by Nic Saint
“No, don’t apologize. I can’t imagine how I would feel if my dad suddenly walked out and never came back. And fifty-five years later I discover he was actually murdered.”
“Yeah, it’s tough, not knowing. That’s the hardest pat. I sometimes think it would have been easier if we’d have found him immediately, but of course now I’ll never know.”
“So… your brother will get back to me about the names thing?” said Odelia, feeling slightly embarrassed to keep asking her reporter questions while the woman was in obvious distress.
But Rita pulled herself together, wiped away her tears and nodded. “I’ll call him now. I want to be the one to tell him about what happened.”
Odelia nodded. She’d taken out her notebook. “Your dad used to work for Courtyard Living, a landscaping company. Any idea if they’re still in business?”
“They might be.”
“I’ll have a dig. They might have an archive. Old personnel files.”
“Might be worth pursuing,” Rita agreed.
“Anything else that might be important?”
“Can’t think of anything right now, but if something occurs to me that I think might shed some light on his disappearance—his murder—I’ll call you, okay?”
“Please do,” said Odelia. “And please call me even if you don’t have anything to share and just want to talk.”
“I’ll do that,” Rita said with a warm smile. “God, how long has it been? Five years? It seems like yesterday that you were that adorable little girl with pigtails sitting on my lap.”
“You were the best babysitter I ever had, Rita. I mean that.”
“Yeah, I loved our evenings together, pigging out in front of the TV, watching until we both fell asleep.”
Odelia laughed. “Even watching stuff I wasn’t supposed to be watching.”
“Hey, what are cool babysitters for, huh?”
“Thanks, Rita,” she said fondly.
“Why didn’t we stay in touch?”
“I guess life got in the way,”
“Yeah, I guess it did. Well, let’s keep in touch now. You may be too old to need a babysitter, but you’re never too old to need a friend. And who knows, one day you may have kids yourself, and need the best babysitter in the world to keep an eye on them.”
“If that happens, you’ll be the first person I call,” she promised, getting up.
Both women hugged, and then Rita walked her to the door. And as she opened it, the doorbell chimed merrily though the hallway and Rita frowned. “Now who could that be?” And as they both watched, Odelia wasn’t surprised to see her uncle and Chase.
She grinned. “And that, my dear, sweet Rita, is my boyfriend Chase Kingsley.”
Chapter 16
His last patient had left, and so Tex was leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms behind his head. He loved his job, but at the end of a long day at the office he was glad to go home and relax. He was lucky that he had a wonderful family. A wife he adored, a daughter he loved, a mother-in-law… who wasn’t always as horrible as she could be.
He got up, grabbed his coat from the rack and opened the door a crack. Vesta had already left for the day. Unlike most employees she never said hi in the morning, and never said see ya in the evening. She simply showed up and left without announcing either arrival or departure. He’d learned to live with it, though at first it had irked him a little. A garrulous and kindly man himself, he loved chatting with people, and he would have loved a receptionist who dropped in from time to time between patients to shoot the breeze.
In that sense he sometimes regretted setting up his own practice. He wouldn’t have minded working at a hospital, or even in a group practice with other doctors. Sometimes he dreamed of meeting his colleagues in the canteen and talking about what was on TV last night around the water cooler or the coffee machine. What he had, instead, was Vesta, who, more often than not, could be grumpy and annoying. And unlike some receptionists of colleagues he sometimes met at conferences or seminars, she didn’t even bring him his coffee in the morning, something she strongly felt he should do himself.
He glanced around the office, then walked out, closing the door behind him. He walked home, whistling a happy tune as he did, and remembered the idea that had occurred to him earlier in the day, about launching a singing career. He needed a hobby, so why not singing? He could maybe start small, by doing a couple of shows at local eateries, and gauge the response. If he was good enough he could even audition for The Voice or American Idol or America’s Got Talent and get some visibility that way. He didn’t want to become a star. All he wanted was to meet some nice people and have some fun.
So when he arrived home and let himself in with his key, the first thing he did was move down into the basement to check out the space he’d chosen to launch his singing career. When he arrived, he saw that someone had knocked out part of the back wall, and remembered how Marge had told him about the plumbing issues. He hoped the problem had been fixed. He glanced around and imagined building a small stage and installing a state-of-the-art sound system. If only he could convince colleagues like Denby Jennsen in Happy Bays and Cary Horsfield in Hampton Keys to join him, they could even form a band. The Singing Doctors. It would just be about the fun and the camaraderie, of course. And as he stood there, dreaming of a roseate future in which all four coaches of The Voice turned their chairs for The Singing Doctors, suddenly Vesta walked in from the next part of the basement, and growled, “Out of my way, landlubber.”
She was carrying boxes of rice and dumped them on the floor in the corner.
“Hey, Vesta,” he said. “So what’s cooking?”
She merely directed a curious eye at the ceiling. “What do you think? If we reinforced this ceiling, do you think it could withstand a nuclear blast?”
His eyes traveled up to the ceiling, which was plastered but not exactly nuclear-blast-proofed. “Um… why?” he asked, though it was probably a stupid question.
