by Libby Howard
This pool party had been the easiest, most pleasant party I’d ever hosted. Madison’s friends were polite and courteous. After devouring pizza, chips, and soda, they helped clean up, then went inside to change, tearing out in a whirlwind of bikinis and long hair to climb into the hot tub. The sun was going down, so I flicked the lights on and was thrilled with their exclamations about how magical it all was.
When I went in to get the cake, I realized that something was missing… Or rather, someone was missing. Taco. I’d fed him his dinner, and rather than lock him in the basement, I’d warned the girls about keeping him in the house. I didn’t blame them. He was a sneaky cat, and I’d known it was a matter of time before he slipped between someone’s legs and dashed to freedom.
Darn it all. No doubt he was over at Mr. Peter’s house eating chicken sandwiches. Luckily, he was a cat who liked his routine, and he’d be back in an hour or so, before I headed up to bed.
A bit after sunset, several cars pulled up to the curb and I realized that Madison’s guests’ parents had arrived to pick them up. Actually, it was three mothers who were walking up my porch steps, and they were an hour early. I answered the door and introduced myself, thankful that I’d made a large pound cake. Then I shuffled them into the back yard while I put coffee on and grabbed extra plates and forks.
It wasn’t until I’d gone outside that I realized that the three women were especially well coiffed for a Saturday evening. Had there been some sort of charity function, or Toastmaster’s meeting or something? Or perhaps mothers of teenage girls always dressed in skinny jeans and snug, low-cut tops with makeup and glossy, straightened hair on Saturdays. Although I didn’t remember Heather, Madison and Henry’s mother, ever looking like this when she’d come by on the weekends to pick up the kids.
The girls and women alike loved the cranberry, orange, walnut pound cake, and I gave Madison credit for the idea. The girls got dressed, spent a few moments looking for Taco, then one by one, they headed off, all thanking me politely and telling Madison they’d see her on Monday.
I was surprised when I felt an arm reach around my waist to give me a quick hug. “Thank you, Miss Kay. You’re the best.”
“You’re welcome, hon.” I hugged Madison back. “This was fun. Your friends are very nice. They’re welcome over any time, as long as your dad says it’s okay. I want to have a neighborhood barbeque soon, so maybe you can invite one or two of them over. There aren’t many girls your age on this street.”
“That would be fun.” She turned to leave, then hesitated at the doorway, spinning around to shoot me a dazzling smile. “I’m glad Dad decided to live here. I mean, I wish he and Mom would have stayed together, but they fought all the time and it felt like the South Pole every time they were in a room together. They don’t seem any happier apart, but Dad spends more time with us now, and we got to meet you and kind of adopt Taco. I love your house, and your cat, and I know we have a lot more fun here then we would have had if Dad had rented an apartment somewhere.”
I blinked back tears. “I’m glad your Dad moved here, too. I really like having you three around, and so does Taco. Speaking of which, I need to go find my cat. Can you clean up the rest of the cake and coffee, and turn off the light strands when you’re done?”
“Sure thing, Miss Kay.” She skipped up the steps and a few seconds later I heard the back door slam.
Turning around, I steeled myself for what I needed to do. It was only nine o’clock. Both the porch light and several indoor lights were on at Mr. Peter’s house. It was time for me to retrieve my cat before he had a chance to eat the poor guy out of house and home. Straightening my shirt, I took a deep breath and headed across the street, weaving my way through the old appliances as I made my way to the front door.
I knocked, then waited, remembering how long it took Mr. Peter to make his way to the front of the house. After a few minutes, I was starting to feel like an idiot, standing on this guy’s porch. Thinking that maybe he hadn’t heard me the first time, I knocked again. And again.
This time I heard something, but it wasn’t the door being unlocked or footsteps, it was a cat meowing.
“Taco? Mr. Peter?”
The meowing got louder. I tried to peek in the side window, hoping to see my cat, but all I saw was boxes, storage tubs, the back of a filthy sofa, and light somehow filtering through the gaps in all the junk. “Mr. Peter? Are you okay? I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I’m here to get my cat.”
