“I see.”

“While I’m sure what he’d really like is a big check, my budget is limited these days. But he did me a favor, and I’d like to acknowledge it.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you. And I believe I know just the thing.”

She warmed my tea with another half cup and gave me her suggestion.

• • •

When I returned to my apartment, I had a visitor waiting at my door. The black cat.

“Sorry, but unless you like toast with peanut butter, there’s nothing in there.”

It just waited, the tip of its tail flicking, gaze fixed on my door. I opened it. The cat zoomed inside.

As I set up my new laptop, I heard a squeak. Then a crunch. The cat trotted over to me, dead mouse hanging from its mouth.

“Oh, so it wasn’t about me at all. Your dinner squeezed under my door.”

I walked back to the entry hall and opened the door. The cat didn’t follow. I returned to see it crouching in the middle of my kitchen floor, ripping into the mouse, tiny bones crunching.

“Lovely. You’ll let me know when you want to leave?”

The cat continued to ignore its host as it chowed down. I shook my head and started working.

OLIVIA AND EDEN

Rose watched the cat cleaning itself in the girl’s apartment window. She’d seen it around before, sneaking and slinking and killing, as cats were wont to do. So the girl had taken it in? Surprising. She didn’t seem the type. No more than Rose herself. Maybe the girl was lonely. She’d noticed that earlier, when she’d offer more tea and the girl would hesitate before sheepishly accepting. Staving off the return to her empty apartment. Rose knew what that was like.

The girl. She shouldn’t call her that. She had a name. Two, in fact, which was the problem. Olivia was too haughty. Pretentious. It suited the daughter of the man who owned the Mills & Jones department stores. And it suited the coolly beautiful girl Rose had seen in society page photographs. But it did not suit the young woman who’d been in her house an hour ago. Cool, yes. Self-possessed, yes. But not haughty, not pretentious enough to be an Olivia. An Olivia was all surface, an empty shell of sophistication. With this girl, the shell was a veneer. One that was slowly beginning to crack.

Eden suited her better. It wasn’t perfect. A little too cute, conjuring up images of idealistic young parents searching naming books to find just the right one for their little treasure. Still better than calling her “the girl.” As long as she remembered not to say it aloud. She couldn’t afford to alienate Eden. Not now.

Speaking of alienating . . .

Rose looked over at her cell phone and stifled the overwhelming urge to call Gabriel and deliver a verbal smack upside the head. That was the price of having her grandnephew in her life. She must not meddle. A lesson she’d learned when he was fifteen, after his mother left.

A deplorable situation. Her niece had the parenting skills of a . . . Rose didn’t even know how to finish that sentence. Any creature in nature so incapable of caring for its young would have died out centuries ago.

Rose pushed the phone aside, then swept the last hawthorn petals from the desk. A test for Eden. There were others, but this was the one she’d noticed. The power to innately detect and decipher omens was a strange skill, one that most psychics would deny even existed. And yet Rose had seen it once before—an old woman who could read omens. She’d been accepted and even quite celebrated in the community; Cainsville was an odd sort of place that way.

Rose had been only a child at the time, the woman merely a vague memory now, and she knew no more about her and her power. But when she’d seen signs in Eden, she’d set out the tests and Eden had detected one. Only one, though, meaning it was an ability as yet undeveloped. Rose could help with that, and she would, because it was in her best interests. For a Walsh, that’s what it came down to. Eden Larsen or Olivia Taylor-Jones or whomever the girl was becoming would be useful, and it behooved Rose to take advantage of that.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The cat never did leave. When he finished his mouse, he started meowing at me. I opened the door. He ignored it. I quickly laid out newspaper. He kept meowing. I got a towel—one of only two I owned—and reluctantly surrendered it. He curled up on it and went to sleep.

My Internet access wasn’t smoking hot, but it was decent enough if I set up close to the front window. I spent the evening scouring the Web for anything on Jan Gunderson, Christian Gunderson, Tim Marlotte—anyone and anything that might help me make a case against Christian. Or proved he was innocent and the Larsens had been rightfully convicted. I found nothing.

• • •

I woke up, let the cat out, and went to work. Or something like that. I attempted to let the cat out. But he had apparently stuffed half the dead mouse behind my stove, and when I tried to kick him out, he recovered his breakfast and set about eating it. Then he jumped into my sink and meowed until I got him a bowl of water. At least he didn’t expect cream.

When I was ready to leave for work, I opened the door again, and even prodded him in that direction. He pretended not to notice. So I scooped him up and carried him out.

I reached the front doors just as Grace, dressed in a housecoat and a scowl, was retrieving her morning paper.

She glowered at the cat. “No pets allowed.”

“Tell that to whoever let him in.” I shifted the cat under my arm. “Also, you have mice.”

She squawked as I left. Once I reached the sidewalk, I put the cat down. He gave me a baleful look, then tore back into the front yard, leapt onto the porch, and crouched behind a stone urn, gaze fixed on the door, waiting for it to open.

“So that’s how you do it,” I said. “Just don’t let Grace catch you or you’ll end up baked in a pie.”

• • •

As my shift ended, Gabriel called to say we had evening interviews with one of Jan’s old friends and a former teacher of Christian’s whom the police had questioned about his association with the first female victim, Amanda Mays. It seemed like retreading well-trodden ground, but nothing else was popping up. Should I really expect it to? How many professionals had taken a crack at this case? I sure as hell wasn’t going to prove the Larsens were innocent by questioning two people.

Gabriel knocked at my door at ten to six. When I let him in, he sniffed the air, frowning slightly. Then he noticed my guest.