by Debi Matlack
“That sneaky son of a bitch.”
Mike must have gotten to that part the same time I did because he snorted in concert with my cursing. He looked at me and grinned.
“Well, I guess you’re stuck with the store after all.”
William Woodrow MacAllister, being of extremely devious mind, had left me a substantial amount of money in a trust fund. However, the only way I could access that money any time before hell froze over solid was if I used it toward the renovation, operation and maintenance of one Lucky Cat Shop, located at 3639 East Water Street, Pinehaven Florida.
Well played, old man, well played.
Chapter 5
So it was that I found myself, just a week later, looking for a commercial contractor to revamp the entire building. If Poppy was going to guarantee I was stuck with the store for the foreseeable future, I was going to fix it up the way I wanted. All the paperwork thus far had been settled with various notaries and lawyers and clerks and other assorted official types that I never wanted to deal with ever again. Bureaucracy makes my teeth ache.
I chose a contractor that came highly recommended from some of the other downtown business owners. Donna Pendleton had a reputation for excellent work and, once several more reams of paperwork had been signed, we fell into a routine at the store. I arrived early, unlocked everything and started rooting through at least a half-century of contents.
As the work began, so did the curious passers-by. Most were local business owners that I already knew, some just nosy citizens, but one in particular I recognized. Don Marchen, Clark Kent wannabe, was hanging back at the fringe of the crowd, poking through a pile of debris one of the contractors had deposited by the curb to be hauled to the dump. Oblivious to my angry stare, he kept poking around, despite Donna confronting him. I fixed him with a sharp glare as I approached.
“I’ve told you over and over Mr. Marchen, I’m not interested in talking to you. Now get off my property.”
It was almost amusing to see this man, who was nondescript in every way, draw himself up with great dignity. “According to city ordinance, your property ends with the inner edge of the sidewalk. What I’m looking at is off your property and therefore free for the taking.” The pile consisted of rotting boards, crumbled drywall and twisted metal studs that the city wouldn’t pick up, but it was the principle. It may be garbage, but it was my garbage.
“This is a construction area, if you’re not wearing a hardhat, you’ll need to leave.” Donna touched the brim of her protective headgear in illustration. Marchen narrowed his eyes at me.
“She’s not wearing one.”
“She owns the property. If she wants to get her brains smashed out by falling debris, she can sue herself for damages.” This was the same argument Donna had been using on me since we’d started demolition. I snickered and gave her a sideways glance.
“The strap on the back hurts my head.”
Marchen smirked at me in defiance. I pulled my cell phone out, chose a name from my contacts and showed it to him. When Jenkins answered, I said, loud enough for Marchen to hear, “Detective Jenkins? You remember that raccoon problem I was telling you about?”
The reporter’s eyes widened and he backed away a step. I tried to keep a straight face while the police detective chuckled in my ear. “You know, you’re supposed to call Animal Control for this kind of thing. You’re lucky you caught me at my desk. Is Marchen leaving?”
“I’m thinking about putting out traps. Big ones. You know the spring-loaded kind, with teeth? Do I need a permit for that?”
The chuckle became a full-fledged snort. “You are joking right? A bear trap?”
“I’ll put out land mines if I have to. This is one big, ugly-ass raccoon. I bet it has rabies.”
“I bet you’re right.” Jenkins continued to laugh.
Marchen pursed his lips and blew out a resigned breath. He gave me a curt nod and headed back down the alley.
“Beautiful. He’s gone now. Thank you for your time, Detective Jenkins.”
“Not a problem, Miss Kavanaugh. Easiest trespassing warning I’ve ever had to do. Even if it’s not my job.”
“Hey, don’t my taxes pay your salary?”
“And here’s where I hang up. Thanks for the entertainment.”
I put my phone back in my pocket and grinned at Donna. “I love having a cop on speed dial.”