I still heard nothing. Well, nothing except for my cat. He was probably upstairs or at the back of the house. There was no doorbell, and with all the junk in his house, it was probably difficult to hear me knocking. My mind automatically imagined the worst, that he’d had a medical emergency or fallen and couldn’t get up. Did Mr. Peter have one of those emergency button thingies? I hadn’t recalled seeing one. Worried, and figuring that he must have been okay an hour ago to let my cat inside his house, I turned the doorknob and found it unlocked.
“Mr. Peter?” I called into the house. A cat ran to me with a chirping noise, fur fluffed out in alarm. It was Taco. It had to be Taco, but what in the world had he gotten into? The fur that wasn’t standing on end was wet, the light parts of his gray stripes dark. I opened the door further and bent down to scoop him up, smelling a metallic scent just as my hands felt his sticky wet fur and my eyes registered the red paw prints on the floor.
“Mr. Peter?” There was a high-pitched urgency to my voice as I put Taco down and went into the room. He’d fallen. He’d fallen and hit his head on something, and that’s was why he hadn’t answered the door. The only thing that kept me from dialing 911 was my irrational thought that Taco had broken a bottle of old raspberry syrup and had rolled in it. It would be so embarrassing if emergency services came screaming down the street only to find Mr. Peter in the shower.
“Hello?” It was more difficult to get through the room than it had been before. Boxes were blocking what had been the pathway, and everything had been shifted so that I had to navigate my way as if I were traversing switchbacks on a mountain climb. When I managed to get past what had once been a living room, I realized that Mr. Peter was probably not in the shower. He was a hoarder, but a reasonably organized one. The boxes knocked onto their sides, broken dishes, and smashed kitchen appliances sent my fears into overdrive. Had he suffered a heart attack and crashed into his belongings in a desperate attempt to get to the phone?
Climbing over a dusty dresser, I saw a pair of legs on the kitchen floor. It took me a while to push the boxes away, and find Mr. Peter facedown in a pool of what clearly was his own blood. He wasn’t moving. And next to him, jabbed point first into a brown cardboard box, was a sword.
Chapter 8
In reality, it took the police less than five minutes to arrive, but to my mind, it felt like hours. Unable to stand there and stare at my neighbor without making some attempt to help, or at least check his vitals, I went to him, squatted down, and put a hand on his back.
“Mr. Peter?” I asked softly. I couldn’t feel him breathing, and when I picked up his hand, I couldn’t feel anything but what I was positive was my own racing pulse. Wanting to make sure, I attempted to turn him over without success. It was like trying to move five bags of sand that were attached together at the corners. All I managed to do was get blood on my hands and arms.
Clearly not able to provide any sort of medical attention and unwilling to contaminate what was obviously a crime scene, I stood back and waited, holding my hands awkwardly away from my body so as to not get blood on my pants or shirt.
I was numb, filled with horror that was squashed between a combination of practicality and a macabre sense of humor. I’d gone my whole life without seeing a dead body… Now I’d seen two in the last three months, not counting Eli, who had technically died enroute to the hospital. My second murder. Well, I assumed it was a murder. I eyed the sword and began to think of all the strange accident scenarios whereupon an elderly man was stabbed by a m
useum-quality replica in his house. If he fell at just the right angle, maybe the sword could bounce off the floor and launch itself into the side of a box. Or maybe Mr. Peter had gotten some devastating news either about his health or about the authenticity of a beloved piece of china and had committed seppuku, only to ram the sword into a box after committing the act. Or Taco had startled him while he was cutting tomatoes with the sword and he’d impaled himself, then thrown the sword into the box in anger before succumbing to his injuries.
What made the whole thing worse was a shadow that had appeared just out of my line of sight, over toward the stove. It hovered, then moved toward the body, looking for a moment as if it had crouched down, then rose to drift over toward the sword in the box.
