Vanished in Cherry Hills (Cozy Cat Caper Mystery Book 4) Page 5

  Matty meowed again. When Kat looked up, she swore the feline shook her head in dismay.

  “If you’re trying to tell me something, you’re going to have to be more blunt,” Kat told her.

  Matty flicked her tail in response. Then she began licking her paw, as though to indicate she’d done all she could.

  Kat knew how she felt. If the past few days was any indication of what she expected to learn during her search, she might simply have to come to terms with the possibility that she might never find her mother.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next morning, Kat stopped by Cherry Hills Veterinary soon after they opened. Dr. Harry wasn’t yet swamped with patients, and he motioned her back to one of the empty examination rooms.

  “I’m happy to report that Shadow is doing much better now that we’ve got some fluids running through his system,” he said.

  Kat’s relief sent the air rushing out of her lungs. “I’m glad.”

  “He should be fine, but if you notice anything amiss either bring him in again or give me a call.”

  “I’ll let his owner know.”

  “Let me fetch him.” Dr. Harry ducked out of the room and returned a minute later with a squirming cat carrier, which he set on the examination table. “Here you are.”

  Kat opened the hatch, eager to check on Shadow herself. Apparently, the black cat was just as eager to check out his surroundings. He poked his nose through the opening and peeked around the exam room. His eyes were much brighter, and from the way his head swiveled back and forth he looked to have regained some energy.

  When Shadow braced his paws on the edge of the carrier as if to lift himself out, Kat gently closed the hatch. “Thank you so much, Dr. Harry.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” He led her to the hallway. “Stop by Sherry’s desk for your invoice.”

  “Okay.”

  Sherry had Shadow’s bill in hand when Kat arrived at the reception desk. “The 4F rate has already been applied,” the redhead chirped.

  Kat gave the invoice a cursory glance as she took it. “Thanks. I’ll add this to what Imogene owes you for her visit this week.”

  Sherry leaned back in her chair, smiling. “The charges sure do add up fast, don’t they?”

  “I’m just glad you all are so generous about discounting our bills.” Kat adjusted her grip on Shadow’s carrier. “I’ll send you a check when I balance the books this weekend.”

  Sherry waved her off. “No rush. We’re always happy to help you guys out.”

  Kat headed for the door. “I appreciate it.”

  Outside, she unlocked her car, tossed the invoice on the passenger seat, and buckled Shadow’s carrier into the back before starting off for Helen’s house.

  Shadow was much chattier on the return trip. Yesterday he’d spent the ride to the vet’s hunkered down in indifferent silence. Today he meowed almost nonstop, a heartening sign of his improving health.

  Evidently Helen was as anxious as Shadow for the cat to return home. She rushed out of the house before Kat had even shifted her car gear into park, as if she had been watching for their arrival all morning.

  “How’s Shadow?” Helen asked as soon as Kat opened her door.

  Kat climbed out of the car. “He’s fine.”

  The tension in Helen’s shoulders evaporated. “Oh, thank goodness.”

  Kat extricated the carrier from the back seat. “He was dehydrated, but Dr. Harry kept him on an IV all night and he seems to have regained some energy.”

  Helen exhaled. “That’s fantastic. You have no idea how much I appreciate this.”

  “I’m happy to help.”

  Shadow meowed, and Helen smiled. “He’s telling us to set him free. He never did like that thing.”

  Kat followed Helen up the driveway. “I don’t think any cat enjoys being confined.”

  Once Helen closed the front door, Kat set the carrier on the carpet and unlatched it. Several other cats wandered over to greet Shadow as he rejoined them. They touched noses in turn, and a few gave him welcoming head licks.

  Kat stepped toward the door. “I have something else for you. Hang on.” She ducked outside and returned seconds later with the hospital invoice she’d uncovered the day before.

  Helen took it from her. “What’s this?”

  “It got mixed up in Mrs. Polanski’s folder,” Kat explained. “Nick Trotter was your husband, right?”

