she’d had him, but she wondered if she meant it this year. Everything was getting more expensive, and she hadn’t had a raise in those three years. “Maybe you’re a jinx.”

“I am no such thing,” Thistle said, getting up in a huff and stalking out of the room. Fritz got up and followed him, ball wedged in his mouth. Tabitha turned her attention to her painting. It looked like crap.

She sank down into a chair, brush hanging lose in her grip. Her brain was spiraling out of control, and the worst part was that she didn’t even know why. It wasn’t as though she couldn’t handle being single, she did it all the time. Her life had just grown as stifling as the heat of the summer, but apparently her soul couldn’t afford central air either.

*****

“I hate being poor,” Thistle muttered as he slinked down the stairs to the living room.

“Me too,” Fritz bemoaned, following him. “Tabitha loves me, even though I eat, right?”

“Sure.”

“Because I like eating. But I could stop, if it would make her feel better.”

“She was just saying that,” Thistle said. Tabitha’s laptop was sitting open on the vanity by the stairs and he jumped up to paw at a few buttons, bringing it to life. “Go play with your ball.”

“I loves my ball,” Fritz said, dropping it so it would bounce across the old and scarred hardwood floor.

Ignoring the cat hair all over the keyboard Thistle went to his banking site and keyed in his info. Since he was a cat he didn’t put much thought into money. It was something to play with, like a catnip mouse or Fritz’s disgusting ball. Thistle had discovered that he was very good at playing with money.

He had a Cheshire cat grin as he did an internet search then found Tabitha’s cell phone, very carefully keying in a number with his claw. “Mr. Chilly heating and cooling, how may I help you?”

“Hi,” Thistle said. “I’m interested in a price quote for a central air?”

*****

Tabitha checked the seams of her stockings in the mirror the next morning. If she had to wear drab clothes to work, the least she could do was jazz things up. She put on a string of cultured pearls, slid her feet into a pair of retro two-toned heels, and she was down the stairs for her coffee before leaving for work in her boring black suit. “Nice shoes,” Thistle said as she opened cans of food for the animals while the coffee brewed. “Janine’s, right?”

Somehow, in all of the chaos of Danny being arrested, Tabitha had made a point of sneaking back into Janine’s house and snagging the garbage bags of clothes she had been promised. Behind Tabitha Fritz howled. “Stop it,” Tabitha told Thistle. “He’s been through enough--why do you have to bring it up?”

“He says your feet smell like her,” Thistle said, and this made Tabitha pause.

“Do they really?”

“Yes, but he finds it comforting. He likes that you wear her clothes.”

“Good.” She patted Fritz on the head and picked up his food dish. “C’mon Fritz. Out you go.” He skipped out the door easily enough and let her attach him to the dog run in the tiny back yard. Tabitha set the food down next to him and made sure he had water. Fritz couldn’t be left alone for too long without ripping things up, and Thistle promised that the little dog didn’t mind being tied up.

I never wanted a dog anymore than I wanted a cat, Tabitha thought on he way back in, but she didn’t mind, not really. She would be so lonely without them. You need to get out more, start meeting people. You need friends, Tabitha Silverstein. Not just talking animals.

*****

Mr. Daws liked filing cabinets. He kept extensive files, about everything, in very pretty wooden cabinets with brass fittings in the outer office behind Tabitha’s desk. She was bending over to shove something into one of the bottom drawers when Mr. Daws came back from his morning meeting.

She could feel him hovering behind her. “Nice shoes,” he said to her. “Love the stockings.” Tabitha was glad she had her back to him, even if he was looking at her butt, because at least she didn’t have to hide the face she made. “Get me a cup of coffee will you?”

“Of course sir,” she said, straightening up and turning to give him a smile. He looked at her mildly behind his glasses, leaning on a cane that he didn’t really need. (After watching House on TV he had decided it made him look smart and dashing. Tabitha thought it made him look old.) “Anything else?”

“When you get my lunch, make sure they put enough mayo on my sandwich. It was a little dry on Friday.”

“Sure.” She could feel his eyes on her as she walked out of the room, and wondered at how he could be so casual in his sexism. She put up with it because she needed the job--she could deal with a lot to keep her beautiful old house.

Mr. Daws was (thankfully) back in his office when she returned. He had a computer--a top of the line, expensive laptop, but it sat closed and untouched on his massive oak desk, and he made notes on a yellow legal pad, as he had been for the last forty-five years. “Your coffee,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Mr. Daws,” she said, thinking about central air and the heating bill, “I’ve been here a long time.”

“Yes. Who knew you would ever be able to replace poor Marta,” he said, referring to his old secretary. She’d worked for him from 1963 up to her death in 2003. Mr. Daws had gone through a lot of temps before he had found someone who could order his sandwiches perfectly and not mind him dictating every aspect of their dress.

“I was thinking, since I’ve been here for so long, and you are so happy with what I do here, maybe I could have a bit of a raise.”

“A ‘bit’ of a raise?” he questioned, not looking up from his notes. “Marta never asked for a raise.” Tabitha suspected it was because of the affair she had heard whispers about, but said nothing. “I don’t know. The quarter has already started.”

“Sir, I do think I deserve it.”

“Maybe next quarter, if your performance continues to be exemplary. And I do mean exemplary. You went home early once over the summer after all.”

“My friend died!”

“My friends die all the time,” he said, his attitude jumping from suave employer to crotchety old man. “Don’t try to get any sympathy from me there. It’s lunchtime. I’m hungry.”

It was very hard to keep her temper as she stalked out of the office and down the hall. Daws, Daws, and Billings was a large firm. They took up an entire floor of the downtown high rise, between the lawyers, assistants, secretaries, and interns. Even though Tabitha had been there for five years she hadn’t made close friends with any of the other employees. She wasn't the corporate type and had nothing in common with them. “Hi Lawrence,” she said as she passed Vanessa Daws’ assistant.

“What’s new Silverstein?” he drawled in a lazy voice.

“I just wanna kill Mr. Daws. The usual.” As soon as it was out of her mouth she regretted saying it. Death threats were not ‘exemplary performance’ she was sure, and Lawrence would tell Vanessa, who would go running to her grandfather to tattle like a little girl.

Tabitha took the elevator down to the ground floor, waving to Teddy, the security guy at the door, as she exited the building. “Stupid, stupid,” she moaned, dodging traffic as she hurried to The Sandwich Shop across the street.

The Sandwich Shop was a little slice of paradise after being cooped up in that awful office building all morning. There were tables at the window and a shining new cappuccino machine sitting on the counter like a trophy behind the cases of refrigerated salads and desserts.

Leticia was wiping down the cappuccino machine when Tabitha came in. She wasn’t ready to give in to fall, wearing a bright yellow sundress that seemed to glow against her dark chocolaty skin. She was a bright spot in Tabitha's day, always cheerful and ready to offer advice. It was like having a therapist that served food.

“Still can’t get used to it, huh?” Tabitha asked. Leticia and her husband had only owned the shop for two years and the machine was a sign things were going well.

“It’s so shiny,” Leticia insisted, turning to take her order. “The Boss’s usual,” she said, ringing up the tuna sandwich. “And anything for you?”

“A new job,” Tabitha said, trying to smile.

“I can do that,” Leticia said, looking at her with serious brown eyes. “No, really, I can. I need a second daytime person to help me out.” Aside from Leticia a tiny black-haired girl usually worked in the mornings. Apparently she had called off.

“I wish I could,” Tabitha said. At that moment Leticia’s cheerful demeanor and the shiny new cappuccino machine had a lot of draw. “I bet you would let me wear anything I want.”

“Within health codes.”

“And you wouldn’t leer at my butt every time I bent over.”

“I’d try my damnedest not to.”

“And I’d get raises?”

“Every Christmas.”

Tabitha smiled. “You have no idea how much I’d love to work at your store.”

“That makes two of us,” Leticia said. She leaned on the counter. “I can offer you management opportunities. Look, the truth of the matter is, Jerry and I are having a baby.”

“That’s wonderful!” She waved at Jerry though the window separating the kitchen from the rest of the restaurant. He and Leticia made a perfect team. They would be great parents as well.

“We’ve been waiting until the store was in the black. Well, we are, and while we’re not rich, we can afford for me to take some time off.”

“Order up!” Jerry called at the window and Leticia collected Mr. Daws’s sandwich, passing it across the counter to Tabitha.

“I probably can't pay you what you make over there, but I can give you a living wage. Think about it,” she told Tabitha. “If you’re so miserable…”

“Not that miserable,” Tabitha said. “Not yet. But I'll think about it.”

Back at the office Tabitha passed Vanessa in the halls. Vanessa was a year younger than her, but she had a hard look to her face that made her seem older. She wore her honey-blond hair in a harsh chignon and tended to look at people over the tops of her glasses like they were smaller than her. She was a younger, fiercer Mr. Daws in designer suits and heels.

“You be nice to my grandpa,” she demanded when Tabitha tried to pretend she wasn’t there. “He loves you, and you should have the decency to appreciate all he does.”

“Yes ma’am,” Tabitha grumbled, saluting with the paper-wrapped sandwich.

“I mean it.” Vanessa shook a French-tipped finger at her. “I’m watching you.”

Tabitha tossed the sandwich in front of Mr. Daws and went back to her desk. She took a deep breath and opened up a new document. She was going to write a resignation letter.

******

A/N:
Okay. First chapter of Fat Cats is up. Enjoy. I'll leave 'Cat in Cougar Country' up for a few more weeks before making it available for download only.

The donate link has been fixed. I've signed up for classes and filed my financial aid and I'm not going to have enough to cover the whole semester. I know you guys can't come up with $900, but every bit helps.

Some individual notes:

Arielle: It is very short. I planned the series to be in a novella form, between 20k and 30k per story. The idea is that once I have 3 or 4 of them done, I'll stick them together in one print volume.

Fiona: Cats are rarely nice and never as cute and fluffy as they make themselves out to be. Anyway, Thistle has a good soul, but cat's are selfish creatures.

Slammer: Character or story depth? The series will be ongoing and the characters will develop. As for the story, there might be room for improvement. I know mysteries are supposed to be plot-driven, but that might be why I dont like them. I'm trying to develop a more character-friendly series.

Thrantor: I started the series wanting the animals to be the detectives, pulling Tabitha grudgingly along. With plotting Fat Cats I know that will not be the case, but Thistle and Fritz will solve a few of the mysteries. Cat in Cougar Country was my first ever mystery. I'm going to try to do better with Fat Cats. I've been reading and watching a lot of mysteries lately (I hate them) so that hopefully will help.

Chapter 9: The End of the Beginning

2010-08-02T07:39:00.001-07:00

Tabitha felt empty as she fumbled with the locks on the front door, dialing Caleb as she walked to the back door to do the same. She wasn’t sure she could speak when he picked up. “Tabitha?” he asked when he said hello and she didn’t respond. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said finally. “I need you to come over.”

“I can’t, I’m on duty. What’s wrong?”

“I know who killed Janine,” she said quickly. “I can’t tell you how I know, I just do. I don’t have any evidence to back me up. I just know that it was Danny. Danny killed her, and I need you to come over because he is next door waiting for me to sleep with him and I’m afraid he’s going to come looking for me when I don’t show, and he’s a freakin’ murderer.” She didn’t care what words came out of her mouth, she just needed Caleb there to arrest him or protect her, one or the other.

“You were going to sleep with him?” It was amazing how the murderer part skipped over his head.

“I’m really sorry. You have no idea how sorry. Oh my God—I made out with a murderer.”

“You made out with him.” Caleb’s voice was flat. He was either mad, or he didn’t believe what
she was saying.

“Caleb, focus!” As she spoke someone knocked at the door and she let out a scream straight into the phone.

“My God!” Caleb exclaimed.

“He’s here, Caleb please. There’s no way I can hide that I know, and that means he’ll probably kill me to try to cover it up and then I’ll be dead and who would take care of the animals, because my mother hates cats and—“

“I’m coming,” he told her, and she could hear the sound of a siren in the background. It made her feel better.

“Tabitha?” Danny called through the front window, and Tabitha felt the blood in her entire body stop flowing. All of the windows were open. There was nothing between them except some nylon screen.

Tabitha pressed herself against the wall separating the kitchen from the living room, clutching the phone. “Are you still there?” Caleb asked on the other end of the line.

“Yeah, where are you?”

“High Street. It’s going to be a few minutes. Just try to stay calm, okay?”

“Calm. Right.”

“Go away,” Tabitha heard Thistle say, and she hoped Danny’s murderous tendencies didn’t run towards talking cats.

“What was that?” Caleb asked. “Is he in the house? I thought I heard a man’s voice.”

“Tabitha, what’s going on?” Danny called. “Are you okay? Look, if you think we’re rushing
things we can just slow down—I don’t want you to get in trouble. If this Caleb guy is dangerous—“ Tabitha let loose a sharp laugh.

“I just heard you laugh,” Danny said. “Do you think this is a game? If you don’t come out I’m going to have to come through this window--”

“I’m in the German Village now,” Caleb said into the phone. “I’m gonna hang up and be there in a few minutes, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

Knowing Caleb was close, and not wanting her window busted in, Tabitha stepped into the living room. Danny was peering into the window, while Thistle and Fritz both stood guard under it. Fritz was growling. “There you are,” he said. “Are you going to let me in?”

Tabitha shook her head, not able to speak. She looked around the room and stepped closer to the little table beside the couch and the lamp with the cast iron base on top of it.

“You look like I’ve done something terrible. I haven’t done anything.”

“Not to me,” she whispered. “She was your mother.”

Danny’s face changed expressions, from one of exasperation to a look of fear. “How did you know?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“She had sex with my best friend in my bedroom. When I was sixteen. How do you think that made me feel? How do you think my father felt? He pays her thousands of dollars a month so she can go sleep with anyone she pleases. I’ve been reading your blog, Tabitha.”

“What blog?” She forgot to be terrified and for a split second she was confused.

“Tails Around Town? A friend pointed it out to me one day and said that ‘J’ reminded him of my mother. I started reading, got a good idea of what neighborhood it was talking about, and sure enough, ‘J’ was my mother. Having sex with high school boys again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So you’ll play dumb when I suggest that it’s your fault I came to visit dear old ma. Okay, that’s fair.”

