A Familiar Tail Read Online Free

Hawthorne,” Sean said softly. “She was one of those fixtures a town like this gets. You know, the ones who are involved in everything and seem like they’ll just live forever? When she died, there was some talk that she’d, well, maybe been helped out of the world before her time.”
    â€œYou mean she might have been murdered?”
    â€œSome people thought so, but you know.” Sean shrugged. “It’s a reality-show world. Nobody believes in the normal anymore.” He sounded almost angry as he said it.
    â€œDid you know her?”
    â€œEverybody knew Miss Hawthorne, and she loved that cat. Her nephew, Frank, put the word out after the funeral that he’d gone missing, so . . .” Sean stopped and reclaimed the box. He tossed the towel into the bottom. “Listen, I’ve got to get back to work or I’ll be the ghost bartender of Portsmouth. You sure you’re okay?”
    â€œYeah, I’m sure,” I told him, and this time I was telling the truth—mostly, anyway.
    â€œOkay. See you around maybe?”
    There was a hopeful note in his voice. I smiled back in what I hoped was a friendly but noncommittal fashion. “Maybe. It’s a small town.”
    â€œThat it is.” Sean smiled back. “And you never know what’s going to happen next.”

3
    YOU MIGHT THINK somebody with a Vibe like mine would be open to all sorts of . . . let’s call them “alternative perspectives” when it comes to the nature of reality. That’s not how it works, though. What really happens is you get very good at talking yourself out of having seen or experienced anything the least bit, well, weird.
    By the time I turned the corner onto Summer Street I had pretty much managed to convince myself that Alistair the cat had not, in fact, vanished into thin air. He had just done the regular cat thing and whisked away, really fast. I’d blinked. I’d looked around. I’d missed it. That was all.
    As for how he got into the Jeep in the first place . . . well, I must have left the window down and not realized it. Or maybe the top wasn’t on quite right, or it had gotten jiggled when I went over a particularly impressive Boston pothole and there was a gap someplace. It didn’t matter. What mattered was there would be some kind of simple explanation, and it’d show up soon. There was nothing more to think about here. Move along, Anna.
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    PORTSMOUTH, LIKE A lot of harbor towns, had grown outward in rough rings from its center by the river. The oldest buildings were the ones closest to downtown and the Piscataqua. After that, it was like a tour through the timeline of American architecture. I went from the 1700s and 1800s, with their brick-and-clapboard farmhouses, into the Victorian era, with its cozy cottages or elaborate gingerbreaded homes, to bungalows from the 1920s and ranch houses from the 1950s, with the newest homes and the strip malls curving like a shell between the town and the highways.
    Summer Street and McDermott’s Bed & Breakfast turned out to be squarely in the 1800s ring. The B and B was a beautiful Georgian house, doubtlessly the former residence of some prosperous sailor, merchant or smuggler. A tangle of ivy and rambler roses climbed the orange brick walls. As with a lot of older Portsmouth homes, there was only a narrow strip of lawn between the front of the house and the sidewalk. Here, the yards and gardens were mostly at the back or sides of a home.
    â€œGood morning!” A gate in the privacy fence swung open and a pale woman wearing a denim skirt and loose pink T-shirt waved as she walked down the drive. “You must be Annabelle. Martine phoned and told us you were on your way over. I’m Valerie McDermott. Welcome to Portsmouth.”
    We shook hands. Family vacations had left me with the idea that B and Bs were all run by