Every morning, the crew arrived and scattered to their various jobs. I’d hear my name called once in awhile and would emerge to find one or another of them with a question. Did I want security glass in all the downstairs windows? Yes. How about reproduction steel doors that looked just like the original wooden ones? Sure. Could they tear off this drywall to see what was underneath? Absolutely. Did I know if the cat in the back alley belonged to anyone?
What?
I followed the skinny drywaller out into the dusty alley. Dale pointed and I saw an equally skinny black and white kitten staring at us from the safety of a pile of debris. As I approached, he shrank back but didn’t run. “He’s been out here the past couple days. Me and the guys have been feeding him scraps.” Great, now my alley was going to be overrun with feral cats. I squatted down where I was and the kitten regarded me with cautious interest. He was awfully cute and I hadn’t had a pet since I was in elementary school.
“You hungry, little guy?”
“Hang on.” Dale disappeared back inside and came back with his lunch bag. Delving inside, he peeled open a sandwich and handed me a piece of bologna. Now the kitten was intrigued. I pinched off a piece and tossed it to him. He snagged it out of the air with one enormous paw.
“He’s got mutant toes!” I chuckled in delight. A few more pieces of lunch meat and I had him by his flea-bitten scruff. His resistance was token at best. “His name is Ernie, right here, right now.”
Dale cocked his head. “Why Ernie?”
“He’s a Hemingway cat, extra toes. They’re supposed to be good luck on ships.” It dawned on me what I’d just said. A good luck cat had shown up at the Lucky Cat Shop. It was providence or destiny or maybe just a twist of fate, but it was done. I now had a pet. It was something I hadn’t considered and I was happy as a clam at high tide.
Two afternoons later I was coated with a liberal layer of dust and grime as I dragged a heavy burlap sack out from under a wobbly roll-top desk whose veneer was peeling in sheets. I ignored the desk for now, it was destined to be firewood once I had thoroughly looted its drawers. The sack’s contents shifted and I heard a faint metallic chime. I had a fleeting hope that it was full of silver coins. Hey, it was Florida, there’d been pirate activity a few centuries back. Granted, we were too far inland for my hopeful theory to hold much water, salt or otherwise. As I suspected, alas, it was not so.
The bag was full of keys. Hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand were densely packed into the sack, which, in its former life, had held fifty pounds of cotton seed. As I bent over to inspect the contents, the overbalanced bag tipped and most of its contents spilled onto the floor, everything from tiny box keys, ordinary brass and steel house keys to large, old fashioned skeleton and barrel keys, ringing as they struck the concrete. I stood over the mess I’d made, torn between amusement and exasperation. Creative curiosity wrestled them both aside and regarded the newly discovered bounty with the acquisitive glee of a magpie. Poppy was uncharacteristically silent now.
“Shiny,” I mumbled with a grin. I cast about for more materials to construct the assemblage my mind had conjured and found a few items that would give me exactly what I wanted. I now knew what my main lighting was going to be to fill that impossibly high, brick archway in the center of the main downstairs space. It had once served as access to the attic loft, complete with a ceiling hook to raise and lower heavy items. Perfect. A quick consultation with my laptop ensured that a quantity of clear bubble glass light pendants were available at the local home center. My vision was taking shape. Now all I needed was a cherry picker to mount the thing when it was
done. It was going to weigh a ton.
As the store took shape around me, I worked on my creation. The barrel hoops were rigged to hang horizontally, stacked one above the other. I spent my nights at Mike and Karen’s house cutting monofilament and tying a key to each end. Ernie thought all the shiny things were his toys and I spent much of my time extricating him from the mess he made, finally having to lock him in the bathroom for the duration. Karen and the kids were more than happy to assist, Mike watched for a few minutes only to shake his head, wander away, and mutter something about communal glue sniffing.
During the day at the shop I tied them onto the barrel hoops, until the bands dripped with keys. A couple of the crew calculated the probable finished weight and helped me maneuver the thing under the arch. As I finished each ring, they raised it so I could attach the next. When I hung the last of the several hundred keys, the entire crew stopped what they were doing to watch as we raised it into place. The electrician made a few adjustments and then he smiled and pointed at me. I flipped the switch.
