Chapter Nine #2
“She wants to sit down with you and her lawyer down in Marietta,” Tennessee told her, correctly interpreting her silence.
“Because one thing everyone might not know about Mrs. Bonney is that she’s a cat lady.
I think she has something like ten cats in that house with her right now and I’ve never known her to say no to a kitten. ”
“She sounds like my kind of lady,” Matilda said.
“She knows who you are,” Tennessee told her.
“She said she would never consider trusting an animal’s life to anyone except that girl in the red truck and if she can help you make that dream of a rescue come true, she will.
” He grinned at the look on her face, and Matilda knew it had to be something like dumbstruck.
“Before you get too sappy on me, I think it made her feel good to have somewhere to leave not only some of her property, but all of those cats.”
“She can depend on me to take care of her babies like they are my own,” Matilda vowed fervently, cats unseen.
Something she repeated in person to Mrs. Bonney herself when they got together the next week.
She sat in the old woman’s sweet little house, filled with the kind of clutter that Matilda was very careful never to allow hers to become—but hey, life was long—with a big, fat calico cat purring happily in her lap.
“I always wanted to be a rescuer sort myself,” Mrs. Bonney said as they sipped tea and ate sugar cookies from a tin that tasted like butter. “But I only end up making pets of them, I’m afraid.”
“In the end, that’s the goal, isn’t it?” Matilda asked. “We want them to have families. Seems like yours are perfectly happy right here with you, where they belong.”
Mrs. Bonney gazed at her for a long moment.
“They all said I went a bit odd after my Peter died. But between you and me, though I was certainly fond of him, he had a hard limit on cats.” She didn’t shift her gaze from Matilda’s, and Matilda couldn’t repress the urge to sit up taller in her seat.
“My advice to you, if I may, is to never, ever accept cat limitations. Not only does that lead to fewer cats, it tends to be emblematic of other issues.” She nodded, with a sniff. “The less said about that, the better.”
“Mrs. Bonney,” Matilda said in the same intense way, “I have not accepted a cat, dog, or small mammal limitation yet.”
The old woman smiled, her cheeks creasing. “I knew I liked you.”
And that was how Pied Piper Rescue, Matilda’s dream come true, started in the rundown old Bonney barn that was going to need a whole lot of TLC to get going. Matilda was no stranger to the TLC side of things. She’d transformed the outbuilding behind the cottage all by herself.
What mattered was that it was real. And it was happening.
Even if Matilda couldn’t really explain why it was happening to all the interested parties who she had to tell about the new venture. Like her sister and brother and all of her extremely nosy cousins.
“So Tennessee Lisle just took it upon himself to suddenly become deeply interested in animal welfare, and hunt down this old woman with this barn, and convince her to do this?” Rosie asked one morning, having come to the barn while Matilda was busy working there on her day off.
“As you know, Rosie,” Matilda said airily, “Tennessee takes the welfare of the town very seriously. Why not the animals as well?”
“Yeah, right,” Rosie said, studying Matilda suspiciously. Especially when Matilda aimed her vaguest smile her way. “That sounds like him.”
Her brother Jack was even more dubious.
“Did you bribe him or something?” he asked gruffly.
“Jack,” Matilda said impatiently. “If you don’t want to help me clear out this barn, I don’t really know why you’re here. I thought you were the renovation king.”
“I don’t understand why this is happening,” her cousin Wyatt chimed in, gruffly.
“Who just swoops in and makes all this happen out of the goodness of his heart?” Logan, another cousin, demanded.
“Not Tennessee Lisle,” her other male cousin answered shortly.
She had corralled them all here on a Sunday afternoon because they were brawny and covered in muscles and she did not want to lug all the debris inside the barn out herself.
“I have always wanted to open a rescue,” she told them all, folding her arms and glaring each one of them in turn, just in case they were under the impression that she really was as ditzy as her mother.
When they should know better. “I discussed this lifelong dream of mine with Tennessee, who as you may know, having grown up here, has his fingers in everything. That means he knows exactly who, for example, has an old barn sitting around with nothing to do. What is difficult to comprehend about this?”
“And he’s helping you renovate it too?” Wyatt asked, sounding darkly dubious. Like Tennessee’s help was nefarious, somehow.
