She Wore Mourning by P.D. Workman (best desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

you sure it’s the same cat?” Zachary demanded, unable to wrap his mind around it. A cat disappears for eight years and then comes back? Was she imagining that a stray she saw was her old cat, Mittens? Maybe she’d even tempted one into the house with a bowl of kibble?

“Of course, do you think I wouldn’t know my own cat? He came to the door. He was yowling and scratching to get in. When I let him in, he went straight for his bowl.” For eight years, she had emptied and refilled that bowl, and she sounded triumphant. Nobody had believed the cat would ever return, but she had continued to feed it, and she had been right.

“That’s pretty amazing. What did… what did your husband have to say about it? He saw the cat?”

“What, do you think it’s my imagination? Am I that deranged?”

She could be. Zachary didn’t know. Maybe she had finally snapped and gone over the edge. Having lost too much, she had decided to resurrect her old pet. She did sound manic.

“Of course, Spencer saw it. He was surprised. But it’s Mittens. He knows it’s Mittens.” Isabella’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial tone. “Spencer doesn’t exactly like cats. They shed, you know, and their litter tracks. It’s just so amazing. I’m so happy. And I think… it must be a good omen for the case. I think that since Mittens came back, that must mean… that you are going to find something in Declan’s case. You’re going to figure it all out.”

“Yes,” Zachary agreed. “Maybe I will.”

Zachary had called Kenzie several times, but she wasn’t returning his calls. He took a quick look at her social networks to confirm that she was not sick or out of town, but she was posting the same type of stuff as usual. He gave her a couple of days. If she had been put off by Bridget’s call, she would need a couple of days to cool off. She’d found out a lot about him all at once, and she was apparently the type who needed to think about it for a while before she felt comfortable talking to him again.

It was a painful couple of days. He also called Molly and told her that he would be preparing his final report shortly, wishing that he could have uncovered something new like Isabella had suggested.

“What did you find?” Molly demanded.

“That will all be in my report.”

“But you can tell me what you found. Tell me whether you found anything to indicate that it wasn’t just an accident. I’ll wait for your report, but you can tell me that, can’t you?”

“I… I really can’t. My investigation was… inconclusive. I didn’t uncover anything that the police didn’t already know, but there were a few facts that… I think could lead in other directions.”

“So, there was someone else involved? Someone took him?”

Zachary didn’t like being forced into a corner, especially before he had a chance to write his report. Once he laid it all out in a report, he could just reference the appropriate paragraphs and say, ‘it’s all there.’ He didn’t ad lib well.

“It’s possible, but I didn’t find anything that could be used to persuade the police to look into it further. I don’t know what help that is.”

“But at least… we would know. Maybe something would come up later on down the line that would let us pursue it. For now… at least we’d know that it wasn’t just… negligence.”

The way that she said the word made Zachary flash back to his own childhood. Missed meals, ratty clothes that didn’t fit, absent caregivers, institutions with thin, hard mattresses and exploitative staff. He held tightly to his phone, and breathed in the smell of stale coffee, trying to ground himself in the present. Declan hadn’t been neglected. He’d had two parents who loved and cared for him. He’d been well-fed and clothed. They might not have been perfect, but they were there for him.

The way Molly said it made him wonder what had happened in her past. Had she been the neglected child? Or was she the negligent parent? Or both? Did she hire Zachary because she wanted to assuage her own guilt rather than Isabella’s? Maybe she needed to believe that she had raised Isabella to be a good, caring mother, not an emotional wreck who couldn’t care for herself, let alone a child. Or a cat.

“I’ll write up my report,” Zachary promised. He looked at the calendar. “I’ll try to get it to you by Friday.”

“That’s Christmas Eve.”

It was, but Zachary didn’t understand why that made it a bad day for him to finish his report. Wasn’t it good to have it settled before Christmas so that they could be at peace during the season of peace and goodwill blah, blah, blah?

“Right. Christmas Eve,” he agreed. “I’ll have it to you by then.”

But Zachary hadn’t written it yet. He had scribbled down some notes. He had made an outline. He had tried to summarize his thoughts, but he couldn’t do it without putting down the words of the report first, to get everything laid out and itemized.

He found himself avoiding his computer, knowing that the work was waiting for him there.

Instead, he decided to go to the medical examiner’s office to see if Kenzie were around. If she weren’t busy, they could chat for a few minutes. Hopefully, things would be pretty quiet with the Christmas season approaching. People would be going on vacation. Just a skeleton staff at the police station.

Down in the basement, a few red garlands had been strung along the top of the wall, but it didn’t make it look festive. It just made it look like a bare, clinical hallway with a tattered red garland running along the top. Like when Zachary had pulled discarded garlands from his neighbor’s garbage and tied them to his tricycle. In his mind, he was going to make it into something fabulous, like Santa’s