Cat in a Bag

by Angela M. Sanders

  “We didn’t send for a housekeeper. We have a regular gal who comes Wednesdays.”

  “Mrs. Lancaster requested us, I believe. For a special deep cleaning.”

  “This place is turning into Grand Central Station.” He stepped aside. “Come in.”

  As she entered the foyer, Ellie had the feeling of being back in her old life before the Bedlamton Arms, her old life of waxed floors, pots of white orchids, and flutes of crisp champagne. Lancaster didn’t offer her the suck-up smile she would have merited then. He turned his back on her and walked toward the basement, sure she’d follow.

  “Down there’s the closet with the mop and what-have-you. My wife will be home in an hour. If you have questions, save them for her. I’ll be pruning my tomatoes.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Lancaster.” Ellie made a show of rattling around in the cleaning closet. For a basement, it was nice. White carpeting—her favorite—and a huge TV and sectional sofa.

  Enough sightseeing. She had work to do, and quickly. From the closet, she chose a feather duster and climbed back to the ground floor. A Bach cantata drifted from the house’s far end. She continued up a flight, where she knew the dog bed was from Mitzi’s prior wailing.

  A peek through the door ajar at the back of the house showed the master bedroom. Other than a heap of workout clothing at the foot of the bed, the room was immaculate. Ellie’s keen gaze estimated a good fifty thousand dollars of furniture in here, including the eighteenth-century gilded mirror. Mitzi had better taste than her drab club dress showed.

  The next room was also a bedroom. It had the dark, stiff look of a guest room. She closed its door.

  This had to be it. This door, also closed, had to open to the dog bed shrine. According to Mitzi, the room featured a large portrait of Marie Antoinette, a blue velvet platform holding the dog bed, and a leather armchair where B. E. could gaze upon it.

  Ellie’s joy spun to a fevered pitch. Her fingers itched to toss the bed into the black bag folded and pinned under her skirt and carry it away. In a few hours, when the Villa’s residents were napping, she’d hide it in the basement’s furnace room, clearly marked in the floor plans she’d studied. Then she’d call the police.

  Hand on the doorknob, Ellie turned and pushed. Marie Antoinette’s rouged face gazed down from her portrait. The armchair, the impression of B. E.’s buttocks clearly marked, was where she expected it. The blue velvet platform took pride of place.

  The dog bed was gone.

  * * *

  This had been a straightforward job for Mort and Father Vincent, Gilda knew. Mort didn’t have much experience with break-ins, but as a former con man, he was good at bamboozling people with small talk. Father Vincent was primarily a getaway guy, of course. Back in the sixties, before he’d entered the seminary, he’d helped on a few heists.

  Not that this was a heist. At least, not formally. Mort would have checked the cable connections throughout the house, including in the study where B E. Lancaster kept his prized dog bed. He’d have handed the bed through the window to Father Vincent at about the same time that Grady reconnected cable service. In a minute, they’d drive away and set up the dog bed for ransom. Done. Even if B. E. Lancaster had been smart enough to jot down the cable van’s license plate number, he’d find it was for a wrecked convertible in the junkyard.

  At last, the van’s rear door opened. Gilda squeezed back to her spot on the spool and took the package, wrapped in a plastic garbage bag, from Father Vincent. A moment later, Mort jumped into the van and belted himself in. Father Vincent, the ladder replaced on the van’s roof, settled into the driver’s seat.

  “How did it go?” he asked Mort.

  “No problem. Grady’s timing is impeccable.”

  “A housekeeper knocked while you were inside. She didn’t cause you any trouble?”

  “Nah. I thought the place looked pretty clean already,” Mort said.

  “Sure it does. Because they have a cleaning service,” Father Vincent said as he pulled the van away from the curb.

  “With one less thing to dust,” Gilda said.

  15

  The Villa felt empty without Gilda’s singing and Mort’s chatter while he whittled and Father Vincent’s travels in and out to the parking lot with his tool kit. So much the better to paint, Adele decided.