Tabitha held back a gasp when she saw Caleb’s cruiser pull up silently behind Danny on the street. She hoped that Danny would keep talking, but he just stood there, considering. How he’s going to kill me I suspect. “Why don’t you come with me?” Danny asked. “I’m taking an extended vacation.”

Caleb was out of the car and walking across the tiny lawn. When he put his foot on the top step of the porch the wood squeaked, and Danny spun around.

“What are you doing here?” Danny asked.

“Danny Bukowski, I’m placing you under arrest,” Tabitha heard Caleb through the window. She couldn’t see him but a moment later found Danny pressed face against her window screen, Caleb behind him and pulling his cuffs from his belt.

“You can’t arrest me for sleeping with your girlfriend.” Danny struggled, not making Caleb’s job easy.

“Almost,” Tabitha amended, feeling bolder with Caleb there.

“But I can arrest you for murder.”

As soon as Caleb spoke Danny threw his whole weight backwards against him, throwing him off balance. Caleb was on his feet at once as Danny bolted, a cuff around one wrist. Tabitha, caught up in the excitement, rushed to the front door and pulled it open.

Fritz was out the door in a flash, concentrating too hard to even bark as he rushed across the lawn and grabbed Danny by the ankle. Danny screamed and fell, but Fritz only bit down harder. Tabitha, Caleb, and Thistle reached them in moments, Caleb cuffing him the rest of the way while Tabitha grabbed for the dog, forcing her fingers into his mouth to release him and nearly getting bitten in the process. “I want you to bite him too,” she comforted, “but you can’t.”

She hugged the dog tight to her and tried to pay attention to what was going on at their feet. Caleb was straddling Danny’s back, cuffing him properly “…anything you say can be used against you in the court of law. You have a right to an attorney…”

God, I hope Mr. Daws doesn’t want to take this case, Tabitha thought.

Caleb pulled Danny to his feet and shoved him into the back of the patrol car. “You better be right about this,” he told Tabitha once the door was shut.

“I am. He confessed to me. I can testify in court that he did.”

“Well, good. You were going to sleep with this guy?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Women don’t cheat on me,” Caleb said. “No one’s ever cheated on me.”

“I was going to break up with you first, honest. It just didn't—“

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Tabitha shook her head. “Never mind. I’ll just go back into the house.”

Once Caleb left Tabitha collapsed on the couch and gathered Thistle into her arms. Fritz dropped to the floor over her feet. For once, Thistle didn't speak.

*****

“So you see dear readers,” Thistle typed the next day, “crime does not pay.” He glanced over at the couch where Tabitha was curled up in a ball, hair unbrushed and still in her pajamas. She had one arm thrown over Fritz, who looked only marginally less pitiful. “Especially,” Thistle continued, “if you’re trying to have an affair with it.”

He considered not updating any more. He didn't like that Danny had discovered his mother’s activities from his blog, but in the end he decided it wasn’t his fault the man was unhinged. And it made for a great blog entry.

*****

Monday afternoon Maya came to see Tabitha at work. “No visitors,” Mr. Daws crowed from his open office door, but even he shut up when Maya flashed her badge.

“Got a minute?” Tabitha pushed away the phone and the keyboard to give Maya her full concentration. Maya ignored Mr. Daws’ protests when she shut his door. “When we searched his car and apartment it was glaringly obvious. He had a suitcase and boxes in the back of his car.”

“I know,” Tabitha said, suddenly recalling that there had been boxes in the back of Danny’s car when they went over to Janine’s. She thought they were for moving things from the house. “So what?”

“He was going to run. He just wanted to get into the house for any valuables the victim might have had, and he was going to take off. You caught him just in time.”

“But what about me?” Tabitha said, hoping her voice wasn’t shaking. “We were—“

“A bit of fun before he took off, I’m afraid.” Her voice was gentle and less cop-ish, but hearing it still hurt. She’d sat up late the last two nights thinking about what she had almost done, and how charming he was and—she fantasized about having kids with the bastard! “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Tabitha said with a sigh.

“I just thought you should know, since you’ve been so crucial to this case, that we have DNA evidence against him. We got the labs back this morning. There was skin under Janine’s fingernails, and some blood on the vase that turned out not to be hers. It’s male DNA, and a close enough match to Janine that it has to be a relative.”

“So we’ve got him for real? Not just my insane ramblings?”

“Your insane ramblings kept him from running. We might not have caught him otherwise. But I have to ask, how did you know?”

“Fritz was acting funny at Janine’s house,” Tabitha said after a long pause. “I knew something was wrong, and suddenly I knew. That’s all. It was…instinct.”

“Some good instinct. You’d make an okay cop. But,” she continued, “you are not a cop.”

“The whole catching Danny thing was an accident,” Tabitha protested. “And I didn't make him confess to me.”

“You questioned every suspect on this case. You kept calling us, trying to tell us how to do our jobs—“

“No I wasn’t!”

“You were,” Maya shot back with her new detective fierceness. “Cut it out. You can get seriously
hurt doing stuff like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Tabitha said, meaning it. If she had just stayed out of all of it—the case, Danny--she wouldn’t be feeling so rotten.

Maya gave her a long look and nodded. “Okay. I’ll—“ she was interrupted by her cell phone. “Excellent,” she said at the end of the conversation. “Meet me at the station.”

“What was that?” Tabitha asked, and Maya gave her that look again. “Sorry, sorry.”

“I sent Caleb dumpster diving for the murder weapon. He found the fireplace poker in the dumpster outside of Danny’s building. He probably panicked and dropped it there right after the murder.”

“You sent Caleb into a dumpster?”

“He brought in my murder suspect. Mine. Do you know what its like to be a new detective and have a uniform catch your perp?”

“Only because of me,” Tabitha countered. “I knew you wouldn’t take me seriously. But he had to—he was my boyfriend.”

“I heard that was in the past tense.”

“Another reason why you shouldn’t have made him flail around in garbage all day. I cheated on him with a murderer!”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Maya said kindly. “So you’re single now?”

Surprise jolted through Tabitha. “That sounded like you were hitting on me.”

“Maybe a little,” Maya said. “You know where to find me. I have to go do paperwork on our murder. I’ll see you later.”

“As long as it’s not another crime scene.” Maya was laughing as she left. Tabitha wasn’t sure she had any humor left. She’d hoped the ‘you know where to find me’ was a joke. She was so done with cops. Or any anyone else who wanted to sleep with her. It was time to be single for a while. After all, she had a talking cat and a crime-solving dog. What more did she need?

*****

A/N:
More apologies for the lateness. It was raining today too, but I braved the weather--just for you guys. :)

Okay. That was my first murder mystery. How did I do?

Ch 8: The Nose and the Answer

2010-07-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

By Saturday Thistle still hadn’t gotten over missing the funeral and Kyle’s impromptu proposal to the corpse. He had related the story on his blog of course, but it wasn’t the same thing as being there and getting all of the juicy details. Still, he hoped this would win him an award of some sort. People liked hearing gossip about ordinary people. The celebrity gossip blogs had nothing on Thistledown Copperbottom.

Tabitha was not painting that day. She was dressed up in a skirt and heels and kept pacing around the house, sitting down on the couch and trying to watch TV, getting up again a few moments later. Fritz followed at her heels every time she got up, and would lay down next to her when she sat down again.

“I can’t take it anymore!” Thistle said finally, as Tabitha returned from walking around the kitchen.

“What?”

“Why are you pacing?”

Tabitha blushed. “Danny said he might come over. He wanted to go over his mom’s house, but its nearly two and--” With that the doorbell rang and she jumped, nearly falling over in her high shoes.

“You’re pathetic,” Thistle told her, and she hushed him as she opened the door.

Danny was indeed at the door when she answered, holding a large flower arrangement. “Hi,” he said. “Don’t get too excited. They’re funeral flowers. My apartment is full of these things.”

“They’re still beautiful,” Tabitha assured, and Thistle wondered if he could manage to throw up a hairball on her shoes at that very minute. She put them on the fireplace mantle behind the TV and glanced at Thistle. He wanted so badly to say something, and he knew that if he did, she’d deserve it. Bouncing around with this Danny character behind Caleb’s back. Thistle had no concept of infidelity of course, as related to himself--cats didn’t care. But he was fully aware that humans found it to nearly be a crime. He didn’t like to put Tabitha in his blog very often. But if she was going to do something this stupid, he had little choice.

*****

Tabitha felt a nervous buzzing in her chest as she walked with Danny across her yard towards Janine’s. The grass hadn’t been mowed since the day before she died and it was getting scraggly. Mrs. Garret was probably having fits.

“So we’re going to go through Janine’s stuff?” she asked.

“It has to be done sooner or later,” Danny said. “I prefer sooner, myself.”

“Okay.”

She hadn’t been in the house since the murder. There was still blood on the carpet in the living room. She tried not to look at it, instead focusing on the task at hand. Janine’s furniture was all nice, but nor really Tabitha’s taste. It was modern and new, while she preferred old stuff from flea markets. Janine didn’t decorate in pictures of her family, like most people (even Tabitha, who avoided going home as much as she could, kept a few snapshots). Instead she had art on the walls, mostly framed prints, in the bold colors of red, purple and royal blue that she loved so much. Danny wandered into the kitchen and came back with a box of garbage bags. “Mostly I thought we’d do the upstairs today, and I want to clean out the fridge. There’s stuff starting to grow in there.”

“Sure. No problem.”

“Thank you for helping me yet again,“ he said. He was standing close enough to her that she could feel his body heat. The nervous buzzing she’d been feeling melted into a different, more pleasant type of buzz.

“Really, it’s not a big deal. We‘re friends.” She stepped back.

“Friends, huh? What kind of friends?” She knew he was going to kiss her, could tell by the way his eyes burned. She didn’t give him the chance and hurried upstairs.

She had never been upstairs in Janine’s house. Janine had three bedrooms to Tabitha’s two, and a huge bathroom. Janine had replaced the old claw foot tub like Tabitha’s with a new whirlpool, and even though Tabitha loved her tub she was instantly jealous. “Mom liked luxury,” Danny said with an edge in his voice. “Check this out.” He pulled Tabitha into the bedroom. The queen sized bed was unmade and there were dirty clothes strewn about, but Danny steered Tabitha towards the closet and she could see what he meant. The back wall had been knocked out and now opened up into the smallest of the bedrooms. She had turned the entire room into a closet, including a wall of shoes going up to the ceiling.

“Look at all the shoes,” Tabitha breathed, eyes wide. Janine had shoes in every color and style imaginable. Tabitha knew they were all expensive--Janine used to criticize her Discount Shoe Shack footwear.

“If they fit, you can have them,” Danny said, a small smile playing on his face.

“Really?” she breathed.

“You can have anything you want. It’s just going to Goodwill otherwise.”

Tabitha felt a little guilty about the greed welling up inside her, but it was easily stamped down. She picked up a pair of alligator skin pumps and, kicking off her own shoes, slipped them on. They fit her perfectly.

Suddenly the chore was no longer a chore. Even though Janine was shorter than Tabitha they both wore a size eight, so she knew most of the clothes would fit her. “I feel like I’m taking advantage,” Tabitha said as she shook open a second garbage bag for herself. The Goodwill bag was only half-full.

“I kind of enjoy watching you get excited,” Danny said. “Even though I don’t see the appeal.” Danny’s idea of fashion, Tabitha had learned, was a black t-shirt with something written on it, and a pair of jeans. He’d worn the same shoes every time they’d met.

“Clothes are like art,” she explained. “I like being a walking masterpiece and expressing myself.”

“I won’t complain. That dress you wore on Wednesday--wow.”

“Caleb didn’t think it was appropriate.”

“Caleb is an ass,” Danny insisted. “When are you going to dump him?”

“Soon,” she said, her nervous feeling coming back. She felt Danny’s hand on her waist and he spun her around.

“Why don’t you break up with him right now, and just not tell him about it until later?”

*****

“Thistle, I wanna go,” Fritz whined. “It’s my house and I wanna go!”

Thistle peered out the window. He couldn’t see what was going on in the house, but it looked like they might have left the front door slightly ajar. “Okay then,” he said. “Let’s go.” He led Fritz around to the back and slipped through the cat door easily. Fritz followed. He was a small dog, but not tiny.

“My butt is stuck,” Fritz cried out, wiggling.

“If your head fit, the rest of you can fit,” Thistle said knowingly.

It took Fritz a long time to get through the door, but soon they were slipping between the houses and hopping up onto Janine’s porch. Thistle was right, they hadn’t shut the door all the way. Fritz shoved his nose into the door and pushed.

The room just smelled like dried blood to Thistle, but Fritz sighed happily. “Janine,” he said.

“Do you smell the alive her, or the dead her?” Thistle asked as Fritz circled the room with his nose to the carpet.

“My Janine,” Fritz said again, ignoring his friend’s insensitive comments.

Thistle wondered where Tabitha and Danny had gotten to when he heard giggling from upstairs. “That can’t be good,” he said, but Fritz barked at him before he could get more than half-way up the stairs. “Not now Fritz.”

“Something’s wrong,” Fritz said.

“Yeah, I know.” He glanced up the stairwell. “They’re doing it, I know it. I can feel it in my whiskers.” He shook his head. “She’s forcing me to do a blog on her.”

“No no no. Really wrong, Thistle. Wrong. The smells don’t add up.” Thistle finally gave Fritz his full attention as the little dog continued to sniff around the room, following a scent into the kitchen and back over to the stairs. “I think—I think its bad.”

“What! What’s bad?” Thistle sniffed around where Fritz was standing. He could only smell Tabitha and Danny.

“I can smell Janine all over,” Fritz said with a low whine. “There are other people smells, not from this week. Police smells. And it smells like Tabitha over here—“ he buried his nose in the carpet at the foot of the stairs. “And over here.” He trotted over to the dining room, where Tabitha had taken the phone from Janine’s purse.

“So?”

“Over here is old. Days old.”

“Right. Tabitha found the body, remember?”

Fritz ignored him and rushed over to where the carpet was stained with blood. “I—I can smell Danny here. He was here a week ago.”

Danny shouldn’t have been there, Thistle knew immediately. “The son! I knew it was the son! But why?”

“Danny hated my Janine,” Fritz said with a small growl. “She was very nice to his best friend in high school, whatever that means, and he’s never forgiven her.”

