Caught Redhanded by Gayle Roper Page B

in his new office. Have lunch with Jolene and Edie. Visit Good Hands clients with Bailey. Take my off-season clothes over to Curt’s and figure out where they could be stored.
    Here I grinned. Moving my things slowly into his home made the wedding, which could seem a mirage despite all the preparation being made, take on a vivid realness. There was something very intimate about my blouses and his shirts hanging side by side, my towels and his sitting together in the linen closet.
    Then I’d cook dinner for Curt and go to bell choir practice.
    All in all, an interesting day.
    I scraped a can of food into Whiskers’s bowl as he wrapped himself happily around my ankles. Trying to trick him, I mixed some of his dried food with the wet. He began to eat and I heard the tap, tap of dry nuggets as he spat them on the floor. He’d snack on them during the day, but he didn’t like them interfering with his enjoyment of the wet food.
    Intelligent pets can be trying.
    When I left the apartment, I met Mrs. Anderson, my next-door neighbor for the past three months, on the little porch we shared. An elderly lady who was to her generation what Jolene was to hers, Mrs. Anderson had an extremely active social life. I rarely saw her, but when I did, she was always dressed to the nines for some meeting or luncheon or dinner. Upon occasion I had seen her and other of her blue-haired friends at Ferretti’s.
    Not that Mrs. Anderson had blue hair. No, sir. Her hair was suspiciously golden-brown with patches of a strange purple at her temples that I finally figured out came from her rouge, which she brushed on with a little too much enthusiasm. She wore bright, youthful colors and while she didn’t trot along at the same clip as Mrs. Wilson, she was pretty spry. She was a friendly, alert, intelligent woman. I wanted to be like her when I grew up.
    Which is why I was so startled to see her in her bathrobe with her hair uncombed and her face devoid of makeup.
    “Did you hear him, Merry?” she whispered. “Or see him?”
    “Who, Mrs. Anderson?” I looked around for an interloper.
    “That man last night.” She peered over my shoulder as if she expected to see him standing behind me. “He was skulking around the house.”
    Our carriage house held four apartments, two down and two up. An extremely quiet teacher, who was currently in France for the summer, lived above Mrs. Anderson. A pimply faced, very young couple whose ambition was to be roadies for a rock group used to live above me. Last month they’d gotten their wish and were on the road with a local band called Don’t Rush Me. No new tenants had taken their place, assuming they had broken their lease.
    That left Mrs. Anderson and me, and I would be gone in another week.
    “What was this man you saw doing?” I asked, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder, too.
    “I don’t know.” She hugged herself and rubbed her hands up and down her upper arms. “I was having one of my sleepless nights—I have about two a week—and I was sitting in the rocker by my bedroom window that looks out on the alley when I saw him. He was dressed in black and slinking along.” She pursed her lips. “Anyone slinking along at three in the morning is up to no good.”
    I had to agree with that thought. “Did you call the police?”
    She shook her head. “All I saw was a man in black. I didn’t see him do anything. I don’t think they come for everyone who sneaks down alleys. He’d have to commit a crime for them to be interested.”
    I nodded. “Maybe it was just a husband stealing home and he didn’t want his neighbors or his wife knowing he’d been out so late, especially if he’d been with another woman or something.”
    Mrs. Anderson relaxed visibly. “See? It could be something that innocent, couldn’t it? Though if Mr. Anderson ever tried to sneak in like that, I’d have had a word or two for him, let me tell you.” She sniffed. “Innocent, my foot.”
    I grinned. I was