“To survive the nuclear winter, numbnuts. What do you think? Now I figure if we’re going to survive in here, you, me and Marge, we gotta dig deeper. Create more space.”
“Dig d… deeper?” he asked, staring at his mother-in-law the way he’d been staring at her for what seemed like his entire life.
“Sure. And if you want to add Odelia and Chase, we’ll probably need to go even deeper. Though I figure screw ‘em. They can dig their own bunker next door. What do you reckon?”
“Bunker? Next door?”
“Oh, don’t just stand there like a chump. Give me a hand with the potatoes.”
And she dumped a bag of potatoes into his arms.
He now saw she’d probably bought up the store’s entire stock of spuds.
“So is this for a party?” he asked. “Are you organizing a surprise party?”
“Haven’t you been listening? I’m building a bunker. To survive the nuclear winter, though it could also be a flood, at the rate the oceans are rising, or a tsunami, or a tornado. Take your pick. Or volcanoes. If Yellowstone explodes, you know we’re all screwed, right? So better get cracking, bud, and count your lucky stars we have a house to call our own. Think about the poor bastards who live in an apartment. They’ll be wiped out first. So where do you think we should start drilling?”
When Marge arrived home ten minutes later, it was a pale and visibly distraught Tex who emerged from the basement. The first thing she thought was that the skeleton was still down there, and she now remembered she’d totally forgotten to tell him about that. But when her husband uttered the word Vesta, she knew it wasn’t the skeleton that had scared the living daylights out of him, but her mother. Now why wasn’t she surprised?
Chapter 17
“Brutus, you have to get me out of here,” Harriet said, not for the first time.
“I know, sugar muffin, but I can’t. Your head seems to be really, really stuck in there.”
“Damn mouse,” Harriet grumbled. “If I get my paws on that horr
ible creature, I’ll tear her limb from limb and then stomp on her remains. Ouch!” she yelled when Brutus had grabbed hold of her butt and tried pulling her in a straight line away from the wall.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think we need a helping paw here.”
“No way. Uh-uh. I’m not going to suffer the indignation of anyone finding out about this,” she said decidedly. “No one can know this happened, Brutus. Promise me.”
“Okay,” he said without conviction. “I just don’t think we’ll be able to get you out of this wall all by ourselves. We’re going to need tools and we’re going to need Odelia.”
“Brutus, read my lips. No one can know.”
It was hard to read her lips, as they were stuck along with her head inside the wall, but Brutus could see where she was coming from all the same.
“Look,” she said, “can’t you just… pick away at the wall until you’ve dug a hole big enough to get my head out?”
‘Trust me, I’ve been picking away like nobody’s business, but the only thing that’s worn down by now is my claws. This old wall is a lot tougher than it looks.”
“I’m hungry, Brutus, and I’m getting a cramp. Literally a pain the neck.”
“I know, sweet peach. Just hang in there. At some point someone will come and they’ll get you out of your horrible predicament in a snap.”
She was silent for a moment. She hated to be exposed to ridicule. If there was one thing she feared more than anything else in life, it was to be the object of mirth, to be laughed at, to be the laughingstock of the town’s cat population. And laugh they would.
“I could get Max and Dooley,” said Brutus. “If you tell them not to tell anyone, they’ll do it, right?”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” she said softly.
“But they’re our friends. And Dooley adores you.”
“I know he does. And it’s not his loyalty that worries me. It’s the fact that he’s not smart enough to keep his big trap shut. He can’t help it. He’ll promise me not to tell a soul, and the next moment we’ll be down in the park for cat choir and he’ll be shooting his mouth off. Not because he means bad, but just because that’s how he is.”
“What about Max? Do you think he’ll blab?”
“Oh, no, he won’t. Max is true to his word, and smart enough not to talk.”
“We could always tell Dooley a story.”
“What story?”
“We could tell him… you’ve been exploring. That you decided to explore what’s behind these walls, and now you need help getting your big discovery out of there.”
“Could work,” she admitted. “Dooley is probably dumb enough to believe it, too.”
“I don’t think Dooley is necessarily dumb,” said Brutus. “I just think he’s… naive.”
“Well, whatever he is, he can’t be allowed to blab about this. He just can’t.”
Brutus nodded, even though Harriet wasn’t in a position to see it. “You know, I’m the latest addition to the team, right?”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“But I want to tell you how much I’ve come to appreciate you, and Max and Dooley, too,” he said, suddenly feeling maudlin. He glanced around the basement, which looked dark and dank and, with Harriet being stuck in the wall, a little scary, too.
“I know, Brutus. And I also know that you and Max didn’t get along at first, but that you’ve become fast friends, and I can’t even begin to tell you how happy that makes me.”
“It does?” he asked, smiling. “That’s great.”
“Yes, and I also understand you’re suddenly feeling talkative and philosophical and ruminating on life and all of that, but right now I need you to focus, all right, wookie? And I need you to get me out of here, for even though we can try to tell Dooley that I’m an urban explorer, I’m not sure the story will stick, so if you can get me out of here before anyone shows up, that would make me love you even more than I already do.”