Thistle had to hold back the urge to hit Fritz, claws outstretched. “Why didn’t you say so before? That’s motive, Fritz!”

“What’s motive?”

There was a thump upstairs. “She has to know he did it,” Thistle said. “She can’t do 'it' with a murderer.”

“What’s 'it'?” Fritz asked, following him upstairs. “He was there the night Janine died. He did it, didn’t he?”

“Yes. It was Danny.”

Janine’s bedroom door was shut, and Thistle could hear lovemaking noises from the other side. He wanted to yell and shout, but Danny couldn’t find out his secret, so he meowed at the top of his lungs. Fritz caught on immediately and started barking.

******

Tabitha forgot about Caleb entirely when Danny pulled her over to Janine’s bed and they fell into it together. This is so wrong, she thought, but only because they were in a dead woman’s bed. Her boyfriend was so far from her mind. As they struggled out of their clothes she started having wild fantasies about dating Danny, maybe even settling down permanently and having a few kids that wore black t-shirts and glasses.

Danny was fumbling with the button on his jeans when a racket came up on the other side of the door--first meowing and then furious barking. “What the hell is that?” Danny asked, distracted.

Tabitha’s heart sank. Thistledown was up to something, and ruining her plans. As the meows and barks became even more frantic she knew she couldn’t ignore them. “Those would be my animals,” she said, pushing him off her and reaching for her shirt.

“What a mood killer,” Danny said. “Take them back to your house and come back.”

“Okay,” she said.

She opened the door and immediately caught Fritz as he launched himself into the room. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded, scooping up Thistle in the other arm and carrying them down the hall. Thistle stopped meowing immediately, but Fritz continued as they went down the stairs.

“He did it,” Thistle whispered to her, wiggling out of her grasp and climbing up on her shoulders so she could grip Fritz more firmly. “It was Danny. He killed his mother.”

Tabitha nearly dropped Fritz. “No. It was Sylvia and Zach. I thought we’d decided.”

“We were wrong.”

Tabitha picked up her pace and left the house, crossing to her own yard and shifting Fritz to get the door open. With Fritz barking it was hard to concentrate. She had to be misunderstanding something. Like the part where her future murdered his own mother. “Thistle,” she said, “just because you don’t like me seeing Danny doesn’t mean you can tell lies about him.” Denial was so much easier.

“Fritz can smell him in the house. He was there the night she was killed. He hates her for shtupping his best friend in high school. You told me yourself how he didn’t like the way she treated his father!”

Tabitha dropped Fritz on the couch and pulled Thistle off her back so she could see him. “It’s not him. It can’t be.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her, and it was only then that she believed him, because Thistle was rarely sorry about anything.

*******

A/N:
This chapter ended up covering more than I had originally planned, so we might be finished in 9 chapters instead of ten. I'm not sure yet.

Thrantor: DES has been cut down into 3 shorter books instead of one long one. The one I just finished is about David and Heather, so Sprite's personal issues are pretty much out. The second book will be about Katy and Lex, and the third book will be about Sprite and Gabby. The fourth book is about David's vampire friend Millie and her brother Sam. I think the series will end after that.

Fiona: Are you sure you want your cats to talk? I certainly wouldn't. Thistle has shorter hair, like Morris the 9 Lives cat.

Arielle: I believe you guessed the murderer a couple chapters ago. Gold star!

Ch 7: The Ring and the Funeral

2010-07-19T08:11:00.000-07:00

A fresh wave of guilt washed over Tabitha when Caleb showed up at her house on Wenesday for the calling hours. He was dressed in his only suit and looked as good as he ever did. She was wearing Janine's favorite color--a bold red halter dress and matching five-inch heels. She knew Janine would approve. Thistle agreed.

Caleb kissed her in the doorway, but he froze when he realized Tabitha was holding two leashes. He looked down and Thistle and Fritz looked back up. Tabitha could only imagine what her silent cat was thinking. "What exactly are you doing?"

"They wanted to come," Tabitha said with a shrug, deciding there was no way she could explain or lie her way into a sane person. Thistle had been quite clear that he needed to see people mourn to decide how guilty they were and Fritz howled for an hour until she gave in.

"No way," Caleb said, backing away from her. "You can't just take animals to a funeral."

"I called the home. They said they didn’t care. Caleb, just let it go."

"This isn’t normal," he insisted. "You don't wear a bright red hooker dress to a funeral and you don't bring your menagerie! Why can't you be normal?"

"Normal!" She threw the leashes down. "Look here. This is who I am, this is what I do. I like bright clothes and guess what, so did Janine. This is for her, remember? Fritz has been miserable all week. His best friend just died. He needs to go to this. I know its crazy. You can call me crazy all you want, I don't mind. But don't call me weird."

She must have looked manic because Caleb studied her a long time before he answered. "Okay," he said finally. "I'm sorry." She sighed. She didn’t want him to be sorry, not really. If he broke up with her for being crazy not only would it be his fault, but he would be an asshole too and she wouldn’t have to feel bad anymore. "But they're riding in the back."

Tabitha gave him a weak smile. "Of course."

So all four of them piled into Caleb's car, and Caleb didn’t say anything about cat or dog hair, though Tabitha knew he wanted to. He was trying, and she appreciated it, even if it wasn’t what she wanted.

At the funeral home Tabitha held her head high as Thistle and Fritz walked ahead of her, ignoring the stares of the other people as she entered the building. Caleb, to his credit, walked beside her, but he did not hold her hand or touch her in any way. That was okay. She couldn't be embarrassed if she wanted to pull this off, but she couldn't expect him not to be.

There were a decent amount of people there, mostly men under thirty-five. "Lots of ex-boyfriends here," Caleb remarked under his breath, interested. To his cop brain every one of them was a potential suspect, but Tabitha had a hard time concentrating on the murder as she scanned the crowd looking for Danny.

She found him standing near the casket, talking to one of the few women in the room. "Let's go say hi to Danny," she said, because she couldn’t *not* include Caleb.

Danny excused himself with a smile and took Tabitha’s hand, giving it a squeeze. "Thank you for coming," he said, basic funeral speech.

"This is my boyfriend," Tabitha said, introducing Caleb. "He's working with Detective Vargas."
"She's here," Danny said. "I haven't really had a chance to talk to her yet--have you made more progress?" he asked Caleb.

"I can't really discuss the case," Caleb said. "But I expect we'll get some answers soon." Tabitha could feel Thistle, leaning against her leg, go on alert, crouching down like he wanted to pounce.
"I hope so," Danny said, and went down on one knee to pet Fritz, and Tabitha felt warm all over. He didn't care that she was crazy.

"I'm going to go say hi to Maya," Caleb told Tabitha. "I'll catch up with you later."

"Sure," she said, and knew he just wanted to get away from the animals.

Thistle began to pull at his leash immediately and Tabitha sighed. "Fine," she told him under her breath when she leaned down and unhooked the leash from his harness. "But if we get kicked out of here I'm blaming you."

Danny was looking at her when she stood up again. "He's a free spirit," she explained.

"Is he now?" She saw that he was amused. "I'm so glad you're here." He leaned close to her to whisper. "Love the dress."

"I firmly believe in celebrating the deceased, not mourning them," she told him as she folded up Thistle's leash and put it in her bag. She was much less conspicuous with just Fritz. The little dog was sitting quietly, watching. This was not normal behavior. He was a Jack Russell. He should have been jumping on every person in reach. She picked up the dog and gave him a hug. "Fritz is depressed," she explained. "I thought the funeral might give him some closer."

"You talk about them like they're people."

She couldn’t expect him to understand any more than Caleb or any other guy did, but somehow she had hoped. "People don't understand anything about animals. Not really. Fritz loved Janine in ways we can’t possibly understand. You can tell just by looking at him that his heart is broken."

"Of course. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings."

"Sorry," she apologized. "Caleb freaked out a little bit when he saw I was bringing them." She looked for him across the room—Thistle was sitting under a chair near him and Maya. Watching.

*****

Thistle picked his way through the sea of ex-boyfriends, half-paying attention because it would make for a good blog topic later. He settled under a chair near Maya and Caleb. "This place is creepy," he told Maya. "Most of these guys are younger than me!"

"Focus," she told him. "We’re working, remember?"

"Are the lab results back yet?" Caleb asked.

Maya shook her head. "Monday at the earliest. Then we’ll find out whose blood is whose." Thistle perked his ears up at this. They had found the murderer’s blood?

"If we can just get the fireplace poker back, that would be something," Maya continued. "I talked to the ex-husband today," she said. "No wonder she dumped him—what a wimp."

Thistle was eager to hear about the ex-husband, the one paying the alimony. If he had learned one thing from watching TV it was that murders usually occurred over two things: greed and jealousy. The husband would have both. Unfortunately Maya didn't seem inclined to share any more, and Thistle’s whiskers prickled when he saw Kyle and his mother enter the room. Kyle was already crying, but Sylvia, if anything, looked smug. She let her son roam to the front of the room and glanced about at the people present.

The funeral home appeared to have two floors open to the public, and Thistle watched her slip upstairs without speaking to anyone. He was torn between hoping to overhear something about the case and seeing where his killer was running off.

In the end he tore himself away from the cops and slinked around the edges of the room and up the stairs. The second floor held a closed office, a full bathroom, and a medium sized sitting room equipped with a pair of sofas and a coffee maker. Thistle managed to slip inside the door and make a run for the sofa right before Sylvia shut it.

"Was that a cat?" a man’s voice said, and Thistle looked up to see Zach standing there. Zach had been lying low around the neighborhood since Janine was killed—this was the first Thistle had seen of him.

"I think so," Sylvia said, not even glancing under the sofa. "C’mon Zachary, its been too long. I’ve considered breaking the sink on purpose just so you could come over."

Thistle was appalled and thrilled when Sylvia pulled Zach into an embrace. I knew it was them, he thought, whiskers twitching. They were in on it together, they had to be. He was slightly less thrilled with the sucking sounds the couple was making, and he soon saw that they had every intention of having relations in the funeral home. This is going to be a great blog, he cackled internally. Hypocrisy was always a welcome subject to discuss, and this was a wonderfully scandalous example. He was a little impressed—Sylvia had hidden her cougar tendencies incredibly well.

Zach and Sylvia did it fast, standing up against a wall. The logistics were very interesting to Thistle, and he wondered if it was simply the fastest way to go about it in case someone walked in. But no one did, and once they were finished Zach simply zipped up his fly and Sylvia smoothed her skirt back down over her thighs. "Let’s go mourn the departed," Sylvia said, and they both laughed.

Thistle streaked out after them—he couldn’t wait to tell Tabitha.

*****

"Not this time," Tabitha told Thistle the next morning. She was running late so she didn't have time to worry about him seeing her in her underwear as she pulled on a charcoal grey suit. "I don’t care how many more secret affairs you uncover."

"But I want to go," Thistle insisted, sitting up straight on the bed.

"Too bad. I’m leaving, you’re staying here." She glanced at Fritz at her feet, looking up at her with big doggie eyes. "You’re staying too. I have to go straight to work after the funeral—Daws wants to kill me as it is. You know, he takes off to go to funerals a couple times a year. All day—not just a morning. Well, he’s old and all his friends are dying. But when my neighbor is murdered, do I get sympathy?"

She slipped her feet into practical work shoes and looked in the mirror. "Ugh. I look depressing."

"Like you’re going to a funeral?"

"I hate you."

*****

Tabitha still managed to get to the funeral with ten minutes to spare, and Danny waved her to the front of the room. "I want you to meet my dad," he said, and she saw a man even shorter than Danny and just as slight. He was going bald and had tiny, squinting eyes behind large glasses.

"Hi," she said, offering her hand and trying to be upbeat and ignore the dead body behind them. "I wish we could have met under better circumstances."

"My son has told me all about you," he said, shaking her hand with both hands. If Caleb had been there he would have laughed at the man’s grip afterwards. "It’s a pleasure." Tears prickled at his eyes as he spoke, and he pulled away to reach for a real handkerchief. "I’m sorry. My ex-wife, she was a remarkable woman."

"I know," Tabitha said.

Danny asked Tabitha to sit with him, and he leaned over towards her to whisper. "Mom really did Dad wrong in the end," he said. "But he still didn't want her to leave. In the end she got whatever she wanted, because he just wanted her to be happy."

"That does suck," Tabitha said, feeling a little cowed. She didn’t like thinking of Janine as the bad guy when she was the one who was dead.

Tabitha sat through a brief eulogy that tactfully skirted around the issue of Janine sleeping with three quarters of the people in the room, and then after a prayer the minister asked if anyone wished to speak.

There was the sound of uncomfortable shifting in the room, and then a low murmur when someone stood up. Danny and Tabitha both twisted around to see who it was. Kyle. "This isn’t going to be good," she muttered.

Kyle was dressed in a full suit—black with a black tie. He had rings under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in days. He looked around and made his way to the front of the room. He ignored the podium the minister stood beside and stepped up to the coffin.

For once Kyle was not crying.

"J-Janine was an amazing person," he said. He wasn’t talking loud enough to reach the whole room, but Tabitha could hear him perfectly. "She loved to laugh, she loved art and music. She opened the world to me." He turned away from everyone else. "I loved her." Tabitha’s mouth fell open in disbelief when Kyle took a ring from his pocket and slipped it onto the corpse’s finger.
He didn't wait for anyone’s reactions, just turned around and walked out of the room. "Well," the minister said, clearing his throat. "That was…new." And at that Sylvia stood up, a furious expression on her face, and hurried out after her son.

*****

A/N:
Thanks for the comments last chapter guys!

For those of you who’ve been around a while (like, 3 years), DES is finally done, more or less. It was a job of work, but the novel has been slashed in half, character issues have been resolved, yadda yadda yadda. I’ve got a handful of proofreaders to go over it, and then I start looking for an agent.

Arielle: I did finish Wizards and Warlocks in the week I had planned. My computer also broke down that week and I've only just gotten around to typing it up. I need to change some placeholder names and then I would be thrilled if you would read the first draft. (it's only half the length I planned so the finished product will be different)

Ch. 6: The Boyfriend and the Other Man

2010-07-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

“She did it,” Thistle insisted later that afternoon in the living room. “It was her. I can feel it in my whiskers—and my whiskers are very sensitive to this sort of thing.” He talked in a quiet whisper to prevent Fritz, sitting under the kitchen table and chewing on a rawhide bone, from hearing him through the archway that led from living room to kitchen.

