Excerpt from A Whisker of Trouble
By quarter after nine we were on the road, with Mac riding shotgun and Rose
and Elvis in the backseat. I’d been serious when I told Charlotte that I was
taking the cat along to deal with anything that had more than two feet. While I
believed that all living creatures had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
the animal equivalent of happiness, I didn’t really want most of the fourlegged
ones sharing my space while they were doing it—Elvis excluded, of course.
Before I’d acquired Elvis, or maybe more accurately, before he’d acquired me,
the cat had spent some time living on the streets around the harbor front. I
wasn’t sure if that was where he’d honed his skill as a rodent wrangler, or if that
particular ability came from his previous life, whatever that had been.
Edison Hall’s house was a small white bungalow on the outskirts of town. It
was usually a short trip over to Beech Hill Road, but a water main had broken
on the street a few days earlier. Now it was being repaved, down to one lane
for traffic. When it was our turn to go, I tried not to wince as the tires threw bits
of pavement up against the undercarriage of the SUV. Elvis sneezed at the
sharp smell of tar and when I looked in the rearview mirror he was making a
sour face, despite Rose stroking his black fur.
There was a singlecar garage at the end of the short driveway at the Hall
house. I was happy to see the Dumpster I’d ordered