Catwalk

by Sheila Webster Boneham

  thirty-seven

  I punched in the speed dial number for Shadetree Retirement Home. Jade was not available, and the receptionist couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me anything, so I left my number and typed a return email as well. The parts of Jade’s email to me that ran over and over in my mind were “respiratory distress” and “nonresponsive.” I checked for signs of life at Goldie’s again, and looked out the front window, knowing Tom wouldn’t be there yet but vaguely hoping to see his van. The dogs, sacked out in the hallway, roused themselves enough to watch me, but went back to sleep when I returned to the kitchen. I pushed Tom’s speed dial number, but closed my phone before the call want through. Bill, my brother, was away on business, so I called Norm’s number to see whether Shadetree had tried to reach them. My call went to his voice mail. He would be at the gym, I knew.

  I got my coat from the closet, bringing the dogs to their hopeful feet, but threw it onto a chair. For all I knew, my mother was on her way to a hospital, and I wasn’t sure which one. I stared at my phone, willing it to ring. Two warm chins found my lap, and I leaned into the tops of the dogs’ heads and breathed in their warm presences. “Everything will be okay, right, guys?” I said. They both pressed into me a bit more firmly.

  A car door closed out front, and I heard the double honk of Tom’s van locking. Then my phone rang. I answered as I unlocked and opened the front door.

  “Getting nasty out there,” said Tom, pushing the pizza through the door ahead of him. A grocery bag hung from his wrist.

  I nodded at him, listening to the voice through the phone. When she finished, I asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. There’s nothing you can do here, she’s fine now, and the roads are getting really nasty. Stay home.”

  “But …”

  “Come tomorrow,” said Jade. “I’m staying here, and she’s sleeping now. I’ll check in with you around ten if you like.”

  “If anything changes, you’ll let me know?” I asked.

  “Of course.” Jade’s voice is so soothing, I almost relaxed. “Try not to worry.”

  Tom stood watching me, his coat still on. “What’s happened?” he asked when I set my phone down. “Your mom?”

  “Jade called it a ‘respiratory event.’ She collapsed and couldn’t breathe. Mom, I mean.”

  Tom pushed a chair up behind me and guided me into it. “Sit down,” he said, and poured more tea into my mug.

  He was right. I felt a respiratory event of my own coming on. I stared into the dark, fragrant tea and worked at that steady breathing thing. In one-two-three, out one-two-three-four.

  “If you want to head over there, say the word,” said Tom.

  “Everything’s apparently under control and Mom is sleeping. I guess … Jade will be there all night and promised to check in at ten.” To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to do. If she was well and truly out of immediate danger, there was no point sitting there at Shadetree all night. “Damn, I don’t know what to do.” Then I had another thought, but decided to wait and discuss it with Norm, not Tom. Norm was Mom’s attorney, after all. He had drawn up and I had witnessed her directive.

  The phone rang. I expected it to be Jade or Norm, but it was Alberta. “Janet, are you okay?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Louise told me about your mom.”

  That made no sense at all for a moment, and then it did. Anthony Marconi would have called Louise, and Louise must have told Alberta.

  Alberta was still talking. “Tell me what you need. Anything. You have someone there with you? We can come if you need us. You shouldn’t be alone. We’re over here at Louise’s, well, her father’s place. It’s not far, you know.”

  I didn’t know. I had no idea where Marconi’s house was. “Alberta, I’m fine, really, and I just talked to Shadetree. I appreciate it, but I need to keep this line open. I’m expecting a call from my brother, and Shadetree will call me if anything … So, thanks again. Goodnight.”

  “Oh, right, okay, I ju …” I flipped my phone closed.

  Tom hung his jacket on the back of the chair and got a couple of plates and a cake server. He opened the pizza box and pushed it toward me, then checked the fridge. “No pop?”

  “There’s beer in the back if you want it.”

  “No, not tonight.” I knew he meant “in case we have to go back out for your mother,” but was glad he didn’t say it.

  “Laundry room,” I said. I realized that I wasn’t speaking in full sentences, but couldn’t seem to do any better than that. “Root beer.”

  Tom set two glasses with ice on the table, poured root beer over the ice, and sat down. He watched me for a moment while I stared at an olive on the pizza, then lifted a slice with the spatula, slid it onto my plate, and said, “Come on, eat. You have to eat something.”

  I picked the olive off my slice and dropped it onto my tongue. The briny bite reminded me that I was thirsty, and I drank down my whole glass of root beer. I took a bite, forced myself to chew and swallow, and set the slice back on the plate.

  “She didn’t tell you anything specific?” asked Tom. “She isn’t asthmatic, is she?”

  “No, never has been.” The sugar seemed to hit my brain all in a rush, and I woke up a bit. “They sent a report to Mom’s regular doctor. I’ll check with her in the morning.”

  The dogs both leaped to their feet and ran to the front of the house, and a few seconds later the doorbell rang. Tom gestured for me to eat, and followed the dogs. The next voice I heard was Goldie’s.

  “Whew, boy, it’s slicker than snot on a doorknob out there.”