“She seems angry enough,” Tabitha admitted. He didn’t like how uncertain she sounded. “But motive is not evidence, Thistle. You’ve seen enough cop shows to know that.”

“It was her. Go call your cop boyfriend, call Maya. Tell them she did it. I could claw her eyes out right now.” Tabitha was surprised how emotional Thistle was getting and couldn’t help but smile. She always knew his supposed disdain for the dog next door was an act.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tabitha told him, reaching for the phone all the same. “Is Detective Vargas in?” she asked when the station picked up. “I’m just letting Maya know what we found out,” she told Thistle while she was being connected. “It’s the good Samaritan thing to do.”

“Detective Vargas,” Maya’s voice said, and Tabitha turned her attention from her cat to the conversation.

“Hi, it’s Tabitha.” She deliberately left off her last name in an attempt to convince Maya that she didn’t want to play ‘hard ass cop’ with her. Maya had been so friendly when she was a street cop.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Tabitha imagined that the phrase suggested familiarity and was pleased, but after she had explained what she had learned Maya’s attitude was far from friendly. “Thank you Ms. Silverstein, but next time perhaps you should leave the detecting to the professionals.”

“Did you talk to Sylvia Harding?” Tabitha asked, cowed by the comment but not letting go so easily.

“Of course,” Maya snapped. “She seemed like nothing more than a distressed mother. It’s a perfectly understandable in the situation.”

“But you’re the cops,” Tabitha tried again. “She was probably hiding her guilt—the woman is terrifying.”

“Thank you,” Maya said again. “I’ll definitely look into it.” And with that she hung up.

“Can you believe that bitch?” Tabitha asked, staring at the phone. She turned to talk to Thistle but he was gone from his perch on the couch and was booting up the computer. “Useless cat.” She glanced into the kitchen and saw Fritz. He’d stopped chewing on his bone and was watching her. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “We have a lead. We have a motive.”

She sighed and started up the stairs. She hadn’t gotten any painting done that weekend and it felt wrong. She would drown her discontent in acrylics, she decided, and ignore the world for a while.

******

“Dearest readers,” Thistle wrote. “I apologize for my lack of internet presence this weekend. One cannot ever think that the small dramas in their lives could possibly explode into murder, and yet. The Ballad of J has come to a jarring end. Her last note has been sung, she has finished her last chorus.” He stopped typing to re-read his words. His tendency towards musical theater embellishments had led many to speculate that he was an effeminate gay man. He let them think as they liked. It was of no consequence to him.

“J was found murdered in her home yesterday. Police are still gathering evidence, but I fear it was her liaison with the poor K that led to her end. She was well loved, as well as a great lover (or so I have heard). This blog will not be the same without her.” He posted what he had written and jumped down from the table. He needed a nap.

Fritz was still under the table, and Thistle joined him. “I can’t remember what she smells like,” he told Thistle. “I’m trying to and I can’t.”

“Are your allergies still acting up?”

“A little.”

“Maybe its affecting your memory too.” Thistle said, making things up as he went along. It seemed to work because Fritz perked up a bit.

“You think so?”

“Sure. Why not. Now scoot over—you’re hogging all the shade.” Thistle nestled down in the shadow of the table next to Fritz and fell asleep.

*****

Tabitha was having a hard time getting into the zone. Even her prisms of color were falling flat on the canvas as she tried to paint life into Janine’s old metal garbage can. Normally she could see the beauty in everyday objects, but nothing seemed very pretty at the moment. Having Fritz moping around must be getting to me. She moved a pile of half-finished canvasses and sat down in the room’s only chair. She still held a paintbrush between her fingers and began to absently paint her arm chartreuse.

She heard Fritz begin to bark and soon enough Thistle was peeking his head into the room. “Door,” he offered. With Fritz around I wont have to worry about fixing the doorbell. She dumped the paintbrush into a cup of water and went downstairs.

Tabitha had changed into paint covered sweatpants and a tank top, which she was only all too aware of when she opened the door and found Danny standing on the steps balancing a huge bag of dog food on one shoulder. “Hi,” he said brightly.

She stood horrified. “Hi.”

“Can I come in? This is kinda’ heavy.” She stepped inside to let him in and he set the food down next to the computer table. “Hey, you read ‘Tails from Town’ too?” Thistle had some blog she didn’t recognize up on the screen.

“Uh, sure. Hey—thanks for the dog food.”

“It’s the least I can do, what with you taking care of Fritz for me. You’re a true friend.”

“You barely know me.”

“Well, I’d like to change that. Are you free tonight?”

“Oh! Well…” She looked down at her clothes, the streak of color down her arm. “I’m not really dressed—“

“So go change. I’ll wait.”

Tabitha didn’t need to consider for very long before she was upstairs scrubbing the paint off of her arm and again donning her outfit from that morning. She even took the time to put on a little bit of mascara. It’s just dinner with a friend, she told herself as she dug around in a drawer for lipstick. It’s not like I’m cheating or anything. On that thought, forget the lipstick. She felt butterflies in her stomach like she might as well be on a date, and closed her eyes before she went back downstairs. “Just dinner,” she told herself.

They walked half-way down the block to Danny’s car—a hybrid. “You are so lucky,” she said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “I want one of these so bad, but I can barely afford my mortgage payment, let alone a new car.” She had been foolish to buy a house in the German Village making what she did, but she loved her little brick home and didn't care in the slightest that she didn't have money anymore.

“Well, I think its important to do what we can for the environment,” Danny said as he started the car.

Tabitha thought about Caleb’s unwillingness to recycle or quit using Styrofoam plates. “I quite agree,” she told him. “So dinner. What did you have in mind?” They decided on Japanese and Danny took her to a restaurant she had never been to before. It was different and new, and Tabitha found herself resenting Caleb even more. (His idea of going out was some greasy spoon diner.)

The more she enjoyed herself, the more miserable she grew, and the meal went on and Danny was charming, funny and fun. She was having a good time—a great time. Which was exactly what she was afraid of.

After dinner they went out for a few drinks and it was late when Danny pulled up to her house. “Thanks for dinner,” she said feeling a heavy weight of guilt. Because if he was going to kiss her, she wasn’t going to stop him.

He leaned in close to her. “Tabitha? The police have released my mother’s body. I was wondering if you would come with me to the funeral home tomorrow. I know we just met, but you were her friend and I feel a real connection with you.”

She blinked, surprised and disappointed, guilty all over because she was disappointed. “Of course I’ll come with you.”

“I’m glad.” And then he kissed her. This is it—you’re officially a cheater. She might not have been, except she couldn’t help but kiss back. He smiled at her in the dark when they separated, and she tried not to smile back. I am a vile, evil cheater. “So tomorrow?” he asked.

“What time?”

“Four. Prentice Funeral Home. Do you know where it is?”

“I’ll Google it.”

“Thank you,” he said, and he looked like he was going to kiss her again.

“Goodnight.” She got out of the car before she could cheat any more, and hurried into the house.

*****

Tabitha’s cell phone rang before her alarm went off the next morning, and she fumbled for it on her nightstand, glancing at the caller ID with bleary eyes. She sat straight up when she saw Caleb’s name, tossing Thistle off her in the process. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Caleb demanded when she answered.

“What? Nothing! It was just dinner.”

“Dinner? What are you talking about?”

Her mind caught up with her and she realized he couldn’t possibly know. “What are you talking about?”

“Playing detective and then calling Maya about it. I got chewed out this morning, and let me tell you—“

“Oh, get over it,” Tabitha moaned, getting out of bed. “I was just checking a few things. It’s no big deal.”

“It is a big deal, Tabby. Maya is my superior, remember? When you do something stupid it reflects on me. You can’t go around talking to suspects on your own. You’re going to mess up the case.”

“I don’t see how. Its not like anything happened. Caleb, I was asleep.”

“It’s time to get up. Who’d you go to dinner with?”

“No one. Janine’s son. It was nothing.” It wouldn’t do any good to lie.

“And did you interrogate him too? We’re checking out the son. Everything is under control. Stop talking to people before I get fired.”

“Okay.” It was too early for this. “I promise. I’m going to go pee now. And take a shower. Since I am up.” She hung up and sat down on the toilet and Thistle walked in.

“So dinner was nothing, huh?”

“Go away.”

“You’re acting pretty guilty for ‘nothing.’”

“I got Caleb in trouble for snooping around. You got him in trouble. And now I’m in trouble. Get out!” Thistle turned and left. Tabitha was able to stretch to reach the door and slammed it behind him. When she had finished her business she found Fritz waiting on the other side. He looked up at her with sad eyes and whined. “I’m sorry I yelled. I bet Janine never yelled. Give it a few more weeks living with Thistle. You’ll yell too.”

Later at work there was more yelling from Mr. Daws when she told him she had to leave early, and by the time three-thirty rolled around going to help plan a funeral was looking like actual fun.

Prentice Funeral Home was directly off the Short North across town, her second favorite place in the city after the German Village. Danny was waiting for her in the parking lot. “Are you ready?” she asked him, and he nodded, giving her a brief kiss on the cheek and grabbing for her hand.

“Thank you.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

He held her hand through the entire process, listing relatives for the obituary and picking out a coffin. Tabitha didn't say much and wasn’t sure how much help she was being as he decided on white roses for the mahogany coffin and set the viewing hours for Wednesday evening, the funeral and burial for Thursday. He was still clutching her hand when they left. “Thank you,” he told her, still standing in the doorway of the funeral home.

“I didn't really do anything.” He pushed her gently against the doors and kissed her, his free hand reaching up to stroke her hair. She didn't want to push him away but when his tongue slipped into her mouth she did.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, looking at her shoulder instead of her face.

“No, it’s not that, it’s just—I have a boyfriend,” she admitted, not wanting to. “He’s a cop—he’s working on your mother’s case with Detective Vargas.”

“You should have said something last night.”

“I didn’t want to.” She felt like crying. “Look, I really like you, Danny, but I feel miserable about doing anything behind Caleb’s back.”

“Do you love him?” he asked.

“No.” She didn't even pause to think about it, and she knew it was the truth. “I don’t. But I can’t cheat on him.”

“Okay. I understand.”

“Do you really?”

“Of course.” He smiled at her. “So when you break up with him, you’ll let me know.”

“You’ll be the first person I call.”

“Good.”

******

A/N:
Prentice Funeral Home is actually in Akron, OH. It’s a block from where I grew up and I used to play in the parking lot when I was a kid and try to peek through the windows.

There haven’t been any comments in a couple of chapters. If you’re enjoying yourself, please say so. Right now I’ve only got my boyfriend telling me I’m awesome and while I believe him, I could still use a bit of moral support.

We’re more than half way through the story now. The Cat in Cougar Country is book one. There are 4 more chapters left and then I’ll start book 2 (as yet untitled) and book one will be available for download only. I haven’t decided if it’ll be free or something measly like a dollar. When book 2 is finished it will be available for download for two or three bucks, and book 3 will be free to read online. And so on. I have book 2 outlined more or less, and book 3 is in the planning stages. I have murders for books 4-6. It would be awesome if I could find an e-book company willing to pick up the series.

I’ve been reading lots of cat-centric cozies lately. I get one every time I go to the library. It’s been an overall painful experience. Anyone have suggestions for something good? Did you know that there are themed cozies for everything, from knitting to chocolate to sudoku? I haven’t found any books I like yet, but there’s this British tv show, Rosemary and Thyme. It’s about gardeners that solve murders. It’s great.

Ch 5: The Boy and the Betrayal

2010-07-04T18:17:00.001-07:00

Tabitha woke up late Sunday morning to Thistle sleeping on her hip and Fritz cuddled up against her stomach. Ugh. I’m spooning a dog, she thought, pushing Thistle off of her and rolling away. It was way too hot to sleep with so many warm, furry bodies. Danny had stayed over an hour the evening before, but she was pretty sure that when he left Fritz was in a better mood. Fritz was quiet enough while they slept and didn't stir when she moved.

Thistle got up with her and followed her into the bathroom. “We can start questioning suspects today,” he told her.

“You’re serious about this,” Tabitha said, reaching for her toothbrush.

“As a heart attack.”

“Do cats have heart attacks?”

“Are you going to help us?”

“Sure. I always spend my Sundays looking for murderers. Get out so I can shower—I feel gross.”

Tabitha took her time showering, relishing the temporary privacy of the bathroom. She ran the water only lukewarm to wash off the sweat from sleeping with Fritz and Thistle. She’d always had a hard time justifying an air conditioner because there were usually only a handful of too-hot days a year in Ohio, but one night in a bed full of animals was enough to make her second think that decision.

Fritz was in the hallway when she got out of the shower and he gave her a low whimper. “What is it boy?” she asked, feeling like she was in an episode of Lassie.

“He has to pee,” Thistle said coming out of the bedroom, sounding bored.

“Oh! Okay. Just a second.” She pulled on a light summer robe and slippers and was ushered down the stairs. Both Fritz and Thistle rushed out the back door when she opened it, and once it was shut she leaned against it and stifled a groan. Too many animals…

*****

“Are you ready to play detective today?” Thistle asked as Fritz rooted around the yard for a good spot. Thistle used his usual space under the tomato plants. They were starting to not look so healthy.

“What’s detective?” Fritz asked, and raised his leg on the apple tree.

“It’s where we question people and find out who killed Janine.”

“My Janine!” Fritz answered with a howl. “She’s gone gone gone!”

Damn, Thistle swore. “And that’s why we must avenge her death. Do you know what that means?”

“A little.”

“Good enough. Let’s get back inside—I’m starving.”

Fritz perked up a little. “Food?”

Thistle went back through the door and was greeted with the smell of brewing coffee while Tabitha busied herself with breakfast preparations.

“It’s a wonderful day for interrogation,” he remarked to her as she opened the door to let Fritz back in.

"And how exactly are you going to interrogate people?" Tabitha asked Thistle.

"You're going to take us for a walk over to Kyle's to check on him. Be a concerned neighbor and all. Mrs. Garret is always out working on her lawn on Sundays—we should stop by all friendly-like."