The monofilament and keys glittered and glowed in the light that shone from within. A light breeze wafted through the structure and the keys chimed gently against one another. I grinned and fifteen construction workers burst into spontaneous applause. I felt like I had reached the summit of Everest. Take that, old man. I can make something cool out of this crap you collected. Poppy remained silent but I knew he was watching because the fixture jingled once as a sudden gust swirled around it.
Chapter 6
Not long after the chandelier project was finished, I was waylaid by another massive headache. It started with a steamer trunk, which in turn had supported a pile of fruit crates for several decades. I got the impression that it had been deliberately buried under all that crap but curiosity got the better of me. The trunk was locked, the key probably hanging twenty feet overhead, anonymous among the massive flock. Lucky for me, one of the skills I acquired in my misspent younger years was a moderate proficiency at lock-picking. Don’t ask.
After several minutes and a couple of unbent paperclips, I was able to get into the trunk. The first thing I saw was exciting; Louis Vuitton lining. Contents aside, the trunk itself could sell for several thousand dollars. It needed cleaning and was old but was still in good shape. Heartened by my change in fortune, I peered into its depths. An odd sense of foreboding stole over me, but I shook it off. It was an old trunk, what possible harm could come of investigating the contents?
Some fragile clothing I pulled out and set aside carefully. An old pair of men’s brogans, leather curled but still pliable, lay atop a smaller cigar box in the bottom.
The box was light and I opened it to find letters and newspaper clippings inside. Touching them gave me a slight chill, even though it was hotter than deep-fried Hell outside. Scanning the papers gave me a range of dates from some time before the Civil War to the mid-1950’s. The newspaper articles followed a series of murders, all in the same area. This area, Pinehaven. I’d heard stories about the Pinehaven Killer but always dismissed it as nothing more than local legend blown out of proportion. Maybe I had been too quick in my doubts. The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention when I noticed the handwriting in the letters. It all looked the same. The same hand had written every line, on all those various kinds of paper, from vellum to cotton rag to motel stationery, over a span of nearly a hundred years. Certain phrases echoed among the passages. “She’s angry with me”, “I plan to see her one last time”, and, most disturbing, “They’ve found her.” Now gooseflesh made the hairs stand higher, and not just on my neck.
A growing ominous sensation struck as an image formed unbidden in my mind, pushing my here-and-now surroundings away. I saw a quiet, unfamiliar room that gave me a sense of boarding house or cheap hotel. A table surface, paper, yellow light spilling from a single source, a lamp on the table. I saw the room almost from the perspective of the person seated at that table, as if I were peering right over his shoulder. A hand scribbled furiously with a ballpoint pen, words pouring onto the page, the shapes angular and chaotic. Anger. Outrage. Hatred. Hunger. My mounting anxiety exploded into panic. A single curtainless window showed night outside, the lamp throwing sinister shadows across the sheets of paper. My heart thundered against my ribs; I didn’t know what the hell was happening to me but it needed to stop. Right. NOW. The scribbling hand froze in mid-phrase and the head lifted to look around, startled. I caught a glimpse of blue eyes and a dark-stubbled face reflected in a gloomy window pane before I fell back, seeing and feeling nothing but terror for several seconds.
“Miss Maeve? You okay?”
I blinked, my sight cleared, sort of, and I saw Hal, one of the plumbers, looking at me with his head cocked in concern. He was surrounded by a nimbus of light, colors shifting, tending toward mostly blue and green. I sat at an awkward angle, back against the wall, the contents of the trunk scattered around. I nodded to let Hal know I was okay and that’s when my head caved in. The sunlight from the front windows gouged vengefully at my eyes, the sounds of Hal calling for help and the answering footsteps shook the earth, threatening to dislodge my throbbing skull. As I shut my eyes to protect them from the shards of sunlight glittering like razors off every surface, I felt myself pulled off the floor. Much jostling followed which had the unfortunate side of effect of producing nausea and vomiting. I couldn’t do anything to help myself, trapped in a strangling net of pain. The motion stopped, someone gently cleaned me up and I was left alone in the darkness. Curled into a ball, I lay there, wherever I was, and prayed like I had never prayed in my life, that I would soon feel the breeze of Death’s sooty wings.
