Laurie Cass - Bookmobile Cat 02 - Tailing a Tabby by Laurie Cass Page A

relative. “There are what you might call issues.”
    Every spring Aunt Frances took careful stock of the boardinghouse applicants for the upcoming summer. Though she didn’t have a Web site or even a Facebook page, she did have years upon years of happy boarderswho referred friends and family and near strangers. The stack of letters and e-mails from people asking to stay was thicker than the phone book for the entire county.
    Aunt Frances studied each letter carefully, and if a candidate looked at all probable, an intense series of letters and phone calls followed. To explain the unusual setup at the boardinghouse, Aunt Frances would say, and go on to explain that the summer’s fee included a daily breakfast, with one catch. On Saturday, a boarder cooked for everyone else. The daunting task of cooking for the six boarders, Aunt Frances, and often her librarian niece had made more than one applicant back away.
    The cooking of breakfast, however, was a requirement Aunt Frances would never change. Because the real reason she took so much time studying the applicants was that the entire summer was a secret matchmaking setup, pairing boarder with boarder.
    “There’s no better way to get a person’s measure than to see him or her working in the kitchen,” she’d said to me privately. And she had a gift for pairing up her boarders. In all the years she’d been running the boardinghouse, which had been ever since her husband died so young that I barely remembered him, she’d never once missed. Until now.
    She sighed again. “It’s a downright mess.”
    “Do you want to talk about it?”
    There was a pause. “Not really.” Then she spoke in a lighter tone. “It’ll work out. I’m sure of it.”
    Because this year, early on, her carefully selected summer pairs had mismatched completely. The lovely twenty-six-year-old Deena and the fifty-year-old Quincy had taken to each other with a liking that seemed far more than friendship. This had pushed fifty-three-year-oldPaulette, Quincy’s theoretical match, into the companionship of sixty-five-year-old Leo, which left twenty-three-year-old Harris, Deena’s supposed match, to spend a lot of time with Zofia, a grandmother who wore clothes of many colors and a baker’s dozen of rings. But Zofia had been matched with Leo. It was a problem and my matchmaking aunt was ready to pull out her hair.
    “Well,” I said, “there’s always breakfast to look forward to. And that’s one of the reasons I called. Tucker and I both have the day off and I was wondering if it would be okay to bring him.”
    “Oh, honey.” Aunt Frances laughed. “Of all the Saturdays to bring your young man to breakfast, you pick this one.”
    “What’s up?”
    “Harris,” she said succinctly. “He’s been making a mess of the kitchen all week, working on a culinary creation of his own.”
    “Not good?”
    “Horrible. I can’t count the number of eggs he’s gone through, and I have to tell you, the smell of burning maple syrup isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy.”
    “You don’t have an enemy in the world.”
    “I’ll have a houseful if I don’t have a backup plan for breakfast this Saturday. Do you have any ideas where I could hide a few boxes of cereal?”
    I suggested the trunk of her car, thanked her for the warning about breakfast, and went back to work.
    •   •   •
    Saturday morning, the first Saturday I’d had off in weeks, started off with a dawn so bright and shiny that the world felt brand-new.
    I’d taken my aunt’s warnings to heart and had asked Tucker to come by the houseboat later that morning, but I found some courage, took a deep breath, and headed up to the boardinghouse.
    “Good morning, favorite niece,” Aunt Frances greeted me on the front porch. She had a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. “Would you like a cup? It’ll be the best thing about breakfast.”
    Since I was her only niece, I didn’t let the favorite comment go to my