The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare by Lilian Jackson Braun Page A

hasn’t come right out and asked me yet, so don’t you say anything.”
    She refilled her cocoa cup and carried it upstairs, saying a weary good-night.
    Qwilleran made his nightly house check before setting the burglar alarm and locking up. Then he retired to his own quarters over the garage, carrying a wicker picnic hamper. Indistinct sounds came from inside the hamper and it swung to and fro vigorously as he carried it.
    The four-car garage was a former carriage house built of fieldstone – the same masonry that made the main house spectacular. There were four arched doors to the stalls, a cupola with a weather vane on the roof, and a brace of ornate carriage lanterns at each comer of the building.
    Upstairs the interior had been refurbished to suit Qwilleran’s taste – comfortable contemporary in soothing tones of beige, rust, and brown. It was quiet and simple, an escape from the pomp and preciosity of the K mansion.
    In the sitting room there were easy chairs, good reading lamps, a music system, and a small bar where Qwilleran mixed drinks for guests. He himself had not touched alcohol since the time he fell off a subway platform in New York, an experience that had been permanently sobering. Nor had he ever ridden the subway again.
    The other rooms were his writing studio, his bedroom, and the cats’ parlor, which was carpeted and furnished with cushions, baskets, scratching posts, climbing trees, and a turkey roaster that served as their commode. There was also a shelf of secondhand books bought at the hospital bazaar for a dime apiece. There were books on first-year algebra and English grammar simplified. There was a collection of famous sermons. Other titles were The Burning of Rome and Elsie Dinsmore and Vergil’s Aeneid. Koko could push them off the shelf to his heart’s content.
    Qwilleran opened the wicker hamper in the cats’ parlor and invited two reluctant Siamese to jump out. Why, he asked himself, did they never want to get into the hamper? And when they were in it, why did they never want to get out? Koko and Yum Yum finally emerged cautiously, a performance they had repeated every night for the last year stalking the premises and sniffing the furnishings as if they suspected the room to be bugged or booby-trapped.
    “Cats!” Qwilleran said aloud. “Who can understand them?”
    He left the Siamese to their own peculiar occupations – licking each other, wrestling, chasing, biting ears, and sniffing indiscreetly – while he tuned in the midnight news in his sitting room.
    “The offices and printing plant of the Pickax Picayune were destroyed by fire tonight. The building is a total loss, according to fire chief Bruce Scott. Twenty-five fire fighters, three tankers, and two pumpers from Pickax and surrounding communities responded to the alarm and are still on the scene. No injuries have been reported. Elsewhere in the county, the Mooseville Village Council voted to spend five hundred dollars on Christmas decorations – “
    He snapped off the radio in exasperation. The same fifteen-second news item would be repeated hourly without further details. Listeners would not be told how the fire had started, who reported it, what records and equipment had been destroyed, the age of the building, its construction, the problems encountered in fighting the fire, precautions taken, the estimated value of the loss, the insurance coverage.
    Without doubt the county needed a newspaper. As for the fate of the Picayune, it was regrettable, but one had to be realistic. The Pic had been a relic of the horse-and-buggy era. It was Senior’s sentimentality and self-indulgence that had bankrupted his newspaper. Typesetting was his obsession, his reason for living, to quote Junior.
    Reason for living? Qwilleran jerked to attention and combed his moustache with his fingertips. If the newspaper had truly been on the brink of failure, could Senior’s accident have been a suicide? The old plank bridge would be a logical