by Nic Saint
“Oh, so Rupert is a good father, is he?” said Harriet, surprised to hear that the obnoxious and frankly annoying rodent they’d met had another, softer side to him.
“Oh, yeah, he’s great with the kids. Likes to play with them, but can also be strict when he needs to be.”
“You have to be strict,” said Harriet. “You need to raise them with a firm paw.”
“They need to know their limits,” Brutus said, nodding.
“I think you’d make a great daddy, buttercup,” said Harriet.
“You really think so, honey bug?” he said, touched.
“Yes, I do. I’ve always thought that.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet of you to say. I think you’d make a great mother.”
“You do? Why, thank you, pookie bear.”
“And I think you two would make great parents,” said Molly, adding her two cents.
“You know, Molly,” said Harriet. “Now that I got to know you a little better, I have to say my entire idea of mice as a species has taken a radical turn for the better.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Harriet,” said Molly. “Likewise. I mean, listening to Rupert it’s almost as if cats are the worst creatures on the entire planet, and I always told him, ‘Rupert,’ I say, ‘cats are probably a lot nicer than you think if only you would bother to get to know them a little better.’ You know? But does he listen? Of course not. ‘Get to know them better!’ he’ll say. ‘Do you want to be eaten? Huh? Do you want to become breakfast, lunch and dinner to a bunch of vicious hairy monsters?’”
“We’re not vicious monsters, are we, Brutus?” asked Harriet.
“I don’t feel like a vicious monster,” said Brutus. “I really don’t.”
“Live and let live has always been my motto,” said Harriet. “There’s a place under the sun for every creature on this planet. Isn’t that what I always say, Brutus?”
“It is,” Brutus confirmed. He couldn’t actually remember ever hearing those exact words from his partner’s lips, but it did sound like something she could have said.
“I think we should all try to live together in perfect harmony,” said Molly now. “That’s what I teach my kids, and that’s the kind of life I try to live as an example for them.”
“Inspiring,” said Harriet, nodding. “You’re an inspiration, Molly. My hat off to you.”
“Likewise,” said Brutus, who wondered why Harriet was suddenly talking about non-existent hats. Then again, a large chunk of the conversation had gone right over his head, including but not limited to the virtues Harriet had suddenly extolled of motherhood.
“A quick question, though,” said Harriet now.
“Shoot,” said Molly. “Anything for my new best friends.”
“Could you tell your husband to open the door so we can get out of this basement? He accidentally closed it.”
“Oh, you don’t need that door,” said Molly. “There’s plenty of ways in and out. Just follow me.”
And with these words she headed to a corner of the basement, Harriet and Brutus right on her heels. The mouse moved beyond an old toboggan, and they followed suit, though they had to displace the object to fit behind it. And then the mouse vanished from view. Harriet and Brutus searched around, but found no trace of her, until her tiny head with the long whiskers came peeping out of a tiny hole at the bottom of the wall.
“Over here,” said Molly. “If you follow me I’ll lead you straight to the next floor.” And then her little head popped off again.
“Um, Molly?” said Harriet.
Molly’s head reappeared, her nose twitching as she sniffed the air. “Yah?”
“Um… not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re too big to fit in there.”
“Nonsense,” said Molly. “You’ll fit just fine. Just make yourself small.”
“But…” said Harriet. “I’m not sure if…”
“Oh, don’t be such a pussy,” said Molly. “You know what they say, if your head fits, the rest of your body does, too. So just follow me, and you’ll be out of here in no time.”
“Oh, all right,” said Harriet finally, and proceeded to stuff her head into the tiny hole.
And then she was stuck.
She couldn’t move forward, in spite of the theory about the fitting head Molly had expounded, and she couldn’t move back either, as her head was wedged in too tight.
“Um… Molly?” she said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I think I’m stuck.”
And then Molly appeared right in front of her nose. Harriet had to squint a little to get a clear view of the mouse, but she was right there, and much to Harriet’s surprise the cute little mouse, mother of no less than four hundred baby mice, was smirking at her.
“You stupid cat,” she said.
“Pardon me?” said Harriet, shocked by this sudden change in demeanor.
“I got you good, didn’t I? Did you really think I’d help you out of this basement? So you could hunt us all down and eat us whole? I know what you cats are like. All sweet talk and surface charm until you pounce on us and gobble us up without batting an eye.”
“But-but-but I thought we were friends,” said Harriet, shocked at this denouement. “I thought we were kindred spirits.”
“Kindred spirits my tush. I’m a mouse and you’re a cat, cat, and we will always be mortal enemies, no matter how you look at it.”
Just then, Molly was joined by a familiar figure. It was her husband Rupert, who’d slung an arm around his wife’s shoulder. “I’m so proud of you, darling,” he said. “You trapped the beast!”
“Of course I did. If I had to leave it all up to you she would still be roaming around, probably thinking up ways and means of feeding on my babies.”
“Good riddance,” Rupert agreed.
“Hey, you have to let me out,” said Harriet, getting a little nervous. “I don’t like small spaces!”