"They might believe I'm walking Fritz, but what about you? You can't just follow along and stop when we do without calling attention to yourself."

Thistle closed his eyes. "You can put me in the harness." He hated the idea, he really did. Being strapped into something and stuck on the end of a leash sickened him, but it was a valid way to get around town. Tabitha had gotten many comments about how 'well trained' he was. The very thought made him want to cough up hairballs in Tabitha's shoes.

"Well, if you insist," Tabitha said. He knew she was fully aware of how much he hated it, and how serious he was.

Tabitha fed Fritz his own food in his own bowl (eventually Maya had let her retrieve a few items for him) and made eggs for both herself and Thistle. Tabitha made vegetarian sausage for herself--Thistle was content with just egg. It was their normal Sunday breakfast ordeal, but everything was strange with Fritz crunching away at dog chow in the corner.

"Do you think the son will come take him?"

"I don't know," Tabitha said, sitting down at the little table in the kitchen. (Her house was smaller than Janine's with no dining room.) Thistle noted her stiffen, raising her guard. She didn’t want him to know she was attracted, but he didn’t have to ask. It was in her body language, they way she leaned in close to Danny while they spoke the night before, in the way she laughed. And she smelled a little different. You didn’t hide things from a cat.

"Maybe he'll move into the house next door," Thistle suggested, knowing it was an evil thing to say. Sure enough, Tabitha tensed even more. "We can all be best friends."

"Stop teasing me," Tabitha said. She concentrated on eating her breakfast and did her best to ignore him as he continued to make offhanded remarks about Danny, never coming right out and accusing her of attraction. It was fun to live with a woman.

Once Tabitha had finished cleaning up and gotten dressed she turned to Fritz. "Wanna go for a walk?" she asked. It was as if a little switch had been turned in the dog's brain, and he went from completely depressed to jumping up on her legs and even giving a hopeful bark. "I take that as a yes," she said. "Let me get out the leashes."

Fritz's leash was hot pink--courtesy of Janine--but Thistle had insisted on basic black, if he had to wear one at all. He stood still and let Tabitha strap the harness around him, his skin crawling at the feeling of it around his middle. She snapped the leash onto it and he felt claustrophobic in the middle of the room. “I hate this,” he told her.

“I know.”

Thistle had to resist the urge to slink along on his belly when they left the house but did his best to look normal. Fritz didn't care about the leash, trotting happily across the red brick sidewalks. As Thistle predicted, Mrs. Garret was outside, working on her postage stamp sized yard, little more than a strip of flowers and a strip of grass behind a hip-high iron fence. She plucked every weed from the beds weekly and combed the grass for dandelions wearing pink garden gloves and a wide-brimmed hat even on a cloudy day. “Good morning Mrs. Garret,” Tabitha said.

Mrs. Garret gave them a studying look over her bifocals. “You had two different men over at your house yesterday.”

Thistle wanted to laugh, but that wouldn’t have been professional. “The police and Janine’s son,” Tabitha answered. “It was business.”

“There’s no such thing as good business over there,” Mrs. Garret said. “That girl got what was coming to her.” A funny thing to say, Thistle figured, since Mrs. Garret wasn’t more than ten years older than Janine.

“That’s a little harsh.”

“Sinners are always punished. You’ll see. You might not come to such a pleasant end either.”

Thistle had to hand it to her—Tabitha kept her cool. “Thank you very much for the advice,” she said. “I’ll certainly take it under consideration.” Mrs. Garret seemed somewhat mollified by this. “So did you see anything out of the ordinary at Janine’s Friday?”

“Do you think I spend all my time spying on that—that—slut?” She cut off short to whisper the word like it was dirty. “Why do you care so much anyway?”

“At church they always tell me I should love thy neighbor. Even someone like Janine. She could have been saved, you know. And now she’ll never get that chance.”

“Too true,” Mrs. Garret said with a nod. “You go to church then?”

“All the time,” Tabitha said.

“Well then. You should know better than to have all those men over at your house. A girl your age should be married anyway.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Tabitha assured. “Thank you.”

Thistle suppressed his laugh as they walked away. “Don’t,” Tabitha warned. “It’s not funny. Do you still think she did it?”

“Probably not,” Thistle admitted.

“I don’t like this,” Tabitha said as they walked on. Kyle Harding lived with his parents two blocks away. It was beautiful out and a lot of people walked up and down the streets, some residents, some tourists taking in the architecture and shopping in the many little boutiques and antique stores scattered throughout the area. “I don't like going around suggesting that my neighbors are criminals.

They walked past an older couple who turned and glanced at Tabitha. “People think you’re talking to yourself,” Thistle said softly.

“No kidding.”

*****

Kyle Harding lived in a house built right on top of the brick sidewalk, behind the same type of iron gate as Mrs. Garret’s home. Tabitha felt nervous going up to the door, but one look a poor Fritz was enough to give her enough courage to ring the bell. She stepped back a little when Kyle’s mother answered the door.

Tabitha didn't know Sylvia Harding very well, except that she was on every neighborhood and city committee or council she could manage. She often came to Tabitha’s door with fliers or petitions, the most recent being for a leash law for cats.

“You see,” she couldn’t help but exclaim, gesturing towards Thistle. “It’s such a simple matter, and he’s so much safer that way.”

“Er, yeah,” Tabitha said, not wanting to get into it. “I was just passing by walking the animals and I thought I’d pop in on Kyle.”

“It’s so nice to see him interacting with girls his own age,” she said.

“I’m twenty-seven.”

“As far as I’m concerned, within ten years is his own age.” Her voice had an edge to it. “You know he never even considered dating until that woman showed up. I thought she was being so nice, offering to pick up Kyle from school one day when my car broke down. And she seduced my poor little baby. I thought he would lose interest when I sent him away for school—he wanted to give up Brown for her! He came home even more obsessed than before. I’ve tried everything short of locking him in his room. I took away his car, his allowance. He said he’d just go get a job. And the police were no help. There was a dangerous predator after my baby, but he was eighteen, as though that means anything, just look at the poor dear, so young, so fragile. I’m so worried he’ll never have a normal, healthy relationship and—“

She stopped her rant, perhaps realizing she was going too far. “Well. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say. The world is not going to miss anything with her passing. Maybe you kids would like to go out for food or something? My treat.”

“Uh, maybe,” Tabitha said. What have I gotten myself into?

Sylvia disappeared into the house only to reappear with a sullen Kyle at her side. He looked like he hadn’t slept much, and was wearing the same clothes from the day before. “You two have fun,” she insisted, and pressed a twenty into Kyle’s unwilling hand.

“Want to go to Java Hut?” Tabitha asked, trying to smile.

“Whatever.”

They walked in relative silence to the coffee shop. Tabitha knew that Kyle hadn’t killed Janine, just as Maya knew it. He had lost his first love—this was not going to be an easy conversation.
Tabitha tied Fritz and Thistle to the leg of one of the outdoor tables. “Be good,” she told them, knowing they would be.

Breakfast had only been an hour ago and Tabitha wasn’t hungry, so she just got an iced mocha.
“The same,” Kyle said, his voice flat as he paid.

“Have you eaten since yesterday?” Tabitha asked, suspicious.

“Not really.”

“He’ll also have a banana muffin,” she said, and Kyle didn't object.

“I thought maybe you’d want to get away from your mother,” Tabitha said when they went outside and sat down. It was warm but not hot—a perfect June day. She had taken more care in her clothes that day and wore a blue tank top and floral print skirt with low wedge hemp sandals.

“Yeah,” he said, picking at his muffin. “She really hated Janine. But I loved her.” Tears sounded in his voice, but he managed to hold them back. “The cops said that Janine was seeing someone else.”

Tabitha nodded. “I’m sorry.”

Kyle began to cry a little and stared at the tabletop to try to hide the tears. “I knew it would be hard for her to stay faithful while I was in school.” He looked up at Tabitha. “She was—you know how she was. She liked sex.”

Tabitha nodded, smiling a little. “Yeah. She did.”

“I thought that when I came home anyone else would go away. She loved me too, you know.” He wiped at his face with his napkin. “She might not have acted like it, but she did. We were online talking every night when I was away. She was so smart—and funny too. You wouldn’t think it to look at her. And she didn't treat me like a little kid, the way my mother does. I was an adult to her.”

“It sounds like you two suited each other,” Tabitha said, trying to be kind.

“We did. I know people like you and my mom think we were freaks, but I didn't care.”

“I am sorry, Kyle,” she said, feeling guilty for judging them.

“Who do you think did it?”

“I really don’t know,” she said. But I have my suspicions.

******

A/N:
The big news is that a sold a short story, Sky, to an e-book company. It's a gay erotic post-apocalypse romance. :) That's fun, huh? When I have more news (like release dates) I'll let you guys know.

I managed my children's story in a week--but my monitor blew up (again) so a large portion of it is in a notebook as I have no computer at the moment. The story turned out a lot shorter than I thought, but I know there's a lot of stuff to add on to. I'm questioning the POV character, but I think I might just expand to 2 characters. It's not ready yet, but there is a first draft, about 13,000 words long.

Ch. 4 The Cop and the Crime Scene

2010-06-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

Tabitha was relieved when Caleb appeared halfway through Maya's interview with her. Her short, harsh tones sounded accusatory as she asked questions, and she seemed dubious of Kyle being the killer, even with the perfect motive. Caleb rounded the corner of the house dressed in running clothes, looking sweaty but also toned in his tight t-shirt and tiny shorts. Any other time and Tabitha would have regretted sending him home the night before. Caleb was very…solid. "You found a body?" he asked her immediately.

"I didn’t mean to," she shot back. She was getting frustrated with the situation, and Fritz had been sitting at her feet alternating between whimpering and groaning, a doggy version of heartbreak. Thistle sat at Fritz's side, leaning into him slightly to comfort, and looking at all the humans in the yard like they were idiots.

"Why didn’t you call me?"

"I did--I called the police. I'm assuming that's who called you?"

"You should have called me," he said again. "I would have come over right away."

"I was fine," she said, knowing what the problem was. He was upset that she hadn’t needed him.

She expected him to say more to her, but he turned to Maya. "So what have we got?"

"Who's the detective here?” Maya shot back. “I'll ask the questions." Tabitha knew Caleb wanted to say something and was proud that he'd managed to hold his tongue. It must be difficult, having your partner promoted over you. Especially a woman, Tabitha thought, not feeling sorry for him at all.

"Miss Silverstein, you said you saw the victim with a man last night. Can you recall what time that was?"

"Last month you called me Tabitha."

Maya's voice dropped a few degrees, from ice water to a glacier. "But now you're a witness. And I'm the cop."

Tabitha sighed. "It was somewhere between twelve and one."

"Closer to one," Caleb interrupted. "I remember when she dropped me off." Sure you do, Tabitha thought, but said nothing. She didn’t want to cause a scene in front of half the police force.

"I could see their shadows through the shades--Janine and a man. About the same height as her. Like Kyle."

"We'll talk to him first. don't worry," Maya promised, perhaps making an effort to sound more like herself and less like a tough detective.

"The other boyfriend," Tabitha continued, "is Zach Gordon. There might be others." Fritz took that moment to bark and Tabitha glanced down at the animals. Thistle shook his head. "I think it was just the two though." she amended.

"Okay Ms. Silverstein. I guess that's all--"

"Speak of the devil," Thistle announced, very loud, but only Tabitha turned her head towards him to give him a warning glare. No one else seemed to care who had spoken, because their eyes were on a new person entering the back yard. Kyle, looking wide-eyed and much younger than usual, stepped into the back yard pushing his bike.

"What's going on?" he demanded. "What happened to Janine?" Any thoughts that he might be the killer fled Tabitha when she saw his frightened face, but at her feet Fritz started growling.

******

Not good, Thistle thought, jumping away from Fritz out of instinct, but the dog’s only concern was “Die, not my Janine you took my Janine I let you scratch my belly you bastard DIE!” Tabitha was fast and had Fritz by the collar even as he was lunging at Kyle.

The boy jumped back in fear and began to cry. “Please, someone tell me what’s going on!”

“Someone get that dog out of here,” the lady cop said, her voice upsetting Fritz even more.

“I’ll take him to my house,” Tabitha said quickly. She put her hand on Fritz’s head. “Shh. It wasn’t him,” she tried to soothe, obviously not caring if the other people thought she was crazy, which Thistle approved of. Fritz gave up quickly, going silent and leaning against Tabitha’s leg. She made a big deal about leaning down to pick him up and whispered to Thistle, “Keep an eye on things.”

Aye, aye Captain, he thought as she carried Fritz off. Tabitha just didn’t want to miss anything. Not that it mattered, because Thistle had already decided. He was going to catch the killer. He’d never get any peace and quiet if he didn’t.

Thistle crept closer, doing his best to be invisible. “You’re the boyfriend?” Maya asked, taking in the sight of Kyle. He wasn’t very tall and skinny in his khaki cargo shorts and t-shirt. Crying with his arms wrapped around his body, Kyle hardly looked like a killer anything.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” But Maya didn’t look like she meant it as she studied the boy. “You’re Kyle?”

He nodded. “Kyle Harding.” He did his best to dry his tears.

“What was your bike still doing here?”

“After the movie Janine dropped me off at home. I said I’d come pick it up today.” The floodgates started again and Kyle wiped his face with the back of his arm. “What happened? Was it a robbery?”

“Why don’t we go down to the station and talk about it?”

“Wh—why?”

“Can you account for your whereabouts last night between eleven and two?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said, his tears melting into anger. “You can ask my mom.”

“Don’t worry. We will.” Maya shook her head. “Go home kid. I’ll come by later.”

“I want to see her first,” he said, and before either cop could react he was through the kitchen door and Thistle followed after.

Caleb made a grab at him but Thistle was too fast, shooting back into the house. In the dining room Thistle made a jump from the table to the top of the tall china hutch against one wall. He situated himself at the very back in the middle, where no one could reach him.

"Caleb," Maya said as she reappeared, trying to keep her voice modulated. "Get the cat."

"Why me?"

"He belongs to your girlfriend."

"Yeah, and it hates me."

I'm not an 'it,' Thistle thought. From his perch he could see most of the living room. The police had apparently finished gathering evidence because the broken vase was now in plastic evidence bags and they had placed the body in a big black bag and hoisted it onto a gurney. Someone had obliged Kyle and opened it so he could see her face, pale and smeared with blood.