“He might, yes,” Matilda said, glaring at him.
“Because—and again, I don’t know if any of you are aware of this in between your questionable trips down into Marietta to hang out at the Wolf Den and make fools of yourselves—but some people actually care about Cowboy Point.
And are invested in its growth. And community-based organizations like animal rescues, just to pull something out of a hat, are good for communities.
It pulls people together. It makes them feel like they all belong to a place that cares about them and the things they care about in return.
I know none of this is meaningful to you three since you all run wild and are literally known for nothing but your escapades, but other people, grown people—”
“We get it,” muttered Noah.
“My God,” Logan agreed. “I’ll renovate the damn barn myself just to make you shut up.”
“Your assistance is appreciated and accepted,” Matilda shot back.
And because she made sure to make her family as miserable as possible, they got the barn cleared out pretty fast, too.
It was when Sara Jane showed up that things got trickier.
Because she came with her crew of best friends in tow.
Esther Wayne, whose true crime podcast was the only thing better than coffee in the mornings when Matilda was inching her way down the slick side of Copper Mountain on her way to work.
Juliet Cross, one of the elementary school teachers—and the one Mrs. Bonney had mentioned by name, admiringly.
And Kitty Bennett, the culinary genius behind the best pizza around.
“Did I see Tennessee Lisle in here the other day?” Esther asked, which meant that she had absolutely seen Tennessee right here, probably seventeen times, before she asked.
“He helped put this all together,” Matilda said.
It was another Sunday, and the girls had come by to see the place before Matilda started transporting the animals she still had in the outbuilding up at the cottage.
“He likes to come by from time to time and see how it’s going.
Even helped put together the kennels and the runs. ”
This was all true. It was equally true that out here in rural Montana, things that took months for city folks happened fast. Especially at this time of year, when the snowmelt wasn’t happening fast enough and every man with a toolbox was only too happy to lend a hand to a project that would get him outside.
It was also true that she and Tennessee had celebrated all of these truths and accomplishments, naked.
Though not here.
“I’ve never known Tennessee to be at all helpful,” Sara Jane said, studying Matilda much too closely for her liking.
But Matilda gave her nothing, even if she wanted to bristle in Tennessee’s defense. She made herself laugh instead.
“Are we talking about the same Tennessee?” she asked. “Grumpy, I grant you, but since when is he unhelpful? Remember the Farm & Craft Market last summer? Sure, he refuses to put up a booth for the store or the diner, but that Saturday when it was so hot, who was out there handing out drinks?”
Kitty nodded. “That is true. He’s like his own sneaky, kind of off-putting chamber of commerce.”
Sara Jane did not look convinced. Esther looked intrigued, which did not bode well.
Still, Matilda delighted in telling Tennessee what Kitty had said later that same night. When he was deep inside of her, slamming into her from behind.
“Obviously not off-putting enough,” he growled, gripping her hips in that hard, masterful way of his that made her nearly shiver herself over a cliff just remembering, later.
Rosie rustled up her husband and brothers-in-law to help Matilda get the animals down the hill one afternoon, and they did that so quickly that she was surprised.
She’d been certain it would take a lot longer.
Multiple days, endless trips. But the Careys handled it in an hour or two, like it was nothing.
“We’re ranchers,” Ryder told her with a grin. “It’s literally in our blood to move animals from one space to another space, repeat forever.”
“Some of us are good ranchers,” the oldest Carey brother, Harlan, said with a laugh. “So if there’s maybe a little more art to it than that, Ryder wouldn’t know. He’s still got the rodeo in his head.”
The Carey brothers, who always spent time together and seemed to enjoy each other’s company even with all the teasing, had always been a kind of mystery to Matilda.
Her brother Jack was solitary and dark, and she thought that he took pleasure in that.
Her cousins were, always, wild. She and her sister and Sara Jane had never really fit the mold around here.
Rosie had gone and gotten pregnant and hadn’t intended to tell anyone who the father was.
Matilda was, well. She was herself. And Sara Jane hid it a little better, but she was just as strange.
She just dressed it up behind books at the library.
The Starks had always been a little edgier.