“Oh, shut up, you whiny pussy,” said Molly, nothing like the nice and sweet mouse she’d appeared before. She was a tough little creature, and gave Harriet the evil eye.
“Try to catch us now, cat,” said Rupert.
“Yeah, good luck with that,” said Molly.
“And now we bid you adieu.”
“Adieu. That’s French for ‘Goodbye and good riddance.’”
“Hey!” said Harriet. “You can’t leave me here!”
“Watch us,” said Molly, and then both she and her husband disappeared down the hole and all Harriet could hear was the laughter of what sounded like hundreds of mice.
Either it was the echo of Rupert and Molly, or that of their four hundred kids.
Whatever it was, the sound struck Harriet as very unpleasant, but what was even more unpleasant than the stinging ridicule or the fact that she’d gotten her head stuck in a mouse hole, was the sheer indignation of the situation. Now who was the fool?
Chapter 8
Vesta was still thinking about the end of the world, and when it might happen, when the outer office door swung open and Scarlett Canyon walked in from the street.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Vesta muttered, then sat up a little straighter. Scarlett might be her mortal enemy, but she was also an inveterate gossip, and if she found Vesta slumped at her desk, looking less than her best, word would be all over town that she’d been in a terrible state and had probably turned to liquor, just like her late husband had done.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“That’s no way to greet one of your patients,” said Scarlett, pursing her blowfish lips.
Scarlett probably spent her entire pension on the kind of treatments popularized by Gwyneth Paltrow or Jennifer Aniston, designed to make them stay young forever. At one time even Gran herself had been an avid fan of Goop, and had ordered several items that she’d hoped would clear up her skin and add to her eternal youth, like those bees Gwyneth was so crazy about, and that you needed to allow to sting you for some reason.
“You�
��re not a patient of mine,” said Vesta now.
“Thank God for that,” said Scarlett, then laughed a light laugh. “Imagine me, being a patient of yours. That simply wouldn’t do, would it?”
“Tell me you’re here for a lobotomy and I’ll gladly do the honors,” Vesta growled.
“I just wanted to make an appointment.”
“You could have called.”
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“Still. Why bother a hard-working woman like me if you could have simply picked up the phone?”
“I thought I’d have a nice little chat with an old best friend.” She glanced around and heaved a wistful little sigh. “Do you remember when I used to work here? The waiting room overflowing with patients? The place buzzing with business?” She directed a pointed look at the empty waiting room.
“It’s one of our quiet moments,” said Vesta. “The lull before the storm.”
Scarlett rapped her knuckles on the counter. “I hear they found a skeleton in your basement? One of your old boyfriends? Couldn’t hack it anymore and decided to brick himself up inside your wall?”
“Ha ha. Very funny. If your jokes were any funnier I’d bust a gut. Besides, it wasn’t a body, it was a skeleton.”
“Isn’t a skeleton, like, an old body that lost its pep? Like a certain person we know?” She cocked an eyebrow at Vesta, who decided to ignore the slur.
“I’m sure that skeleton has been there forever. From what my daughter told me it’s probably been there from when the house was built, way back in the fifties.”
“Is that right?” said Scarlett, clearly not believing a word of this. “I’ll bet it’s that no-good husband of yours. Do you think the police are going to exhume his coffin now? To find out if it’s really Jack we buried, or a pile of bricks?”
Vesta directed her most fiery glare at the woman. “How dare you speak of my husband like that?”
“Well, he was my husband as much as he was yours, now, wasn’t he? At least in the biblical sense.”
She had half a mind to grab the woman’s blond hair and give it a good pull, to find out once and for all if it was a wig or her real hair, but restrained herself with a powerful effort. Tex had recently reminded her, after a similar altercation with Scarlett, that she was the public face of this office, and that if she misbehaved it reflected badly on him, and might even put him out of business. She’d argued that, if anything, a fight put bodies in seats, as everybody likes a good scuffle, and none more so than those cheapskate patients of his, who never enjoyed their entertainment more than when it was free of charge. So he should probably give her a pay raise each time she and Scarlett squared off.
Scarlet had casually taken a small black object from her purse and placed it on the counter. “Oh, look at the time,” she said. “I have to be going.” And then, before Vesta’s widening eyes, she folded the object open and the screen suddenly doubled in size.
It was a foldable smartphone—the holy grail of smartphones.
“Where did you get that?” she demanded heatedly.
“Oh, Dick Bernstein gave it to me,” said Scarlett.
“No way,” said Vesta. “Dick gave one to me.”
“I know! But you broke it, didn’t you?” She held up the nifty little gadget and tapped at the screen with her freakishly long fake nails. “So lucky for him he was fully insured, so he bought himself another one.”
“And then gave it to you? Has he lost his mind?”
Scarlett shrugged. “He knows I’m more careful with his gifts than you are.”
“Can I help it if he gave me a lemon?”
“The story he told me was that you dropped it in the soup.”
“It broke first. I only dumped it in the soup to put out the fire.”
“A likely story,” said Scarlett with a little laugh, and once again Vesta had to suppress a strong inclination to put her hands around the woman’s neck and squeeze. “At least he gifted me this phone. He only loaned you his, before you decided to dunk it in your soup.”