  Helen’s brow furrowed as she scanned over the page. “This is for Cherry Hills Veterinary.”

  “Oh!” Kat smacked her palm against her forehead. “Sorry, I gave you the wrong bill. Let me go get the right one.”

  She took the invoice from Helen and returned to her car. This time she verified Nick Trotter’s name on the top of the page and the long list of hospital charges before shutting her car door and heading back toward the house.

  She only made it halfway up the driveway before a realization hit her so hard she gasped.

  She looked down at the bill again, the words ‘second notice’ printed in red pulling her eyes to the top of the page. She forced her gaze downward, mentally tallying each line item until she finally reached the bottom of the page where the total was printed in bold.

  Sherry’s words from this morning echoed through her brain. The charges sure do add up fast, don’t they?

  Kat had a flashback of Matty covering up the Furry Friends Foster Families discount on the veterinary invoice that Imogene had given her yesterday. Without a discount, medical charges added up even faster.

  Kat lifted her eyes up to Helen’s house, her heart slamming against her rib cage. Was it possible that Nick Trotter’s medical needs had become so overwhelming that Helen had found herself in a situation where she wasn’t able to pay anymore?

  The real question was, would such a situation have driven Helen to rob a bank? Kat had to admit, the more she considered the possibility, the more plausible it seemed. Or, was she only scrabbling to assign guilt to someone other than her mother?

  Kat thought back to what Jessie had told her about Helen. She’d claimed her aunt loved to talk, that she would practically hold Kat hostage for as long as she was willing to listen to her old stories. Yet Helen had barely said a word yesterday. Kat hadn’t given her reticence much thought at the time, too busy catching up with Mrs. Polanski, but what if Helen hadn’t been quiet in deference to her sister? What if her reticence was because the topic being discussed had concerned an old crime no one knew she’d committed?

  Barely able to feel her own legs, Kat moved toward Helen’s house and let herself back inside. Her brain was racing so fast she felt lightheaded. A thousand questions were running through her mind.

  “There you are,” Helen said. She had settled into the same armchair she had occupied the day before, the Christmas scarf she was knitting in her lap. “I was afraid you’d gotten lost out there.”

  Kat walked toward the other side of the room in a trance. She was so preoccupied she didn’t even check for cats before planting her behind on the sofa.

  Helen jerked her chin in Kat’s direction. “Is that the bill you were talking about?”

  Kat looked at the invoice, almost surprised to see it gripped in her hands. She’d forgotten she was holding it.

  She swallowed hard and forced her gaze back up to Helen’s. “Yes, it is.”

  “Thank you for returning it.”

  “Helen, did you rob that bank?” Kat blurted out.

  Helen swayed backward, the force of Kat’s question seeming to slam her against the armchair. “What?”

  “Did you rob PNW Financial all those years ago?” Kat waved the hospital bill in front of her. “Did your husband’s medical treatment get to be so expensive that you no longer had a way to pay for it?”

  Helen’s mouth gaped open, but no sounds came out. She seemed to be floundering over what to say.

  Kat set the invoice on the coffee table and leaned back against the couch. “Helen, I know I could be jumping to co
nclusions here, but I really need to know the answer. Please. I need to know if you were the one who committed that robbery, the one my mother has been suspected of for the past thirty years.”

  Helen didn’t say anything. Although she’d stopped knitting, the needles clacked together as if she couldn’t hold them steady. She looked at them, then set them in her lap.

  Shadow jumped onto the vacant couch cushion beside Kat. She stroked the feline to ground herself. “This hospital stay wasn’t cheap. And the bill is dated around the same time as the robbery.”

  Kat waited for Helen to answer, but the only sound in the room was that of Shadow purring.

  “You and my mother looked fairly similar back then.” Kat eyed the old photograph of Helen and Mrs. Polanski before focusing on Helen again. “I’m not trying to accuse you if you didn’t have anything to do with it, but I’m struggling for answers here. If you did hold up that bank, I would really, really appreciate you saying something.”