Kyle had managed to pull together some sort of dignity in the mostly male company of the crime scene people. He stood next to it; arms still wrapped around his chest like armor. Caleb stepped up next to him. "You're not supposed to be here," he told him. "This is a crime scene. You'll tamper with evidence."

"You'll find out who did it, won't you?" Kyle's voice was hard. He'd grown up in the last ten minutes.

"Of course," Caleb said. Thistle didn't trust Caleb to do anything, but he had a bit of confidence in Maya. She was a little high strung, but he liked her.

Maya had disappeared and returned carrying a stepladder. It had apparently come from Janine's basement because there was a wide smudge of dust across her black suit from where she had held it against her body. She handed it off to Caleb. "Get the cat down, and out of my crime scene."

Now it was Caleb who looked like he was going to cry. He climbed up to Thistle. "I do not want to deal with you," Caleb said to him. "Not today."

Thistle hissed at him and tried to jump out of the way, but Caleb managed to get a hold to the skin behind his neck. Why do they always go with the Vulcan death grip? Thistle froze as he was hauled down and tucked under Caleb's arm. So humiliating.

Caleb nearly fell getting off the ladder but kept a tight grip on Thistle as he took him out of the house through the front door, giving Thistle one last glance at the crime scene. Next-door Caleb kicked Tabitha's door to get her attention and dropped Thistle on the floor as soon as they were in the house. Caleb did his best to smile at Tabitha. "Got any beer?"

*****

Caleb stayed for lunch despite his sweaty running clothes, drinking beer and eating grilled cheese. "Are they going to let you help with the case?" she asked him.

"I'm a street cop," Caleb explained. "Not a detective."

"You'll get your chance," Tabitha soothed. She was eating her lunch with Fritz balanced precariously on her lap, one hand on the dog's head, the other stabbing at her salad. "Maybe Maya can give you some help. Recommend you or something. Then you two could work together again."

"Yeah. I don’t think so."

"You used to like her."

"We're on two different levels now," he explained. "We aren't equals anymore. If she says jump, I better hop to attention."

"Janine was my neighbor," Tabitha said. "She had her faults--"

"Like Junior crying next door."

"But I liked her. I want her killer to come to justice."

"I promise I'll see what I can do," he said. "If—and only if--you take me to get my car after we finish eating." Tabitha nodded with a smile. Caleb had many issues, but he always kept his word.

***

After lunch Caleb insisted he take her to get ice cream to make up for being drunk the night before. She didn’t want a bribe--she wanted him to behave himself. But it was Jenny's ice cream, so it wasn't too hard to supplicate her.

It was late afternoon by the time she dropped Caleb off at his car still in the deck and got home. Fritz and Thistle were lying on the couch together like they had grown up together. "Hey," she said, voice soothing for Fritz as she sat down next to them. "How are we holding up?"

"We're okay," Thistle answered for Fritz. "He's been sleeping on and off."

"I'm sorry Fritz," Tabitha said. The dog raised his head and gave her a mournful look before setting it back down and closing his eyes.

Thistle stood up. "I'm going to catch whoever did this," he announced, hopping down from the couch. He pawed on the power switch of the computer and waited on the vanity while it booted up. "Fritz deserves to know what happened."

"But Thistle," Tabitha said. "You're a cat."

"What's your point? You should get over here and type for me. It'll go faster." Tabitha sighed and did as he asked. They started making lists: one with all of the pertinent crime scene indications, the other a list of people of interest. "Put Kyle on there just in case," Thistle said.

"Zach. Mrs. Garret--"

"Why?"

"She's one of those uber judgmental types. You know that she got poor Jacque neutered because men are unclean and she didn’t want him to have nasty thoughts?"

"You don’t know that."

"He told me," Thistle insisted. "Why do you think he's so unstable? Or maybe Zach's grandma caught wind of what was going on and--"

"Mary Gordon did not bash anyone over the head," Tabitha objected. "She's almost eighty."

"She's pretty spry," Thistle insisted, but was cut short at a knock on the door.

Tabitha opened the door to a short, lean man about her own age, maybe a few years older. He wore jeans, a Ramones t-shirt, and black plastic rimmed glasses. "Hi," he said, looking apologetic. "The police department said I should talk to you...about my mother's dog?"

"Your mother's--Fritz?"

"Oh good, you do have him. Pets are so often overlooked in situations like this."

"You're Danny," Tabitha said, remembering that Janine had mentioned him once or twice. Her son.

"Yeah."

Tabitha opened the door wider. "Please come in--I'm so sorry for your loss."

"Thank you," he said. "You're very kind."

"I'm Tabitha Silverstein. Can I get you anything?" she asked. "A beer. Coffee?"

"Do you have any tea?" he asked, and she nodded. "That would be nice."

At his voice Fritz stood up and gave a bark of recognition. "I guess you two will want to catch up," Tabitha said, and went into the kitchen to put on the kettle and find tea bags. She had three different flavors and set them out in a teacup on a vintage cookie sheet she used as a tray. She also found some cookies in the cupboard. Something had clicked in her chest when she opened the door and found the exact opposite of Caleb standing there. Maybe she needed the change.

Fritz was on Danny’s lap and wagging his tail when Tabitha came back into the room, a good sign. "Your mom was nice," she said when she set the tray down on the coffee table.

"We had our differences," Danny said. "But yeah. She was very nice. I just can't believe someone would just come in and--” His voice cut out. "You never think this will ever happen to you. She'd been a smoker my entire life--I thought for sure I'd be losing her to cancer." It must have been terrible, getting a call like that, Tabitha thought, her sympathy going out to him.

"So I guess you've come to take Fritz home?" she asked, feeling sorry that she wouldn’t be keeping him, even though the last thing she needed was a hyper Jack Russell.

"Actually," Danny said, "my apartment doesn’t allow pets--at all. I was hoping that you could take care of him until arrangements could be made. I can pay you of course," he finished quickly.

"That’s not really necessary," Tabitha insisted. "I'd be happy to keep him for a while."

"Good."

Thistle, who had hung back by the computer, jumped up onto the back of the couch behind Tabitha so he could whisper into her ear. “You like him.”

*****

A/N:
I didnt get a chance to send this to my beta before posting, so any spelling/grammar/other wonky stuff, please feel free to let me know.

I'm marathoning a children's book this week. It's a fantasy story about three 12 year olds who have to save their gaming convention from evil. I want to have the whole thing written by next monday. I'm saying this because if I tell you guys I'm doing it, I'll have to finish. If a few of you (preferrably regular commenters from ETW) want to read it when I'm done, I think I'll let you. I had a slow start yesterday thanks to storms, computer issues, and episodes of Grey's Anatomy, but so far I have 3,000 words and an outline.

Ch. 3: The Dog and the Body

2010-06-21T08:43:00.000-07:00

Tabitha woke Thistle up sometime mid-morning when she climbed out of bed, and he was annoyed. “People are trying to sleep here,” he complained, but she ignored him and went directly across the hall, not stopping at the bathroom, not changing out of her long pink nightshirt.

Tabitha had a secret talent. She was a painter.

Thistle let himself fall back asleep for a few minutes, but he had already been disturbed, so he
got up and poked his head into Tabitha’s studio. She was working on these very bold abstracts that if you looked very closely, you could see bits of things from around the house and on the street. Her computer on the vanity, Fritz in his back yard, all obscured by a haze of wild colors. Thistle rather liked them, but never said so. He left her to her work and went downstairs.

Thistle went straight to the kitchen to nibble on what was left of the dry cat food, knowing it would be a good hour or two before Tabitha realized she was hungry or thirsty or needed to pee. Through the open window over the sink Thistle could hear Fritz howling in a panic. What now? Thistle thought, mentally sighing as he hurried out the cat door, scaling the tree easily and dropping to the ground on the other side of the wall.

Fritz continued to howl, straining on his chain, which was attached to an eyelet buried deep in concrete at the corner of a small patio. “What on earth is wrong?” Thistle demanded, licking his paw and trying to look like he didn't care.

“Been out all night!” Fritz nearly screeched, his bark growing shrill. “No bed no food no water. My Janine hasn’t come why not? She’s in the house—something’s wrong!”

“Okay, okay,” Thistle said. “Calm down.” He turned his attention to the house. “I’ll check it out.”
The only windows he could reach were the ones in the front, so Thistle bound up the front stairs to the front window. The blinds were half closed and it was hard to make anything out, but he saw broken china and a high-heeled sandal lying on the floor.

Thistle returned to the back yard and Fritz started jumping. “What did you see? What did you see?”

“I don't know. Maybe nothing. Is there a way into the house?”

“She never locks the back door,” Fritz said. “The boys come over after dark sometimes.”

Thistle glared at the doorknob. Not something he could manage on his own. “I’ll have to get Tabitha.”

Fritz whimpered and lay down, resting his chin on his paws. “I don’t wanna be alone.”
“It’ll just be a minute.”

“Thistle…” he whined.

“I’ll be right back,” He said, softer this time. “We’ll find out what’s wrong.”

Back in his house Tabitha was just as he left her, still in her nightshirt and dabbing chartreuse onto a canvas. “Tabitha, wake up!” Thistle commanded.

“Hmm?” she asked.

“Fritz is going crazy next door. Something happened to Janine.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. I need you to open the door so I can find out.”

Tabitha finally looked away from her work. “I’m sure everything is fine. I’m not going to walk into someone’s house—“

“Fritz was left out all night!” Thistle said, and was surprised at the emotion in his voice. “The woman has issues, but she wouldn’t do that.”

Tabitha put down her paintbrush. “You’re right. Just let me put on some clothes.”

She must have felt some of his urgency because she did nothing more than slip on a pair of jeans under her nightshirt and slide her feet into flip-flops before going next door. Fritz started jumping on her immediately, his bark turning into a frenzy. “He’s really worried,” Thistle translated for her.

“I can see that.” She pushed Fritz away and bound up the back steps, knocking first and calling Janine’s name.

When no one answered Thistle nudged Tabitha’s leg with his head. “It’s unlocked.” She gave the knob a cautious turn and the door swung open. Fritz started barking again, but Thistle ignored him, slipping inside ahead of Tabitha and moving though the kitchen and dining room. Fritz’s house had the same floor plan as his own so it was slightly eerie, walking through his house—but not his house.

His eyes grew wide when he stepped into the living room. Janine was laying splayed across the floor, one shoe on, the other laying where Thistle had seen it through the window. Her blond hair was soaked through with blood, lots of it seeping into the carpeting and splattered across the sofa and the mirror over the fireplace. What had once been a ceramic vase had been shattered, but he couldn’t tell if she had been it with it.

Behind him Tabitha screamed.

“I think she’s dead,” Thistle said.

“No shit.” Tabitha’s voice was little more than a whisper. Thistle stepped forward, sniffing the body. “Ew, don’t!”

“She’s been here a few hours,” He said. The blood didn't smell that old. He might not have the nose of a dog, but the remnants of predator in his genes knew about dead things.

“She was alive when I came home last night,” Tabitha said. “I saw her with someone through the curtains.”

“That someone probably killed her,” Thistle said.

“We need to call the police.” Tabitha backed away, looking around. Janine’s purse was sitting on the dining room table and Tabitha picked it up to search.

“What are you doing?” Thistle cried, and Tabitha dropped the purse in surprise. The phone tumbled out onto the floor with a set of keys and some change. “You could be tampering with evidence.”

“Since when did you become an expert?” She picked up the phone and dialed 911. “Hello? I need to report a murder.”

Thistle shook his head and went back the way he came so he could break the news to Fritz.

******

Tabitha's hands were shaking when she pressed 'end' on the phone and set it down on the table. She knew she should leave, but instead she looked around. The table cloth was askew on the table, like it had been tossed back carelessly. She tried not to look at the blood on the sofa and mirror, and definitely not at Janine. She had always seemed so full of vitality, and now she was dead, dead. An empty shell. Not a person anymore.

"I'm really sorry Janine," Tabitha whispered. She noted that the largest part of the broken vase, the thick, heavy bottom, had not shattered and there was blood on it. Murder weapon Tabitha thought, and felt horrible. She backed out of the room and went out through the kitchen, deciding it would be best to wait for the cops outside.

Thistle was sitting next to Fritz, his paw on the dog's shoulder. She wondered if Thistle was aware of how human his actions were sometimes. Fritz was howling over and over. She couldn’t understand him--Thistle was the only animal she had ever been able to talk to--but she could hear the pain in his howls.

"He wants to see the body," Thistle explained to her. “We should let him in—see if he can smell who was in there.”

“Good idea.” Tabitha unhooked Fritz’s collar from the chain and scooped up the little dog, thankful that Janine’s tastes hadn’t run towards St. Bernards. He wasn’t like Thistle—he was an actual animal. She couldn’t let him go tearing through a crime scene.

Tabitha’s stomach dropped when she saw Janine’s body again, even though she expected it this time. Fritz struggled to be released from her grip but she held tight even when he began howling in her ear. “Well?” she asked Thistle with a grimace.

“He doesn’t know,” Thistle said, sounding disappointed. “Zach mowed the grass yesterday and Fritz has allergies.”

“Figures.”

She knew she had to get Fritz away from the body and moved quickly back to the yard, sitting down on the steps and cradling Fritz in her arms. "Can he understand me if I talk to him?" Tabitha asked.

"A little," Thistle said. "He'll understand tone of voice and intent more than your actual words."
Fritz pressed his face against her chest, his howls tapering off to a whimper. "I'm so sorry," Tabitha said, rocking him, and started to cry. "I know your mama's gone--I wont let anything bad happen to you." She didn't feel silly crying over a dog's pain. Having Thistle had taught her a lot about animals. They didn’t have feelings the way people did--but they did have them. Dogs were deeply loyal, making attachments deeper than any human (or cat) Tabitha knew.

"You know I'm going to hold you to that," Thistle said quietly.

"I know," she replied. "I'll take care of your friend."

Tabitha held Fritz closer and Thistle jumped up onto her shoulders, arranging himself like a breathing fur stole around her neck. This was how the police found them a few minutes later. Neither Thistle nor Fritz was disturbed by the siren sounds.

