Peter had left the stair door open, and soon Judy heard Blackberry padding up to keep her company. He looked around, the way cats will, and then came into the storeroom to see what Judy was doing.
“Hi, Blackberry! You can’t play with these things,” she told him as she continued sorting and arranging the cards that were to be exhibited at the library. The theme for September would be school. She found a few Hallowe’en things and a Columbus Day card which she put aside for October. There were turkeys and prayers of Thanksgiving for November, a pile of Christmas things for December, and a stack of old calendars for January. The stack grew higher and higher.
“I do believe Grandma saved a calendar for every year. This is wonderful,” Judy said to herself. “I’ll find some recent calendars and complete the collection. It will be just perfect for the January exhibit.”
The library was new, and the built-in exhibit cases were still empty. Nearly all the buildings in Roulsville were new since the flood that had swept the valley and started Judy on the trail of her first mystery. Her own home had been swept away, and her father, Dr. Bolton, had been obliged to move to Farringdon where he still lived and practiced. Only her grandmother’s house, two miles above the broken dam, had stayed the same.
“Maybe that’s why I love it,” she thought.
And yet she and Peter had made changes. It was a rambling old farmhouse too big for just the two of them so only the downstairs rooms had been changed. Up here in the attic nothing had been disturbed except by Blackberry as he played with the spools in Judy’s sewing room or searched for mice in the other two rooms where her grandmother’s keepsakes were stored. She liked having him for company as she worked. Attics and black cats seemed to go together.
Judy smiled at this thought. She was so absorbed in what she was doing that at first she didn’t hear the front doorbell ringing downstairs. It rang again more insistently, and she gathered Blackberry in her arms and hurried down the two flights of stairs. It wouldn’t do to leave the cat alone among the things she had collected for the exhibit.
“I can’t trust you,” she told him, “even if you are a famous cat.”
Blackberry wore a life-saving medal on his collar, and just recently he had worked for the government, or so Judy insisted, ridding the Capitol Building of mice. But when she opened the door he fled through it to prowl around outside like any ordinary cat.
The cat startled Holly Potter, Judy’s sixteen-year-old neighbor, who had rung the bell. Obviously she had been running at break-neck speed along the shortcut from her house to Judy’s.