Busy as a Beaver Read online

  “Hey, Angela. Up here,” Sophie called out. I made my way up the stairs, following the sound of her voice. Something was off about this whole scene.

  Sophie was in the master bedroom, where nothing looked like it had been touched.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.”

  “No, you don’t get it. I think that’s what we’re missing. It’s nothing. There’s nothing missing. There’s a watch on the dresser—sure, it’s not a Rolex or anything, but it’s still a watch, and there’s about twenty bucks’ worth of coins in a mason jar on the nightstand.”

  “So the thief didn’t actually take anything,” I said. “He hadn’t even collected anything when Gloria got home.”

  “I think that’s important.”

  “Maybe he broke in right as she was coming back?”

  Sophie shook her head. “Maybe, but it doesn’t really make sense. If you’re going to break and enter somewhere, you’re going to make sure that the person who lives there is at work. If they’re retired, then they’re almost certainly going to be home all day. And this is Willow Bay, everyone knows who lives in what house; if the person who did this was local, they knew this was Gloria’s place.”

  “And it seems unlikely that someone would come here, specifically, to rob a place. There are plenty of way nicer houses up in Portland where someone could blend in more easily, what with it being a big city and all.”

  “Exactly. So presumably our thief is someone from here. Which means they knew Gloria would have been here during the day, so they probably staked out somewhere and waited to see her leave before coming in.”

  “Which means they would have had lots of time to rob the place before she came back,” I finished.

  “So how come there’s been absolutely nothing taken?”

  “And how come the thief hung around long enough for Gloria to return?”

  “Exactly.”

  Sophie and I looked at each other, the features of her face super pronounced in the thin light from the phone camera. Sophie was right: there was something weird going on.

  “But we do know the thief was after money,” I said. “After all, he asked Gloria where it was and only attacked her when she wouldn’t tell him.”

  “Yeah. And yet he left the money that was here. Something strange is going on with this case.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find any answers here,” I said, shaking my head. “Only more questions.”

  “Yeah,” Sophie replied. “I agree. I mean, I was kind of tempted to say it was just some teenager with an IQ of a potato who thought he was being clever and got surprised, but idiot teenagers who break into homes don’t manage to get through back doors so cleanly.”

  “Agreed,” I said with a nod. “Plus, there aren’t any real signs of him anywhere else in here.”

  “True. Though the cops might have taken anything that he had left here.”

  “You had better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

  “That I should sweet-talk Taylor into telling me anything he knows about this case?” Sophie asked with a wink, and I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Good. I absolutely didn’t want to use my magic to break into the police station and check Chief Gary’s files. Again.”

  Sophie grinned. “Plenty of time for that later in this investigation.”

  Chapter 5

  Sophie and I spent another twenty minutes in the house, just making sure we hadn’t missed anything, before we gave up and decided it was fruitless; the crime scene wasn’t going to give us any more information.

  However, even though we had some more questions, I felt like it was a promising step. The more we discovered about the incident, the more we might be able to glean about the culprit.

  When I got back home, exhaustion finally overtook me, and I fell into a deep sleep from which I was finally roused by Bee deciding she wanted breakfast twenty minutes before my alarm went off.

  “We’re hungry, wake up,” Bee murmured, pawing at my face.

  “Can you not wait twenty minutes?” I groaned, rolling over and covering my face with the pillow. Bee replied by jumping on my back and sticking her face under the pillow.

  “No, we’re hungry now. If we were your human children, you wouldn’t let us starve.”

  “Neither one of you is starving,” I muttered as I got out of bed. It was hopeless; now that Bee knew I was awake, nothing was going to stop her until I finally got out of bed.

  “Text me if you find out anything juicy about your case,” Jason muttered sleepily as he turned over.

  I grumbled at him and his ability to sleep in past six in the morning as I threw on some clothes and made my way into the kitchen, putting on a pot of coffee as I stifled a yawn. I definitely had not gotten enough sleep last night; this was going to be a long day.

  Bee and Buster both sat in front of Bee’s food bowl and the extra bowl I had put out next to it for Buster. He was holding up his injured foot, looking up at me like a huge bowl of premium cat food was the only thing standing between him and unimaginable pain.

  Right.

  I managed to hide another tablet of painkillers in Buster’s food, this time sticking with the NSAID only. I watched with satisfaction as he and Bee both munched away, the pill eaten without being noticed. Thank goodness. There was nothing harder than trying to get a cat to eat a pill it knew you were trying to feed it, even if the pill was going to help.

  “Are the two of you coming to the clinic today?” I asked. “Buster, you have to come, since Gloria’s going to come in at some point and take you home, but what about you, Bee?”

  “Of course,” Bee replied, as if I should have known the entire time. “After all, Buster and I have to try and find out who did this to him and to Gloria.”

  “Oh, the two of you are investigating, are you?” I asked, my eyebrows rising.

  “Absolutely,” Bee bristled. “After all, a cat’s dignity is our most important feature. When Buster attempted to save Gloria’s life and didn’t manage to take down the criminal, well, we can’t let that kind of action stand. We’re going to find the man who did this, and we’re going to make him pay.”

