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“Angie,” my mom whispered. She hadn’t been whispering before, so whatever she had to say, I was guessing it would be good. “I’ve found something.”

I swung the phone around to illuminate the room and found her sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed at the ankle. In her hand, she held a small book, and on her face she wore an excited smile.

Here we go.

Chapter Eight

Like most older people I knew, Rhonda had kept her phone fully charged, which meant I didn’t need to be careful about preserving its battery life—and thank goodness for that. I used the screen to illuminate my path as I moved carefully past her body and joined my mother at the bed.

“It’s her personal planner,” Mom revealed, flipping through the pages demonstratively. “You know, like the calendar app, but on paper.”

“C’mon, Mom. I know what a personal planner is.” The cover on this one was made of blue leather that I suspected matched the exact shade of Grizabella’s eyes. Gold trimmed the edges of each page, not unlike a Bible.

Mom shook her head and continued to search through the entries until she landed on the current week.“Here,” she pointed to the box reserved for yesterday. “She got on in New Brunswick. A bit earlier than us.”

“I found the same thing on her Facebook profile, but I could’ve sworn we saw her when we were saying goodbye to Nan. She was in a hurry, but I definitely remember that blinged out cat carrier of hers.”

Mom tucked her heavily hair sprayed hair behind her ears, but it immediately bounced back to its previous shape.“Huh. I don’t remember seeing her, but maybe she just got off to stretch her legs.”

“Or to a say a quick hello to someone waiting at the station,” I suggested. We’d only seen her returning, though. Huh, indeed.

“So she got off, but she got back on,” Mom recapped with a shrug. “Hang on. Let me see what else is in here.”

While she thumbed through the planner, I returned to Rhonda’s email and searched the name of the train company. Sure enough, since she never discarded anything, her travel itinerary popped right up.

“She was headed to Houston,” I told Mom hardly believing anyone would want to be on a train for such a very long trip, but then again, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad with a private room. Still, she had either knowingly lied to me or changed her plans quite suddenly. “She told me she’d probably get off before Georgia.”

Mom stood and marched over to me, then shoved the planner in my free hand.“Her planner has a cat show in that area early next week.”

So a sudden change of plans, then.“I wonder if the person she met at our stop said something that spooked her. Like maybe a threat. Maybe she reached out to me in the dining car because she felt safer with company.”

Now I felt terrible. Had I been given the opportunity to save her, only to run away because I couldn’t take another mundane cat story?

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Mom said, rubbing my shoulder like she somehow knew I was partially blaming myself for poor Rhonda’s fate. “I do agree this is all very suspicious, but we don’t know anything for sure.”

I shook those feelings aside and focused on the facts. Whether or not I’d played a role in what had happened, the best thing I could do now was to find justice for the poor lonely woman who loved her cat more than anything else in this world.

“She was wearing a necklace when I met her, but the necklace was gone when Octo-Cat and I came in presumably just minutes after her murder,” I told Mom, forcing myself to move on.

Mom frowned and set the planner down where she’d initially found it. “Missing necklace. Quick visit to the platform in Bangor. Abandoned trip to Houston. Five stab wounds. We have a lot of little bits and pieces, but not enough to know what kind of puzzle we’re building.”

“Don’t forget the distraught feline. It was Grizabella’s cries that alerted us to the trouble.” Despite the Himalayan’s cool demeanor when we’d first met her in the dining car, her reaction to Rhonda’s death showed the cat had loved her owner just as much as she’d been loved by her.

“Now that’s interesting. Could it be a jealous cat show competitor?” Mom ventured, taking the planner back from me and holding it in both her hands as we continued to talk. “They were on their way to a show, after all. Maybe someone threatened them to keep them on the sidelines this year, so another cat could take the crown.”

“I don’t think cat shows work the same as beauty pageants,” I said with a wry laugh. Laughing was good. It kept the horror from creeping in. “But it’s not a bad theory. A jealous rival killed her off and then took the necklace to make it look like a simple robbery.”

Mom nodded, but her face remained grim.“There are worse reasons to take a life. Not many, mind you, but I’m sure there are at least some.”

The door swung open so suddenly, it made us both jump in fright. My heart hammered a heavy tattoo against my chest.