The cop was one Tabitha was slightly familiar with, Scott Faber. She had gone to the precinct Christmas party the winter before and met most of Caleb's fellow officers. "Hi," she said, feeling awkward covered in animals. "I'm Tabitha, Srgt. Simon's girlfriend."

"Yeah," he said, smiling. "I remember you. You were wearing that awesome little silver dress at the Christmas ball." Well, at least someone had appreciated her flapper outfit. "Everyone talked about your boobs for weeks afterwards." Oh. "So what are you doing at a crime scene?"

"She found the body." Caleb's ex-partner Maya Vargas came around the side of the house. She kept her curly black hair just long enough to be pulled back and was wearing a blue silk shirt under a black jacket and slacks. A pair of scuffed work boots ruined an otherwise perfect outfit. She had been promoted to detective not long after the (apparently) ill-fated Christmas party, and it looked like she was still adapting to dressing like a professional. Tabitha had met her on several personal outings, and knew she usually wore torn jeans or faded camo. "What were you doing in the house?"

"I live next door," Tabitha said, any fondness she'd had for the woman draining at the accusatory edge in her voice. "Fritz was freaking out, so Thistle and I went to investigate. The door wasn’t locked."

"Thistle?"

"The cat," Tabitha said, pointing at Thistle's bottom draped over her shoulder.

"Could you move so we can get in to see the body?"

"Oh. Yeah."

She set Fritz down on the patio and started to remove Thistle from her shoulders, but he hung on tight and meowed in her ear. "Let go," she said.

"Fritz is thirsty," he whispered so quietly she almost didn’t hear him.

"Okay, just get off me." Thistle jumped down. Maya and Faber looked at her oddly.

"Be my guests," she said, getting out of their way. "I'm just going to get the dog a bowl of water and some food--" She started up the stairs after them but Maya stopped her.

"You can't touch anything in the house. Sorry."

"But the kitchen hasn’t been touched--"

"Nothing."

"Fine, fine. I'll get a bowl from my house." Tabitha went up the side yard to go around the wall
between the two properties and nearly tripped over Kyle's bike. "My god," she muttered. "The little squirt must have found out about Zach and flipped."

She got a bowl of water and also opened up a can of Thistle's food onto a plate in case Fritz was hungry. Some gravy slopped across her front and she realized she was in her pajamas, so she ran upstairs and put on a bra and a green polo shirt, running a brush through her hair and tying it up. She took a quick glance in the mirror. More or less normal. "Okay."

Tabitha set the food and water down next to Fritz. He took a bite of the food and a few half-hearted laps of water before collapsing down on the patio. "I know buddy," she said, and scratched him behind the ears. Thistle was nowhere to be found, so she went inside to tell Maya about Kyle's bicycle.

She found her cat in Janine's living room, Faber crouched in front of him as Thistle hissed and spit at him, back arched and fur standing up, his tail as fluffy as a squirrel's. "What the hell are you doing to my cat?" she demanded, crossing the room without even seeing the body. Faber backed off and looked relived.

"I haven’t touched him, I swear. No animals at the crime scene," he explained. "But I can't get near him.”

Even Tabitha was a little frightened of Thistle in his agitated state, but she was able to scoop him up without being scratched or bitten. Uniformed officers Tabitha didn't know swarmed the house, a woman taking pictures of Janine while a guy in rubber gloves and tweezers went all over taking samples. It seemed awful to be treating Janine like nothing more than a piece of evidence. One of the cops picked up the purse Tabitha had dropped on the floor.

“I did that,” she said, hugging Thistle close to her chest. “Looking for a phone to call 911.”
He nodded, and bagged it as evidence anyway. Tabitha approached Maya, who was standing over the body with a notebook and pen. “I think I know who did it,” she said.

“That so?” Maya was only half listening as she scribbled something, but then she looked up. “Ms Silverstein, the cat has to go—now. Why don’t you wait in the back yard? I’ll be out in a minute to get your statement.”

“Okay,” she said, feeling put out, but doing as she was told. You didn’t argue with cops.

Out in the yard Fritz lay where she had left him, looking mournful. Thistle sprang from her arms, his fur still a little fluffed. “I don’t know who did it,” Thistle said, “but whoever did it was mad. I think he hit her with the vase first, and then the fireplace poker.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s gone,” he said.

“God. What a mess. It had to have been Kyle. His bike is still here. He must have panicked and run off without it.”

“I don't think Kyle would do that.”

Fritz started barking then, standing up and putting his ears back. Tabitha didn’t think it was possible for him to look fierce, but he was frightening. “Uh, Thistle?”

“He says,” Thistle spoke slowly. “He says that if it was Kyle, he’s going to rip his throat out next time he sees him.”

“Okay,” Tabitha said. Fritz looked as if he meant it. That’s just what she needed—a homicidal dog.

*****

A/N:
I hope it didnt take too long to get to the dead body part of the story. I know that they like to kill 'em off early, but I thought maybe some character development might be nice first. I'm writing a cozy because I've never found one that I liked. They always seem flat and trite to me, but I keep trying because I like murder mysteries but I dont like cop shows. (Bones and Castle being the exception.) I know that somewhere there is a perfect cozy writer for me, and chances are she only wrote like, two books.

A couple of things:
Went back and added a brief line of description about Tabita's neighborhood in chapter one. You dont have to go find it, here's the info: Tabitha and Thistle live in the German Villiage of Columbus, OH, which is my favorite section of the city. All of the houses are ancient brick and squeezed in on top of eachother The sidewalks and streets are all brick and everything is old and beautiful. If I ever have money and a sane number of cats I'm gonna move there.

Sorry about the 'T' in Thistle's blog entry last chapter. It is fixed. Kyle's name used to be Tyler. I decided he reminded me of this stoner kid I used to work with (but the character is not a stoner, for the record) so I borrowed his name.

Linda: Thanks for the blurb on web fiction guide!

Xirena: Bones has been renewed for two more seasons.

Ch 2: The Girl and the Men

2010-06-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

Tabitha felt her late-morning headache coming on as she started on her third cup of coffee and continued sorting though Mr. Daws' emails, returning some correspondences, deleting spam. She cursed under her breath as she double keyed with her new fake nails. She'd worn them short (usually bitten) and unpainted until about two weeks ago when Mr. Daws had noticed and decided she looked awfully unkempt, making her get acrylics on her lunch hour. Tabitha found herself chewing on them anyway, wishing she could bite them off.

She glanced at the clock. Eleven-thirty. With a sigh she stood up. It was time to get Mr. Daws' lunch. On the days he did not have a lunch meeting he would eat at his desk, working. And so she had to work too, eating her lunch at her own desk in case he needed her for anything. (He always did.)

She grabbed her purse and pushed her rolling chair away from the desk, taking her cell phone out of its pocket as she walked across the room. Two text messages from Caleb. "Babe, we still on for tonight?" was the first one, the second "Tabby, where are you?" sent ten minutes later. She was surprised he hadn't kept texting.

Her fingers flew across the tiny keyboard as she took the elevator down to the ground floor, nodding at the doorman. How did this become my life? she wondered as she waited for the light to cross the street. "You know I'm at work," she texted. "I'll see you at seven." Because Mr. Daws made her work late whenever he did, and he relished a long Friday afternoon.

She ordered Mr. Daws' usual tuna salad on rye at the deli across the street and decided to indulge in a cookie to go with the packed lunch under her desk. Caleb texted back the equivalent of an eye roll.

Like she didn’t get enough of that from Thistle. "I have too many men in my life bossing me around," she muttered to herself.

"So do something about it Girl," Leticia said, sliding the wrapped sandwich across the counter. "That'll be six-ninety-five." Leticia worked the register at the deli and was probably the closest thing to a best friend that Tabitha had, and she only saw her to get lunch every day.

"I didn’t meant to talk to myself that loudly," Tabitha said, feeling her face color as she handed Leticia exact change and put another dollar in the tip jar. (Her dollar, not Mr. Daws's. He didn’t believe in tipping.) "My boss and my boyfriend are both getting on my nerves. And the cat."
Leticia laughed. "I'm a dog person myself."

"Wouldn't that be nice," Tabitha said, taking her cookie from its wax paper sleeve and biting into it. "Thanks Leticia."

“Seriously,” Leticia said, sliding the paper bag holding the sandwich across the counter. “No one can make a change in your life but you.”

“I know.” She scooped up the sandwich and marched back across the street, determined. She didn't have to take this, did she?

*****

Getting back off on the seventh floor she found Mr. Daws sifting through the papers on her desk. "Mr. Daws?" she said uncertainly, all resolve melting away at his red face and cold eyes.

"Where is it?"

"What?"

"My notes for Kennedy vs. the State of Ohio? Dammit girl, it goes to trial next week!"

"I typed it up and put it in the computer," she answered, breathing slowly to keep herself from screaming. "I'll print you a copy right now." She handed off his sandwich and maneuvered around him to her chair.

"I told you--I don't want my notes in the computer. What happens if we get hacked?"

"That's why we have firewalls," she tried to explain.

"Well what if it crashes? Do you want these bastards to walk just because you couldn’t be bothered to keep track of a few pieces of paper?"

Tabitha sighed and pulled up the documents he needed. When she didn't type his notes he complained about not being able to read his own handwriting. "Why don’t you go eat your sandwich and I'll bring you your notes in a few minutes."

"Don't patronize me, young lady. I'm old enough to be your grandfather." All the same, he stalked off into his office and slammed the door with a huff. Tabitha closed her eyes and let her forehead fall onto the keyboard.

*****

“The sordid affair of J and Z continues,” Thistle typed on Tabitha’s laptop. She always left the computer open for him on the antique vanity she used as a computer desk. His typing had improved over the years, alternating between using paws and nose.

Thirteen months ago he had started a gossip blog based on the people and animals on the street. Humans had a perverse interest in the personal lives of others, Thistle had found, and took advantage of it. “Tails from Town” averaged 1.1 million hits a day and made a comfortable seven hundred a month in advertisements and CoffeePress merchandise. (Women couldn’t get enough of his cute kittie logo.) Of course it was all in Tabitha’s name, but she didn't know that. She was completely unaware of her online checking account set up with a bogus email and her actual social security number. (It wasn’t his fault if she left that sort of thing laying around.)

After documenting the morning’s discoveries in intimate and exacting detail—the more salacious the better—he answered his email and checked his stocks (they were doing well). He ate an early dinner of hard cat food and a few houseflies before he went back next-door.

Janine didn’t work. She had a wonderful human thing called “alimony” which Thistle fully approved of. He liked the concept of being able to sleep in and take naps without the stress of a real job. She was sitting on the back steps smoking a cigarette and throwing a stick for Fritz. Over and over the little dog chased after it—it was enough to make Thistle dizzy.

He lounged on his tree branch watching Fritz until he fell half asleep, jolting awake when he heard the sound of a bicycle bell. Kyle Harding barreled through the strip of side yard and dropped his bicycle in the honeysuckle, so eager he was to see Janine. Not two in one day, Thistle thought, already planning his next blog entry.

Kyle was even younger than Zach, only nineteen and just home from his first year of college. As far as Thistle was concerned that meant he was old enough to get himself into this mess on his own, so it didn't occur to Thistle to warn him about Zach. (Not that the boy would listen. Most of the time when he did try to talk to humans they would look around, confused at where the voice was coming from. They were more willing to believe he was a ghost than a talking cat. Which was why Tabitha was so special.)

Thistle jumped down from his branch and wound his way around Kyle’s skinny legs in support—regardless of responsibility, he felt sorry for the poor boy, especially since he would make fun of him in his update that night. “Hey cat,” Kyle said, scratching him behind the ears and running a hand across his back. It felt good, so Thistle began to purr despite himself.

Janine put out her cigarette on the steps and rushed to put her arms around the boy’s lank frame. “Missed you, baby,” she purred into his ear, and the boy flushed with pleasure. “So what do you want first? Dinner, or dessert?”

“Depends on what we’re having,” Kyle said, attempting to sound cool but failing. Janine laughed and led Kyle into the house through the back door. Fritz whined and tried to follow, but Janine shut the door in his face.

“What do you make of all this?” Thistle asked his doggie friend, half fearing the answer.

“Maybe we’re going to have puppies!” Fritz’s cheerful demeanor returned, his tongue half hanging out of his mouth as he trotted off to retrieve his stick.

Thistle tried not to look down at his friend’s naiveté. After all, few animals were as sophisticated as himself. He understood that sex was recreational for humans, even if he didn't know why.
“Hey Thistle,” Fritz said, talking through the stick in his mouth. “This time I’ll throw the stick and you can go after it.”

“You are a simple creature,” Thistle told Fritz, and chased the stick when Fritz threw it. Hey, sometimes you couldn’t resist.

*****

Caleb met Tabitha in the parking deck below her building at seven sharp. She had changed her clothes into yellow flats and matching leggings, belting her long purple shirt with a wide red elastic belt rescued from a bad eighties dress. She knocked on the window of Caleb’s car, but he had to stare at her for a few moments before unlocking the door. “Hi,” she said, climbing in and leaning over to give him a kiss.

“How old are you?” he asked her in lieu of greeting.

“Twenty-eight,” she told him. “A year older than you.”

“You dress like you’re an eighteen-year-old art school reject.”

“Thank you.” She tried not to be annoyed. He hated the way she dressed. “So can we go to dinner or what? I’m starving.” He shook his head at her but smiled anyway, to show her there were no hard feelings. On his side maybe…

****

“Passion unfolds again,” Thistle wrote later that evening, missing his usual meal of canned food, mouth feeling dry from the kibble Tabitha insisted was edible. “The ineffable J is presently occupied in a second liaison for the day, this time with barely legal K. They have already made love—loudly might I add—and are off to dinner at some awful chain restaurant and then a movie afterwards, probably something PG-13. Is a cougar to be looked down upon, or applauded? And what of the young kittens these males pass over in preference to their more mature counterparts? Don’t they feel inadequate?”

Thistle posted this and waited for the comments to come flooding in. In half an hour it had been explained to him that cougars were predators feeding on the emotions of the young, and that young women preferred older men anyway. Humans were strange. Why didn’t they want mates of the same breeding age? It was no wonder their young had so many problems, growing from expired sperm and egg. (Thistle knew the importance of good breeding. He had his eyes set on a few choice females, but hadn’t made any rash decisions. He was not so old yet.)