  Leo bounded into the kitchen, still in his harness and dragging his leash. He hopped onto the chair next to me and leaned in for a nose bump. I heard some near-whispers in the other room, and then Goldie was beside me, unwinding a long orange scarf from her neck with one hand and gripping my shoulder with the other.

  “Tom told me,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I smiled at her, and at Tom. He unbuckled Leo’s harness and started to refill my root beer but I waved him off, rinsed the glass, and filled it with tap water. I nibbled at my pizza slice and listened as Goldie turned the conversation to her evening.

  “There’s going to be a teach-in on wild areas in urban and suburban settings. Several groups are involved. I’m sort of helping the organizers, you know, organize.” Goldie’s face was glowing.

  “This is out at Alberta’s place, right?”

  “Is it?” She frowned as if she needed to think about it, then smiled. “I hadn’t put it together. You’re right.”

  “What’s happening with that now that Rasmussen is out of the picture?” asked Tom.

  Goldie said, “He wasn’t alone. There were five partners, so four now, and they’re going to try to go forward, and we’re going to stop them.” Goldie leaned toward me and said, “Janet, guess who I saw at the meeting tonight?”

  “Who?”

  “Our old partner in crime.”

  Tom laughed and asked, “Which one?”

  “Peg. You know, Peg from your vet clinic.” I had to smile at the idea of Goldie and Peg together again. The consortium may just have met its match in those two. “I just love her!”

  I started to ask whether she knew Robin Byrde, the environmental studies student who was also involved in the teach in, but the phone rang and I excused myself as I answered.

  “Hi, Norm.”

  “Janet. Did Shadetree reach you?”

  “Yes. I spoke to Jade.”

  “Okay. And how much did they tell you?” There was a sharp edge not usually present in my brother-in-law’s voice.

  Suddenly I needed to sit down. I backed up and sank onto the bed and said, “What do you mean? What did they tell you?” Leo reached out from the pillow where he had been sleeping and tapped my leg.

  His tone s
oftened slightly, and he said, “No, nothing. Sorry, I didn’t meant to upset you. I’m just concerned about …”

  I knew there was more. I knew what he wanted to say and why he was having trouble saying it, so I helped him. “The directive, right?”

  Norm let out a long breath and said, “Yes. I’m concerned about your mother’s wishes being followed, or not. I’m making some calls right now. I just wanted you to know that.”

  Goldie was telling Tom about her painting class when I rejoined them. They both watched me settle into my chair. Neither of them asked what Norm’s call was about, but I had the sense that they both knew. We had all discussed the ins and outs of do-not-resuscitate directives, and we had all agreed that it was Mom’s choice to make.

  I felt a warm muzzle in my hand and looked into Jay’s soft brown eyes. Drake stepped up and laid his chin on my arm, and Leo strolled into the kitchen and rubbed against my leg. Something alarmingly tear-like filled my eyes, and I knew it was all true. I was fine, or would be, because I was not alone.

  thirty-eight

  Goldie decided to high-tail it back home before the sidewalks got any more treacherous, and I thought a long, hot shower would do me some good, so I left Tom watching a NOVA show about melting glaciers and ducked into the bathroom. I set my phone to maximum volume and laid it on a towel beside the bathtub. I turned the shower on as hot as I could stand it, sprinkled a few drops of peppermint essential oil under the spray, and stepped in. I’m worlds away from New Age-y, but I have to say there really is something to the revivifying effects of peppermint essence and steam.

  When I stepped out of the shower I checked my phone for missed calls, and again after I dried my hair, but no one had called. My face was red from the hot water, so I patted on some moisturizer and stared into the mirror. The woman staring back at me looked older than the one who lived inside me, and she still looked tired. I fished around in a drawer and found some eyeliner and beige shadow. They helped a lot, even without the mascara I couldn’t locate. I re-secured my towel and scurried into the bedroom, where I stepped into clean, comfy yoga pants and pulled a soft gray cardigan over my black t-shirt. The mirror over my dresser revealed a much more human-looking being than I had felt like half an hour earlier.

  The ten-o’clock news was on when I rejoined Tom. Robbery at a fast-food place. Some political idiocy. Several accidents attributed to the icy roads. Better weather on its way. Tom clicked the TV off and said, “Feeling better?”

  “Much,” I said. “Think we could rearrange the seating assignments?”

  Jay was stretched out beside Tom, his hind feet pushed up against the cat in Tom’s lap and his head on my embroidered Australian Shepherd pillow at the other end of the couch. Drake was on the floor, belly up, a round chewy hanging from his forearm like an enormous bracelet.

  Tom set a protesting Leo on the floor and said, “Jay. Off.”

  Jay opened one eye and looked at me as if to say Really? I felt like a heel since he looked so comfy, but I signaled him to get off, and he rolled his feet to the floor, toddled a few steps, and crashed. I’m not sure he ever woke up completely.

  Tom wrapped his arm around me and we sat in silence for a few minutes. “Jade hasn’t called.”

  “She will.”

  “She said she’d call at ten.”

  Tom hugged me. “She’ll call. She has a lot on her plate there.”

  I knew it was true, but couldn’t help feeling that my plate—Mom’s plate—should have priority tonight. “I’ll give her ten more minutes. Then I’m calling her.”