  Helen dropped her gaze to her lap and started plucking cat furs off of the scarf.

  “I wouldn’t turn you in,” Kat rushed on. “My only interest is to locate my mother. And if I knew she was innocent, I wouldn’t need to hide my search from anybody. Besides, the statute of limitations has surely passed if you did have something to do with the bank robbery. I don’t think you could be prosecuted even if you went down to the police station and confessed firsthand.”

  Helen stopped picking at the scarf. “I suppose that’s true.”

  Kat’s breath caught. “What exactly is true?”

  “About the statute of limitations.” Helen swallowed hard and looked up at Kat through lowered eyelids. “And all the rest too.”

  Kat sucked in a breath, the implications of Helen’s statement rocking her to the core. The thought of her mother running from the law for three decades when the real guilty party had been in town all along made her head spin.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  Helen sighed. “It would help if I started at the beginning. Nick was sick for years. He was always running himself into the ground. I told him to slow down, but that wasn’t his nature. He ended up in the hospital on more than one occasion, yet that still didn’t deter him. There were times when I thought he was going to die.”

  “What was wrong with him?” Kat asked.

  “Lupus, but it took us years to receive the correct diagnosis.” Helen shrugged. “It’s bad enough when women get it, but it’s even more rare in men. When we finally found a doctor familiar enough with the disease to recognize the symptoms and run the appropriate tests, we were so relieved just to have some answers.”

  Kat sagged against the couch. The pain on Helen’s face inspired a pinch of sympathy in her gut.

  Helen stared down at her hands. “I lived every day in fear back then, constantly wondering when Nick would end up in the emergency room next. Then, the times he was admitted, a tiny part of my brain was always questioning whether this would be it, if this would be the last time I would ever see my husband alive.”

  “And all those hospital visits were expensive,” Kat surmised.

  A shadow crossed over Helen’s face. “Yes. With me being a secretary and him often being too sick to hold down a steady job, it wasn’t as if we had great medical insurance or a tremendous source of income.”

  “So you robbed a bank.”

  Helen spread her hands. “What other option did I have? Watch Nick suffer at home when I knew he needed to be in the care of professionals?” She shook her head. “That was unconscionable.”

  Kat’s heart twisted as she watched the emotion playing across Helen’s face. She didn’t envy the decision she’d had to make all those years ago.

  “When the idea first came to me, I wasn’t sure I would be able to go through with it,” Helen continued. “But I had to do something. And I knew I had to choose a bank outside of Cherry Hills, where nobody knew me. So, I started by driving around. I spent some time checking out different establishments. Whenever I’d stop at one, I’d ask myself what I was doing, if I’d lost my mind. Here I was, this law-abiding citizen thinking about committing a major felony.”

  Helen stopped talking to wipe at the tears pooling around her eyes. Kat turned away for a moment to give her some privacy, only looking back when she started talking again.

  “It killed me inside, what I’d been reduced to. Did I really want to be a person who threatened and demanded what wasn’t hers?” Helen took a deep breath. “But it always came back to one deciding factor: Nick’s health.”

  “And I’m guessing PNW Financial looked like the easiest target,” Kat said.

  “Yes. This was back in the eighties, mind you. Security wasn’t as good anywhere as it is nowadays, but it struck me as particularly lax at PNW. So I waited until a rainy Tuesday around two, when I figured there would be fewer people, donned a hat and sunglasses to better obscure my face from the cameras, and held up the teller.” Helen sighed. “I told her I was armed, but that wasn’t really true. I had my hand stuck in my empty jacket pocket the whole time. My heart was pounding so hard, and I had no idea what I would do if she challenged me.”

  “Did she?”

  Helen shook her head. “I don’t think it even crossed the poor girl’s mind. She was too scared to do anything but hand over the money. Looking back, I believe I was actually more scared than she was, but she didn’t know that.”

  Kat rested one palm on Shadow’s soft fur, her stomach clenching as the question she really needed to ask jumped to the forefront of her brain. “How does my mother fit into all this?”