  She left her door open and cracked the bedroom window to let out fumes from her oil paints. Gilda’s portrait was coming along well. She’d been afraid her touch might have become heavier and less precise while she was in prison, but her old easiness with the paintbrush had come right back. So had the delicious sense of absorption.

  She was adding blue shadow under Gilda’s jaw when Warren appeared at the door. “I can smell your paints halfway down the hall.”

  “I’m sorry.” She set down the palette. “I opened the window an inch, but I didn’t want to open it too much, because—you know.”

  “I know. We don’t want anyone seeing you. I brought a fan.” He lifted a small electric fan. “There’s an outlet behind you.”

  She stepped aside while he perched the fan on a chair. “You know what they’re doing for you, don’t you?”

  “No. Are they out now? The Villa seems so quiet.”

  “They’re stealing an antique dog bed from a brain surgeon. They’ll return it after he operates on you.” Warren faced the window.

  Adele was certain he avoided looking at her on purpose. “I didn’t ask them to do that. I had no idea.”

  “You don’t have to ask. These are good people.” He placed his hands on his hips. “They shouldn’t be carrying off spur-of-the-moment heists like this. Not at their age.” He bent to the fan again and plugged it in.

  “I’d tell you I’m sorry—and I am—but it doesn’t seem to do much good. You’ve decided you don’t like me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” He opened his mouth to reply, but Adele cut him off. “Can we simply agree to tolerate each other until this is over?”

  He pushed a button, and the fan whirred to life. “Fine.”

  It wasn’t exactly a truce, but she’d take it. “Good.”

  As he turned to leave, his gaze fell on Gilda’s portrait. His expression morphed from disapproval to wonder, and he lifted eyes to hers. “You painted that?” he said.

  “Of course. You know I paint. You saw the Italian landscape.”

  “Sure, but….” He stared at the canvas. “That’s incredible. It’s Gilda, but so lively. You know what I mean? It’s not like a photograph. It’s as if it holds three expressions at once.”

  “I love to paint, but I don’t pretend to be very good.” She spoke tentatively at first, but when she saw he seemed genuinely interested, her words picked up passion. “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to focus on my own work. Even if it’s just for a few days, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.”

  Warren studied the portrait for another minute. “Listen, maybe I’ve been a jerk. I’m sorry. I’ve gotten so attached to these guys that anything that threatens them puts me on alert.”

  When Adele was a girl, her family had a mutt—a Labrador retriever crossed with a Rottweiler crossed with lord-knew-what—that barked and growled at anyone who knocked. The mailman would drop packages at their door and hurry down the corridor. The dog was a sweetheart, though. He slept next to Adele’s bed, and he wagged his tail when she dressed him in a tattered velvet coat from her grandmother’s house. Warren was like that dog. All his bark came from a good place.

  Adele touched his arm. “That’s okay. I understand.”

  He reached for her hand, and then withdrew. “Cook left me some tomato soup. She cans the tomatoes herself in the fall. Would you like to have lunch with me? We could make grilled cheese sandwiches, too.”

  “All right.” They made their way to the cafeteria, then through to the kitchen, Warren in the lead. “I haven’t been in here,” Adele said.

  They stood in a kitchen far smaller than Adele would have imagined the Villa requir
ed. A full battery of pans hung over a restaurant-style stove, but that was the room’s only institutional touch. The cupboards were wooden, their handles threaded with drying herbs and ropes of garlic. Rag rugs lay in front of the sink and range.

  “Cook is foraging for morels today, so we have the place to ourselves.” He motioned toward a small pink armchair next to a wooden gate-legged table. “Have a seat. That’s Cook’s chair for when she takes breaks.” Warren busied himself at the stove.

  “What’s in there?” Adele pointed toward a heavy wooden door.

  “The larder. The Villa has a lot of strange nooks and crannies. I’ll give you a tour some evening, if you’d like.”

  Soon they were sitting over fragrant soup and grilled cheese on thick-cut bread, all served on white crockery. “Do you eat here every day?” Adele asked.

  “Most weekdays. Cook sets up the laptop, and we watch The Andy Griffith Show together.”

  “I love that show! Don Knotts is a genius.”