  “I assume your version of making him pay doesn’t involve simply calling the cops and letting them take care of it?”

  “Cat justice is far more efficient than your silly method with trials and stuff,” Bee replied, showing me her claws.

  “Alright, well, just make sure you don’t murder him if you find him,” I warned the two of them. “And let me know if the two of you actually come away with any decent information. We’re trying to find him as well, because unlike you, we can talk to humans, and we want to know if Gloria’s in any more danger or not.”

  “Wait, you think Gloria might be in more danger?” Buster piped up.

  “Well, we don’t know,” I replied. “It might be exactly what it looks like on the face of it—a home invasion gone wrong. But it might not be, either.”

  I didn’t want to let the cats know that quite frankly, Sophie and I didn’t really have a clue what was going on with this.

  “Alright, we’ll tell you what we find out,” Buster said, earning himself a glare from Bee. “What? I know it goes against Cat Law, but this is important. This is my mom we’re talking about. If telling them what we find out helps keep her safe, then I’m going to do it.”

  “You’re betraying your species,” Bee muttered.

  “And you know just as well as I do that Cat Law has an exception when it comes to helping save the life of your human.”

  I had never heard of Cat Law before, and a part of me suspected it was something Bee and Buster had come up with on their own. I sort of wanted to know what the other “cat laws” were, but at the same time, I also just wanted to veer as far away from that ship as possible.

  An hour later, after eating a quick bagel for breakfast, I drove down to the vet clinic along with t
he two cats, who insisted on being let out straightaway. I told them they could go out, so long as they came back to check in every hour in case Gloria came by to get Buster.

  After barely acknowledging my orders they headed off, and I made my way to the back, where Sophie was getting everything ready for the day.

  The bags under her eyes told me she’d slept just as little as I had.

  “Do you mind going to Betty’s and grabbing me something with caffeine in it? Literally anything,” Sophie said, and I laughed.

  “Sure. Want any food?”

  “Always,” Sophie replied with a wink. I headed out, checking my watch—there were still about thirty-five minutes to go before our first patient of the day was due, which gave me plenty of time to grab Sophie and myself a couple of coffees and a breakfast burrito for her as well.

  The instant I stepped into Betty’s café and the warm aroma of roasting coffee reached my nostrils, I felt reinvigorated, like the caffeine had seeped straight into me already. Betty McMahon waved at me from behind the coffee machine as she frothed some milk, the slight squeal of the steam wand adding to the atmosphere in the shop.

  Even though it was just after seven-thirty in the morning, most of the tables were already taken up by people huddled around enjoying a morning delicacy before going to work, or simply retirees huddled together and having a chat.

  I made my way up to the counter, my eyes falling on the slices of fresh pumpkin pie in the fridge. That would go perfectly with my lunch, after all.

  “Did you hear about Gloria?” Betty said to me after she finished making the coffee and took my order.

  “I did,” I replied. “I saw her yesterday. Buster got a bit banged up.”

  “Oh, the poor dear,” Betty tutted, shaking her head. “I’m so glad she’s going to be alright. It’s terrifying, thinking about this sort of thing happening in Willow Bay.”

  “I know,” I nodded. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  “That poor woman’s had a string of bad luck. What with her husband dying a couple of years ago, and now this?”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize she was married.”

  “Yes, I knew her husband. He grew up here, actually. They were both teachers up in Portland, although they worked at different schools. He taught high school and she taught middle school. I think that’s one of the reasons why Gloria retired here; when Francis Romano died she gave her notice at the school she worked at and moved here, because it reminded her of him.”

  “Aww,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt. For as much as Buster spent a ton of time in the vet clinic and with Bee, I realized I didn’t really know all that much about Gloria herself. I really only saw her when she came to drop Buster off in the morning.

  “I do hope the police find who did this to her soon,” Betty continued. “I’d hate to think this could become a regular thing. I can’t remember the last time we had a home invasion that put someone in the hospital here. The closest I can think of was back in the eighties when a couple of kids got drunk and tried to steal an ATV, and the owner came out in the middle of the night and chased them off. But that was quite a few years ago now, and no one got hurt then. This is just something else. I mean, Oregon has had its share of major crimes. There was the I-5 killer in the eighties, the Leather’s Oil Company murders in the nineties, that huge robbery at a credit union in Portland about a dozen years ago, the husband who ordered a hit on his wife and she killed the hitman around the same time, and that shooting at the community college three years back, in 2015. But nothing like that has ever happened here in Willow Bay.”

  Betty shook her head sadly as she took the change I handed her. “At least Chief Gary is on the case. He’ll hopefully get to the bottom of it.”

  “I hope so,” I replied. “In the meantime, I hope it was just a one-time thing.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Betty nodded in agreement. “I really hope you’re right.”

  Before I had time to really think about the case too much, though, I ended up having to deal with my patients for the day.