  “I think this is a time when no news is probably good news, Janet,” said Tom, and I knew he was right. Someone would call if my mother had another “event.” I decided to change the subject.

  “Goldie’s trying to recruit you for the teach in, right?” I asked.

  “Sort of. Mostly she wants me to take a look at the flora out there. See if there’s anything of note.”

  “Of note? Like endangered or something?” I knew there were quite a few endangered species in Allen County and other parts of Indiana, so it wasn’t a crazy idea. “Could they stop the development if there’s an endangered species out there?”

  “It’s possible,” said Tom. “It’s not that simple, but it could be an argument in their favor. But here’s the thing,” he said, and paused. “I didn’t want to get into it with Goldie tonight, but I think they need to think this through. At least Alberta needs to if she wants to keep the cat colony out there, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, endangered plants are one thing,” said Tom. “Endangered mammals, birds, or amphibians are another.”

  The light went on. “Oh, crap. So the opponents of Alberta’s TNR program could use an endangered animal as an argument to remove the cats.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But the cats have been there for years, according to Alberta,” I said. “So if they’ve been living alongside the endangered animals …”

  “There’s no way to know whether the cats are a problem for other species without a field study, and we don’t have any such thing for this piece of land,” said Tom. “I looked at some of the studies but they’re scattered, and they don’t necessarily apply here.”

  “So Alberta is going to have a moral dilemma on her hands,” I said.

  “Maybe, “ said Tom. “But I …”

  My phone cut him off.

  “So sorry, dear,” said Jade. “The time got away from me.” She assured me that all was well, and that she would be there all night. “I’m not officially on duty, but I’m going to sleep here just in case.”

  I said I’d be over first thing in the morning.

  Tom got up and looked out the window. “Looks like the rain has stopped, at least for now. Drake! Jay! Let’s go out before it starts again.”

  I pulled my old blue afghan from the back of the couch and wrapped it around me. My mother had knit it for me the summer before my freshman year in college. Thirty-some years of spin cycles and tumble dries had softened the yarn, and a spot near one edge sported a slightly different blue yarn where Mom had repaired it after a puppy got hold of it, but it was big and warm and felt like love.

  Love. Tom’s voice floated to me from the kitchen, where he was toweling eight wet feet and talking some sort of silliness to the dogs. I heard the refrigerator open and something about a treat. Leo heard, too. He focused all his senses on the sounds, then leaped off the chair and hurried to join them. I could live this way, I thought. But as soon as I thought it, the voice of doubt piped up. You like your freedom, it said. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds in the kitchen. A knife hitting the cutting board, sit and down and spin commands. I could almost hear Janis Joplin singing about freedom and loss.

  Exhaustion was taking me again when the phone in my kitchen startled me back to the moment. “You want me to get that?” asked Tom.

  “Please.”

  The usual greetings followed, and then Tom said, “Hutchinson.”

  I abandoned my warm afghan nest and went to the kitchen. “Wonder why he’s using the land line,” I muttered, wishing I had put socks on. The vinyl floor was cold. Tom smiled at me, and he and the critters went back to the living room. I sat down, pulled my feet up onto the chair, and wondered why I had never trained my dog to fetch my slippers.

  “Sorry to call so late,” said Hutchinson. “I heard about your mom. I just wanted to see, well, you know, to check on you?”

  I filled him in, and thanked him for his concern. I thought he was about to hang up, but then he said, “My buddy who’s on the Rasmussen case called me. He wanted me to know that I’m in the clear.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Yeah. I guess sometimes it pays to be on the Internet at odd times.” He lost me there, and I didn’t say anything. I was starting to shiver, and wanted to c
ozy up between Tom and my afghan again. I stood up and paced the floor.

  “You know, the timeline on Facebook vouched for my being online.”

  “Ah. Well, that’s good, Hutch.” I gazed at the knife and cutting board. Tom had washed them and put them in the rack to dry.

  “Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t really worried, but it’s better for the investigation if they narrow the suspect list,” said Hutchinson.

  What had Tom cut up for the dogs?

  “He had something else, too. Nothing official yet, I mean, you know, a report, but the coroner says …”

  I opened the refrigerator and looked in, half listening to Hutchinson. I stared at the shelf for a minute, trying to figure out what was missing.

  “… that Rasmussen was hit …”

  I knew what they had eaten. The leftover eggplant parmesan I’d been saving for lunch.

  “… by at least two different weapons.”

  “Dammit,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Sorry,” I said, shutting the fridge. “Two weapons? So that means, what, two killers?”

  “It’s possible,” said Hutchinson.

  It was hard enough to believe that any of the people I knew to be on the potential-suspect list could have killed a man. But two of them? Conspiring to commit murder took Rasmussen’s death to a whole new level.

  “So, I wanted to let you know,” said Hutchinson, “because they may be talking to people they know might, you know, work together.”

  I held my breath and waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “People who had problems with Rasmussen,” said Hutchinson. He sounded a bit apologetic. “Like Louise and her father, or Marietta and Jorge, …”

  I closed my eyes, knowing what was coming.