  Helen’s cheek twisted. “That was rather an unfortunate accident for her. You see, your mama and I, we didn’t look so different from a distance, and those grainy films they took in the eighties don’t really give you a good look at a person. It didn’t help her that I was careful to keep my face down the whole time either.”

  Kat felt a lump in her throat. “And everybody thought it was my mother in those tapes.”

  “One of the local cops, a friend of mine, he’d seen the footage. I guess he’d dealt with Maybelle before, when she was picked up for some drug charges. He mentioned how the woman in the tapes looked like her to his superiors, and I gather they ran with it.”

  A sick feeling settled in Kat’s stomach. “And you didn’t correct them.”

  Helen held up her hands. “What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t admit I was the one who robbed that bank. Nick needed me. If I went to prison, who would take care of him?”

  Kat listed against the couch. “What did my mother do when she realized she was wanted for the robbery?”

  Helen pursed her lips. “I guess that’s when she fled town. Can’t say I blame her. Your mama, I don’t want to speak poorly of her, but she didn’t have the best reputation. Nobody would have to be strong-armed into believing a person like her would resort to criminal behavior.”

  Kat felt as if a knife had been shoved into her heart. She could only imagine the dilemma her mother had been put into then. After all, how well would the police have received a protest of innocence from a junkie who had already been deemed unfit to care for her own daughter?

  Helen fingered her unfinished scarf. “Over the years I convinced myself that perhaps everything worked out for the best. Nick got the treatment he needed, and your mama got to escape the bad influences she was exposed to around here and start fresh.”

  Kat’s eyes narrowed. “Except she left me behind.”

  Helen looked at her, something Kat interpreted as pity reflected in her eyes. “Yes, you were perhaps the one who suffered the most. But can you honestly tell me you would have been better off being raised by a drug addict?”

  “That’s not the point,” Kat spat. She realized her hands were shaking and slipped them between her knees. “You didn’t give her a choice.”

  Helen’s face fell. “I know, and I’m truly sorry for that. But what could I do?”

  “Start by making things right now.”<
br />
  “How can I do that? It’s too late.”

  “You can tell me where she is.”

  Helen shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “You owe me.”

  “Yes, I owe you, but I can’t tell you where Maybelle went.” Helen’s gaze strayed across the room, where two cats had begun tussling. “I don’t know the answer. I never knew what happened to her. She just skipped town.”

  Kat’s anger faded, giving way to the suffocating feeling that she wasn’t any closer to locating her mother than she had been three days ago.

  “I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I really would help you find her if I could.”

  Figuring there was nothing to gain from prolonging this visit, Kat moved Shadow aside and stood up, swallowing past the lump in her throat. “I guess I’ll take off then.”

  Helen set her knitting on the floor and rose from her chair. She took a step forward as if to close the distance between them but then stopped herself. “I really wish I could help you.”

  Kat looked at her, feeling every inch of the space between them. “I wish you could too.”

  Helen twined her fingers together. “You mentioned not turning me in earlier.”

  Kat nodded. “I’ll keep my word.”

  “No.” Helen reached her hands out, but they fell back to her sides when Kat retreated. “I don’t want you to be burdened by this secret like I’ve been. Thirty years of silence is long enough. If it helps your search or eases your conscience, go ahead and tell. You have my blessing.”

  The two women regarded each other for a long moment. Then Kat nodded once and let herself out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kat considered stopping by Cherry Hills Police Department headquarters after leaving Helen’s house. But, as anxious as she was to clear her mother’s name, she felt too emotionally drained to deal with the authorities. She could talk to Chief Kenny later, after she had more time to process Helen’s bombshell.

  Instead, she drove straight home and spent the next few hours alternating between bouts of crying and angry cleaning fits. She thought Helen’s confession would offer some relief, but she didn’t feel any better than she had before. After all, knowing Maybelle hadn’t robbed that bank didn’t actually bring her back. She had still managed to vanish into thin air, and who knew if Kat would ever get to meet her.