  “Have you seen The Ghost and Mr. Chicken?”

  The next hour was spent in a way Adele never would have guessed—in easy conversation and laughter with Warren. She discovered they both liked board games and shared a fondness for crazy eights; loved early mornings; and didn’t like meat on the bone. When Warren relaxed, Adele saw it through his whole body. His face smoothed, his shoulders settled.

  “Tell me,” he said after they’d discussed the finer points of car camping. “Why are you so set on getting back your forgeries?”

  She hadn’t expected this turn of conversation. Furthermore, she wasn’t ready to tell him everything. She considered her words. “Painting feels as necessary to me as breathing. Except that breathing is something you do without thinking. You can be an expert breather pretty much straight out of the womb.”

  “What does this have to do with the forgeries?”

  “I’m getting there.” She pushed her soup bowl to the side. “To forge a painting well, you have to get inside the artist’s mind. By recreating his work, you become him—or her—in a way. For instance, once I did a forgery of a George Stubbs painting of a horse. When I finished the painting, I felt like I understood the artist. Even though he was a cranky and horse-obsessed man, I felt I could sit with him for a, a” —she wasn’t sure exactly what eighteenth-century society horse portraitists ate— “pint of ale or something and really talk.”

  “Like what?” Warren asked. “How did you think you knew him?”

  “Well, he loved animals, so he had to be a good person.” Adele thought of Warren’s tattoo of Goldie the pit bull. “And he was a scientist. You could tell he knew every tendon in a horse’s body, as if he could see below the flesh. I also had the feeling he was the sort of guy who liked precision and would correct your grammar.”

  Warren’s expression softened, but only for a moment. “What does that have to do with you wanting your paintings back?”

  “It’s a way of respecting these artists I came to know.” She hoped this would be enough for him, but his gaze was sharp.

  “Oh.” He waited as if he expected her to elaborate, but she didn’t. At last, Warren rose. “I suppose I’d better clean up before Cook gets back.”

  She stood, too. “Thank you for inviting me down for lunch. It was—great.”

  “So, we’re friends?” He held out his hand. It was warm and strong.

  “Friends.”

  16

  “There it is,” Father Vincent said. He’d just removed the dog bed from its garbage bag and set it in the cafeteria’s recesses, far from the front window.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” Gilda said. Imagine. Some doctor dealt out a load of cash for it. She poked her nose under the bed’s canopy. “At least it doesn’t smell like dog.”

  “It’s been more than two hundred years since a dog lay there, you know.” Mort lovingly traced the gilded carving on the bed’s posts with his finger. “Nice work. Ruby’s Chihuahuas would love one of these. She could keep it in the hair salon.” He flipped the bed over to examine its bottom.

  “Careful,” Gilda said.

  “Yep,” Mort said. “I could make one of these for Ruby in no time. The sides would be balsa, but a thick balsa’s tough enough to stand up to a Chihuahua.”

  “Unless the dog’s a chewer,” Father Vincent said.

  “Enough of the chatter,” Gilda said. “Now we’ve got the goods. What’s next? We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

  “Where’s Adele, anyway?” Father Vincent asked.

  “Upstairs, painting. Warren was up there, too,” Bobby said. He pulled a deck of cards from his shirt pocket.

  Gilda exchanged glances with Father Vincent. Hopefully the visit wouldn’t come to blows. Last night she’d managed to convince Warren that Adele hadn’t meant the Villa any harm, and she’d stay in the Villa with no outside contact for as long as they said. He’d seemed mollified, especially when she reminded him Adele could die any time. Love and hate, Gilda thought. Two sides of a coin.

  “Well, we need to get her on that operating table,” Gilda said. “So, chop chop. Grady, are you already set up to send him a note through the computer?”

  “No problem. We’ve got to have proof for him, though.”

  Father Vincent plunked the day’s newspaper on the table. “Set the dog bed here, so the date shows, and we’ll take a photo.”

  “Good idea,” Gilda said. Being in charge suited her. Back in the day, she’d always been a little bossy with the girls at the club, but she’d found it didn’t sit well with a lot of the guys she’d cultivated to make a living over the years. Except Hank, of course. Hank had liked her the way she was.