No such luck. The door opened a little while later, just as I was reconciling myself to the rest of my hopefully-short life in agony. A mournful sigh preceded some scuffling and I was juggled into position in another set of arms. The scent of Mike’s Cool Water layered with clean sweat identified my rescuer/tormentor and my gut lurched again. Lucky for him I must have run out of vomit on the last guy. Sunlight burned through my eyelids and I squeaked an incoherent whimper, trying to cover my face.
“I always suspected you were a creature of the night.” I would have something very stern to say about Mike’s joking if I survived, which I hoped with all sincerity I did not. This made the last headache seem like a pleasant dream of rainbows and bunnies and fluffy white clouds. A few words of encouragement from the crew followed me into Mike’s vehicle, identified from the smell of ancient cigarette smoke, stale popcorn and Febreze. A click that echoed through my head like the slamming of the Black Gate of Mordor secured a seat belt around me. I lost track of time, interrupted by more jostling and finally cool sheets and a dim, quiet room, Mike’s soft murmur informing me, “We’re home.”
I woke to absolute darkness and the feeling that someone was watching me. I froze, not wanting to alert whatever stalked me to my change in awareness. But there was no cold spot, no intense emotions that originated outside myself. Only a steady, quiet breathing.
“Aunt May?” The tiniest of whispers reached me. My head stayed in place.
“Yes, baby?”
“I can’t sleep.”
Without a word I lifted the covers and Deanna crawled in beside me. She snuggled into place and sighed, a warm soft weight against my chest.
“Aunt May?”
“Yes?”
“I know you’re sick, but remember, I’m not a baby anymore, okay?”
I chuckled softly and nodded with care. “I’ll try to remember from now on.”
“Okay.” Dee was almost immediately asleep, leaving me to draw comfort from her trusting slumber.
When I emerged from hibernation the next morning, the house was quiet. Mike and Karen were gone to work, the kids at school. The calm was welcoming and I staggered toward the kitchen for something to eat. My stomach reminded me that the last thing I ate had been more than twenty-four hours ago and that hadn’t stayed down. I reached up to the cabinet door and touched the handl
e. I heard Karen’s voice, chivvying the kids to hurry up. I snatched my hand off the door and shot a startled glance around the room. A part of me remembered hearing that exact phrase, in the same timbre and intonation a couple of hours ago while I was still abed. I took a deep breath, reached for the cabinet and heard it again, this time layered, with fleeting glimpses of many mornings. Mike’s presence was felt too, as he held the door open with one hand and pawed through the boxes of fruity kids cereals, looking for Frosted Mini Wheats.
Hunger forgotten, I let go of the door and turned in a circle, looking all around. I was still alone. The refrigerator stood nearby; I reached toward it then hesitated, anticipating another invasion like an electric shock. This time I felt Dee struggle to get the door open, grab a cup of yogurt and slam the refrigerator shut. Mike, Karen, Chris, all opening the fridge, all hours of the day and night, Karen hiding a couple of cookies behind the pitcher of orange juice, Mike later discovering them, Karen’s disappointment some time after. Shouts of ‘Mom, I can’t find the ketchup!’, ‘Karen, didn’t I see a piece of leftover chicken in here?’, ‘Christopher Aaron Kavanaugh, did you take the last cold drink out of here AGAIN?’ echoed through my mind, all things I’d heard a thousand times right here in this very room, but when my family was present. Now it was as if they were all ghosts and my heart quivered in the grip of pure adrenaline at the thought. Panic grabbed me tight in its stony fist and I scrambled to find my purse. I located it after a frantic search and fumbled my cell phone out, dialing my brother’s number.