Free The Big Kitty by Claire Donally Page B

threatened, he’d plumped for family values and sent Sunny a severance notice.
    Speaking of which,
Sunny thought,
I’d better get back to work before Ollie the Barnacle gets the same idea.
    She headed back through the crooked, Colonial era streets and then through the newer, more open part of town, passing city hall and the big brick library. After aquick glance at her watch, she lengthened her stride along the final long blocks to the New Stores.
    Unlocking the door, she stepped into the MAX office and immediately checked the answering machine. Nothing critical there. Sunny settled behind her desk and switched on the computer. A couple of clicks on the mouse, and she’d brought up the project she’d been working on before lunch, marketing copy for the website.
    Then she checked her e-mail. The first few items were just routine business. But after them came a string of e-mails from Ken Howell at the
Crier
.
    Sunny sat for a moment, looking at her computer monitor.
    She tried to concentrate on the marketing copy on the screen. This was supposed to be the good part of her job, the creative work that made up for the website maintenance and listing updates.
    But now she had something a hell of a lot more interesting than that to think about. After she’d called him yesterday, Ken had promised to send over the
Crier
’s coverage of the two disputes she’d inquired about.
    Sunny sighed, glanced around guiltily—although she knew no one else was in the office—and started downloading the files Ken Howell had e-mailed over. As each one came through, she found herself reading a new installment of a continuing saga to rival a soap opera.
    Ada Spruance’s friction with the neighborhood homeowners’ association had essentially boiled down to an offense against Veronica Yarborough’s esthetic sense—and her property values. That didn’t exactly make for a front-pagenews story, even for a small weekly like the
Harbor Crier.
    Ada’s other disputes, however, were precisely the stuff of small-town newspapers. The first wasn’t a man-bites-dog story, but a dog-bites-cat one. One of Ada’s feline residents had gotten mauled—and ultimately died—after a run-in with a neighbor’s pit bull–Rottweiler mix.
    The
Crier
tried to keep an impartial stance, but it was interesting to see how the community’s sympathies had shifted. Initially, folks had been shocked by the attack, and Ada had threatened a lawsuit. But the Towles—Chuck and Leah, the owners of the dog—had a story to tell, too.
    Although their dog had caught up with the cat in front of Ada’s house, the chase had begun in the Towles’ backyard. According to them, the cat had climbed over the fence and taunted the dog until he’d broken his tether and taken off in pursuit.
    Howell hadn’t sent just the news stories; he’d also sent the impassioned exchanges from the Letters to the Editor section. The situation had only gotten wilder with the second case.
    Nate and Isabel Ellsworth ran a free-range chicken operation at the edge of town. They thought they were facing a fox problem—until they installed some video surveillance and discovered it was a cat that was raiding their stock.
    When they checked the largest local collection of cats—the Spruance place—they found a chicken foot with their identifying tag on the ankle near the porch.
    This pretty much swept Ada off the moral high ground.Now she was the one with the predatory pet. Tempers ran so high that one local wag wrote to the editor suggesting that the cases be put together and adjudicated on one of those TV legal shows.
    As far as Sunny could make out from the accounts, none of the situations ever got to court. Would that have changed if Ada Spruance had received a whopping infusion of lottery money?
    She scrolled back through the various stories until she found a quote from the Ellsworths describing the chicken thief. Although they had a hard time telling from the night-vision images, it appeared to