  The first was a cat named Gina who had been spayed three days earlier. Her owner, Sally, a young woman in her mid-twenties who I recognized as a cashier at the local grocery store, came in with her for a normal checkup.

  “I’m really worried. I wasn’t sure if I should have called you as an emergency,” Sally said.

  “Really? What’s wrong?” I asked, taking a look at the wound. The cat’s stitches seemed to be healing fine, and Sally had a cone on her, so she couldn’t get at them. “I don’t see any sign of infection.”

  “Well, she’s been acting extremely lethargic. She won’t move, she won’t eat, she won’t drink, she won’t do anything except lie down. Last night I felt her stomach, and she was breathing super slowly. I think something is wrong. I think she might actually be dying.”

  Tears welled in Sally’s eyes as she said this, and my brow furrowed. This definitely wasn’t good, but at the same time, there were no outward signs that might indicate anything was wrong. None that were visible, anyway. After surgery, infection was the most frequent complication. This was certainly strange.

  “Has she been eating and drinking?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Any vomiting or diarrhea?”

  “No. She just doesn’t do anything.”

  “Are you doing alright, Gina? Are you going to tell us what’s wrong?” I asked as I grabbed my stethoscope, stroking her gently as I pretended to just be speaking with her like a normal human would.

  Gina didn’t reply at all. That was definitely strange.

  I checked her heart, and while her heartbeat might have been a little bit on the slower side, it certainly wasn’t within a range I would normally worry about.

  “Hmm,” I muttered as I began a physical exam. She didn’t seem to have any pain in her body, and she let me touch her paws without a problem. I was very much perplexed.

  “You don’t know what’s wrong, do you?” Sally said, biting her lip.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m not letting you leave here until I know what’s going on with Gina.”

  I undid the wrapping around her cone and slipped it off her head; I wanted to get a better look at Gina’s face and ears. As soon as I did, she let out a meow and stood up with a stretch.

  “Oh my God! She hasn’t moved that much in over twenty-four hours,” Sally said with a gasp.

  “Ah, that’s much better,” Gina said, moving her head from side to side as if stretching it.

  I couldn’t help but let a small smile creep to my face as Gina made her way towards Sally and rubbed herself against her.

  “You fixed her!” Sally exclaimed. “But what did you do? What was wrong with her?”

  “It appears she hated the cone of shame so much she pretended to be dying so that you’d take it off her.”

  “Oh…OH!” Sally exclaimed as realization dawned on her. A blush crept up her face. “I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have brought her in for something so silly. I had no idea. I thought something was seriously wrong with her.”

  “Not to worry,” I said with a laugh. “Animals can definitely be tricky little buggers. Anyway, she was due for me to look her over anyway, so it’s fine that you came in.”

  “Thank you so much. I didn’t realize that was the whole problem.”

  “Not to worry. Luckily, everything seems to be healing up nicely. If you could leave the cone on her when you leave for long periods of time, like when you go to work, that would be ideal. But when you’re home, as long as you can more or less keep an eye on her, I think you should be fine to leave the cone off, so long as she doesn’t bite at the stitches.” I leaned down to face Gina. “You hear that, missy? As long as you’re a good kitty and leave your stitches alone you don’t need the cone much anymore.”

  “Fine,” Gina scowled at me.

  “That’s right, if you’re naughty, the cone goes back on,” I said in my fake-happy voice that I always used in front of
clients who couldn’t know their pet was actually speaking back to me. I handed Sally the cone and had her on her way. I could still hear her apologizing to Karen at the receptionist’s desk, as Karen calmed her down with the knowledge that she was definitely not the first person to come in with an uncooperative cat.

  I made my way to the back room to find Sophie giggling. “I can’t believe Gina pretended she was dying so that Sally would take the cone off her.”

  “Cats,” I replied with a small smile. They certainly had attitude.

  Just as Sally stepped outside, I saw Gloria walking down the street towards us.

  Chapter 6

  “Gloria!” I exclaimed. “Come in, please.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Gloria said to me with a smile. I couldn’t help but notice she walked with a bit of a limp.

  “How are you feeling? Please, have a seat. Bee and Buster decided to go out this morning, but Buster ran off without using his injured paw, which was nice to see. I’m sure they’ll be back shortly.”

  “A seat would be nice, actually,” Gloria said as she plopped herself down in one of the lobby chairs. “And don’t worry about Buster. In fact, I think a bit of a rest is just what I need.”

  “If you’d like I can get Karen to drive you back home after the two cats get back.”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t want to be a bother.”

  “I’m happy to do it, ma’am,” Karen said cheerily from behind the counter. “It’s really no trouble at all. You’re only a couple minutes away. I’m glad to see you looking so much better.”

  “It’s quite alright, really. The doctors told me I should try to do some light exercise anyway, that sitting around all day would only make things worse. Frankly, I’m more worried about the state of my home.”

  “I’m sure it’s all fine,” I assured her, not letting Gloria know that I knew all too well what the inside of her home looked like. “Are you worried about staying in it alone? Is there anyone who can stay with you for a few days?”