Tropical Holiday Tails - Zoe Chant Page 0,26
the desk, the gray kitten was walking through the pee for a pile of paperwork, leaving wet footprints behind her.
“I don’t think so…”
Scarlet caught it just as it stepped onto the latest letter from Beehag’s lawyer (though she sourly considered that urine pawprints could only improve the correspondence), and tossed her gently in to join the first.
She growled under her breath as she cleaned up the mess, already plotting out the amendment to her contract with Conall. She set up the litter box according to the directions and slipped it into the bathroom…to find only the gray kitten inside, blinking innocently up at her.
A frantic search of the small room with the gray kitten trying to rub against her ankles and twine between her feet led to escalating panic. Scarlet wondered how she was going to explain to Conall that she’d lost one of his kittens within ten minutes of their arrival.
“The island isn’t that big,” she thought fiercely, and just as she settled in to widen her search, the cream kitten launched itself from the tiny space above the cabinet onto her shoulder and alighted with a triumphant trill.
“How did you even get up there?” Scarlet demanded of it, as it purred and rubbed its tiny face against her cheek. She pulled it off her shoulder and held it at arms length while it swung playful paws in her direction. She set it down with its sibling and sidled backwards out of the room, nudging them back into the bathroom with her foot multiple times as she closed the door carefully behind her.
A single peach paw stretched out from underneath the door, investigated everything it could reach, and withdrew.
Scarlet stared, narrow-eyed, at the place the paw had been, and went cautiously back to her desk.
At first, the sound of their play—meows and pounces and scrambling claws—was distracting. But Scarlet soon tuned it out, turning to the pile of mail that Graham had dropped on her desk along with the kittens.
Much of it was to be expected: bills, advertisements, and end of the year license renewals. But there was one large manila envelope, addressed to Scarlet personally, that was a curiosity.
It had a Vermont return address, but a New York postscript, and when Scarlet opened it, it was thick and full of irregular paperwork. A glossy brochure fell out alone.
There was a letter of introduction that Scarlet read twice, growing more and more livid, and then she flipped through the rest of the material.
She was holding Gizelle’s past in her hands. An unofficial copy of her birth certificate, a photocopy of the newspaper article involving the car accident that killed her parents, photographs from when she was a child, and the scientists’ records of her time in Beehag’s zoo.
She picked up her phone, now fully charged, and dialed a familiar number.
“Do you realize what time it is, Scarlet?”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” Scarlet snarled, not caring that it was probably three in the morning in Maryland. “I asked you to find out about Gizelle’s past, not find her a quiet little mental hospital to lock her up in.”
“What are you talking about?” Tony asked at the other end of the line after a puzzled pause.
“This little package that you had your friend at Safe Shifters send me has your fingerprints all over it.”
There was another tired and confused moment of silence on the line. “My literal fingerprints?” Tony asked. “What is Safe Shifters?”
He certainly sounded innocently befuddled.
“Safe Shifters is apparently a lovely little house with bars on the windows in the countryside of Vermont that specializes in mentally ill shifters. They assure me that Gizelle will have a beautiful life with the finest of medical attention and psychiatric care. I received a letter from their director because we had a mutual friend who cared very much for her well being. Are you saying that mutual friend isn’t you? Because some of this paperwork regarding her past has your agency’s letterhead.”
Scarlet could picture Tony’s furrowed brow in the silence that resulted.
“I’ve never heard of this place,” Tony insisted. “Look, I’ve been doing some research for you, but it’s still in processing to be declassified. I can’t send it until the beancounters decide it’s not going to negatively impact an active investigation.”
Scarlet shuffled one of the pages forward. “So you didn’t send anyone a copy of the bill of sale for exotic wildlife to Beehag twenty-six years ago? Or the newspaper clipping of her parents’ death with your agency’s stamp? Or