Chapter Ten
Trey
Where is my cat?” Callie demanded. Her voice was calm enough, but Trey knew how much she loved that cat and figured she was about a half second away from blind panic.
“She’s got to be around here somewhere,” he said, scanning the room for any kind of clue to where the cat might be.
“Stella, where are you?” she called into the empty air. And when she did, not only did her voice come reverberating from the speaker, but Stella’s meowing got louder too. As if she’d heard Callie and was calling out to her.
“Oh, baby! I hear you,” Callie called back, and when Trey picked up the speaker and turned it off, she called out to the cat again. This time, they heard Stella coming from the far side of the reading room.
“That’s weird,” Trey said, “there’s nothing back there but the cloakroom, where I keep old furniture and stuff to donate to the all-island yard sale later this month.”
But he and Callie headed across the room toward the wood-paneled wall on the opposite side of the chamber. And when Callie called out to her cat, Stella started meowing as if her life depended on it. Smart kitty, Trey thought.
“Stella?” he called out before opening the door concealed in the paneling. And sure enough, as soon as he pushed it fully open, the cat burst out of the room and stopped short at the sight of Callie. Stella stood up on her hind legs and pressed against Callie, as if demanding to be picked up.
Leaving them to enjoy their reunion, Trey went into the cloakroom, intending to see if whoever had put the cat in the room had left any clues.
Then he realized what he’d just thought and rolled his eyes. “Left any clues,” he muttered. “Listen to yourself, LeBlanc. You sound like an extra on Scooby Doo Special Island Crime Unit.”
Still shaking his head, he flipped on the light switch, but the chaos there had him muttering a curse.
The cushions of the outdated plaid sofa that had once been in the breakroom on the first floor had been pulled off and split open, the polyester innards bleeding out all over the floor.
Tables were tipped over, and in some cases, the legs had been broken off.
Desk drawers had been removed and smashed into bits.
A gorgeous antique globe that Trey had only stuck in here temporarily before taking it down into his basement workshop to polish it had been split in two, the halves gaping open like one of those plastic Easter eggs filled with candy he’d hunted as a kid.
All this time, he’d been blaming the noise on pranks by bored kids.
But staring at the remnants of these relics of a once thriving and active college library—items that could easily have been given a new life by bargain hunters later that summer—he realized he’d been dead wrong.
Whoever had done this had a lot of anger in them.
And he was damned glad they hadn’t decided to take it out on little Stella.
Trey was so distracted by his thoughts and the mess in front of him that he didn’t notice Callie behind him until he heard her stunned gasp. “Oh my God, did they do this?”
He didn’t need to ask who “they” were. There was only one “they” who could be responsible for this and it was the same ones who’d left the speakers and locked up Stella.
When he turned to look at her, he saw that she held Stella to her shoulder, like a baby being burped. At least the cat didn’t appear any worse for wear after her earlier ordeal.
“Unless Stella is a lot stronger than she looks,” he joked, though at the moment he didn’t find any of this particularly funny.
“Yeah,” Callie said wryly, stroking a hand down the little cat’s back. “She only does that kind of damage to catnip mice.”
She looked back at the detritus in the room. “It appears they were looking for something. At least that’s always the reason when the heroine’s apartment gets tossed in a romantic suspense novel.”
Despite his frustration at the events of the morning, Trey bit back a smile. “Romantic suspense, huh?”
“It’s a very popular subgenre,” Callie said with a little shrug. “And it can teach you a lot about crime and the underworld.”
“Well, it does seem to have taught you something because I suspect you’re right,” Trey said with a glance back at the broken furniture.
“I wasn’t really thinking in terms of a search, but that is exactly what it looks like.
But what the hell would they think could have been hidden in a bunch of outdated furniture from a library that hasn’t even been in use for decades? ”
“You know the place better than I do,” Callie said thoughtfully, “but is it possible that Miss Khaki tucked something away in here for safekeeping without telling you about it?”
Sure, it was possible, Trey thought impatiently.
But knowing how frustrated Khaki had been after Remy’s death, when she’d been unable to readily find his will and insurance paperwork, there was no way his aunt would have hidden something valuable without leaving instructions for whomever she wanted to have it.
Besides, there was a more logical reason.
“Khaki was a big believer in planning ahead. Remy’s death was unexpected and as a result she had a hard time finding all of his paperwork when he passed.
If she was going to squirrel something away in here, she would have told me.
Or since she was apparently planning to leave this place to you, she would have told you.
What she would not have done is, I don’t know, duct tape a treasure map on the underside of a library table or some kind of Nicholas Cage or Dan Brown shenanigans. ”
Callie nodded. “Oh lord, no. One of the other librarians offered her a copy of the latest Dan Brown and let’s just say she was not a fan. But if it wasn’t Khaki, then who could have hidden something in here?”
As he watched her, she reached up to scratch Stella under the chin. As she did so, however, she frowned. “What’s this on your collar, little girl?” And as Trey watched, she began to unfasten a small roll of paper from around Stella’s collar.
Wordlessly, she set the cat on the floor and unfolded the page, which looked to be the size of a cash register receipt.
As she scanned the paper, Trey watched all the color drain from her face.
“Callie, what does it say?” He stepped up beside her, put an arm around her, and ushered her out into the reading room. Once she’d lowered herself onto a nearby bench, she handed him the paper.
Feeling his heart pounding hard inside his chest, Trey took the message and read:
Why are you ignoring my wishes, Thomas? You know I don’t like to be ignored!
With a curse, he dropped the paper as if it had singed his fingers. “What is this?” he demanded, turning to face Callie with a scowl. “Who did you pay to come in here while we were gone?”
But Callie stepped back from him, clearly reading the anger in his expression correctly. He was furious. How the hell had she managed to find someone to outdo the ghost after only being here for a day and a half?
“I didn’t pay anybody,” she said, raising her hands as if to ward off a blow. “I don’t even know what that note means. Who is Thomas? And what are they even talking about? What wishes?”
“Sure, lady, I highly doubt you spent so much time with Khaki that you didn’t once hear her call me Thomas like she did my entire life, even though everybody else in the world called me Trey.
” He shook his head in disgust. “And it’s not like you don’t already know I want you gone.
So of course you’d make it look like Khaki’s scolding me from beyond the grave. ”
At his explanation, he saw Callie’s eyes widen.
“Trey, listen to me,” she said, her voice dead serious.
“I had no idea your name is really Thomas. I’ve met only the people you introduced me to in town this morning, and the people at the crawfish boil tonight.
We’re certainly not close enough that I’d feel comfortable asking them to do something like this.
And why would I want to tear up all of this stuff? ”
He considered that. It would take a bit more than the quick chats she’d had with the shopkeepers in town that morning to arrange this kind of stunt.
And if she’d left the library that afternoon, he’d have seen her.
And he supposed if Julie had been around while Khaki talked to Callie about him, his great-aunt might have called him Trey instead of Thomas, who to Julie had always been Trey’s father.
“You really didn’t do this?” he asked Callie, his anger at her replaced now with fury at whoever had done this.
“I really didn’t,” she said with a shake of her head. “But I would like to know who did. Because they not only scared the hell out of both of us, they used my cat to do it. Which really ticks me off.”