I hoped the ghost didn’t have poltergeist abilities, because I doubted the police would believe my story of a specter that contaminated the crime scene and disturbed evidence in a homicide investigation. And I fully believed that this was a ghost. It didn’t have the same feel as the ghost that kept me company in the evenings, and its shape wasn’t the same. If I believed in ghosts, then it would be logical to assume that this was Mr. Peter’s spirit remaining behind after his violent demise. His, or its, presence made me just as panicked as the blood on my hands. The man had seemed to like me, and he definitely liked my cat, but who knew what a ghost of a murdered man might do?
I was grateful the police showed up when they did, before I had the chance to explore any further wild flights of imagination. I was pulled through yet another maze into what seemed to have been a dining room at one point, and questioned while the police gawked at the degree of clutter and waited for the M.E. and techs to arrive. The ghost followed me, hovering over a dust-covered damask chair. I wished he had remained in the kitchen with his body.
“Maybe he tripped on a box and fell on the sword?” one of the officers in the kitchen asked.
“And threw it into the box in a fit of rage before he keeled over?” another scoffed. “Right.”
An Officer Adams joined me in the dining room, looking around in vain for a place to sit and finally just leaning against a buffet stacked high with plates and lamps. He got out a notepad and pencil, then asked me to recount what had happened. I explained about my cat and my previous visits to Mr. Peter’s house, about how I’d heard Taco inside, and when I’d seen the blood, I’d thought maybe my neighbor had fallen and needed help.
“And the blood on your hands?” he asked.
I really wanted to wipe it off, but there wasn’t anything nearby, and I didn’t think it would be polite to wipe bloody handprints on the boxes. Hopefully they would let me wash them soon, because my emotional numbness was starting to wear off, and the sticky feel on my fingers hinted toward a looming panic attack.
“I tried to see if he was breathing or had a pulse.” I looked at my hands and swallowed hard. “I wasn’t sure and he was facedown, so I thought if I could turn him over, I could…”
What, do mouth-to-mouth? CPR? I needed to wash my hands. I had to get this off my hands.
“Did you have any problems with Mr. Peter? Any disagreements beyond him feeding your cat?”
Was I hearing him right? There was no way this police officer was insinuating that I had anything to do with my neighbor’s death. Murder. It was a murder, although I didn’t really want to think about that right now with blood on my hands and his body one room away. Clearly, he’d fallen on the sword by accident.
“No. He was going to fix up a vintage toaster for me. Just yesterday he’d given me an appraisal on a pitcher my husband and I had received as a wedding gift. And I wasn’t angry about the cat. Well, I was a bit angry at the cat, but not at Mr. Peter. He was a lonely guy who clearly had his problems, but I never had any issues with him.”
The officer scribbled some notes. “Anyone else you know have any disagreements with Mr. Peter?”
My heart sank. “Yes. Nobody liked the junk in his yard, of course. A few years ago, when the Millers were selling, they tried to get the city to condemn the property to force him out, and Will Lars next door has been frustrated because he’s opening a B&B and all the junk deters people from wanting to stay at his inn.” I thought for a second. “Oh, and Friday, Mr. Peter’s nephew came by and argued with him. I think he’s been trying to get his uncle to go into assisted living.”
Scribble. Scribble. “Anyone else?”
“Yes. I mean, look at the place.” There is blood on my hands. There is blood on my hands. “We all work hard to keep our houses and property nice, and it’s difficult having this mess smack in the middle of our block. But being upset because someone has broken washing machines all over their front lawn isn’t the same as wanting him or her dead. If you think that’s the motive, then half the neighborhood and more would be suspects, including the electric company guy who, when Mr. Peter doesn’t chase him off, has to run an obstacle course every time he comes to read the meter.”
“You’d be surprised at what is often a motive for murder,” the officer commented dryly. “Did you touch anything except for the body? The sword? We’ll need to print you so we can exclude your fingerprints.”
At least they were no longer considering me a suspect based on an alleged wandering-cat-feud. But at the mention of fingerprints, I’d looked down and was now on edge over the blood on my hands. It was sticky, but was drying into a cold, hard crust on my fingers. Would it stain? Would I be standing at the sink, scrubbing my hands raw like Lady Macbeth as I tried to wash it off?