“I’m telling you, it broke and caught fire!”
“Yes, well, I guess that’s your story and you’ll stick to it, won’t you? But Dick was pretty cross, Vesta. He said he’s never coming near you again. And I can’t blame him. First you go and destroy his nice new phone, and then the police start finding dead bodies in your basement, so… Well, I must be off now. Give my love to Tex, will you?”
“Didn’t you need to make an appointment about something? Those hemorrhoids of yours, for instance?”
Shocked, Scarlett glared at her. “I don’t have hemorrhoids.”
“You don’t? So maybe one of your fake boobs sprang a leak?”
Scarlett’s lips drew together into a thin line, which was an amazing feat, given the fact that they were stuffed to the gills with collagen. “One day, Vesta, something really nasty will happen to you. Something that’s gonna knock that mean streak you got right out of you. And when it does, you’ll need a friend, and you’ll be sad to discover you don’t have any friends. You managed to scare them all away with that forked tongue of yours.”
“Oh, just buzz off, will you? And tell Dick his phone is a piece of junk.”
“I will tell him no such thing. And when we’ve been going steady for a month, and he gifts me a diamond necklace, I’ll tell him he’s much better off with me than he ever was with you. If he’d stayed with you he probably would have found himself murdered and stuffed down your basement, and that skeleton they found is living proof I’m right.”
And with this powerful harangue she was finally off, slamming the door as she went.
“Skeleton… living proof,” Gran muttered with a grin as she wrote down the gist of the conversation. She’d been keeping a diary for a while now, all colorful stories about the colorful people that inhabited this colorful town of hers. Odelia often borrowed from her observations for her pieces in the Gazette. She could have used a note-taking app on her phone, of course, but with the NSA spying on every phone in existence, she didn’t need her deepest darkest secrets being salivated over by some government pencil pusher.
Having preserved Scarlett’s words for posterity, she picked up her phone and called her daughter. Marge picked up at the first ring. “So who the hell is that dead body?”
Chapter 9
Marge was hanging up the laundry in the backyard when her phone demanded her attention. She picked it out of her apron pocket and pressed the red Connect button. “Yes, Ma?” she said dutifully.
“So who the hell is that dead body in your basement?”
“My basement? Our basement, you mean.”
“Not when there’s dead bodies. Then it’s your basement. So who is it?”
“We don’t know yet. Abe was here and took the body and he’ll run some tests.”
“What tests? To make sure it’s really dead? Abe is losing it, honey.”
“Not to see if it’s dead. To figure out who it is.”
“Well, it’s not your father, that much I can tell you.”
“Of course it’s not my father. I know that much.”
“And don’t you forget it, oh, daughter of mine.”
Marge’s expression softened. “Have people been saying things?”
“If with people you mean Scarlett Canyon then yes, they’ve been saying I killed my husband and dumped his body in the basement.”
“That’s impossible. That skeleton has been there for many, many years. Probably way before we bought the house.” She suppressed a shiver. “Can you imagine we lived in that house all these years with a dead person in the basement? I must have passed that spot hundreds of times, without knowing there was a dead person buried there. It’s simply too horrible to contemplate.”
“Then don’t. What does Alec say?”
“He’s very upset, too. Especially since Abe will need a lot of time to figure this out.”
“Weren’t there any clothes, a watch, a wallet or something?”
“There are remnants of clothes. Rags, really. Abe thinks it’s a man, judging from the bone structure. Oh, and he found a brooch, so that tells me it might be a woman.”
“Or a dude wearing a brooch,” said Vesta. “Was it a nice brooch?”
“A very nice brooch. Looks very expensive. At least if those diamonds are real, of course. They could be zirconium, though I don’t think so. They looked real to me.”
“So did you pocket the brooch?”
“No, of course not. Why would I pocket the brooch?”
“To sell it, of course. If it’s as valuable as you say it is, it might net us a small fortune.”
“God, Ma. I’m not even deigning that obscene suggestion with a response.”
“So how about the leak? At least tell me Gwayn plugged the leak.”
“No, he didn’t. And he’s not allowed to go anywhere near that basement because Alec turned it into a crime scene. So until he decides otherwise…”
“No water.”
“No water,” said Marge miserably. “I had to use Odelia’s machine to do the laundry, and I guess we’ll have to go over there for our showers and meals, too. In fact we might as well move in with her and Chase, as I don’t feel comfortable staying here as long as that body is still downstairs.”
“Why? It’s been there all this time and you were never bothered.”
“That’s because I didn’t know it was there, Ma.”
“Anyway, I just called to tell you that I’m going to be needing that basement from now on. At least once that dead carcass is carted out of there.”
“You’re going to need the basement? Why? What are you planning to do with it?”
“Turning it into a bunker, of course, what else?”
Marge closed her eyes. This was too much. First the water thing, then the skeleton, and now her mother was going nuts on her again. “Listen, Ma. I can’t deal with this right now, so whatever you’ve got in mind, please don’t tell me, all right?”
“Sure, fine. Be that way. It’s your funeral.” And with these words, the old lady disconnected.