“Okay, great,” he said, getting up. “I’ll give it another shot.”
And as he took a firm hold on her shoulders and pulled, while she wriggled to try and get her head dislodged, in a corner of the basement sat an entire family of mice watching the scene and snickering freely. They consisted of Molly and Rupert and nearly all of their four-hundred-strong offspring. Molly had felt this was a sight they’d never seen before and she was right. It rarely happened, at least outside Tom and Jerry cartoons, that a cat was bested by a mouse, and she felt this had an educational value that was hard to overstate. And as they all chuckled and snickered at Brutus’s attempts to free his lady love, all Molly could think was that she would give a million bucks if she had a phone right now and could film the whole thing and throw it up on YouTube.
She was pretty sure it would set the cause of cats against mice back about a millennium, or even more, and give mice the world over fresh hope in their eternal battle against their age-old nemesis. It might also deal a significant psychological blow to cats everywhere, and make them think twice about trying to attack mice in their lair.
But mice don’t carry smartphones, and it’s hard for them to create a YouTube account, so for now she’d have to suffice with her four hundred kids prodding each other in the midriff and rolling on the floor laughing and generally having a grand old time.
Chapter 18
The lights in the kitchen had been turned on, and from the noise inside and the sound of voices it was clear that our humans had finally returned home from work.
So Dooley and I jumped down from the swing and stood in front of the kitchen door and applied our front paws to it, scratching until someone inside heard us and decided to open the door. When finally they did and Marge appeared, Dooley said, “I could have gone in through the pet flap and told Marge to open the door, couldn’t I, Max?”
“That’s right, you could have,” I agreed. And it just goes to show how famished we both were that a simple idea like that hadn’t even occurred to either of us.
We both moved in the direction of our bowls and moments later we were tucking in. You may wonder why cats need a double set of bowls, over there in Marge’s house and at Odelia’s, but then my answer would be, of course we need double bowls. The same way humans like to go out to restaurants or the diner or a snack bar or order Chinese, we like to source our food from as many places as felinely possible. And can you blame us?
“Could you tell Odelia to open the sliding glass door, Marge?” I asked.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know when she’ll be home. She’s on a case, and you know what she’s like. She might be gone all night. Can’t you go through the pet flap?”
“No,” I said, though I wasn’t prepared to elaborate.
“Max doesn’t fit through the pet flap,” said Dooley, who doesn’t mind elaborating on my behalf, even though I hadn’t even signed him a power of attorney or anything.
“You can’t fit through the pet flap?” asked Marge with a frown. “Let’s see. Try to go through now, Max. Yes, just give it a go… Oh, dear.”
Following her instructions, I’d gotten stuck again, of course, much to my embarrassment. Marge made short shrift of my predicament by shoving me through, and then she opened the door for me again so I could return indoors.
She studied me for a moment with a critical eye. “Did Odelia put you on that diet she mentioned?”
“Um…” I said, stalling for time.
“She forgot,” said Dooley. “After Vena told us about the diet you guys all went vegetarian, and then you all turned carnivore again, and the diet thing fell off the radar.”
Marge smiled. “Good summary, Dooley. I see the whole picture now.”
“Thanks, Marge,” said Dooley, pleased as punch.
“And about that diet, I think you need to go on it again, Max. If you don’t even fit through the pet door…”
“Isn’t it possible that the pet flap shrank?” I said. “Heat expands wood, but cold makes it contract, right? So isn’t it possible
that even though I lost weight that the pet door simply shrank in size?”
“I doubt it,” said Marge. “The pet flap is made of plastic, and plastic doesn’t expand or contract as much as wood does. No, I’m afraid there’s only one solution for you, Max. Lose weight, or otherwise spend your nights outside, and return inside in the morning.”
I shivered at the quaint notion. “Spend my nights outside? But the nights are getting colder, Marge. And you know what I think about the cold. I don’t like it.”
“So slim down a little, and fit right through that door again.” She crouched down next to me. “See, Max, that pet flap is your weight control tool. As long as you fit through there, your weight is fine. When you don’t fit anymore, it’s time to slim down. See how easy it is? Fit? Fine. Don’t fit? Time to go on a diet.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, not fully convinced. “I still think the trouble is the door, not me.”
“Well, then you won’t mind sleeping outside from now on,” she said, getting up.
Humans. Not an ounce of compassion with a pet-flap-challenged cat.
“So what happened to Harriet and Brutus?” asked Marge as she picked up a bucket of water and placed it on the drain board.
“Next door, probably,” I said as I watched her wash her hands.
It’s a habit that frankly annoys me: each time my humans touch me, they wash their hands. Now why is that, I wonder? Am I as dirty as all that? I don’t think so. In fact I think my grooming capacity is far superior to any human’s. And still they wash their hands after they touch me. Weird, right? And so I immediately started grooming myself. After all, she had touched me, with those dirty pre-washed hands. And as I sat there, carefully removing every hint of human scent from my precious fur, Gran stalked in. “Can you please tell that husband of yours to remove his head from his ass?” she asked.