  “How do we make sure he actually does the surgery?” Mort said. He flipped up the canopy’s edge and examined a joint in the wood. “I mean, what if he says okay, then he botches it?”

  “We discussed this already. We make it conditional. Adele comes out of it okay, or no dog bed. We’ll have Doc Parisot watch by camera to make sure there’s no hanky panky.”

  “No problem on my end,” Grady said, adjusting his hearing aid. “Won’t take me more than a couple of minutes to scrub the note and photo and send it. No matter how many police detectives they put on it, they’ll never trace it. Should I send it now?”

  “Let’s give it until morning. We want him to work himself into a lather,” Gilda said. “Let him sweat a bit. Then—boom!—we pop him with the note. All communications will be by computer. None of this face-to-face. Too risky. The day of the operation, we drop Adele off a few blocks from the hospital.”

  “I can fix up a laptop for her to take with her. She can set it up to connect with Doctor Parisot.”

  “I like it,” Father Vincent said.

  “Me, too,” Mort said, still gazing at the dog bed.

  “Great. Tomorrow morning we send the note.”

  * * *

  Later that day, Gilda yawned and stepped into the hall. She was getting too old for this. There was a time when she was busy from first thing in the morning—okay, really about noon, when she rose—to two the next morning. Ever since she came to the Villa ten years ago, she’d subsisted on one activity a day. Two, tops. What had she been doing with her time, anyway? Talking about the old days, she guessed. While the rest of the Villa relived every moment of the dog bed heist, Gilda had gone upstairs for a nap.

  Adele’s door was ajar, and Gilda pushed it open with her walker. “You kids all right?”

  Instead of the clenched fists and hot words she’d feared, Adele and Warren were actually smiling at each other. Warren was showing her one of his books, the romance about the mail order brides, if Gilda remembered right. A few other books lay toppled over the dresser.

  When they saw her, they looked away from each other, Warren toward Adele’s painting, and Adele toward the carpet.

  “I was just lending Adele something to read.” Gosh darn if Warren didn’t look guilty.

  “First Class to Wyoming, a mail order bride roma
nce, if I remember right,” Gilda said. “You like romances?” she added, looking toward Adele.

  “I’ve never read one before,” she said.

  “Give it a try,” Warren said. “It’s about a lot more than romance. There’s drama. You’d never believe what happens to the characters.”

  Poor girl. Probably was afraid she wouldn’t be able to make it to the end before she died. “I’ll save you the suspense and tell you it all works out.”

  “Is there something you need?” Warren asked, clearly irritated by her interruption.

  If Gilda wasn’t mistaken, romance was blooming here, and not just in the novels, either. For all the hundreds of thousands of pages Warren read, she’d never seen him so much as go to the movies with a girl. Strange, since he was a tempting blend of tough I’ll-take-care-of-it and childlike vulnerability. Plus, he was handy. There was something in that boy’s past making him gun shy.

  She turned to Adele, whose face had pinkened. Realization dawned. Adele was dying. Just like the heroine in Amish Heart. Catnip to a romantic like Warren.

  “No. Just checking in. You two carry on.” She turned to leave, but Warren beat her to the door.

  “I was going anyway,” he said. Then, to Adele, “Will you be downstairs for dinner?”

  She nodded.

  Gilda didn’t miss how Adele’s gaze followed him. Gilda pushed the door shut and stayed behind. “He’s a nice man, that Warren.”

  Adele held the novel against her chest. “I guess. Yes.” Her gaze focused. “Warren told me about the surgeon’s dog bed. Are you going through with it?”

  “Already done. We’re going to send him the ransom note in the morning.”

  Adele rose and hugged Gilda. “Thank you. But I don’t see why you bother. Even if he operates and is successful, I still risk ending up in jail.”

  Gilda sat on the other side of the bed. “Is that all you have to say? ‘Thank you, but’? We just stole a valuable artifact for you.”

  “I don’t want to sound ungrateful—”