Murder at the Lobster Pound

I was shelving the last of the day's returns—three mysteries, a poetry collection, and someone's abandoned copy of Moby-Dick with sand still caught in the binding—when Poirot knocked over my coffee mug.

"Damn it, cat."

He sat on the counter beside the spreading puddle, his single amber eye blinking with studied innocence. The other eye, long since lost to some pre-rescue misadventure, gave him a permanently skeptical expression that I'd found oddly comforting during the divorce proceedings last year. A cat who'd already survived one catastrophe and landed on his feet seemed like appropriate company.

I grabbed the dish towel from beside the register and mopped up the lukewarm dregs. Through the shop's front window, Camden Harbor glittered in the late afternoon light, August humidity turning the air thick enough to taste the salt. The tourist families who'd packed Main Street in July had thinned to a trickle. The college kids who'd worked the harbor tours were heading back to school. Labor Day weekend loomed three days away, that annual hinge when the town exhaled and remembered it belonged to us again.

"We made it through another season," I told Poirot, who'd moved to the windowsill to observe the harbor with his customary disdain for maritime commerce. "One full year of me not driving this place into bankruptcy."

He flicked his tail. I took it as encouragement.