Thistle got up with a stretch and jumped off the vanity, then used the leg to sharpen his claws. ‘We can never have anything nice,’ Tabitha liked to complain, but once he explained that de-clawing a cat was like cutting off its fingers with a meat cleaver, she shut up. He thought it was important to inform humans that just because it made their lives easier didn't mean it was a good thing. Tabitha had also gone vegetarian since he came into her home, though he didn't find that necessary.

He checked on Fritz through the back window before settling down for an evening nap. Fritz was snapping at some unseen bug, his chain rattling behind him. Being tied up was no way to live, but the poor Terrier was too hyper to be left alone in the house and it was better to be on a chain than in a cage. At least that’s what Fritz told him, and he didn't seem to mind much. All the same, Thistle knew that he was both lucky and privileged to be a cat.

*****

Tabitha came home sometime after midnight, her head aching from the thumping of dance music, but she couldn’t help but note that Janine Bukowski still had her lights on. What is she up to? Tabitha wondered, knowing the answer well enough. She wondered which neighborhood boy was over that night.

Everyone knew about Zach, but fewer were aware of Kyle since he’d only been home from school for a few weeks. Tabitha looked over the wall and noticed his ten-speed leaning against the honey suckle growing along the side of Janine's house. While she had a hard time of approving of Janine dating a boy almost young enough to be her grandchild, she couldn’t help but feel a little envious. Janine never had her boyfriends telling her to grow up.

Caleb had been a pain, drinking too much so that he commented on her outfit again, and Tabitha had to drive him home in her car. He’d asked her to stay, pawing at her in the car, but she was too disgusted by the whole evening and was almost relieved to walk him to his apartment door and retreat.

Thistle was waiting for her at the back door, rubbing against her legs and purring as soon as she got inside. “Yes, I remembered your cheesecake.” She held up the small Styrofoam container from the restaurant earlier that evening. “Marcello’s.” One good thing about Caleb was his excellent taste in restaurants, and Marcello’s had the best cheesecake. Thistle settled into his treat readily enough and Tabitha dragged herself upstairs. It had been such a long day, and she was so tired.

******

A/N:
If anyone can come up w/ a better title for this chapter. It needs to follow the formula of "The _____ and the _____." Its an homage to Bones--most of the episode titles are "the blank in the blank." (I love that show.)

Hello new readers! I know this is mostly ETW ppl reading this, but I hope there will be some new people too. I encourage everyone to suggest this story to their friends and family, really spread it around. Post a link on Twitter, your facebook--I will reward you all with imaginary gold stars. (You know you want one.) We got a total of 79 hits last week--lets try to double it this week.

I'm working on a pretty title graphic, but my new computer doesnt have a decent graphic program and I have no downloading capabilities, so it's a long going process. This is what I have so far, but there is no color and it's not the right size/shape for anything useful. What I want is some 19th century line art of a tabby cat. I had a book when I was a kid, "Great Comic Cats" or something, that would be perfect for the art I want, but its been lost for forever.

Ch. 1. The Cat and the Cougar

2010-06-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Tabitha could see his outline through the frosted shower curtain. While most people would chalk up his presence in the bathroom to curiosity, Tabitha knew he was just being a perv. “Get out Thistle,” she called as she turned off the water.

She watched for the orange blur jumping off the toilet seat before she pushed open the curtain and reached for a towel, wrapping it around her and wrapping her hair in another. She retreated from the steamy bathroom (she really needed to get that window unstuck) and left wet footprints on the old, highly polished wood as she moved down the hall to her bedroom.

Thistle was lying on the bed pretending to be asleep, but an involuntary swish of his tail betrayed him. “You big faker,” she said, rubbing the top of his head. Despite his downfalls she couldn’t help but be affectionate, especially when he started to purr.

Thistle lifted his head so she could scratch him under his chin. “You’re right,” he told her. “Your thighs are getting bigger.”

“Thank you,” she replied, tone dry. She was fairly certain other cat owners didn’t have to put up with this. “Get out. I have to get dressed for work.”

“I’m already dressed for work,” he told her, getting up with a stretch and digging his claws into the green quilt she had sewn herself.

“Work,“ she scoffed. She was the one keeping him in Fancy Feast. “I’m not going to hear any complaints about you wandering into Mrs. Garret’s yard and tormenting her poodle, am I?” she asked him as she sat on the side of the bed and let her long brown hair loose from the towel.

“Anything is possible,” Thistle replied. His voice was slightly raspy and reminded Tabitha of a favorite uncle that smoked too much. "I have no control over that dog's reactions to my astounding wit."

"Astounding my ass. Go away."

"I don't care if you get naked," he tried to explain. “I lick myself in front of you all the time."

“Out,” she said for the last time and managed to scoop up the ten pounds of ginger cat without losing her towel. She’d had a cat growing up and she’d never been too concerned about it seeing her naked, but Thistle was no ordinary cat. She found the bedraggled Thistledown Copperbottom (that was his full name, he informed her at the time) under her front steps, six months old and dumped at the side of the road during a thunderstorm three years before. Her perception of cats and pets in general had changed.

Tabitha wasn’t much of an animal person but she could hardly turn him away, so she brought him inside and fed him leftover chicken Kiev. It had shocked her to no end when he looked up at her with big green eyes and said, “Please ma’am, may I have some more?” Though his voice was squeaky and weak at the time, she still screamed and bolted from the room. Later she learned that he had gotten the Oliver Twist reference from a movie but that he could read. His mother had made sure of that.

“I come from a long line of gifted felines,” Thistle told her once she had regained her composure, his prepubescent kitten voice sounding ridiculously superior. “And I have been told that we are descended from Hemingway’s cats.”

“How…nice,” Tabitha had managed to sputter as she dumped the last of the chicken Kiev onto his plate.

It wasn’t easy having a talking cat. Thistle was difficult for a number of reasons. He complained about his food, the cat litter, the condition of his catnip mouse (and he made her fetch it every time he knocked it under the sofa). Thistle could answer the phone but never remembered to give her any messages, and more than one boyfriend had left because “her brother” picked up the phone at her house.

Tabitha didn’t know if there were other people with talking pets, and she certainly wasn’t going to find out. After the first telephone fiasco she tried telling her boyfriend Jeff the truth, but Thistle had refused to say a word to him, and that was it for Jeff. Thus she had lost Bill and Kyle in similar fashion. Her current was Caleb and she had the house phone disconnected. So far, so good.

She dressed for work quickly, pulling on stockings and opening the closet to reveal a neat row of white shirts and five suits in various shades of navy and black. Snagging one at random from its hanger she slipped into the outfit, wanting to kill herself. The pencil cut skirt did nothing for her figure (she was slightly bottom-heavy) and she was not a navy and black person. The rest of her clothes were splashes of bright colors and exciting prints, but she had a very traditional boss and as a result she didn’t really care what her work clothes looked like as long as they were inoffensive.

Maybe this week you’ll quit, she thought to herself, knowing that it was a joke. She got the secretary position at Daws, Daws and Billings Attorneys through a temp agency, but five years later she was still there.

Thistle had turned on his morning CNN, but got up off the couch when Tabitha came downstairs. “Food, woman,” Thistle demanded, and Tabitha screwed up her face in distaste.

“What have I told you about that language?”

"I'm simply mimicking the mating calls of your species. Its the same as when you meow at me you know."

“It isn’t,” she said. In the kitchen she started coffee for herself and took a can of tuna flavored wet food out of the cupboard. While the opener was running she grabbed a floral print saucer from the cabinet. Thistle always ate off of the good china. "I'm going out with Caleb after work so I wont be home until late. I'll put some hard food out for you in case you get hungry."

"If I had opposable thumbs I would rule this kitchen," Thistle told her. "With an iron fist."

"I bought the expensive organic stuff. I thought you liked it."

"It's tolerable."

She put the dish on the black and white tiled floor and scooped some of the hard food into a bowl and put it down beside his water dish. Thistle gave the tuna flakes a tentative sniff and, finding it acceptable, ate in small, dainty bites.

"I'll bring you home some cheesecake tonight," she said to sooth him.

"I don’t see why you continue to go out with that guy."

“Lets see. He’s dependable, has a job, he’s pretty—”

"He's a dog person," Thistle said between bites. "And a cop. He likes people and animals to be subservient to him."

"That's not true."

"You ever meet a cop with a cat?"

"Maya." Maya was Caleb's ex-partner, recently promoted to detective.

"Lesbians don’t count." He glanced up at Tabitha rolling her eyes. "The name 'Caleb' means dog in Hebrew."

"So you've told me." She poured her coffee into a travel mug and screwed the lid on tight. "I'm going to work. Be good." She gave him a pat on the head and left through the back door.

Tabitha lived in the German Village section of Columbus, Ohio, where the houses were all old, pretty, and built right on top of each other. One of the lucky few in the neighborhood to have her own driveway, Tabitha got directly into the car and started the drive downtown, relishing in the quiet the ride afforded her. Sometimes she wished she lived alone.

*****

Thistle ate his breakfast in relative quiet, catching snatches of words from the television that told him that the world was a mess. Which he already knew.

Thistle considered himself a scholar of human behavior, and in the last three years he had concluded that humans (even Tabitha) were idiots, only good for opening cat food and cleaning litter boxes. Of course Tabitha was better than most, free of the violence he saw on the television and when he went on his daily rounds. And she recycled.

He finished his meal and left the house through the cat door. It was the electronic kind and he had to wear a collar, but he understood that one must compromise at some point. The very idea of being a house cat was intolerable.

His house was small for its lot, which was big for a neighborhood where all of the old brick houses rested close to each other, and as a result Thistle had a bit of yard to explore. He used the vegetable garden as a litter box before leaping up against the trunk of a squat, twisted apple tree leaning against the low stone wall separating his yard from next door.

Thistle walked delicately across a branch that hung down over the other yard where a Jack Russel Terrier sat waiting with his tail moving. "Thistle!" Fritz yapped too loud, straining his chain to run under the tree. To the human eye it might appear that the little dog wanted to eat him, but Thistle couldn’t be so lucky. Fritz thought he was his best friend.

“Heya Thistle what’s up guess what I caught a bug!”

“Good for you,” Thistle said, not moving from his perch above Fritz’s head. “Remember to breathe.”

“Right.” Gasp. “Thank you.”

“Do you have any real news?” Thistle asked, knowing the answer.

“Lost my ball,” Fritz answered. “And it’s grass day.” A boy came once a week to mow the lawn, and Fritz was deeply allergic. “I hate grass day. I can’t smell anything for days afterwards.”

“Excellent. Grass day.” Thistle would have smiled if he’d had the necessary facial muscles. He was interested in it for a different reason. Zach Gordon lived with his grandmother even though he was several years out of high school and mowed lawns for money. Fritz’s owner, Janine Bukowski, was fifty-one and Tabitha referred to her as a ‘cougar.’

Thistle wasn’t exactly sure what his larger, wilder cousins had to do with older women who liked younger men, but it definitely made for interesting gossip, and Thistle was always looking for interesting things to write about in his blog.

Thistle ignored Fritz as he continued to complain about the grass and slipped through the space between Fritz’s house and Thistle’s driveway, stopping only to nibble at some honeysuckle. At the front of the house he jumped onto the porch, scrambling up the rail to peer inside through the blinds. Couldn’t make it up the stairs, could they? he thought as he noted the black t-shirt and purple bra tossed on the floor, part of a trail of clothing leading through the living room and ending at the dining room table. He saw two pairs of legs hanging off the edge of the table through the doorway, one pair still wearing jeans bunched up around his ankles. This was the third time in a month that Thistle had caught Zach Gordon and Janine Bukowski on the dining room table.

Thistle watched with interest as the legs bounced, knocking over a chair. Eventually the movement stopped and Janine reappeared with a white lace tablecloth wrapped around her, Zach hiking his pants up around his waist and belting them again. "You'd better go start the lawn," Thistle could hear Janine say through the cracked window. "Now that you've finished me."

The boy grunted in reply as he scooped up his t-shirt and pulled it on inside out. Zach stepped, slightly dazed, out of the house and went for the lawn mower in his truck. Janine was shameless, walking as far as the door in her table cloth (the lace barely covering the areas of the human body they deemed 'private') where she ran the red painted nails on one hand through her hair and smiled. "You're doing such a good job, I'll bring you out some lemonade and cookies."

Zach turned around from the mower and gave her a fake smile. "Gee wiz Mrs. Robinson. Thanks!" The smile disappeared quickly and he wheeled the mower across the sidewalk.

Janine made no move to retreat indoors, the tablecloth dragging across the porch as she moved towards the railing. “Shoo!” she said, batting Thistle off the rail. He pumped from the porch, not keen on sticking around while Zach did his work. Mrs. Garret was out watering the flowers in her front yard (and not hiding her glares at Janine), leaving the front gate open and giving Thistle access to Jacque, her French poodle.

There was nothing Thistle enjoyed more than tormenting the neurotic animal, so he looked both ways before crossing the street (Tabitha insisted) and sauntered over with his tail in the air, pleased that his blog would not be boring that day.

***********

A/N:
So that's Thistle and Tabitha. I havent written anything this close to "reality" in a long time. For the record, Thistle is not orange because of Garfeild. I wanted him to be a grey tabby so I could use pics of my cat Xavier, but my bf thought of the name Thistledown Copperbottom (thanks Parker!) and I loved it. Of course any cat named 'Copperbottom' had to be copper colored, so orange he became. Fritz is based on my aunt's dog Petey.

So, updates will be on mondays or tuesdays. I'll try to keep it consistently monday, but I don't have internet at home so I have to go to the library to update. If it's pouring rain, you can bet I'm not biking three miles in it. A full chapter will be around 2,000 words and at the moment I'm planning on 10 chapters for Cat in Cougar Country.

Story Launches Monday

2010-06-05T08:33:00.000-07:00

The Cat in Cougar Country is the first in (I hope) a series of mysteries about Tabitha and her talking cat, Thistle. Each mystery will run between 15k and 25k words. I'll update chapters once a week, probably on Mondays.

For those of you who've read my previous work, this is a lot different. I never like to do the same thing twice, which I'm sure will be a problem if I ever break into traditional publishing.

I have great plans for Thistledown, so I hope everyone enjoys it.