What had the officer asked? Oh, yeah. “No. I mean, I may have balanced myself on some boxes coming in, and I did have to climb over that dresser to get to the kitchen, but after I touched Mr. Peter, I didn’t touch anything else. Except my phone.” Oh no. My phone probably had blood on it as well. It was a wonder I’d managed to get the touch screen to work.
“Not the sword?”
“Not the sword,” I repeated, putting some emphasis in the statement. I might have touched something that I could no longer remember, but I was positive that I hadn’t touched the sword. “Oh, but my cat was probably all over everything. He’s got blood on his fur. That’s how I knew something was wrong. That’s why I came into the house. It’s not like I make a habit of walking into my neighbors’ houses uninvited, you know. I’m not a thief or anything. My cat had blood on his fur, and Mr. Peter didn’t answer when I knocked. I was concerned.”
And I was rambling. No wonder criminals got caught all the time. I wasn’t even in an interrogation room and I was singing like a canary. Of course, criminals were probably calmer under pressure than I was. I’m sure the murderer wasn’t staring at his hands, fighting off a panic attack and wondering if nail polish remover might help get the blood out. Or maybe he was, for all I knew.
“Kay?” Judge Beck appeared in the doorway, his brow creased in concern. “What’s going on? I came home to Madison in hysterics because Taco is covered in blood and half a dozen police cars are across the street from our home.”
Our home. In spite of my being at the edge of a panic attack, my heart grew ten times its size at that. My parents were gone. Eli’s parents were gone. Neither of us had siblings, and we’d never had children. Was I so starved for family that I was ready to cling onto Judge Beck and his children like a lifeline? I hoped that this, like the shadows, was a product of grief, because he would be leaving in two years, moving out and buying a place of his own, and unlike real family, they most likely wouldn’t keep in touch beyond the occasional Christmas card or an invitation to a graduation party.
“Mr. Peter was murdered.” I was proud at how steady my voice was. “Although I heard the police mention they thought he might have fallen on his sword.”
I don’t know why I added that ridiculous idea. Perhaps to soften the thought of a murder directly across the street from my home—from our home.
The judge’s face froze in shock. “Fell on his sword? Like seppuku-style? Was he Japanese? I don’t think I’ve ever even seen the man.”
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Officer Adams glared at Judge Beck, then must have recognized him because his expression quickly shifted to one of wary respect. “No, sir. It’s clearly a murder, although we’ll wait for the M.E. report to deliver the official announcement.”
“Now Mrs. Carrera,” he continued. “You say you’ve been here before. Did you notice if anything is missing?”
A theft? Who in the world would be foolish enough to steal from a hoarder? They’d need six months and a backhoe to find anything of value among the cases of toilet paper and broken appliances.
“Um, I’m not sure. Things seemed to have been moved around a bit, but from what Mr. Peter told me, he got new china in and rotated what he liked to ‘display’ up front near the door. He did say he had some valuable Faience upstairs in a bedroom, but I’ve never actually seen it, and by Mr. Peter’s standards, everything in the house was valuable.”
The officer made another quick note, then flicked his fingers, extending a business card toward me like he was a sleight-of-hand magician. “Thank you. If you remember anything else, please call us.”
I guessed that was my dismissal. I looked around, trying to find the best way out of the house that wouldn’t either compromise the crime scene or send me to the hospital with a broken ankle.
“Should I go out the back door?” I pointed. Unlike my house, Mr. Peter didn’t have the door in the kitchen leading to the rear of the house. His was at the back of a little room off from the former dining room that I was standing in.
The officer looked over at the door. “I guess. You’ll need to move those boxes. And I’m not sure if it opens of not.”
I wasn’t, either. The wood might have swollen to the point that the door was wedged tight in the jamb, or painted shut. What happened to a door that didn’t get used in a few years or decades?
In spite of the implication that I’d need to move the boxes myself, the officer began to clear a path to the door. We set up a sort of fire brigade, where he’d hand me the box, then I’d hand it to Judge Beck who would look around, trying to find a place to put it where one more box wouldn’t send a tower toppling to the floor.