It's late spring and young artist Gerry Coneybear and her twenty cats are thrilled to finally be able to get out of the house and into the garden surrounding her 200-year-old house on the Ottawa River. But Gerry is having a time keeping her curious cats in their own yard, safe from the new neighbours' large dog. Her neighbours' marriage isn't quite what it should be, and when the philandering husband is murdered, the wife is the obvious suspect. Or ought to be. As events unfold next door, Gerry watches from her garden, where she picks rhubarb, weeds, and plants her flowers, catnip and herbs, all supervised by her cats and her friend and part-time housekeeper Prudence. A terrible car crash, an eccentric train engineer (and his equally eccentric wife), and a midnight visit to the house next door all contribute to this cozy mystery coming out all right in the end. And there's jam-making. And ghosts.

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Gerry paddled east, downriver, passing the wide lawn below the Parsley Inn, where guests ate and drank under red umbrellas on the restaurant’s riverside patio. Friday night and the parking lot was full. She wondered if Gregory, one of Jay’s littermates, was working inside with his owner Phil Parsley, and pictured the cat parading along the bar.

She guided the canoe between shore and the islet where the Parsleys had set up an old Christmas tree, lit with coloured lights in winter, now just a bare dead thing.

She approached the ferry landing and back paddled, watching a ferry dock, load and leave.

She turned and retraced her way. As she passed the Parsley Inn she thought of Doug who’d used to have a room there, and of how nice it would be if he were in the canoe with her.

“Not that you don’t make a great substitute, Bob,” she complimented the cat, who turned his head briefly before staring ahead into the dimming light.

Gerry passed her own house—Jay had retreated elsewhere— and decided to paddle a bit longer. She passed Edwina’s and sure enough, as Edwina had explained to Prudence, the couple appeared to be entertaining. There must have been six or eight cars pulled up in the wide dirt and gravel driveway that girdled the back of the long low white house. Gerry looked for the yellow car she’d seen from the ferry. It was not in evidence. But the red car was.

Lots of people have red cars, she told herself. And, that a circular driveway is good for parking but she wouldn’t want to give up that much of the garden. Though the garden that remained was sizeable, bigger than that at The Maples.

Windows in Edwina and Roald’s house were open. Music and laughter trailed out into the night. It’s good the house is inhabited again, Gerry thought, thinking of its recent and not so recent sad past. She went a little further but, as dusk advanced, decided to call it a night. She dug in her paddle and held it and the canoe slowly turned.

As they again passed Edwina’s house, Gerry heard Roald talking loudly then laughing in the backyard. By a small glowing point in the near-dark she guessed he was enjoying a cigar. The woman at his side was shorter than Edwina and, as he pressed her to his side, she laughed too, looking up at him. He bent his head to kiss her.

Then, as Gerry watched, frozen in surprise, Edwina came out of the back door of the house, saw her husband and the woman and immediately turned around and went back in.

Gerry paddled as quietly as she could towards home. She doubted the couple had heard or seen her, or Edwina, they’d been so caught up in each other.